Closing Time (20 page)

This I could not understand. Why, I badgered him, didn’t he just off-load those wedgies? After all, beggars couldn’t be choosers. But he would not be persuaded. He was like Lord Jim, eternally seeking to atone for that one irretrievable moment when his nerve had failed him. Or like Henry Hudson, convinced that if he could just have one more crack at it, he would find that elusive Northwest Passage. This was not about money. This was about exoneration.

Once, at Christmastime, I asked Len why he did not stuff our pathetic inventory in the back of his station wagon and give it away to the poor. He would not hear of it; he would never engage in such shabby largesse. He was far too much of a gentleman to fob off pitiful trash on some starving, one-eyed invalid and act like he was doing him a favor. Christmas was a time of rejoicing, he reminded me, and it was hard to believe that anyone would start jumping for joy after waking up on the twenty-fifth of December to find that Santa had left a pair of fifteen-year-old alligator-skin wedgies under the tree. Poverty was bad; anachronistic footwear only made things worse.

Len’s Clothing Store was, in many respects, the proverbial enigma wrapped inside a mystery concealed within a conundrum. Consider the communications network. For whatever the reason, Len had no personal telephone in the store; instead, he had a pay phone rigged up behind the counter. But no one except him was allowed to use it, because no one—including me—was allowed anywhere near the cash register. Not once was I on hand when the man from the phone company came to empty the coin box; for all I know, he turned up just once every twenty-five years, because Len never spent any money on the phone. Instead, he would ring his wife according to a prearranged code shortly before closing the store, then hang up. Seconds later she would ring back. He would tell her that he was on his way home. She would say, “Good.” That was the only time the phone ever got used. Even as a kid, I had suspicions that the phone company’s business model was defective.

My father always believed that Len operated the store as a “front,” that he was in fact a bookie. He may have said this because he hoped it would diminish my employer in my eyes. I did not know what a bookie was when I started working there, but by the time I was twelve or thirteen, I did. I was sure that Len was not a bookie, because the phone did not ring with the frequency needed to maintain a gambling operation, and because the only sports in which he expressed any interest were baseball and boxing and golf, but not college football and certainly not pro football or basketball, cornerstones of the wagering industry that Len despised. Also, he was not Italian. More to the point, when was the last time anyone heard of a German-American bookmaker?

At first, I was not sure whether Len viewed me as a protégé who might one day step into his shoes and lead his emporium to even loftier heights—perhaps by unloading those accursed wedgies—or whether he simply enjoyed my company. Eventually, I decided that it must be the latter, since he knew that I had my heart set on becoming a priest, not a merchant. Though adept at straightening stock, folding shirts, and lacing shoes, I was never more than an adequate salesman, as I lacked what was known in the trade as moxie, aka “the tinker’s
cojones
.” At the first sign of resistance from a customer, often in response to a garment he or she deemed culturally repellent, I would back down. Len would not. Len was a master at steering our clientele toward purchases they did not want to make—in some cases, purchases that every fiber in their being cried out against.

Not a churchgoer, and most assuredly not a Catholic, Len nevertheless encouraged me to improve my vending skills, insisting that this would make me a more effective plenipotentiary of the Lord later in life. His rationale was simple: Pushing the word of God was like pushing any other product; learning how to persuade priggish, recalcitrant customers to choose one type of footwear over another would stand me in good stead the day I had to persuade some filthy heathen to choose Christianity over cobra worship. Len did not understand that while deceit might be the cornerstone of the salesman’s craft, it was not a marketing tool available to me, since lying was a mortal sin. He refused to view his sales spiels as deceitful; it was more a case of banging the drum slowly and gilding the lily fast. When teenagers would come in seeking the kind of fleetingly fashionable attire we never carried, he would devise mythical scenarios and resort to time-honored schtick to create the impression that the merchandise we did have in stock was preferred by all the glamorous athletes and movie stars of the era, that the customers should thank their lucky stars merely to be offered this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to add such eye-popping treasures to their emaciated wardrobes.

“I had to order these shoes specially from Monte Carlo and get them sent up by cargo plane from the Panama Canal,” he would cheerily declare. “Jack Paar wears these shoes; Sandy Koufax swears by them; Burt Lancaster wears this exact same brand. I actually lose a dollar on every pair I sell, but that’s okay, because the volume overcomes the loss.”

Sometimes when customers would divulge the extortionate price they had paid for a shirt or a pair of pants bought elsewhere, Len would ask if they had received a complimentary kiss with their purchase. His modus operandi when he did not have the products people wanted was to resort to his own special brand of ridicule, intimating that the only men who would wear such items were limp-wristed Neapolitans and jaded
Schwärze
of dubious moral character. By dint of his resplendent manliness, his massive chest, his amazing hair, his flashy sweaters, his cutting-edge Hush Puppies (later viewed with contempt by coy fashionistas but at that time universally deemed the apotheosis of casual chic), the Marine Corps regalia hanging on the walls, and the aura of liberation from all financial worry that he exuded, Len was usually able to convince even the most obstinate customer that he would be a fool not to snap up the goods that were being proffered so altruistically at such a massive discount to their true value.

It is probably not going too far to say that Len viewed his sales mission from an evangelical perspective; that he believed he had been put on this planet to preach the old-time religion of black lace-ups and thermal underwear and to persuade the ovine public to resist the meretricious, come-hither appeal of patterned acrylic jumpers and Italian loafers with toes shaped like a marlin’s proboscis. He was here to protect working-class people from their own worst instincts, to shield the proletariat from fads, whimsy, flights of fancy, lapses of sanity. To accomplish this, he would sometimes resort to logic, sometimes to teasing, and, when all else failed, to outright abuse.

“What are you, meshugah?” he would ask a dumpy middle-aged man vainly trying to shoehorn himself into a pair of jeans two sizes too small.

“What are you, meshugah?” he would ask an ugly, poorly groomed factory worker eyeballing the fancy dress shirts that, because they required cuff links, had been designated as demographically off-limits to the proletariat.

“What are you, meshugah?” he would demand of the bespectacled pipsqueak gazing covetously at the heavy flannel shirts in the middle of an August heat wave, shirts that were worn only by he-men. None of our customers was Jewish, but they all seemed to know what the term “meshugah” meant. If nothing else, Len had succeeded in bringing Yiddish to the monolingual goyish masses. Most of them were so much in awe of Len’s personality, so solicitous of his approbation, so emotionally servile, that they would abandon their original intentions and purchase whatever he deemed appropriate for their personality, physique, skin tone, sexual orientation, economic class. They were not our customers; they were our marionettes.

Many of our customers
were,
in fact, meshugah. Orders of shoes came in sets of two dozen, arranged in sizes that corresponded to the theoretical distribution of shoe sizes throughout American society. Because the popular sizes quickly disappeared, frantic young men hell-bent on looking their best come Saturday night would try jamming their feet into shoes that were a full size too small, sometimes two sizes too small. This was the only time Len would retreat from the hard-sell mode, begging these young men to be reasonable, imploring them not to throw away their podiatric future for a brief roll in the feathers with some Manayunk-based harlot, steering them toward more realistic sizes in styles that fit them even if they did not please them. But sometimes the customers persisted; young men, in particular, would rather be able to dance on Saturday night than to walk on Sunday morning. And then we had lost their business forever.

Len had no way of knowing this, given how shabbily I dressed, but, like many of our customers, I too harbored clandestine dreams of fashion conquest. My fifth-grade class, boasting a multicultural panorama decades ahead of its time, included three bullies: a hulking Caucasoid named Eddy Sawyer, who pounded me straight into the pavement one afternoon; a stocky black youth named Joseph Lynch, who was more of a henchchild than a full-blown thug; and a rake-thin, good-looking boy of indeterminate ethnic provenance whose name I have long since forgotten but whose attire will live on in memory forever. The common wisdom was that this boy was Hawaiian, because he had jet-black hair and smoldering eyes and did not look like the Puerto Ricans or Chinese in the neighborhood. I think his name may have been Vincent. I also think he may have been Cambodian.

Unlike the other two bullies, who were dangerous only if provoked, Vincent was always looking for trouble. He was an unbelievably vicious youth, with a malevolent set to his teeth, and I am sure that he eventually came to a sorry end. Be that as it may, he was a snazzy dresser, what was known at the time as a Fancy Dan. Unlike the rest of us, who mostly wore interchangeably bland getups, this debonair child psychotic always sported a flashy jet-black suit. From the time I started working for Len at the princely sum of $6 a week, I had visions of buying a suit exactly like Vincent’s. Throughout my childhood, I was convinced that if I could only raise enough money to acquire such a suit, my life would change overnight. To me, the suit—particularly the jacket—was invested with insuperable magical powers. Enveloped in its ebony magnificence, I would be able to impress girls, stir the envy of boys, cow the bourgeoisie, realign the constellations, impersonate an Apollonian Hawaiian.

Of course, in order to buy a jet-black suit, I would have to make the purchase at some other store. This was out of the question, because Len would have felt betrayed. Whenever I did report for work wearing a shirt or jacket I had not purchased from him—and he always sold me clothing at a 70 percent discount—Len would act stunned, as if Benedict Arnold had just sauntered into his establishment, with Maréchal Pétain, Ethel Rosenberg, and Judas Iscariot in train. What was the point of risking his life on that hellhole of Iwo Jima if his protégé was going to turn up in a shirt like
that
? “That outfit makes you look like a smacked ass,” he would snicker, or “Why would anyone want to walk around looking like a smacked ass?” or “Have you noticed that there seem to be an awful lot of smacked asses among young people today?” In Len’s circumscribed view of the sartorial cosmos, the world was divided into two distinct groups: people who bought their clothing from him and people who looked like smacked asses.

I never did get around to buying that suit, because every time I came within sight of my goal, something bad would happen and my tiny nest egg would disappear. One night, when I had saved up $32, putting me within striking distance of that mesmerizing outfit, I chipped a tooth playing football. The tooth got infected, neuralgia set in, and by Saturday night I was sporting an abscess the size of a golf ball. As we had no family dentist—after my mother was induced to get her teeth pulled out at age thirty-nine, she seemed to give the orthodontic community a wide berth—it was impossible to receive treatment until the following Tuesday. The tooth-industry butcher recommended by a sadistic neighbor sedated me with some sort of buy-one-get-three-free nerve gas, but it never took complete effect, and throughout the operation I could see a throbbing volcanic mass swelling up in front of my face, primed to explode. Through a haze of pain, I felt the backwoods oral surgeon yank the teeth out one by one and then lance the abscess. He did not cover his profession in glory that afternoon; I could have managed just as well with a string, a doorknob, and a knitting needle—or a pair of pliers. The procedure was expensive, and as we had no insurance, my piggy bank got cracked open immediately. That was the last time I thought about buying any jet-black suits.

“You don’t want to be a clotheshorse anyway,” my mother consoled me. She was right: I was not a clotheshorse, and I did not need that suit. But I wanted it; I wanted it more than I ever wanted anything except the English racing bike my uncle Charlie bought me. To this day, I believe that if I could have only gotten my hands on that jet-black suit, everything in my life would have been different. There would have been much more drama and general gaiety at the very least, and it would have occurred earlier and lasted longer. I might have been named interim chairman of the Commerce Department or recruited to fill a surprise vacancy at the Académie Française or nominated to serve in an advisory capacity—perhaps functioning as an éminence grise—in some postcolonial transitional government. Later in life, when I began dressing entirely in black, friends theorized that I did this in imitation of Johnny Cash or in homage to Samuel Beckett or as a way of vicariously experiencing the visual splendor of the clerical vocation that had eluded me, or even because black clothes have a way of making a 210-pound man look thinner. But I think it was because of that Hawaiian kid. Better late than never.

 

One day after I had been working for Len for six months or so, a group of boys slightly older than me began to make a commotion at the front of the store.