Crazy (5 page)

I checked Dick Tracy, wondering how many locks he had picked with that icepick-pointed jaw, and I saw it was time to head home for dinner. Besides that my head hurt. Too much was going on inside of it, too many delirious, mysterious fandangos all bombarding my brain like it was some kind of run-down cargo spaceship being battered by swarms of pissed-off meteors because an article in
Science Magazine
had referred to them as “space debris.” I took a last wistful look around for Jane and then started to wend my way droopily home, always watchful, of course, as the shadows of autumn gathered deeper, for a sudden Baloqui sneak attack. Though as a matter of fact I was fond of the jerk. Being both Don Quixote
and
Sancho Panza, plus a touch of Trabb’s Boy in Dickens’s
Great Expectations
so relentlessly and quirkily deviling Pip, he had what most of us lack, which is vivid life, which I was practically certain beat vivid death, most especially when these scientists were constantly scaring us by insisting “vivid death” was where the universe was headed, though I suppose that when Miss Doyle heard the news, she said, “So?”

I chose an out-of-the-way route home that would take me past the “Supe” in the hope of maybe spotting Arrigo in the lobby and then somehow luring him out into the street, but, as it happened, when I got there he was standing out in front on a cigarette break. When he saw me coming toward him he froze for a second, his eyes wide and staring, then he flicked the cigarette into the street and tore back into the theater. Mr. Heinz was in the lobby at the time. He caught my eye, turned and stared at the auditorium door as it slowly and silently closed behind Arrigo, took another unreadable look at me and then lowered his head and shook it. So okay, so now I knew who was the real “eyewitness.” But what on earth had ever happened to Arrigo? Three years before on Halloween night a whole bunch of us had stopped in at Boshnack’s for a soda. Boshnack’s radio was blasting and he said to us, “Shhhh, boys! Be quiet, now! Quiet! Listen!” Well, turns out it was Orson Welles with his famous phony “Martian Invasion” broadcast on CBS radio which he did so well it sounded like it really was happening and all these building-sized Martian spaceships had landed in New Jersey and were spewing out death rays left and right and all of us were shivering in our skivvies, that is, all except one of us kids who shook his head and dismissively flipped his hand, sneering, “Ah, come on, you guys! It’s total bullshit!”

It was Eddie Arrigo.

Not to dwell on the matter, but in trying to sort out what had changed him, I would keep coming back to this one other time that we’d all come to Boshnack’s on a sweltering summer night with the demon of boredom clawing at its cage within us. Many years later, when I was struggling for a living in Southern California, I lived for a time in a low-rent apartment complex in Studio City called the Valli Sands where there would be late-night Bing Crosby sightings when he would come to visit his future wife, Kathryn Grant, and where the tenant list ranged from Clint Eastwood—then under contract to Universal Pictures for a hundred a week and doing “wild tracks” of Indian war whoops and such for his pay—to me, then a midnight-to-dawn United Airlines reservations agent, and to the guy in the apartment next to mine who sold Bibles door to door and whose daily big meal was a budget-friendly serving of cabbage boiled in vinegar and lots of brown sugar, whereas mine was a dish of Uncle Ben’s rice that I would cook in tomato sauce instead of water and then add sauted onions and a lot of salt and pepper. It was a dish I would serve at the occasional little ’dos to which I would invite a few residents of the complex. Clint and Maggie, his wife, were at the first such gathering, sitting across from me on a tiny sofa, Clint with his hands clasped tightly around his knees and already beginning his
A Fistful of Dollars
persona of silent and inscrutable staring, although the look was benign and full of both wonder and a touch of bewilderment, perhaps, about what he was doing on the Universal lot following the day that a studio executive pulled up to a Ventura Boulevard gas station where Eastwood was working as an attendant, took one look at him and offered him a studio contract. Clint had never given a thought to a career in movies. I learned this from Maggie. She spoke. Other than that it was a quiet affair.

But the next time, and times after that, were different as uninvited, struggling young actors showed up, including a young Jayne Mansfield, who was bubbly with a sweet-natured confidence in her future, and her husband, Paul, and their six-month-old baby. Of the three only Paul was quiet. He and Eastwood soon found each other and wound up in a staring contest over whose was the deeper silence. In the meantime, and finally getting to the point—because the crowds at these things were now straining my budget, and not wanting to be outdone by the burgeoning attendance at the Brown Sugar Cabbage parties next door—after hours of nightly experimentation, during which I would imagine myself to be Claude Raines in
The Invisible Man
, dripping chemicals from vial to vial, I found that mixing 7 UP and sauterne wine in a ratio of one-to-two will give you champagne for about four minutes. The inspiration for this great humanitarian discovery was an inevitable progression, I believe, from that previously mentioned fascinating night in July when the slender green bottle of Vanti Papaya that we handed to Arrigo was actually three parts Vanti and one part collective youthful piss.

Arrigo took a sip or two, and then judged it to be “a little bit off,” so he handed it to Boshnack who, after a test sip, shook his head and agreed, “It’s not right.” It was soon after that, is what I’m saying, that Arrigo started making up incredible stories. Connect the dots. I mean, I had to suspect it was the atomically altered Vanti Papaya that had somehow altered Eddie, although old man Boshnack had sipped at it too and the only bizarre effect it seemed to have was that the very next day he cut the price of chocolate Hooten bars from two to one cent and a Hooten with nuts from three to two. A little strange. Maybe Boshnack’s immune system fought the thing off and he only got a touch since the price of egg creams stayed the same. But then who knows? It could even be that Eddie found out what we’d done and was slyly and secretly eating his cookies as he showed us that revenge is a dish best served not only cold but maybe endlessly as well.

Right after my encounter with Arrigo at the Supe, I doubled back to Second Avenue and as I passed the Chinese laundry who do I see but “Upright” Olsen in what looked like a pretty heavy argument with one of the laundrymen, probably the owner, and then two others came out from the back and were yammering and mad as hell and right away I saw another of my front-page headlines:

And below it the subhead:

I hurried on before Olsen could turn and see me and then afterward say the whole thing was all my fault because if I hadn’t missed the last three meetings he wouldn’t have had to transfer his annoyance with me to the Chinks by raising their protection fee from seven to ten percent.

You can prove almost anything you want if you want to.

Pop had cooked Peruvian shish kekab for dinner with a side of corn and boiled potatoes, and as we ate, our little curve-topped Philco radio was booming out the Saturday shows that began at five o’clock with
Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge
(“Make way for Her Nibs, Miss Georgia Gibbs!”), and then Bob Hope, Fred Allen and
The Hit Parade
, which played the top fifteen songs of the week; and, of course,
The Lone Ranger
, which in every single show had the Masked Man declare to some badass, “You’re not hurt! I only shot the gun out of your hand!” What I achingly longed for was right after that to just once hear a moan and the thud of a body falling to the ground. Pop loved
The Lone Ranger
, and the
Red Skelton Show
even more because of Skelton’s running character “The Mean Widdle Kid” who every week made Pop smile and chuckle with delight at his “If I do, I get a whippin’,” and then after a pause for wicked thought, “I
dood
it!” Pop was so pleased that I could imitate the voice of the kid to a tee and at random times he’d smile and say, “Joey, doing for me now ‘I dood it!’” It tickled him so! And when I’d done it he’d look down and shake his head and start to chuckle just the way he always did at the name “Baby Snooks” or the voice of his favorite newscaster, Gabriel Heatter. Imitating radio voices was the reason I was popular in school, though later on in my high school years when I discovered I could do a really chilling movie werewolf cry, it was a whole other opposite story inasmuch as not anyone, not even Pop, would ever dream of saying, “Joey, doing for me now scary werewolf call,” most especially on a Sunday in Central Park while we’re watching all these honking, ungrateful seals being fed and complaining like they’d just been harpooned when a fish didn’t score a perfect strike into their mouths as if the City could afford to hire Whitlow Wyatt, the Brooklyn Dodgers star pitcher, to come down there every day at two o’clock to throw flounder straight into the mouths of a bunch of glistening, spoiled little shits.

“What you do today, Joey?”

I shook my head as I chewed and swallowed, and then finally answered Pop, “Not much.”

“Me too.”

Yeah, sure: just busting his hump with that hot dog cart.

I thought of Jane:

“Be good to your father. He loves you so much.”

How could she know such a thing? Were her mom and dad friends with the Pagliarellos? Or was it just a pretty easy guess?

“Something wrong, Joey?”

“What do you mean, Pop?”

“You face. You thinking hard about something.”

I stabbed at the potato with my fork.

“No, nothing, Pop. Really. Just regular.”

“Could be this girl who buys spaghetti for you, Joey?”

“Ah, come on, Pop! I’m okay! I mean, really! I’m fine!”

Pop kept studying me, chewing on the stem of his briar pipe. He wasn’t buying it and I knew it. I was thinking about scads of things: Jane Bent and Mr. Am and the Asp and Baloqui, plus this sense of unreality that would drop over me at times like a Faraday cage reconfigured to block out time, and now and then I would feel, however distantly and through a veil all too freaking darkly, that
events were repeating themselves!
Not just moments, but in blocks of months—even years! It wasn’t déjà vu, it was déjà
everythin
g! At times I even knew what was coming next! Very rarely. But like now. The radio. The
Hit Parade
. A new “bonus song” about the Lone Ranger: