In God We Trust (20 page)

So I am crouched next to the icebox, sweating. And listening. I catch one line, and it came winging through the screen door like a shot.

“I don’t think either of them know what it means.”

Mrs. Wocznowski is struggling in broken Polish, and she has been crying. My mother is struggling along in broken South Chicago-ese, and she has not been crying; she has been
laughing. Which is the difference between the types of family, and the whole Ethnic business that they both came from. I did not know ‘til some time later that my mother was a retired Flapper.

Between the two of them they somehow got it all straightened out. All I know is that Casmir had trouble sitting down for a month. Apparently he had gone home and told Uncle Ben’s story to
his
kid brother. Loudly.

We’re sitting around the supper table that night when it began to dawn on me the enormity of what I had perpetuated. My mother all the while has not said anything to me. I have not been given the business, I have not been hollered at. I would have felt better somehow if I
had
been given the treatment. So, naturally, I can’t eat.

One of my great favorite delicacies at the time was mashed potatoes thoroughly mixed with red cabbage. Oh boy! It looks terrible, I have to warn you. It looks like the worst glop, but it’s great. Tonight, however, I was just fiddling with my fork.

“Why aren’t you eating your red cabbage?”

“Ah … I’m not very hungry.”

And then, of course, she knew that it was really biting me, down where it counts. She turns to my father and says:

“Look, the next time we see Ben, I want you to talk to him.”

When she called Ben “Ben” it was
Ben
. Whenever she thought he was all right, she called him “Uncle Ben.” Now it was just straight Ben.

“I want you to talk to Ben.”

My father looks up from the Sport page.

“What about?”

“You know what about. You know very well what about.”

My Old Man started to laugh, and she says:

“Yeah. Him. Today. Casmir.”

“Well, what did he say?”

“Ouyay owknay utway.”

“Oh no!”

They’re both laughing, and that made it even worse. I had
no conception, and that made it even worse, to have two grownups laughing at something I did. I mean, they’re really
laughing
. All I knew was that it had something to do with Uncle Ben’s joke. And Hockey.

XIX
WE HAVE TWO SMALL VISITORS

“You know, this isn’t a bad drink,” said Flick.

“Indeed it isn’t. You maybe could sell a few here.”

“The only thing is, we might have trouble with the ladies around here if I told ’em why I put the olives in it.”

Flick, I could see, was Public Relations conscious. He fished with his swizzle stick for one of the olives; speared it neatly.

“That reminds me, Ralph, of the time my mother made a cake for the PTA, and she squeezed the icing out of one a them squeezers, making roses and all that stuff on the PTA cake. And my Old Man snuck in and squeezed something else on it, only she didn’t know it until Miss Shields opened it up at school and they put it out in front of all the ladies at the Penny Supper.”

“I presume it was a well-known four-letter word.” Flick chuckled at the memory of what his father had written on the cake.

“Flick, speaking of food, do you remember the time you rushed into the kitchen in your house when you were hot as hell, when we were playing ball, and grabbed that bottle out of the refrigerator? And you thought it was cider and drank down a quart of vinegar before you knew what hit you?”

“Oh God! I heaved for about an hour!”

“As I recall, all over my new tennis shoes.”

Flick laughed. “And Schwartz’s knickers.”

“Did you ever find out why your mother put the vinegar bottle in the icebox?”

“I was too busy heaving to worry about that!”

All this talk of food had made me acutely aware that I had not had anything to eat all day, since that dinky little toy Airline breakfast of plastic eggs that they had served me on the plane.

“Hey, Flick, you got anything to eat around here? I am willing to pay.”

He turned away from the bar and with a casual wave of his hand indicated a couple of cardboard posters carrying cellophane bags of dried peanuts, pork rinds; the usual bar junk.

“That’s about it,” he said. “We have those electric sandwiches, though. You stick ’em in the infra-red machine and it cooks ’em.”

“No, old buddy. I think I’ll pass.”

I was looking forward to a plate of good old Indiana frogs’ legs which I intended to devour later on in the evening.

Two kids trooped in through the front door at this point, letting in a big blast of frigid air and a strong whiff of Refinery gas, an aroma so much part of the everyday life in Hohman that it is called “fresh air.” They were wearing heavy skeepskin coats and giant stocking caps. Their noses ran copiously. The larger of the two got right to the point.

“Can we have a glass of water, please?”

Impassively Flick stared down at the scruffy pair.

“I can’t serve kids here.”

I could see he was putting them on. The smaller of the two started to whimper weakly. Flick drew a large glass of water, handing it over to me. I passed it on to the elder of the pair.

“You kids can split it. And don’t tell your mother that you’ve been hanging around Flick’s Tavern, you hear me?”

They silently drank the water, doggedly, finally handing the glass back to me. Without a word they turned and headed for the door. Flick stopped them in their tracks:

“All right, you guys. Whatta you say?”

The smaller one squeaked:

“…  thank you.…”

They were gone. Flick rinsed out the glass.

“Boy, all day long they’re in and out of here. I’m surprised they don’t ask me for a beer.”

Outside, in the unfriendly air, the two struggled out of sight, clinging to one another.

“Flick, that little one with the runny nose looked suspiciously like he belonged to your lodge.”

Flick snorted:

“That kid ain’t no Elk.”

“No, that isn’t what I mean. I know a Root Beer Barrel Man when I see one. Did you notice that suspicious bulge in his right cheek? I suspect that he was loaded.”

Flick sat down heavily on his high stool behind the bar. He rubbed his hands over his white shirt front. I swear his eyes clouded noticeably, although it could very well have been all the beer, as well as the vodka I had put down, not to mention the other stuff.

“You know, Ralph.…” he said at long last, “…  I haven’t had a really good root beer barrel in a hell of a long time.”

“To be honest with you, Flick, I never fully understood just what you saw in root beer barrels.”

Flick did not answer, being off in a world by himself. I pushed on:

“As you recall, I, personally, was a Jawbreaker man. And I am proud to say that I have the silver inlays to prove it.”

XX
OLD MAN PULASKI AND THE INFAMOUS JAW-BREAKER BLACKMAIL CAPER

There is a vast, motley mob of Americans, untold millions, who even today, years after the consummation of their original sin, are paying the Piper. Paying in many ways, the most notable of which is sheer, stark, shrill, agonizing, bone-shattering pain which sometimes strikes its debauched victim late at night and sends his shuddering frame into the gray fringes of near-madness. The agony sometimes becomes so poignant that men, strong men, unweeping men, have been known to toy actively with suicide and even worse as the only escape. And in some instances, not as rare as might be thought, have actually taken that final, fatal step, the pain unbearable that made the sharp, crashing impact of a Thirty-Eight slug behind the ear child’s play by comparison.

Yes, the sinners are paying, as they have always paid in the end, and will always pay. There is no escape!

These poor, innocent citizens are Victims, and they seldom even know the origin of their ordeal by fire of what has lately become known in some of the more advanced medical textbooks as “The Juju Baby Plague,” sometimes termed “The Root Beer Barrel Rot.”

Anyone who has ever experienced a first-degree, Big League, card-carrying dedicated toothache in a major molar at 3
A.M
. in
the quiet solitude of night has stood at the very gates of Hell itself. There are no words in the language that can adequately describe the ebbing and swelling, ebbing and swelling and then rising to even greater heights, then again deceptively receding, only to turn again to the attack; insistent nagging, dragging, thudding, screaking ache of a tooth that has faced more than its share in a hard, rough and tumble lifetime of Juju Babies, Root Beer Barrels, Jawbreakers, and countless other addictions devoured during the innocent days of childhood. And like all sinners, Orgiasts of all stripes, he looks back upon the very thing that reduced him to a shuddering, denture-ridden, cavity-wracked hulk with bleary-eyed, teary nostalgia. Everywhere, daily, dentists—cackling fiendishly—reap the harvests sown years ago in Penny Candy stores across the land.

Well I remember the Pusher that sent me on that long rocky road that finally led to $765 worth of silver alloy and various plastic compounds which I now carry in my skull as a mute reminder of past, fleeting pleasures. The fillings are not permanent, but the cavities are!

In the throes of a toothache, all men are one. It is the one affliction known to Man that is truly the Great Leveler. Kings and commoners, Generals and simple peasants of the field all bow to this basic, somehow singularly humiliating curse that has been known and endured as long as there has been Man on earth. George Washington became a Revolutionist because of a bad set of incisors. And no wonder!

Recently there was a dispatch from Burma that told of a rampaging tiger that in a single night, without warning, killed twenty-eight Burmese in a quick dash down the main street of a jungle village. The native hunter who later bagged him simply said:

“He had bad teeth.”

One afternoon recently, while staring bleakly out of a waiting-room window, having tired of the ancient
National Geographies
and the Currier & Ives prints, attempting to blot out of my consciousness the sound of muffled moans and occasional sharp yelps of pain which were mingling with the Muzak, my tortured
mind—perhaps out of some deep-hidden well of submerged masochism—plucked out of my vast file of sinister Life Experiences and dredged to the surface Old Man Pulaski and the great Jawbreaker Tie-In Sale. While waiting my turn on the Rack, I began to piece together the whole sordid tale.

Pulaski, a blue-eyed, blue-jowled native of the Midwest, operated a mercantile establishment that was the Steel-town Indiana version of The Candy Store. Nobody ever called it by that name. It was just “Pulaski’s.” On the side of his red brick, two-story store there was an enormous Bull Durham sign that showed this great, dark red, arrogant, fully equipped bull looking out into the middle distance toward Chicago, with the simple inscription “Her Hero.”

It was under this sign that Pulaski dispensed Juju Babies, licorice cigars, Mary Janes, Jawbreakers, Navy Cut Chewing Tobacco, Mule Twist, Apple Plug, Eight-Hour Day Rough Cut, Mail Pouch, Copenhagen Snuff, and summer sausage, sliced thin.

Penny Candy is just about the very first purchase that any kid actually makes himself. That very first buy which launches all of us on a lifelong career as Consumers, leading finally to God knows where. Kids take to buying the way fleas take to Beagle hounds. It’s just natural. You don’t have to learn; somehow you know.

It doesn’t take long for Penny Candy buyers to begin that great weeding-out process of the Slobs versus the Anti-Slobs. It is here that it starts. A discriminating Penny Candy connoisseur knew what he was after, while the rest merely settled for anything that was big, lumpy, sticky, and sweet. The Juju Baby connoisseur today buys Porsches and fine wines while his slack-jawed erstwhile friend continues to dig large, lumpy, sticky-sweet automobiles and syrupy beer that comes in six-packs with self-open tops. I pride myself, perhaps overly so, on having developed an exceedingly discriminating palate for the various vintages and
châteaux
of Penny Candy.