Little Casino (16 page)

As you will recall, I’m sure, I did all that I could for our relationship for nearly a decade, only to see it dwindle into a charade of unpleasantness on your part. Our separation, at the end of that experience, left much to be desired. I may be dead wrong, but the emotional effect of that separation was one that only a person with a perverse sense of the comic aspects of life would want to experience again. And that does not describe me, as you know. I did feel a twinge reading your letter, for although it is repetitiously obsessive and darkly paranoid, it is ashine, here and there, with your talent for expression and the
mot juste.
And although I am, more often than not, befuddled by your poetic phrases, they occasioned a number of emotionally wrenching memories. I have, as you know, great admiration for you still, and for your courage in writing. I regret to say, however, that I do not wish to see you again. I’m sorry. Please do not write again, unless you feel that you have something fresh and interesting to convey, a “new and different” offer, so to speak.

Sincerely,

Your friend

Although these stiff, even stilted and wooden letters are supposed to evoke a modern world that is at once badoom as well as baraboom, it may be noted, in objection, that among the fancy phrases sorely missed are “I’ll never smile again,” “Shoot if you must this old gray head,” and “I saw a groundhog lying dead, Dead lay he.” Devoted Friend forgot to add, or, perhaps, insert them.

“Harry, how about another coffee over here, OK?”

What if it were to be revealed that these stiff, stilted, and wooden letters were exchanged between Donald and Dolores?

“Here’s your coffee, friend,” Harry says, carefully noting that the friend so addressed is not Donald, who has long since moved out of the neighborhood—as has Dolores.

“I am putting a pound to win on Small Advance in the fourth at Gulf Stream,” Harry says. “Do you want to come in for another pound? At eight to five, it is a nice, comfortable price.”

Would Dolores of the dark eyes and deep-golden skin and the face of Tibullus’s Delia ever have written such a caitiff, whorish letter? Even to Donald?

NB: “These letters can only be thought of as the most elementary exercises in the epistolary. They are, even at best, stiff, stilted, and wooden. Their author, student though he or she may be, would do well to consider a career in handicapping, under the able tutelage of Harry the waiter.”

Clarity, neatness, and thoroughness

H
E WAS RAISED A ROMAN CATHOLIC, AND
while not relentlessly devout, was a good Catholic, heard mass every Sunday and on all Holy Days of Obligation, went to Confession and received the Eucharist a few times a year, regularly performed his Easter Duty, and had been an excellent catechism student as a boy, receiving a Commendation of Scholarship certificate from Monsignor Patrick J. O’Hara of Our Lady of Angels R.C. Church. He went on at least four retreats, ultimately joined the Knights of Columbus, and never, or at least rarely, took the name of the Lord in vain. At Brooklyn Technical High School, he excelled in his studies, and showed a special gift for organic chemistry. His laboratory notebooks were exemplary for their clarity, neatness, and thoroughness, and were, as a matter of fact, famous throughout the school. He was a Boy Scout, joining Troop 93 and becoming a member of the Eagle Patrol. He became, in time, a Junior Assistant Scoutmaster, then an Assistant Scoutmaster, and progressed rapidly from Tenderfoot to Eagle Scout with two Silver Palms, earning, finally, thirty-seven merit badges, a record for the troop. He was a dishwasher and then an assistant counselor and then a counselor at Ten Mile River Scout Camp, where he won the tmr badge, qualifying for additional awards in aquatics, crafts, nature studies, and woodsmanship. In his third summer at Ten Mile River, he was selected for the Order of the Arrow, a secret honor society based upon Indian lore and practices. He attended at least eight camporees and jamborees, and at the age of sixteen became an Explorer Scout. He went to Brooklyn College for a year as a full-time day student, then switched to night college because of the necessity of earning a living in order to assist his mother and father, both of whom were drunks. It took him seven years to earn a B.S. in Chemistry. He was drafted into the Army and became a Military Policeman, stationed, in that capacity, at Fort Dix, Fort Lee, and Fort Leonard Wood. After being discharged from the Army in 1955, he fell in love with a beautiful neighborhood girl, Isabelle Piro, who was beginning to develop a very successful career as a high-fashion model. She was killed in an automobile crash on the Gowanus Expressway at 4:30 on a Sunday morning, and it was generally known that she had been blind drunk, driving at well over eighty, and completely naked under her dress, with her underwear, some of it semen-stained, in her handbag. He began to drink heavily after quarreling wildly with her parents over a nonexistent letter that he insisted she’d left for him. He joined the Lions, the American Legion, the Book of the Month Club, and the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, all the while working as a laboratory assistant for IBM, a job that demanded virtually nothing from him. He then abruptly fell in love with the wife of one of his boyhood friends, and although she performed fellatio on him on an irregular basis, she would not go to bed with him, nor even consider leaving her husband. He asked her once to meet him, naked underneath her clothes but with her underwear in her handbag, and she told him that he was beginning to scare her and not to call anymore. He joined A.A., although, as a Catholic snob, he despised what he thought of as their humble, regular-guy God. He succeeded in his attempt at sobriety, but gave the organization no credit, since he never went to meetings after his fabricated tales of drunken degradation were accepted without question. As he began to dry out, he, oddly enough, was fired, and got another job, much like the first, in a lab in Long Island City. He became the Scoutmaster of a newly formed troop, and was soon adulterously involved with the absurdly thin wife of the pastor of the Norwegian Lutheran Church in whose basement the troop met every Friday evening. One night, after the boys had been dismissed and sent home, he was fucking Mrs. Ingebretsen, whom he sometimes called, with vague affection, “Bones,” on the desk in the tiny closet of a room that had been designated the “troop library,” because of the single shelf of unread books behind the desk, when one of the new members of the troop, a gawky boy who had not yet procured a uniform, opened the door, his
Handbook for Boys
in his hand, and a question, never asked, poised behind his open mouth. That was that, and he left the troop, began to drink again, and flirted with Zen, just before joining the War Resisters League and a pornographic video club, i.e. Pussie Video Sales. For a time, he became an obsessive masturbator, but then grew bored with orgasms. At a rally in Union Square against hate and violence, etc., he fell in love with Joan Baez, or someone who looked and sounded like her, who was singing of peace and fellowship and against most, but not all, rich people. He left the square, humming some old Pete Seeger warhorse, and composing, in his mind, the perfect letter to Miss Baez, when, just as he was completing his witty postscript, he was hit by a Checker cab at Tenth Street and Broadway, directly in front of Grace Church, and died on his way to St. Vincent’s.

Obviously missing from this “sketch” (not my word, I assure you!) is anything that this man may have said, at any time, to anybody. It would have been interesting to know, for instance, the content of his remarks, if any, to Mrs. Ingebretsen and Donald Fritjofsen (the gawky boy), on the occasion of their common embarrassment, and, too, his comments on the matter to Pastor Ingebretsen.

It is to be hoped that this man practiced safe sex in “the age of AIDS,” shared responsibility for birth control whenever he “got lucky,” eschewed cigarettes and all other tobacco products, knowing, as he did, that they are far, far deadlier than massive carpet-bombings and low-level napalm strikes, avoided red meat, salt, refined sugar, and saturated fats, and got plenty of exercise, despite the weeping that regularly convulsed him.

Modern Business English; The Life of the Spider; Mark, the Match Boy; Fables in Slang; Dave Dawson with the Air Corps; Penrod Jashber; Selections from the Homilies of Pastor Pietsch; The Boy Ranchers in the Desert; A Mother’s Prayer; Tom Sawyer; Best Loved Poems of the American People; The Curse of Darwin; The Ordeal of Harriet Marwood, Governess; Letters for All Occasions; A Heap o’ Livin’; A Pocket History of England; The Adventures of Ulysses.

Joan Baez, or the singer who looked like her, could not hold a candle to Isabelle Piro insofar as feminine beauty is concerned; an indication, perhaps, of this unfortunate man’s mental decline.

“Checker cabs are gone, you know? And if we play our cards right we can get rid of the age of AIDS, too, you know? If we talk to the Checker cab guys who got them out, I mean, who got rid of them, the cabs, you know what I mean?”

“Talks like a guy with a paper asshole,” Tommy Azzerini remarks.

The tomato episode

H
E HAD BEEN, FOR MANY YEARS, INTRUSIVE
, selfish, callous, controlling, petty, and childish, and given to prevarication, forgetfulness, and maddening self-justification. An almost intolerable clod of a husband, whose smug egotism made him a good target for his wife’s occasional, unexpected, and thoroughly justified countermeasures. One night, when his wife asked him to slice a tomato for their supper, he took a large, ripe tomato out of the refrigerator, and noticed that there was a half-tomato there as well, covered tightly in shrink wrap. He took that out, too. He had sliced this half-tomato and was beginning to slice the whole tomato, when his wife asked him why, why he’d sliced the half-tomato when she had expressly asked him to slice
a
tomato, a
whole
tomato. With the counterfeit, smug patience that often causes brutal assaults and even murders to be committed upon those who pretend its possession, he explained that he’d sliced the half-tomato and would now slice
half
of the whole tomato, so that they could “use up,” was his phrase, the older, so to speak, half-tomato, and save half of the newer, so to speak, whole tomato. He indeed employed the phrase, “so to speak,” in itself a maddened attacker’s defensible justification for battery. He quietly noted that if it was her
heart’s desire,
he would slice the entire whole tomato, should she feel that a tomato and a half would not be too much for supper, considering, no, knowing of the
wonderful meal
that she was certainly preparing. She asked him why he thought, why in Christ’s name did he think, what gave him the goddamned idea that she wanted him to slice the goddamned half-tomato to begin with. Huh? He said, almost bloated with reasonableness, that it seemed a perfectly reasonable “operation to perform,” yes, he said that, that is: to “use up” the half a tomato that had been in the refrigerator since the day before yesterday, losing flavor and juiciness and vitamins and fucking minerals, whatever the hell they have, to eat the thing, made perfect sense to him. Did he ever, ever, ever, she asked, stop to think that maybe she was saving that half a tomato for something, that she had plans for it? Plans?, he said. Plans?
Plans?
He said that if she indeed had, ah, plans, big plans for the fucking half a fucking tomato, could she not use the half-tomato that would be left after he finished slicing the whole tomato? Couldn’t she? She told him that it wasn’t his business to decide for her which half a tomato she wanted to use. To use, he said, to implement your
big plans.
She said that her decisions were her decisions and that if she wanted to take all the miserable goddamned tomatoes and throw them out the window, it was her business! He said that he hadn’t intended to make decisions for her, God forbid, he simply thought that blah blah and sensible blah, that he thought that it was something that she herself would do, blah. You have no idea, you have no idea, you don’t have any idea what I’d do about it, you have no idea what I’d do about anything, that’s the trouble, that’s always been the trouble, and wasn’t, she added, wasn’t it about time that he seriously started looking for a job?, with his Master’s in sociology? And did it ever occur to him while he watched the ball game that she didn’t feel like eating a stale tomato, a dried-out tomato, that she wanted a fresh tomato? Or was the ball game too intellectually demanding? She said that when she asked him to do something she wished that he would, just once, do it, and not do something else and then spend three hours trying to convince her that that’s what he thought she wanted him to do. I ask you to cut a tomato,
cut a tomato!
At which, with a small, hapless smile, he asked her, whining, whether she wanted him to continue slicing the whole tomato, or just half of it, and what about the sliced half-tomato now? He stood, slightly slumped, as if crushed in spirit, unmanned, impotent, a posture which his arrogant sneer belied. She said that he could do what he wanted to do, the king of the kitchen, the reader of minds, the weaver of dreams, he could slice, not slice, stick the tomatoes up his ass slice by slice, send them to the goddamned stupid millionaire bastard Pittsburgh Cubs. As for her, she didn’t want any tomatoes or any supper, for that matter! She washed and dried her hands and walked out of the kitchen. What about the chicken? he asked. What about the chicken? I said, what about the chicken? And the rice? The sliced tomato on the cutting board had the placid look of all blameless objects that have been swiftly carried across time so as to bewilder and confound.