Little Casino (3 page)

“Don’t fence me in!” the doughty President would exultantly cry to the aromatic woods. And soon it would be time for a raw onion.

The very picture of loneliness

D
ESOLATE LOT. A BOY OF PERHAPS FOUR
, in a tattered and patched hand-me-down windbreaker, a knitted cap on his head against the raw cold of a late March afternoon. He is alone, rooting with a stick in the rubble of broken red and buff bricks, shards of stained porcelain, diseased shingles, tree limbs, all the rubbish and detritus of this failing neighborhood, struggling for life on the thinnest edge of utter decay. It is the very picture of loneliness. The boy’s father, who has gone to look for him as the bitter darkness begins to slide across the low roofs of the neighborhood houses, watches him, heartbrokenly, in silence. He knows, although he has no idea that he knows, that the boy, alone in the sad quiet of this gray, dispirited lot, will be alone always in his life, and that the distant, perplexing world that he is to inhabit is one to which he will be forever strange. This knowledge enters the father with viral efficiency, and years later, he will remember this day, even remember the shape of a brown leaf that lies at his feet, crepitant.

And years later, after a long period of estrangement and silence, the boy, now a solitary man, will write his father a letter, suggesting that the years of separation and misunderstanding might, possibly, be ended, might, possibly, be “cured,” is his odd word. And the father, tentatively, carefully, replies, with guarded love and exquisite care, but hopelessly. The boy will have no memory of the death of hope that lay at the center of that lot, at the center of that raw afternoon, eerie in thin, failing sunlight and dirty cold. The father will have no way of telling his son of the truth that was thrust upon him, as he watched from the sidewalk before he called to him to come home. The fact of the loveless void of that shattered lot on that unremarkable block in Brooklyn in the fading years of the 1950s will be in and of his letter, and even as he mails it, the letter, full of carefully phrased sentences that demand nothing and expect nothing and promise nothing, that is but a salute, labored yet authentic, will not, he knows, be answered.

Céline writes that “the living people we’ve lost in the crypts of time sleep so soundly side by side with the dead that the same darkness envelops them all.”

No one used to think that a vacant lot was
owned,
rather, lots were everybody’s property, loci of quiet anarchy. A lot took its character from that of the surrounding neighborhood. Because of this, it was an accurate index of a neighborhood’s present, but held no hint of its future. To place a living human figure in the center of a lot is to
compose
a kind of iconic reality that is, oddly, more real than the presence of an actual living figure in the center of a lot.

It is hard to be a father.

No love. No nothing.

The scow

T
HE BOY LEAPS FROM THE SLIPPERY EDGE
of the pier out toward the scow tied up alongside it. He’s done this dozens of times over the past few years, timing the slow heave and slide of the clumsy vessel as the swells carry it toward the pier and then away from it, but this time he misjudges and, in midair, his arms outstretched and his legs pistoning, realizes that he won’t land on the deck. His left foot touches the gunwale, but the scow is riding away from him on the water, glassy with oil. Some other boys stand in momentary silent terror, still, on the pier in the anemic sunlight and brisk wind of the October afternoon, knowing that their friend’s foot has not gained purchase. He falls between the hull and the pier just as the scowreaches its maximum distance from the pier, and is held, wholly still, by its huge, splintery hawsers. As the boy surfaces, the scow lifts and begins its terrible slide toward him, the swell carrying it silently, calmly, toward the pier. A deckhand hears the screaming of the boys on the pier and emerges, half-drunk, from a makeshift cabin of planks and tarpaper on the deck, and knows, instantly, what has happened, and that there is nothing to be done. He stands at the gunwale and looks into the space between the hull and the pier, sees the boy’s small, tough face white with shock and fear, and yells, in a voice high with rage and anguish, in a near-comic Norwegian accent, that the focking goddamn kid is focking goddamn crazy and to get the focking goddamn hell out of there, and then the boy is a soft crack and an explosion of gore and, weirdly, makes no sound as he is crushed to his filthy death.

“What did you see as you fell? What did you hear as you sank?/Did it make you drunken with hearing?”

The boy would not have understood these lines in any other way but the literal. That is, had anyone known to avail him of the poem from which they come. But who would have known?

Go fish. And blues in the night.

A more innocent time

T
O BOMBARD THE SMALL AND INEFFICIENT
gas refrigerator with grapefruit would be his weekly, perhaps daily delight, yet he was astigmatic, myopic, amblyopic, cross-eyed, knock-kneed, bowlegged, and box-ankled. To heave huge turkeys, each shot several times with a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver, into the kitchen sink, seemed a promising idea, not, however, to be realized by the likes of him, who could not catch a ball, the pitiful bastard. To pull up the skirts and slips of all the pretty girls on their way to Sunday mass was a romantic ideal, and yet, he broke his steel clinic glasses every week or so. What about throwing the guys who had ripped his shirt right off the fucking roof, one after the other? But had he ever, once, managed to hit the ball past the infield? Killing that large, handsome German shepherd with a perfect slab of perfectly poisoned meat would have surely benefited mankind, but the poor chooch was afraid to put his head underwater. To become a priest, kind and brave and strong among the disgusting yet worthy lepers, was a noble calling, but how could he find time to study when he couldn’t stop polluting himself for a minute, the pasty-faced, underweight, nervous degenerate? He could easily kidnap Dolores and Georgene from in front of Fontbonne Hall and carry them off to Rio and CARNIVAL! and unspeakable sin, although he would not let them know that he still, on occasion, wet the bed. To sink, with nary a moment’s hesitation, the Staten Island ferry, so as to drown the secret Nazi agents who spied on convoys in the Narrows would have shortened the war by a month, but he was having serious problems with long division. To use his Amazing Hypnotic Powers, from time to time, and solely for the refined amusement of his closest academic chums, so as to compel Miss Ramsay to happily strip naked in front of the hearty group gathered in the detention room was a pastime that appealed to his sense of fair play, but hard, hard to do when she pinched his earlobe and called him a dunce. To smoke a quiet pipe before the cheery fire while mulling over the details of the latest gruesome ax murder always hit the old anglophilic spot, but not for the sort of rough fellow who smoked Wings, Twenty Grand, and Sweet Caporal loosies. To show Liz and Mary how to do the Harlem Glide could have been a charming way to pass the time, had the young women been willing to tolerate the importunate if unintentional prodding of his manly erection. He argued, convincingly, that a Tom Collins was more refreshing than a John Collins, that upstart drink, but his buttocks showed through the large holes in his threadbare corduroy knickers. And who better to warn the grizzled pilots of the
Queen Mary
and the
Normandy,
as the great ships approached the Narrows, of the foul Sargasso Sea of floating condoms that threatened their safety? But had not two Garfield Boys cut his tie off with a switchblade and stolen his lunch money? To batter the persons of the neighborhood bullies, in, of course, strict accordance with the Rules of the Ring, while casually remarking on Annette’s tiny though shapely breasts, was always invigorating, but the shirt-cardboard inserts in his worn-out shoes were soaked through. To carry swiftly messages of highest priority, down pitch-black streets, from one air-raid warden to another, could help to bring the Axis to its knees, but 3
^¢
chocolate sodas and Mrs. Wagner’s strangely malevolent pies had given him a faceful of pimples. Most seriously, he would have liked to explode a magical bomb that he had invented one night in bed, a bomb that would do the Job, that is, maim, dismember, roast, fry, broil, and obliterate all his enemies, but for the fact that a group of charming and brilliant, sober and judicious proxy killers were about to do the trick. Twice.