Palisades Park (3 page)

A tall man with an amused twinkle in his eye sat down beside him. “Don’t let these little moochers fool you,” he told Eddie as he unwrapped a pastrami sandwich. “They do okay, cadging meals off the steady staff. I haven’t seen one starve to death in the twenty years I’ve been working here.”

“Where do they all come from?”

“They live in the woodshop, curling up between the piles of sawdust. Breed like rabbits. The office staff adopts one or two each season, the rest are on mouse patrol.” He extended a hand. “Roscoe Schwarz. I blow air up women’s skirts for a living.”

Eddie laughed, remembering the Funhouse and how his mother’s and sister’s skirts were hiked up around their waists like umbrellas blown inside out by a storm. “Yeah? What does your wife think about that?”

Roscoe shrugged. “She’s not overjoyed. But she knows it pays the bills.” He took a bite of pastrami. “Before managing the Funhouse I worked the Ferris wheel for sixteen years. I like the Funhouse better, you’ve got an audience, you get laughs. Only once a lady got huffy with me, hit me with her purse.” He smiled. “She was a natural redhead, by the way.”

They shared a laugh. Eddie surrendered the last of his ham and cheese to a calico cat and resolved to pack an extra sandwich tomorrow.

By the end of the day Eddie’s legs ached like a mountain goat’s, but the next day he finished ahead of schedule and did a good enough job that he was assigned to the park’s second biggest coaster, the Skyrocket. In the middle of his third day, Eddie was called down by Harold Goldgraben, who told him, “I just spoke with Chief Borrell, he can use an extra man on his candy concession. Meet him at his hot-dog stand near the pool.”

Eddie had worked enough carnivals that he wouldn’t have been fazed to be meeting with a full-blown Indian chief decked out in war paint and headdress, but at the stand he found a tall, avuncular man around forty, wearing a police uniform. “Hi. Frank Borrell,” he said, offering his hand.

“Eddie Stopka.”

Borrell smiled. “I see you’ve noticed the uniform. No, it’s not for show. I’m the police chief here in Cliffside Park.”

Confused, Eddie asked, “And you own a hot-dog stand too?”

“This is just kind of a sideline, you know what I mean? I also sell candy floss, soda pop, apples on a stick … we got no crime to speak of in Cliffside Park, but a hell of a lot of tooth decay.”

Eddie laughed. “So how did a cop wind up selling hot dogs?”

“Lotta cops moonlight here as security guards, but me, fifteen years ago I was walking a beat on Palisade Avenue. I got friendly with the Schencks, the owners—helped them out with traffic and whatnot—and they offered to let me buy into some concessions as an investment.” He looked Eddie up and down. “The Goldgraben kid says you’re a damn good worker. You’ve worked carnivals?”

Eddie rattled off his experience, and Borrell took it in with the close attention one would expect of a policeman. Then, “I need a grind man to sell candy floss and popcorn,” not exactly police parlance. “You interested?”

“You bet.”

“I can pay fifteen dollars a week plus two percent of the take. But that might not amount to much.”

“Why not?”

“We’re all holding our breaths to see how this stock market crash affects gate receipts. As it is, I’ve been just breaking even. The Schenck brothers aren’t doing any better—I’m not sure how much longer they’re going to foot the bill to keep this place open. They got bigger fish to fry in Hollywood.”

“I’ve worked other shows that were getting by on the skin of their teeth,” Eddie said, though saddened to hear of it. “I know what it’s like.”

“Okay, one more thing. Palisades has an employee dress code: men have to be clean-shaven and wear coats, ties, and collared shirts during the week, a full dress suit on weekends. I’m looking at you and thinking maybe you don’t own a suit, am I correct?”

Eddie flushed with embarrassment. “No, but I can—”

“Don’t sweat it, I’ll front you the cash. Go over to Schweitzer’s Department Store in Fort Lee, get yourself a nice suit, couple ties, two or three dress shirts. You could use a haircut, too. Phil Basile’s got a barbershop here on the park grounds, tell him the Chief sent you and to shear off some of that hay on your head, put it on my tab.”

“Thanks, that’s really swell of you.”

“You got a place to stay, kid?”

“Yeah, a room at the Y.”

“My cousin Patsy’s in real estate, I’ll see if he knows of a place. No, wait a minute. Hey, Duke!” he called out across the pool area. “Duke!”

About fifty feet away, one of the men helping to clean up the pool area looked up. “Yeah?” he called back.

Borrell said, “You know the guy, don’t you, that manages the building where Lightning lives? Over on Anderson Ave?”

“Yeah, so?”

“So get your wop ass over here, there’s somebody I want you to meet.” The Chief turned back to Eddie and gave him a good-natured slap across the shoulders. “We’ll get you fixed up with something, kid.” Borrell then spoke three words that thrilled Eddie more than he could admit:

“Welcome to Palisades.”

*   *   *

Johnny Duke was not a sentimental man. “Sure, I’d miss the park if it shut down,” he told Eddie. “It’s a great place to get laid.”

John “Duke” DeNoia, one of the lifeguards at the Palisades pool, was six feet tall, husky, with curly black hair—a rugged thirty-year-old with only his scarred, pockmarked cheeks to detract from his good looks. According to him, that didn’t matter much.

“The pool is like a giant magnet for pussy,” Johnny expounded as he and Eddie made their way across the park. “Blondes, brunettes, redheads, big tits, little tits, what have you—they all come to the pool. And if you’re a lifeguard, sitting on one of them big red chairs, you might as well be a king. Well,” he added with a laugh, “a duke, at least.”

“Yeah, I was gonna ask,” Eddie said, “why Duke?”

“The Duke DeNoia was a nobleman from Naples, sixteenth century. His given name was John Carafa. I’m John DeNoia, ergo, Johnny Duke.”

“Does the park let you take girls on the rides for free?”

“Wouldn’t know. Never been on one.”

“You’ve never been on a ride here?”

“Never been on one anywhere,” DeNoia said.

“Really?” Eddie said in disbelief. “Not even as a kid?”

DeNoia shrugged. “They go up, they go down. What’s the point?”

Eddie was at a loss to reply to that.

The “Duke” grinned. “Only one thing I’m interested in riding, and it ain’t no friggin’ Ferris wheel. Though one gal I knew was kind of a cyclone.”

They reached the parking lot where Johnny kept his sporty yellow Oldsmobile Roadster. “Nice car,” Eddie said.

“Thanks. Great for getting laid. Climb in.”

Johnny opened the throttle and drove to a redbrick building with Tudor-style gables in the 700 block of Anderson Avenue. Eddie thought it looked too swank for him, but Johnny disagreed: “Times are tough, everybody’s willing to negotiate. C’mon, let’s see what they got.”

Johnny made introductions to a rumpled-looking manager: “Eddie here’s working for Lightning and the Chief. You got any singles available?”

“Yeah, I got one backs up on the alley. No fancy view or anything…”

“I don’t mind,” Eddie told him.

As they followed the manager down the hall, Eddie said in a low voice to Johnny, “Who’s … ‘Lightning’?”

“The Chief’s partner at the park, that’s his nickname. He lives in this building, I’ll introduce you. Hey, come to think, you’re gonna need a nickname yourself. Stopka—is that Russian?”

“Polish.”

“‘Eddie the Polack’? No, wait, we got one of those already…”

The manager led them into a cramped but clean room with a Murphy bed, a small kitchen with an icebox and coal-burning stove, the promised view of an alley, and a bathroom about the size of a box of Wheaties. But it was a nice neighborhood and right on a trolley line. It rented for ten dollars a month—a bit rich for Eddie’s blood, but when Johnny bargained it down to eight-fifty, Eddie bit and paid the first month’s rent in advance.

On the way out, Johnny stopped by Dick Bennett’s apartment and introduced Eddie to him. “Hey, nice to meet ya,” Dick said, glad-handing him. “Lightning” Bennett lived up to his nickname, a fast talker not unlike many Eddie had met in the carny game but a bit slicker than most, sharply dressed and genial. “You play the ponies, Eddie?”

“Not really.”

“I’ve got a tip on a nag called Legerdemain in tomorrow’s fifth at Freehold. I’ll be at the track, I can place a bet for you.”

Eddie demurred again. Dick didn’t hold it against him, and he even gave him a bottle of bootleg whisky (at least it looked like whisky). “Welcome to the park, kid. I don’t get by as often as I used to—I’ve got stakes in a couple of nightclubs too—but the Chief’s a great guy, you’re in good hands.”

Leaving the building, Eddie offered to buy Duke dinner by way of thanks for his help. They dined at one of Duke’s favorite haunts, Tarantino’s on Palisade Avenue, where they consumed hearty helpings of spaghetti and split the bottle of pretty good whisky Bennett had given them. “Dick gets this hooch from a guy at the track,” Duke said, “who uses it to spike a nag’s water before a big race. Man, I could run a few lengths myself after this.” He looked at Eddie, snapped his fingers, and suddenly announced: “I got it!”

“Got what?”

“What is it they say? ‘I wouldn’t touch that with a ten-foot pole’? You’re our Ten Foot Pole! There’s your nickname.”

Eddie smiled and hoped not.

The next day, with the money the Chief fronted him, Eddie went to Schweitzer’s Department Store and bought a blue worsted suit for $14.95 and three white dress shirts for 88¢ apiece. He bought some toiletries at Ghiosay’s Pharmacy and groceries at the Big Chief Market—mostly cans of pork and beans, Dinty Moore beef stew, a pound of Hills Brothers coffee—and moved into his new apartment. It was tiny, lacking in niceties—but it was
his
, not a carnival tent or boxcar. Maybe he couldn’t go back to his old home in Newark, but he was determined to make a new one for himself.

Like all concessions at the park, the Chief’s candy stand—in a good location, halfway up the main midway—fronted a larger stockroom behind what the public saw, crammed with supplies, gaming equipment, or prizes. Eddie was one of two concession agents, the other a short, round man named Lew who never seemed to be without a lit cigar in his mouth. As they shook hands, Lew said, “They call you Ten Foot, don’t they?”

“Where’d you hear that?” Eddie said, appalled.

“Word travels fast. I was on the job less than thirty minutes before I became Lew the Jew.” He shrugged with equanimity. “Whatcha gonna do?”

Ride operators worked in shifts—four hours on, four hours off—but concessionaires didn’t have that luxury, often only having time for bathroom breaks and maybe twenty minutes to wolf down a quick meal. Lew and Eddie agreed to alternate doing the “grind,” the pitch to the crowd, while the other worked the counter and rang up sales. They spent the first day inspecting and cleaning the working parts of the candy floss machine—the copper bowl, the spinner with its colander-like holes in its surface, the heating elements—which Lew warned could be a little erratic.

Lew also introduced Eddie to the agent next door, a veteran grind man named Jackie Bloom, who worked a “cat rack”—an old carny game in which marks tossed balls in an attempt to knock fuzzy stuffed cats off a shelf and win plush prizes. Then Eddie made the faux pas of asking, “Where’s the gaff?”—the button or lever that threw the game.

Jackie looked at him with a mix of scorn and amusement: “You’re not working the carny anymore, kid. Everything here’s on the up-and-up. Now, that doesn’t mean this is an easy game to win. See all that fuzz on the cats? A ball can sail right through that fuzz with barely a ripple—you gotta hit the center of the cat to knock it down. But that’s not a gaff, it’s a challenge.”

Eddie was surprised to find how much the park reminded him of the Ironbound, where so many nationalities shared just four square miles of neighborhood. Palisades was a similar melting pot: August Berni, an old-timer who ran the Penny Arcade with Phil Mazzocchi, had emigrated from Italy. Plato Guimes, originally from Greece—and looking with his pince-nez glasses like a stuffy European professor out of a Hollywood movie—had operated the shooting galleries and soda stands almost from the park’s beginning. Harry Dyer, from Colchester, England, had the mug of a street brawler but the soft heart of a carny; he co-owned many park restaurants, though not the chop suey place above the roller-skating rink, which was run by Yuan Chen. All were struggling to stay afloat after the Crash.

But one concession agent made a particular impression on Eddie.

Directly across the midway was a root-beer stand whose red, white, and blue awnings one day unfolded like a flower opening to the sun. It was run by two women agents—one a shapely blonde about Eddie’s age. She had a sweet face with delicate features; he found himself stealing glances at her whenever he could. When she was at work, her wavy blonde hair would periodically get in her eyes and she would blow air out of the corner of her mouth to clear her vision. Somehow Eddie found this very fetching.

“Who’s the blonde across the way?” he asked Lew.

“Adele something-or-other,” Lew said indifferently. “She and Lois work for Norval Jennings.”

It wasn’t long before Eddie decided he needed a bathroom break and moseyed across the midway, pausing in front of the root-beer stand. He waited until the girl came up to the cash register at the front of the stand, opening the cash drawer to dust it out. Eddie stepped up, smiled, and said, “Hi.”

She looked up. Her eyes were gray—not blue, not violet, but the lightest, most beautiful shade of pearl gray. They stole away Eddie’s breath.

“Hi.” So perfunctory, she made it sound like less than one syllable.

“I’m Eddie.”

“I’m busy.”

She clanged shut the cash drawer and turned away.

Eddie’s smile sank to somewhere below his knees. He skulked off to the men’s room, and when he returned to the candy stand he concentrated on his work, doing his best to put the girl out of his mind.