Train Tracks (6 page)

The apprenticeship continued. I would go in with my
father on a weekend, usually a Sunday. I remember in the early years before
things went bad for my father—and I don't mean businesswise, I mean with my
brother sick and all, the one who was eventually hospitalized in a mental
institution—before things really got on him and he had a nervous breakdown when
he was about thirty-five. I remember he was joyful on Sundays, which I would
spend with him. There were a lot of games we used to play in the market. Games
like these:

Physically the market was laid out so that there
were approximately one, two, three, four, five different-sized stands on the
left side of the market as you faced the front to rear, and five on the right,
with steps at the rear going downstairs to the basement. And each stand had
wooden doors that swung down and up, which were locked at the end of the day. On
a typical Sunday, the market was filled with people. It was something to behold,
like Coney Island or maybe Ripley's Believe It or Not! Museum. It was jammed
with sightseers, real buyers, no buyers, bums in and out of the cold, natal
hippies; it was just fantastic, the beautiful hum of people on a Sunday, out
spending time and money. And, you know, it was busy, just busy—it would be like
a stage; the show opened, the crowds came in, and by three or four o'clock it
was packed. Sometimes you could hardly walk through the crowd. And there was a
beautiful feeling of prosperity in the air. To me it didn't matter, money or
not. Obviously commerce was at the base of it all. But it was the buzz, the buzz
we used to hear, that really turned me on.

So the crowd would be out on the main gangway of
the Ship of Merchants, walking. There'd be someone gobbling the peanuts and
dropping the shells on the wooden deck, eating and gobbling and dropping, eating
and gobbling and dropping. And Benny didn't just stand there and take it. He
wanted to get even a little. So, naturally, there evolved a whole array of
pranks that were played on the customers. They were all gentle tricks. The one I
liked best as a young kid was the least complicated: You simply squatted down
behind your stand, where you couldn't be seen. There was always a forest of
bronze candelabra between you and the people, so they couldn't see you—not with
all the lights bouncing off the shining bronze. They could only see the bronzes
and the paintings and the clocks. So we'd squat down, my father and I, and he'd
have a water gun, and we'd squirt through the bronzes and water a person. Now,
of course, the beauty was not just squirting, but to observe the human reaction
to being surprised. It was so primitive; we were two primeval hunters attacking
invaders and watching their reaction as they were stung with our poison darts.
The typical reaction would be: “Hey!” as the victim glanced up. It was very
logical; they're not stupid. The man gets wet inside a market, he figures the
ceiling is leaking. He doesn't assume there is a man squatting down behind his
merchandise, squirting him with a water gun. So he looks up at the ceiling. And
he starts to complain. He says, “Hey, mister,” to somebody behind a stand. “Hey,
mister, your skylight is leaking” meant that the guy had been squirted by Benny
and Michael behind the bronzes. And there was a standard response to that: “Nah,
I'm telling ya,” they'd say, “there's nothing—the skylight is not leaking, we
just had it fixed.” “Look, I'm, not crazy,” the guy would argue, “I'm telling
ya, I got wet. The skylight is leaking.” “Naahh, the skylight's not leaking, you
oughta go have your head examined better. There's no water comin' in.” And this
way they'd steam up the customer till he was almost at the point of socking
somebody, and then they'd grudgingly admit, “Well, maybe the skylight is leaking
a little, we'll have it checked.” And that would disarm the guy. So that was one
of our gimmicks.

Now that you must appreciate, the beauty of being
four years old, or five, and squirting another adult with the complexity of your
father—I mean, he even thought it up—can you
picture
the beauty of it? Great. I'm glad you can. Because as I got older, there were
still other tricks. The simplest is one I'm sure you've seen elsewhere, but to a
child who had never seen it, it was magnificent. What was the gimmick? You'd
solder a quarter really well onto a nail. And you'd hammer the quarter into the
wooden countertop, in an out-of-the-way place, kind of away from your view. And
then on a busy day you'd make believe that you were occupied elsewhere, and
you'd wait to see who would try to steal the quarter. It was a beautiful thing
to see the hand reach out, the “thief” waiting for you not to look. As he'd grab
the quarter and try to pull it away, it would stick to the counter, and the look
on his face—the look of how he was caught; his hand caught in a bear trap.

Another of our games was the tapping trick, which
carried me from the age of six to about thirteen, fourteen. This must have been
developed in a carnival somewhere, because it was somewhat of a barker's cane
that was used, although if you didn't have a cane, a yardstick could substitute,
or even a small stick. It was simple. Here was how we'd set it up: A man would
be at my father's counter bargaining with him, or at someone else's counter, and
you'd go up behind in the crowd. Of course, you wouldn't give away your trick by
looking down; it had been perfected. You'd place the cane just above his toes,
over his shoes. And just as he'd reach in his pocket to pull out a coin, to pay
for merchandise, you'd give him a good tap right on the toe just as the coins
came out. That's it. The guy was finished. He'd look down. You'd pull the cane
away and he'd start looking down. He'd search the floor; he was sure he'd
dropped the coin because it hit his foot. He'd start in, he'd say, “Look,
mister, I dropped a coin,” and then of course the other guy would say, “You
didn't drop nothin'. I'm tellin' ya, ya didn't drop. Stop botherin' me, you're
making it up.” And this guy would search and search and he wouldn't go away; for
fifteen minutes he'd be looking on the floor for a coin that never existed.

Now, if that doesn't turn you on, we had a better
method. Actually, the tapping game was fantastic, because you'd find people have
very different sensitivities. I mean, there were times when I was
hitting
people on the feet with a yardstick—you'd
start with your tap light; no response. You'd tap a little again; no response.
Again, again; no response! Till you're actually pounding on the guy's foot with
a stick. No response. To vitalize the sensitivities of these dull-footed
individuals, another variety of the tapping game was originated. This was the
jingling game. You would simply take a coin and drill a hole in it. Then you'd
cut rubber bands and tie them together so they made a string, and you'd tie the
rubber band string through the hole in the coin, and you'd wrap one end around
your finger. And then while the man dug for a coin in his pocket, as he was
paying, you would throw the coin in your hand out onto the wooden floor so it
jingled, and it would bounce right back, really fast, faster than the eye,
almost, and the man would look down, right? He was sure he dropped the coin. And
those guys were the worst. When you pulled that trick, that was the final one,
because you would get them looking for an hour. They would search through the
dust and the grime underneath the counter for the coin they were sure they
dropped; a coin they would never find.

A few other details come to me regarding the dear
old market. In particular, I remember, in the back of the store, there were two
of those dimwitted signs bearing particularly cute American phrases. One was to
the effect, “We grow up too soon old and too late smart.” It took me years to
figure that out; by the time I'd figured it out, it was too late to do anything
about it, I was too old. And the other one was from the class of sayings, like,
“Old golfers don't die, they just lose their balls.” But this one in particular
struck me every day as I went to the bathroom downstairs in that dingy, dark,
depressing, stinking bathroom that I was afraid to pee in. It stank, it had a
dim 20-watt yellow electric bulb, it was cold. And inside this horrible
bathroom, atop this stinking urinal, inside this freezing, cold Dickensian
basement craphouse, there was one of those “old golfers lose their balls” signs,
and this one said in pseudo-Yiddish script, “Please piss in the bowl.” Of course
it took me years to understand, (a) that it wasn't in Yiddish, and (b) what it
said, that it really just said, “Please piss in the bowl.” For years, I thought
it was some kind of religious sign to do with peeing; you know, from the Old
World, like from the Torah. Well, what can a kid know? SO, it took me years to
figure that one out.

Now I'm jumping ahead to years later. My father has
had his first heart attack and it's a great trauma to the family, because he was
this great strong man, yelling, telling everybody what to do and he was usually
right. Finally, the patriarch of the family was laying under oxygen. Number One
Son, ripped from college, has to take over getting the family income. So I would
open up my father's antiques market every morning, and try to do a little
business. And I didn't do too badly, I thought; I brought home a few—five, six
hundred—bucks a week, gross income; who knows what it netted? Nevertheless,
there was a little cash flow coming into the house. You guessed it. It wasn't
good enough for the old man. Under oxygen, he gets my report: “How's
business?”—“Not bad. Moe came in, he took his lamps.” “What: What lamps? Don't
let any of those sonsabitches bullshit you. They'll come in and they'll tell
you, ‘how's Benny,' and this and that, and they'll look to rob a pair of
candelabra on ya that cost me seven fifty.” All right, that's not good enough.
He's laying under oxygen there, a week in the tent, he remembers, he gets a bug
in his head. In front of the antiques, he sold old clothes—to always be safe; he
had it all figured out. In front he sold used clothes, a rusty razor blade, an
old knife, an old fork that he bought at an auction. He took in ten cents,
fifteen. He always said it made lunch money; if the antiques didn't sell, he'd
make money from the junk in the front. As you progressed back, the merchandise
became more expensive till finally at the top tier was the expensive stuff. So
under oxygen he remembered his lot of clothes. He asked me, “How are the clothes
going?” Who remembered clothes? To me it was a bunch of rags. We'd throw the
boxes out and let the bums go through it. He said, “What about the sweater?” I
said, “What sweater?”—“The ski sweater, the good black sweater, the Austrian
sweater.” “I don't know about no sweater,” I said. “I sold it to someone for
about two bits, twenty-five.” That did it. In his oxygen, they almost had to
come in and give him a sedative. That his stupid son running the family show
sold a sweater worth at least three dollars for a quarter. This was all that was
on his mind.

Now, Benny's beautiful paranoia was a reflection of
his image of the world, which was based largely on his many years working among
the cream of society of the Lower East Side of New York. Take the way he entered
his stand in the market. He backed into it. I didn't know from backing in,
walking in forwards, whether to go it sideways. There was a little corridor
entering his booth, and then in front was the merchandise. He'd always warn me,
“You'll always walk in backwards. Never take your eyes off them. You take your
eyes off them for a second, they'll hit ya like a hawk.” He'd say, “They'll look
ya right in the eye, they'll talk to ya, and they'd wait for ya to blink, and
the minute ya blink or ya sneeze, boom! Ya lost somethin' and you'd never know
it.” So, as you would guess, he figured out in the oxygen tent that someone
clipped an Austrian ski sweater from me because I failed to back into the stand;
that is, I didn't walk in backwards at work. At college you had to do that a
great deal, walk backwards into your seat. Can you imagine that? It's pretty
crazy. What a reality. I mean, how was I supposed to have known to walk in
backwards? But in his mind, he probably thought professors backed slowly into
their rooms, never taking their eyes off the students for fear that some
philosophical wizard would steal a thought, you know what I mean?

Another guy pops to mind. This was the freak, the
one-titted man. His name was Harry the Freak. Harry started out as a freak in
Coney Island. Just a regular barnyard freak. And his big attraction was that he
had one tit. Big deal. He billed himself as “Half Man–Half Woman.” As years went
on, he became fairly well off. He became a capitalist freak, and he opened up
his own sideshow in Coney Island. He employed and exploited his freak brothers
and sisters, the microcephalics, the macrocephalics, the midgets, you know, the
standard dwarf that would say a little thing with his voice and scare the kids,
“blah, blah, blah,” you know. And the bearded lady, too. But Harry's game was
running the freak show, and he made a lot of money—and where would he spend it?
This distorted, twisted man would buy beautiful antiques; that was his
counterbalance. And he'd spend virtually all his money on such merchandise. He
lived in Long Beach, in a little
Godfather
-like
house. It was strange. From the outside it was a regular house in Long Beach.
You'd knock on the door—I remember I went a few times with my father to make
deliveries of, oh, a bronze figure of something, or a grandfather clock—and the
door would open, but never all the way, only just a crack through which you
would come in sideways, schlepping the thing in with you. And there it was: from
floor to wall to ceiling and back again, with no apparent order, merely a
storage house of antiques. No order, no rhyme, no reason to the display; as he
got them, he dragged them in, found a place for them, and stuck them there on
the floor, maybe moving a few things around. And this was the world he lived in.
He treated his antiques just as if they were mere objects of art. So in a sense
he had a purer vision of what these things were. He didn't worship them, give
them a pedestal or a special place; he merely liked associating with them, and
treated them as such, as mere objects. SO you might say that Harry the Freak was
really an antiques chauvinist.