Underworld (15 page)

Sometimes we used the pauses to watch TV. We looked at reruns of “The Honeymooners” and my mother laughed when Ralph Kramden flung his arms and bellowed great complaints. It was about the only time I could expect to hear her laugh. She must have felt a certain clean release, looking at the sadly furnished apartment, at wife Alice in her apron or dowdy cloth coat, at Norton the neighbor with a bent fedora on his jerky head—things that were close to what she knew. Superficially of course. Close to what she knew in an apparent rather than actual way. A closeness that was shallow but still a bit touching and maybe even mysteriously real. Look at the picture on the screen, flat and gray and staticky with years, not unlike memories she carried to her sleep. She slept in a room in Arizona and how strange this must have seemed to her. But Jackie Gleason on the screen made the place more plausible—he drew her toward a perceptible center.

A hawser is the thing you tie around a bollard.

I noticed how people played at being executives while actually holding executive positions. Did I do this myself? You maintain a shifting distance between yourself and your job. There's a self-conscious space, a sense of formal play that is a sort of arrested panic, and maybe you show it in a forced gesture or a ritual clearing of the throat. Something out of childhood whistles through this space, a sense of games and half-made selves, but it's not that you're pretending to be someone else. You're pretending to be exactly who you are. That's the curious thing.

Marian wanted to know me at seventeen, see me at seventeen, and there were small shrewd things she asked about, and they talked about my father and I listened, in the deep lull after dinner. My mother said things I already knew but I listened from the living room with a magazine in my face. He was a bookmaker famous for his memory, never wrote a number on a piece of paper. This was the legend of the street. I was eleven years old when he walked out the door and I heard the story later,
that he remembered everything, made his rounds of the barbershops and sweatshops, downtown, in the garment district, the street corners, the hotel lobbies, strictly small-time, and that he never had to commit a figure to paper because he was able to retain the details of every bet. This is the story that settled around his name. It was part of the awe that trails a violent death or an unexplained disappearance.

She posed in the doorway in stately profile and we turned off Interstate 10 and entered one of those death marathons of mall traffic and finally found their little street and there she was, pregnant to beat the band.

My mother said things to Marian, a story now and then in her Bronxy half brogue, and I sat and listened fitfully behind the body-throb of the dishwasher. We gave her room a coat of fresh green paint, Lainie's old room, pale and restful. We fixed her up with the TV set and the resilvered mirror and the good hard healthy bed and we laid in a case of flavored seltzer—lemon-lime, I think.

In my office in the bronze tower I made gangster threats that were comically effective. I said to a consultant who was late with a report, “I'm telling you once and for all that I, me, Mario Badalato, I'll sever your fucking family's head off.” This in a scraped-raw voice faithful to the genre and evilly appreciated by the others in the room.

In Holland I went to VAM, a waste treatment plant that handles a million tons of garbage a year. I sat in a white Fiat and went past windrows of refuse heaped many stories high. Down one towering row and around to another, waves of steam rising from the tapered heaps, and there was a stink in the air that filled my mouth, that felt deep enough to singe my clothes. Why did I think I was born with this experience in my brain? Why was it personal? I thought, Why do bad smells seem to tell us something about ourselves? The company manager drove me up and down the steaming rows and I thought, Every bad smell is about us. We make our way through the world and come upon a scene that is medieval-modern, a city of high-rise garbage, the hell reek of every perishable object ever thrown together, and it seems like something we've been carrying all our lives.

He was the kind of person you'd have trouble describing if you saw him in the commission of a crime. But after the riots he put on an L.A. Raiders hat and an ultralong T-shirt that had a pair of sunglasses slung
from the pocket. Nothing else changed. He lived in his room, disappearing into chips and discs, the same shy boy but physically vivid now, a social being with a ghetto strut.

We sat in the room watching reruns, my mother and I. He left her for a time before I was born. This is why I carry her name, not his. She didn't think he'd ever come back and she told me she saw a lawyer, who did some finagling. The courts tend to rule that a child must retain his father's name until he reaches legal age, at which time he can choose for himself. But the lawyer finagled an exception out of some judge and this is why my birth certificate says Shay. Then he came back and stayed a long time before he went out for cigarettes, ten years or so. He was a man from nowhere, she said, slightly resigned, as if this was all she could expect fate to offer us—her and me and my brother—or maybe I misread the tone and she meant this is where he came from and this is where he went, inescapably, given the rhyming slang of life.

Coming home, landing at Sky Harbor, I used to wonder how people disperse so quickly from airports, any airport—how you are crowded into seats three across or five across and crowded in the aisle after touchdown when the captain turns off the seat belt sign and you get your belongings from the overhead and stand in the aisle waiting for the hatch to open and the crowd to shuffle forward, and there are more crowds when you exit the gate, people disembarking and others waiting for them and greater crowds in the baggage areas and the concourse, the crossover roars of echoing voices and flight announcements and revving engines and crowds moving through it all, people with their separate and unique belongings, the microhistory of toilet articles and intimate garments, the medicines and aspirins and lotions and powders and gels, so incredibly many people intersecting on some hot dry day at the edge of the desert, used underwear fist-balled in their bags, and I wondered where they were going, and why, and who are they, and how do they all disperse so quickly and mysteriously, how does a vast crowd scatter and vanish in minutes, bags dragging on the shiny floors.

I used to say to the kids. I used to hold up an object and say, The little ridged section at the bottom of the toothpaste tube. This is called the crimp.

Gleason dead but also in the room with us, Irish like her and camped in a stale sweatbox, dressed in a busman's suit, arm-waving, flailingly fat, the only person who could make her laugh. He stalked across the floor pumping his fist.
You're goin' to the moon, Alice
. My mother liked the familiar things best. The more often he used a line, the more she laughed. She waited for certain lines. We both waited and he never let us down. We felt more closely bound with Gleason in the room. He gave us the line, gave us the sure laugh, the one we needed at the end of the day. Gleason aggrieved. Pounding the table-top and bending his knees and tilting the great head skyward. He was the joke that carried a missing history—the fat joke, the dumb joke, the joke about the rabbi and the priest, the honeymoon joke, the dialect joke, the punch line that survives long after the joke is forgotten. We felt better with Jackie in the room, transparent in his pain, alive and dead in Arizona.

I dropped her off and picked her up and made sure she had money for the basket.

We built pyramids of waste above and below the earth. The more hazardous the waste, the deeper we tried to sink it. The word plutonium comes from Pluto, god of the dead and ruler of the underworld. They took him out to the marshes and wasted him as we say today, or used to say until it got changed to something else.

I liked to hurry home from the airport and get into my trunks and T-shirt. I ran along the drainage canal with Sufi voices tracking through my head and sometimes I saw a plane taking off, all light and climb and calculus, and I thought of my son Jeffrey when he was younger—the gift he thought he possessed to take an aircraft out of the sky, the mastery of space and matter, a power and control that rose damnably from the curse of unbelonging.

And sometimes I sat with her through the mass, the mass in English, what a stark thing it was, without murmur or reverberation, but still the best part of my week, and I took her arm and led her out of the church and she was not a small woman but seemed to be dwindling, passing episodically out of flesh—she felt like rice paper under my hand.

He used to shave with a towel draped over his shoulder, wearing his undershirt, his singlet, and the blade made a noise I liked to listen to,
a sandpaper scrape on his heavy beard, and the brush in the shaving cup, the Gem blade and the draped towel and the hot water from the tap—heat and skill and cutting edge.

Dominus vobiscum
, the priest used to say, and we'd push our way out of the vestibule, several kids chanting, Dominick go frisk 'em. What was Latin for if you couldn't reduce the formal codes to the jostled argot of the street?

It was science-fiction stuff or horror-movie stuff except that Jeff was too shy and frightened to test it in the world, even with his sister whistling in his ear to make the thing explode.

Brian Glassic called late sometimes. He called in streaks, late at night, four calls in one weekend maybe, and what did he talk about when he called? The office, of course, bringing up matters he could not easily discuss in the tower itself, or the latest national scandal maybe, with anatomical details, or he'd carry on about a movie he wanted me to rent, guns and drugs—he thought it made us better buddies.

He also did it as a provocation. Brian believed I was safely encased, solid, with a house and family folded around me, surer than he was, older but also physically superior, physically fit, a man of hardier stuff, this was his own stated theme—a man who keeps his counsel. And it greatly fazed him, it made him want to chip away, make boyish forays, place claims on my attention.

When the phone rang at a certain hour, Marian and I exchanged the Brian look—had to be him.

“You will not believe where I am. Get over here right away. This place is astonishing. You're the only person I can bear to share it with. Come alone,” he said.

It took me a while to find the place. I kept crossing I-10, out where
the map begins to go white, low stucco buildings with satellite dishes—tractor parts and diesel tune-ups, sand and rock and self-defense. Then I spotted a cluster of shops that matched Brian's description, a neat clean minimall, painted sort of rancho pink and green, three of the outlets not yet open for business, and I parked near the last shop on the left, the only going concern, called Condomology.

College kids, gently unkempt. They stood between the shelves talking and browsing, going through the catalogs and reading the small print on the product boxes, and others mixed in, slightly older men and women, they had professions and soft slacks with knife pleats and a certain ease of bearing and belonging, the package of attitudes and values known as lifestyle.

Brian pushed me into a corner so I could scan the area. Wide aisles, the carpeting was soft and pale and the aisles were wide and there were wall paintings, five panels on each of the two long walls showing scenes of an ice-cream parlor of the nineteen-forties and -fifties. A soda jerk behind a marble counter making a strawberry float for a couple of girls in school jerseys and bobby socks—that was one mural, flat-painted, painted in a style not current to the scene, and the effect was interesting, completely undreamy. Brian was studying my lower jaw for some reaction. I heard music in the deep distance, a crooner doing lost songs, the kind of ballad that sometimes included a verse or two in slurred Italian, and it was all nicely subdued, I thought, unaffected, without patronizing humor.

Brian whispered at me sharply, as if I hadn't noticed.

“Condoms.”

That's what it was all right, condoms, the whole place was condoms, shelves filled with a hundred kinds of protection, male and female, spermicides, body butter, latex gloves, silicone lubricants, with books, manuals, videos, special displays, with novelty items of the big-dick little-dick type, and T-shirts of course, and baseball caps with condom logos.

“And the place is strategically located, out at the new frontier,” he said. “I can see a satellite city growing out from this one shop, a thousand buildings, this is my vision, sort of spoked around the condom outlet. Like some medieval town with the castle smack at the center.”

“They built their castles on the periphery.”

“Fuck you. Show some amazement. They have peach-flavored rubbers. And kids come here to socialize, to hang around and see what's doing. I'm waiting to hear Al Hibbler sing ‘Unchained Melody.' ”

“Al Hibbler was good.”

“Good? Fuck you good. He was amazing. You think Ray Charles is blind? Al Hibbler,
that
was blind. Show some response.”

He led me down an aisle. My response was, Look at all these condoms. Studded, snug, ribbed, bareback. We used to say, Don't go in bareback. Meaning wear a rubber or you'll knock her up. Now there were rubbers called barebacks, electronically tested for sheerness and sensitivity.

“These will replace running shoes,” Brian said. “Kids will shoot each other for expensive lambskin condoms.”

There were loose condoms sold in bowls, in candy jars—grab a handful. A woman looked at a display model of a polyurethane sheath with flexible rings at either end. Brian knew her from the automated teller machine at his bank—hello, how are you, hi, hello. There were finger condoms and full-body condoms, oral condoms with a minty savor. There were condom cases, pocket-sized, and a condom you could wear as a hat.

Brian said, “My brother carried a rubber in his wallet all through adolescence. He showed it to me once, I think I was twelve. Flipped open his wallet and showed me this little wizened thing like a deflated penis and I don't think I ever recovered. This was a world I wasn't ready to enter. I could understand sex on the animal level. This was something else entirely. Something about the material, the plasticky sort of rubber, the look and touch, he made me touch it, and the whole nature and function of the thing, I don't know, it was alien and unsettling. Sex alone was tough enough to encounter. This was technology they wanted to wrap around my dick. This was mass-produced latex they used to paint battleships.”