Bernard Boyce Bennington & The American Dream (2 page)

Jack walks across from the bar, eyeing the man who has just stepped out of the real world and into his private domain, and places a fresh pitcher on the table, takes the other one away with a grunt that to some might seem rude but to others not that way at all, and around the grunt he’s
tum-tumming
in tune with Wayne Shorter’s tenor break on ‘Agitation’ like he’s got no worries in the world…like he’s still got a wife in the apartment upstairs, a wife who’s still alive and well and waiting for him when he closes up.

The third man at the table, the ‘Holy Ghost’ of this particular trio, reaches for the new beer and fills his glass, shaking his head and smiling at Jack Fedogan’s back, thinking all the time about the annual check-up he’s got day after tomorrow, thinking about the seeing-eye pipe the doctor’s going to run down his dick and into his body, twirling it around to get a good look at his prostate—
my, will you just look at that!
—and wondering whether it’s going to be followed by meaningful stares as the doc tries to find the words to tell him, tell him not to start any long books or get too engrossed in any TV serials.

Then he notices the man standing over at the foot of the stairs, in the bar but looking like he’s still a little bit outside, like he’s wondering whether he’s done the right thing coming in here, looking around at the empty tables and at the one where the three friends are sitting—all of them now watching this new addition—and the booth over on the back wall, where a pasty-faced man makes table-top mosaics out of beer puddles, seemingly oblivious to anything…except his eyes are watching intently.

This man, the third of the three friends, is Edgar Nornhoevan, a big man, big and bearded, a big bearded man whose toes never curl and who never grimaces in pain except when the doctor runs that pipe down his dick every six months. The next time is just two days away, and Edgar is not looking forward to it one bit.

Edgar knows diddly about loneliness but he knows all there is about cancer. The way Edgar figures it, you’re never lonely with a tumor.

It’s been almost a year now since the cancer that Edgar expected turned out to be just a slight enlargement, and the pills have been working just fine, so fine that Edgar can once again hold his own—
pardon my French, ma’am!
as Jack might say, Jack who speaks no language other than English-American—when he takes a pee, sometimes feeling like it’s the best sensation in the world that meaningful expulsion, so all seems okay and it would be just fine and dandy if Edgar were not going for his check-up day after tomorrow. But the fact that he is has brought back the memories and the uncertainty, like he’s never going to get rid of this feeling even if he really is okay, never going to get rid of the feeling that maybe something’s happening that just shouldn’t be happening. Something inside his body. Someplace where he can’t see, can’t get at.

And this is why Edgar Nornhoevan never feels lonely, except when it’s late and he slips between the sheets, turns out the light and listens to the sirens caterwauling in the nighttime streets.
Hey
, a little voice says to him then, faint in the darkness,
I sure am lonely
.

Jack gives a flourish with his ever-present cloth, sweeping it across a bar-top that’s already clean enough to eat your food straight off of it without so much as a plate or a napkin, and he nods to the newcomer.

“Get you something?” Jack asks.

The man look at Jack and then around at the rest of the bar, frowning, like he’s considering this strange language…wondering whatever could it mean, this bizarre sing-song of grunts and wind. Then, without so much as a word, he sidles up to the bar and onto a stool. Dutifully, Jack wipes the portion of counter right in front of him. “Beer?” he suggests.

The man rubs a hand over his face, allowing it to linger a little on his mouth, pulling it down some and letting the bottom lip flap up into place like it’s one of those exaggerated lips on the cartoon cat in Tom and Jerry—the lip makes a
flapatapatap
sound in Jack’s head and for a moment he fights off a smile.

The man wears his hair long, unfashionably long by today’s standards even if he were a twenty-something—which he is clearly not…unless one could stretch the ‘something’ element into another three decades—and it hangs over his ears and his forehead and his collar in black curls that look like they haven’t seen soap and water in a long time. Meanwhile, what there is of it on top is a little thin, combed or brushed back across a balding pate.

“My name is Bernard Boyce Bennington,” the man says, the first word of which he pronounces with an emphasis on the ‘ard’ syllable, stretching the vowel out like taffy, while the first comes out as ‘buh’, like he’s just been gut-punched. He holds out a hand to Jack.

“Jack Fedogan,” says Jack Fedogan, shaking the proffered hand.

“This your bar or are you just tending it?”

“It’s my bar.”

For a few seconds, they both seem to be satisfied with the exchange of information, even Jack…who now regards the man with a squint, wondering if he needs to reach under the counter to retrieve his pacifier—a smooth-handled baseball bat he keeps there to quieten down trouble-makers—or make an excuse to go to the cash register where he keeps the Saturday Night Special Phyllis used to rag him about. But the man seem harmless enough—if a little on the flaky side—and the ever-patient Jack is prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, at least until he hears what he’s after.

“I have a story for you,” Bernard Boyce Bennington tells Jack, “if you want to hear it,” he adds.

Jack waves his hands magnanimously. “That’s what bars are for,” he says, “telling stories. But they’re also for buying drinks. So I’ll make a deal with you.” He leans on the counter. “You buy one of my beers and I’ll listen to your story. How’s that sound to you?”

The man looks around again, does his lip thing—
flapatapatap
—once more, and then nods. “That sounds fair to me,” he says, and he scans the refrigerated shelves at the back of the bar, the ones with all the bottles on them. “Give me…I’ll have a Michelob,” he says after some deliberation, his eyes scanning the brightly-colored labels first one way and then the other.

“Coming right up.” Jack produces the bottle, flips the cap off with the bar-top opener, and pours about half of it into a glass he’s pulled from the back shelf. He puts the glass on a coaster right in front of the new customer, and the bottle next to it, then polishes the counter around it, even though he hasn’t spilled any beer. Jack Fedogan never spills beer.

The man takes a sip, more like it’s meant to pacify the bartender than to relieve any inner thirst, and then sets the glass back down on the bar, making sure it sits squarely on the coaster. “I’m looking for someone,” he announces out of the blue. “A woman.”

“And it’s a big Amen to that one, friend,” Edgar Nornhoevan observes. Edgar is halfway across to the washrooms and well within earshot of the man’s conversation with Jack Fedogan. He turns back to the table, towards Jim Leafman and McCoy Brewer and says, “Fella here looking for a woman. Do we have any we can spare?” And he lets out a deep throaty laugh.

McCoy shakes his head. “Don’t think we can help with that one,” he says, and the wistfulness of his tone overrides the self-deprecating humor by around a hundred to one.

“She come in here, this woman?” Jack asks, his mind already running through the images of the various women who occasionally sit on the stools at his bar or over in one of the booths along the back wall, nursing Manhattans and Screwdrivers as they reflect on the barren ground that their life has become, Jack trying to match up one of the images with the man sitting right in front of him now.

Jim Leafman and McCoy Brewer pick up their glasses and the pitcher and stroll over to the bar, Jim taking the stool a couple over from the newcomer and McCoy standing a few feet away from the counter. Edgar goes off in search of the restroom.

“Truth is, I don’t know,” Bernard Boyce Bennington says.

Although Bernard Boyce Bennington is indeed the man’s name, it is not the one he has most often been called these past 45 of his 51 years. It’s Daisy, which, he explains to Jack and Jim and McCoy in a tired voice, comes from the fact that his two first names—and his last, for that matter—begin with the letter B, hence ‘Daisy’, the stock-in-trade BB gun that graced a million homes at around the same time as Forry Ackerman kicked off
Famous Monsters of Filmland
, and you could earn extra money by delivering
Grit
door to door which you could then spend buying hundreds of toy soldiers for a couple of bucks or packets of seed to grow your own underwater monkeys.

The 1960s were wonderful times for him, the man continues, times during which he read comicbooks voraciously before going on to spend inordinate amounts of money buying up back issues from dealers who stretched out the once acceptable grading system of ‘Mint’, ‘Fine’ and ‘Good’ into a myriad sub-categories which involved buyer and seller alike studying, with magnifying glass and plastic gloves, the item under dispute—a comicbook, for goodness’ sake!—while haggling over such heinous deformities as ‘small crease on back cover’ and ‘small chip from bottom of spine’. By this time, school had given way to college and college then emptied BB out into a world for which he was wholly unprepared.

Jack glances across at Jim and McCoy—and Edgar, who has returned from his safari to the restroom, retrieved his glass from the table and sat down next to Jim—and gives a quick raise of his eyebrows that says
So when does this story get interesting?
but nobody seems to be taking any notice. Jack gives the counter a quick wipe and looks back at the man.

“My first job was as a computer operator, handling the mainframe for a small Savings and Loan outfit in Jersey City,” he says, taking a sip of Michelob that wouldn’t have quenched a fly’s thirst. “It was a machine whose numerous metal boxes and whirling tape- and disk-drives filled a room the size of an entire floor of a plush apartment out on Riverside Drive. Of course,” he says, turning to his audience, “this same long-ago machine had but a fraction of the processing capacity of the word processor that now sits on my cluttered desk  but then that’s progress.”

Progress, the newcomer explains, moves life on with casual disregard for the Bernard Boyce Benningtons of the world but he didn’t let this bother him too much. He moved into programming, which meant he could spend his life even further away from other human beings…filling his days with printouts as tall as the small boy he once was, and which he would scrutinize for long hours to find the misplaced or juxtaposed numbers that had caused a particular program to fail, and his evenings surrounded by his beloved comicbooks.

And oh, how Bernard loved his comicbooks.

“I had full runs of most of the Marvel titles that had turned the industry on its head in the early 1960s, and I’d bought back and filled out DC titles such as
House of Mystery
and
House of Secrets
, all of which I just adored.” Here he stops for a few seconds and glances around the bar—which is still empty save for the man in the booth, still wearing his hat and coat and scarf—like he’s checking to make sure nobody sneaked in while he was talking. Apparently satisfied that he’s in control of the situation, the man called Daisy continues with his story…which even Jack, who has long held a secret fascination for the old comicbooks of his youth—things like
Sad Sack
and
Mutt and Jeff
and, his favorite,
Archie
—is beginning to enjoy.

“Trouble was, I found it annoying that, in order to protect my investment—because these things are damned expensive,” he says, frowning—”I was reduced to reading some of the books wearing a mouth mask and skin-tight gloves. And that took away much of the sensation of reading.

“To me, comicbook reading is a multi-sensory experience and full enjoyment can only truly be achieved with as many of the senses in contact with the actual book—the smell of the primitive ink mixes and the feel of the resilient paper stocks used in the old Sparta, Illinois printing plants coupled with the almost primal feeling of holding a genuine artifact were considered by many to be as important (and by some to be
more
important) than the occasionally infantile drawing techniques and frequently infantile plotting employed in the sweatshop creative bullpens of the 1930s and ‘40s.”

Edgar’s eyes are wide as saucers. This guy sure knows a lot of two-dollar words, he’s thinking, but Edgar is glued just the same.

“How does all this tie into the woman you’re looking for?” Jack asks.

“I’m getting to that,” the man says, and he takes another sip. McCoy gives Jack a sneaky frown to back off and let the guy talk…so Jack gives the counter another wipe and waits.

“Those were the days, the days before Frederick Wertham declared war on what he considered to be the sadistic and evil manipulation of kids’ minds carried out by the pre Comics Code Authority comicbooks, when horror truly was horror.” Bernard Boyce Bennington stops and his eyes go all dreamy. “My, but I loved them all, those ridiculous books, despite the predictable denouements and the scrawky pen- and pencil work. I loved the monsters and the dragons, adored the animated rotting corpses seeking vengeance; I delighted in the alien horrors stalking far-off worlds…but, most of all, I loved vampires, particularly those in the old EC comicbooks, before Bill Gaines fell foul of Doctor Wertham and was forced to anesthetize the stories in
Crypt of Terror
,
Haunt of Fear
and
Vault of Horror
to the point of virtual emasculation. Long-toothed creatures of the night drawn by Jack Davis and which owed more to Nosferatu than to Bela Lugosi’s tuxedo-clad European Count…and paved the way for the TV adaptation of Stephen King’s
‘Salem’s Lot
and the almost animal-like Mr. Barlow.”

“But this life-long fascination with horror comicbooks and, in particular, with the undead made me a difficult man with whom to strike up a casual conversation. I accept that without question. And this, in turn, meant that my chances of companionship were slight at best, what with the vast majority of the fairer sex’s staunch ignorance of such fundamentally important matters. Sure,” he went on, shrugging his shoulders, “I had passed time in comic convention bar areas chewing the fat with like-minded souls—most of whom could recount exact dialogue and page numbers of ‘key’ stories in the favorite books—but  these brief liaisons were ill-fated and amounted to nothing even approaching stability. But then something happened that was to change my life.”