In God We Trust (2 page)

I got out of the cab at the intersection and headed directly for Flick’s Tavern, the tavern whose floors I had helped to clean as a tot, and where I had learned a few of Life’s seamier lessons. Flick himself had been an old boyhood sidekick who had taken over the tavern from his father, long since passed away. I hadn’t seen him since my Army days.

It was a cold, early December day and a few plastic wreaths were in evidence. The sign hanging out over the sidewalk read:

BOOZE

Flick’s sense of humor obviously was still operating.

Inside I instantly saw the place had changed little. The bar was longer, the jukebox bigger; there was a color TV hanging from the wall, but the air was as gamy and rich as ever, if not more so, a thick oleo of dried beer suds, fermenting bar rags, sweaty overalls, and urinal deodorants. I breathed in a deep gulp to clear my brain, kicked some snow off my Italian shoes, and sat down at one of the stools near the window.

Down at the far end of the bar I saw a white-shirted back banging away at what appeared to be some sort of ice cabinet. He glanced up in the gloom and called out:

“What’ll you have?”

“A beer.”

“I’ll be right with you.”

He went on working. Through the window I could see a Used-Car lot where once, I recalled in the dim past, a stand of willows had grown. It was midafternoon, between shifts, so the tavern was empty. I looked back down the bar just in time to see the white-shirted figure draw a stein of draught, topping it off neatly with a good head. He sat it down in front of me.

“How the hell are you, Flick?” I went right at him in a frontal attack.

“Uh … okay. How’re you?”

“Don’t you remember me?”

He looked at me in that long, wary Bartender stare, suspecting, at first, a touch.

“Fer Chrissake!”

“Yep, it’s me. Your old buddy.”

“Fer cryin’ out loud! What the hell’re you doing back here in Hohman, Ralph?”

I will now lightly pass over the ensuing sickening scene of boyhood companions meeting after years of elapsed time. Back-slappings, hollerings, and other classical maneuvers were performed. I told him why I had come back, about the piece I was supposed to do for an Official magazine on The Return Of The Native To The Indiana Mill Town. He snorted. They don’t think of Hohman as a mill town. It’s just Hohman.

He had drawn a beer for himself and another for me, broken out a bag of pretzels, and we began to do some really good, solid Whatever-happened-to …?, Did-she-ever-marry …?, When-did-they-put-in-the-bowling-alley-down-at …?, and all the rest of it. I could see that Flick was wearing a bowling shirt, white, with his team name stitched over the pocket. Bowling is the staff of life, the honey of existence, the
raison d’être
for most men in Hohman. Flick was no exception.

“Did you ever learn to control that hook, Flick?” I remembered him as a wild fastball bowler who lofted a lot and who had a wicked, uncontrollable hook.

“I’m getting my wood.”

We sat for a long moment, sipping our beer and looking out
into the gray, gloomy day. A big red Christmas wreath hung over the cash register.

“Are you gonna be around for Christmas, Ralph?” he asked.

“I hope so.”

He had reminded me of something that had crossed my mind a few days before. The Christmas season does things like that to you.

“Flick, do you remember that BB gun you used to have? That 200-shot Daisy pump gun?”

“That what?”

“Your BB gun.”

“Hell, I still got it. It comes in handy sometimes.”

“You won’t believe it, Flick, but the other day, in New York, I’m sitting in the H & H …”

“The H & H?”

“The Horn & Hardart. The Automat.”

“Oh yeah. I heard about those. You get pie right out of the wall.”

“That’s right, that’s the H & H. Anyway.…”

“You know, I’ve never been to New York. I’d like to go there some day. I hear it’s a rough place to live, but.…”

“Anyway, Flick, I’m in the H & H and this lady comes in and sits down, and she’s got a button that says ‘Disarm the Toy Industry’ on it.”

“Disarm the
Toy
Industry?”

“I guess she meant BB guns.”

“Fer Chrissake, it’s getting nuttier and nuttier.” Flick’s native Indiana humor struck to the core.

“Anyway, Flick, I’m sitting there talking to her, and I suddenly remember that BB gun I got for Christmas. Do you remember?”

“No kidding, Disarm the Toy Industry? Oh boy.…”

II
DUEL IN THE SNOW,
or
RED RYDER NAILS THE CLEVELAND STREET KID

Printed in angry block red letters the slogan gleamed out from the large white button like a neon sign. I carefully reread it to make sure that I had not made a mistake.

That’s what it said. There was no question about it.

The button was worn by a tiny Indignant-type little old lady wearing what looked like an upturned flowerpot on her head and, I suspect (viewing it from this later date) a pair of Ked tennis shoes on her feet, which were primly hidden by the Automat table at which we both sat.

I, toying moodily with my chicken pot pie, which of course is a specialty of the house, surreptitiously examined my fellow citizen and patron of the Automat. Wiry, lightly powdered, tough as spring steel, the old doll dug with Old Lady gusto into her meal. Succotash, baked beans, creamed corn, side order of Harvard beets. Bad news—a Vegetarian type. No doubt also a dedicated Cat Fancier.

Silently we shared our tiny Automat table as the great throng of pre-Christmas quick-lunchers eddied and surged in restless excitement all around us. Of course there were the usual H & H club members spotted here and there in the mob; out-of-work
seal trainers, borderline bookies, ex-Opera divas, and panhandlers trying hard to look like Madison Avenue account men just getting out of the cold for a few minutes. It is an Art, the ability to nurse a single cup of coffee through an entire ten-hour day of sitting out of the biting cold of mid-December Manhattan.

And so we sat, wordlessly as is the New York custom, for long moments until I could not contain myself any longer.

“Disarm the Toy Industry?” I tried for openers.

She sat unmoved, her bright pink and ivory dental plates working over a mouthful of Harvard beets, attacking them with a venom usually associated with the larger carnivores. The red juice ran down over her powdered chin and stained her white lace bodice. I tried again:

“Pardon me, Madam, you’re dripping.”

“Eh?”

Her ice-blue eyes flickered angrily for a moment and then glowed as a mother hen’s looking upon a stunted, dwarfed offspring. Love shone forth.

“Thank you, sonny.”

She dabbed at her chin with a paper napkin and I knew that contact had been made. Her uppers clattered momentarily and in an unmistakably friendly manner.

“Disarm the Toy Industry?” I asked.

“It’s an outrage!” she barked, causing two elderly gentlemen at the next table to spill soup on their vests. Loud voices are not often heard in the cloistered confines of the H & H.

“It’s an outrage the way the toymakers are forcing the implements of blasphemous War on the innocent children, the Pure in Spirit, the tiny babes who are helpless and know no better!”

Her voice at this point rising to an Evangelical quaver, ringing from change booth to coffee urn and back again. Four gnarled atheists three tables over automatically, by reflex action alone, hurled four “Amen’s” into the unanswering air. She continued:

“It’s all a Government plot to prepare the Innocent for evil, Godless War! I know what they’re up to! Our Committee is
on to them, and we intend to expose this decadent Capitalistic evil!”

She spoke in the ringing, anvil-like tones of a True Believer, her whole life obviously an unending fight against
They
, the plotters. She clawed through her enormous burlap handbag, worn paperback volumes of Dogma spilling out upon the floor as she rummaged frantically until she found what she was searching for.

“Here, sonny. Read this. You’ll see what I mean.” She handed me a smudgy pamphlet from some embattled group of Right Thinkers, based—of course—in California, denouncing the U.S. as a citadel of Warmongers, profit-greedy despoilers of the young and promoters of world-wide Capitalistic decadence, all through plastic popguns and Sears Roebuck fatigue suits for tots.

She stood hurriedly, scooping her dog-eared library back into her enormous rucksack and hurled her parting shot:

“Those who eat meat, the flesh of our fellow creatures, the innocent slaughtered lamb of the field, are doing the work of the Devil!”

Her gimlet eyes spitted the remains of my chicken pot pie with naked malevolence. She spun on her left Ked and strode militantly out into the crisp, brilliant Christmas air and back into the fray.

I sat rocking slightly in her wake for a few moments, stirring my lukewarm coffee meditatively, thinking over her angry, militant slogan.

A single word floated into my mind’s arena for just an instant—“Canal water!”—and then disappeared. I thought on: As if the Toy industry has any control over the insatiable desire of the human spawn to own Weaponry, armaments, and the implements of Warfare. It’s the same kind of mind that thought if
making
whiskey were prohibited people would stop
drinking
.

I began to mull over my own youth, and, of course, its unceasing quest for roscoes, six-shooters, and any sort of blue hardware—simulated or otherwise—that I could lay my hands on. It is no coincidence that the Zip Green was invented by
kids. The adolescent human carnivore is infinitely ingenious when confronted with a Peace movement.

Outside in the spanking December breeze a Salvation Army Santa Claus listlessly tolled his bell, huddled in a doorway to avoid the direct blast of the wind. I sipped my coffee and remembered another Christmas, in another time, in another place, and … a gun.

I remember clearly, itchingly, nervously, maddeningly the first time I laid eyes on it, pictured in a three-color, smeared illustration in a full-page back cover ad in
Open Road For Boys
, a publication which at the time had an iron grip on my aesthetic sensibilities, and the dime that I had to scratch up every month to stay with it. It was actually an early
Playboy
. It sold dreams, fantasies, incredible adventures, and a way of life. Its center foldouts consisted of gigantic Kodiak bears charging out of the page at the reader, to be gunned down in single hand-to-hand combat by the eleven-year-old Killers armed only with hunting knife and fantastic bravery.

Its Christmas issue weighed over seven pounds, its pages crammed with the effluvia of the Good Life of male Juvenalia, until the senses reeled and Avariciousness, the growing desire to own Everything, was almost unbearable. Today there must be millions of ex-subscribers who still can’t pass Abercrombie & Fitch without a faint, keening note of desire and the unrequited urge to glom on to all of it. Just to have it, to feel it.

Early in the Fall the ad first appeared. It was a magnificent thing of balanced copy and pictures, superb artwork, and subtly contrived catch phrases. I was among the very first hooked, I freely admit it.

    
BOYS!
AT LAST
YOU
CAN OWN AN
OFFICIAL RED RYDER
CARBINE ACTION TWO-HUNDRED SHOT
RANGE MODEL AIR RIFLE!

    This in block red and black letters surrounded by a large balloon coming out of Red Ryder’s own mouth, wearing his enormous ten-gallon Stetson, his jaw squared, staring out at me
manfully and speaking directly
to
me, eye to eye. In his hand was the knurled stock of as beautiful, as coolly deadly-looking a piece of weaponry as I’d ever laid eyes on.

The next issue arrived and Red Ryder was even more insistent, now implying that the supply of Red Ryder BB guns was limited and to order now or See Your Dealer Before It’s Too Late!

It was the second ad that actually did the trick on me. It was late November and the Christmas fever was well upon me. I thought about a Red Ryder air rifle in all my waking hours, seven days a week, in school and out. I drew pictures of it in my Reader, in my Arithmetic book, on my hand in indelible ink, on Helen Weathers’ dress in front of me, in crayon. For the first time in my life the initial symptoms of genuine lunacy, of Mania, set in.