Little Casino (17 page)

This is a variation on a certain kind of common marital quarrel. The elements are simple and faintly absurd, yet they must be understood as counters that have negligible literal value. The quarrel, that is, is metonymic, as are all inane quarrels. Such quarrels are very much like dreams. You remember dreams.

Elements that might enrich this quarrel are many and diverse, the most interesting being any that have to do with the past, where all resentments and failures and regrets lie in a state of horrible suspended animation, ready, at the slightest nudge, to wake and shamble out of the darkness, unchanged, unchanging, terrible to behold.

“The tomato episode” featured RUTH and HER LOUDMOUTH BELLIGERENT YAHOO HUSBAND. We don’t let anybody get away with anything.

“Now’s the time to fall in love,” Eddie Cantor says. As it was in 1931, so it is now and ever shall be, love without end. Amen.

“It says on this note that I’ve been asked to read,” adds Eddie Cantor, “’This could, too, be Dolores and her husband, the plumber.’”

Fats Navarro

H
E HEARS OF A MAN, AS ONE WILL, OR HE
“dreams up” a man, and, elaborating upon a simple notion, places him within a storm of sexual pleasure with his first wife of some three months, pleasure so intense that the newlyweds break the bed on which they have been making the fabled beast. Much loving laughter ensues, life cynically proffers itself in its lying guise as a bowl of cherries, and then goes blundering on.

Some years later, the man, in an adulterous episode in a hotel, or a motel, thinks of that evening of the broken bed and recalls that it was a Sunday, as is this particular evening of, as they say, illicit love. He commemorates the fact by embracing the cliché of the post-coital cigarette. “I can’t believe that I’m actually thinking of this cigarette as a cliché,” he says to the girl. “That’s being self-conscious to a fare-thee-well, right, kid? It’s life imitating kitsch imitating the movies imitating life.” She smiles at him, and he realizes that she has no idea what “kitsch” means. God knows, she’s nice enough, but she worries, she has told him, about what will happen to the Beatles if George should leave. Well, if she doesn’t know what kitsch is, she can’t know who Fats Navarro is, either. “Fats Navarro?” he says to her. She smiles at him and asks for a drag. Oh shit, it
is
a scene from a lame slice-of-life movie, chock full of intense looks, precocious children, and New York stoops. [It was a Sunday evening, absolutely, when he and his first wife broke the bed.] Don’t forget the badinage in the laundromat!

The years pass, he and his first wife divorce, the usual grief with the two children, the fucking puppet shows and zoo and trips to Coney Island, the strained jokes with the new boyfriend, an optometrist of enormous sensitivity, the prick. He remarries, and after a brief time, begins to commit adultery again. The girls with whom he grapples and sweats and fails and lies don’t know who Fats Navarro is, either. They don’t know who Red Garland is, or Lester Young, or Ziggy Elman or Kid Ory. They never heard of the Roxy or the Strand or “Brooklyn Boogie” or the old Battery Park Aquarium or Pete Reiser or the Third Avenue El or Grant’s or Toffenetti’s. Some of them have been to the Bronx, but not too many. They don’t know about Vito Marcantonio or William O’Dwyer or Joe Adonis. They don’t know anything. “Bye, Bye, Blackbird,” he says to one of them one night as he puts her in a cab. She smiles at him, that Ohio smile, that editorial assistant smile, that Godforsaken Shakespeare-in-the-Park smile that they all have to hand. Now, when he’s in bed with one of these girls, he often has to put up with the fatal-secondhand-smoke cliché that tends to ride in on the back of the post-coital cigarette cliché. These young women, who have no idea of Art Tatum’s actuality, or that Dexter Gordon at his best can make your heart stop, think that a whiff or two of this evil smoke will cut years off their fulfilling, really peppy lives. They are content to flirt with chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis, herpes, and aids, but fear the fragrant weed as if it is the Foul Fiend himself, in miniature static disguise. One, a stunning girl who sustained herself on yogurt and dried fruit, called his Marlboro a “death stick.” This is true. But more troubling than the dippy health concerns of these glowing, utterly amoral lawyers and consultants and junior brokers, these persons with promising careers in creative “fields” like magazine publishing and advertising, is the fact that each bed that he finds himself in—not a salubrious phrase, to be sure—reminds him of the broken bed, now, of course, rotting, figuratively, in the far-off past. He thinks to call his first wife about this, stupid as such a thought may be, but she has long been remarried, to, as he recalls, Mark, the civil engineer, has moved to some grim, sunny outpost crammed with Friendly People, and loathes him. He cannot speak of this to his current wife, for obvious reasons. So he keeps this malaise to himself, in the same box with Lundy’s and Steeplechase.

The man who heard or invented this story, such as it is, later hears that the pitiful adventurer has died, and that he believed that his deathbed had broken. This pleased him. The deceased was identified as a fellow named either Teddy or Perry, and there should be someone who can confirm this, someone to whom a letter of inquiry might be sent, at some address like “Chez Freddy” or “The Blue Front” or, simply, “the island.” Perhaps the inquiry might be directed to Orville or Jackie Lang, but they, too, must be dead by now. Others who might know are anonymously strewn across the playful, desolate land.

The broken bed was located in the bedroom of a four-room apartment in a small brick building on Woodside Avenue in Brooklyn. The motel was the Castle Rest Inn, some two miles from the Jersey entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. The “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” girl was put in the cab on the corner of Bleecker and Charles Streets. Chez Freddy burned down and on the site is a Christian bookstore, Gethsemane Books and Videos. The Blue Front is now Lakeview Video, after a Radio Shack in that location failed. Nobody seems to have any idea to what island “the island” might refer.

Loue makes men sayle from shore to shore,

So doth Tobaccoe,

Tobaccoe, Tobaccoe,

Sing sweetely for Tobaccoe,

Tobaccoe is like loue.

“It’s a shame that a person who is wholly uninterested in Beatles lore should suggest, by literary example, that smoking is acceptable. And where is Woodside Avenue, for God’s sake?”

[“Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries,” words by Lew Brown, music by Ray Henderson, was published in 1931, when the Depression was still being characterized by Herbert Hoover as a passing aberration. This was the same Mr. Hoover who, at about that time, noted that many people had left good jobs to sell apples on the street, so profitable was the latter undertaking. What a sweetheart.]

“The banal motif (e.g., the post-coital cigarette) is not precisely defined by the word ‘kitsch’….”

—Ancilla to Theory Studies, 1984.

Mysteries of causes and effects

H
AD HIS MOTHER NOT GIVEN HIM CREAM
of tomato soup for lunch every day for four years, three months, one week, and two days, it is possible that he would not have married the neighborhood whore. Had his mother not got a restraining order against his father, which prohibited the latter from coming within fifty yards of him, it is probable that he would not have become a dedicated drunk. Had he not got “pink eye” at the Tompkinsville swimming pool, it is likely that he would not have become a truck driver. Had she not torn open her forearm on a rusty hurricane fence, it is not too much to assume that she would not have, some years later, contracted poliomyelitis. Had she not unaccountably lost her panties during a festive day at George C. Tilyou’s Steeplechase, it can be conjectured that she would have graduated from a “good college.” Had he not drunk a third of the contents of his father’s quart of Kinsey Silver Label Blended Whiskey, he, perhaps, might have become a priest. Had he not, in 1950, bought a 1937 Chevrolet for sixty dollars, he, maybe, would have bought, in 1982, a 1982 Mercedes Benz. Had he not had eleven tubercular ribs removed, it’s a cinch that he would never have written a novel. Had he not been seduced by an ugly young man in Owl’s Head Park, it is a surety that he would not have been seduced by a handsome young man at a Grove Street party. Had he not masturbated relentlessly, obsessively, and “at the drop of a hat,” he would surely not have burst into flames while sound asleep. Had he not regularly tormented and thrashed younger children in the schoolyard of P.S. 102, he would have absolutely avoided his fate as a palooka club fighter. Had he not had his eye injured in a fall down a stairway of Fort Hamilton High School, he, without a doubt, would have had a long career as a noncommissioned officer in the 2nd Armored Division. Had she not been sexually exploited and slandered by a petty criminal, she would, doubtlessly, have resisted the lure of heroin. Had he not blasphemously prayed to God and His Blessed Mother to supply him with “bevies” of lascivious girls with whom he could have his debauched way, he, conceivably, might have avoided “problems” with various sexually transmitted diseases. If she had not hated her mother and father throughout all the years of her childhood, adolescence, puberty, and young womanhood, she would have, presumably, resisted the call of the convent. Had he not been fascinated by ships and the sea, it is evident that he would not have been killed in action aboard the U.S.S.
Portland.
Had she not lied, regularly and flagrantly, in the confessional, she would certainly have embraced atheism. Had he not seriously injured his hip while roughhousing in the Loew’s Alpine, he would, clearly, have become a professional baseball player of minor-league proficiency. Had she not masturbated with various kitchen implements, most notably a wooden potato masher, she would have definitely resigned herself to her husband’s indifferent carnal performances. Had he not eaten, laughingly, a Baby Ruth just fifteen minutes before receiving the Eucharist at the altar rail of Our Lady of Perpetual Help R.C. Church, he would, indeed, have escaped the lightning bolt that killed him on the way home. Had he been aborted, as his mother wished, he would not, positively, have had the opportunity to shoot to death two Armenian shopkeepers and a policeman of Irish extraction one hot July afternoon. Had he not smashed a plate-glass window of Shiftman’s Toys, he would have become a successful corporate attorney and rapist. Had he not been dangerously frivolous in his play with a Gilbert chemistry set given him for Christmas, there is a good chance that he would have been famously unsuccessful in a “search for the cure” for AIDS. Had his mother not suffered his rage, insults, and contumely, it is not beyond expectation to assume that he would never have developed into a sadistic killer. Had he not become frightened when he tried on his mother’s underwear, he would, presumably, have become a contented, if boring homosexual, or, as he would have learned to say, “queer.”