Pinball

PINBALL

Books by Jerzy Kosinski

NOVELS

The Painted Bird

Steps

Being There

The Devil Tree

Cockpit

Blind Date

Passion Play

Pinball

The Hermit of 69th Street

ESSAYS

Notes of the Author

The Art of the Self

Passing By

NONFICTION

(Under the pen name Joseph Novak)

The Future Is Ours, Comrade

No Third Path

Jerzy Kosinski

Copyright © 1982, 1983 by Jerzy Kosinski

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

This edition, first published in 1983 by Arcade Publishing, Inc., New York,
incorporates minor textual changes and revisions.

Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kosinski, Jerzy N., 1933-1991

Pinball / Jerzy Kosinski.

p.      cm.

eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9576-0

1. Missing persons—Fiction. 2. Musicians—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3561.08P5 1996

813′54—dc20                                                        96-24958

Grove Press

841 Broadway

New York, NY 10003

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the publishers named below for permission to reprint the following material:

Excerpt from “Under Which Lyre” from
W. H. Auden: Collected Poems
by W. H. Auden: copyright
©
1946 by W. H. Auden. Courtesy of Random House.

Excerpt from
Ulysses
by James Joyce, copyright
©
1914, 1918 by Margaret Caroline Anderson, and renewed 1942, 1944 by Nora Joseph Joyce. Reprinted by permission of Random House, The Bodley Head, and the Society of Authors, literary representative of the Estate of James Joyce.

Excerpt from “Hypocrite Auteur” from
New and Collected Poems 1917-1982
by Archibald MacLeish. Copyright
©
1985 by The Estate of Archibald MacLeish. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

Excerpts from The
Book of Rock Quotes
by Jonathan Green used by permission of the Publishers, Omnibus Press, UK/Music Sales Corporation, USA/Angus & Robertson, Australia.

Excerpt from “His Confidence” from
Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats.
Reprinted with permission of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., M. B. Yeats, Anne Yeats, Macmillan London Limited, and A. P. Watt Ltd. Copyright 1933 by Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., renewed
©
1961 by Bertha Georgie Yeats.

Excerpts from The
Legacy of the Blues
by Samuel Charters, copyright
©
1977 by Samuel Charters. Published by Marion Boyars, Ltd., London, and Da Capo Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

The excerpts and translations from “Chopin: The Man” by Arthur Hedley, “Studies, Preludes and Impromptus” by Robert Collet, and “The Songs” by Bernard Jacobson, which are included in
Frédéric Chopin: Profiles of the Man and the Musician,
edited by Alan Walker (Taplinger Publishing Co., Inc., 1967;
©
1966 by Barrie & Rockliff), are reprinted by kind permission.

To Katherina v. F., with love
like no other,
and to the memory of Goddard Lieberson
and Boris Pregel

The man that hath no music in himself
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus;
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.

S
HAKESPEARE
Merchant of Venice

For he who has once had to listen
will listen always, whether he knows
he will never hear anything again,
or whether he does not … Silence
once broken will never again be whole.

B
ECKETT
The Unnamable

When Patrick Domostroy turned the ignition key of his car, no sound came from the engine and no lights showed on the dashboard. He tried again and again, and still nothing happened: the battery was dead.

Knowing that in his neighborhood it would take at least an hour to get a mechanic to show up and not wanting to lose the time, he unbolted the battery from its brackets and put it in an old canvas bag he kept in the trunk of the car. Then he carefully lugged the bag the full length of the parking lot, and when he reached the street, he hailed a taxi.

In a few minutes he was at the National Know How, the largest automobile service station in the South Bronx. A big sign reading “Wouldn’t You Rather Know How?” loomed above the main entrance.

Canvas bag in hand, Domostroy went to the manager, a big-bellied guy in a blue work shirt, with JIM stitched on his white coveralls.

“Will you charge a battery for me?” asked Domostroy.

“Sure,” said Jim. “Just bring her in.”

“Here,” Domostroy said, setting down the bag on the floor.

Jim looked at the bag, then at Domostroy over his glasses. “The car,” he said, pronouncing each word deliberately; “bring the car in.”

“I can’t,” said Domostroy. “It wouldn’t go with a dead battery.”

“Couldn’t you jump-start it?” Jim asked.

“A jump-start is not enough: It needs a full charge. I just took the battery out, grabbed a taxi and here
it is!” He prodded the bag open with the tip of his shoe.

Jim lifted his eyes wearily and asked, “Where is the car?”

“In the Old Glory’s parking lot,” Domostroy replied.

“You brought this”—Jim pointed at the battery—“in a cab?”

“Sure. It was too heavy to carry all the way here on foot,” said Domostroy.

Jim’s expression changed. Taking his glasses off, he kicked the bag shut. He called to another mechanic. “Pete, will you come here for a minute!”

Pete, a slim young man, looked up, saw Jim and Domostroy, and put down his wrench. “Coming,” he said.

Turning to Pete, Jim pointed at the canvas bag. “Guess what’s in that?” he said brightly, with the air of a host on a TV game show.

Pete’s eyes circled from the bag to the visitor, back to the bag, then back to Jim. “I, don’t know,” he said with a shrug.

“Just guess,” said Jim, clapping him on the back.

Pete’s eyes measured Domostroy, then the bag. “Dirty laundry,” he said.

“Wrong,” Jim answered triumphantly.

“A bowling ball?”

“Wrong again! Try once more,” Jim prodded.

Pete took his time. “A dead dog,” he ventured.

“Dead—right! Dog—wrong,” Jim announced, kicking the bag open. “It’s a dead battery! And this guy,” he said, pointing at Domostroy, “brought it here.” After pausing for effect, he added, “In a cab!’

“But where’s his car?” asked Pete.

“Couldn’t come with its battery dead,” Domostroy broke in, “so the battery had to come without it.”

“In a cab?” asked Pete.

“In a cab. To save time.”

Shaking his head, Pete wandered away.

Jim started to write out a work order. “I’ve been twenty years at National Know How,” he said, bending over the form. “Plenty of people tow in cars with dead
batteries. But you’re the first to haul in a dead battery without a car.” He paused. “What kind of work do you do?”

“I’m a musician,” said Domostroy.

“You have an accent,” said Jim. “Where are you from?”

“South Bronx,” said Domostroy.

“I mean—before that. Where does that accent come from?”

“The New Atlantis,” said Domostroy. “But accents don’t show up in music.”

Jim laughed. “What kind of music?”

“Serious,” said Domostroy. “Dead serious.”

“If it’s as dead as this battery,” said Jim, “you should have brought your music here to charge it too.” He kept on laughing as he glanced at the work order. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of New Atlantis,” he said. “Where is it?”

“The Land of Sounds,” said Domostroy. “Francis Bacon wrote a book about it.”

While the battery was being charged, Domostroy opened his mail, which he had thrown into the bag with the battery. He pocketed the bills and the usual creditcard statements; then he glanced through the junk mail. A letter from the National Vasectomy Club asked in large print, “Had a Vasectomy?” and then suggested, “Now Encourage Others! If you’re one of the thousands of men who have had a vasectomy, join the National Vasectomy Club and inspire others to follow your lead in bringing population growth under control.” For only a few dollars, the club offered to send him a sterling silver lapel pin or tie tack, a membership card, and a bumper sticker.

Domostroy stopped to think. If he should ever undergo a vasectomy—although he could imagine nothing less likely—what right would he have to proselytize? Furthermore, if in search of external identity—again, a concept quite foreign to him—he should decide to define
himself as an American Vasectomite, where would he feel confident wearing the National Vasectomy Club lapel pin or the tie tack? To cocktails? To dinner with a date? To church? And what about the membership card? Why and where would he need it? To whom could he show it? He imagined being stopped by the highway patrol for speeding and saw himself producing, in addition to his driver’s license, his National Vasectomy card: “It’s like this, Officer: I’ve got to get to all those guys who aren’t keeping population growth down, and there s not much time left!”

In another letter, an illustrated flier advertised Candypants—the hundred-percent edible underwear. “Comes in butterscotch, cherry, banana, orange and lime flavors. One size fits all.” Domostroy tried to imagine eating-such panties off Andrea. Why, he asked himself, if he were aroused by her, would he want to waste his time eating her panties? Wasn’t eating underwear in itself time-consuming? And what would Andrea be doing while he filled up on her banana, cherry, or butterscotch panties? Watching him chew? Asking him how they tasted? For a moment he imagined a court case involving poisoning by Candypants, and their manufacturer, faced with a wide range of questions: Were edible panties more life-threatening than, say, candy? Did they improve family relations? Speed up courting? Did they increase or diminish a healthy sexual appetite? Should students engaging in campus panty raids be prohibited from ripping off more panties than they could chew? And finally, what was the responsibility of the manufacturer as tastemaker in such a business?

When the battery was ready, he hailed a taxi for the trip back to the Old Glory, once the South Bronx’s largest ballroom and banquet center. It was empty now. The rise in crime and gang warfare in the neighborhood had driven out most of the Old Glory’s mostly Jewish clientele—who once flocked to it for their wedding parties and bar mitzvahs.
Its owner, an aging slumlord, had finally closed the place, put it on the market, and retired to Florida.

A decade ago, when Domostroy was at the height of his success, he had given several benefit concerts at the Old Glory to aid the displaced children of the South Bronx, and for the last two years the slumlord, remembering those benefits, had allowed him to live in the dressing room off the ballroom.

Hoping that any potential buyer would want to reopen the Old Glory just as it had been in its golden days, the slumlord had left in it all the original furniture and fixtures. The vast kitchen stood ready to feed twelve hundred diners, and on a low stage next to the dance floor loomed an ancient grand piano backed by an impressive array of other musical instruments, all badly used and in need of repair, ranging from a harp and a cello to electric guitars, accordions, and—a mark of modern technology—an electronic music console that could simulate the sound of several instruments.