The Roy Stories (15 page)

 

Blows with Sticks Raining Hard

Roy wanted to get home before dark, so he decided to hitchhike rather than wait for a bus. At ten past five, when he left Little Louie's, the sky was gray with black stripes painted on the clouds. Snow began to fall as Roy stood in the slush next to the curb with his right thumb out.

He'd been sitting in the back booth at Louie's reading Joseph Conrad's
Congo Diary
, which he'd checked out of the Nortown branch library after having read
Heart of Darkness
. Roy had decided to write his next book report on
Heart of Darkness
, and his English teacher, Mr. Brown, had mentioned Conrad's
Congo Diary
as being interesting background material for the story. Roy enjoyed reading passages from Conrad's diary to his friends, especially to the girls, who hung out in Louie's after school.

“To Congo da Lemba after passing black rocks long ascent,” Roy read to them. “Harou giving up. Bother. Camp bad. Water far. Dirty. At night Harou better.”

After hearing this, Bitsy DiPena said, “Africa sounds icky. Why would anyone want to go there?”

“For jewels and ivory and minerals,” Roy told her, “and slaves, of course.”

“There's no slavery anymore, I don't think,” said Susie Worth, as she combed her long, blonde hair, which she did constantly. “Not in 1961.”

“Arabs still have slaves,” Jimmy Boyle said, “and some African tribes, too. I learned it in history.”

“In the evening three women of whom one albino passed our camp,” Roy read aloud. “Horrid chalky white with pink blotches. Red eyes. Red hair. Ugly. Mosquitos. At night when the moon rose heard shouts and drumming in distant villages. Passed a bad night.”

“Spooky,” said Susie Worth, biting on her comb.

“Spooky
and
icky,” Bitsy DiPena said.

“Row between the carriers and a man about a mat. Blows with sticks raining hard.”

“Stop it, Roy!” said Bitsy. “I don't want to hear any more.”

It was getting colder as the light disappeared and snow came down harder. Roy kept his thumb out but nobody stopped. People were just off work, hurrying home or to the grocery stores. Roy began walking, turning every few steps to show drivers his thumb. Finally, a car pulled over, a dark green Plymouth sedan. It slowed, then idled a few yards ahead of Roy. He ran up to the Plymouth and opened the front passenger side door. The driver was a middle-aged man wearing an overcoat and a homburg hat. He had wire framed glasses and white hair.

“I'm going to Peterson,” Roy said.

“Hop in,” said the man. “That's in my direction.”

Roy got into the car and pulled the door closed. The car heater was on full blast.

“Good to be out of this weather,” the man said.

“Yeah, thanks,” said Roy. “Didn't think anybody was going to stop.”

“People are afraid to these days. You never know who you're picking up.”

“I'm just a kid, though,” said Roy.

“Even so,” the man said, “you'd be surprised the things that happen.”

Roy glanced again at the driver. He looked like he could be a minister. His face was bland, almost colorless.

“What's your name, son?”

“Roy.”

“You go to high school?”

“Yes, sir. I'm a freshman.”

“You're about fourteen, then.”

“Almost.”

“What are you interested in, Roy? What subjects?”

“Sports, mostly. I like to read, too.”

“Good, good,” the man said. “Are you reading a book now?”

“Yes. Joseph Conrad's
Congo Diary
.”

“Really? That's impressive, Roy. Do you like it?”

“I like his descriptions of the people and places along the river where the boat stops. The crew walk inland sometimes and make camp. There's lots of insects and sickness. A boy gets shot. The boat has to avoid rocks that appear suddenly in the river. It's pretty exciting.”

“You want to travel, Roy? Go to foreign places?”

“Uh huh. My uncle's been all over the world, he's always going somewhere. Right now he's in Mongolia. I'm going to be like him.”

“What about the Bible, Roy? Do you read the good book? Are you a Christian?”

“My mother's a Catholic, but it doesn't interest me much. This is Peterson,” said Roy. “You can let me out here.”

“It's awfully bad outside,” said the man. “What street do you live on? I can take you there.”

“Rockwell, but you don't have to. I can walk over.”

“It's only a couple of blocks out of my way. I'll take you.”

The driver turned left on Peterson. The sky was completely black now.

“Where on Rockwell, Roy?”

“Near the corner,” Roy said. “Here's okay.”

The driver pulled the car over and stopped.

“You should go to church, Roy,” he said. “You're a very bright boy. Christianity will help you to understand the mysteries of life.”

The man placed his right hand firmly on Roy's left leg, up high, near his crotch. Roy yanked down hard on the handle of the passenger side door and got out of the car. He slammed it shut. The dark green Plymouth pulled away slowly, sliding through the snow, Roy thought, like a crocodile oozing off a Congo riverbank. He dropped his books and made a snowball, packing it hard with ice, then threw it at the car. The snowball hit the rear window, but the driver did not stop. Roy made another iceball. The Plymouth was almost out of sight. He didn't know where to throw it. Roy was not wearing gloves and his fingers were freezing. His eyes were tearing up from the wind. He hurled the snowball as far as he could across the street into the darkness.

“Night cold,” Roy said out loud. “Natives hostile. Back to boat. Harou suffering again.”

 

The Chinaman

I always spotted the Chinaman right off. He would be at the number two table playing nine ball with the Pole. Through the blue haze of Bebop's Pool Hall I could watch him massé the six into the far corner.

My buddy Magic Frank and I were regulars at Bebop's. Almost every day after school we hitched down Howard to Paulina and walked half a block past the Villa Girgenti and up the two flights of rickety stairs next to Talbot's Bar-B-Q. Bebop had once driven a school bus but had been fired for shooting craps with the kids. After that he bought the pool hall and had somebody hand out flyers at the school announcing the opening.

Bebop always wore a crumpled Cubs cap over his long, greasy hair. With his big beaky nose, heavy-lidded eyes, and slow, half-goofy, half-menacing way of speaking, especially to strangers, he resembled the maniacs portrayed in the movies by Timothy Carey. Bebop wasn't supposed to allow kids in the place, but I was the only one in there who followed the Cubs, and since Bebop was a fanatic Cub fan, he liked to have me around to complain about the team with.

The Chinaman always wore a gray fedora and sharkskin suit. Frank and I waited by the Coke machine for him to beat the Pole. The Pole always lost at nine ball. He liked to play one-pocket but none of the regulars would play anything but straight pool or nine ball or rotation. Sometimes the Pole would hit on a tourist for a game of eight ball but even then he'd usually lose, so Frank and I knew it wouldn't be long before we could approach the Chinaman.

When the Chinaman finished off the Pole he racked his cue, stuck the Pole's fin in his pocket, lit a cigarette, and walked to the head. Frank followed him in and put a dollar bill on the shelf under where there had once been a mirror and walked out again and stood by the door. When the Chinaman came out, Frank went back in.

I followed Frank past Bebop's counter down the stairs and into the parking lot next to the Villa Girgenti. We kicked some grimy snow out of the way and squatted down and lit up, then leaned back against the garage door as we smoked.

When we went back into the pool hall Bebop was on the phone, scratching furiously under the back of his Cub cap while threatening to kick somebody's head in, an easy thing to do over the phone. The Chinaman was sitting against the wall watching the Pole lose at eight ball. As we passed him on our way to the number nine table he nodded without moving his eyes.

“He's pretty cool,” I said.

“He has to be,” said Frank. “He's a Chinaman.”

 

The End of Racism

One of my favorite places to go when I was a kid in Chicago was Riverview, the giant amusement park on the North Side. Riverview, which during the fifties was nicknamed Polio Park, after the reigning communicable disease of the decade, had dozens of rides, including some of the fastest, most terrifying roller coasters ever designed. Among them were the Silver Streak, the Comet, the Wild Mouse, the Flying Turns, and the Bobs. Of these, the Flying Turns, a seatless ride that lasted all of thirty seconds or so and required the passengers in each car to recline consecutively on one another, was my favorite. The Turns did not operate on tracks but rather on a steeply banked, bobsledlike series of tortuous sliding curves that never failed to engender in me the sensation of being about to catapult out of the car over the stand of trees to the west of the parking lot. To a fairly manic kid, which I was, this was a big thrill, and I must have ridden the Flying Turns hundreds of times between the ages of seven and sixteen.

The Bobs, however, was the most frightening roller coaster in the park. Each year several people were injured or killed on that ride; usually when a kid attempted to prove his bravery by standing up in the car at the apex of the first long, slow climb, and was then flipped out of the car as it jerked suddenly downward at about a hundred miles per hour. The kids liked to speculate about how many lives the Bobs had taken over the years. I knew only one kid, Earl Weyerholz, who claimed to have stood up in his car at the top of the first hill more than once and lived to tell about it. I never doubted Earl Weyerholz because I once saw him put his arm up to the biceps into an aquarium containing two piranhas just to recover a quarter Bobby DiMarco had thrown into it and dared Earl to go after. Earl was eleven then. He died in 1958, at the age of fourteen, from the more than two hundred bee stings he sustained that year at summer camp in Wisconsin. How or why he got stung so often was never explained to me. I just assumed somebody had dared him to stick his arms into a few hives for a dollar or something.

Shoot the Chutes was also a popular Riverview ride. Passengers rode on boats that slid at terrific speeds into a pool and everybody got soaking wet. The Chutes never really appealed very much to me, though; I never saw the point of getting wet for no good reason. The Parachute was another one that did not thrill me. Being dropped to the ground from a great height while seated on a thin wooden plank with only a narrow metal bar to hold on to was not my idea of a good time. In fact, just the thought of it scared the hell out of me; I didn't even like to watch people do it. I don't think my not wanting to go on the Parachute meant that I was acrophobic, however, because I was extremely adept at scaling garage roofs by the drainpipes in the alleys and jumping from one roof to the next. The Parachute just seemed like a crazy thing to submit oneself to as did the Rotor, a circular contraption that spun around so fast that when the floor was removed riders were plastered to the walls by centrifugal force. Both the Parachute and the Rotor always had long lines of people waiting to be exquisitely tortured.

What my friends and I were most fond of at Riverview was Dunk the Nigger. At least that's what we called the concession where by throwing a baseball at a target on a handle and hitting it square you could cause the seat lever in the attached cage to release and plunge the man sitting on the perch into a tank of about five feet of water. All of the guys who worked in the cages were black, and they hated to see us coming. Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen my friends and I terrorized these guys. They were supposed to taunt the thrower, make fun of him or her, and try to keep them spending quarters for three balls. Most people who played this game were lucky to hit the target hard enough to dunk the clown one in every six tries; but my buddies and I became experts. We'd buy about ten dollars worth of baseballs and keep those guys going down, time after time.

Of course they hated us with a passion. “Don't you little motherfuckers have somewhere else to go?” they'd yell. “Goddamn motherfuckin' whiteboy, I'm gon' get yo' ass when I gets my break!” We'd just laugh and keep pegging hardballs at the trip-lever targets. My pal Big Steve was great at Dunk the Nigger; he was our true ace because he threw the hardest and his arm never got tired. “You fat ofay sumbitch!” one of the black guys would shout at Big Steve as he dunked him for the fifth pitch in a row. “Stop complaining,” Steve would yell back at him. “You're getting a free bath, aren't ya?”

None of us thought too much about the fact that the job of taunt-and-dunk was about half a cut above being a carnival geek and a full cut below working at a car wash. It never occurred to us, more than a quarter of a century ago, why it was all of the guys on the perches were black, or that we were racists. Unwitting racists, perhaps; after all, we were kids, ignorant and foolish products of White Chicago during the fifties.

One summer afternoon in 1963, the year I turned sixteen, my friends and I arrived at Riverview and headed straight for Dunk the Nigger. We were shocked to see a white guy sitting on a perch in one of the cages. Nobody said anything but we all stared at him. Big Steve bought some balls and began hurling them at one of the black guys' targets. “What's the matter, gray?” the guy shouted at Steve. “Don't want to pick on one of your own?”

I don't remember whether or not I bought any balls that day, but I do know it was the last time I went to the concession. In fact, that was one of the last times I patronized Riverview, since I left Chicago early the following year and Riverview was torn down not long after. I don't know what Big Steve or any of my other old friends who played Dunk the Nigger with me think about it now, or even if they've ever thought about it at all. That's just the way things were.