Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories (16 page)

Others were clad in castoff costumes from Joan Crawford pictures: padded shoulders, frumpy skirts, sequined wedgies, ringlet curls and feather boas. Here and there a Grand Concourse version of Humphrey Bogart sneered condescendingly at the mob, cigarette drooping sardonically from a lower lip. A few Belmondos and several Warhols added vivid accents to the mosaic. A Salvation Army Santa Claus at the curb, his Kriss Kringle costume hopelessly
démodé,
rang his bell listlessly above the clamor. I tugged at the bill of my Jackie Coogan tweed cap, setting it more firmly on my head as I shivered slightly under my Clint Eastwood paisano serape, my Fred Astaire two-tone patent-leather pumps pitifully inadequate to the December slush.

After the show—which turned out to be a flawed but compelling black-comedic existential skin flick in the
drolly amusing Sacher-Masoch genre—I eased into a booth at Le Bagel Vérité, a favorite haunt of cinemagoers in the neighborhood. Sipping a mug of mocha absinthe, described on the menu as the favorite of John Barrymore, I found myself studying a striking poster on the wall amid the likenesses of Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, Peter Fonda, Ché Guevara and Charley Brown. It was my old friend Ludvicka, “Don't I know you from someplace?” I reflected, the absinthe flowing like tepid laval through my veins.

Of course! It hit me. Every male I ever knew believed that foreign girls, even if they're just from the next town, were infinitely sexier than the ordinary homegrown product. I laughed ironically in my Sidney Greenstreet manner, as I often do when my mind takes a philosophical turn. Then, painfully, it all began to come back—my own almost forgotten adventure in alien sensuality, foreign passion, forbidden fruit.

It began innocently enough a couple of weeks before Christmas in the northern-Indiana steel-mill town where I festered as a youth. It was just before Christmas vacation, already deep into a bitterly cold winter, and I was shuffling idly through clots of drifted, soot-covered snow, my mind drifting aimlessly like a semi-deflated blimp. I was between romances. A brief, disastrous fling with Elizabeth Mae Longnecker had petered out in late November, when I discovered she wore earmuffs and galoshes with snaps. Somehow she had seemed
different
on the tennis courts.

I was coming home late from band practice, my
left shoulder still aching from the weight of my sousaphone, lips tingling from the last 24 bars of
The 1812 Overture,
when I sniffed a pungent aroma that was to play a dramatic part in the erotic history of my kidhood. I sniffed again. It was vaguely familiar, yet strange—and mysteriously exciting.

The elusive aroma mingled with the rotten-egg smell of the Grasselli Chemical Works, the swamp-gas exhalation of the Sinclair refining plant, the smoldering, metallic miasma of the blast-furnace dust that formed our daily breathing air.

As I got closer and closer to home, the aroma grew even lustier.

It was then that I noticed
lights
coming from the Bumpus house next door. The infamous house had been empty since the moiling Bumpus clan, a mob that made Genghis Khan's hordes look like a Cub Scout Jamboree, had stealthily departed in the night with their blue tick hounds and their gallon jugs of corn likker, leaving unpaid rent and a yard full of garbage behind. I looked curiously at the lighted windows. After the Bumpus family, there was no telling
what
might show up. I went up our back porch and into the kitchen, already feeling a vague, rising excitement.

“HEY, MA….”

“How many times do I have to tell you to take off your overshoes out on the porch?”

“Yeah. Ma, who … ?”

“I said take 'em off on the porch. Now! Look at my floor!”

I went back out on the porch, kicked off my overshoes and darted back into the kitchen. My kid brother sat at the kitchen table, glaring sullenly at an arithmetic book.

“Hey, Ma, who moved in next door?”

She didn't answer, being busy at the moment sliding a meat loaf covered with tomato sauce into the oven. The radio on the refrigerator whined:

“Would you turn that radio down? I can't hear a word you're saying.”

Flushed after her usual struggle with the oven door, which had a bad catch and hardly ever closed right unless it was slammed four times, my mother straightened up and wiped her hands on a kitchen towel. I reached up and turned the radio down just as the back door opened and in came my old man, snow showering off him as he stamped and snorted.

“Holy Christ, it's cold enough to freeze off a brass monkey's….”

“Please. The kids are listening.” She caught him just in time.

“Hey, what the hell's that I smell? You cookin' somethin' new for supper?” he asked suspiciously, being strictly a meat-and-potatoes man who viewed all divergences from that basic menu as an effete affectation. He truly believed that the only food people really liked was
meat and potatoes and that they just pretended to like other things in order to impress each other.

“It's coming from next door,” my mother answered absently as she set the table.

“Next door? Y' mean they're actually cookin' supper over at the Kissels?” His voice rose in disbelief. Lud Kissel, our other next-door neighbor, had given up eating food years before, about the time he discovered bourbon, on which he subsisted entirely except for periods when he had to settle for gin. Since he had given up eating—and working—the rest of the family lived on cornflakes.

“No, from the Bumpus house.”

“THE BUMPUSES!” He blew up, rushing to the window. “Don't tell me them bastards are back! Goddamnit, if I have to kick another of them lousy hounds….”

One of his worst fears was that the Bumpuses would move back next door, just to drive him crazy. The memory of that shiftless swarm of tobacco-spitting, raw-boned, gimlet-eyed primitives was still an open wound in my father's psyche.

The heady aroma from next door filled our kitchen like a cloud of exotic gas. Suddenly, without warning, as the old man peered into the darkness, a loud musical thumping, heavy and rhythmic, added to the clamor.

“What the hell is that?” The old man's voice was tinged with trepidation. We remembered all too well the sleepless nights we spent while the Bumpuses' ever-twanging Victrola filled the night air with the nasal sounds of Ernest Tubb, the Delmore Twins and Cowboy
Copas. It was the first note of a barrage of thumpings that was to continue for some time.

“Well, here we go again.” My father slumped into his chair at the kitchen table and opened a can of Atlas Praeger.

“I think I know what that smell is,” said my mother with quiet authority. “Yeah?”

“That smells to me like stuffed cabbage.”

The old man looked up from his beer. “It does smell like stuffed cabbage. But there's somethin' else.” He sniffed the air.

“I think they're cooking blood soup, too.” My mother said it as if everybody cooked blood soup every night.

“Blood
soup!” My father gagged briefly on his beer.

“AAAGGHH!” My kid brother had joined the discussion. He was a notoriously picky eater.

“Yes. Irma Kissel says they're Polish.”

“Boy, that's a relief!” The old man said it like he meant it. “For a second there, I thought we had the Bumpuses back. Sometimes I get nightmares dreamin' about all that guitar playin' and them dogs yappin', and that old bastard spittin' tobacco juice into our driveway.”

POLISH! I thought, suddenly alert. “Do they have any kids?” I asked.

“I'm not sure, but I think there's two or three boys. And….” she stirred the mashed potatoes expertly, salting them lightly with her left hand, “… I believe there's a girl.”

My father had lost all interest in the subject and was
deep in the sports page. As long as the Bumpuses weren't coming back, he didn't care who moved in.

A
girl!
A
Polish
girl! A wave of ecstasy shuddered through my frame. Our neighborhood was singularly lacking in girls of any kind. For some reason, practically every kid in the neighborhood was a male. The only place we ran into actual girls was at school, and they all lived in mysterious neighborhoods far from ours. Of course, there was Esther Jane Alberry, squat, truculent and morose; and there was Helen Weathers, who had hair like a football helmet and who weighed 200 pounds soaked in sweat, which she almost always was; and there was Eileen Akers, in her thick glasses, who spent all of her time at the library. But they didn't count. Though Schwartz, Junior Kissel and I talked a lot about girls, it was mostly hypothetical.

“Her name's Josephine,” said my mother. “She's about your age. She goes to All Saints School.”

I struggled to maintain my composure, but inwardly I reeled. My god, the jackpot! A Polish girl my age had moved next door to me!

A prime universal belief among my peers was that the girls of the next town, East Chicago, were fantastic, and that the most fantastic of all were Polish girls. There was never any scientific evidence. It wasn't necessary. It was just an established fact. Sometimes when Flick got his old man's car, we'd go to East Chicago to ride around with the windows open just
looking
at Polish girls walking around the streets. We'd holler out at them and ride around and around the block, jabbing each
other in the ribs, swigging Nehi orange, gulping down White Castle hamburgers and blatting the horn. This sport was called skragging for some reason. We never actually talked to a girl, of course, or even really got near one; we just hollered, gunned the motor and stared.

“Josephine?” I tried to sound unconcerned, as though I hadn't caught the name.

My mother ladled out the gravy as she said, “They call her Josie. Their last name's Cosnowski. They come from East Chicago.”

God almighty! Wait'll Schwartz and Flick hear about this! Josie Cosnowski from East Chicago! A new era had begun.

At lunchtime the next day, the following dialog took place at a fashionable greasy spoon called John's Place, which catered to the high school crowd and featured the gristliest hamburgers in Christendom:

SCHWARTZ
(mouth full of French fries):
“I bet you couldn't guess what I'm gettin' for Christmas.”

FLICK
:“This ketchup is rotten. It's all clotted on the bottom.”
(Hollering loudly over general hullabaloo and 400 watts of jukebox.
“HEY JOHN, HOW ABOUT SOME FRESH KETCHUP HERE? THIS BOTTLE'S BEEN ON THE TABLE FOR SIX YEARS!”

SCHWARTZ:
(persistently)
“You wouldn't believe what I'm gettin' for Christmas.”

FLICK
(standing up at his stool and waving ketchup bottle):
“HEY JOHN, KETCHUP OVER HERE FOR THE TROOPS!”

JOHN
(a short, swarthy man of uncertain parentage and evil temper due to a life of continual harassment by acne-plagued adolescents and a succession of short-order cooks who quit every three days):
“Who the hell's hollerin' for ketchup?”

FLICK
: “Me. Over here.”
(Ketchup in bottle, still being waved, suddenly unclots, spraying surrounding customers, including renowned defensive halfback who rises menacingly from his stool and then settles back, figuring it isn't worth it.)

HALFBACK
: “Watch it, punk.”

JOHN
: “I don't have ten arms, kid. Here's your damn mustard.”

FLICK
: “I wanted ketchup.”

JOHN
: “Oh, fer Crissake!”
(Disappears into smoky blue kitchen, where loud crash has just occurred.)

SCHWARTZ
: “Yep, this is gonna be some Christmas.”

ME:
(hearing Schwartz for the first time through my daydream)
“Hmm?”

SCHWARTZ
: “What's the matter with you? You got the crud or something?”

FLICK
(resigned to his fate, scooping mustard out of bottle with finger and smearing it on cheeseburger):
“You got the crud? Stay away from me, man! I don't need no crud.”

ME
: “Crud? Who's got the crud?”

JOHN
(reappearing from kitchen trailing sweat and lugging tray of hot roast-beef sandwiches):
“Who wanted the ketchup here?”

FLICK
: “I had an uncle once almost died of the crud.”

JOHN
: “WHO WANTED THE KETCHUP?”

HALFBACK
(to Flick):
“Hey, Shrimp, you wanted the ketchup, right?”
(Grabs ketchup from John, pours half a bottle on Flick's cheeseburger.)
“That enough? Or wouldja like a little on top of yer head?”

ME
: “Pass the ketchup, please.”

HALFBACK
: “You trying to get smart, kid?”

SCHWARTZ
(oblivious):
“I think my old man's getting me a power saw.”

HALFBACK
(shoving ketchup bottle toward me):
“Just watch it, kid.”

FLICK
: “He caught it in Indianapolis, at the Y.M.C.A.”

ME
: “Caught what?”

SCHWARTZ
: “Yessir, I'm gonna mount it on my workbench.”
JOHN
: “Which one a you gets the coffee malt?”
FLICK
: “Here.”

JOHN
: “You two guys get the Cokes, right?”

ME AND SCHWARTZ
: “Yeah.”
(BRIEF PERIOD OF GULPING.)

ME: “YOU
guys know the Bumpus house?”

SCHWARTZ
(chewing on an ice cube):
“Don't tell me?”

ME
: “Tell you what?”

SCHWARTZ
: “That good old Delbert Bumpus has moved back. One a them stinkin' Bumpus hounds bit me so hard one day on my paper route, I thought I'd die. That mutt hung onto my leg for two blocks.”