By Eric Le Roy
Table of Contents
The Snows
A Return to Charleston
There was a light snow falling when Gary Smithers got off the bus at the Greyhound station in the center of town. It was early in the morning, just after 6.00 or thereabouts, and he searched the streets for a cafe, not wanting his first coffee of the day to come from the scabrous machine inside. The street lights were still on; early December was occupying the city of Charleston like a weary platoon trudging gamely toward a Christmas ceasefire.
He remembered the name of the street: Summers Street. Gary saw that it had changed, but how much he couldn’t really tell because, although it was one of the central streets of the small state capital (really just a hick town, he assessed), it had never been much to look at. If you turned left out of the bus station and kept going, you would come to a fast food place that used to be called “Burger Boy” – the first ‘fast food’ place he had ever seen in his life. God knows what they called it now, or if it was still there.
Beyond that, he suddenly remembered Court Street, and ‘back in the day’ it had been where the hardcore black men and women lived, hung out, and tried to move the shambles of broken furniture of which their lives were constituted. A white boy could get laid or killed there. He had tried to get laid, but had been so intimidated by the situation that he couldn’t perform. The black woman had laughed and taken his money; he recalled that there was a trace of sympathy in her laughter. “Don’t cut your feet!” she had yelled as he walked over broken glass, forlornly, in search of his shoes.
These thoughts drifted through his mind like the snow that was falling in bigger flakes now, parading above the streetlights in a way he truly loved; they were as little living organisms engaged in the first and last dance they would ever know, and to Gary, though he wasn’t able to say it… couldn’t quite put his finger on it…. nevertheless these broken off snow beams, so small but intricate and elaborate like wizened, accomplished old fingers weaving angels out of stone, seemed to be telling him something at once blissful in their calm descent, but wild and full of strange glee, like someone who goes completely mad right in front of you and is never all right again.
A bum from the night walked up to him now with a crooked face, saying “Can you loan me a dollar, man?”
Gary, bleary-eyed and with a voice that floated across many seas, suddenly so tired, answered, “Bro, I haven’t got 20 cents on me.” The bum’s face was an infinite cliche.
The bum snorted, “Fuck you, ya damned Queer” and wandered away.
Welcome home. How much time had passed? 40 years? And the welcoming committee greeted him: “Fuck you, ya Queer.” Didn’t they say ‘faggit’ nowadays?
When Gary turned just to make sure the scarecrow hadn’t returned to further insult or to beg, he saw that the guy was gone, cutting through the gray gleam of dawn like some noxious phantom, at once real and unreal. “Queer,” he repeated. It sounded almost quaint. Like calling a hot young bitch a “fair young maiden.” Besides, wasn’t ‘Queer’ an official title or something now? He shook his head at the ghost of the deadbeat maestro. Whatever, it was nothing to do with him.
He briefly imagined that a great snowfall was happening inside him, sinking down amid the howls of distant, lonely animals. But it was because he hadn’t slept all night on that bus, and he knew from long experience that protracted insomnia will show you God as surely as the ocean that drowns you or the killers who exterminate you. It just wants a few seconds to get your thoughts together, and death often allows you this last voluptuous look at luminous life at the edge of the hereafter. Or so he imagined and half-hoped.
All bullshit, he said and walked on, understanding that, except for his dwindling finances, he was…well…homeless. He had come here, back to his childhood city from a Greyhound station in Ohio, and what he had been doing there was not clear to him. When the ticket seller asked, “Where do you want to go?” he had mumbled ‘Charleston, West Virginia,’ as though prompted by something beyond his control. When he said ‘Charleston,’ it was as if he were lying to a policeman, but the next thing he knew he was on a bus heading that way. A night bus, the kind he liked.
When Morning Brings Nightfall
You could never really sleep on them because the technicians who made the seats had the so-called pillow-part bulging in the back of your head like a broad kneecap, or as if some invisible knight-at-arms was assailing you with a rubber sword. So you slept, if you did, not on a soft billowed pillow but on a geometrical point. You could take refuge by curling up cheek-to-cheek with the big Greyhound windows, and there half-rest in a slobber-producing trance that would then seep down the glass like a penitent to his knees: Gary had proclaimed it the ‘Greyhound Confessional’ because the spit-glitter brightened under the passing lamps of the highway or street like tears of remorse.
Or you could tilt the seat back, of course, but never far enough; besides who wanted to be that close to the crotches of one’s fellow peons scrunched behind you – most of them of African descent and inclined to disapprove of your white ass. “That’s far enough motherfucker!” they would snap. Implied threats in defeated voices bristling with anger that never slept.
Other than that, it was fine. Winks as involuntary as the stars at the night-people extending from a constant, unsleeping twitch of one’s eyes. An entire species distinguished only by the debauchery of one’s semi-dreams, never fully awake, never fully asleep. He was at home in that condition. He loved the night, the pagans of darkness, and as an old medieval criminal poet had written once – the snows of yesteryear.
He laughed because the snow falling now would affect traffic, and Gary always liked it when something affected traffic. Traffic. Hmmm…the word triggered something in his mind, and all of a sudden, he needed a girl. It hit him like a last assignment from the past. He wanted to take out his hunger on a ripe melon. Even a split cabbage. Ahead of him was the previously infamous Court Street where old mythology said you could get laid for a modest price.
He wanted to rectify an old degrading episode of impotence by giving it – his revived power – to who was ready, willing, and a good actress. Someone real – not some princess curled up in his hand – but he had to find her. He was still half drunk, possessed a magic flask that knew how to make him drunker still, and he even had some sex pills with him, penile hardness guaranteed.
Thus Gary gazed along the distances of Summers Street. He could have told you that this particular street, being in effect the gateway to the city if you traveled in the way he was accustomed to, would appear both familiar and foreign. He was taken aback by the sudden realization that no one would know him anymore, no matter where he strayed. His reaction would be: where are the people I knew? And he answered himself: all dead or old and disfigured. But it wasn’t possible, he reasoned. How can that be when he could summon them in a mental bubble any time he wanted? How can they be old when his memories insisted they were young?
Gary was an educated drunk man who had never lost his taste for adventure. So he went, light bag in hand, toward Court Street for one reason only: to meet someone who would present him with the royal amnesty of a false smile. And give him some cheap pussy.
He loved mixing in the foulest words and phrases he could imagine (and he was a lyric poet in this sense) with what he believed was language of stunning eloquence. In his view, he could disarm strangers and keep them off balance by quoting great poets and then switching to pimp and prison talk. Sure, he conceded, it was an ‘affectation’, an act of sorts born of atheistic orneriness in the midst of the pious, but there was a catch to it. Sometimes his own absurdities left him sobbing. He dreaded the emptiness he compulsively sought.
In exchange for a smile he would do anything; in exchange for money, the human race would do anything. Now he wanted to make a deal. The snow was falling harder now, and the night lights still crawled like vivid lightning bugs, around the exterior of the bus station. The station itself seemed to soften in a way that bus stations never did. It was like the Greyhound Bus Station was shedding its mask of blank totalitarian squalor and loosening up into a cocoon of lights. But Gary knew it was only the snow making one of its illusions. He heard a departing bus squealing and snarling its departure, and then he was sure.
So here is what he would do. First, look for the Burger Boy and have some coffee and maybe a taste from the yet relatively ample volume of rum he had in his coat – a “soldier-at-arms” he called it – and then he would wander back to Court Street and see what was ‘shakin’. Probably not much, but worth a look. Maybe a woman was free, he said to himself, remembering a song called “110th Street” that seemed to know the scene and the situation better than he ever would, but in a way that stroked him, wanting him to feel its asphalt dreaming and hardcore longing.
He noticed that the snow was starting to stick, even out in the street, though traffic was picking up a little and would soon flatten it all into blackening mush. Now there were a few pedestrians as well, hooded and, often as not, squinched up behind a fusillade of cigarette smoke. With the smoking fanning out into the windy air as it did, the smokers looked like little exhaust emission machines. He continued his slog down Summers Street to where it intersected with Washington Street. He remembered that Court Street was a straight shoot past the Burger Boy.
The Judgments of the Snow
When he got there and looked up, something peculiar happened to his vision. He saw, very clearly, albeit through the flecks of snow, the same Burger Boy that had been there before when he was a teenager. He even noticed the sign on top that advertised 15 cent hamburgers and, above that, the big twirling satellite that Burger Boy was famous for. But this was only for an instant: it was as if his mind had fished up a photograph from some dormant darkroom and flashed it across his eyes, like a postcard from the distant past.
Then it obliterated and turned into a small business park of sorts. Thoroughly modern and nondescript was this newer facility. But just for an instant it had all come back to him, so vividly that it left him blinking for several seconds, the snow nipping his eyes almost affectionately like puppy teeth. But disappointment gnawed at him. He needed that cup of coffee, and now he’d have to look elsewhere. In the meantime, he plucked the flask of rum from his coat and surreptitiously took a long draw, wiped his lips on the sleeve of his old coat, and replaced the lid. The flask disappeared into the folds of his coat like an abducted child from a playground.
He realized, as soon as the rum burnt his innards and the old Burger Boy disintegrated, how desperately he wanted it not to have done that, and for the vision to have replaced reality. It was like hot molasses slowly being poured over cold pancakes: that’s how the past related to the present. It woke up your taste buds. But when you looked down at your plate, there was no molasses, no syrup of any kind. Just cold dough dotted with boulders of butter that would never melt, dairy eyeballs that would never see.
He could taste the burgers, yes, and the thin fries, he could still salivate just by smelling them in all their hot succulent grease, even, he guessed, like a hungry baby drinking milk from a mother’s tit that was soiled and oily from bad living. Generously, his memory provided more. He could taste the thick sliding vanilla membrane of the frozen custard, which the name they gave that ice cream substitute back then. These were the snows of yesteryear.
He was on Court Street. Taking a liberty with an old, decrepit passerby, he asked for a cigarette. The muffled man hesitated, looked annoyed and reluctant, then reached into his pocket and wedged out a crumpled pack. Without saying anything he thrust the pack toward Gary and thumbed one out for him to take, which Gary did. The donor lurched onward, shaking his head no to the question, “Sir, have you got a light?”
Gary looked at it. A filterless Pall Mall. Or was it a Camel? The snow was already saturating it, but it was still smokable if only he could find someone with a lighter. He needed to look. His eyes stole up and down snowy Court Street, home of the ‘colored’ people of the cheap-wine past. Was it the same? For now, it stretched out in restless emptiness – if emptiness could be restless, and on Court Street, it had always seemed that it could. Too early for action.
He saw already that a number of those fire hazard edifices of the past had been knocked down, but again only after first having it all come back to him as a hallucination. This reminded him of a story he had heard, probably apocryphal, which had to do with archaeologists in Egypt opening up some old pharaoh’s tomb buried deep in one of the pyramids in Giza, and when they chiseled open the door, they saw the splendor of the day he was interred – a golden stasis – and then, as soon as the oxygen from the desert filled the room, everything disintegrated into dust. The archaeologists, so the tale went, had seen the immaculately mysterious ancient world in its full regalia, but only for a second; then it went to hell.
Gary had at first been seduced by this account, but gradually started to disbelieve it. He disbelieved it because it did not make scientific sense. Whole rooms do not fall apart, like the hearts of vampires, just because real light and oxygen strike like an air raid. But it was one cool story, he thought. And that’s how he now felt about the remnants of the old Court Street.
He had expected to see the early risers or sleepless night hawks active here in the early hours, even though he knew that the dopers and dealers usually called it a day after 4 a.m. But there was nothing. Some exodus had occurred, or maybe the snow was driving everyone to stay indoors. Maybe brown faces unseen by him were peeking from behind the blinds of grainy windows and muttering to themselves, “What that crackuh want?” Or “Honey, not today.”
If they were there and just wouldn’t come out, well, that was disappointing. He needed to see lights – not sunlight, but the lights of human activity – just to reassure him that chemical warfare hadn’t suddenly broken out and cooked or suffocated everybody. But the mood of the street, old rambunctious Court Street, had, he saw now, retired into the grip of predictable mundane house-boxes and Lego-buildings laid out in judicially imposed and regulated rows – behind them all the mentality of the studio sit-com with laughter from cans and soap operas squeezing tears from buckets – it had taken over. A polyester, prefab environment. There were no more neighbors. The world was now devoid of wooden stairs of asymmetric inclination. The fist-pumping tennis player, the lip-synching rock star, the customer service robot – all were fake. It was a fake world driven on and on by marketing titans that never slept. Yet all doors were locked at night. Standing on Court Street, he looked in vain for Court Street.
For some illogical source, probably born of fatigue and alcohol, he remembered clotheslines: those makeshift ropes that stretched across the past. Now they seemed as bizarre connecting cords, like hands extended out of a wind that wasn’t there a moment ago. Yesterday’s housewives used to hang clothes to dry on strings and cords that, if you saw them all together – in one backyard after the other up the street where he had lived long ago – formed a kind of link between them, as if they were all ancient women full of scabs and shadows, but still dancing together around some tarnished maypole.
But if he had walked up to them, and if they appeared out of the past to be addressed, they would have looked at him like what he had always been: an intruder. They held some sort of cosmic advantage that he had never understood or why they deserved it; yet, nondescript and bland, they were superior according to some circular bond that held them together like a vast donut, like rings around Saturn, circling around him, tighter and tighter, as if accosting a witch, gathering round him like a thousand midnight employees in all-night convenience stores of imaginary cities. They had always been, he saw now, as if in a vision, that they had always been his judge and jury. If he had asked what he was guilty of, they would have just seemed puzzled by it all, as if a spider had crawled up to them to declare his love.
Thus had been ruined what should have been his best moments in life, moments that he believed could have changed him if they had gone the other way – these were his imaginary judges. Not God, not the Devil, and not the Secret Police – but the endless accumulation of facial expressions that came from galaxies full of human thought and non-thought, and then, instead of lawyers and jurors, they changed their uniforms and because lab technicians who, when their examinations slid across him like some MRI machine fished out of a closet – as he lay supine on a gurney, they would briefly pause to read his chart and then just shake their heads and look bored, like drifters in a small town waiting for a bus. NEXT!! Hey, are you still here? NEXT!!! There had been no diagnosis or prognosis. Prehistoric lizards of the homeless afternoon, his judge and jury, nurses and technicians… why they had hardly noticed him!! He wasn’t worthy of any verdict or any diagnosis. And he accepted this outcome because he knew it was correct. He was unworthy even of punishment.
It was just one of those things, he decided. A Thing Thing. He took a sip.
In any case, Gary didn’t worry about it long. In the distance, he suddenly saw the gleam of someone lighting a cigarette, and so he plowed forward, his lungs still burning for their first taste of the raw tobacco and his mind deliciously unbalanced from sleeplessness and its welcoming committee of neither provable nor disprovable hallucinations.
The Calling of Court Street
He chased the gleam until he finally saw a black woman of no particular description sweeping the snow from a doorway. He thought it odd that she was in her night dress without a coat and was using a broom to do this. It was like she was looking for nonexistent leaves and coping with the new reality of unexpected snow. But maybe there was a lot of dust buried under the snow-rim that was forming.
He was on Court Street now after all. There were cars parked intermittently along Court Street, old models and of course outlandishly large. He remembered the taste for expensive-looking Cadillacs that were in fact on their last legs, that black men in the past had purchased and parked extravagantly in front of their houses, where the television screen was large enough to block out sadness and fury, and the cartoons and football games seemed so large that all hunger gave way to Popeye and his spinach, and all rage hacking and swirling in the stadium of gladiators.
So he approached the woman, and softly asked? “Honey, have you got a light for this wet old cigarette I been carryin’ with me half the night, or even better you got one I can buy offa you?” And he smiled charismatically.
She looked at him with all the enthusiasm of someone realizing that they have a flat tire, yet one which, pumped up, could work to her advantage. This revelation caused a softness in her eyes and the potential for compliance in her demeanor. She saw weakness and potential.
“Shonuff?” she purred, like an egg beater in a bowl of cake mix. She waited. The woman looked to be about his age. In the cold weather and the obligatory coats, it was impossible to judge the weight and shape of her body, but probably it had seen better days. Like his own, he supposed.
She thought about it and pulled one from her pack. “Ok, no harm in giving you one, I guess. You need a light?”
“Yes. Yes, I do.” He almost said ‘Yes Ma’am’ and I need to kiss your pussy like a riot in the whorehouse powder room’ – but that would have been laying it on too thick, so he just stood there like a doorknob.
“Yes. Yes, I do”, he repeated. He thought about saying “Yeah. Or Yep”. But some kind of humility guided him to add “Yes, I definitely would. .” She gave him a riverboat smile, designed by much training, to beguile and dismiss all at once. Smart men see the hungerless come-on; dumb men, full of love, see only an untouchable finger without a wedding ring.
All of a sudden, the scene started to repeat itself:
She thought about it and pulled one from her pack. “Ok, no harm in giving you one, I guess. You need a light?”
“Yes. Yes, I do.” He almost said ‘Yes Ma’am’ and I need to kiss your pussy like a riot in the whorehouse powder room’ – but that would have been laying it on too thick, so he just stood there like a doorknob.
In an instant he kept replaying this:
She thought about it and pulled one from her pack. “Ok, no harm in giving you one, I guess. You need a light?”
“Yes. Yes, I do.” He almost said ‘Yes Ma’am’ and I need to kiss your pussy like a riot in the whorehouse powder room’ – but that would have been laying it on too thick, so he just stood there like a doorknob.
And—
She thought about it and pulled one from her pack. “Ok, no harm in giving you one, I guess. You need a light?”
“Yes. Yes, I do.” He almost said ‘Yes Ma’am’ and I need to kiss your pussy like a riot in the whorehouse powder room’ – but that would have been laying it on too thick, so he just stood there like a doorknob.
It wouldn’t stop. It was like the Twilight Zone, an old TV program that had been among his favorites. He was in a place where there was no beginning, middle, or end. Then the film he was trapped in slightly jerked, as if there had been a glitch in the reel, and restarted.
He couldn’t light it, so she did. He admired how she cupped her big brown hands in a way that made the snow go away from them until the job was done, and Gary stood there puffing away.
He cleared his throat. “I’ve come a long way,” he began.
“Wheah you from?” she asked, and a slow smirk crossed her face..
“Well, I’m kinda from here. But that was a long time ago.”
She snorted. “Why you back? Ain’t nuthin heah.”
He was stuck for an answer. Finally he said, “Well, sometimes you just get an itch, or a smell, or, hell I don’t know what it is, for something, something that seems to be calling you back. You ever had that feeling?”
Gary looked at the deep mahogany of her snowy face.
“Maybe,” she said. “But the only shit dat keep comin back are troubles and tribulations.” Her solid eyes revealed hidden lakes.
He paused, and the pause went on longer. She looked at him steadily as if waiting for what she knew he would say next.
Gary shuffled his feet in the glittering snow. “Well…” he finally mumbled, “I’m new here, been travelin’ all night, and I guess I’m…well, I’ve had a drink, and…” – he just blurted it out – “I want a woman.”
At this, the woman seemed to slide back into silence, her mind driven, against her will, to flickers on a screen or, more, like old stones trampled on up some well-worn path by familiar feet in eternal darkness. When the last step was climbed, the last place was reached, wherever it was, the pilgrim wiped away his dreams like sweat from the forehead and became a land surveyor:
“You know, my man, what happen da last time.”
They watched each other, and for a split second, it was two shoplifters waiting to see who was going to steal the merchandise first. Gary waited.
“What do you mean?” he asked in an almost obligatory way, as if it had been scripted. “You called me Baby…..then. That time…”
They each took drags on their cigarettes.
“What else was I going to call you?”
She spoke like some old battered machine that still worked in fits and starts, a huff here, a puff there. But working.
“Ya see,” she said now with frost and patience in her brown staircase voice: “A man can fuck up a lot of times, and his woman will forgive it. But comes a time when he fucks up too much, and then the woman has had it. And she says bye-bye.”
Gary nodded.
“Then,” she continued, “she tries to leave the muthafucka, but he won’t accept it, he won’t believe it. He keeps saying “Baby Baby” like that Smokey Robinson song.”
She leaned her head back and crooned, “Oooooh-oo-oooh, Baby Baby.” “Like that. And he will nevah unnerstan that when a woman’s love is gone, it be gone like da last train. The niggah always think there gonna be one mo’ chance if he keep sayin and singin Baby Baby long enough. You white folks stand in the street and yell out “Please dawling! Fogiv me”. The black man breaks in through the window and sings Baby Baby. The woman might die, and sometimes she do, when he finally sees that all them Baby Babies ain’t goin do no good no mo.”
Gary said, “But it means that it’s over.”
The woman heaved and laughed and her eyes looked like the end of the world as she said, as definitely as dirt being shoveled onto a box, “Yep.”
Her eyes became pale canyons. “That’s what it means. But even then da bitch know and da nigga beatin on her doah know the same thang: It ain’t ovah tills it’s ovah.”
The world sagged in her breath, rejuvenated in the next one, like someone had put money in the jukebox and all sleep was gone from the night.
So go on about your bidness. Ah got nuthin fo ya. But I like ya. I do in muh way.”
And she pointed down toward the other end of snowy, personless Court Street.
Gary nodded and finished his smoke. Then he buried his head in his coat and started walking. He shouted back at her, “Maybe?” He paused before the words shot out into the wind, “Maybe we could try it again?”
He didn’t know what he meant. The woman called after him, “White boy, don’t cut your feet on that glass.”
Then the light of the cigarette, like a dying star in a distant galaxy, went out, and he saw her lower her head into the secrets of some doorway. And climb a twisted wooden staircase. He knew where she was going. But now he was alone again in the mounting morning snow.
*****************************************************************
An Old Siren in the City
Back in those days, you could almost buy a whore for the price of a movie double feature, popcorn, coke, and a box of Junior Mints or Good ‘n Plenty, he recalled, remembering how his grandparents had gone away to Morgantown for a couple of days. He, having keys to the car, had decided to go look for sex, which he had never had before, somewhere in the city. But he didn’t know anywhere, and that was why the thought of Court Street. “I can get it there!” – he thought. So he got in the car and drove there and parked, which was easy to do. He stood there, or walked around, trying to avoid danger, until some guy came up to him and said, “What you lookin’ fo, man?”
And he had said he wanted a woman. So the guy said, “Pay when she come and go in this building here and go up the stairs and wait. She’ll be along in five minutes.”
He followed orders and to his fearful astonishment, she arrived, looking as average as a checkout girl at any counter in the slums of the universe and at the same time as business-like as a sober secretary trying to cover for a drunken boss: “Mister Jones is in a meeting right now, can we reschedule?”
She said a few dreamless words, and took off her clothes and lay on the bed. Her brown body was tempting, as good as he had imagined or wanted, but he could not make his mind into a sexual engine. A scared teenager, white as dull wallpaper, he followed suit, but he just couldn’t get erect. He was scared, and there was no emotion. His member wilted, and he felt ashamed.
“I can’t get a hard on,” he cried.
“Well, getcha a hard on,” she said from the bed. Her voice was the epitome of boredom. “Your time soon be up.”
“Ok Ok Ok OK,” he said, furiously stroking his tadpole of a penis, which at that point was the equivalent of bringing the worm on the end of a fishing pole back to life, or a car without a battery, a man in the desert carrying an empty wine glass with him – all of these praying for water, different waters, but water all the same. Which there wasn’t any.
When he soon realized he was defeated, sadly he put his clothes back on, a failure. There was broken, shattered glass everywhere in that room, from god knows what quarrel recent or old, and he still didn’t have his shoes on.
That’s when she said… It was coming back like a fly ball to center field.
So why had that older woman asked him about that? Has she cared about him, and his beggarly little meager hooves?
No, she had not cared about his feet or his soul and most certainly not about his impoverished dick, but she had at least warned him of danger.
One owl to another, and that was the best of the forestial night. One cry to another place, to one in similar danger, and the treebound leaves and branches gave up their treasures to the wing-batting darkness.
So now, when the snowy woman put out her match and went inside, he wanted to go back, go through her doors, mount the stairs, and make love to whatever monstrosity the years had made of her. He wanted to finally be inside her. Three minutes of warmth. And finished.
Why did she now, with fake smiles and a real frown, tempt him into a garden to which his narrow, bony feet could never go without a torture of fire, burning their bottoms away until they were just ash amid other ash? And say “be careful” like a curse?
*******************************************************************
Puppets without Strings
As he made his way along the dim-remembered streets that had been cohorts to his life long ago, he kept trying to find things that looked familiar, but he saw that time kept few companions, and not only did people dissolve, but so did the boxes they lived and worked in. The general idea was roughly the same because most of the buildings that rimmed the roads now looked just as blank, basic and banal as they had in the past, except for a dismal ‘newness’ that brought no joy.
Names had changed, tastes had changed, but substance hadn’t. Modernity had definitely sped things up; most people probably felt like toy tops spinning on asphalt playgrounds in the dead of summer, not knowing why or where they were going until becoming aware of the spin slowing down until they finally ‘toppled’ over and just lay there, dead and stupid. All human ingenuity and its nano-speed application had done nothing that he could see to fix the basic flaw in the design: that human beings were fundamentally ego-driven ‘super-animals’ who, all bullshit to the side, existed only to seize and consume, to take and discard.
The snow increased, falling as from rafters.
Sure, there was a lot of window dressing, and for the most part, the good sheriffs no longer hanged miscreants in the town square before a bellowing battalion of boisterous burghers, but there was something underlying it all, some kind of timeless puke that had gotten stirred into the primordial soup and which had never boiled away into vapor. Nope, it was still ‘seasoning’ the broth after all the millennia. If you wanted to meet the people of a million years ago, all you had to do was stand around in the nearest bus station or supermarket. They were still there. The bus to heaven had never come after a million years, and the apples were still being peddled by snakes.
But the snow today, as the snows of yesteryear no doubt, gently put the blanket of forgetfulness over the surfaces, and the street seemed strangely warm, as if this were a snow unfolding in a vast studio with a giant dome that somehow was designed to issue all the snowflakes in the sky – and keep the world warm at the same time.
It was a long walk down Bigley avenue, and he knew he would pass Taft Elementary School along the way. He wondered if it was still standing, and as he moved along, feeling light and graceful all of a sudden, as if he were wearing slippers instead of worn-out old shoes, he began ticking off the names of girls he had known. They came to him on the snowflakes: Sue Barnett, Judy Britton, Donna Paisley, and the guys he had cut up with because he had been one of three who always disrupted things in class. The other two were Mickey Samples and Steve Hissom. Where had they gone?
Naturally, they would be his age now, assuming they were still alive. Probably at least one of them must be dead – after all, life was just a numbers game, wasn’t it? People passed through the years like soldiers through a war: some survived on skill and wisdom, some on luck; others went the other way, dying due to dumb ideas or bad luck. The cosmic was a roll of the dice. Always had been. Luck…hadn’t chaos theory in science kind of verified the Monarchy of Luck, the Dynasty of Chance?
So which of them was dead? He recalled a few of his teachers. In the second grade, there was Waxanna Sales, a colored lady – which was strange back in those years of the mid- 50’s, that a school such as his would hire a Negro woman like her. He remembered her because on Fridays when the school let out for the weekend, she always made the children give her a hug as they went out the door.
Nowadays, they would probably call it inappropriate behavior – touching the students and all, but he could never remember Waxanna reaching down in a ‘nutward’ direction and whispering, “Where is the damned thing?” It was, or seemed, an innocent time of life.
That’s how it was back then. Nobody thought they were guilty of anything that wouldn’t be brought to the attention of the Lord. They acknowledged a higher power.
Then there was Miss Burdette. He remembered her for savagely squeezing his wrist prior to the school talent show when he was supposed to get up there and sing a song called, “I Got No Strings on Me”, while a girl he liked named Rene Sauldsberry danced around him. He had done something to annoy her, and her way of dealing with it was what now would have been called ‘inappropriate’. But at the time he had been cowed and gone right out and sang the stupid song, more for Rene than for Miss Burdette, not that she noticed. Now, reliving what had happened all those misty decades ago, it wished he could go back, pull down his drawers, and shit right on the stage. Lessons for life.
Then there was Edith Miller, the 5th grade teacher whom he despised, a big granite-looking woman who looked like she would delight in serving you cold porridge in the middle of a windy alley on Christmas Day, and then jerking the bowl out of your hands as you prepared to take your first bite – and noble old Gladys Summers, a stately spinster who read us stories late in the afternoon if we were good. A good creature.
All bones of an orchard now, at rest under the helmets of flowers that gave names to the emptying out of who they had been. It was, again, nature defeating humanity. The perfection so agonizing for the living to accept: they were nobody now. Existence had fled from them like a lost lamb from a barn in the Dakota winter. The winter had them; they were winter itself.
The street was silent, but just up ahead he saw a small diner, and, seduced more by the lights burning within than by anything they might be serving, he decided to check it out. There seemed to be a full-house inside, and he was surprised to find that there were no cars out front; he thought this was a good idea, putting the parking lot somewhere in the back. They had a lot of ideas nowadays, but not always good ones to help the people. Back then, they’d wipe your windshield at the gas station and refill your coffee as many times as you wanted.
**********************************************************************
Calling the Roll
He entered and saw right away that it had an old-world coziness: booths, tables, and countertops that recalled another era. The people at the clutter of tables were reading the Charleston Gazette and smoking. Two waitresses dashed about, refilling everyone’s cup and setting big glasses of ice water on the tables. He was surprised that they let them smoke in here – perhaps the city or state laws were different – and somehow it warmed him to know that not everything got demolished or ratified, or whatever you called it. This place, whose name he hadn’t noticed on the way in, reminded him of the old city he had lived in from when he was eight years old until about 17.
Someone slapped a menu down in front of him and hurried off. A few minutes later a waitress buzzed over to his booth, where had sat across from a guy reading the paper. He saw the back of the sports page. Stonewall Jackson and Charleston High would soon be playing their annual end of the season game, and as always it would be bitterly fought.
“May I take your order, sir?” asked the waitress, a 40-something woman of no fixed appearance, someone of few blossoms and much fading in her face, but with the early morning energy of a person running from the law back in the days of John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde. She had truck-stop written all over her, and he imagined her name as Mabel or Mildred, though nobody named their little girls that anymore.
“You got pancakes and eggs?” he asked.
“Can’t you read? How do you want your eggs, scrambled or sunny side up?”
The question surprised Gary. “Uh, sunny side up I guess. And coffee. Black” She started to walk away, and he asked, “Say is that a cigarette machine over there?”
She gazed at him for a moment as if perplexed, then nodded. “You need some change?”
Gary paused, wondering why his question had puzzled her. “No,’ he finally mumbled. “I have some.”
The guy sitting across from him seemed to take a cue from this, as if prompted by stage directions, and offered him a cigarette from his crumpled pack. Philip Morris.
“Goddamn,” said Gary, accepting. “I haven’t seen one of those for a while.”
“Really?” The man laughed. His face was a fold of features, labyrinthine in its premature wrinkles but not sour or unkind. “You’re not much of a smoker?” He pushed the half-full ashtray closer to Gary. “Anyway,” he went on, “name’s Ray.”
“Gary.”
“Good to meet you.”
Ray had already finished his breakfast and pushed his plate away. He looked like a man who might have an appointment somewhere but meanwhile was just biding his time, in no hurry to do anything. That was all; nothing else about him so much as suggested an occupation or destination. “You new in town?” he asked, half out of curiosity and half because it was simply on his checklist of things to say to a stranger. Or maybe he had read something in Gary that made him sincerely inquisitive.
There was a constant uproar of cups banging onto saucers, waitresses shouting to the short-order cook who sometimes peered out to surmise the situation, his elbows and hairy forearms on the tight square of ledge leading back into the kitchen. He reminded Gary of a zoo animal looking briefly out from his cage, soon deciding that there was no future in anything out there and withdrawing to the humid hovel where he had come from. When it was ready, the steaming breakfast food was shoved out the window onto the ledge, and the waitresses hurried to grab it; otherwise, they prowled the crevasses between tables, glass bulb of a coffee pot in hand, sloshing refills into willing cups. Gray heard a boing-boing-boingbingboing behind him, and saw a teenager playing a pinball machine. Every time there was a boing or a boingbingboing, some lights lit up as a reward, and Gary imagined that the score went up as well. He remembered playing pinball himself long ago, although, as with pool, he never had been worth a shit. In fact, as he surveyed his life – that iron road full of steel potholes deep with dust that lapsed into mist on both sides, he could not remember being worth a shit at much of anything. Not really. It had all been a promise, a misdirection, a fake. He had once had potential. No one could deny it. Ray was looking at him, waiting for an answer.
“Well,” Gary began, rubbing his chin and smiling, wishing he could pull out his flask and offer Ray a belt after first imbibing one himself. “I used to live here a long time ago. I hadn’t really meant to come back, and I’m not sure what I’m doing here….but,” he brightened, “here I am !” – as if he were the solitary organizer of a surprise party for none other than Ray. “Actually, since I have some time on my hands, I thought I’d walk down towards my old school, Taft Elementary. You know, it brings back memories. Or have they torn it down?”
“Why would they tear it down?” Ray demanded, still amiable but clearly baffled.
Gary wasn’t sure what to say about this. “Hell, I don’t know,” was all he could manage. “But I used to go there, to that school. Sure enough, grades 1-6. I can remember some of the students and teachers, and even the principal. His name was Cheniworth or something like that. I can’t remember his face or ever even seeing him, but I must have. There were some pretty girls. Well, there would be, wouldn’t there?” Gary laughed. “Even a 12 year old can get hard.”
Ray looked at him with a degree of unexpected sternness.
Startled, Gary corrected himself, “I don’t mean that I myself get turned on to kids, but I mean when I was 11 and 12….”his voice trailed off…”And attending Taft Elementary School.
“I am not sure when you were there,” was all that Ray answered.
About this time the food was delivered and it looked tasty indeed. Even the waitress smiled as she saw his eyes light up. He poured the hot maple syrup on his stack of hotcakes and dug it. Something started coming back to him, but he wasn’t sure what.
“More coffee?”
“You bet. Thanks.”
Between bites, he looked over at Ray and the silent buddha that seemed to lurk strangely behind the outer contours of his hill-and-valley face. “I used to live up on Hillsdale Drive. There was, I remember, another way up that was known as Allen Addition or something like that – a name that never made much sense to me. We lived on Carson Street. It was a dead-end. Big white house at the very end overlooking a wooded area that went down hill. Full of ticks and copperheads, I used to imagine. From there you could look into the distance and see the airport. I can still remember those twin-engine planes.”
There was a faint stare behind the chain of glances blinking from Ray’s eyes. He seemed to want to change the subject. But Gary pressed on.
“I lived up there on Carson Street,” he repeated, “with my grandparents. My mom loved me, but she was divorced and couldn’t handle me because I was sick a lot and kind of rowdy – went through a pisspot full of babysitters and ran them all off – so after my Grandpa transferred his job, he talked her into letting me come to live with him and Grandma.” Gary chewed and talked, chewed and talked, the memories igniting like flickers of flame in a coal mine. Ray listened more or less impassively, though a smile crept onto his face from time to time. It was as though he was catching onto something.
“My Grandpa worked for the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company, and he was what they called back then a ham radio operator. It was a long damn time before the internet, you know. There wasn’t any cable TV either, so you could only watch sports on the weekends. College football on Saturday, the pros on Sunday. And the Baseball Game of the Week on Saturdays.”
Ray, as if pleased to be let in on a joke, replied, “Well, you must have liked listening to a guy named Dizzy Dean doing the baseball games on TV.”
“You’re damned right!” Gary practically shouted. “But you don’t look old enough to remember Old Diz. I used to lie in bed at night upstairs in my room and sneak and listen to the Cincinnati Redlegs broadcasts. A guy named Waite Hoyt – an ex-Yankee – would do the games.”
Ray continued to regard Gary with a patient, steady eye. He offered Gary another Philip Morris, as Gary put down his fork.
“You know,” Gary continued, “when Waite Hoyt called those games out of that radio – it was a cream-colored little box that fit perfectly in a slot at the head of my bed – it was like they were coming from some bubble just floating around in the universe. I mean, even if I knew the game was in Philadelphia or Los Angeles or somewhere, I never thought about a real city; that didn’t matter. It was just the voice coming out of that box – but somehow real…I don’t know…intimate, I guess you could say, like a woman in bed with you that would always be there and never get up and get dressed, except it was baseball. It was like that radio was all I’d ever need as long as it stayed nighttime. Who needed the daylight when you had Waite Hoyt calling the game and it was just the 3rd or 4th inning”?
“I can imagine,” said Ray softly.
“And you know what?” asked Gary, starting to get excited now. “Grandpa and I would listen to the West Virginia University basketball games. That’s back when Jerry West was their star player and a guy named Jack Fleming announced the games. He had a great voice and for a long time I wanted to be a broadcaster like him. But West…he was the guy. They almost won a National Championship with him. Came within a hair.”
Ray again looked puzzled and focused a long look at Gary like someone who had just been dropped out of the sky onto a dirt road in a place where there was nothing but cornfields, and now was turning in all directions trying to figure out which row of corn might lead somewhere.
Gary went on, “He was even better with the Lakers. But they could never beat the Celtics and that must have driven him crazy. Won one though. Against the Knicks, I think. But it was Wilt that led the way. Jerry didn’t play all that well, and I’m sure that pissed him off. But at least he got a ring.”
He didn’t notice that Ray had signaled to the waiter for the check. Nor had he taken stock of the facts that a few snowflakes were swirling around in the restaurant. Some damned fool must have left the door open. But the breakfast, coffee, and conversation had cheered him up so much that he really didn’t want to go outside again. So instead he waved for more coffee, liking this arrangement more all the time. Where he came from they only allowed you one cup and you had to pay for the second. And the third.
But he could not locate the waitress, and he noticed that the cafe was emptying very quickly, as if someone had started a fire. Or maybe the roof was leaking, which would account for the now steady snowfall inside the room. He saw Ray leave a twenty dollar bill on the table and put on his hat and coat.
“Ray, why are you in such a hurry?” cried Gary.
The man returned him a cheery but hasty grin. “Got to get to work, my friend.”
“Uh…Ok…Ray. It is Ray, right?”
“You got it right. Ray. Ray Cheniworth. So long pal. I’m off to a meeting at the school board. But you should turn on your radio tonight. I think you’ll have a nice surprise.”
And out he went, soft and graceful as a ballet dancer, which Gary thought strange since the man…did he say Cheniworth? – was a fairly heavyset man. But Gary didn’t have time for the name to register clearly. He was looking for the waitress and couldn’t find her. The cafe was almost empty now, so Gary walked behind the counter to see if he could locate the cook. There was nobody, but he could swear he saw someone disappear into the pantry. He called out and crossed the room, knocked at the door, then knocked again.
The snow was swirling through the cafe now, and whoever was in the kitchen pantry refused to answer, so he again pounded at the door, and to his astonishment he heard not one but many voices inside, and it was like the peal of children’s laughter followed by the shifting and screeching off chairs and things thumping on tables.
“Open up!” Gary cried, but then he heard an adult clearing her throat and suddenly a voice began:
“Judy Britton ?”
“Here !”
“Sue Barnett?”
“HereI”
“Rene Sauldsberry?”
“Mickey Samples?”
“Steve Hissom?”
“Donna Paisley?”
“Peggy Young”
“Here! Here! Here! Here! Here! Here! Here!”
The adult speaker hesitated.
“Gary Smithers?”
There was no answer, so she repeated. “Gary Smithers?”
Then a faint voice answered from the back, “Here.”
Outside, Gary was pounding on the door and yelling “Open up! Open the fucking door! Open the door…..please! Please!!”
And he heard a great commotion within and if the children in the pantry were running in circles and clapping their hands joyously, wildly, as if at a religious revival.
And then he heard them start chanting “You can’t come in, You can’t come in. We hear you knockin’ but you can’t come in!”
This chant went on and on, becoming louder as Gary thumped at the door. Finally, as he felt tears trickling down his face, he cried “Fuck you! Fuck all of you!!” – and whirled around to leave. Then he did an about-face and cried one more time, “Judy, come out!!!!” Receiving no answer, he turned on his heels again.
The door of the port-o-let swung open, and he stepped back out into the snow whose thick flakes now seemed to be galloping on the wind. Mr. Cheniworth, he thought. So his name was Ray. I never knew that, he thought. But where was the restaurant? There was nothing here but this crappy, rusted out port-o’-let. Discombobulated, he reached for reality, and took a swig, then one more as the snows were circling him.
Part 2: https://thinkmytime.com/jerry-west-and-the-snows-of-yesteryear-part-2
