The Last Carousel Page 9

  “Besides, the stiff’s still in it,” Emil pointed out.

  The dead-wagon came. A woman on her way to the supermarket with a shopping bag, the words VOTE FOR DALEY emblazoned on it in red, white, and blue, stopped to watch the dead-wagon boys lift a corpse into the dead-wagon.

  “I’m glad it ain’t me,” she thought; and went her ways.

  The Board of Health inspectors didn’t bother cleaning out the flat because the building was coming down anyhow.

  The first swing of the wrecking-ball buried the old bed under tons of bricks.

  Before the bricks were hauled away, the year’s earliest snow lay lightly above them. Then a contractor, using County Jail labor, hauled them away.

  * * *

  This was in that time of year when silver-paper bells hang by tinseled cords in the offices of all the loan companies. It was that time when Save-Your-Home-Loans holds Open-House-For-Money in offices lit by an aluminum Christmas Tree: one proudly bearing a shining six-foot papier-maché dollar-sign, hung with brightly-polished quarters, nickels, and dimes; all the while it keeps slowly revolving.

  While poorer firms can offer no more than tidings of comfort and joy under a single unmoving star.

  Then a winter of a single wind set in. Snow-shadows went tobogganing down the crumpled, yellowed, tattery-torn mattress that the old man had died upon. And at night a street lamp shone upon the bent and dented upside-down bedposts the old man had died between.

  The midnight B-train passed overhead. And no one who rode the B-train knew that a hundred thousand dollars worth of fine white dust stayed dry in the deeps of those rusting posts.

  All that winter smudgefires burned, both sides of West Congress, after the jackhammers had gone still.

  Phantoms of old-time junkies passed and repassed between their wild and flickering flares.

  Shadows of long-gone hepsters, phantoms of fools who never could learn, went by like shadows on old walls: forever trying to turn one more trick.

  Nobody remembers where Beulah went. Nobody has heard of any woman calling herself The Inimitable Vivi-V. Where the old man is buried nobody knows.

  The passion that, in him, had been transformed by fear of women into deep need of something to love safely—a paper doll or a girl wearing a bunny-tail—curiously overlapped that of lives equally barren yet more affluent.

  His letter to the world was never mailed. In the world in which he lived there were no postal zones. Had it been read, even by chance, no one would have paid it any heed: the old con’s spelling was so bad.

  Yet had he made the connection, for which he was groping, he would have become the living legend that in fancy he felt himself sometimes to be.

  For he shared a secret fury with the world: a hatred of all birth that comes from love of man for woman.

  THE LEAK THAT DEFIED THE BOOKS

  ROMAN-From-Metal-Finishing never expected more out of life than to be married to Selma-From-Endless-Belting. Selma-From-Endless never dreamed of any life other than one of being married to Roman-Metal-Finishing. Had anyone prophesied that a day would come when Roman would wear the proud blue and grey of Some People’s Gas Company, who would have believed? Neither I nor the other children of Moorman Street.

  For Some People’s Gas is a mighty utility, owning miles of gas piping and gasified bookeepers keeping gasified books, to see that people who use Some People’s Gas pay their gaseous bills. It employs gasified collectors who come to the doors of people who have not paid for their Some People’s Gas. Nobody knows but that there might somewhere be ghastly courts where people who steal Some People’s Gas are sentenced—quite properly—to gas-lit cells.

  And this vast empire of gas tubing and gas meters, gas inspectors, gas collectors, gas directors, gas detectives and gas detectors, rulers of an underground city as extensive as the city above it, depends completely on the little hunk of snot and bone called: The Nose.

  Down in the dark megalopolis where water drips between abandoned walls, a tiny leak in rusted tubing may blast innocent persons through their roofs in the middle of a summer afternoon. In the middle of a wintry night is better yet.

  Selma and Roman were so serious about one another that one day she said to him, “Let’s go down to Hubbard Street and get the free blood-test.”

  “I go where I’m needed most,” Roman agreed.

  Selma stood on one side of a screen and Roman on the other.

  “Do you have good urine, honey?” she asked him. “Mine is fine.”

  “It was romantic-like,” Selma told me, “it was like being in love.”

  The next week Roman received an induction notice.

  “I’m needed there even more,” he assured Selma.

  The first time he lined up with his squad, a second lieutenant observed that Roman had more muscles than the army knew how to use.

  “Keep this man off KP,” the lieutenant instructed the first sergeant, “he’s boxing material. Make that out in triplicate.” Then he looked Roman over once more.

  “See that this man gets a quart of milk a day while in training. Make that out in triplicate also.”

  For the remainder of his stateside army career Roman received three quarts of milk a day.

  “How come you get three quarts for yourself when eight of us fellows have to divide two quarts?” an undernourished corporal wanted to know.

  “Because I always go where I’m needed most.”

  Roman never minded hitting somebody with his fists if it was all right with the other fellow, and then the other fellow would hit Roman with his fists and Roman didn’t mind that either. He had simply never thought of it as a profession.

  Roman won his first four fights on knockouts as they were all fellows from Los Angeles. He had never been in a fight before where he had never been hit himself; it came as a complete surprise. This had it all over KP.

  “There’s a sergeant from Butte been pretty lucky so far,” his First Sergeant told Roman. “If you can put him away you’ll make Pfc.”

  “I don’t know if I can handle the responsibility of office,” Roman admitted candidly, “but I go where I’m needed most.”

  The fellow from Butte knocked Roman cold in twenty-two seconds of the first round.

  “If you hadn’t come out of your corner so slow,” his first lieutenant reproached Roman, “he could have knocked you out in nineteen.”

  “I’ll try to come out faster the next time, sir,” Roman promised.

  And he kept his word. After that Roman got himself knocked out so fast that other armies began sending in men to see him get it. One night eight German PWs, flanked by two MPs, walked in. His opponent broke Roman’s nose as soon as they met in the middle of the ring. The eight Germans stood up in the front row and cheered with a single shout.

  “You’re raising morale all over the post,” the first sergeant encouraged Roman, “keep it up.”

  Roman kept it up. How many times his nose was broken not even his HQ company knows to this day. Medical records, however, reveal that he was in the Ft. Bragg infirmary thirty-two times. Since medical records are made out in quadruplicate, this indicates that Roman’s nose was broken eight times in defense of democracy.

  On the day that Von Rundstedt began his great drive to the sea, Roman sneezed so hard in the Ardennes forest that he blew a bone fragment out of his right ear. Von Rundstedt kept coming all the same.

  Selma was waiting for Roman at the gate when his turn to be discharged came up at Camp Grant. But Roman didn’t come through the gate. His nose had been broken so often, it turned out, that he was no longer entitled to be a civilian.

  Every time he sneezed, he was informed, he put innocent bystanders in danger of being struck by bone fragments.

  Faced with the alternative of signing up for the regular army or of having his nose cleaned, Roman endured a night-long struggle to decide where he was needed most. In the end he tossed a coin. Heads he’d go for the operation and marry Selma; tails back to Germany. It came t
ails. He made it two out of three. Tails again.

  When it got to the most out of 131, Selma won: 66-65.

  The operation was so successful that now Roman could smell things he had never even known had a smell before. Passing a bakery, he could tell whether they were baking egg bread or potato bread or rye or pumpernickel. Passing a butcher shop he had only to sniff to tell whether the cut on which the butcher was cheating was liver, pork or steak.

  And of all the smells he had never smelled that he now could smell, the sweetest smell of all was that of Selma-From-Endless.

  Selma came to him now in waves of lilac, rose, pine and rhododendron. Roman didn’t smell too bad to Selma either. They were married at St. John Cantius on a Sunday morning that smelled of incense and minute rice.

  Their honeymoon was a whole Sunday afternoon in Nelson Brothers Rock Garden.

  One morning shortly after their wedding Roman was smelling the difference between Old Fitz and Old Grandad in Sigmund’s Whiskey-Tavern, when he smelled something which was neither Old Fitz nor Old Grandad; nor even Sigmund. He traced it around a corner of the bar and right under Sigmund’s feet.

  “Gas,” he told Sigmund.

  Sigmund couldn’t smell it. The customers couldn’t smell it. Nonetheless, Sigmund phoned Some People’s Gas.

  The Some People’s Gas Detector couldn’t smell anything either. But when he put the automatic gas-detector to where Roman’s nose was pointing, the needle jumped.

  “You ought to be workin’ for Some People’s yourself,” the Smeller told Roman.

  “I got a cousin works downtown there,” Sigmund told Roman. “I’ll bring him over. We’ll talk to you and Selma about gettin’ you on.”

  “You don’t talk to no Selma,” Roman told Sigmund. “You talk to me.”

  Some People’s Gas put Roman on call as an apprentice smeller. Now, any hour of the day or night the phone might ring and Roman would jump into his gas company uniform, grab his Some People’s Gas-Detecting Bag and wheel, walk, run, taxi or bus to the leak whether fast or slow.

  “It’s romantic, sort of,” Selma told Sigmund, “like a doctor’s wife almost. And in forty years he gets a pension.”

  Sometimes Roman had to creep beneath a sidewalk and sometimes he had to climb a chimney. Sometimes he had to break a hole in a roof and hang head down. Sometimes he had to get people out of bed and sometimes he had to fight off dogs; and sometimes he would answer a call from a woman with a slow leak.

  One evening Selma put knoodle soup on the table. Roman took one spoonful and then poured the pot down the sink.

  “Rotten soup by rotten cook,” he told Selma, “tastes like gas.”

  “Take bat’ before you come to bed,” she told him later.

  “Had bat’ by afternoon.”

  “Take another. Wash under arms.”

  “I go where I’m needed most,” Roman agreed, and took another bath, and went where he thought he was needed most: Their bedroom.

  Selma had locked the door.

  “Ain’t knoodle soup smells by gas,” she shouted from inside, “is Mister you!” and she began pounding on the walls.

  After that Roman ate his meals in restaurants and slept on the front room couch. His blanket smelled of gas.

  Among men who smelled of gas, Roman now felt more contented than among people who smelled of nothing but pink soap. He had always gone where he was needed most; but where he was most needed was now no longer Selma’s bed.

  And as there aren’t any other places to go for men not wanted in a woman’s bed, Roman worked as much overtime as he could; and spent the rest of his hours in Sigmund’s Whiskey-Tavern.

  One night the Jerry Lewis show was so bad that not even Roman, who could stand almost anything so long as it was televised, could take it.

  “If that boy had a brain,” he announced gravely, getting down off the stool beneath the set on which Jerry was stomping somebody in traction, “he’d be dangerous. I’m going out to look for a leak.”

  In that ashen TV night Roman’s face was that of a man who had fasted many days.

  He hadn’t been gone two minutes before Sigmund called to me, “Mind the bar!” and was out the door and down the street in the opposite direction to which Roman had gone.

  “Where’s he going in such a hurry?” someone wanted to know.

  “Not to look for no gas-leak,” someone answered.

  Sigmund got back behind the bar a couple of minutes before Roman returned.

  Roman looked much better than when he’d left.

  “A leak!” he called out cheerfully, “under gas station where street-car bends the corner!” And he raced to the phone to report it to Some People’s Gas.

  By nine A.M. the following morning, a squad of drillers had blocked off traffic both ways down Moorman Street. The hole the drillers dug looked promising; yet the promise was unfulfilled. A detection squad worked under floodlights all that night.

  A vapor-test machine showed nothing at all.

  Four gasified historians, working with maps showing the paths of gas-pipes, some put down by the city at the turn of the century, found no evidence of a gas pipe ever having been laid down within twenty feet of where Roman had smelled gas.

  “There isn’t any leak,” the four gasified historians decided, “for the simple reason that there isn’t any pipe there.”

  “I smelled gas,” Roman insisted.

  Thirteen new holes were dug. In every one of them a hose attached to a Davis Gas-Testing machine was lowered.

  In one of the holes the needle of the machine jumped a couple of degrees, Roman’s hopes jumped with it—then sank when the needle returned to zero.

  “This leak defies the books,” Roman had to concede.

  “The leak don’t defy nothin’,” the foreman of the Gas-Detection Unit made up his mind, “for the simple reason there ain’t no leak to defy.”

  The Gas-Detection Unit went home; the Vapor-Testers went home; the Davis Gas-Testing machine rolled away. The drillers left.

  Roman came down to the loosely-filled hole in the middle of the night, flashlight on his knees. He went sniffing up the curb and down.

  “I’ve found the spot,” he phoned Some People’s Gas at four A.M., “seven feet down and creeping.”

  “That case is closed,” the Chief Gasified Historian informed Roman and hung up.

  At 12:55 A.M. the following Sunday morning, while we were playing twenty-five-cent limit and Roman was watching a rerun of Joan Crawford in Lingerie Party, a fatal blast of fatal gas blew the fatal bed upon which Selma and Sigmund had been making fatal love, up through that fatal roof.

  The same blast blew up the kitchen of the bungalow next door, in which the last celebrants of a wedding party were still celebrating instead of letting the groom take the bride to bed. Had they left when they were no longer welcome, the pair would have been able to have them back for wedding anniversaries for fifty years. As it was, the groom was blown to shreds and the bride was paralyzed, from the waist down, for the rest of her life.

  The same blast blew the back porch off the house next door, dispatching an elderly grandmother to an elderly grave. Her husband, troubled by prostatitis, had left the porch a minute before the blast; thus saving his own life. Moreover, the shock of losing his wife of many years cured his prostatitis by giving him a coronary just in time to be buried beside her.

  The family cat, long in the service of this elderly pair, had its right foreleg and left hindleg severed. Yet somehow it survived, hopping about in a most curious fashion, for some years. It was finally brought down by a rat who’d become embittered at having been deafened in one ear by the same blast.

  Roman took our congratulations modestly.

  “I owe everything to the army doctor who operated me,” he assured us. “I give him full credit for everything.”

  Late last Saturday night I took the shortcut across the lot where Roman-From-Metal-Finishing once lived with Selma-From-Endless. Yellowed newspapers we
re caught, as always, among the weeds. And the weeds moved slightly as I passed; though there was no wind.

  Then a scent of gas rose ever so faintly, from somewhere far under the arteried stone.

  He went where he was needed most.

  TINKLE HINKLE AND THE FOOTNOTE KING

  I was in New York recently for the skating at Rockefeller Plaza and was sharpening my skates at the Sherry-Netherlands when the telephone rang and a woman’s voice informed me, “Mr. Kazin would like to have you for dinner.”

  “I don’t blame him,” I told the voice and was about to hang up when it struck me a fellow like that might use some advice. “Tell him to look for me in the lobby,” I suggested, figuring that by putting it that way I could still make it hard for him to find me. When I realized he could scarcely eat me in plain view of a desk clerk, I went downstairs and there were two of them waiting, one a breathless blonde.

  What caused her shortwindedness I have no notion, but she looked like a cross between a shrike and a barbed-wire fence. The fellow with her was built along the lines of Budd Schulberg but richer. I surmised he must be a CCNY poet so I asked, “How’s business?”

  When put to someone in the poetry line this is supposed to be a highly ironic question; but this one didn’t take it that way. All he said was, “Slow. The holidays.” And added, “Do you like Italian food?” He was going the flour-and-cheese route on me.

  All the way to the restaurant they kept touting the cheesified lasagna that had made this place famous from coast to coast. So I told them of a cave crosstown that had got itself a very big name for its Frenchified toast; but for myself I was a meat-eating mouse and at the moment was so eager to get at a T-bone that I might not even wait till the brute had died.

  Once at a table they both swung to a sort of finkified ravioli that looked like the dogs had had it under the house. I went for the oyster stew and the filet avec three champignons. That didn’t make the conversation any gayer.

  “What do you do?” I asked the lady shrike by way of breaking the ice.

  “I work at Doubleday,” she told me, “but I don’t like it. Everyone around me is so grim. Nobody laughs at Doubleday.” I could pretty well see how things might work out that way, but I wanted to be helpful. “They laugh at Random,” I told her.