Paul Silverman Stories

Barry, then as now, was just about twice Carroll’s size. They began hanging out at age fifteen, when Barry was this thing. Hognecked, rhino-bellied, punch-throwing, skull-cracking. He was a Visigoth in a Don Eagle, now known as a Mohawk.

It was Barry who taught him, with a thumb and a blade, how to jam and scam the Skeeball machines. Good trick to know if you swabbed Fryolators and hung fly paper for a living. If you were paid what Spuckey Park paid Carroll.

Of course, there was a hitch. Barry, whose Neanderthal-looking cranium was endowed, even then, with J.P. Morgan acuities, was a betting man. No bets, no Barry. And Carroll’s win rate was way south of 50-50.

By day, Barry and Carroll were like the great Babe Ruth and the unknown bunt runt. Roughly. This wasn’t a money league, nothing like it. By twilight they were the field hands of Spuckey Park, scraping the stuck cotton candy off the sidewalk and the shit smears off the men’s room seats. Midnight hit, the Ferris Wheel cranked to a halt and they punched their clocks. From then till dawn they punched other things like body parts. They roamed up and down, the ballbusters of the raucous Boulevard.

But not exactly in equal measure.

Nine times out of ten it was Barry busting and Carroll watching - for cops, for anyone who could call a cop. For anyone who even stared too long. Barry would take them two at a time, pounding their heads bloody in the dark beachside parking lots, working up his appetite for yet another box of clam puffs. In the early a.m. they patrolled the refreshment stands until the last french fry was sold, stalking the wiggling quarter-moons of love-ass, which were bare and glistening everywhere in those days, thanks to the national craze for too-short short-shorts.

When August rolled around, with Barry in the cleanup slot, the team moved into contention for the Bay League pennant. The turnout ballooned, and not just for the games. Girls straggled around while they hit flies and chased grounders on the practice days. There was humping and rumping in the cool shadows under the stands.

Wildest night of the week was their night off from the amusement park. They roamed and grazed and made trouble; Barry always instigating, Carroll – almost always - imitating.

“Drink a lot today,” Barry said one afternoon shagging flies. “Try not to piss.”

“I’m not a camel, you know.”

“Hey, shithead, think of it as ammunition.”

At nightfall Barry produced a case of bad beer. They drank until Carroll felt he had Boston Harbor in his bladder. Then Barry took him from men’s room to men’s room, all over the strand, sabotaging the clear-glass dispensers that were filled with yellow liquid soap.

“You unscrew it here, see. Then you spill it out. Then you fill it with piss.
Same color.”

“Can I do the pissing this time? It hurts up to my teeth.”

Carroll let go like a horse, hosing with such pressure the dispenser frothed with foam.

“Whooey. Let the fuckers wash their hands in that.”

Next they hit the desolate strip of the Boulevard, where the traffic thinned out. A sharp corner was guarded by two tall lampposts, one on each side of the road, throwing their arcs out on the asphalt in intersecting pools of blue-white light.

Barry took a position under one lamppost and shooed Carroll over to the opposite one. At the sound of a car coming around the bend they extended their arms and hands toward each other, straining as though they were pulling a cable across the road. The driver, flying his vehicle into this illusion, plunged into shock and stomped his brakes with everything he had. As the car screeched and swerved and did a three sixty, Barry and Carroll vaulted the guard rails and fled aross the dunes.

Then they came back and did it again.

After five or six such terror strikes Barry decided it was time they took a car of their own. They picked a parking lot off in Hell’s Half Acre, far from the donut joints where the cops congregated.

“There, that one, the convertible. The heavy Chevy.”

Carroll had enough piss left, after the dispensers and the beer, to want to piss his pants. He had never stolen a vehicle before.

“It has a fucking flat,” he said.

“It has seat covers like creamy butter,” said Barry. “Change the flat.” And he jimmied the trunk and found the jack and the spare.

Barry stood there like a chain gang guard, watching Carroll fumble with the hubcap.

“Don’t dick around till dawn now,” he said.

But Carroll knew he could do this - so he made a bet. A buck, on whether he could do the job in under five. Barry took him up on it, and Carroll went to work. The flat came off, the spare went on. Barry paid in small coins, Skeeball loot, and swung into phase two, deftly jimmying the driver’s door.

Now it was Carroll’s turn to stand and watch. It was a starless night, a car-booster’s dream. Through the murk Carroll saw Barry bend forward to work under the dash. Then he saw him sit up and nearly put his fist through the roof.

“Deader than the dead of night,” Barry said. “The fuck won’t turn over.”

So it was Carroll’s turn to bet. He was feeling flush. Barry had a knife and stuff in his pocket, but nothing like jumper cables. A dead battery meant a dead car - and Barry was Barry, not Houdini - so Carroll felt safe wagering against the impossible. Against a car without odds.

And putting more than money on the table as well.

“Fix this in twenty and I’ll kiss your ass,” Carroll said.

Silence.

Barry sat sidesaddle in the driver’s seat, legs hanging over, slowly scratching his crotch and thinking it over.

Finally he spoke, spelling out the exact terms. “Both cheeks, in broad daylight - at home plate.”

They shook hands and Barry took off like he had just cracked a screaming line drive into the left field hole. In the dingiest end of the lot he threw open the hood of a fat Buick and went to work at buzzsaw speed, using every piece of metal in his pocket.

All too soon he was trotting back to the Chevy, both hands tight on something square and heavy. Had to be - it was, a battery.

Up went the Chevy hood. Out came the dead Chevy battery. In went the Buick battery. Barry worked so feverishly he nearly left his feet and climbed onto the engine assembly.

“In like Flynn,” he said, and jumped, rasping and snorting to catch his breath, back behind the driver’s wheel.

Carroll was still as a statue as the juice kicked in and everything sparked and the Chevy shook with thunder.

“Sixteen minutes,” said Barry, cracking his fist against the dash like a gavel. “Let me take you for a ride, you asskisser.”

*****

Next day they were idly tossing the pill in the outfield, waiting their turn for batting practice. Slow high lobs, soft and easy.

Barry cranked up and threw a surprise glove-burner, a fireball. Catching it knocked Carroll back a step. His mitt-hand stung. “Hey, easy, easy,” he said.

The response he got wasn’t about the ball. “You wouldn’t try to welsh on me, now, would you?”

Carroll shrugged. He looked nervously at home plate. It was close to high noon. The sun was strong as a strobe. Players, hangers-on, girlfriends were all over the diamond, like ants. A big game was coming up. Home plate might as well have been a bus station.

“Either you kiss my ass or I kick yours. From one foul pole to the other. And I mean it,” said Barry.

And Carroll could tell he did mean it.

In fact, Barry milked the bet for all it was worth. He made it into an affair of state. He hauled Carroll back to the bench and made him sit there. He went up the first base side and down the third base side, rounding up spectators of both genders. These smirkers he positioned like a human shield, bunching them into a ring so solid no prying coach, umpire or other official adult could wedge a nose in. Then he led Carroll into the human arena and made him kneel at his ass, knees on the plate.

*****

“It’s payback time!” Barry’s words boomed with so much reverb they might have come from the ballfield’s P.A. system. The gallery roared its approval - let the games begin. And Barry, with the swagger of a winning gladiator, unhitched and dropped them, pants and then sweaty underpants, wagging his hips so the ripe skivvies brushed Carroll’s nose on the way down. Barry’s bare frontal stuff brought a new torrent of squeals from the girls and war-whoops from the boys.

“Kiss, kiss, kiss.” They broke into a chant.

“Left cheek first,” instructed Barry. “And make it a wet one.”

Even as he puckered up and bent forward Carroll knew he would suffer less, down the years, if he stood up and ran. Or tried to.

To think is one thing. To act another. At the moment of truth Carroll’s frozen knees stayed as stuck on home plate as a fly’s legs on fly paper, and he dutifully kissed away, first planting his lips on one slab of a cheek and then on the next, as the jeering applause rang in his ears.

Fueled by too much bad beer, Barry ended the show with his own fanfare, a howitzer of a fart, followed by such howling he fell on his face in the batter’s box - and Carroll scuttled away.

That night Carroll had the deep aftertaste no Listerine could clean – and key girls were already calling him A.K. for asskisser - but Barry came around with a big box of greasy clam puffs and cajoled him back into life and the arcade, where they scored like never before jamming the Skeeball machines. Later in the parking lot a pompadour on a Harley made a big mistake. He gave Carroll shit about standing in his way. He leaned over the handlebars and backhanded him, too, drawing lip blood.

But Barry, who was off taking a leak in a municipal trash barrel, heard it all. He charged into the scene like a rogue elephant, just as the pompadour was dismounting. In the end it was hard to tell which got kicked and dented more, the bike or the rider. Both lay inert and blood-smeared across a yellow parking stripe.

“You take care of my ass, I take care of yours,” Barry told Carroll, leaning into the surf to clean the gore off his fist. And Carroll, he could only nod.
Of such synergies great enterprises are built, such as the Spuckey Park of today, site of the tallest, longest, wildest mega-monster coaster east of the Mississippi. As CEO, Barry rides the very first run every spring, sliding his Armani-suited ass in the very front of the lead car. Making a bet with the Fates that every gear and sprocket is greased and grooving.

Beside him sits Carroll, swallowing back the vomit, picking its remnants out of his teeth with a business card. Not a hint of their long-ago arrangement appears on the card, which, twenty eight years after the deal was sealed at home plate, simply reads, “Senior Vice President.”

This is nothing the National Geographic would ever cover. There are no foreign lands involved, no exotic places. What is about to happen – the whole matter – is just here, somewhere in nowhere, my few feet of cracked linoleum, a zip code on a mailing label stuck to a yellow magazine. But I’m writing to you anyway, because of your part in all of this. And under the circumstances I’m writing fast. I mean fast as I can. My fingers are stiff as sticks and it’s even hard to curl them around a cane handle, let alone a ballpoint pen. As I tell the bitch nurse who comes here once a week, two or three of these knuckly digits are so twisted they’re numb right down to the crud under the nails. She’s an irrigator, that one, so she recommends an enema. This whole place is about to be irrigated, I’m afraid. At least my two alcoves of it, my unit, as they say. It’s cold in here and getting colder – and wetter. The place has bad pipes, just like its withering occupants. Has them now and it had them then, when it was my cage the first time around. My neighborhood school.

Dear editors, this is the very edifice where I perused my first National Geographic back when horses still shat in the street. It’s where I flipped one open and first saw brown breasts ballooning under some banyan tree. Now why they had to go and turn my old school into a place like this – a lockup then, a gulag now - makes me want to throttle somebody. As if I had the fingers to shut down a windpipe. These days I can hardly wipe myself without tearing a rotator cuff.

I’ve never thrown out a single copy! Saved every last one. Have towers of them. Brought them with me, and packratted more, year after year. Skyscrapers of them. Wedged from floor to ceiling. Every page a trip I took. Took? To where? Why, to Lucknow. Timbuktu. Micronesia, Tuvan and Yakut. All on paper – glossy stock, long-lens baboon shots, years of trekking no farther than my own john.

Around the world on a toilet seat I went. Rode the porcelain to Vladivostok, Tierra Del Fuego. Thus I spent my days, flipping the pages while pinching a loaf.

What we all thought would come next was the wrecking ball. Janitors and truant officers all buzzing about the hulk being wired for dynamite. Implosion imminent. But then it sat. And sat. Looming there on its ratty rubble, a school for squatters and crate dwellers and dumpster foragers while the neighborhood did a five-decade slide down skid row.

The tide goes down, the tide comes up. Along comes the real estate wave, then the Historic Preservation Committee. Along comes their proclamation sanctifying the very brick of it. They anoint the hulk with period significance, never to be violated. Sacred to the grout. To chair the esteemed body they pick a gorilla with a briefcase, the arch-entrepreneur of assisted living. His claim to fame a necklace of “caring communities” strung round the metropolis. We will not so much as brush a fly from the façade, he says, beating his monogrammed chest. We will keep faith with the original footprint.

I happen to know this building like the knuckles of my fingers. I swear the “bedroom” of my “living space” is that closet. Windowless. Scratch the painted sheetrock and smell Miss Scully, the steam of her rising with each clank of the pipes. The skullness of her face bones creeping out of the corners. The door she slammed shut on me – on my fingers - for ogling that shot of the Borneo girl. Scratched at it in the darkness like a dog, I did. Bringing more rattan stripes on my other hand, the writing hand. But there’s no room in there any more, Mr. N. Geo. Not for me. Years of packratting you, every last issue of you, have squeezed me out to the hotplate and aluminum-framed walker in the front alcove. And now it’s gushing icy cold from under your door.

My kin and my kind, it was they who returned me here. To a cot in Miss Scully’s old closet. Proclamation of the family. Assisting my living. That’s what they said.

From the slit called my window I see the moving truck pull up. Moving trucks is what we call these long black Cadillacs and Lincolns that roll down here, what we seniors on the move call them – we seniors moving out and on. To other galaxies, perhaps. Too far even for N.G. to cover. Outside the range of the longest lens. The moving trucks with their weeping offspring and their little orange flags, stopping traffic, rolling through stoplights to the cemetery. Blacker this time of year when the snow in the driveway turns hard white. When the icicles creep into the walls and stab the pipes.

Did the gorilla even rip out the asbestos? Sheetrock and paint, that’s it, all he did - a few wheelchair ramps thrown in and a sign out front naming the “facility” after him. Good as new. And he’s off to the bank with the government seal of approval.

I did my share of plumbing in my time. I know what’s cooking back there. I know the sound of a frozen, bursting pipe. Know where the shutoff is too, back behind the magazines, but I can’t reach it.

When the water outweighs the floor, Maggie down below me will get a crashing surprise. The dripping and seeping has begun. Plaster turning to chowder. A rain of rust on her stuffed dolls, her pandas and pigtailed princesses, her hundreds of roommates silent and smiling, her sawdust friends from the shopping channel and the Wal-Mart warehouses. No National Geos for her. Not huggable. Not right for tea parties. Can’t serve a crumpet to a magazine stack.

Getting so cold I could ice-fish in here. No climb to the shutoff possible. Not over those mountains. Himalayas of paper, right up to the buried ceiling bulb. No tunneling either. Not through the Gibraltar of yellow covers, seven decades thick. Have an emergency pull-chain but wouldn’t touch that. The gorilla installed an overseer (her title, Executive of Caring Services) whose scowl alone makes Miss Scully the angel of mercy.

But there is a plan, I have my out. My exit strategy. Deploy my plastic pill organizer, still high and dry on a shelf. Enough Medicare medicine to take down a rhino. Just before it hits the stomach, I’d punch the wall phone, summon the black moving truck myself.

Of course I’d charge it to the family. Wood box and all, the luxury package.

There it starts, that cracking sound. Sir or Madam, I’ve been meaning to do this for years. Please cancel my subscription.