head bent low, he slouched away with this limp he was faking in a pitiful attempt at drawing my sympathy, and in my mind I could see him as Richard III grumbling, “Now is the winter of our discontent made even worse by this heartless prick El Bueno.” I saw him suddenly stop and broadly smile as he seemed to have spotted something on the walkway’s grassy berm. He stooped down to recover a thin piece of wood, but then scowled and, tossing it away, gimped on.
He must have thought it was a “Lucky Stick.”
7
I checked Dick Tracy, wondering how many locks he had picked with that icepick-pointed jaw, and I saw it was time to head home for dinner. Besides that my head hurt. Too much was going on inside of it, too many delirious, mysterious fandangos all bombarding my brain like it was some kind of run-down cargo spaceship being battered by swarms of pissed-off meteors because an article in Science Magazine had referred to them as “space debris.” I took a last wistful look around for Jane and then started to wend my way droopily home, always watchful, of course, as the shadows of autumn gathered deeper, for a sudden Baloqui sneak attack. Though as a matter of fact I was fond of the jerk. Being both Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, plus a touch of Trabb’s Boy in Dickens’s Great Expectations so relentlessly and quirkily deviling Pip, he had what most of us lack, which is vivid life, which I was practically certain beat vivid death, most especially when these scientists were constantly scaring us by insisting “vivid death” was where the universe was headed, though I suppose that when Miss Doyle heard the news, she said, “So?”
I chose an out-of-the-way route home that would take me past the “Supe” in the hope of maybe spotting Arrigo in the lobby and then somehow luring him out into the street, but, as it happened, when I got there he was standing out in front on a cigarette break. When he saw me coming toward him he froze for a second, his eyes wide and staring, then he flicked the cigarette into the street and tore back into the theater. Mr. Heinz was in the lobby at the time. He caught my eye, turned and stared at the auditorium door as it slowly and silently closed behind Arrigo, took another unreadable look at me and then lowered his head and shook it. So okay, so now I knew who was the real “eyewitness.” But what on earth had ever happened to Arrigo? Three years before on Halloween night a whole bunch of us had stopped in at Boshnack’s for a soda. Boshnack’s radio was blasting and he said to us, “Shhhh, boys! Be quiet, now! Quiet! Listen!” Well, turns out it was Orson Welles with his famous phony “Martian Invasion” broadcast on CBS radio which he did so well it sounded like it really was happening and all these building-sized Martian spaceships had landed in New Jersey and were spewing out death rays left and right and all of us were shivering in our skivvies, that is, all except one of us kids who shook his head and dismissively flipped his hand, sneering, “Ah, come on, you guys! It’s total bullshit!”
It was Eddie Arrigo.
Not to dwell on the matter, but in trying to sort out what had changed him, I would keep coming back to this one other time that we’d all come to Boshnack’s on a sweltering summer night with the demon of boredom clawing at its cage within us. Many years later, when I was struggling for a living in Southern California, I lived for a time in a low-rent apartment complex in Studio City called the Valli Sands where there would be late-night Bing Crosby sightings when he would come to visit his future wife, Kathryn Grant, and where the tenant list ranged from Clint Eastwood—then under contract to Universal Pictures for a hundred a week and doing “wild tracks” of Indian war whoops and such for his pay—to me, then a midnight-to-dawn United Airlines reservations agent, and to the guy in the apartment next to mine who sold Bibles door to door and
He must have thought it was a “Lucky Stick.”
7
I checked Dick Tracy, wondering how many locks he had picked with that icepick-pointed jaw, and I saw it was time to head home for dinner. Besides that my head hurt. Too much was going on inside of it, too many delirious, mysterious fandangos all bombarding my brain like it was some kind of run-down cargo spaceship being battered by swarms of pissed-off meteors because an article in Science Magazine had referred to them as “space debris.” I took a last wistful look around for Jane and then started to wend my way droopily home, always watchful, of course, as the shadows of autumn gathered deeper, for a sudden Baloqui sneak attack. Though as a matter of fact I was fond of the jerk. Being both Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, plus a touch of Trabb’s Boy in Dickens’s Great Expectations so relentlessly and quirkily deviling Pip, he had what most of us lack, which is vivid life, which I was practically certain beat vivid death, most especially when these scientists were constantly scaring us by insisting “vivid death” was where the universe was headed, though I suppose that when Miss Doyle heard the news, she said, “So?”
I chose an out-of-the-way route home that would take me past the “Supe” in the hope of maybe spotting Arrigo in the lobby and then somehow luring him out into the street, but, as it happened, when I got there he was standing out in front on a cigarette break. When he saw me coming toward him he froze for a second, his eyes wide and staring, then he flicked the cigarette into the street and tore back into the theater. Mr. Heinz was in the lobby at the time. He caught my eye, turned and stared at the auditorium door as it slowly and silently closed behind Arrigo, took another unreadable look at me and then lowered his head and shook it. So okay, so now I knew who was the real “eyewitness.” But what on earth had ever happened to Arrigo? Three years before on Halloween night a whole bunch of us had stopped in at Boshnack’s for a soda. Boshnack’s radio was blasting and he said to us, “Shhhh, boys! Be quiet, now! Quiet! Listen!” Well, turns out it was Orson Welles with his famous phony “Martian Invasion” broadcast on CBS radio which he did so well it sounded like it really was happening and all these building-sized Martian spaceships had landed in New Jersey and were spewing out death rays left and right and all of us were shivering in our skivvies, that is, all except one of us kids who shook his head and dismissively flipped his hand, sneering, “Ah, come on, you guys! It’s total bullshit!”
It was Eddie Arrigo.
Not to dwell on the matter, but in trying to sort out what had changed him, I would keep coming back to this one other time that we’d all come to Boshnack’s on a sweltering summer night with the demon of boredom clawing at its cage within us. Many years later, when I was struggling for a living in Southern California, I lived for a time in a low-rent apartment complex in Studio City called the Valli Sands where there would be late-night Bing Crosby sightings when he would come to visit his future wife, Kathryn Grant, and where the tenant list ranged from Clint Eastwood—then under contract to Universal Pictures for a hundred a week and doing “wild tracks” of Indian war whoops and such for his pay—to me, then a midnight-to-dawn United Airlines reservations agent, and to the guy in the apartment next to mine who sold Bibles door to door and
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