A Fistful of Fig Newtons (28 page)

“Me, a phony? Why would you say an unkind thing like that?”

He spat viciously into a tulip bed. “You phony bastard. You studied!”

Inevitably, those of us who are gifted must leave those less fortunate behind in the race of life. I knew that, and Schwartz knew it. Once again I had lapped him and was moving away from the field, if only for a moment.

The next morning, Thursday, I swaggered into algebra class with head high. Even Jack Morton, the biggest smart-ass in the class, said hello as I walked in. Mr. Pittinger, his eyes glowing with admiration, smiled warmly at me.

“Hi, Pit,” I said with a casual flip of the hand. We abstract mathematicians have an unspoken bond. Naturally, I was not called on during that period. After all, I had proved myself beyond any doubt.

After class, beaming at me with the intimacy of a fellow quadratic equation zealot, Mr. Pittinger asked me to stay on for a few moments.

“All my life I have heard about the born mathematical genius. It is a well-documented thing. They come along once in a while, but I never thought I’d meet one, least of all in a class of mine. Did you always have this ability?”

“Well …” I smiled modestly.

“Look, it would be pointless for you to waste time on our little test tomorrow. Would you help me grade the papers instead?”

“Gosh, Pit, I was looking forward to taking it, but if you really need me, I’ll be glad to help.” It was a master stroke.

“I’d appreciate it. I need somebody who really knows his stuff, and most of these kids are faking it.”

The following afternoon, together, we graded the papers of my peers. I hate to tell you what, in all honesty, I had to do to Schwartz when I marked his pitiful travesty. I showed no mercy. After all, algebra is an absolute science and there can be no margin for kindness in matters of the mind.

I smiled my thin, crafty Sidney Greenstreet smile, admiring it in the rearview mirror
.

“Yep, you pulled it off, you snake in the grass … heh, heh.” It ain’t luck. It’s like Lippy Durocher said: “There ain’t no such thing as breaks. Winners make their own breaks.”

I peered into the gloom ahead, rich with burned Exxon. Some days you grease right through this bastard; others, it’s forever. This is one of the mean ones
–
bad. A Jack Daniel’s night
.

A warning buzzer which I had never heard before sounded off under the hood. Now what the hell? Mysteriously, it stopped, but my life around cars of all types had taught me one thing: Nothing bad ever really goes away
.

In desperation for something to do, I flicked on the radio. Still nothing. Well, you don’t get anything in the tunnel anyway these days. I remember a few years back, maybe in the early sixties, they had a radio station inside the tunnel. It just came in all over the dial, playing music, with a happy voice giving you facts about how long the tunnel was, when they built it, how many cars go through. Really exciting stuff, but at least it was a human voice and not a warning buzzer. Gone, all gone, with other graces of
human existence in these dark days of advancing barbarism and approaching ice ages
.

Ice ages
–
I wonder if the tunnel will get clogged with ice when it comes, and a few last commuters will get frozen down here for all time like those Mammoths in Siberia? Or like that ancient Irishman they dug up a couple of years ago, perfectly preserved in a peat bog. He was sitting in his canoe, still wearing his socks. They say that even though he was three thousand years old, he had that smart-ass look on his Irish map like all the Third Avenue Irishmen I ever knew, including Breslin
.

Tough, boy. That’s what they are. Or at least loud. I turned over mossy rocks in my memory, rummaging around looking for tough Irishmen I had heard of. Why? Well, that’s the kind of thing you do in traffic jams. The late Mayor Daley, a true Mick. Used to say, “Gimme a dozen Irish cops and I’ll clean up this crummy neighborhood.”

Out of the blue, it came to me, the toughest Irishman I ever personally ran into, who didn’t look tough, but when the test came, he was there. I knew his kid from high school. What was his name? Leggett, of course, Mr. Leggett. Tougher than a cob
.

As I drove my rental car over the cracked and potholed surface of what had once been the main drag of my home town, I felt a bit like an invisible alien from another planet. First of all, it was the car itself; anonymous, sexless, of no known make. Perhaps it was a Hertz Deluxe, or maybe an Avis. It was hard to tell: cheap, cigar-scarred naugahyde seats, a Taiwanese radio that emitted only a crackling hum; it was a far cry from the proud, gleaming chariot I had floated down this very street during my lusty youth.

My old man’s Pontiac Silver Streak 8 with its three yards of gracefully tapering obsidian black hood, its glorious Italian marble steering wheel with gleaming, spidery chromium spokes–a steering wheel that could well hang on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art–its low, menacing purring classic Straight 8 engine, bore as much resemblance to this eighty-five-dollar-a-day tin can as the
Queen Mary
does to a plastic Boston whaler.

Past the boarded-up, graffiti-splattered ruins of what had once been elegant shops and petite tearooms, past burnt-out hulks of erstwhile department stores, I had the disturbing sensation of being a Pompeian suddenly restored to life and being treated to a tourist jaunt through the ruins of old Pompeii. I had an instantaneous feverish image of the leering Italian spiv who had collared me as I alighted from the bus one day outside tourist Pompeii. As he hissed into my ear: “Cocka-balla, Cocka-balla. Maka dem laugh at home,” he furtively displayed his wares: key rings carved crudely to resemble swollen, erectile male genitalia made of the actual alabaster that his far-distant ancestors had used to create “David” and “The Pietà.” At the time I had thought, God, Rome really
has
fallen, but now I knew that our time, too, had come.

My home town in industrial northern Indiana stood craggy and sharp against the grayish mud-colored skies of the Region. Even the seemingly immutable steel mills looked sullenly deserted and were decaying into rust. Never a town to be confused with Palm Beach or Beverly Hills, Hohman resembled a vast, endless lake-side junkyard that had been created by that mysterious obscene wrecking ball known as Time.

Summoned back from civilization to attend the funeral of a distant relative, I felt curiously alone, as though surrounded by lurking, unfriendly natives speaking mysterious tongues and worshiping alien gods.

“How would Norman Rockwell have handled this?” I muttered as I lurched past a row of decaying porn shops and “Adult” theaters, one of which bore a crude, hand-lettered sign reading: TOPLESS MUD WRESTLING! LIVE! XXX RATING!

It was the very site on which once the proud Parthenon theater had reposed, named after the Parthenon itself of ancient Athens. It had been famous for its elegant lobby and its graceful Fred Astaire movies. Now, TOPLESS MUD WRESTLING and dealers in greasy film cartridges shot in the cellars of Caracas. Where Clark Gable was once the King, Linda Lovelace now reigned.

I fiddled with the knob of my rented alleged radio. A few whistles and the distant sound of someone singing “Bringing in the Sheaves” was all I could manage. I flipped the bastard off and concentrated on the potholes.

A giant dump truck roared past me, flinging bits of gravel and what appeared to be molten tar over my windshield. I struggled for control in his wake. His tailgate bore a sticker that read THE CHICAGO CUBS SUCK. I felt a note of reassurance that at least some things hadn’t changed. This was White Sox country for sure, where the fans followed a ball team as ragged-assed as they were and as cosmically defeated. The White Sox, who once, in my salad days, had actually advertised in the Classified section of the Chicago
Tribune
for a third baseman, they were that desperate. Four thousand out-of-work hod carriers and steel workers showed up for the audition, which was by far the largest crowd the Sox had drawn in ten years. Oh well.

Heavy diesel fumes rolled in my window. I frantically tried to crank it up, but naturally the handle came off in my hand. I flung it under the seat with a snarl, there to join the handle from the other door and an empty Pabst Blue Ribbon can thoughtfully left for me by the previous renter.

Out of the gloom rose the great bulk of my beloved former high school. My God, there it was! It was like meeting a totally unexpected old friend strolling through the streets of Bombay.

I croaked the words of the “Wildcat Victory Song” as the great building loomed against the sky, untouched by time. It was all there, even the weedy athletic field with its paint-peeling goalposts where I had once played the role of an intrepid defensive lineman and where I had irrevocably shattered the ligaments of my left knee, which now began to throb sympathetically as we passed the old battlefield.

Ghostly voices of my teachers of that golden time moaned in my subconscious: Miss Bryfogel, her high, thin bleat intoning facts about Bull Run and Appomattox, Miss McCullough’s birdlike chirp squeaking something about gerunds or whatever they were, old red-faced Huffine, our coach, barking, “I don’t want to kick no asses, but …”

I clutched at the plastic steering wheel in a cold sweat. Old fears never really die. The long winter days I had spent in this red brick mausoleum, its echoing halls, clanging lockers, its aromatic gym and cafeteria, scented forever with the aroma of salmon loaf and canned peas. The roar of thousands of students surging up and down the stairways. My peers, now scattered to the four winds and more by the tides of life. Wars and presidents had come and gone. Do they all remember Miss Bryfogel, Miss McCullough, the salmon loaf? And do they remember … ?

Great Scott! If it’s possible to reel in an Avis (We Try Harder) Rent-a-Car, I reeled. It was still there, exactly as it had been in my days as a Wildcat lineman, as a ceaseless unsuccessful pursuer of Daphne Bigelow, the belle of the junior class; the shrine where Schwartz and Flick and I had squandered many a hard-earned quarter. Untouched! Unchanged!

Now squatting defensively in the shadow cast by a majestic Burger King, still gleaming snow-white, topped by a gigantic concrete Rainbow three-dip ice cream cone was–THE IGLOO.

The Igloo! My God, I can’t believe it. Still in business, still spreading tooth cavities among the young–the Igloo. The home of the greatest malted milk ever created by the hand of man!

So ran my feverish thoughts as I smartly cut across traffic,
dodged a lounging drug pusher, and pulled into the very parking slot where eons ago I had moored the Silver Streak Pontiac.

Drawn to the Igloo by forces too immense to comprehend, I eased out of the car and headed for the same old glass door through which my generation had passed, the door that Flick had once shattered while attempting to kick Schwartz in the ass, an act which sent us on the lam for weeks and was the cause of an investigation that eventually involved the police (but they never got us)–the door through which I had once escorted Daphne on a disastrous double date centuries before.

The Igloo was not a candy store, not a hangout. No, it was purely and functionally a place that made and sold ice cream. There were no booths, jukeboxes, all the other semi-mythic appurtenances of the traditional American kid high school hangout. You went to the Igloo for one thing alone–ice cream. Ice cream such as must be served in the ice cream parlors of heaven: rich, creamy, many-flavored, and made on the premises. It did not come out of machines, squirted out like toothpaste. No, the Igloo dealt in serious ice cream.

In keeping with its high purpose, its interior had all the charm of the inside of a Kelvinator refrigerator; a long white formica counter, a bank of deep ice cream drums set in stainless steel, ladled out by hand with gleaming chromium scoops. The Igloo was as clean and functional as a paring knife.