Three Home Town Vignettes

Jack Steele                                                                                                      2498 wds

240 Regency Drive

Marstons Mills, MA 02648

508-280-8645

jacksteele1@comcast.net

    

Three Home Town Vignettes

By

Jack Steele

     He probably knew people who believed that Mr. Baum was evil, but what he heard people actually say about Jews was not that extreme.  His father said they were tight and implied their shrewdness with money by noting that they tended to start businesses with high markups, like jewelry and furniture stores.  No Jews in town were in the grocery business, for example.  One was a record store owner, but you had to allow for their near monopoly of the entertainment business.  An uncle by marriage was a musician, for example.  And shoes?  Were shoes high markup?  And the clothing business in general.  Jews were everywhere in the clothing business.  Every department store he’d ever heard of in Texas was owned by Jews.  Were clothes high markup?  He didn’t know, but still, the theory probably had more exceptions than it could bear, but he got the idea.  Jews were good with money, to an unseemly degree by the standards of other people. 

     Sunday school teachers also had something to say about Jews.  At the First Baptist Church he was taught not to hate Jews but to pity them, as we would anyone who rejected Christ.  But extreme views were there, he was sure, and what kept him from them when he was little was propriety, an understanding among a certain class of adults that there were limits to what could be openly discussed among children.  Inevitably, though, there are those who test the limits, either from coarseness or idealism—children can’t be protected from the truth forever and isn’t it our duty to tell them the truth, to prepare them?  Or just from spite.  Not being able to bear such innocence, one that would make no distinctions.

      Dr. Gipson was his Sunday school teacher when he was sixteen.  He was a surgeon who believed that prayer could cure cancer and that Karl Marx never did an honest day’s work in his life.  No socialist, i.e., communist, or anyone who lived under such a system of government, ever did an honest day’s work, and that alone proved it was evil.  Dr. Gipson knew the truth about everything, and he gave his time to share that knowledge with young people, to make a better world.  At first he liked him because he was singled out for being smart.  The doctor flattered him by asking if he’d ever considered medicine as a profession and offered recommendations, even money if he needed it, which should have warned him right away, not the money, but for reading him so badly.  He’d won his respect by asking him questions in his Sunday school class, even arguing with him,  but he had no interest in science.  Nevertheless, Dr. Gipson took him so seriously that he prepared detailed responses, which had the unintended consequence of trapping him into regular attendance.

     Dr. Gipson thought he was answering his call for reason with reason, but it soon became clear that what really interested him were miracles.  Not only did God heal cancer, but people came back to life after dying in car wrecks.  All bullshit, of course, but he was glad to find someone who would address his concerns and not go silent or hostile.  But Dr. Gipson was a newcomer to town and perhaps a little too dark complected.  Despite his two beautiful daughters and a comfortable brick home in a fashionable part of town, he was regarded with suspicion by most of his neighbors, and his downfall came when he invited the Sunday school class over to his house one night to watch his home movies of the Texas City oil refinery explosion.  They ate cookies and drank punch and watched mangled bodies, serious blood and guts, accompanied by the doctor’s clinical narration.  No one threw up on his carpet, but everyone thought it was a little creepy, and word soon got out among parents that Dr. Gipson was to be avoided.

     It was around that time that he started liking Mr. Baum.  When he was little he was afraid of him.  Not because he was Jewish, but because he was such a strange, imposing presence.  He was built like one of those men at cocktail parties in the New Yorker, a graceful S, only a little stooped, and his teeth were yellow and his mouth always seemed to be full of mucus.  He had a strange accent, patrician New York he guessed later when he knew what that was, all of which was odd enough, but he compounded his own strangeness by standing out on the sidewalk in front of his store in order to collar passersby.  That’s what had scared him as a kid.  That stooping aggressiveness, standing on the sidewalk like some big bug about to scoop in little kids, all the while smiling between those yellow teeth and speaking in a way that sounded like whining to a Texas ear.

     The first clue about Mr. Baum’s real nature came when he brought both a bottle of bourbon and a bottle of scotch to his father when he had his appendix out, saying he didn’t know which he drank.  Next came an afternoon spent in his store, the old man showing him and a friend his boxing trophies and photographs from his service days at around the turn of the century, and then demonstrating “a real Army spit shine,” spitting on shoes, cracking the rag.  He was always fond of Mr. Baum after that, and bought shoes from him whenever he could, but the real clincher came when he saw him at the airport one day with his family.  Mr. Baum didn’t see him, and he kept his distance.  It was a family affair.  The occasion was that Mr. Baum was on his way to the LBJ inaugural, and there was something about the elegant way he sat at the gate, a smile on his face, basking in his family’s admiration, that tugged at his heart.          

*****

     It was probably Juapo, but he didn’t know that until years after, and it remained stubbornly in his brain as Wappo, a man who talked as if his mouth was full of mush, or yellow phelgm, or mucus, his walk a slow shuffle, his profile a graceful but sickly S, an old zoot-suiter now racking balls at the Navarro Club, Members Only.  Wappo never hurried, never smiled, never said anything anyone could understand.  He was always there.

     He didn’t own the place.  That was Mr. Wappo, also the owner of the Army Navy store next door, who sometimes sat on a stool in his dark suit to watch the high rollers play nine ball for five dollars a game.  That was where he learned about shape, standing on his toes to see the good players between the heads of the not so good.  That’s what it all came down to.  Shape.  Nothing else mattered if you didn’t have it.  Hard hitting.  Finesse.  Brains.  Grace under pressure.  Endurance.  None of that was enough if you didn’t have shape and didn’t know how to get it.             

He and his friends weren’t supposed to be there, but once inside they were tolerated.  The sign on the door said No One Under Eighteen Allowed, so they kept a low profile and minded their manners.  They put their nickels on the edge of the table, a nickel a cue a game, and meekly waited for Wappo to notice them and come shuffling back to rack the balls.  It never occurred to them that the nine ball players probably tipped him. 

      Wappo’s was long and narrow, hardly room enough at either end of a table to draw back a stick without hitting a wall.  There were about eight tables, side by side in single file, and they played eight ball at the last two on worn felt, even ripped in places, and got used to the urine smell from the toilet at the rear of the building.  The only light came from the flourescent bulbs over each table.  The heat came from little gas stoves up front, nearer the nine ball players, and in the summer there were a couple of revolving table fans, also up front.

     The only person their age who ever played on the front tables was Beasley.  He’d been part of their crowd in grade school, but by high school they’d almost forgotten about him, and then one day he started showing up at Wappo’s with his own stick in a leather case, determined to play with the nine ball players.  It took nerve.  More nerve than any of them had, even if they’d been good enough.  They had to respect that, but on the other hand, who did he think he was?  Maybe he’d paid a fortune for his stick and his leather case, and somehow had the money to lose, and was actually good enough not to make a total fool of himself, but it still didn’t seem right.  At first they thought the nine ball players would laugh at him and turn him away, refuse to take his money, but they didn’t, and then they wanted him to lose.  They looked forward to seeing him walk out of there with his tail between his legs, especially since he never acknowledged them, always had his game face on, as if he had something to prove.  They laughed at him behind his back, partly in resentment, partly in embarrassment for him, he looked so ridiculous, so comically serious.  He never won even one game.  He didn’t completely make a fool of himself, he wasn’t that bad.  He made some tough shots and could have beaten any of the kids blindfolded, but he wasn’t in the same league as the nine ball players.  After two or three months of losing every Saturday morning, patiently waiting his turn and then showing everyone he was pretty good but not good enough, he stopped showing up.  One Saturday he wasn’t there, and then the next, and pretty soon they stopped talking about it.

*****

    

     We had no business on Commerce Street.  Across from Wappo’s was a pawn shop and down the block was the Tex Theater, which none of ever went to.  It showed double features of old westerns and somebody’s older brother said it was only for Mexicans.  That meant you’d probably get knifed, not to mention sick if you ate or touched anything.  We didn’t belong, but no one paid us any attention.  We stared at the switch blade knives in the pawn shop.  We looked at the gask masks and bayonets in the Army Navy store.  We tried to find the damage on the furniture at the damaged freight outlet.  The next street over, Beaton, the main street, was respectable.  Very wide, metered angle parking, Penney’s, Sears, two banks, two barber shops, two drug stores, two shoe stores, two jewelry stores, three dime stores.  Two restaurants, one Mexican, one home cooking.  Two record shops.  Penney’s still had hardwood floors and pneumatic message carriers.  Here and there you could find an old hitching ring in the sidewalk.  Farmers in bib overwalls sometimes sat on the curbs outside the drug stores.  Traffic was bumper to bumper on Saturdays.  Nearly every day the smell of cottonseed oil permeated all of downtown.     

      The third street over was Main.  A local department store, three stories high, a bakery, a printer, a stationer, shoe repair.  Black people were never seen on Beaton or Main.  There was a side door in Sears that could be reached from Commerce, and separate facilities.  Sometimes you saw them crossing Beaton to go to the Ideal theater, where they were allowed in the balcony.                

     There were two ushers at the Palace, which had no balcony and allowed no black people anywhere.  One usher had a big ass and the other had very bad acne.  It was thought of as a sissy job, but their word was law.  No talking.  No knees on the backs of seats.  They’d warn you the first time, sometimes knocking your knees down with a flashlight, then throw you out if you did it again.  The one in charge was the one with the bad acne.  The rumor was that the manager of the theater had a big stash of pornography in his office, and if the usher with bad acne liked you, he’d let you see it.  Some also said that he liked you only if he wanted to suck your cock.

     The Palace was part of a chain of small town movie theaters, which meant that everything was standardized.  What movies played, how it looked, what you could buy at the concession stand, maybe even including the giant dill pickles in a jar.  You couldn’t get ice in your drinks.  You couldn’t get Coke.  Just Pepsi.  But the Palace was the only game in town for first run movies.  They changed after two or three days.  One for the first half of the weekend, another for the second half, and usually a third (always a B movie) for the middle of the week.  He went two or three times a week, often by himself, depending on how much money he had.  He never worried about when the feature started.  He’d just ride his bike downtown in the afternoon and go.

     He also went to the Ideal, but not as often, certainly not as part of a routine.  It was always second best, more the kind of place he went to when he couldn’t think of anything else to do.  But it had its attractions.  You could always get Coke with ice at the Ideal, you never saw an usher, and although he wasn’t conscious of it being a big deal back then, perhaps the opera boxes, faded murals on the walls and ceiling, and grand staircase to the balcony, made an impression.  It was pretty rundown by the fifties, but it was hard not to be aware, sense in some way, that unlike the Palace, which hardly existed except as a nearly invisible vehicle for the films that played there, the Ideal had a past.  More of a past than a future, which would have been clear even to him, if he’d ever thought about anything changing, since he never saw it even half full.  Was it the black people in the balcony that kept people away?  Its seediness?  I’m sure neither of those things helped, but the main thing had to be the movies.  When I think of the Ideal, I think of films that were already old:  Lash LaRue and the Cisco Kid serials, short subjects like the Bowery Boys, The Three Stooges.  Tom and Jerry cartoons instead of Bugs Bunny.  And many of the movies weren’t just second run, but borderline respectable.  Foreign movies.  Documentaris about childbirth, marijuana, prostitution.  Rock and roll.  Brigitte Bardot, Mondo Cane, High School Confidential, La Dolce Vita.