Gilbert Sorrentino: Little Casino

Hide and seek: death. He had been in Lincoln Hall. After the death of Bubbsy, he was sent to Coxsackie, then Dannemora. Nobody knew where he went from there, although there were recurring, preposterous rumors that he was acting in the movies, with a different face.

“They can do fuckin’ anything in Hollywood.”

Bubbsy liked to torture cats and cruelly tease and hurt little children. Had he lived, there is a good chance that he would have become a hail-fellow-well-met regular sport of a bully, drunk, and dedicated beater of women, like his older brother, Mac, the cop.

“There are always, sure, a few bad apples in the barrel, but it’s very wrong to condemn and blacken all the other honest, hardworking, law-abiding people who and so forth, and who and so on, and who, day in and day out, do this and do that and do the other thing too.”

It could happen to you. Hide. And seek.

The same darkness envelops them all.

HAVE A SPAGHETTI SANGWICH! HAVE A spaghetti sangwich with pieces of cold frankfurter on it! Have a cod-liver oil sandwich, a sammich that’ll put hair on your chest, your head, your hands, and your freezing feet!

A ketchup sammich? A ketchup-and-mustard sammich? Or how does a cold stringbean sammich strike you, little fella? A canned pineapple sandwich might go well with a big jelly jar chock by Jesus Christ up to the brim with lemon Epco or grape Kool-Aid, as too might a canned-spinach sandwich. Succotash on moldy rye? Mmmm.

A cottage-cheese-and-cold-boiled-puhtaytuh sangaweech on stale Bond bread, now that is the absolute ticket! You’re talking nutrition? Then, too, sandwiches of sliced green pepper and Crisco will surely refresh after a long day of career discussions. And don’t neglect to pop over to friendly Gallagher’s, sport, for a pitcher of Trommer’s: crisp, light, and tingling! And zesty! It’s the Ivy League beverage of choice, you’ll recall?

How to feed your family of five, or even six, on a dollar a day, without endangering their health or welfare. Just takes a little g-u-m-p gumption!

Stay away, oh, stay far hence from those terrible crumb buns, cinnamon buns, coconut buns, crullers, doughnuts, and Danish pastries: they’ll send you to your grave, yowzah.

Break out the lettuce-and-oleo sammiches, pliz. Look at those smiling children in the sunny kitchen! Look at those cavities and suppurating ears! Bacon and eggs and sausages and toast with butter, again! That will do it every time.

Afterward, when the coughing lets up a little, these tykes can build a little character selling Liberty at the subway station. “How to Feed Your Growing Family on Fifty Cents a Day” is in the latest issue, wow!

And for the love of God, who does not cotton to the idle poor, as we all know, please avoid those thick steaks, buttered mashed potatoes, rich sauces, cream-laden desserts, all those deadly foods that will damage the courageous heart, OK?

Lard on toast might allay certain yearnings, but moderation, moderation.

How amazing that the poor have always eaten a healthy diet, rich in vegetables, legumes, and whole grains, and low in fat and sugars. They’ve had it puh-retty darn good!

Here you go — a kohlrabi sangwich on what looks like a fetching pale-green slice of Silvercup! Fulla vitamins Q and T.

Herbert Hoover died at the age of 137, of course. It is said that he never ate a steak in his life, and that his favorite dinner was farmer cheese on soda crackers with skim milk.

He did not call the unemployed “the shiftless idle,” and the rumor that attributed this remark to him has been traced to Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, described as “Godless un-Cristian [sic] Jews” in Jesus Knows News. It is a cruel rumor, and one that is in very poor taste as well.

When the burdens of the Depression and such aberrations as the Bonus March could not be lightened by cheery thoughts of Tom Mix, Mr. Hoover often went fly-fishing, called “the sport of dukes.” He wore his Stanford tie.

“Don’t fence me in!” the doughty President would exultantly cry to the aromatic woods. And soon it would be time for a raw onion.

DESOLATE LOT. A BOY OF PERHAPS FOUR, in a tattered and patched hand-me-down windbreaker, a knitted cap on his head against the raw cold of a late March afternoon. He is alone, rooting with a stick in the rubble of broken red and buff bricks, shards of stained porcelain, diseased shingles, tree limbs, all the rubbish and detritus of this failing neighborhood, struggling for life on the thinnest edge of utter decay. It is the very picture of loneliness. The boy’s father, who has gone to look for him as the bitter darkness begins to slide across the low roofs of the neighborhood houses, watches him, heartbrokenly, in silence. He knows, although he has no idea that he knows, that the boy, alone in the sad quiet of this gray, dispirited lot, will be alone always in his life, and that the distant, perplexing world that he is to inhabit is one to which he will be forever strange. This knowledge enters the father with viral efficiency, and years later, he will remember this day, even remember the shape of a brown leaf that lies at his feet, crepitant.

And years later, after a long period of estrangement and silence, the boy, now a solitary man, will write his father a letter, suggesting that the years of separation and misunderstanding might, possibly, be ended, might, possibly, be “cured,” is his odd word. And the father, tentatively, carefully, replies, with guarded love and exquisite care, but hopelessly. The boy will have no memory of the death of hope that lay at the center of that lot, at the center of that raw afternoon, eerie in thin, failing sunlight and dirty cold. The father will have no way of telling his son of the truth that was thrust upon him, as he watched from the sidewalk before he called to him to come home. The fact of the loveless void of that shattered lot on that unremarkable block in Brooklyn in the fading years of the 1950s will be in and of his letter, and even as he mails it, the letter, full of carefully phrased sentences that demand nothing and expect nothing and promise nothing, that is but a salute, labored yet authentic, will not, he knows, be answered.

Céline writes that “the living people we’ve lost in the crypts of time sleep so soundly side by side with the dead that the same darkness envelops them all.”

No one used to think that a vacant lot was owned, rather, lots were everybody’s property, loci of quiet anarchy. A lot took its character from that of the surrounding neighborhood. Because of this, it was an accurate index of a neighborhood’s present, but held no hint of its future. To place a living human figure in the center of a lot is to compose a kind of iconic reality that is, oddly, more real than the presence of an actual living figure in the center of a lot.

It is hard to be a father.

No love. No nothing.

THE BOY LEAPS FROM THE SLIPPERY EDGE of the pier out toward the scow tied up alongside it. He’s done this dozens of times over the past few years, timing the slow heave and slide of the clumsy vessel as the swells carry it toward the pier and then away from it, but this time he misjudges and, in midair, his arms outstretched and his legs pistoning, realizes that he won’t land on the deck. His left foot touches the gunwale, but the scow is riding away from him on the water, glassy with oil. Some other boys stand in momentary silent terror, still, on the pier in the anemic sunlight and brisk wind of the October afternoon, knowing that their friend’s foot has not gained purchase. He falls between the hull and the pier just as the scowreaches its maximum distance from the pier, and is held, wholly still, by its huge, splintery hawsers. As the boy surfaces, the scow lifts and begins its terrible slide toward him, the swell carrying it silently, calmly, toward the pier. A deckhand hears the screaming of the boys on the pier and emerges, half-drunk, from a makeshift cabin of planks and tarpaper on the deck, and knows, instantly, what has happened, and that there is nothing to be done. He stands at the gunwale and looks into the space between the hull and the pier, sees the boy’s small, tough face white with shock and fear, and yells, in a voice high with rage and anguish, in a near-comic Norwegian accent, that the focking goddamn kid is focking goddamn crazy and to get the focking goddamn hell out of there, and then the boy is a soft crack and an explosion of gore and, weirdly, makes no sound as he is crushed to his filthy death.