Gilbert Sorrentino: Little Casino

There were, surely, other things that worried, concerned, angered, appalled, and enraged her, but she continued to use Sunset Blush lipstick because her really manly but gentlemanly Italian American boss had once made a subtle and charmingly suggestive comment on her mouth, and she also continued to consume Ho-Hos, although they reminded her of an unpleasant summer she had spent at Camp Gitchegumee. She ate three meals a day, dieted constantly, was warm in winter and cool in summer, and had a number of so-so friends who were not curious or demanding or intrusive or constant. She thought her sex life a disaster, although it was, more or less, the norm. All in all, she lived better than eighty-five percent of the human beings on the face of this indifferent earth.

And when the winter arrives for this concerned and worried woman, why, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

“Well, if Jewish persons, and I’ll be the first, believe me, to say that you’ve gotta hand it to them, if they don’t own all the news media, how do you explain the fact that Rex Morgan, M.D., changed his name from Morgansky?”

Uh-huh.

This woman once owned a pale-blue knitted dress, but a person or persons unknown broke into her apartment and cut the dress into one-inch strips. A note, which read, in its entirety, “Dunderbeck’s Machine,” was left beneath her Christmas tree, long stripped of ornaments and lights, and thoroughly dried out.

(Might be a symbol.)

Mr. Schmitz writes: “There will be a tremendous explosion, but no one will hear it and the earth will return to its nebulous state and go wandering through the sky, free at last from parasites and disease.”

“Mr. Schmitz was Jewish and changed his name.”

ON MOTHER’S DAY SHE TAKES HER MOTHER to the Paris on 58th Street to see Olivier’s Hamlet. Afterward, they go to Rumpelmayer’s for ice cream and coffee, and then stroll over to the Plaza and then down Fifth Avenue. All these small, thoughtful, and seemingly loving acts are really instances of an anemic contempt for and patronization of her mother, who, she is sure, absolutely sure, would much rather have seen a Bette Davis double feature in the neighborhood rerun house, the Stanley, and then have enjoyed a melted-cheese sandwich and a cup of tea in Holsten’s Ice-Cream Parlor. Her mother had little to say about the movie other than a comment on Olivier’s bleached hair. Well, why would she even begin to understand it? Her mother had gone to Manual Training High School, and was unaccountably proud of the commercial diploma that she had earned. God! They walk down to 34th Street, chatting and window-shopping, and then prepare to separate, she to board a bus for the Village, her mother to take the subway to Bay Ridge.

Thanks, her mother says, so much, thanks so much, sweetie, I really enjoyed our day, it was such a nice surprise. They stand and wait for the daughter’s bus, which is just down the avenue, and her mother kisses her on the cheek and moves away. Really wonderful, dear, she says, so lovely to be up near the Plaza again, it’s been such a long time, and I remembered the hotel, too, perfectly. Talk about a long time! What? her daughter says. The Plaza, her mother says, the beautiful Plaza and the week I spent there, oh, long before I was pregnant with you. A couple of thousand years ago. What? her daughter says, and then she gets on the bus, and as she sits down, sees her mother walking west down the street, heading for the subway.

The Plaza? A week at the Plaza? And before she was pregnant. Her father was not the sort of man who would take her mother to the Plaza. A week alone at the Plaza? Why? She sees, in her mind’s eye, her mother as a young woman. This is intolerable. She’ll call her tonight. A week at the Plaza, but not with her father, surely not. She must have misunderstood her mother, she was always doing that. Did she say a beautiful week?

Children are often surprised to learn that before their births their parents lived secret, complex lives from which these children are wholly excluded. There they are in old photographs, dressed in odd clothes, their curiously unfamiliar faces in the foreground of strange streets and obsolete automobiles. This young woman, for instance, thinks of her mother in her remodeled gray Persian lamb coat, or sitting down to a plate of cream of chicken soup in the Bay Terrace Lounge and Restaurant, or scrambling eggs while she sings “Poor Butterfly.” What she cannot imagine is her mother, her clothes in disarray, being fucked from behind by a lover.

“I think, although I only caught a quick glimpse of these women, that the older one might have been Annette.”

The older woman was not Annette, but Linda Piro. Had she been Annette, there would have been here proffered a clean juxtaposition, across time and space, of two different years and two different parks. I might even have had the pleasure of seeing Annette, once again, holding down her light beige skirt, which the wind is lifting, slightly, above her knees. Oh well, another time, perhaps.

The young woman, Linda’s daughter, Isabelle, has been dead for many years, as you know.

HE TELLS, YET AGAIN, WITH A LITTLE ADDED here and a little subtracted there, a story centered on Fat Harry, an essentially unremarkable story, tells it as if to understand what he may think of as a “secret” at its banal core. Fat Harry of angry, abused, neglected, and deserted wives and forgotten children, of bad debts and beatings by shylocks and policy muscle, of absurdly long shots with no chance to run in the money, of disastrous losing streaks created and sustained by betting the wrong way, the right way, the hard way, by drawing to inside straights, holding low kickers, bluffing with pairs of deuces and treys, ignoring aces up, betting carefully when winning and recklessly when losing. In short, a chump. A Fat Harry of drunken nights and gonorrhea, lost keys, back rent, wrecked and repossessed cars, broken windows, maudlin tears, filthy bathrooms, dirty underwear, take-out Chinese, useless refrigerators leaking freon, plastic forks and spoons, dull knives, semen-spattered girlie magazines, of this job and that job, moving furniture, painting shotgun flats, spraying roaches and bedbugs, helping out in saloons in Bay Ridge and Park Slope, Red Hook and Borough Park, Greenpoint and Bath Beach. A Fat Harry who cleans out urinals, mops up vomit and blood, washes grease-slick dishes, walks dogs, shovels coal and snow, washes cars, pumps gas, delivers dry cleaning and laundry and groceries and flowers and pizza. A Fat Harry of fruitless, hopeless, futile, irrational, meaningless journeys by bus to Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, to Wilmington, Richmond, Albany, to Altoona and Camden, to the Delaware Water Gap, to the Poconos, to Binghamton and Paterson, for what reason? For no reason, for any reason, to be able to say — nothing. Nothing at all. A Fat Harry who is punched in the mouth and nose, who suffers lacerations and abrasions, cracked teeth, a broken jaw, crushed ribs, sprained fingers, split lips, for talking, for not talking, for saying the wrong thing, for not answering, for making promises and breaking promises, for being a wiseass, for being a dummy, for being a momo, for just being fucking there. A Fat Harry, who, in some crazed final gesture before he disappeared, trailing bad markers and murderous bookmakers, used his temporary night bartender job to close the Lucky Shamrock Bar and Grill, a police hangout by day and early evening, at 3:00 a.m. of a Saturday morning, to pull the blinds so as to enable the dozen patrons still at the bar to drink free of charge, dance to the jukebox fed by the bar’s quarters, laugh and embrace and sing and kiss and grope each other, make drunken assignations, confess hidden attractions, and then stagger out of the joint at dawn, reeling and blinking and joyous in the thin cold of the pre-snow morning, ecstatic with the pleasure of transgression. I’m fucking dead anyway, Harry supposedly said, by way of explanation, as he pocketed the cash in the till. And so he probably was.