Stanley Elkin - Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

“What’s special about it? It’s ordinary cat fur,” Lesley said.

“Why’s it special, Belgium? Tell him.”

“Because,” Belgium said shyly.

“Go ahead. Tell Lesley why,” Danny said gently.

“Because,” he said again.

“Because it feels like the hair…” Danny said, inciting Belgium’s imagination.

“Because it feels like the hair…”

“On…” Danny said softly.

“On…” Belgium repeated.

“On…”

“On my mother,” Belgium shouted.

Danny dropped the cat and hugged Belgium. “ Creep ,” he roared, hugging him, kissing him. “Creep. Foreigner. Creep.”

Danny Lubell was not so much our leader as he was a polarity about whom we gathered. He had a job in a gas station which paid him only enough to keep him in egg creams. These, as far as I could see, sustained him. The job also kept him in stolen gasoline for his long black 1933 Packard. What ventures we made beyond the horizons of the neighborhood were made in Danny’s car, which Ox Hersh, another member of our group, drove because Danny didn’t know how. These trips, rare because somehow we were uncomfortable in other sections of the city, were expeditions really, halting and tentative as steps into cold, deep water. Once Ox, sent to another borough on some special mission for Danny, told us on coming back, unfeigned sadness in his face, “There’s nothing out there. There’s really nothing out there.”

I have said that Danny was a polarity, but this is inexact, at least incomplete. He was our taste-maker. There are night clubs — sometimes we went to them in the Village to insult the queers — where they cater to the demented, where for money they tap the private lusts of the diseased and crippled. In a way, Danny was like the owners of these clubs. He could never, as they were, have been in it for the money, however; he encouraged aberration for its own sake. He drew it out of you. Whatever secrets you kept — awful things — you could not keep, could not hide from him. He pulled them out of you, and then he’d laugh at them, making them such a good joke that you were almost glad you were the way you were.

But all of them — pervert Belgium; Ox Hersh; Rabbi Old Guy, a crazy Yeshiva kid who told us he liked to spit in the shul because he was mad at God for Hitler; Shelly Malkin; all of the — had this private thing which turned into a public thing around Danny Lubell. This is the point. I had no thing, and Danny left me alone. I mean, I had no thing except the thing I had for my friends. For a year after I graduated from high school I didn’t go to college. I just wanted to be around the boys, wanted to stay in the neighborhood to see what was going to happen to them. I mean, you’ve got to see how they must have been to make me want to do that. Fun’s fun, but who delays his life just so he can hang around with his pals?

Sometimes we’d go out with girls. Not with them, but where they were. Shelly Malkin, who went to C.C.N.Y. night school, was our social chairman. The girls were always ugly. After one of his parties he’d apologize. “Gee, I’m sorry,” he’d say. “It’s a night school. They never turn on the lights.” We didn’t care what they looked like. We liked to sit around and tell them filthy stories.

Or we liked to listen to Ox Hersh talk to a girl. Ox was a giant. He shouldered out of his small suits in a way that gave you the impression you were actually watching him grow. His voice disturbed the peace. Listening to him used to break us up. He was wonderful with girls. We could hear him across the room. He’d be sitting on this couch and you could see he was straining not to put all his weight down on it — he had a way of sitting on tiptoe — and he’d let his huge head hang down, or roll it around on his chest or stick it in the girl’s lap as though it were the trunk of some curious elephant. He would talk very slowly, drawing out each word as though there were a danger that the girl did not understand English.

“Oh, you go to col-lege? You are a col-lege girl? Education is a beauti-ful thing. I have a cousin who lives in Brooklyn who is planning on going to college. Maybe you will…meet…him there…one day. What do you study at your col-lege, miss? Do you study so-ci-ol-o-gy? I am sure that must be terribly difficult. Is it not, miss?”

“You get used to it,” she’d say, clearing her throat.

Ox would think about this for a while in silence, his big head shaking up and down. “I think you are being modest, miss,” he’d say finally. “I think you must be very brilliant in col-lege.” He’d pause and start the business with the head again, rolling it around as though it had to be wound up every time he wanted to say something. “I think your pro- fess -ors must be very proud to have such a…brilliant girl in their col-lege…What is so-ci-ol-o-gy?” he would ask her suddenly. By now her own head would be unconsciously tracing the splendid arcs made by Ox’s and he would take it in his big hands and steady it. “Better get your head fixed, miss,” he would say.

Maybe afterward we’d be feeling so good we’d go out to a cafeteria on the Grand Concourse, where each of us would do his imitation of Ox and the girl. We might arrive just when the movies were letting out, and Ox would storm into the place and start throwing people out of the line. We’d be right behind him. “Excuse me,” Ox told them, “ain’t ate today yet,” and little Belgium, stepping on his heels, ferociously pumping his tiny legs to keep up with the Ox’s long strides, would shout his favorite joke in his piping voice, “Excuse us, excuse us, got to feed an Ox. Out of the way please. Got an Ox here to feed.” It’s funny the way people relinquished their rights in the line. They always thought somebody was going to hit them. Not violent themselves, they thought they lived in a world of violence. People get hurt only by accident, but they don’t know that.

Only Belgium and the Ox seemed to have a kind of extra-group relationship. The rest of us were each other’s friends and seemed to be able to let it go at that, but with Belgium and the Ox it was different. I don’t know if it was affection or hate Belgium felt for the Ox. Sometimes he’d whine to Danny, “Come on, Danny. Let’s get in your car and leave the big fat Ox. I drive it for you, Danny. Ox too fat to drive, Danny. Come on. I have to sit next to him and he’s so fat he squeezes me. Let’s leave the bastard.” But whenever all of us were together Belgium wouldn’t let the Ox out of his sight. In the cafeteria he’d run up behind the Ox, who was beginning to pile things on his tray, and he’d yell at him, “How come you always first in line and not me? How come? Why I’m always second? Why is that?”

Ox would turn around to him, and not bothering to modulate his dangerous voice, tell him, “Cause you’re a midget, that’s why. You’re a little midget, you midget.”

We were a tight-knit group, but no closed corporation. Eventually we got to know almost every nut in The Bronx.

There was one guy named Eugene Lepransky. Eugene was much older than the rest of us, about twenty, I guess, at the time of Pearl Harbor, the turning point in Eugene’s life. He was huge, bigger even than the Ox. Something was wrong with Eugene, of course, which was why we took such delight in him, but what it was, even a psychiatrist couldn’t have told you. Except for us he was an insulated individual. He lived with his mother, and she never let him out of the neighborhood. He couldn’t cross streets, so he never had a job. When you asked him he said he was “self-employed.” This was true in a unique way. He got ten dollars a week for walking his mother’s dog, and-this was more than enough for Eugene to buy one copy of each comic book and flashy crime magazine in Fein’s candy store.