No explanations, but enormous good times.
The happiest time of my life.
I had the “real” world, the world of my store and my friends and my family, the world of profit&loss, of taxes and evenings with young women who talked about going shopping or the United Nations, or the rising cost of coffee and microwave ovens. And I had Jeffty’s world, in which I existed only when I was with him. The things of the past he knew as fresh and new, I could experience only when in his company. And the membrane between the two worlds grew ever thinner, more luminous and transparent. I had the best of both worlds. And knew, somehow, that I could carry nothing from one to the other.
Forgetting that, for just a moment, betraying Jeffty by forgetting, brought an end to it all.
Enjoying myself so much, I grew careless and failed to consider how fragile the relationship between Jeffty’s world and my world really was. There is a reason why the present begrudges the existence of the past. I never really understood. Nowhere in the beast books, where survival is shown in battles between claw and fang, tentacle and poison sac, is there recognition of the ferocity the present always brings to bear on the past. Nowhere is there a detailed statement of how the present lies in wait for What-Was, waiting for it to become Now-This-Moment so it can shred it with its merciless jaws.
Who could know such a thing…at any age…and certainly not at my age…who could understand such a thing?
I’m trying to exculpate myself. I can’t. It was my fault.
It was another Saturday afternoon.
“What’s playing today?” I asked him, in the car, on the way downtown.
He looked up at me from the other side of the front seat and smiled one of his best smiles. “Ken Maynard in Bull-whip Justice an’ The Demolished Man.” He kept smiling, as if he’d really put one over on me. I looked at him with disbelief.
“You’re kidding!” I said, delighted. “Bester’s THE DEMOLISHED MAN?” He nodded his head, delighted at my being delighted. He knew it was one of my favorite books. “Oh, that’s super!”
“Super duper,” he said.
“Who’s in it?”
“Franchot Tone, Evelyn Keyes, Lionel Barrymore and Elisha Cook, Jr.” He was much more knowledgeable about movie actors than I’d ever been. He could name the character actors in any movie he’d ever seen. Even the crowd scenes.
“And cartoons?” I asked.
“Three of ’em: a Little Lulu, a Donald Duck and a Bugs Bunny. An’ a Pete Smith Specialty an’ a Lew Lehr Monkeys is da C-r-r-r-aziest Peoples.”
“Oh boy!” I said. I was grinning from ear to ear. And then I looked down and saw the pad of purchase order forms on the seat. I’d forgotten to drop it off at the store.
“Gotta stop by the Center,” I said. “Gotta drop off something. It’ll only take a minute.”
“Okay,” Jeffty said. “But we won’t be late, will we?”
“Not on your tintype, kiddo,” I said.
When I pulled into the parking lot behind the Center, he decided to come in with me and we’d walk over to the theater. It’s not a large town. There are only two movie houses, the Utopia and the Lyric. We were going to the Utopia and it was only three blocks from the Center.
I walked into the store with the pad of forms, and it was bedlam. David and Jan were handling two customers each, and there were people standing around waiting to be helped. Jan turned a look on me and her face was a horror-mask of pleading. David was running from the stockroom to the showroom and all he could murmur as he whipped past was “Help!” and then he was gone.
“Jeffty,” I said, crouching down, “listen, give me a few minutes. Jan and David are in trouble with all these people. We won’t be late, I promise. Just let me get rid of a couple of these customers.” He looked nervous, but nodded okay.
I motioned to a chair and said, “Just sit down for a while and I’ll be right with you.”
He went to the chair, good as you please, though he knew what was happening, and he sat down.
I started taking care of people who wanted color television sets. This was the first really substantial batch of units we’d gotten in–color television was only now becoming reasonably priced and this was Sony’s first promotion–and it was bonanza time for me. I could see paying off the loan and being out in front for the first time with the Center. It was business.
In my world, good business comes first.
Jeffty sat there and stared at the wall. Let me tell you about the wall.
Stanchion and bracket designs had been rigged from floor to within two feet of the ceiling. Television sets had been stacked artfully on the wall. Thirty-three television sets. All playing at the same time. Black and white, color, little ones, big ones, all going at the same time.
Jeffty sat and watched thirty-three television sets, on a Saturday afternoon. We can pick up a total of thirteen channels, including the UHF educational stations. Golf was on one channel; baseball was on a second; celebrity bowling was on a third; the fourth channel was a religious seminar; a teenage dance show was on the fifth; the sixth was a rerun of a situation comedy; the seventh was a rerun of a police show; eighth was a nature program showing a man flycasting endlessly; ninth was news and conversation; tenth was a stock car race; eleventh was a man doing logarithms on a blackboard; twelfth was a woman in a leotard doing setting-up exercises; and on the thirteenth channel was a badly animated cartoon show in Spanish. All but six of the shows were repeated on three sets. Jeffty sat and watched that wall of television on a Saturday afternoon while I sold as fast and as hard as I could, to pay back my Aunt Patricia and stay in touch with my world. It was business.
I should have known better. I should have understood about the present and the way it kills the past. But I was selling with both hands. And when I finally glanced over at Jeffty, half an hour later, he looked like another child.
He was sweating. That terrible fever sweat when you have stomach flu. He was pale, as pasty and pale as a worm, and his little hands were gripping the arms of the chair so tightly I could see his knuckles in bold relief. I dashed over to him, excusing myself from the middle-aged couple looking at the new 21” Mediterranean model.
“Jeffty!”
He looked at me, but his eyes didn’t track. He was in absolute terror. I pulled him out of the chair and started toward the front door with him, but the customers I’d deserted yelled at me, “Hey!” The middle-aged man said, “You wanna sell me this thing or don’t you?”
I looked from him to Jeffty and back again. Jeffty was like a zombie. He had come where I’d pulled him. His legs were rubbery and his feet dragged. The past, being eaten by the present, the sound of something in pain.
I clawed some money out of my pants pocket and jammed it into Jeffty’s hand. “Kiddo…listen to me…get out of here right now!” He still couldn’t focus properly. “Jeffty,” I said as tightly as I could, “listen to me!” The middle-aged customer and his wife were walking toward us. “Listen, kiddo, get out of here right this minute. Walk over to the Utopia and buy the tickets. I’ll be right behind you.” The middle-aged man and his wife were almost on us. I shoved Jeffty through the door and watched him stumble away in the wrong direction, then stop as if gathering his wits, turn and go back past the front of the Center and in the direction of the Utopia. “Yes sir,” I said, straightening up and facing them, “yes, ma’am, that is one terrific set with some sensational features! If you’ll just step back here with me…”
There was a terrible sound of something hurting, but I couldn’t tell from which channel, or from which set, it was coming.
Most of it I learned later, from the girl in the ticket booth, and from some people I knew who came to me to tell me what had happened. By the time I got to the Utopia, nearly twenty minutes later, Jeffty was already beaten to a pulp and had been taken to the Manager’s office.
“Did you see a very little boy, about five years old, with big brown eyes and straight brown hair…he was waiting for me
?”
“Oh, I think that’s the little boy those kids beat up?”
“What!?! Where is he?”
“They took him to the Manager’s office. No one knew who he was or where to find his parents–”
A young girl wearing an usher’s uniform was kneeling down beside the couch, placing a wet paper towel on his face.
I took the towel away from her and ordered her out of the office.
She looked insulted and snorted something rude, but she left. I sat on the edge of the couch and tried to swab away the blood from the lacerations without opening the wounds where the blood had caked. Both his eyes were swollen shut. His mouth was ripped badly. His hair was matted with dried blood.
He had been standing in line behind two kids in their teens. They started selling tickets at 12:30 and the show started at 1:00. The doors weren’t opened till 12:45. He had been waiting, and the kids in front of him had had a portable radio. They were listening to the ball game. Jeffty had wanted to hear some program, God knows what it might have been, Grand Central Station, Let’s Pretend, Land of the Lost, God only knows which one it might have been.
He had asked if he could borrow their radio to hear the program for a minute, and it had been a commercial break or something, and the kids had given him the radio, probably out of some malicious kind of courtesy that would permit them to take offense and rag the little boy. He had changed the station…and they’d been unable to get it to go back to the ball game. It was locked into the past, on a station that was broadcasting a program that didn’t exist for anyone but Jeffty.
They had beaten him badly…as everyone watched.
And then they had run away.
I had left him alone, left him to fight off the present without sufficient weaponry. I had betrayed him for the sale of a 21” Mediterranean console television, and now his face was pulped meat. He moaned something inaudible and sobbed softly.
“Shhh, it’s okay, kiddo, it’s Donny. I’m here. I’ll get you home, it’ll be okay.”
I should have taken him straight to the hospital. I don’t know why I didn’t. I should have. I should have done that.
When I carried him through the door, John and Leona Kinzer just stared at me. They didn’t move to take him from my arms. One of his hands was hanging down. He was conscious, but just barely. They stared, there in the semi-darkness of a Saturday afternoon in the present. I looked at them. “A couple of kids beat him up at the theater.” I raised him a few inches in my arms and extended him. They stared at me, at both of us, with nothing in their eyes, without movement. “Jesus Christ,” I shouted, “he’s been beaten! He’s your son! Don’t you even want to touch him? What the hell kind of people are you?!”
Then Leona moved toward me very slowly. She stood in front of us for a few seconds, and there was a leaden stoicism in her face that was terrible to see. It said, I have been in this place before, many times, and I cannot bear to be in it again; but I am here now.
So I gave him to her. God help me, I gave him over to her.
And she took him upstairs to bathe away his blood and his pain.
John Kinzer and I stood in our separate places in the dim living room of their home, and we stared at each other. He had nothing to say to me.
I shoved past him and fell into a chair. I was shaking.
I heard the bath water running upstairs.
After what seemed a very long time Leona came downstairs, wiping her hands on her apron. She sat down on the sofa and after a moment John sat down beside her. I heard the sound of rock music from upstairs.
“Would you like a piece of nice pound cake?” Leona said.
I didn’t answer. I was listening to the sound of the music. Rock music. On the radio. There was a table lamp on the end table beside the sofa. It cast a dim and futile light in the shadowed living room. Rock music from the present, on a radio upstairs? I started to say something, and then knew…Oh, God…no!
I jumped up just as the sound of hideous crackling blotted out the music, and the table lamp dimmed and dimmed and flickered. I screamed something, I don’t know what it was, and ran for the stairs.
Jeffty’s parents did not move. They sat there with their hands folded, in that place they had been for so many years.
I fell twice rushing up the stairs.
There isn’t much on television that can hold my interest. I bought an old cathedral-shaped Philco radio in a second-hand store, and I replaced all the burnt-out parts with the original tubes from old radios I could cannibalize that still worked. I don’t use transistors or printed circuits. They wouldn’t work. I’ve sat in front of that set for hours sometimes, running the dial back and forth as slowly as you can imagine, so slowly it doesn’t look as if it’s moving at all sometimes.
But I can’t find Captain Midnight or The Land of the Lost or The Shadow or Quiet, Please.
So she did love him, still, a little bit, even after all those years. I can’t hate them: they only wanted to live in the present world again. That isn’t such a terrible thing.
It’s a good world, all things considered. It’s much better than it used to be, in a lot of ways. People don’t die from the old diseases any more. They die from new ones, but that’s Progress, isn’t it?
Isn’t it?
Tell me.
Somebody please tell me.
FREE WITH THIS BOX!
Here’s where we part company. You’ve been extremely patient with me, and I know you understand that I’ve been a little loose and twitchy from the start, directing this at people your age for the first time. So I am in your debt, and I thank you. So by way of a proper gracious “bread ’n’ butter” gift for your indulgence, I’m going to leave you with this last story. The thing of it is, there were only supposed to be 15 stories in this book, ending with what may be one of my best ones, “Jeffty is Five.” But after I sent the book in to my editor and publisher, I thought about it, and I knew I had to add “Free With This Box!” to the collection because, well, it’s as close to a recounting of what trouble I’ve been in all my life as I have handy. Oh, hell, I’ve written whole books of essays and columns and commentaries and reviews, many of which include anecdotes about my weird span; but in this story, which I wrote a long time ago, I took something that had actually happened to me, when I was a little kid, and I only fictionalized it a little bit. It is a story, yeah, not a memoir, but it is clear and clarion me-speaking-to-you warning about what it means to live the kind of life I’ve lived, amazing and fulfilling as it has been. There is a line I remember from the journalist and madman Hunter S. Thompson, in which he speaks about “the dead end loneliness of a man who makes his own rules.” I recall it now, as I get ready to bid you fond farewell, because if there is a lesson above all others contained in this volume, it is this: be your own person. Be kind, be ethical, be honorable and courageous; respect your friends, keep your word, treat your enemies with honor if you can but spin ’em if they won’t let you treat them that way; don’t believe the okeydoke that people who’re trying to sell you something lay on you, remember True Love only happens when you have no fear and can laugh about it, and you cannot possibly be too smart. Above all, be your own person. Never blame bad luck, or fate, or “the breaks,” or paranoid delusions about conspiracies for what your life has become. You are now, and you will always be, in charge of your destiny. What was that line out of Buckaroo Bonzai…oh yeah, I remember…“Never forget: no matter where you go, there you are.” Here I am, the product of what I’ve made of myself, in trouble from the git-go; and there you are, looking at me looking at you. Wherever you are, kid, remember, I’m there, too. Take care of yourself. Don’t step on no broken glass.
His name was David Thomas Cooper. His mother called him Davey, and his teachers called him David, but he was old enough now to be called the way the guys called him: Dave. After all, eight years old was no longer a child. He was big enough to walk to school himself, and he was big enough to stay up till eight-thirty any weeknight.
Mommy had said last year, “For every birthday, we will let you stay up a half hour later,” and she had kept her word. The way he figured it, a few more years, and he could stay up all night, almost.
He was a slim boy, with unruly black hair that cowlicked up in the back, and slipped over his forehead in the front. He had an angular face, and wide deep eyes of black, and he sucked his thumb when he was sure no one was watching.
And right now, right this very minute, the thing he wanted most in all the world was a complete set of the buttons.
Davey reached into his pants pocket, and brought out the little cloth bag with the drawstring. Originally it had held his marbles, but now they were back home in his room, in an empty Red Goose shoe box. Now the little bag held the buttons. He turned sidewise on the car seat, and pried open the bag with two fingers. The buttons clinked metallically. There were twenty-four of them in there. He had taken the pins off them, because he wasn’t a gook like Leon, who wore his on his beanie. Davey liked to lay the buttons out on the table, and arrange them in different designs. It wasn’t so much that they had terrific pictures on them, though each one contained the face of a familiar comic character, but it was just having them.
He felt so good when he thought that there were only eight more to get.
Just Skeezix, Little Orphan Annie, Andy Gump, the Little King, B.O. Plenty, Mandrake the Magician, Harold Teen and–the scarcest one of them all–Dick Tracy. Then he would have the entire set, and he would beat out Roger and Hobby and even Leon across the street.