Red Baker (5 page)
But it’s hard to hang on to these memories after all that has happened, hard now and, to be honest, hard even two days after the snowball fight, because that very next Monday I was faced with the same stomach-grinding facts—no job, not knowing where to look, my temples pounding and stomach churning just thinking of hitting the snow-slushed streets.
Maybe it was that day, yes, it probably was, that I started to slide, though at the time I told myself I was just lying in bed a little longer, waiting for Wanda and Ace getting ready to go off to work and school.
Up until that day I had been getting up with them, trying to keep everybody’s spirits up, telling the kid that he was going to do great on his English test and assuring Wanda I’d get the food on the way back from the union hall or job hunting. But every day cost me, every day without work wore me down and made me think of Crystal and the open highway, every morning sitting alone in the house made me want to reach a little quicker for the bottle just to dull the ache.
This morning I didn’t get up at all. And when they left I lay there, with two rose-printed pillows stacked up under my head, and felt my breath coming hard and a pain in my right side.
I stared up at the ceiling, at the cracks in the plaster, and thought of Dog over in his house, maybe doing the same thing, and Billy Bramdowski at his house, waiting for the new baby and scared shitless how he was going to pay for it all. And Henry and Babe down at Fells Point, sitting there waiting, and then it seemed like I could look into every home in Highlandtown and Dundalk, and they’d all be the same, the men sitting in their bathrobes, smoking cigarettes, staring at the morning game shows, maybe calling one another to keep their spirits up but having nothing to say, and finally even the sound of their buddies’ voices, so hollowed out and defeated, made them feel more alone, so they stopped calling at all. And sat at white porcelain tables in their crowded kitchens underneath sunburst clocks, listening to the low drone of the TV from the other empty rooms or the radio with its loud-mouthed wake-up Balmere jocks.
I sat straight up in bed, my chest heaving with short, jerky breaths, and I told myself to get a move on it. I’d been here before, and I knew that late at night and early in the morning were the two most dangerous times. Better by far to keep it rolling, get out in the hustle, where even if it’s tough you got the ability to get mad, to fight back with anger, anything better than sitting stock-still, having ghost visions in cracked-ceiling rooms.
After I made it to the bathroom I started to get undressed, but found myself feeling a little dizzy, so I sat down on the bed and felt the chill from the windows cutting through my bones. So I put on my old terry-cloth robe, tied it right around me, and rubbed my temples.
“Hey, it’s going to be all right,” I said out loud, but my voice sounded like it was from somewhere else. And from something else. The mechanical voice of a robot from one of those space pictures like
Star Wars.
I picked up the TV magazine and flipped through the rough pages and saw suddenly that “The Honeymooners” was on. This was something I didn’t want to do, had told myself to avoid at all costs. But suddenly it seemed (and I hate to admit this, it seems so lame) that if I watched a little of it, with good old familiar Ralph and Ed, it would cool me out, almost like talking to an old friend.
So I switched on the RCA ColorTrak we have on the gold tray with wheels at the end of our bed, and right away I knew the episode. Knew it? Hell, I’d seen it maybe forty times. It was the one where Ed and Ralph buy all these pots and pans and cooking utensils which they decide to advertise on TV. Old Norton is the Chef of the Past, who uses this worthless old-time apple corer, and Ralph is supposed to be the Chef of the Future, using their modern new equipment, and the great scene, the scene that always cracked me up in the past, is when Norton has this chef’s hat on and he’s fumbling with the dull old apple corer and then he says, “Oh Chef of the Future, do you know a modern way to core an apple?” And Ralph, who up to now has been all cocky as hell and ready to knock ‘em dead, Ralph comes on with this new gadget. Only he gets stage fright, and instead of talking he starts mumbling “Ahummmmmmmma hummmmmmmmma hummmmmmmmmada,” and sweat starts pouring down his great fat head, and he flails around like a baby rhino and knocks down the whole set, pots and pans flying everywhere.
Now, like I say, I’ve seen that show maybe forty times. In fact, it’s one of my all-time favorites, didn’t seem to matter how often I saw it, it always cracked me up. I’m talking about serious laughing, where you’re holding your sides and you can’t breathe right, and this time wasn’t any different. I started laughing the second I recognized the show, and by the time the set was destroyed I was falling backward on the bed, yowling like a madman—only suddenly I couldn’t stop laughing, and then my voice began to sound like the fat lady’s screech at Gwynn Oak Funhouse, the place where Buck and Dot used to take me as a kid, and I saw the fat lady’s mechanical mouth opening and her great, fat, geared jaws and those perfectly even, two-feet-long, filed teeth and the way she rocked back and forth like some crazed priest come to tell you about the everlasting pain of hellfire. And then I made myself stop, holding my chest and feeling like a fool and thanking God I was alone, but then another thought scared me almost as badly.
What if, when I was applying for a job, I got like Ralph and said, “Hi, I’m Red Baker, ahummmmmmmada hummmmmmmmmada hummmmmmmmmada,” and I couldn’t stop?
That thought sent cold chills through me, and I huddled up in the old terry-cloth robe, an act that usually settled me down. But it’s a funny thing about terry cloth. You get yourself a fireplace, and a dog named Chief, and a good shot of Wild Turk, and your terry cloth, and it will seem like the damndest, coziest material on earth. But here, sitting in the drafty bedroom, my skin clammy with the fears, suddenly that terry cloth seemed cheap and threadbare and like everything else in my life—lousy, secondhand, something only an out-of-work bum would wear.
Suddenly I couldn’t stand having it on me. It was the damndest thing, and I am ashamed to tell you these feelings, which I would ordinarily associate with a lunatic.
But it was me, Red Baker, who felt this way, and I knew the longer I stayed in that bedroom the closer I was going to come to heading down the booby hatch, so I threw on my street clothes, rushed down the steps, and set out looking for work.
I drove my old Chevy down Aliceanna Street toward Fells Point and stopped in front of Ruby’s Play Lounge. Ruby was a black-haired, big-breasted woman who I’d known longer than Wanda. The truth is she and I used to do some parking out by Loch Raven Reservoir back when I was at Patterson. We’d long since stopped that kind of thing, but I knew she still liked me some, and since her husband, Jim, had died of a tumor last year, I figured she might need some help running her bar.
There is no place lonelier than a bar at ten in the morning. Only two old rummies sitting there at the counter, sipping their Four Roses and mumbling things to each other about Johnny Unitas and the Colts.
“I’ll tell you if ‘ey jest got Johnny U to play for ‘em again, ‘ey would never leave town.”
“You said it. Get him and Raymond Berry. I’m telling you. ‘Ey was great! Greatest combination of all time.”
I looked at Ruby standing behind her bar, polishing the gold-edged mirror she’d put up. Behind me there were seven or eight dinner tables, with white tablecloths and flowers. It was a simple place, but she ran it decently.
At the bar was Ed Farmer, a milkman I know. He was telling Ruby about his new part-time occupation.
“Ruby, I tell you I started doing hair?”
“Hair?” Ruby said, catching my reflection in the mirror. “You’re doing hair? Ed, I didn’t know you were gay.”
Ed Farmer’s face puffed up like he’d been bit by one of them puff adders you see on “Wild Kingdom.”
“It ain’t like that. Goddamn it, Red, did you hear that?”
“Hell, Ed,” I said, “it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Some of the greatest men in history were that way.”
“Goddamn,” Ed yelled, pounding his fist on the bar so hard that the two old rummies down at the end almost fell off their stools.
“I am not a goddamned queer and never have been. In fact, I’m not even learning on women. I’m learning to cut hair on the dead.”
“Hell,” Ruby said, winking at me. “That must be easy. You don’t even have to do the back.”
This cracked me up, the first decent laugh I’d had in a week, but Ed didn’t find it that amusing.
“Look here, it’s a responsibility. You got the deceased’s parents and family to face.”
“Yeah,” Ruby said, “I can see it now. ‘Hey, my granny don’t look like no Liberace.’”
“Well hell,” Ed Farmer said. “You don’t respect nothing. What do you do that’s so great?”
“Well, one thing I don’t do is cut no corpse’s hair. You can’t even ask ‘em how they want it done. What kind of hairdressing is that?”
“Yeah, and they only come one time,” I said. “How do you know they even like what you do?”
Ed Farmer took a deep breath, tossed off a shot, and shook his head.
“A couple of wiseasses,” he said. “Well, how come you’re not working if you’re so damned smart, Baker?”
“Hey, I’m retired. Won the lottery, didn’t you hear?”
“Smartass,” Ed Farmer said. “World run by smartasses.”
He picked up his milk bottles and clanged noisily toward the door, leaving Ruby and myself pounding the bar and laughing a little too hard. I mean, it wasn’t
that
funny.
“Pretty rough on old Ed,” I said, after a while.
“He’s so damned dumb,” Ruby laughed, “I can’t help myself. Every time he comes in here I say to myself, ‘Now this time treat him with some respect,’ but then he starts in bragging about what a great provider he is, how some people don’t want to work and all that other bullshit, and I just can’t resist giving it to him.”
I smiled at her, and she smiled back, and I thought of how we used to be, young and driving out in the country, the only worry whether we were going to beat Dunbar in basketball.
“You need a beer, Red?”
“Well, maybe one.”
“Things pretty hard, Red?”
“Yeah. In fact, that’s why I come to see you. I was wondering if maybe you had a job. I mean, I can make drinks or help out … anything.”
She sighed and gave me the beer and then put her hand over mine. It was rough, scratchy, almost as raw as my own.
“Red, you need a little loan or something, I could come up with something. You know that. But, hon, I just had to let Steve the night kid go. To tell you the truth, what with the cutbacks, I don’t see how I’m going to make it through the winter. I got a plan, though. Before the money Jim left me runs out. Got a place all picked out.”
She reached down under the bar and showed me a folder of a place called Deltona, Florida.
“I’m heading down that way by this summer, maybe sooner, Red. You can get you a Spanish-hacienda-type home down there for about thirty-five thousand dollars. Real nice and right on a lake. I know a little bar down there for sale. People down there got money too, Red.”
I took a sip of my beer and looked at the folder. It had blue skies and palm trees and a young couple water-skiing and looking at each other like they were birthday cake.
I thought of Crystal and me down there. The thought ached through me, and I suddenly wanted to see her so bad, tell her I loved her and that we should leave now, just take off, head down the highway until we got to the land where the sun never quit.
Crystal and me in the moonlight, cutting through a midnight, black-water lagoon. Our boat nosing through the lily pads.
“Red, hon, you want another beer?”
“What? Oh no … I don’t think so, Ruby. You really moving to Florida?”
“I don’t know, Red. To tell you the truth, it scares hell out of me. I grew up here. I know everybody, but there’s nothing left, Red. You can’t live on memories.”
“I know we don’t see each other much, Ruby, but … well, I like knowing you’re here. I mean … hell, you know what I mean.”
She smiled at me softly, then leaned over the bar and kissed me on the cheek.
“You’re a good man, Red Baker,” she said. “I shoulda never let you go.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just smiled and told her I’d see her before she left and headed back out into the sleet and wind and snow.
• • •
For three hours I drove around Highlandtown, past the old boarded-up National Brewery and up and down Broadway, past the Circus Movie Theatre, which was playing a picture called
Behind the Green Door,
where I used to go see my serials like
Gangbusters,
and
The Rocket Man,
and Gene Autry in
The Phantom Empire,
and along with them would be two or three Woody Woodpeckers or Looney Tunes, and then a double feature. Saw my first 3-D movie in that picture house,
Bwana Devil.
Now it’s all horny sailors from off the Greek ships down on Pratt Street, with newspapers on their laps.
And in the old days all of those pictures, serials, cartoons, and double features cost thirteen cents. 1948. When I was five years old.
This was Broadway, and on Easter people would march down this street past the Johns Hopkins Hospital, and they’d be dressed in their finest clothes, and the Navy and Marine color guard would lead the parade.
Now it was nothing but bars for artists and lawyers and a bunch of dead-assed stores, and not one of them needed help. I did hear from Jim Halenski that they might be hiring up at the soap factory, so I hustled over there and waited for an hour, waited in a gray room with one chair in it and the smell of old soap leaking from the walls. When they finally did come out they told me they’d cut back 34 percent of their work force. There wasn’t even any point in filling out the papers.
I went out to the parking lot and sat behind the wheel of the car for a long time and thought again of calling Crystal. Fuck it, call her now, take off, get the hell out. I was forty years old. Maybe Wanda and Ace and I could throw a special party in the city dump, shoot and eat rats.