CHAPTER TWO
Boardwalk Morality
Roller coaster and amusement stands, Revere Beach Boardwalk, 1947.
“Do you really think that they’ll think I’m old enough?” “Yeah, fourteen is a little young for this work, but don’t worry about it, kid. As soon as old Abe Shaw sees you, he’ll give you a job. I guarantee it.”
It was 1946. I was surprised by Jason’s confidence in me, yet it made me feel a bit less scared. But only a bit; my palms were still sweating, and my voice was still up somewhere in my throat as I walked toward Revere Beach. I arrived at the boardwalk early, but already there was a long line of kids waiting outside the back room at the penny arcade. They were there to be interviewed by Abe Shaw, the guy who managed most of the rides and arcades in the amusement park. Abe had been there forever and had earned a reputation for being a shrewd manager and a tough boss who took no shit from anyone, not even his Mafia bosses.
I was dismayed to see that there were about three times as many kids waiting in line as there were summer jobs. Besides, most of them looked to be at least sixteen years old, the legal age for working at the amusement park. My palms began to sweat even more as some of the older guys in line looked at me contemptuously. “So why had that fucking Jason been so confident that old Abe would give me a job right away?” I thought to myself. I considered walking out and heading back home. But I couldn’t bear to imagine the look of disappointment on my mother’s face when I told her that I had left without even trying.
Boy, was I dumb. It slowly dawned on me that Jason had been teasing, using the oldest boardwalk joke in existence—“As soon as old Abe Shaw sees you, he’ll give you a job.” Of course he would. If he saw you, he’d give you just about anything you asked for—because, as everybody knew, old Abe was blind as a bat and hadn’t seen anything in forty-five years. He was a legendary figure, rumored to be able to size you up without even being able to see you. His office was in the rear of the arcade building, and his door was always open—not out of friendliness, but so he could hear the sound of the pennies and nickels clinking into the arcade machines. It was said that if Abe listened closely for about fifteen minutes at the peak of the evening, any evening, he could guess the night’s receipts with uncanny accuracy.
“Next!”
My turn finally came. I walked into the dingy office and stood in front of the desk while Abe pretended to be looking out the window. I stood quietly for three or four minutes and then cleared my throat. Abe spun around, looked straight at me, and said, “You don’t have to make noise, sonny. I know you’re there.” I gasped. Abe picked up a pencil from the desk, moved a pad of paper in front of him, and said, “What’s your name, sonny?” By this time, I was completely undone; how could a blind guy so easily find a pencil and paper on his desk? And what use could he have for them anyway?
“El . . . El . . . Elliot Aronson.”
“Well, Aronson, don’t you think you’re a little young for this kind of work? You don’t look more than fourteen, maybe fifteen, years old, tops.”
“Uh . . . I th . . . th . . . th . . . th . . . think I can do it, sir.”
“Oh, you th-th-th-think so? Well, we’ll see. We’ll try you on the milk-bottle game. The pay’s sixty cents an hour. Report to Louie tomorrow night, six o’clock sharp.
“Next!”
“So, Jason, if he’s blind, how the hell could he see that I am only fourteen years old?”
“Blind bastard was just showing off. I bet he asked you for your name right off, right?”
“Yeah. But he doesn’t know me from Adam, and he didn’t ask for my age. I swear to God! How could he know my age? That’s what I want to know!”
“Keep your shirt on. A couple of nights ago when I was leaving work, I told him my kid brother would be coming in applying for a job. I said you were a good little kid and a hard worker. So he was lying in wait for you and was probably set to hire you. And he knows that I’m seventeen, so he probably guessed that you were two or three years younger than me. He knew if you were twelve, you wouldn’t be applying for a job, right? So he figured fourteen or fifteen would be a good guess. End of mystery.”
“But why would he want to go through all that, just to confuse a little kid?”
“Like I said, just showing off. Look, Abe is blind, right? And he’s got some weird talents that only blind guys have, like he can hear better than most people. So he knows somebody’s in the room—right? ‘Cause he heard you walk in. And he knows where you’re standing because he can hear you breathing. So, because he can do some things that are only slightly out of the ordinary, he’s become famous for having a sixth sense. He likes that, right? So he tries to add to that legend by faking more dramatic stuff—stuff that he really can’t do. But he pretends that he can by taking a calculated guess based on information he has, but that you don’t know he has. And he says it as if he’s sure as hell. And the next thing you know, the kid in front of him—you, simple bastard that you are—is dazzled by his magic.”
“But what if he’s wrong?”
“Nothing! If he’s wrong about your age, you correct him, and you don’t think much about it one way or the other. After all, who expects a blind guy to be able to guess a person’s age? But if he’s right, you get all impressed, and you go around telling everybody who’ll listen what a supertalented hotshot old Abe is. And the next thing you know, we have a living legend on our hands. Don’t you see? He can’t lose.”
Jason was right on this one, but blind Abe had other foibles too, some of which weren’t quite so harmless. Like the way he used to grab little kids by the balls when they came into his office. He pretended that he was just horsing around, but none of us ever believed that. We all knew he was serious, but we kept quiet about it. All for sixty cents an hour, a penny a minute. Quite a bargain, for him.
Abe and his cronies stiffed us boardwalk workers to boot. They would stop counting our time the minute we closed the doors, but there was always another forty-five minutes of cleanup to do that we never got paid for. And if we ever checked in a nickel short, they docked us the nickel. Nobody ever complained, though. Not just because we needed the money, but because we knew there were fifty kids in line waiting for our jobs. Besides, we figured the bosses had the power and therefore the right to jerk us around.
But we got even, thanks to what Jason called “boardwalk morality.” For example, everybody I knew who worked on the boardwalk used to clip—a euphemism for stealing. But boardwalk workers never thought of it as stealing. Stealing was wrong; that’s when you shortchanged a customer. It was wrong for two reasons: First, most customers were poor slobs like us and couldn’t afford to be cheated. Second, if you thought about shortchanging anyone, you would never try it on the untrusting customers who counted every cent in change as if their lives depended on it. No, the only customers you could get away with cheating were those who trusted you. And what kind of a guy would cheat someone who trusted you? That’s why any kid who was known to cheat customers was held in contempt by the other boardwalk workers.
But clipping wasn’t stealing; it was getting even—getting even with a bunch of rich, dishonest bastards who underpaid you and who watched you like a hawk. Clipping therefore had to be subtle and skillfully done. Anyone who was caught was fired immediately, as happened to Noman Pasternak. Noman’s real name, of course, was Norman, but one day, when penciling his name on the starched lapel of his working jacket, something we all did, he unwittingly left out the “r.” From then on, we all called him “Noman.”
Noman worked on a penny-pitch game in the arcade, where the customers tossed pennies, trying to get them to lodge in a shallow bowl floating in a tub of water. If they succeeded, they won a chintzy little prize—such as a balloon shaped like Mickey Mouse that could stand up on cardboard feet. Nine times out of ten, the tossed penny would skip out of the bowl and land in the water. One night after work several of us dropped into a boardwalk deli run by Abe and his associates. Noman ordered a corned-beef sandwich and promptly paid for it with thirty-five wet pennies. The next day, when he reported for work, he was sacked on the spot.
The boardwalk was a two-mile microcosm of a complex city, crowded with colorful characters, all kinds of games and rides, nightly shows, and food stands galore, their pungent smells intermingling in the air—including frozen custard, pizza, hamburgers, cotton candy, fried clams, and Joe Nemo’s hot dogs. And the sounds! The roar of the roller coaster, the screams of its riders, filled the air. At first I worked the milk-bottle stand, where the customer got three baseballs to throw at five hollow aluminum bottles stacked on a small table. (They weren’t real baseballs, of course; they were cheap sawdust-packed nickel bricks that we had to wrap in tape so that the covering wouldn’t fall off after a day.) If you knocked the five bottles off the table with three balls, you’d win a cockamamie plastic Hawaiian lei; with two balls, a cheap wooden cane. But if you succeeded in knocking them all off with one ball, you would get the best prize on the boardwalk—a teddy bear. But not just any teddy bear. “No sirree,” I’d say, “but a big, fat, cuddly Mumbo Jumbo teddy bear. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, we’re playing for the big one, the Mumbo Jumbo teddy bear. Come on over! Three balls for a quarter. How about you, sir? Don’t you want to win a Mumbo Jumbo teddy bear for the little lady?”
Almost anyone could win himself a lei. And quite a number of people could win a cane. But the probability of knocking all those bottles off the table with one ball was almost zero. “I’m sorry, sir,” I’d have to tell customers time and again, “you can’t just knock them down; they have to be all the way off the table.” It would have been extremely difficult to throw a single ball hard enough and true enough to knock all the bottles off with one pitch, even if the game had been honest. But Abe Shaw didn’t take any chances. The thing was rigged. The two end bottles on the bottom row had about an inch of lead poured into them, so that when the ball hit one of them it sort of keeled over in a dead faint and laid there on the table without budging.
The bottles flopped down in such an unnatural manner that it’s a wonder everybody didn’t get suspicious right away. A few people did, but Abe had worked out a contingency plan. He had instructed me and the other workers how to handle that situation: A guy might say, “Hey, the bottom bottles are made out of lead!” At which point I would assume a long-suffering look of resignation, walk over to a newly stacked set of bottles, grab the middle bottle from the bottom row, and present it to the complainer for his inspection. This gesture was designed to be so winningly forthright that no one thought to quibble about whether the other bottles might be leaded. It worked every time.
My biggest problem, though, was not with suspicious customers but with frustrated ones. There were four tables of milk-bottle games, each in its own alley. After spending several dollars vainly trying to win his girl a Mumbo Jumbo teddy bear, players were likely to feel exasperated, embarrassed, and angry. And, since they didn’t care much about the second and third prizes anyway, after missing with the first ball, they had two spare balls that they had no real use for. So they found a use for them: hurling them at me while I was busily setting up the bottles in the next alley. The first time it happened, I didn’t know what hit me. I felt a searing pain in the small of my back, and spun around in shock and fury only to see the smiling face of my tormentor, claiming, in mock apology, that the ball got away from him.
Of course, I didn’t believe a word of it. But my options were limited; these guys invariably had ten years and eighty pounds on me. Besides, deep down, I believed they had a right to be angry because they were being gypped. I struggled with that one, trying to protect myself and also trying to figure out where I fit into this world.
“They’re right to be mad, goddammit,” I’d complain to Jason. “So what the hell are you complaining about?”
“Why me? I didn’t do anything wrong. I don’t deserve to get hit with a fucking baseball. I get sixty cents an hour here. I’m not the one that’s cheating them.”
“Of course you are.”
“No, I’m not. Well . . . okay, I am, but I’m not getting rich off them.”
“Justice, he wants. On the boardwalk, no less.”
“Damn right! What’s wrong with that?”
“Look, El. Don’t get all self-righteous all over me, willya? Part of what you’re getting paid for is to be insulation, and you know it. When’s the last time Abe Shaw got hit with a fucking baseball?”
“That prick!”
“He’s not such a prick. He’s just playing the system. And that’s the way the system works. When a person gets some dough together, he can walk around in his house in his shirtsleeves in the middle of winter without being cold because he can afford insulation. In our house everybody is wearing eleven sweaters, and we’re still shivering and freezing our asses off. Abe Shaw can pay for insulation. On the boardwalk his insulation is you and me, and everybody else that works for him. We stand between him and the big guy throwing baseballs. It’s a shitty job, and I hate it and I can see that you hate it too, and I’m glad you hate it. Some of these guys don’t seem to mind it, and I feel really sorry for them,” he continued. “But look, don’t pretend that you don’t know what’s happening. If you start pretending, you’re really lost. Abe is a crook, but he’s pretty honest with us. He tells us what he’s going to pay us, and he tells us what he wants us to do. And we can take it or leave it. Just don’t whine about it.”
During Jason’s talk I was staring down at my feet, nodding occasionally, and letting the words flow over and around me. It reminded me of the delicious sensation of climbing into a nice warm bath after a day out in the cold. (In our house nothing nice was ever simply called by its name. There was never anything as simple as a warm bath. It was always a nice warm bath. Conversely, nothing was ever simply unpleasant, such as a draft of cold air coming through cracks in the window frame; it was always a terrible draft.) I loved listening to Jason. The world was a confusing place. Nothing was as clear as I wanted it to be and as it was in the movies, where the good guys wore white and always behaved politely and the bad guys always needed a shave and could never look you in the eye. In the real world I tried to identify the villains, spot the phonies, and, by the way, cast myself in the role of the hero. But I suspected that I was kidding myself, that the world was more complex than I wanted it to be, though I wasn’t entirely certain what I was leaving out of the picture.
Every once in a while Jason turned on a spotlight for me. He illuminated the unspoken rules of the boardwalk, where you shouldn’t believe your eyes, where what you saw was not the truth, where the games were rigged, where you always needed to look behind the curtain if you wanted to know what was really going on. I was grateful to him, so how did I express my gratitude? I punched him as hard as I could on the arm. “How did you get to know so much?”
“Don’t be a smart-ass, El. Nobody likes a smart-ass.”
I was anything but a smart-ass. I was timid, often confused, but I kept trying to understand. I did appreciate Jason’s insights, but they were usually delivered as lectures, with an attitude of know-it-all pomposity that made it difficult for me to swallow the lesson whole. I always wished that the message would come in a beautifully wrapped package, so that I could embrace the whole thing without all those feelings of ambivalence.
Nonetheless, during the first eighteen years of my life, Jason was just about the only person in my family to see me as a bright and talented youngster with a lot of potential; he was undeterred by all the evidence to the contrary. He taught me that hard work could be fun, and that having fun was important. He taught me to take myself seriously, but not too seriously. By example, he showed me the joy of poking fun at my own foibles and blunders and that humor could be found in anything. For years after the aphasia brought on by my concussion, he would mimic the way I tried to say “I’m all right”—a flawless imitation of Charles Laughton’s Quasimodo, the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Also by example, he taught me how to play the hand I was dealt, in poker as in life, like a mensch—that is, with a minimum of whining or complaining.
The boardwalk was full of other lessons besides the cynical ones, if you were ready to observe them. One lesson came from the brilliant divers at the aquatic show, who could do triple somersaults in the air before gracefully entering the water, making barely a ripple. After their act a clown would appear on the high dive, wearing a baggy swimsuit that hung down to his knees. He would peer over the edge tentatively and then back away. He would try again, look down in feigned fright, step backward toward the edge, go too far, and fall, arms and legs flailing. The audience would be helpless with laughter. “What an idiot!” my buddy exclaimed.
It took me many nights of observation before I realized that far from being a clumsy buffoon, he was the most talented diver in the show. I came to appreciate how much hard work he put into appearing so clumsy, while entering the water safely at the last second. Years later, when I became a college professor, laboring for hours to prepare lectures that seemed casual and spontaneous, I would think fondly of that clown diver and the lesson his performance taught me: If it looks easy, it probably isn’t.
My milk-bottle game was on the boardwalk just down from the biggest arcade, where Abe Shaw’s office was. You would enter the arcade to find, on your right, pinball games, a fortune-telling machine, and the penny-pitching game where Noman worked. On your left was Pokerino, thirty individual tables that ran in a long row from the front of the arcade all the way to the back. In Pokerino you didn’t compete with other players. You sat at your own table and rolled a ball into one of its pockets, labeled with card names—jack of spades, king of hearts. As the board lit up, you’d try to roll the ball into the pocket that would give you the best poker hand. It took some skill to win this game, but mostly luck; that ball took some strange bounces.
The only grown men on the boardwalk who made more than $3 an hour were the mike men on the major games, such as Pokerino and Fascination. A good mike man was worth his weight in gold (or, more accurately, in nickels), because a lot of money was riding on how quickly he could break the ice—that is, on how quickly he could get those first few people off the street and into the arcade. These guys were charming, witty schmoozers, and we all admired the hell out of them. The least-experienced kids worked the simplest games, so I was thrilled when, at age sixteen, I was offered a promotion, to make change at the Pokerino tables.
One cold and rainy night, with hardly any patrons on the boardwalk, the mike man at the Pokerino tables stepped down from his perch and asked me if I wanted to take over until closing time. This was a fantasy come true. I had been observing him, listening to his spiel over and over until I had it memorized. I even found ways to improve upon it, while rehearsing for hours in front of a mirror. So when he gave me a chance, I was ready. This is what I came up with my first night behind the mike:
Roller coaster and amusement stands, Revere Beach Boardwalk, 1947.
“Do you really think that they’ll think I’m old enough?” “Yeah, fourteen is a little young for this work, but don’t worry about it, kid. As soon as old Abe Shaw sees you, he’ll give you a job. I guarantee it.”
It was 1946. I was surprised by Jason’s confidence in me, yet it made me feel a bit less scared. But only a bit; my palms were still sweating, and my voice was still up somewhere in my throat as I walked toward Revere Beach. I arrived at the boardwalk early, but already there was a long line of kids waiting outside the back room at the penny arcade. They were there to be interviewed by Abe Shaw, the guy who managed most of the rides and arcades in the amusement park. Abe had been there forever and had earned a reputation for being a shrewd manager and a tough boss who took no shit from anyone, not even his Mafia bosses.
I was dismayed to see that there were about three times as many kids waiting in line as there were summer jobs. Besides, most of them looked to be at least sixteen years old, the legal age for working at the amusement park. My palms began to sweat even more as some of the older guys in line looked at me contemptuously. “So why had that fucking Jason been so confident that old Abe would give me a job right away?” I thought to myself. I considered walking out and heading back home. But I couldn’t bear to imagine the look of disappointment on my mother’s face when I told her that I had left without even trying.
Boy, was I dumb. It slowly dawned on me that Jason had been teasing, using the oldest boardwalk joke in existence—“As soon as old Abe Shaw sees you, he’ll give you a job.” Of course he would. If he saw you, he’d give you just about anything you asked for—because, as everybody knew, old Abe was blind as a bat and hadn’t seen anything in forty-five years. He was a legendary figure, rumored to be able to size you up without even being able to see you. His office was in the rear of the arcade building, and his door was always open—not out of friendliness, but so he could hear the sound of the pennies and nickels clinking into the arcade machines. It was said that if Abe listened closely for about fifteen minutes at the peak of the evening, any evening, he could guess the night’s receipts with uncanny accuracy.
“Next!”
My turn finally came. I walked into the dingy office and stood in front of the desk while Abe pretended to be looking out the window. I stood quietly for three or four minutes and then cleared my throat. Abe spun around, looked straight at me, and said, “You don’t have to make noise, sonny. I know you’re there.” I gasped. Abe picked up a pencil from the desk, moved a pad of paper in front of him, and said, “What’s your name, sonny?” By this time, I was completely undone; how could a blind guy so easily find a pencil and paper on his desk? And what use could he have for them anyway?
“El . . . El . . . Elliot Aronson.”
“Well, Aronson, don’t you think you’re a little young for this kind of work? You don’t look more than fourteen, maybe fifteen, years old, tops.”
“Uh . . . I th . . . th . . . th . . . th . . . think I can do it, sir.”
“Oh, you th-th-th-think so? Well, we’ll see. We’ll try you on the milk-bottle game. The pay’s sixty cents an hour. Report to Louie tomorrow night, six o’clock sharp.
“Next!”
“So, Jason, if he’s blind, how the hell could he see that I am only fourteen years old?”
“Blind bastard was just showing off. I bet he asked you for your name right off, right?”
“Yeah. But he doesn’t know me from Adam, and he didn’t ask for my age. I swear to God! How could he know my age? That’s what I want to know!”
“Keep your shirt on. A couple of nights ago when I was leaving work, I told him my kid brother would be coming in applying for a job. I said you were a good little kid and a hard worker. So he was lying in wait for you and was probably set to hire you. And he knows that I’m seventeen, so he probably guessed that you were two or three years younger than me. He knew if you were twelve, you wouldn’t be applying for a job, right? So he figured fourteen or fifteen would be a good guess. End of mystery.”
“But why would he want to go through all that, just to confuse a little kid?”
“Like I said, just showing off. Look, Abe is blind, right? And he’s got some weird talents that only blind guys have, like he can hear better than most people. So he knows somebody’s in the room—right? ‘Cause he heard you walk in. And he knows where you’re standing because he can hear you breathing. So, because he can do some things that are only slightly out of the ordinary, he’s become famous for having a sixth sense. He likes that, right? So he tries to add to that legend by faking more dramatic stuff—stuff that he really can’t do. But he pretends that he can by taking a calculated guess based on information he has, but that you don’t know he has. And he says it as if he’s sure as hell. And the next thing you know, the kid in front of him—you, simple bastard that you are—is dazzled by his magic.”
“But what if he’s wrong?”
“Nothing! If he’s wrong about your age, you correct him, and you don’t think much about it one way or the other. After all, who expects a blind guy to be able to guess a person’s age? But if he’s right, you get all impressed, and you go around telling everybody who’ll listen what a supertalented hotshot old Abe is. And the next thing you know, we have a living legend on our hands. Don’t you see? He can’t lose.”
Jason was right on this one, but blind Abe had other foibles too, some of which weren’t quite so harmless. Like the way he used to grab little kids by the balls when they came into his office. He pretended that he was just horsing around, but none of us ever believed that. We all knew he was serious, but we kept quiet about it. All for sixty cents an hour, a penny a minute. Quite a bargain, for him.
Abe and his cronies stiffed us boardwalk workers to boot. They would stop counting our time the minute we closed the doors, but there was always another forty-five minutes of cleanup to do that we never got paid for. And if we ever checked in a nickel short, they docked us the nickel. Nobody ever complained, though. Not just because we needed the money, but because we knew there were fifty kids in line waiting for our jobs. Besides, we figured the bosses had the power and therefore the right to jerk us around.
But we got even, thanks to what Jason called “boardwalk morality.” For example, everybody I knew who worked on the boardwalk used to clip—a euphemism for stealing. But boardwalk workers never thought of it as stealing. Stealing was wrong; that’s when you shortchanged a customer. It was wrong for two reasons: First, most customers were poor slobs like us and couldn’t afford to be cheated. Second, if you thought about shortchanging anyone, you would never try it on the untrusting customers who counted every cent in change as if their lives depended on it. No, the only customers you could get away with cheating were those who trusted you. And what kind of a guy would cheat someone who trusted you? That’s why any kid who was known to cheat customers was held in contempt by the other boardwalk workers.
But clipping wasn’t stealing; it was getting even—getting even with a bunch of rich, dishonest bastards who underpaid you and who watched you like a hawk. Clipping therefore had to be subtle and skillfully done. Anyone who was caught was fired immediately, as happened to Noman Pasternak. Noman’s real name, of course, was Norman, but one day, when penciling his name on the starched lapel of his working jacket, something we all did, he unwittingly left out the “r.” From then on, we all called him “Noman.”
Noman worked on a penny-pitch game in the arcade, where the customers tossed pennies, trying to get them to lodge in a shallow bowl floating in a tub of water. If they succeeded, they won a chintzy little prize—such as a balloon shaped like Mickey Mouse that could stand up on cardboard feet. Nine times out of ten, the tossed penny would skip out of the bowl and land in the water. One night after work several of us dropped into a boardwalk deli run by Abe and his associates. Noman ordered a corned-beef sandwich and promptly paid for it with thirty-five wet pennies. The next day, when he reported for work, he was sacked on the spot.
The boardwalk was a two-mile microcosm of a complex city, crowded with colorful characters, all kinds of games and rides, nightly shows, and food stands galore, their pungent smells intermingling in the air—including frozen custard, pizza, hamburgers, cotton candy, fried clams, and Joe Nemo’s hot dogs. And the sounds! The roar of the roller coaster, the screams of its riders, filled the air. At first I worked the milk-bottle stand, where the customer got three baseballs to throw at five hollow aluminum bottles stacked on a small table. (They weren’t real baseballs, of course; they were cheap sawdust-packed nickel bricks that we had to wrap in tape so that the covering wouldn’t fall off after a day.) If you knocked the five bottles off the table with three balls, you’d win a cockamamie plastic Hawaiian lei; with two balls, a cheap wooden cane. But if you succeeded in knocking them all off with one ball, you would get the best prize on the boardwalk—a teddy bear. But not just any teddy bear. “No sirree,” I’d say, “but a big, fat, cuddly Mumbo Jumbo teddy bear. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, we’re playing for the big one, the Mumbo Jumbo teddy bear. Come on over! Three balls for a quarter. How about you, sir? Don’t you want to win a Mumbo Jumbo teddy bear for the little lady?”
Almost anyone could win himself a lei. And quite a number of people could win a cane. But the probability of knocking all those bottles off the table with one ball was almost zero. “I’m sorry, sir,” I’d have to tell customers time and again, “you can’t just knock them down; they have to be all the way off the table.” It would have been extremely difficult to throw a single ball hard enough and true enough to knock all the bottles off with one pitch, even if the game had been honest. But Abe Shaw didn’t take any chances. The thing was rigged. The two end bottles on the bottom row had about an inch of lead poured into them, so that when the ball hit one of them it sort of keeled over in a dead faint and laid there on the table without budging.
The bottles flopped down in such an unnatural manner that it’s a wonder everybody didn’t get suspicious right away. A few people did, but Abe had worked out a contingency plan. He had instructed me and the other workers how to handle that situation: A guy might say, “Hey, the bottom bottles are made out of lead!” At which point I would assume a long-suffering look of resignation, walk over to a newly stacked set of bottles, grab the middle bottle from the bottom row, and present it to the complainer for his inspection. This gesture was designed to be so winningly forthright that no one thought to quibble about whether the other bottles might be leaded. It worked every time.
My biggest problem, though, was not with suspicious customers but with frustrated ones. There were four tables of milk-bottle games, each in its own alley. After spending several dollars vainly trying to win his girl a Mumbo Jumbo teddy bear, players were likely to feel exasperated, embarrassed, and angry. And, since they didn’t care much about the second and third prizes anyway, after missing with the first ball, they had two spare balls that they had no real use for. So they found a use for them: hurling them at me while I was busily setting up the bottles in the next alley. The first time it happened, I didn’t know what hit me. I felt a searing pain in the small of my back, and spun around in shock and fury only to see the smiling face of my tormentor, claiming, in mock apology, that the ball got away from him.
Of course, I didn’t believe a word of it. But my options were limited; these guys invariably had ten years and eighty pounds on me. Besides, deep down, I believed they had a right to be angry because they were being gypped. I struggled with that one, trying to protect myself and also trying to figure out where I fit into this world.
“They’re right to be mad, goddammit,” I’d complain to Jason. “So what the hell are you complaining about?”
“Why me? I didn’t do anything wrong. I don’t deserve to get hit with a fucking baseball. I get sixty cents an hour here. I’m not the one that’s cheating them.”
“Of course you are.”
“No, I’m not. Well . . . okay, I am, but I’m not getting rich off them.”
“Justice, he wants. On the boardwalk, no less.”
“Damn right! What’s wrong with that?”
“Look, El. Don’t get all self-righteous all over me, willya? Part of what you’re getting paid for is to be insulation, and you know it. When’s the last time Abe Shaw got hit with a fucking baseball?”
“That prick!”
“He’s not such a prick. He’s just playing the system. And that’s the way the system works. When a person gets some dough together, he can walk around in his house in his shirtsleeves in the middle of winter without being cold because he can afford insulation. In our house everybody is wearing eleven sweaters, and we’re still shivering and freezing our asses off. Abe Shaw can pay for insulation. On the boardwalk his insulation is you and me, and everybody else that works for him. We stand between him and the big guy throwing baseballs. It’s a shitty job, and I hate it and I can see that you hate it too, and I’m glad you hate it. Some of these guys don’t seem to mind it, and I feel really sorry for them,” he continued. “But look, don’t pretend that you don’t know what’s happening. If you start pretending, you’re really lost. Abe is a crook, but he’s pretty honest with us. He tells us what he’s going to pay us, and he tells us what he wants us to do. And we can take it or leave it. Just don’t whine about it.”
During Jason’s talk I was staring down at my feet, nodding occasionally, and letting the words flow over and around me. It reminded me of the delicious sensation of climbing into a nice warm bath after a day out in the cold. (In our house nothing nice was ever simply called by its name. There was never anything as simple as a warm bath. It was always a nice warm bath. Conversely, nothing was ever simply unpleasant, such as a draft of cold air coming through cracks in the window frame; it was always a terrible draft.) I loved listening to Jason. The world was a confusing place. Nothing was as clear as I wanted it to be and as it was in the movies, where the good guys wore white and always behaved politely and the bad guys always needed a shave and could never look you in the eye. In the real world I tried to identify the villains, spot the phonies, and, by the way, cast myself in the role of the hero. But I suspected that I was kidding myself, that the world was more complex than I wanted it to be, though I wasn’t entirely certain what I was leaving out of the picture.
Every once in a while Jason turned on a spotlight for me. He illuminated the unspoken rules of the boardwalk, where you shouldn’t believe your eyes, where what you saw was not the truth, where the games were rigged, where you always needed to look behind the curtain if you wanted to know what was really going on. I was grateful to him, so how did I express my gratitude? I punched him as hard as I could on the arm. “How did you get to know so much?”
“Don’t be a smart-ass, El. Nobody likes a smart-ass.”
I was anything but a smart-ass. I was timid, often confused, but I kept trying to understand. I did appreciate Jason’s insights, but they were usually delivered as lectures, with an attitude of know-it-all pomposity that made it difficult for me to swallow the lesson whole. I always wished that the message would come in a beautifully wrapped package, so that I could embrace the whole thing without all those feelings of ambivalence.
Nonetheless, during the first eighteen years of my life, Jason was just about the only person in my family to see me as a bright and talented youngster with a lot of potential; he was undeterred by all the evidence to the contrary. He taught me that hard work could be fun, and that having fun was important. He taught me to take myself seriously, but not too seriously. By example, he showed me the joy of poking fun at my own foibles and blunders and that humor could be found in anything. For years after the aphasia brought on by my concussion, he would mimic the way I tried to say “I’m all right”—a flawless imitation of Charles Laughton’s Quasimodo, the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Also by example, he taught me how to play the hand I was dealt, in poker as in life, like a mensch—that is, with a minimum of whining or complaining.
The boardwalk was full of other lessons besides the cynical ones, if you were ready to observe them. One lesson came from the brilliant divers at the aquatic show, who could do triple somersaults in the air before gracefully entering the water, making barely a ripple. After their act a clown would appear on the high dive, wearing a baggy swimsuit that hung down to his knees. He would peer over the edge tentatively and then back away. He would try again, look down in feigned fright, step backward toward the edge, go too far, and fall, arms and legs flailing. The audience would be helpless with laughter. “What an idiot!” my buddy exclaimed.
It took me many nights of observation before I realized that far from being a clumsy buffoon, he was the most talented diver in the show. I came to appreciate how much hard work he put into appearing so clumsy, while entering the water safely at the last second. Years later, when I became a college professor, laboring for hours to prepare lectures that seemed casual and spontaneous, I would think fondly of that clown diver and the lesson his performance taught me: If it looks easy, it probably isn’t.
My milk-bottle game was on the boardwalk just down from the biggest arcade, where Abe Shaw’s office was. You would enter the arcade to find, on your right, pinball games, a fortune-telling machine, and the penny-pitching game where Noman worked. On your left was Pokerino, thirty individual tables that ran in a long row from the front of the arcade all the way to the back. In Pokerino you didn’t compete with other players. You sat at your own table and rolled a ball into one of its pockets, labeled with card names—jack of spades, king of hearts. As the board lit up, you’d try to roll the ball into the pocket that would give you the best poker hand. It took some skill to win this game, but mostly luck; that ball took some strange bounces.
The only grown men on the boardwalk who made more than $3 an hour were the mike men on the major games, such as Pokerino and Fascination. A good mike man was worth his weight in gold (or, more accurately, in nickels), because a lot of money was riding on how quickly he could break the ice—that is, on how quickly he could get those first few people off the street and into the arcade. These guys were charming, witty schmoozers, and we all admired the hell out of them. The least-experienced kids worked the simplest games, so I was thrilled when, at age sixteen, I was offered a promotion, to make change at the Pokerino tables.
One cold and rainy night, with hardly any patrons on the boardwalk, the mike man at the Pokerino tables stepped down from his perch and asked me if I wanted to take over until closing time. This was a fantasy come true. I had been observing him, listening to his spiel over and over until I had it memorized. I even found ways to improve upon it, while rehearsing for hours in front of a mirror. So when he gave me a chance, I was ready. This is what I came up with my first night behind the mike:Walk right in, sit in, get a seat, get a ball. Play poker for a nickel. Five cents. There are no bells to start you or stop you. You play your own individual game. You win your own individual prizes! And we’re playing for the biggest, the best, the grandest prizes on the boardwalk. It’s so easy to play and win a game. You put a nickel in the slot, and you get five rubber balls. You roll them nice and easy, under the glass, over the incline, and into the various marked pockets. Any three of a kind or better poker hand, and you are a winner. So walk in, sit in, play poker for a nickel. Five cents. Hey! There’s three jacks on table number 27. Pay off that lucky winner! And a full house on table number 16!That was me! There I was, smooth as silk. Actually, there was nobody in the arcade. There wasn’t anyone sitting at table number 27 or table number 16. I had somehow figured out that the only way to attract people was to make it sound as if others had already been pulled in by the game. And sure enough, a few people wandered in and began to play. Within a half hour it seemed like half of the sparse crowd wandering the boardwalk was playing Pokerino. Abe Shaw came out of his office and asked his assistant what was causing the commotion. “It seems to be Elliot doing his spiel,” the assistant reported. “Make that kid a mike man,” said Abe, and my career as a barker began. I got a raise to $1.50 an hour. Even while I was doing it, though, I questioned how I could have made it as a mike man. I was convinced that my shyness was a permanent social handicap: I always had been shy, and I always would be shy. Yet on the boardwalk I was able to assert myself and behave with grace and even boldness. My success behind the microphone delighted me, but also confused me. Who was I, really? Being able to ask that question raised the possibility that, one day, I could become more like my big brother than I had previously dared to dream. 在 线阅DU网：http://Www.yuedu88.com/