KooKooLand (2 page)

Shirley finally got her wallet open and handed Jimmy a fin and Jimmy forked it over. The sub-eating guy went to give Jimmy his change and Jimmy recoiled.

“A two-dollar bill? Forget it, Clyde.”

Two-dollar bills were bad luck. Everybody knew that. Except maybe people out here in the boonies didn't know. Or maybe the guy was just trying to fob off some bad luck on an unsuspecting family.

“I got enough bad luck already,” Jimmy told the guy. “I got Norris Luck. You know what Norris Luck is? It's when a two-to-one shot pops an ankle half a stride from the finish line. So don't gimme any goddamn two-dollar bills.”

The guy shrugged and gave Jimmy two greasy singles instead.

Jimmy gunned it, kicking up a cloud of dust all over the booth. He sped onto the paved area and snaked between the posts that held the hissing speakers. There were mounded areas on the pavement that you were supposed to
park on to get a better view of the screen. Jimmy swerved into a spot dead center and kept shifting the car from drive to reverse to get the best angle. The second the car stopped moving, Shirley jumped out. She Windexed the dead bugs off the windshield until every streak of their guts was gone and it passed Jimmy's inspection.

Then Jimmy yanked the speaker off the post, hooked it onto the window, and adjusted the volume. The sound was muffled and crackly, as if some kid had poured a Pepsi into it.

Jimmy whapped it with his fist.

“Mickey Frickin' Mouse Incorporated musta made these speakers,” he said. “And that screen looks like it was a hooker's sheet in a flophouse. Remember, kids, the drive-in's OK for a slice-and-dice, but for a quality picture like
Lawrence of Arabia
you gotta go to the indoor joints.”

A happy man's voice was tinkling out of the speaker. “. . . Only twenty minutes till showtime. Visit our snack bar for a juicy hot dog, tasty hamburger, or pipin' hot pizza. And don't forget your popcorn, soda, and candy. Mmm-mmm.”

An animated hot dog and hamburger were doing the twist across the screen with a fat bag of popcorn and a smiling soda cup. A worried-looking clock showed there were only twenty minutes left till showtime.

I watched people all around us stampede for the snack bar. I wished I was going to the snack bar too. I could picture those giant boxes of Milk Duds and Junior Mints stacked behind the glass counter. Unfortunately, Jimmy thought snack bars were for ding-dongs.

“Look at all the ding-dongs about to get soaked for a rubber hot dog,” he crowed, as he pulled a fifth of Schenley out from under the seat. I always worried he'd cut his hand on the butcher knife he had stashed under there, but, nope, he never did.

Shirley popped open a bottle of Canada Dry ginger ale and mixed up some highballs in the plastic tumblers that Jimmy had gotten from Charlie, the gas station owner. Normally a person had to buy gas to get the glasses, but Jimmy had gotten them for free. He'd given Charlie a tip on a horse that was being hopped up and it won and Charlie came through with a tank of gas and the tumblers.

“It's too bad I couldn't get poor Hank to come,” Jimmy said as he slugged the highball. “It woulda been better for him than mopin' around over that no-account ex-wife of his.”

I forgot all about the snack bar and leaned closer to the front seat.

Whenever Hank's name was mentioned, I was all ears. Hank Piasecny was
one of Jimmy's best friends and he sure as hell wasn't poor. He was a big shot who owned a North End store that, according to Jimmy, had enough guns to kill every dummkopf in the rotten world. He also sold every kind of ammo, and fancy fishing poles to catch giant fish you could hang on your wall if you were a blowhard, and boats and motors that I figured millionaires bought. Hank and his knockout wife, Doris—well, ex-wife as of a few months back—both drove Cadillacs and Doris had a fur coat and jewelry that Shirley said was the real McCoy, so I figured Hank must be a millionaire too. It made me feel like a big shot that my dad was friends with a millionaire. None of the other kids in the projects had even met a millionaire, much less had a father who went hunting and boozing around and to the fights with one.

Jimmy said Hank was a man's man. A man's man was a guy who didn't get all nervous when a copper stopped him. A guy who would belt any palooka who looked at him sideways. Hank had a bulbous nose that had been broken a bunch of times 'cause guys were always looking at him the wrong way. I myself never looked him in the eye so I wouldn't get clocked.

Hank and Doris had a daughter, Susan, and more than anything I wanted to be her best friend. She was in college and I was only going into fourth grade, but I figured once I got into high school I'd be old enough and cool enough to win her over.

According to Jimmy, Susan could do anything. Supposedly all of Manchester and even some people outside of New Hampshire felt the same way.

“Anything that kid touches turns to gold,” Jimmy insisted. “She's a real brain, a regular egghead. She's really going places.”

I wanted to go places too. I wanted to go where Susan was going.

Jimmy said Susan was going to be a doctor. I'd never seen a lady doctor. I wondered if they got to wear high heels or if they clomped around in those ugly nurses' shoes that looked like the orthopedic ones I got stuck wearing until I was seven so I wouldn't trip over my own feet. I figured they must have lady doctors in KooKooLand. Doris had just come back from there. She must have been scoping things out for Susan.

I'd already made up my mind I was going to be a lady doctor too. That is, when I wasn't writing mystery stories. Or making movies that would scare Jimmy to death. Or flying around the world free of charge as an airline stewardess. Being a stewardess sounded like a real blast. I'd just learned the ins and outs of it from a book I'd stolen from the library. I'd already begun my training by gliding around my bedroom holding one of Jimmy's Louis Armstrong album covers as a tray and repeating, “Coffee, tea, or juice?”

I figured if Susan could do lots of things, why not me?

Susan wrote poems that won awards and she could draw and play the clarinet and ski and ride horses and play basketball and was in school plays and on prom committees and ran a newspaper.

I sure hoped Susan didn't already have a best friend.

I sure hoped Doris didn't drag her off to goddamn KooKooLand.

“Who the hell does that Doris think she is anyway, the goddamn Queen of Sheba?” Jimmy was asking Shirley. “Who the hell does she think she's gonna find better than Hank? The poor sap bought her a new Caddy every time she batted her phony eyelashes. What more did she want? Blood? Hank shoulda booted her ass out instead of the other way around.”

“Maybe we could introduce Hank to Shirley,” Shirley suggested. Shirley was the sister of Shirley's best friend. Her husband had died and she was desperate to find another one even though the one who'd died had been a no-good drunk.

“She's a little dippy, but her legs are sound. Maybe Hank can ride her around the track a few times,” Jimmy said. “I'll go talk to him tomorrow. I gotta get the poor sap out of himself. He's not livin'. And with all that dough, he oughta be livin' the life of Riley.”

Shirley gave Jimmy a peck on the cheek, leaving a pink smear, pleased he was aiding in her matchmaking efforts. She dug into the brown bag on her lap and passed out sandwiches, Fritos, and sweet-and-sour pickles. The sandwich was my favorite, pimento loaf, which was like bologna but with olives stuck in it. I wondered how they got the olives into the meat, but I was glad somebody had figured it out. Virginia hated olives and began to pick them out and hide them in the tinfoil wrapping.

As soon as I took a bite of the pimento loaf I realized I wasn't hungry. A knob of fear was lodged in my gullet like a big, fat olive. I felt like that worried-looking cartoon clock on the screen that was now starting to sweat. There were only three minutes left. Three minutes till
Blood Feast
.

I had a pretty good idea of what I was in for.

One Sunday, a few weeks back, we had come upon a movie theater in Boston where
Blood Feast
was playing. The theater was located in the part of town known as the Combat Zone. The area was crawling with girls in skintight skirts who had eyes like sleepy raccoons and guys hawking “genuine Bulova watches” that were phony as a three-dollar bill. Jimmy told us we were lucky he was showing us around the big, bad city. Other families just got to go camping in the boonies and have their keisters chewed by fire ants. Or maybe to
Disneyland, which was for patsies. Well, screw that. Jimmy wanted us to see the watering holes and strip joints he had frequented when he was in the merchant marine. He wanted us to see the real world, baby.

“How else you gonna write the Great American Novel?” he had asked me.

I didn't answer him.

I'd just laid eyes on a giant poster of a half-naked lady dripping blood. The poster was outside the theater playing
Blood Feast
.

Jimmy saw the poster and let out a whistle.

Shirley's hand holding mine tightened.

Virginia stared down at some garbage.

Jimmy sauntered up to the ticket booth. The punk in the booth was reading a magazine. I caught a glimpse of a picture of a woman with breasts like pink birthday balloons stuck to her chest by static electricity.

“What's the lowdown?” asked Jimmy. “Just how rough is this picture?”

“Oh, it's rough, man. Real bloody. Like nothin' you ever seen.” The guy suddenly noticed us. His mouth dropped open. “You can't bring kids in here.”

Jimmy didn't like the sound of that.

“Oh no? Who says I can't?”

“Read my sign,” the punk said.

He pointed to a handwritten sign taped to the glass that said
ADDULTS ONLY
. I could see he wasn't much of a speller.

“Frick you and frick your frickin' sign,” said Jimmy. “My brats love a good slice-and-dice, the bloodier the better. Don't you, brats?”

Virginia and I nodded, doing our best to look eager.

The bad speller wasn't convinced. “Look, this ain't like any other horror movie. It's eighteen and over. That's it, over and out.”

Jimmy's tanned face grew a shade darker. He tore into the punk. He said he'd seen a lotta phony-baloney movies in his life. Ones where some hooker dressed like a nurse stood in the lobby to take your blood pressure afterwards but the blood in the movie looked like Karo syrup and he knew what he was talkin' about 'cause he'd seen a lotta blood, for Chrissake, he'd been in World War II when the guy was crawlin' around in diapers. So he wasn't buyin' that this one was so bad. He was goin' in to judge for himself and we were comin' with him. It was a free country, and no little pip-squeak in some rinky-dink booth was gonna tell him where to go. He would tell the pip-squeak where to go first.

Finally, the guy hissed at him, softly so we wouldn't hear, but we did. “Beat it or I'm callin' the fuzz. You want your kids to see you get pinched?”

Jimmy's right fist clenched into a knot. I watched the eagle tattoo on his biceps fill with blood and look like it was about to fly away.

Just then, a big cop lumbered by. He was carrying a large box of pastry. I recognized the box. It was from a bakery in the North End where we often stopped for boozy rum cakes and cannoli after we left the Combat Zone. The Dago Joint, Jimmy called it, 'cause of it being Italian.

“Daddy, can we go to the Dago Joint?” I pleaded, hoping to distract him from knocking the guy's block off.

The cop overheard me and chuckled. Jimmy glared at him. He didn't like cops. Not any cops. They were mostly Micks, he said. McMurphys, McMullens, and McMeatheads. You never saw a Greek cop, 'cause the Micks had it all sewn up. They acted like big shots, but they were really just a bunch of four-flushers in uniform. I didn't know what four-flushers were, but they didn't sound like very nice people. They sounded mean for not letting any Greeks like us work with them.

Not that any Greeks would want to be cops anyway. They were too smart for that, Jimmy explained. Who the hell would want to be pounding the pavement in the dead of winter freezing your keister off when you could be in a café drinking ouzo or shooting the baloney at the bookie joint?

The cop disappeared into a pizza joint.

“Look at that lard-ass go,” Jimmy laughed.

The cop did have a fat ass, but it didn't seem right to point it out. Maybe he couldn't help having a fat ass. It might be a glandular thing. Like my friend Tina, she had a glandular thing.

“No wonder they can't finger the Boston Strangler if that's what they got for USDA prime fuzz around here,” Jimmy said.

The ticket taker cracked up. He said he'd been sayin' the same frickin' thing himself. Then he leaned forward and gave Jimmy the lowdown.

“Look, save your dough. This picture stinks,” he whispered. “Not enough bazookas.”

“I love Bazooka,” I chimed in. “I can fit six in my mouth at once.”

The guy laughed and said, “Hey, kid, me too.”

Jimmy told the guy to quit making fun of his kid or he'd golf him one. Then he said never mind the frickin' movie, he'd take his business elsewhere, that he wouldn't be caught dead in that fleabag joint anyway. He might get bitten by a rat and have to sue them for every red cent they had.

Then he turned away from the window and threw his muscley arms around the three of us.

“I'm taking my dolls to the Dago Joint.”

And off we went. We stuffed ourselves silly with rum cakes. Jimmy gave me the maraschino cherry on his. Then he took us to see
Modern Times
and we laughed ourselves silly. Charlie Chaplin played a poor working stiff in a factory, just like Shirley. Except Charlie made machine parts and Shirley made Foster Grant sunglasses, which were mostly shipped to KooKooLand 'cause that's where all the sunshine was anyway.