Little Casino

Beauty Parade

AT FIFTEEN, DURING THE CRUSHINGLY slow months of the numbingly lonely vacations that his family spends at the lake, he discovers, one day, over at the Lang house, dozens of copies of Beauty Parade, dating back five years or so, leafs through the pages of big luscious women, all rich curves and swelling flesh pushing out of the tight, astonishingly abbreviated costumes that have not, surely, words adequate to describe them. And amid the sliding and mildewed piles of newspapers, magazines, junk statuary, empty whiskey bottles, fishing lures and spoons and hooks, sinkers and floats, and cartons, half-cartons, and opened packs of Lord Salisbury cigarettes, he learns to lust and to smoke.

Orville and Jackie Lang, old bachelor brothers, who allow anyone the run of their house and the raw, half-finished workshop behind it when they’re away at work, have unwittingly introduced this boy to the twin, darkly scintillant vices of self-abuse and smoking, two wondrous hells which he luxuriously inhabits. Orville owns a flat-bottomed rowboat, painted a bright, harsh, somehow sinful green, which is moored under the rusting footbridge at the end of the road leading to a small island, the keys to its padlock, along with its oars, just behind the door to the workshop. Each afternoon, all that thickly hot summer, our youthful lecher masturbates himself into nirvana at picture after picture of these utterly generous and unashamed, sensual women, who smile directly at him from out of their welter of lace and satin and elastic, of nylon and patent leather, then he smokes a Lord Salisbury, takes two more, and prepares to spend the balance of the afternoon rowing down the little river to the lake, where he drifts in its center, smoking his stolen cigarettes and listening to the voices and laughter of the young people, whom he does not know and whom he desperately envies, slide out to him in faint timbre from the far-off beach.

In three years’ time, he will fall in love with one of the girls who sat, that very summer, on that beach with her sister and mother, a girl whom he will meet through, somehow, a casual friend, Perry? He and this girl will often cross the footbridge to the deserted and overgrown island where, their young flesh sweating, they will drive each other mad in the dark. He will not comment to her on the rowboat, nor, of course, on the delirium of his lost afternoons, when, kneeling amid the hardly credible mountains of junk and trash at the Langs’, he showed his complaisant harem what he was made of! And in three years’ time, he will know the words for each item of underwear worn by those women, women who patiently wait for his unlikely return. The girl that he will adore will not, of course, wear the wondrously tawdry garments of his courtesans. Such is life.

And, in three years’ time, he will occasionally sit, in early twilight, with Orville, and accept a Lord Salisbury, even though he smokes Philip Morris. Jackie will emerge from the disaster of a house in a vast reek of Aqua Velva to climb into his black Chrysler convertible and start up the hill for a night of drinking and dancing with yet another graying widow who can, as Jackie always says, “ball that goddamned jack.” But he will be uncomfortable with Orville, and, soon, will stop passing the occasional hour or so with him altogether.

The winter before this youth met the girl with the honey-colored hair, there came to him one night a question that he had never before posed himself, one that he had, perhaps consciously, never even formulated, or, to be more precise, refused to formulate: Why did Orville, an old, gray-haired man with brown-stained teeth and yellow fingers, buy and keep every issue of Beauty Parade? As soon as this question “arranged” itself, let’s say, in his head, his face grew hot and red. He and Orville, Orville and he and the women. The women are theirs, they shared them that entire summer of his sixteenth year. He and Orville.

Orville was a color lithographer and worked for the Journal-American.

Jackie owned a service station, Jack’s Texaco. His best mechanic, Andy, had a sister who worked as a nurse’s aide in the Caledonia Hospital in Brooklyn.

Linda! Louise! Candy!

Linda! Louise! Candy!

Linda! Louise! Candy!

Music! Music! Music!

Again! Again! Again!

“My devotion, dear ladies, is endless and deep as the ocean.”