Little Casino

Clarity, neatness, and thoroughness

HE WAS RAISED A ROMAN CATHOLIC, AND while not relentlessly devout, was a good Catholic, heard mass every Sunday and on all Holy Days of Obligation, went to Confession and received the Eucharist a few times a year, regularly performed his Easter Duty, and had been an excellent catechism student as a boy, receiving a Commendation of Scholarship certificate from Monsignor Patrick J. O’Hara of Our Lady of Angels R.C. Church. He went on at least four retreats, ultimately joined the Knights of Columbus, and never, or at least rarely, took the name of the Lord in vain. At Brooklyn Technical High School, he excelled in his studies, and showed a special gift for organic chemistry. His laboratory notebooks were exemplary for their clarity, neatness, and thoroughness, and were, as a matter of fact, famous throughout the school. He was a Boy Scout, joining Troop 93 and becoming a member of the Eagle Patrol. He became, in time, a Junior Assistant Scoutmaster, then an Assistant Scoutmaster, and progressed rapidly from Tenderfoot to Eagle Scout with two Silver Palms, earning, finally, thirty-seven merit badges, a record for the troop. He was a dishwasher and then an assistant counselor and then a counselor at Ten Mile River Scout Camp, where he won the tmr badge, qualifying for additional awards in aquatics, crafts, nature studies, and woodsmanship. In his third summer at Ten Mile River, he was selected for the Order of the Arrow, a secret honor society based upon Indian lore and practices. He attended at least eight camporees and jamborees, and at the age of sixteen became an Explorer Scout. He went to Brooklyn College for a year as a full-time day student, then switched to night college because of the necessity of earning a living in order to assist his mother and father, both of whom were drunks. It took him seven years to earn a B.S. in Chemistry. He was drafted into the Army and became a Military Policeman, stationed, in that capacity, at Fort Dix, Fort Lee, and Fort Leonard Wood. After being discharged from the Army in 1955, he fell in love with a beautiful neighborhood girl, Isabelle Piro, who was beginning to develop a very successful career as a high-fashion model. She was killed in an automobile crash on the Gowanus Expressway at 4:30 on a Sunday morning, and it was generally known that she had been blind drunk, driving at well over eighty, and completely naked under her dress, with her underwear, some of it semen-stained, in her handbag. He began to drink heavily after quarreling wildly with her parents over a nonexistent letter that he insisted she’d left for him. He joined the Lions, the American Legion, the Book of the Month Club, and the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, all the while working as a laboratory assistant for IBM, a job that demanded virtually nothing from him. He then abruptly fell in love with the wife of one of his boyhood friends, and although she performed fellatio on him on an irregular basis, she would not go to bed with him, nor even consider leaving her husband. He asked her once to meet him, naked underneath her clothes but with her underwear in her handbag, and she told him that he was beginning to scare her and not to call anymore. He joined A.A., although, as a Catholic snob, he despised what he thought of as their humble, regular-guy God. He succeeded in his attempt at sobriety, but gave the organization no credit, since he never went to meetings after his fabricated tales of drunken degradation were accepted without question. As he began to dry out, he, oddly enough, was fired, and got another job, much like the first, in a lab in Long Island City. He became the Scoutmaster of a newly formed troop, and was soon adulterously involved with the absurdly thin wife of the pastor of the Norwegian Lutheran Church in whose basement the troop met every Friday evening. One night, after the boys had been dismissed and sent home, he was fucking Mrs. Ingebretsen, whom he sometimes called, with vague affection, “Bones,” on the desk in the tiny closet of a room that had been designated the “troop library,” because of the single shelf of unread books behind the desk, when one of the new members of the troop, a gawky boy who had not yet procured a uniform, opened the door, his Handbook for Boys in his hand, and a question, never asked, poised behind his open mouth. That was that, and he left the troop, began to drink again, and flirted with Zen, just before joining the War Resisters League and a pornographic video club, i.e. Pussie Video Sales. For a time, he became an obsessive masturbator, but then grew bored with orgasms. At a rally in Union Square against hate and violence, etc., he fell in love with Joan Baez, or someone who looked and sounded like her, who was singing of peace and fellowship and against most, but not all, rich people. He left the square, humming some old Pete Seeger warhorse, and composing, in his mind, the perfect letter to Miss Baez, when, just as he was completing his witty postscript, he was hit by a Checker cab at Tenth Street and Broadway, directly in front of Grace Church, and died on his way to St. Vincent’s.

Obviously missing from this “sketch” (not my word, I assure you!) is anything that this man may have said, at any time, to anybody. It would have been interesting to know, for instance, the content of his remarks, if any, to Mrs. Ingebretsen and Donald Fritjofsen (the gawky boy), on the occasion of their common embarrassment, and, too, his comments on the matter to Pastor Ingebretsen.

It is to be hoped that this man practiced safe sex in “the age of AIDS,” shared responsibility for birth control whenever he “got lucky,” eschewed cigarettes and all other tobacco products, knowing, as he did, that they are far, far deadlier than massive carpet-bombings and low-level napalm strikes, avoided red meat, salt, refined sugar, and saturated fats, and got plenty of exercise, despite the weeping that regularly convulsed him.

Modern Business English; The Life of the Spider; Mark, the Match Boy; Fables in Slang; Dave Dawson with the Air Corps; Penrod Jashber; Selections from the Homilies of Pastor Pietsch; The Boy Ranchers in the Desert; A Mother’s Prayer; Tom Sawyer; Best Loved Poems of the American People; The Curse of Darwin; The Ordeal of Harriet Marwood, Governess; Letters for All Occasions; A Heap o’ Livin’; A Pocket History of England; The Adventures of Ulysses.

Joan Baez, or the singer who looked like her, could not hold a candle to Isabelle Piro insofar as feminine beauty is concerned; an indication, perhaps, of this unfortunate man’s mental decline.

“Checker cabs are gone, you know? And if we play our cards right we can get rid of the age of AIDS, too, you know? If we talk to the Checker cab guys who got them out, I mean, who got rid of them, the cabs, you know what I mean?”

“Talks like a guy with a paper asshole,” Tommy Azzerini remarks.