In God we trust_ all others pay cash - Jean Shepherd [107]
A great crash of Gravy Boats like the breaking of surf on an alien shore drowned out his words. And then, spreading to all corners of the house, shopping bags were emptied as the arms rose and fell in the darkness, maniacal female cackles and obscenities driving Doppler from the stage.
High overhead someone switched off the spotlights and Frankenstein flickered across the screen. But it was too late. More Gravy Boats, and even more. It seemed to be an almost inexhaustible supply, as though some great Mother Lode of Gravy Boats had been struck. The eerie sound track of The Bride of Frankenstein mingled with the rising and falling cadence of wave upon wave of hurled Gravy Boats. Outside the distant sound of approaching Riot Cars. The house lights went on. The Orpheum was suddenly filled with a phalanx of blue-jowled policemen.
The audience sat amid the ruin, taciturn, satisfied. Under the guidance of pointed nightsticks they filed into the grim darkness of the outside world. The Dish Night Fever was over, once and for all. The great days of the Orpheum and Leopold Doppler had passed forever.
Somewhere a million miles away a short man with a funny mustache, in a trench coat, was starting the cameras a-rolling for the next great feature, which was to star all the Male kids in the world.
The doors of the Orpheum never opened again. Mr. Doppler disappeared from our lives forever, leaving behind countless sets of uncompleted Hollywood Star Time Dinnerware, memories of Errol Flynn, stripped to the waist, climbing the rigging of a Pirate barkentine; George Raft, smooth and oily under a white, snap-brim fedora surrounded by camel’s-hair-coated henchmen, Bobby Breen and Deanna Durbin on a rose-covered swing, with Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald waltzing endlessly under Japanese lanterns; José Iturbi at a piano made of ivory and mirrors playing great rhapsodies before thousand-piece orchestras in a perpetual MGM Grand Finale. Doppler had done his work well.
“Do you want me to warm up your cup?”
The counterman snapped me back from Screenland abruptly. Before I could answer he moved away. I knew what I had to do. Stealthily, moving like a cat, in one quick motion I swept the damp green bowl into my zippered briefcase. In my booming John Wayne voice, to keep him off my trail, I barked:
“Well, gotta push off.”
I slapped a buck on the counter and quickly scuttled out with my priceless objet d’art concealed under my arm. For a brief instant I almost panicked as I thought I heard the sound of the high, tinny voices of the Andrew Sisters singing “Roll Out the Barrel” from my attaché case, but it was just the buzzing of a leaky neon-sign transformer.
An instant later I was out on the Turnpike, jaw set in my widely applauded Claude Rains smile, the hard-earned result of hundreds of hours logged in secret practice before the bathroom mirrors of my Adolescence, carrying with me safely a relic that would confound and bemuse as yet unborn future generations of anthropologists, a mute, lumpy Rosetta Stone of our time.
* Lines from “Betty Coed” by Paul Fogarty and Rudy Vallee, copyright 1930 by Carl Fischer, Inc., New York. Copyright renewed. Reprinted by permission.
XXXI THE DAY SHIFT DROPS BY FOR A BELT
“You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
With this, Flick hunched down under the bar and began rummaging around on the shelves next to the beer tap. He straightened with an air of transcendent triumph, concealing in each hand an object. Placing his fists carefully on the bar, he slowly opened them to reveal two dull, gleaming objects.
“What are these?” I asked.
“Take a look at ’em. Just take a look at ’em.”
I bent over in the darkening light of Flick’s Tavern. Full winter twilight had now settled down over the grim landscape. Outside, the wind rose, and I could hear the tinfoil streamers snapping and cracking viciously over at Friendly Fred’s Used-Car lot. I bent closer to see what Flick had placed on the bar. Maybe it was the beer, or it might have been the light, but at first I didn’t know what he was driving at. I picked one