In God we trust_ all others pay cash - Jean Shepherd [42]
“Get in there, kid, you’re holding up the line.”
XIII FLICK DREDGES UP A NOTORIOUS SON OF A BITCH
“Do you remember that robot they had at the Fair?” Flick asked.
“What robot?”
“Well, they had this robot. That smoked cigars. My Old Man took me to see it. That’s the only thing I remember.”
“That’s the way it is with fairs. You never know what you’ll remember.” Beer brings out the philosopher in me.
The two ironworkers were now having a loud artistic argument in front of the jukebox. The boilermakers had done their work well. Flick’s blue jaw tightened and once again he left the bar to go into combat. I watched from the corner of my eye as he loomed over the truculent music lovers. A few seconds later, all was peace as the two were eased out of the side door and into the cold air. Flick returned to his station and slapped his bar rag angrily into the brass trough.
“If it ain’t one thing, it’s another. You never get no peace around here.” He continued:
“One day I’m gonna kick that son of a bitch in the ass so hard he’ll never forget it!”
I looked out into the gray street and watched the belligerent, unsteady pair as they struggled against the wind in search of another, friendlier tavern. There was something vaguely familiar about the short, wide one on the left, the one carrying the battered lunch bucket.
“Hey, Flick, who is that short guy on the left?”
“Grover Dill, that son of a bitch.”
“No kidding! Really? Grover Dill! Flick, you shoulda sic’d me on that bastard. It woulda scared him out of his wits.”
Flick stared at me for a moment uncomprehendingly, and then the dawn came up like thunder on his simple Midwestern map. He leaned over the bar on his elbows.
“That’s right! Boy, I will never forget that day!”
I put up two fingers in my best Biltmore Men’s Bar manner.
“That calls for two fingers of the Real Stuff, Flick.”
“You said it, Ralph!” He poured two neat ones.
“So that old son of a bitch Grover Dill hasn’t changed a bit, has he?”
Flick tossed his off.
“If anything, he’s worse.”
XIV GROVER DILL AND THE TASMANIAN DEVIL
The male human animal, skulking through the impenetrable fetid jungle of Kidhood, learns early in the game just what sort of animal he is. The jungle he stalks is a howling tangled wilderness, infested with crawling, flying, leaping, nameless dangers. There are occasional brilliant patches of rare, passionate orchids and other sweet flowers and succulent fruits, but they are rare. He daily does battle with horrors and emotions that he will spend the rest of his life trying to forget or suppress. Or recapture.
His jungle is a wilderness he will never fully escape, but those first early years when the bloom is on the peach and the milk teeth have just barely departed are the crucial days in the Great Education.
I am not at all sure that girls have even the slightest hint that there is such a jungle. But no man is really qualified to say. Most wildernesses are masculine, anyway.
And one thing that must be said about a wilderness, in contrast to the supple silkiness of Civilization, is that the basic, primal elements of existence are laid bare and raw. And can’t be ducked. It is in that jungle that all men find out about themselves. Things we all know, but rarely admit. Say, for example, about that beady red-eyed, clawed creature, that ravening Carnivore, that incorrigibly wild, insane, scurrying little beast—the Killer that is in each one of us. We pretend it is not there most of the time, but it is a silly idle sham, as all male ex-kids know. They have seen it and have run fleeing from it more than once. Screaming into the night.
One quiet Summer afternoon, leafing through a library book, with the sun slanting down on the oaken tables, I came across a picture in a Nature book of a creature called the Tasmanian Devil. He glared directly at me out of the page, with an unwavering red-eyed gaze, and I have never forgotten