In God we trust_ all others pay cash - Jean Shepherd [47]
“Yep. I always was wiry,” I said.
“Oh yeah? I remember the time Paswinski chased you up on the garage and you stayed there all Saturday,” Flick sneered, stroking old fires.
“I liked it up there! What do you mean, I used to always go up on the garage—I liked it up there.”
“Oh sure. Especially when Paswinski was throwing rocks at you.”
“Well, I notice he never did anything about Grover Dill!”
We both watched silently as across the street a solitary drunk struggled from doorway to doorway. For some reason he carried his hat in his hand, waving it frantically at each passing car. Flick, an old connoisseur of drunks, watched his technique critically as he ricocheted from storefront to storefront.
“They don’t make ’em like old Lud Kissel any more.” Flick had the sound of a man describing a recognized all-time great.
“Funny thing, Flick. I thought of Lud Kissel in New York, this past Fourth.”
“Fourth of what?”
“The Fourth of July.”
“The Fourth of July? Reminded you of Ludlow Kissel? Old Lud Kissel, the drunk?”
It was my turn to play it expansive. I leaned forward over the bar, sipping my beer meaningfully, milking the moment.
“Flick, do you mean to tell me you don’t remember Lud Kissel’s Dago bomb?”
“Dago bomb?”
We stared at each other for a long moment and again he lit up like a 60-watt Mazda.
“You mean that big Dago bomb that blew out the …?”
“Yes indeed, Flick, that is the very one I am referring to.”
XVI LUDLOW KISSEL AND THE DAGO BOMB THAT STRUCK BACK
I threaded my way through the midtown, midday sidewalk traffic that eddied and surged over and around the clutter of Construction paraphernalia. It was desperately hot. My wash-and-wear suit clung to me like some rancid, scratchy extension of my clammy skin. All around me New York was busily, roaringly, endlessly rebuilding itself, like some giant Phoenix arising from still red-hot ashes of its dead self. New York’s infamous Edifice Complex blooms mightily in Midsummer.
I scuttled feverishly through shimmering waves of asphalt-scented heat toward the paradise of dark, expensive decadence of my favorite French restaurant, Les Misérables des Frites, little realizing that in another split second I was about to enjoy one of the truly secret subterranean pleasures of the human soul. Frantically taking my place in a hunched line of prickly-heated City dwellers doggedly plodding single file over a long, planked gangway, tightly jammed between an enormous excavation and a line of throbbing bright orange engines of construction. Ahead of me a short, stout lady wearing a damp flowered dress, clutching a Bonwit Teller shopping bag in both hands, ducked her head low as she ran interference for me and for those behind me through the wall of ringing sound and sensual heat.
My mind, as is so often the case these days, was totally blank. Sweat trickled in a long, thin, cool line down the knobbles of my backbone and spread out damply along the waistband of my twisted jockey shorts, which were threatening to emasculate me at any moment. My feet moved steadily to the rhythm of a colossal Diesel engine pounding insanely off my port bow. All around us, reaching high into the copper heavens, the stainless steel and aluminum green-glassed cliffs of partly completed and already eroding towers acted as colossal baffles, amplifying the subterranean reverberations of construction almost beyond endurance. New York’s Summer Festival was in full swing, and I was a celebrant.
I had reached perhaps the midpoint of the plank ladder, breathing shallowly of the rising clouds of pulverized cement dust and carbon monoxide fumes, a subtle mixture that forms one of the more insidious anesthetics yet devised, dulling the senses and clouding the soul, when it happened. It was more felt, at first, than heard—a long, low gurgling sensation pushing up suddenly from the gut and exploding in the brain like some great comber of some ancient sea, on a lost, forgotten beach:
KAARRROOOMMMMPPHHHHH!
For a split second the great sound hung in mid-air and then, unthinkingly,