His ability to gauge instantly the dimensions of things both mystified and intimidated me. It was a gift I seemed to lack completely, one expressed in a language I was ignorant of, with a vocabulary one needed to gain admittance into the practical world of men. We might be rumbling in the Kaiser down a busy street like Western Avenue, and Sir would suddenly hit the brakes and stop in the middle of traffic before a piece of scrap that other cars swerved to avoid. While Mick and I slouched in humiliation below the dash, Sir would get out of the car, pick up the scrap, and singing aloud, wholly oblivious to the motorists honking and cursing as they pulled around him, he’d carefully fasten it to the homemade carriers he’d suction-cupped to the roof. He carried rope in case of such lucky finds, though in the absence of rope, twists of wire coat hangers served just as well. A coat hanger fastened the tailpipe to the Kaiser, and we’d gone through a phase when coat hangers held the screen door to its hinges, secured the lids of trash cans, and appeared in a variety of other ingenious applications. Mick had remarked that he expected Sir to start using coat hangers as belts for our trousers and laces for our shoes. When — still singing — Sir got back in the car, we’d ask: “Yo, Dad, don’t you think the Kaiser is junky enough without stopping to pile more junk on top?”
He always had the perfect comeback. “Do either of you guys know what a good two-by-four is going for by the foot?”
Not only did I not know the price per foot but I didn’t know how by looking at a piece of busted lumber he could recognize its dimensions.
That Sunday on Maxwell Street, back in spring, it was a three-quarter fitting we were after, and I especially hated sorting through used plumbing. I couldn’t help imagining the flood of excrement that had flushed through those moldy gray parts. I was lagging behind, thumbing through a carton stuffed with old comic books, when a gypsy girl came out of one of the storefronts on Maxwell and slipped an arm around my father’s waist. Her earrings dangled nearly to her bare shoulders. Her peasant blouse scooped across the crease between her smallish, pointy breasts. A red scarf bandannaed her black hair, and her eyes were violet with mascara. Beneath the makeup, she didn’t look that much older than me.
“You got black hair like gypsy,” she said to Sir. “Want gypsy good time? I give you.”
Sir took off walking, shaking her arm off, trying to ignore her. Suddenly, he slapped his wallet, pinning her hand to his back pocket. “Let go,” he said.
Instead, she reached a hand around and grabbed his crotch and, still smiling, stared up at him, whispering something I couldn’t hear. It stopped him in his tracks.
“Da-dammit,” he said, screwing up his face as if he’d swallowed something sour, then shot a harried look back at me, a look I interpreted as Don’t tell Mother.
They stood stalemated, nobody on the street paying the least attention, the gypsy massaging the front of his trousers while Sir tried to work her hand out of his back pocket without the wallet coming with it. I just stood there, too, instantly entranced by her, until I saw two gypsy men stepping out of the same doorway toward my father.
A cop, gnawing a Polish sausage dripping sauce, ambled across the street and headed them off.
“Giving you trouble?” he asked Sir.
“Forget it,” Sir said, face still registering a sour taste. “I don’t want no trouble.”
As we walked away, I turned and saw the cop slip his arm around the girl’s shoulder, taking a bite from the sausage he held in one hand while his other hand nonchalantly slid into her blouse so that a bare breast almost lifted over the elastic neckline, flashing the tan areola of a nipple I didn’t quite see. I watched the girl disappear back into the doorway of the storefront. Sir caught the look on my face.
“They get you inside there and shlish,” he said, drawing a finger across his throat. “Girls like that carry a disease that’ll make you walk like Charlie Chaplin.”
It was the first advice he ever gave me about sex and, thankfully, the last.
We saw the Chickenman that day, stilt-legged, balanced on a hydrant above the passing crowds, with the chicken rising from his head like a weather vane. The bird hopped to his shoulder, and the man’s mouth widened to a gaping hole in which the chicken bobbed his head. The mouth closed, and when the chicken slowly spread its wings, it looked as if the man’s head might fly from his body.
I’d described the whole scene more than once to Mick on nights when I’d lie in the dark and think about the girl before I went to sleep, wondering where the gypsies had gone. Mick especially liked the part about her grabbing Sir by the balls.
We knew we were close when we passed Donnelly’s, a block-long factory where telephone books were printed. I could feel the pneumatic exhalation of its giant, racketing presses, smell the scorched ink of all those compressed names and numbers and the sweat of the night shift, who stared out like convicts behind mesh screens. Then traffic accelerated, and as we pulled onto the Outer Drive the sudden coolness made my head light. Soldier Field rose on the left, and the lake stretched past the breakwater and farthest sailboats, shimmering pink under a sun that glazed the park trees.
“Workin on the railroad, workin on the farm, all I got to show for it’s the muscle in my arm,” Sir sang in a voice he lowered to a baritone he considered operatic. He often sang when he drove. “I had a Caruso-quality voice as a kid,” he’d tell us, “but ruined it imitating trains.”
Mick was rolling around in the backseat with his hands over his ears, groaning as if having convulsions.
“At least he’s not singing ‘Brother Can You Spare a Dime?’” I said.
“And it looks like I’m never gonna cease my wanderin.”
“He’s never gonna cease his wanderin,” I said to Mick.
Mick and a black kid in the backseat of a car in the lane beside us were giving each other the finger. The kid tried to spit into our Kaiser, but his spit blew back on him. We all busted up, including the kid.
Sir was pumping the brakes as cars weaved in front of him.
“Da-damn nuts,” he yelled, jockeying for the turning lane. “It’s really dog eat dog on this thing.”
Brakes grinding, we shimmied off the exit for Twelfth Street Beach and crawled along the aisles of the parking lot looking for a space. Finally, Sir had to drive over the sidewalk and park on the grass. There were a lot of other cars parked on the grass.
“Can’t give us all tickets,” he said.
We slipped our jeans off. Sir hid his watch and wallet under the seat.
“Leave the windows open a crack, so when we come back it’s not like a da-damn oven in here.”
“Where’s the door opener?” Mick asked.
“Just climb out this way,” Sir said.
“No,” Mick insisted, “I demand the door opener.”
I handed it to him over the seat, and he began to mash at the buffalo. Only the door on the Kaiser’s driver side opened, so we carried around a sawed-off broom handle we called the door opener. The Kaiser had no inside door handles. Before the Kaiser-Frazer company went out of business, it had advertised its designs as the automobiles of the future. To their engineers, the future meant push buttons, so they’d replaced door handles with push buttons embossed with the Kaiser trademark, a buffalo. By mashing the buffalo with just the right amount of force, we sometimes got the passenger door to open. We’d turned it into a competition. This time Mick got it on five tries — average.
Sir checked to make sure everything was locked while Mick and I hopped barefoot across scorching asphalt to the beach.
“Don’t step on any da-damn broken glass or we’ll have a real mess,” Sir hollered behind us. “I don’t know why the punks have to break the bottles instead of throwing them in the trash.” He paused to kick a bottle neck through a sewer grate. He was still wearing his socks and unlaced factory shoes, though he’d stripped down to his old maroon bathing trunks with the gold buckle and the leaping aqua blue swordfish over the coin pocket. People didn’t wear swimsuits like that anymore. Sometimes seeing it made me weak inside with a feeling that I couldn’t name but that had to do with all the times I’d seen him wear it before, times when I was little — younger than Mick was now — when Moms would always come with us to the beach, times before she got nervous, before we’d hear her pacing the house in the dark in the middle of the night crying to herself. Seeing the maroon bathing suit made me think of the old maroon Chevy, the first car I remembered. I thought my father had driven home from the Army in it. It had a running board he’d let me ride on while he parked.