I had gone to college at Fort Hays, Kansas, and four of my fraternity brothers came east to visit me. Now, I don’t want to finger them as hayseeds, because in their backyard a city boy was an absolute misjudgment of nature, but they did leave their shoes on the north side of the bed; flush toilets were political necessities and Sears Roebuck was the Neiman Marcus of the area, or even better because the catalog held a dual purpose. They marveled at my white sweater since nobody ever wore anything except maroon or navy blue and at the one BIG formal school bash they wondered what that shiny stripe was going down my ‘tux’ pants and how come I wasn’t wearing brown shoes like everybody else? You see, there I was the outsider... now they were here and we were all walking down Sixth Avenue after I had given them a big taste of the big city, Automat for breakfast, chop suey for lunch, early show at the Apollo Burlesque, where Georgia Southern flipped them out, and a quick run-through of the office where we put comic books together.
Big city brother had the country cousins in tow, enjoying having them on his own turf for a change, proving that we had garages bigger than the hotel in Hays, 20-chair barber shops and more taxis than Kansas had cars. They marveled at my dollar tips, the speed of the express elevators in the Empire State Building and interpreted New Yorkese for them in the Stage Door Deli.
Oh, I was big, all right, but I never should have brought them back to 45th Street to see the office. I had forgotten that the Chinatown Man would be waiting. But when I remembered it was too late — until I looked at the Kansas Kids. They were the best cover I ever had. This time he’d have to draw the line smack down the middle once and for all, and after that I’d be home free.
I guess you know what the lousy slob did.
All of a sudden those watery blue eyes picked up their target right in front of the Big Man’s audience, grabbed my sleeve and started his pitch. Only this time I didn’t drop the World Telegram. The Gotham gambit hit me with the secondary move and I looked the Chinatown Man straight in the peepers with a Times Square snarl and said, “Look, I was born in New York, I lived here and I already been to Chinatown 20 times and if I go there I don’t take no sightseein’ bus. You unnerstan’?”
He reeled, he choked... and as the literary types say, he was aghast. My fraternity brothers were real proud of me, but wondered what had happened to my language. They hardly understood it at all. The Chinatown Man’s eyes were a little misty.
The next day the guys went back to Kansas. I went back to work. I came out of the office at a quarter after five and headed for the subway. I almost made it. The enemy I had thought was dead wasn’t dead at all. The bastard had bailed out and all of a sudden he was coming at me again. The hand grabbed my sleeve, the brochure and ticket was shoved in my face and I said, “Look I told you yesterday...”
“Oh,” he told me with casual reluctance, “It’s you.”
Now here it is 30 years later. I’m walking up Sixth Avenue going north. Wars have been fought, tycoons have been battled and beaten, books, movies and TV have made you famous and people say hello on the street. The suit is custom made. You’re a big boy, buddy, so march on... everybody knows you.
But, like I said, there are some battles you never can win, so I withdraw, walked back a block, crossed the street and flagged me down a cab.
I still couldn’t face the Chinatown Man.
Toys for the Man-Child
I was beginning to think that I was the only grown-up who likes to play with toys. Not the sophisticated power-driven goodies and stuff... but just plain old toys that could Walter Mitty you into a happy fantasy land where adventure runs wild and nobody really gets hurt at all.
Then the other day I was prowling through this four-storied hobby shop trying to look like I didn’t belong there, ostensibly on a search to “bring home something for the kid,” but knowing right where I was going, and picking up two kits of a new plastic glider job with fantastic aerodynamic capabilities. The other one was, of course, in case the first one got broken, despite the manufacturer’s claims of nearly total indestructibility.
Hell, that other one was for me. I wasn’t about to let a six-year-old kid have all the fun, especially when I saw the ad first. I don’t think the salesman bought my line. He had probably been through it before and just played it cool, but the well-dressed guy next to me who had been flying the miniature chopper, hand-operated through an egg-beater drive and flexible cable, gave me a silly grin because he had a pair of them and the same explanation that I had.
And there we were, trapped. Two grown men who should have known better. He finally said, “You too?” I nodded. He gave me a silly grin. “I have a sailboat too — I keep it in the pool.”
“So have I. My wife bought it for me.”
“How’d it go?”
“Great... now. When I got the thing it had plastic sails that didn’t work so I got hold of some fabric and a grommet punch and fitted it out right.”
“The kid like it?” he asked suspiciously.
“Hell, I don’t let him near it. He can watch, but don’t touch.”
And so began a very profitable business acquaintanceship nurtured on a quiet pond or an open field and sometimes on the top of the playroom bar that makes a great racetrack and a handy place to talk over new modifications and results.
Like the wives say, it’s cheaper than golf, less wearing on the heart and it keeps them at home. But why the heck can’t they put their junk away when they’re done? And who made these scratches on the table?
So when I happened to be at the Murrell’s Inlett Art and Crafts Festival and stumbled into the handmade toy area, I knew I didn’t have to feel like a loner anymore. It was like something right out of the good old days with Dancing Darts, climbing monkeys, whip tops, tongue-depressor and Popsickle stick fliers, rubber-band guns and all the props we thought we had invented as kids, but had really been handed down through the generations... until this one.
What was really funny... the kids couldn’t work them, but the old men sure knew how to do it and for the first time there was that light of total amazement in a boy’s face when big daddy-o made those gadgets go.
Oh, a few things have changed and you can see why the kids were done out of some of the fun we had because of modern technology. The old snappy rubber inner tubes we used to cut up to make those great guns that could sting the parts of a girl’s legs that showed under her bloomers had been replaced by butyl with no snap at all. But the same technology came up with surgical rubber that really put a zing in them. Now you can pick a fly off the wall at 30 feet and make your sister yelp like a loon right through her mini-skirt.
Seems like the women don’t sew much anymore, so you don’t collect a box full of empty thread spools to notch up and rubber-band power into mock tanks on rainy days anymore. Unless you uncover a forgotten button box with those big, ivory two-holers, you have to invent a replacement friction clutch, and between Zippo and Ronson, wooden stick matches are obsolete, so the rigged shaft drive of the “tank” becomes a plastic substitute. But they don’t quite work as well as the old ones did... and to listen to that older generation explain the relative merits of the kind they had was something else again.
The guy who had spent a winter collecting the obsolete essentials and tooling them up for his nostalgic display of the before-battery era had a run on his supplies he couldn’t believe. Unlike his kid, the old man knew those tongue-depressor propellers you whipped out between your palms always seemed to get hung up in the front yard tree, so he didn’t buy just one... he bought a bagful and screw the tree. The wind always got them down later and why risk a broken leg for just one? And it took more than one tank to fight a battle, so another bagful. Somebody was always breaking the Dancing Dan board, so you got spares, and just so there could be a duet, another Dancing Dan went into the sack too. On top, throw a couple of climbing monkeys, a whip top, two rubber guns because retaliation is always necessary if you want a happy home...