Twentieth Century Limited Book One - Age of Heroes. Jan David Blais
the urgency you’ve introduced around here.”
“My apologies for disturbing your routine.”
“Don’t worry about it. Speaking of urgency, how about Paul’s deadline training?”
“Outstanding, and I say that from experience.”
“I take it they extended yours. You and your editor are still on speaking terms?”
“Oh, sure. It’s one particular prick tried to pull a fast one. My guy backed me up.”
“Incidentally, how are you doing? I’m ready to read.”
“Another week, I’ll have something presentable.”
I reach for the next stack of material. “A couple more high school sections coming up. I don’t know about you but I like seeing the young man being tested, making his way.”
“Testing,” Jonathan grunts. “I’m well acquainted with that.”
* * * * * * *
“EH, CUMPAR’!”
Sweat stinging my eyes, I wrestled a case of canned peaches onto the conveyor belt. “Move it!” the figure at the top of the stairs yelled, “I don’ got all day!” I jabbed the button and the cartons began their ascent to the shopping level, to the fine ladies and gentlemen wheeling their carts in air-conditioned comfort, ignorant of the poor souls toiling in the heat and dust below. “On its way to you, Tone.”
I wiped my eyes on my sleeve, muscling up the No. 6 Canned Peas, Heinz Ketchup, Mott’s Applesauce, Cott ginger ale, pale dry and golden. I’d like to mix it all together, I muttered, slamming the last of my crazy stew onto the belt. Beefaroni.
Saturday afternoon was Pit time for DiLorenzo’s junior workers. A hundred-twenty down there. Smart of them, no thermometer on the wall. I ought to bring my own. Only thing kept me going was the Leica, the thought of my finger on the focusing ring, my eye to the eyepiece, but until my deposit grew to seventy-five dollars, in the display case it stayed. At a buck-thirty an hour that meant a lot of Pit time. Years later the Inferno’s sulfurous realms brought canned pears to mind, and Sisyphus’ hill, it looked a lot like that conveyor belt.
My hours were Friday four to nine and all day Saturday, also Thursday nights. When some kid’s family went on vacation I got extra time. The more the better. Sundays the market was closed, Friday nights were the most sociable. As a bagger I enjoyed seeing what people bought, how much they spent. I became an actor, a master of the significant pause. After putting the customer’s bags in the trunk of her car (men never used baggers) I’d stand there and smile. Usually it was a dime, a quarter was exceptional. Younger women tended to be more generous. The old ones, crotchety and some of them so huge you wondered how they’d ever squeeze behind the wheel, they had this strange idea a thank-you was enough. Maybe in the old days, but this was 1956 and things were darned expensive.
One pretty, dark-haired woman with two little kids drove a red Fairlane convertible. She was always good for a quarter. Sliding behind the wheel her skirt would creep up her leg and when I shut the door and she’d give me this long stare, finally squeezing my hand and pressing a coin into it. I guess I was more muscular from all that lifting, but my underdeveloped imagination didn’t put this particular two and two together, not at first. Also it threw me off, her being married and a mother at that.
My usual restocking partner was Frank Pezzulo. Tommy and Phil (Tomasso and Filippo) DiLorenzo owned the store their father Guiseppe started. Guiseppe was about a hundred and ten and still came around to complain that the boys were doing everything wrong. We griped about the rotten conditions, the pay, the torture chamber those slave drivers stuck us in. A store legend had a family of tarantulas nesting in the canned Sicilian tomato crates. Supposedly one time a crate was dropped and splintered, and a bunch of them scattered in all directions, but I never saw one and neither did anybody else I knew.
This particular Saturday Tony Andreozzi, Tone, grabbed me as I punched in. Frank had called in sick so he had to work The Pit with me unless they brought in someone else which they wouldn’t, being so cheap. Tone had worked his way up at DiLorenzo’s and he protested Pit duty, but today he found himself at the top of the stairs, barking at me through his cigarette. Fat chance he’d come down and give me a hand. In fact more than once he bawled me out, saying don’t work so hard, you’ll make everybody else look bad. The younger kids looked up to Tone. At nineteen he was a man with a life. Tall and swarthy, he often stood at the mirror next to the time clock, combing his pomaded hair and sharpening his D.A. He wore tight T-shirts that bulged at the left bicep where his Luckies were rolled up even if the shirt had a pocket. Suede shoes matching his pegged pants completed the look, rust or dark blue, unsuitable for heavy lifting, like their wearer.
Tone was Captain of the DILORENZO MARKET – FINE MEAT AND PRODUCE panel truck, green with gold block letters, both sides. He made deliveries for elderly shoppers and women like my convertible lady. Then there were the girls who hung around, never buying anything. You’d see one or another in the truck, perfecting her face in the rear view mirror as Tone finished loading. First time I rode with him on a delivery I noticed the pillow and blanket in back. With a job many would kill for plus tips and side benefits, Tone was proof even a Mt. Pleasant dropout could make it big.
The owners’ youngest sister Maria was in charge of the registers. Maria was plump and cheerful, somewhere between thirty and forty, hard to tell. Her marital prospects were a topic of loud and frequent debate. “You see that guy checking you out?” This from Tone, the expert. Maria had just rung up a middle-aged couple who were wheeling their cart out the front door. “If I ever saw a guy with the hots for you that’s him, take it from me.” Maria turned crimson and started in on the next customer. She had a really sweet disposition. The only time you ever saw her sad or mad was when they picked on her like this.
This was my first summer lost to duty, but griping aside, it was not a burden. Some of my friends gave me a hard time, Angelo especially, who made a big deal of my being an honorary wop. I was the only person in the store whose name didn’t end in a vowel. People were always singing and whistling Italian songs, Bacia Me Bambino, Way Marie and so on. DiLorenzo’s was a hotbed of rabid Yankee fans, insufferable at all times but impossible in the fall when they won the World Series. Thank God, Don Larson who pitched the perfect game that year was a Swede or something like that.
That summer I saw a lot of Benny. First time he came to my house my mother made a point of quizzing him about Classical, his classes, how much homework, all the time glaring at me. She told one and all my betrayal had ruined not just my life but hers as well. Like me, Benny had done a year of Latin, but his class read the entire Aeneid while we plodded through excerpts from Cicero and vocabulary drills. Next year he would begin Greek, and when you add in Hebrew I wondered how he kept it all straight. Benny wanted to be a historian because of what Hitler did to his relatives, which if people didn’t pay attention, he said, could happen again. While I, scripted by my elders, would save our country through science. Better things for better living through chemistry, or physics, or math, whatever. It remained to be seen where I would alight, into which jar the specimen labeled Paul Bernard would tumble before somebody screwed the lid on and that would be that.
Everybody said technology was how our country solved big problems like the war. It made me uneasy that Benny truly loved History, in fact he was passionate about it. What did I love? Sports, true, but that didn’t count any more. Photography, but that was just a hobby and, as my father reminded me at every opportunity a damned expensive one at that. For my mother, taking pictures was neither an art nor a science, and it certainly wasn’t a sufficient outlet for the ability God had given me, with a large assist from Fiona Kelley. But first and foremost, taking pictures was not A Profession. And so it was, I found myself with no clear object for my hopes and dreams.
IT WAS A DIFFERENT PAUL BERNARD who showed up that fall, twenty pounds heavier and five-eight, meaning that six feet, my goal, was in sight. I was shaving every day, though only my chin needed it and not that desperately. I pondered my appearance, I admit, but to deliberately create a look like Tone, to mess with your natural self seemed