Going to Chicago (7 page)

Uncle Fritz had us on the sofa with our pie right at 5:30. He thumbed the dial to WBBM, one of Chicago's two CBS network stations. The announcer's voice exploded: “Wheaties, breakfast of champions, brings you the thrilling adventures of Jack Armstrong, All-American boy!” We all loved
Jack Armstrong
back in Bennett's Corners. Jack was just like us, and his fictitious Hudson High just like our real Brunswick High, except Brunswick High never produced too many heinous crimes that needed solving by a boy. Like most of the serial dramas of the day,
Jack Armstrong
lasted just fifteen minutes.

Next came a program called
Little Italy
, right there on WBBM, fifteen minutes of phony Italian accents. Uncle Fritz loved it. Next came
Colonel Stoopnagle and Budd
, on WMAQ, one of the NBC Red network stations. I quietly gathered up the pie plates and took them to the kitchen.

Will's aunt was taking a sheet of cookies from the oven. I piled the plates in the sink and sat down at the kitchen table. “I'm baking you boys some cookies for your drive up to Chicago,” she said. She took one of the cookies off with a spatula and deposited it right in my mouth.

“I like hot cookies right from the oven,” I said.

“You're not a fan of Colonel Stoopnagle?”

“He's about as funny as wet shoes. I thought you might need some help out here.”

“Now I like Little Orphan Annie,” she said, opening the icebox door, bending her housedress tight. “How about a glass of milk, Ace?”

“Nothing better than hot cookies and ice-cold milk.”

She sat across from me and poured me a glass. She started singing the
Little Orphan Annie
theme song: “
Who's the little chatterbox? The one with the pretty auburn locks? Who can it be? It's Little Orphan Annie
!”

I laughed and sang the next line: “
She and Sandy make a pair. They never seem to have a care!
”

In the living room Colonel Stoopnagle was putting one over on Budd. Aunt Mary watched me dunk my cookie and suck the milk out of it. The three beagles were watching us through the screen door. “You know, I envy you boys,” she said. “A whole week in Chicago to raise hell.”

I can still feel my shiver. I couldn't believe a worldly woman like that was saying “raise hell” to a dopey kid like me. “I don't know about raising much hell,” I said. “Will's got our entire trip planned minute by minute, looking at one scientific wonder after the other.”

“Well, I hope you find a little time to raise some hell.”

I licked the crumbs off my lip. “Me too.”

“Nothing wrong with a young man your age raising a little hell. It's natural.”

The way she said
natural
. Goddamn. Sonofabitch. “How about raising a lot of hell?” I asked.

She pretended to frown. “I'm not so sure about a lot of hell, but raising a little hell is an absolute requirement of growing up.”

You can imagine what that word
absolute
did to me. “An absolute requirement,” I repeated. Colonel Stoopnagle signed off. Uncle Fritz thumbed the dial back to WBBM for
Just Plain Bill
, fifteen minutes about the kindly barber of Hartville, brought to us by Whitehall Pharmaceutical Company, the makers of Anacin.

She broke off a corner of my cookie and nibbled on it. “Boys are born with more than one extra organ, you know.”

Organ
. I was ready to faint. “They are?”

“Uh-huh. And that extra little organ works away quietly year after year, deep inside them, storing up drop after drop of hell-raising juice.”

“Hell-raising juice?”

“Uh-huh. And when a boy gets a certain age that extra little organ gets so full, some of that juice just has to spill. He might explode into a million pieces otherwise. Want another cookie, Ace? While they're still hot?”

Spill. Explode
. You bet I wanted another cookie. I watched her move inside her dress all the way to the counter and back. “What about girls?” I asked. “Do they ever fill up with that hell-raising juice?”

“Sometimes they do.”

Like a fool I called her Mary. “You ever, Mary?”

She shot me a wicked wink. “I guess I was pretty full of it my senior year. When I went to the state spelling bee. Two days and two nights free as a bird in Cincinnati.”

Sin-sin-atti
. “So, did you get a chance to spill any of it?”

“The last night there I did.”

“What'd you do?”

Her eyes froze on the icebox door. “I'm not so sure what I did. Except the next morning I came in eighty-seventh out of eighty-eight at the bee.”

“What word tripped you up?”

Her eyes left the icebox and landed square on mine. “I think it was
yes
.”

Well, that did it. I threw my face across the table and sucked her on the mouth like a nursing calf. I cooled my fire with a long drink of milk. I could feel the mustache it left.

She didn't get mad and she didn't laugh. She moved her face close to mine and wiped the milk off my upper lip with her little finger. “Naughty naughty, Ace Gilbert,” she said. For the rest of my life, whenever I made love to a woman, “Naughty naughty, Ace Gilbert” rang in my ears, enhancing the experience greatly.

She slid out of her chair and headed for the doorway. “Buck Rogers is coming on next, I think. You like Buck Rogers, don't you, Ace?”

“Absolutely.”

Buck Rogers was in fact next, right there on WBBM. It was only 6:30 Chicago time, but following Aunt Mary out of that kitchen, I was years older than I'd been going in. I'd been toyed with by an older woman, two rooms away from her German husband. I felt wonderful.

The Goldbergs
came on at 6:45 on WENR, an NBC Blue station. I laughed out loud when Molly Goldberg gave us her very Yiddish “
Yoo-hoo! Is anybody
?” Uncle Fritz shushed me. “Laugh to yourself inside,” he growled, “so da rest of us can hear what's funny, too.”

At 7:00 he thumbed in WMAQ on NBC Red for the
Eno Crime Clues
program, a half-hour detective show we all listened to in Bennett's Corners. Halfway through the clues he thumbed to WBBM to hear
Singin' Sam the Barbasol Man
. At 7:15 he thumbed the dial back to WMAQ for
Lady Esther Serenade
, a half-hour music program featuring the Wayne King Orchestra. Halfway through he thumbed to WLS, another NBC Blue station, to hear
Trade and Mark
, a team of song-and-patter men who made up with long shaggy beards like the Smith Brothers on the cough drop boxes. At 8:00 he stayed on WLS for
Ben Bernie's Blue Ribbon Orchestra
. The Old Maestro was a legend. Everybody knew his closing by heart: “
Until the next time when … possibly you may tune in again … keep the Old Maestro always in your schemes … Yowsah. Yowsah. Yowsah … Au Revoir!
” We didn't dare sing along. But back home in Bennett's Corners I'm sure everybody was.

At 8:30 Uncle Fritz thumbed back to WMAQ for the
Texaco Star Theater
featuring Ed Wynn, The Fire Chief. It was hard to keep your laughs inside with a guy funny as Ed Wynn. But we managed. At 9:00 Fritz stayed with WMAQ for
Lives at Stake
, real-life death defying stories accompanied by the Harold Stokes Orchestra. Aunt Mary helped Clyde with his drops. At 9:30 we stayed tuned to WMAQ for
Madame Sylvia's Hollywood Interviews
. She gabbed for fifteen minutes—minus the advertisements for cold cream and lipstick—with Maureen O' Sullivan, who was currently starring with Johnny Weismuller in
Tarzan and his Mate
.

One by one we made trips to the bathroom, except for Uncle Fritz, who dutifully stayed in his rocker, thumb ready. At 9:45 it was over to WBBM for
Myrt and Marge
. This was a fluffy serial about two career girls struggling to make it big in New York City. At 10:00 the dial was back on WMAQ for
Amos ‘n' Andy
. White guys talking like Negroes. We all wanted to laugh out loud. Even Uncle Fritz. It was the thirties and laughing at Negroes was just as proper as laughing at Italians, Jews, country barbers, ambitious women, and Arkansas hillbillies like
Lum and Abner
, who came on at 10:15 on WENR, on NBC Blue.

At 10:30 we went out to the tent. The three beagles had peed all over the flap, making that old bag of canvas smell even worse than it already did.

“
You see machines that tabulate, sort and file. They can automatically sort out any group of cards from a file of hundreds of thousands in a few minutes. Books and records are kept by machinery. Intricate tasks that would require thousands of eyes and fingers are rattled off at a dizzy speed
.”

O
FFICIAL
G
UIDE
B
OOK OF THE
W
ORLD
'
S
F
AIR

Seven/Whizzing By

Will, Clyde, and I lined up like sardines on the tent floor, our noses itching from the stink of fresh dog urine and moldy canvas. Will clicked off his flashlight. “This is something, isn't it?” he said.

“If you mean how the tent smells, it's something all right,” I said.

“I mean just being here. Almost to Chicago. On the greatest adventure of our lives.”

“I just wish you two would shut up and go to sleep,” Clyde said. “I don't want be awake when my ear starts aching.”

Will hit Clyde on the belly with his flashlight. “You're the one who better shut up.”

Clyde was defiant. “I'll shut up when you do.”

“You'll shut up or I'll take that medicine bottle and give you an earache right up the ass.”

Clyde didn't want to risk that. He rolled over and buried his head under his blanket. Will continued his inspirational lecture: “Week from today we'll be different people, Ace. We'll be men of the world. We'll have seen the future. We'll be armed to the teeth with knowledge. Ready for whatever life has in store.”

I was squirming like a beached catfish. “All I'm ready for is a real bed. There's a rock hard as an algebra test in my back.”

Will's flashlight clicked on. He reached under his pillow for his guidebook. “That reminds me, right after we see them make tires at the Firestone Pavilion we've got to get over to the International Business Machine Company Exhibit. They've got these machines that can count and sort numbers with the push of a button. Listen to this: ‘Intricate tasks that would require thousands of eyes and fingers are rattled off at a dizzy speed.'”

I answered with an unenthusiastic, “Imagine that.”

Will put his guidebook away. Clicked off the flashlight. “If you want to spend your whole life empty as a pumpkin, that's all right with me.”

I'd been disrespectful. “I'm sorry.”

“You're sorry all right.”

We both laughed, instantly recementing our friendship.

“How'd you and me ever end up friends anyway?” I asked.

“I've been wondering that for six years.”

“I mean it,” I said. “We're such different squirrels. You like to stand back and look at life. Study it. Discuss it. Take notes on it. But me, I like to live life.”

Will protested. “I like to live life.”

“No you don't. All the way here you had your snoot stuck in your maps while the real world was whizzing by. You didn't see none of it.”

“Sure I did. Two hundred and eighty-three miles of cornfields.”

“Maybe you knew those cornfields were there. But you didn't see them. Not the way I did.”

“Now that makes a lot of sense.”

“It does. Remember when we dissected that frog in science? You couldn't wait to cut that little croaker open to see how it worked, like it was a broken radio or something. I wanted to see its guts. See how bad it smelled.”

“That frog did smell bad, didn't it?”

“Remember how I cut out its little brain and stuck it in Gloria Gerber's ear?”

I didn't know it then, but that was the deepest talk Will Randall and I would ever have. It chiseled in unerodible tombstone granite just who
he
was and just who
I
was. It didn't matter a lick if we were two different squirrels, only that we accepted and respected, and enjoyed each other unabashedly. In that old Boy Scout tent. In Mary and Fritz's backyard in Valparaiso, Indiana. With the smell of dog urine and moldy canvas.

“
I have drove Fords exclusively, when I could get away with one. For sustained speed and freedom from troubles the Ford has got the other car skinned
.”

C
LYDE
B
ARROW
,
IN A LETTER TO
H
ENRY
F
ORD

Eight/Nothing But Vanilla

Aunt Mary yelled over the purr of the Gilbert SXIII. “We enjoyed having you.”

“We had a swell time,” Will yelled back. “Thanks for the cookies.”

“Be careful in dat got-damned ting,” Uncle Fritz yelled from the porch. He was in his underwear. The three beagles were sniffing his furry legs.

Will yelled back. “We'll send you a postcard from the fair.”

I backed down the driveway. Aunt Mary followed, fingers splayed down her happy hips. “Take care of that ear, Clyde.”

Clyde assured her he would.

Finally she yelled at me. “Nice meeting you, Ace.”

I began a slow roll up Tecumseh Street, anxious to kill Valparaiso. More ready than ever for Chicago and the willing city girls that lived there by the thousands. As I took off I heard her voice chase after me like a siren: “Y.E.S.”

We reached State Route 2 and took it to U.S. 30. It was seven in the morning. Understandably, Will was antsy. He had planned on leaving at 5:30. But Aunt Mary had insisted on gluing us full of French toast and syrup. So we were well behind schedule before we got started.

The plan was to take U.S. 30 west into Illinois, all the way to Joliet, then take the famous U.S. 66 into the city. There were several closer routes. But Uncle Fritz insisted we approach from the west, to skirt “Nikker town” as he called Chicago's south side. We flew through the tiny burgs of Deep River and Ainsworth, Merrilville, Shererville. At some forlorn crossroads we stopped to gas up.