Strange Trades (6 page)

“Gee, I don’t know—”

“People will love you for it.”

“Oh, all right.” Nerfball made tentative movements to emerge, and Honeyman stood up to give him room. Somehow the big man twisted around beneath the desk and began to back out. He said something that was muffled by his position.

“What’s that?” asked Honeyman.

“I said, ‘What’s this coupon called?’”

Honeyman was stumped. “Does it have to have a name?”

Nerfball was standing now, brushing dust from his clothes. “Yes.”

Honeyman reached deep down into some mythic well of American vernacular and came up with a word he would have earlier sworn he didn’t know. “Spondulix. It’s called a spondulix.”

“Is that singular,” quizzed Nerfball, “or plural?”

Without hesitation, Honeyman replied, “Both.”

2.

Days in the Pantechnicon

In Mexico City, in the middle of 1968, the Summer Olympics were taking place.

Sometimes when Honeyman said that sentence to himself, it sounded like a bit of incredibly ancient history. In the year 753 b.c., the city of Rome was founded. In the year 1066 a.d., the Norman invasion of England took place. A fact lost in the mists of time, relegated to musty textbooks, unseen by living eyes.

Other times, that period seemed as close as last night, separated from today only by a little interval of sleep.

For Honeyman had been there. And afterwards his life had never gone as he had once innocently thought it would.

Prior to the start of these long-ago Games, Black protesters had succeeded in denying South Africa the right to participate. The head of the International Olympic Committee, one Avery Brundage, had led those who would have allowed South Africa to take part in the Games. This man was also in charge of handing out the medals.

When two American trackmen, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, won a gold and bronze respectively, they decided to stage a symbolic denunciation of Brundage’s role. On the victory block, wearing African beads and black scarves, their shoes removed as a symbol of poverty, they raised gloved fists and bowed their heads.

They were immediately expelled from future events.

Sitting in the stands during this bit of typical sixties theater was an eighteen-year-old member of the U.S. swim team, a diver named Rory Honeyman. A nice Iowa boy, he had never even spoken to a Black person before coming to the Olympics. Now, all at once, in the same kind of mental burst that would later engender spondulix, Honeyman experienced an epiphany of radicalization. There is, like, injustice in the world. We are all brothers and sisters. I must protest.

Listening that night to the talk of the other Bloods in the Olympic dorms, Honeyman was confirmed in his initial decision. He said nothing to anyone, though, being of a retiring nature.

The next morning Honeyman felt filled with spiritual vigor. He went to his events. He won the silver. On the stand, he raised his ungloved fist in protest and bowed his head. The crowd seemed stunned. There was a silence as big as Mexico. Honeyman was the only White who had elected to register his solidarity with the Blacks.

Unfortunately, there were no television cameras present to broadcast his personal statement. (His hometown paper was the only one to print a photo, a blurred long-distance shot which made Honeyman look as if he were sniffing his own armpit.) Brundage, the media focus, was elsewhere, and at the same time three Black men named Lee Evans, Larry James and Ron Freeman were also protesting.

Honeyman’s actions did not go entirely unnoticed, however.

When he returned home, a changed person, all the familiar sights of his childhood looking transmogrified, his draft notice was waiting for him. Nothing too unusual there—except that he had previously been granted a deferment.

(Eleven years later, talking in a Hoboken bar to a stranger who happened to be a retired Army Colonel, Honeyman learned that those members of the ’68 U.S. team who had belonged to ROTC had received phone calls warning them not to join the protest.)

Life in Canada was not that bad at first. Honeyman was a little sad, naturally, thinking of his vanished career in international diving competition. But, possessing a naturally cheerful disposition and being still young, he made the best of this strange twist of fate.

Life only became a bummer when his money ran out. His parents, feeling betrayed and disappointed by their son, refused to send him any more. Soon, Honeyman was desperate for a job.

That was when he met Leonard Lispenard.

Lispenard was the sole owner, chief roustabout, ringmaster and occasional marriage counselor in Lispenard’s Pantechnicon, a two-bit, vest-pocket, circus-cum-carny that made a circuit of Canada’s north in the summer months, and headed south in the autumn. Lispenard himself was a short fat man with bad skin, who, in his ringmaster garb, looked to Honeyman remarkably like the Penguin, Batman’s archenemy.

It was June of 1969 in Calgary, and summer was already waning, when Honeyman approached Lispenard, reasoning that such an outfit would offer a lower-profile job than most other concerns, an essential attraction for an illegal interloper in a country not his own. Inquiring for the owner, he was informed that Lispenard would not be available until that night’s show was over. Honeyman purchased a ticket and resigned himself to waiting.

The tent was only half-full. Curiously, no one was sitting in the front rows. Honeyman went and took a seat right up against the ring, determined to get his money’s worth.

During the finale of the show, when Honeyman was simultaneously growing impatient and feeling sleepy, he was galvanized by the sight of the first real love of his life, the performer with whom he would daily be associated for the next seven years.

The Baroness von Hammer-Purgstall.

There was a twenty-foot tower in the middle of the tent, with a large platform at the top. No ladder ran up the tower, but rather a kind of open elevator cage, powered by a fitfully chugging engine, stood ready. At the base of the tower was a big square collapsible container, metal-sided, plastic-lined. It had taken half an hour to fill it with water out of a fire hose.

Lispenard waddled to the center of the ring. “Ladies, and Gentlemen, without further ado or needless puffery, may I present, for your edification, the Baroness von Hammer-Purgstall— Canada’s only diving equine!”

The Baroness was led out. A gleaming white Lipizzan mare who had flunked out of the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, she was the most beautiful horse the former farm-boy Honeyman had ever seen.

Lispenard had disappeared. A clown led the Baroness willingly into the elevator. She rode it calmly to the top. She trotted out onto the platform. She paused a moment. She jumped off.

It was like watching Pegasus. Honeyman couldn’t breathe.

When she landed, the impact, as planned, flattened the tub, spraying water in a circle twenty feet out, drenching the first three rows of seats.

Honeyman didn’t care. He vaulted into the ring, ran past the Baroness, and found Lispenard in among the trapeze girls and dog-trainers.

Buttonholing the owner, Honeyman declared, “Mister, I can ride that horse.”

Lispenard replied, “Why, so can I, boy.”

“No, no, you don’t understand. I mean going down.”

Honeyman explained a little about himself. Lispenard still appeared dubious.

“Listen, just give me a chance. Tomorrow night. C’mon. Please?”

“And what if you break your fool neck?”

“I’ll sign a waiver. Anything. Just let me ride her.”

Lispenard, sensing novelty, a circus’s lifeblood, finally agreed.

The next night, Honeyman, attired in borrowed yellow tights, found himself standing beside the Baroness as the elevator made its grumbling ascent. He didn’t even see the crowd or hear Lispenard’s spiel. All he felt was the horse’s shoulder muscles beneath his hand. All he smelled was her clean animal scent.

On the lofty platform, Honeyman boosted himself astride her. The horse never balked. She seemed to sense Honeyman’s devotion and admiration. She waited till he was settled. Then she took off.

Honeyman contributed nothing. He was just along for the ride.

And what a hell of a ride it was. Honeyman had no sensation of falling. Instead, he felt he was going up, up, up, straight to the empyrean. In a splash and geyser, it was too soon over.

Honeyman was addicted. Lispenard was convinced. The deal was struck.

The next seven years were an uncomplicated, almost bucolic period for Honeyman. He slept late each day, rising for a communal lunch with the other performers. He groomed the Baroness, perhaps went to explore whatever town they were playing, ate a light supper. All day long the excitement would be building quietly but steadily inside him, until it reached its pitch just prior to the dive. Then he would feel drained, almost post-orgasmic, and the whole cycle would start again.

One day in November 1976, the trailer carrying the Baroness to winter pasture was broadsided on the highway by a truck. Honeyman was vomiting by the shoulder of the road when he heard the shot from the policeman’s revolver.

Lispenard, genuinely sympathetic, kept Honeyman on for another year, as part of the tightrope act. Honeyman had picked up the skill in his spare time, accustomed to heights as he was and gifted with an infallible inner balance.

But Honeyman’s heart wasn’t in it. His life seemed empty without the nightly flight. Sometimes he swore he still felt the warm barrel shape of the horse’s body between his legs.

When Jimmy Carter announced amnesty for draft dodgers in 1977, Honeyman claimed his savings from Lispenard’s squat old safe—more than once Honeyman had thought how that depository resembled its owner—and returned to the land of his birth. After an uncomfortable reunion with his parents, he headed east, ending up somehow in Hoboken, owner of an eponymous sandwich shop.

His life for the next decade was basically eventless. A smattering of love affairs, most recently with Netsuke, the demands of a small business, the pleasure of the spectator at sporting events. Nothing loomed large in his life; his psychic landscape was flat; his horizons untroubled by mirages, destinations real or unreal.

Until, that is, he invented spondulix.

3.

Higher Economics

Nerfball’s fingers moved like a maestro’s. Fluid, knowing, commanding, they flew through their arcane rituals. Cutting, slicing, chopping, dicing. Layering and spreading, halving and wrapping…

Filling drink orders, taking money and making change, Honeyman watched in admiration. Nerfball, his lank, longish, greasy hair whipping about, was a one-man sandwich factory. No, it was more like performance art. Sometimes, in fact, the crowd at the counter actually broke out in applause.

The inside of Honeyman’s Heroes was clean but not neat. Mounted on the exposed brick of the walls were numerous caricatures of various local characters, in the inimitable Netsuke style. She had also done the illustrated menu that listed the various sandwiches by name: the Shakespeare (ham and Danish Jarlsberg cheese); the Sinatra (tongue and baloney); the Pia Zadora (marshmallow fluff and honey).

Bracketed to the side walls were scarred ashwood counters with stools positioned beneath. A pickle barrel—tongs hanging from the rim—occupied the center of the room.

Nerfball worked at a long, wide butcher-block slab, at the front of which stood a narrow glass case functioning both as a divider between the artist and his fans, and as a display area for various figurines and good luck objects. A herd of plastic dinosaurs, a bust of Elvis, a ceramic horse that everyone knew meant something secret and special to Honeyman.…

Behind Nerfball and on either side, within easy reach, were all his implements and raw ingredients. Bottles of Tiger Sauce, tubs of cream cheese, sharp knives and twin steamers that could turn a quarter-pound of pastrami and Swiss into so much ambrosia.

People yelled out their orders, Nerfball reacted with wordless speed, Honeyman made small talk; slices of pumpernickel, white, and rye arced through the air to land on the slab in perfect formation. What with all this, the afternoon sped swiftly by, another day among many, until finally it was nearing three o’clock, and the store was momentarily empty.

Nerfball wiped his hands on his apron and looked up with a dazed air. Honeyman walked over to him and clapped him with honest appreciation on the back.

“Thanks, Nerf. You were, as usual, superb. I think I can handle the supper crowd alone. Why don’t you break early today? Here, I’ll get your pay.”

Honeyman took from the register the original and unique spondulix which he had hastily scribbled out a month or so ago, in a fit of desperate creativity. The old electric bill was now somewhat more greasy and worse for wear, but its green crayoned message was still discernible.

Honeyman got ready to go through the daily ritual that already seemed ancient. He would hand Nerfball the spondulix. Nerf would cobble up ten sandwiches for himself. Then his employee would hand the spondulix back and depart with the sandwiches, the medium in which it was redeemable.

Today, however, Nerfball refused to take part.