My Blog

Lenny and Elmo

The weather was changing rapidly and hardened leaves clattered against the side of the house.

"Jesus!"  Elmo said.  "Look at you!  A big man like you--200 pounds, muscled, with a beard like dirty steel wool and your feelings are hurt.  Well I am sorry!"

Lenny winced and shrugged and sipped his bourbon again, feeling its burn down his throat and down to the pit of his stomach.

There was a calendar on the wall near the door--it was now a thin pad of individual numerals and it read Saturday, December 6th 1941.  Elmo reached over to the calendar and tore off that page.

"It's midnight, Lenny.  It's Sunday now."

"Hell, why don't we go to church?"

"Hell, why don't we get drunk."

"Hail Mary, full of grace...pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death..." Lenny knocked back the remainder of his glass and held it out childishly to Elmo.

"More."

Lenny was staying with Elmo not because he had been kicked out of his home.  In actuality he had been begged to stay by his mother who loved him.  His pride had been hurt. He could not find work, but it was not because of his eye, at least directly.  Because of his defensiveness, Lenny was damned hard to befriend and therefore not well known in most circles and not at all in others.  The men doing the hiring were all fathers of boys who could have been Lenny’s friends, but weren’t and never would be.  The men at the lumber yard, the farms, the stores in town, all listened with seemingly sympathetic ears, but ultimately said sorry, nothing right now, though the grocery hired a young man right off the next day after one of Lenny’s unsuccessful visits.  Lenny had a reputation as a hothead and a fighter, not necessarily a fight picker, but someone known to have been in one-too-many scuffles, ruining more than one of the Saturday night dances at the Ottie Town Hall. 

His mother and his sister both managed to have jobs, even in the worst of economic times, and yet he...  It vexed him.  He tried to make up for it by bringing game home for their table:  fish, pheasant, and deer.  But the last straw was Thanksgiving when his sister, Lola, made an off-hand remark of how much dryer and tougher deer was to beef.  He couldn’t take it.  He knew he shouldn’t have been, but he was wounded to the core and he had to get out of there.  Little did he know that it would be more or less permanently.

He met Elmo at the Town Pump that night.  The Pump=s owner had no family he wanted to claim, so he kept the place open till about 2 a.m.  A family-free assortment of about 6 men gathered there; there was roast turkey and duck and potatoes and lots of booze--beer, schnapps, whiskey.  Elmo sat on a stool at the bar, sipping a bottle of beer and picking at a plate of already cold turkey breast, pulling pieces off in strips and then chewing them down like a rabbit chewing grass.

Lenny thought Elmo looked like a mewling little snot, so he decided to sit on a stool next to him.  Lenny felt a slight impulse of holiday congeniality.

“Buy ya a beer, bud?”  

“Your money.”

“Just what’s that s’pose to mean?”

“Sure, I’ll take your beer.”

They sat and drank that night.  Lenny had $5 his mother had pressed on him and he drank it all.

Lenny thought Elmo had an ugly face and his feelings toward him softened some.

“Where’s your home, kid?”

“Up by the Minnesota border.”

“Live with your folks?”

“Ain't got any; they’re both dead.  I live alone.   How ‘bout you?  Where’s your home?”

“I don’t have none.”

“Oh, come one; everybody’s got one.”

“I don’t.  Not no more.”

Lenny told Elmo: his father dead; his mom and his sister holding their own; his goddamn eye; the wild game; the jobs he couldn’t get.

“You'd think I smelled or somethin’.”

Elmo pretended to take a whiff of him.  “You do!”

Lenny started to laugh.  He laughed until tears came and Elmo laughed along with him.

“Say,” Elmo said; he was quite drunk now, “Why don’t you come and stay with me?”

“No kiddin’?”  Lenny was thoughtful.

“Sure!  Just bring your stink and move right in.”

Lenny laughed, “All right partner, you’ve got yourself a roommate!”  This, Lenny thought, was a good solution, and he stayed.

Lola and Charlene

By the time they reached the St. Albans theatre, a small ticket line had formed.  And there standing in the front of the line was the red-headed man of the Model A.  Lola touched Charlene's wrist.  Charlene responded as if to an electric shock.  "Yes, I see him," she hissed.

"Do not, do NOT, catch his eye," Lola whispered firmly.

"What am I supposed to do, turn invisible?"

The man had his ticket in hand and as he moved to enter the theater, the two young ladies did indeed catch his attention and he froze with his hand on the door, nodded with a crooked smile, took a wicked glance at their calves, and then walked inside to the popcorn stand.

"Well I," Lola began.

"I hope never," Charlene finished.

"Should we go somewhere else?"

"Where?"

"Skating.  We could go roller skating."

"Lola, I've been waiting for this movie to come for months, and I'm not going to let some little red-headed cheese face ruin it.  We are going to watch the show.  He is no one, no body, and no thing."

"You're right.  I'm being scared and stupid.  You're right."

The girls bought their tickets and went inside.  After their long walk, the popcorn smelled painfully good.  Red had disappeared from the snack stand and they were glad.  They bought two 5 cent bags of hot buttered popcorn and slipped through the black curtained entryway to find their seats.

An usher in a maroon uniform met them and took their tickets and escorted them swinging his flashlight to two seats in the center.  The theatre was filling up fast and in the right hand corner up front they could see Red chewing on his popcorn.  When the lights blackened, first there were the newsreels:  "The March of Time"; automobile racing; dare-devil riding; motorcycles and cars crashing through flaming debris; airplane stunt shows; Winston Churchill speaking; London fire raids. There was a cartoon of black and white cows and horses and mice tip-toeing and skipping in a drafty run-down hotel.  And then there was the feature, "That Hamilton Woman," starring Vivian Leigh as Emma Lady Hamilton, and Laurence Olivier as Admiral Lord Nelson.

Charlene whispered to Lola as the opening credits rolled,   "I hear this is Winston Churchill's absolutely favorite movie.  I heard he's watched it over fifty times.  Of course it got a bad review in Newsweek, but they pan every movie I like."

"When did you start reading Newsweek, Miss Brain?"

"In the St. Albans library, after basketball practice.  Come on, expand your horizons, girl."

Lola was stung and she was in the habit of letting stings build in a rather silly way until she was almost angry.  But this time she sank into sadness.  Her friend was drifting in a new direction with a hunger to know exciting things beyond their little river valley and orbit of small towns.  Lola thought of her own terribly predictable life:

Sound.  Shape.  Shape.  Sound. My mother gets up; it must be 4:30 in the morning; the house is cold, November.  She chunks the wood into the stove and, with some old newspapers, gets it lit.  A kettle of cold water is already on the stove top and a big coffee pot.  She pours some of the water from the kettle into the coffee pot, she hand grinds some coffee beans in  a mill, the grinding sound accompanied by that fragrance, luscious.  The stove gets hot, the coffee perks, the bacon fries and the potatoes.  The sun comes up through the east window.  There are no oranges for orange juice.  One image from a magazine I remember from when I was very young.  Orange juice.  The daylight beginning in a lush backyard full of columbine and morning glory and herbs and vegetables and there is this lady in a morning gown outside with a big perspiring pitcher of orange juice as if she were standing near that morning dew and picket fence to pour this bright beverage, this nectar, into the glass of a handsome neighbor.  My mother, by contrast is gray in her work clothes, ready to work hard for 40 cents an hour on farms, doing a man's work.  And I with no more school, waking for breakfast and later work at the St. Albans creamery, washing the bottles and refilling them with milk for delivery to the stores in the little towns.  I can't count on Lenny for a ride, so I walk most mornings, the Red Ball, five miles, rain or shine.