The Back Shop Boys

The next morning—Sunday—I met my friends as always on Cheese Hill, a cliff overlooking what had been a hat factory, but whose scorched walls (after it burned down) were taken over by the Apex Bicycle Saddle Company. The cliff rose out of the earth like the prow of a ship, a limestone ocean liner. At its base, behind the factory, was a shed in which malformed bicycle seats were stored until they could be melted down and formed into new, healthy ones. The shed’s corrugated tin roof offered a perfect target for the “bombs” of pale yellow limestone that broke off in crumbly, cheese-like chunks, hence “Cheese Hill.” We would toss them and wait for the grizzled old factory guard to come out of his wooden hut and shake a trembling fist up at us, which gesture we’d meet with outthrust palms and shouts of “Sieg Heil!” and “Hail Hitler!”

We called ourselves the Back Shop Boys since all our fathers had worked in the back shops of hat factories: Wesley “Pap” Papadopoulos, Victor Szentgyorgyi (pronounced “Saint George”), Wade “Skunky” White (so nicknamed following an unpleasant encounter with a black and white striped member of the Mephitidae family, order Carnivora). . . and Gilbert Slocum, member by proxy through me: Gilbert who spoke only three words, whose thick glasses and shadowy baseball cap visor could not hide a pair of eternally crossed, bulging eyes, Gilbert whose nose never stopped running, whose plaid shirtsleeves when he didn’t roll them up were always stiff with snot, whose skinny forearms (when he did) were glazed with the stuff as if by a coat of shellac. Gilbert who—back in those barbaric pre-p.c. days— wasn’t mentally “challenged” or “disabled” or “deficient” but “retarded”, or, as we said, a retard. And that’s when we felt generous.

Gilbert didn’t care what we called him as long as nothing stood between him and his “hot-dog”—the optical illusion of a floating bullet of flesh formed by touching the tips of his index fingers together and staring at them cross-eyed (easy for Gilbert to do, since his eyes were naturally crossed). The three words were a hot dog. He said them over and over, always with the same bright intonation of amazed discovery, as if witnessing the phenomenon for the very first time. He would try to eat the thing, snapping at it like a crocodile with his nasty overbite, biting his own fingers and crying out in pain. At first we all found this—and the crying fits it inspired—amusing. But like all of Gilbert’s tricks it got old fast. Now, seeing him about to snap at himself, I’d swat his big-eared, crewcut, encephalitic head.

I alone had permission to swat Gilbert; no one else could swat him. That permission was granted to me by myself, a consolation for the loss of privacy and esteem suffered in having Gilbert as an appendage. I did it for my father, the real one, in his memory. He had asked me to befriend Gilbert, or at least pretend to, as a favor for his former boss and friend, Herbert Slocum, back shop foreman at the Caxton-Dumont Hat Works. Following the factory’s closing in 1957, and Mrs. Slocum’s death (three weeks later) of complications from diabetes, Mr. Slocum plunged into a depression so deep he could barely drag himself out of bed. He fed Gilbert bologna sandwiches and oatmeal and drank his way through the weekends. Gilbert’s clothes grew tattered. He started to smell. My mother fed Gilbert and ironed his clothes. My father let him join us in our pursuits, riding the miniature trolly, bearing witness to hat factory fires. I became Gilbert’s de facto brother, a burden I accepted with forbearance, considering.

At first the other Back Shop Boys protested. What are we supposed to do with him? But certain advantages to the situation soon presented themselves. Gilbert was good for an occasional laugh. He was also a perfect target for the barbs that we would otherwise have launched at each other, an inert object to lash out at times of dissonance and strife. The others could say what they liked to him. They could call him “mooncalf” or “lamebrain” or “blubberhead” or any of dozens of other colorful compound pejoratives. They could call him anything they liked.

But they couldn’t touch him. If they touched him I’d be all over them.

We normally got there before the others, who all went to church. To amuse ourselves meanwhile Gilbert had his ever companionable hot-dog, while I’d brought with me in my knapsack my latest space comics, my purple Dunkin Imperial yo-yo, my How and Why Wonder Book of Planets & Interplanetary Travel, my Ruby Ray squirt gun, and my Space Orb Kaleidoscope (“Space Orb, Eye in the Sky!”). The latter offered glimpses of aliens from Venus, Mercury, Mars, Saturn, and all the other planets, though the “aliens” were obviously cartoons and more ridiculous than anything.

And I had my binoculars, inherited from my dad, 1943 Bausch & Lomb Army issue 7 x 50’s (leather neck strap, black alligator finish, Serial Number 251908). With or without them, from the top of Cheese Hill I could see all of Bowler. Beyond the bicycle seat factory the central stretch of Main Street unfolded, with (from left to right) the hobby shop, the five and dime, the Empress movie theater (where Birdman of Alcatraz, starring Burt Lancaster, was playing) the hardware, drug and jewelry and other stores, their facades interrupted by clumps of trees. To the far right the view was framed by the railroad tracks and, parallel to them, the Cavanaugh Fuel Oil Storage Tanks, arranged from smallest to largest, like the metal cans my mother stored flour, tea and sugar in; to the left by Bowler Junior High, with its copper topped copula and fierce lightning rod. Winding like a copperhead through the view was the Brim River, whose mercury-laden waters would soon drown half the town.

But of all the landscape’s features none stood out more than the town’s smokestacks, nine in all, brick middle fingers thrust up into the dingy Connecticut sky. With my binoculars I could still read the factory names in faded black and white paint down their ruddy sides: MALLORY, KNOX, SUTTON, BENNET, CROFUS & CORBET, LEE, MERRIMAC, CAVANAUGH, CAXTON-DUMONT. They rose taller than the town’s tallest trees, taller than the junior high school copula, taller than the steeples of the Congregational, the Lutheran, the Episcopal, the Presbyterian—even the Catholic Church. Once those smokestacks darkened the sky with soot and prosperity; now only their shadows darkened the air, thick black shadows stretching across parking lots and playgrounds, bending over rooftops and automobile hoods, reaching into people’s back yards and bedrooms, creeping sullenly, with the hours of each day, like the hands of a gigantic, gloomy clock.

From atop Cheese Hill me and the other Back Shop Boys would inventory the day’s possibilities. We could peddle our bikes into town and guzzle from the town hall water fountain, the coldest on earth. We could rob old man Mulvaney blind in his variety store, with two of us distracting him while the other two pinched Matchbox cars, chewing gum and fudgsicles. We could scamper down to the bank of the Brim River and watch the latest garbage float by (bottles and cans and corn chip bags and formerly bright rubber balls, their cheerful colors dulled to the chalky dullness of a pencil eraser in the river’s alchemical laboratory), or set fire to a model battleship and set it adrift, or catch frogs or, if no frogs were available and pokeberries were in season, start a pokeberry war, or cut down a cattail and twist its brown velvet shaft in our fists and send the cottony seeds flying. We could inspect the latest junk cars behind the Sunoco station, or snatch Pepsi empties from the stacked crates behind the Doughboy Restaurant, collect the deposits at the First National supermarket and treat ourselves to root beer floats at the drug store. Or we could climb a barbed-wire fence, break into the ruins of a hat factory and—with Skunky’s CO2 pellet gun—shoot out some windows, if there were any windows left to shoot out. Failing that we could render alternative judgments on people’s mailboxes by the Postmaster General (whose approval had, so often we felt, been given without due consideration). Among our choice alternatives:

Despised by the Postmaster General
Frowned Upon by the Postmaster General
Cruelly Dismissed by the Postmaster General
Given the Finger by the Postmaster General
Told to Fuck Off by the Postmaster General

In the rare but not unheard of event that words failed to adequately express the Postmaster General’s sentiments Skunky would light an M-80 and toss it in and thus let his feelings be known.

These were but some of the many remarkable ways to be bored in Bowler.