Roman Holiday

After watching Audrey Hepburn movies--Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Roman Holiday--Slocoff always pounded the top of the television set like prison bars. He cried. He shouted. He moaned and rolled around the floor. He raved about the bones in her neck, her doe-eyes, how she moved oh so gently. I always watched him from a position on the couch.

Budney watched him from another room.

Slocoff would bring down his mother’s abstinence mints from their mantel. He chewed. Balefully, like horse-teeth grinding, until his rage was over. I remember Slocoff shouting about how pretty Mrs. Hepburn was, how skinny and classy she seemed. Refined. I disagreed with Slocoff; I always thought she looked malnourished. I’d never tell him though--would just cause trouble--but I did tell Budney and what do you know he agreed. During these fits, Budney had to stick a belt or a rolled-up newspaper or once even, his clenched fist in his mouth to keep from laughing too hard. He found his frustration oh so funny. After the fits, Slocoff was left breathing heavily and then he was back to being nervous and touchy and jumpy: some great change swept over him. These were the days I didn’t know where to begin. I would start sentences and not be able to end them, trail off like a half-built bridge. My tongue was tripping up.

One Saturday at the end of February was one of Slocoff’s days. It was a sunny day, one of the first that year. Slocoff, Budney, and I were leaving the apartment. Slocoff, having just seen a photo of Audrey Hepburn in his mother’s movie magazine, had just finished up shouting into the snout of his mother’s phonograph (a recent manifestation of his frustration). He ripped a few leaves off one of his mother’s orchids, too. As I put on my shoes, I admired the spotlessness of his house. Bananas didn’t brown in their bowl; there were no loose papers sitting on empty surfaces; everything had place. Slocoff’s mother had once told me about how she collected paper for the U.S. Government when she was twelve. The government turned the papers into anti-Japanese propaganda that they flew into the Pacific and rained onto islands. She once told me too about how her family--her whole town--stood by the rails as the train carrying FDR’s body slid past and out of sight. This was why now Slocoff’s mother collected paper; she kept the house uncluttered except for select spots in bookshelves and the refrigerator.

When we left, Slocoff locked the door. It was hot on the sidewalk and a Cadillac passed as we rounded a corner.“Where do you want to go?” Slocoff asked.

“Out,” said Budney.

“I heard the circus is coming,” I said.

“Where?”

“End of the grapefruit farms.”

“Is’t Barnum and Bailey?” Budney asked. “No use unless it’s Barnum and Bailey. The circuses they’re bad nowadays.”

“Have you ever been to a circus?” I asked.

“Well, no, but you know what they say: the more civilized the man the more men in civilization. And Noah built his ark for all the animals.”

“You should be a politician, Budney,” Slocoff said. Budney grabbed Slocoffs shoulders and shook him like salt.

Slocoff, Budney, and me had been together for a while. We were not quite good friends, but at the tipping point where after a few months I knew where Slocoff’s mom kept her paintings of the Sistine Chapel. I knew where Budney’s father smoked. I knew where Budney’s father went to be alone. Once I saw him from from my bike tossing the hood ornament that he had decrowned from the head of his Buick--the one that had begun to slur-- and he let out the most intense scream I had ever heard. But that part escaped me until much later, and I latched onto his smoking. This I identified him with: the faint smell that gummed onto his car’s upholstery and teeth color that could have only been fixed by the black-and-white reality of the movies. Budney’s father wheezed because he smoked. His car groaned because he smoked. I was young. 14, maybe.

Slocoff and Budney had the same first name, Fred, so everybody called them by their last. Slocoff wasn’t an inch proud of his, and Budney was able to shrug off most things. Slocoff’s name reminded him too much of his mother’s home. The tight hug and choke of the apartment. I had never heard much about his father, but his mother was deeply religious. A nut, Slocoff would say. Piety as explosive as the volcanoes at Yellowstone. She was stiff-backed with Slocoff and angry to have made such a sensitive boy. She tried to make Slocoff less timid by introducing him to youth groups or psalms choirs, but it didn’t work. I remember some weeks she got so mad at him she wouldn’t let him leave the apartment. There, God hung like a guest and I felt divine eyes trailed to my back whenever I stayed over. I remember once that Slocoff told me how his mother would tick off a point from his 100 test grades and ring up the school to shout at his teacher. “Only God is perfect,” she cited, “why reward him for original sin?”

We started out on the next street and we were debating the merits of the circus, or anywhere else we could go. We knew we couldn't go to Budney’s house because it was pretty much a trash dump. He lived a few blocks away in the tenement housing with his mother, mostly. His father was a once-a-week visitor. Budney’s mother had, nearly, evicted his father when she found out he was a Communist. If he had been a Communist, well now he was a drunk Communist.

One Sunday when Slocoff was at church, Budney and I saw Budney’s father egg an old woman’s car as she pulled out of the lot of a supermarket because she offered to stick money into his hands. She thought he was homeless.  Budney’s father was visibly wobbly. When she got out and threatened to the police he pleaded. Really down on his knees, down on his luck pleaded. Budney was disgusted. We had stopped to watch from the bike path above the store, and Budney grabbed the railing so hard it near bent. His father bowed in apologies. It looked like he was worshipping her. The old woman nonetheless made the call and Budney’s father was charged with a misdemeanor assault count, which was waived by fine, and with  petty theft for stealing the eggs. I wondered why he could not help himself.

We were on Elkin Street now, closer to my house, but we couldn’t go to my house either. My house was no better. What I never told Slocoff’s mother in the mock-confessionals she had me try in an attempt to convert me, was that my parents were swingers and that I was convinced I was going to hell. Or whatever I thought hell could be for the son of swingers. Whereas sex was an open door in my house, it was shut in Slocoff’s. A closed door: this is what I wanted. I wanted family meals. I wanted to make it to heaven. I wanted to go, I wanted to go.

We, well, more Budney than Slocoff or I, decided to go head over to the West side of the local high school to see what circus was in town.

Turned out, the circus wasn’t Barnum and Bailey, but it did have enough interesting sights to keep Budney engaged. Workers were poling together a hundred small tents around the large, peppermint-striped canopy. Circus employees milled about. I could see animal crates at the edge of my vision. Cotton candy machines spinned. The lights on the Ferris wheel were being tacked on. We lied about Slocoff being family with one of the carneys and they ushered us in.

Budney and I walked through the half-raised city. Slocoff was behind and more cautious. We met a carney or two. They had yellow teeth and badly tailored coat tails. I asked for directions; Budney asked for a story. “Where are the animals?” I asked.

“Why are we here?” Budney probed. “I mean like you and me.”

In more vague and explosive language we were told to leave because we looked young. They motioned, sloppily, towards the horizon as a possible destination.

We went around and around the large tent. Circus directors were inside inspecting a clipboard, while two or four construction workers pinned up the ampitheatric bleachers.

“They look like church pews,” Slocoff said. Slocoff took steps away from the tent.

“What?” said Budney. “The bleachers? No they don’t. You’re just paranoid. You know what I was told? If you spend too much time in church you get older more quickly. You get squeezed out like a prune.”  

“Who told you that?” I asked. Budney declined to answer. I knew his father told him that, but he was just too ashamed to say so.

We moved toward the food sector. My mouth watered. Budney and Slocoff’s eyes glazed. We guessed that they were testing out recipes and various sugars and salts. We walked up near to the base of the ferris wheel and I whistled. “Damn right,” said Budney.

As we made a large circuit around the construction, Budney was laughing and Slocoff was hesitant and I was pretty awed. Budney pushed us around and we would mime like we were the drunk carneys: slur, burp if you had it in you, and fall. While pushing us around Budney had this punishing glare, but Slocoff never noticed. It was still funny, though. We did this routine until we hit the animal exhibit. It never got old.

The animals were caged up. Monkeys jumbled together in a hollering mess. Four camels were clumped together in an assembly line. The elephants were huge and impressive, the dogs yapped away. There was a hippo whose jaw hinged open and closed whenever we got near it. Budney jumped back and forth, forcing its mouth to open and close faster than it wanted to. It got tired. It likely decided we were not worth its time. Slocoff and I, we walked down to the end of the crates, leaving Budney behind to play with the monkeys.

The last exhibit was a lion. It looked starved and skinny and gaunt and rawboned and had these deep-set eyes that looked tired and omniscient at the same time. I could see its ribcage. Its stomach was crossed with gashes. I think I got too close because it roared. It was the least impressive roar I could have thought of, unprimal and tame. It sounded like a deflated car engine. I had a thought: Why do lions choose to work for their food? It was clear to me that it’d rather die frustrated and starving. I picked up a stick from the ground a poked its shoulder. It didn’t move, didn’t say anything.

“I think it’s sick,” I said.

“I think he’s dying,” said Slocoff. “I’m going to administer its last rites.”

I moved forward a step. Slocoff moved back, his hands clasped, praying furiously. Slocoff spoke in holy tongues, and I, who knew too little, stayed quiet.

And if the rapture happened right then, as Slocoff’s mother often raved, we, the lion, Slocoff, and I, might have looked pretty crazy when we arrived at Heaven’s gates. And then, maybe, maybe I’d get there.