The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh

The golf course eventually gave way to the parklike skirt of Carnegie-Mellon University, and then the park gave way to the bridge, the ravine, and Oakland. Nothing doing at the Cloud Factory; they weren't making any today. A block of white brick, two beige stacks, an enigmatic series of catwalks and closed doors, the Cloud Factory sat on the other side of the bridge, down the hill from the Carnegie Museum, along the railroad tracks that ran beneath the bridge. The steel confusion of scaffolding and cable around the building seemed to connect it both to the museum above, filled with geodes and dinosaurs, and to the automobile-laden trains that passed alongside it in the night.

As I approached, I looked far below me, into the ravine, and tried to imagine two cravatted schoolboys, kicking through the sand and Coke cans down there, discussing the primes of their lives as though they were yet far off, and not already upon them. Since I had no idea of how Cleveland looked, however, the image was unclear, and anyway, I thought, they would probably have been stoned, just talking about trigonometry, John Lennon, and fathers.

When I reached the end of the bridge, I ducked right, on an impulse, and down a set of concrete stairs I'd never before noticed, which ended in the chain-link and iron grating of a padlocked entrance to the Cloud Factory. From there, steps of wood led down to the sandy floor of the ravine, and I took them, checking my watch; I had a half hour or so. When I hit bottom I looked up at the corroded red bridge stretched over my head, reverberating with each passing car. I came around the Cloud Factory a bit, trying to look through its opaque white windows.

Arthur, I suppose, was content to think it a cloud factory; but I had to know its real purpose before proceeding to pretend I was equally content. I couldn't decide whether the place had to do with the museum or with the rails, however, and after a brief, fruitless examination of some rusted signs lying bent and nearly illegible in the dirt around the building, I turned to climb the steps.

Inside the building something engaged, and a low rumble grew quickly to a whine and a tattoo. I took my steps in time with the metallic tapping of the Cloud Factory, jolted out of my rainy-Tuesday sleepiness. Looking backward at it as I climbed, I had nearly gained the summit when a dense white billow blew from a giant valve, and then spread and rose into the air until a model cloud hung above my head, a textbook cloud, like a sheep, like cotton and all the cloud cliches. At the same time, Phlox rather prissily crossed the bridge on her bicycle, trailing thin scarves, posture perfect, sunglassed face forward and intent, probably, on the waiting white library in the distance. She seemed to be beautifully dressed. I stood still, half hidden against a cold red pile of the bridge, until the cloud began to break apart and she vanished into traffic. I'd spied on Phlox again. Something about her frightened me, though at the time I hadn't the word for it.

As I walked into Boardwalk I caught the unmistakable signs of 'it' being 'whooped up' in the back room. Gil Frick, ex-Yeshiva, weekend marksman, and a deadly boring shrimp of an engineering student, had been left to attend the front cash register, a rare procedure, the management generally reserving for Gil the tasks it considered too menial or benumbing even for me and my malcontent ilk, such as peeling the price stickers from huge cairns of unsold paperbacks or burying the dead remaindered autobiographies of noncelebrities in the remote and freezing basement. In addition, the fifteen or so customers around the wrestling and men's magazines and the Sports section of the store had their heads turned attentively toward the workroom at the back; some of them seemed to be laughing in deep appreciation of whatever fun was being had back there: shouts, hysterical feminine laughter, someone singing.

'Hey, Gil,' I said. 'Well! It sounds as though someone is enjoying himself in the rear office.' Following Arthur's example, I'd begun to affect an overgrammatical, precious manner toward people like Gil Frick, to keep them, as I imagined Arthur saw it, from wanting to talk to me.

'Yeah, someone,' he said. I noticed he sported a small set of facial bruises, and a fresh glum chunk of electrician's tape on his eyeglasses.

'Were you involved in some kind of scuffle or fracas, Gil?'

'No,' he said, coloring.

I didn't press it. Crossing the gum-blackened white tile floor from the front of the shop to the bins chock-full of abysmal children's books (this week: Tuffy the Egg and A Zillion and One Really Funny jokes to Tell and Color) by the back room, I decided that the current festivities must be the result either of liquor, despite the early hour, or, more likely, of five or six dozen doughnuts, both of which seeds of brute merriment were sometimes introduced, with pathetically good results, into the usually sere Boardwalk moonscape.

Actually, there were both whiskey and doughnuts, but the laughter was due not to these but to Ed Lavella, three hundred pounds, and his brother Joey, two hundred and seventy-nine pounds, who had on dresses, high heels, and makeup, and in their costumes were demonstrating cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

'Bechstein!' they shouted as I entered the room. 'How about a date, you big fag?'

I winced inwardly, though Ed and Joey always called me this; for the first time I took it half-seriously, as though my friendship with Arthur made me gay by association. Of course, I reminded myself, they didn't mean homosexual, exactly; what they meant was: you thin, weak kid whom we could completely crush under our tremendous butts or dismember with very little exertion. I laughed.

'Ha ha,' I said. 'What is this? Some Like It Fat?'

'Ha ha,' said everyone in the room. These included, in addition to the pair of giant future paramedics: three chainsmoking, bulimic young women who occupied various higher levels in the byzantine Boardwalk management hierarchy; Rodney, a tall, quiet black man who had gone to jail for evading the Vietnam draft, and who was now in the process of converting to Catholicism, with the eventual aspiration of becoming a Trappist monk, 'like Thomas Merton,' who, as Rodney often told me, died in a terrible and ridiculous fashion; and Calvin, another budding paramedic, a fan of knives and small firearms, and Gil Frick's only friend at work-one friend more than I had myself. These people sold books in the shadow of the University of Pittsburgh.

'Skit Night at the station tonight,' said Ed, lurching to his feet. Joey remained flat on his back, his upper body a mess of decolletage, the tangled gray straps of his bra, and wadded Kleenex. 'Just trying out the costumes on you'ns.'

'Great costumes, fellas,' I said. 'Terrifying. Um-it's not ten yet, is it? I have time? Excuse me. I have to make a phone call.'

I walked back out into the store, hands shaking, and up to the telephone at the front.

The phone was busy at the Bellwethers'. I tried to determine whether this was fear I felt, or anxiety. What, I asked myself, what is the big deal? They were still laughing in the back room; two customers stood nearly on the threshold, probably eyeing the doughnuts. Who was he talking to? What would I say if he answered?

Despite the several girls I had loved and made love to since my last year of high school, my childhood weakness and sexual uncertainty, all my suffering as a 'fag' under the insults and heavy forearms of stronger boys, and what amounted to my infatuation with Arthur had made me an easy victim to this unintentional surprise attack by the two cross-dressed fatsos. I asked myself, in that matter-of-fact, soldierly way one asks oneself this sort of question, standing with the still-chirruping telephone in my hand, if I felt like having sex with Arthur.

'Art!' shouted Valerie, the smartest, most important, and most alarmingly thin of the women at Boardwalk. 'You were just about to hang up!' She looked at me sternly; Valerie considered sternness to be the most effective managerial technique, and could deploy a tremendous battery of stern expressions, made even more effective by her long, heavy eyebrows and Afghan hound's face.

'Why, yes, Valerie, I was. Gee!' I said, quickly hanging up. 'How'd you know?'

'Home Improvement,' said Valeri, 'now. It looks like they've been playing jai alai in it.'

'Right.' I grabbed a feather duster from Gil and headed back to the Home Improvement section, to make order and glittering shelves; to push around the dust until my head was thoroughly ringed with little clouds of motes and murk.

All day, as every day, I wove past customers with my arms full of books, repeating the words 'Excuse me' so many times without getting a response that I began to feel genuinely inexcusable. Like the mounting evidence of a subtly evil betrayal of daily life (dead birds and telephones, the roisterous sheriff's sudden sobriety, the neighborhood children chanting in mesmeric circles in the desert schoolyard) in a movie about invasion from outer space, it seemed that every ten minutes a new reminder of homosexuality intruded into the usually eventless world of Boardwalk Books-a handsome couple of men, a copy of Our Lady of the Flowers that