I ran off into the fog.
The long chattering clack and grind, the ascending slow clang, rattle, and roar, like some robot centipede of immense size scaling the side of a nightmare, pausing at the top for the merest breath, then cascading in a serpentine of squeal, rush, and thunderous roar, in scream, in human shriek down the abysmal span, there to attack, more swiftly this time, another hill, another ascending scale rising yet higher and higher to fall off into hysteria.
The rollercoaster.
I stood looking up at it through the mist.
In an hour, so they said, it would be dead.
It had been part of my life as long as I could remember. From here most nights you could hear people laughing and screaming as they soared up to the heights of so-called existence and plunged down toward an imaginary doom.
So this was to be a final ride late in the afternoon, just before the dynamite experts taped explosives to the dinosaur's legs and brought him to his knees.
'Jump in!' a boy yelled. 'It's free!'
'Even free I never thought it was anything but torture,' I said.
'Hey, look who's here in the front seat,' someone called. 'And behind!'
Mr. Shapeshade was there, cramming his vast black hat down over his ears, laughing. Back of him was Annie Oakley the rifle lady.
Back of her sat the man who had run the fun house; alongside him was the old lady who spun the pink cotton candy machine and sold illusion that melted in your mouth and left you hungry long before Chinese food.
Back of them were the Knock a Milk Bottle and the Toss a Hoop team, everyone looking like they were posing for a passport photo to eternity.
Only Mr. Shapeshade, as coxswain, was jubilant.
'As Captain Ahab said, don't be yellow!' he called.
That made me feel like a sheep.
I let the rollercoaster ticket-tearer help me into the coward's back row.
'This your first trip?' He laughed.
'And my last.'
'Everyone set to scream?'
'Why not?' cried Shapeshade.
Let me out, I thought. We'll all die!
'Here goes,' the ticketman yelled, 'nothing!'
It was heaven going up and hell all the way down.
I had this terrible feeling they blew the legs out from under the rollercoaster as we descended.
When we hit bottom I glanced over. A. L. Shrank stood on the pier, staring up at us lunatics who had willingly boarded the Titanic. A. L. Shrank backed off in the fog.
But we were climbing again. Everyone screamed. I screamed. Christ, I thought, we sound as if we mean it!
When it was over, the celebrants wandered off in the fog, wiping their eyes, holding on to each other.
Mr. Shapeshade stood beside me as the dynamite men ran in to wrap their explosives around the girders and struts of the great ride.
'You going to stay and watch?' said Mr. Shapeshade, gently.
'I don't think I could stand it,' I said. 'I saw a film once where they shot an elephant right on screen. The way it fell down and over, collapsed, hurt me terribly. It was like watching someone bomb St. Peter's dome. I wanted to kill the hunters. No, thanks.'
A flagman, anyway, was waving us off.
Shapeshade and I walked back through the fog. He took my elbow, like a good middle-European uncle advising his favorite nephew.
'Tonight. No explosions. No destructions. Only joy. Fun. Great old times. My theater. Maybe tonight is our last cinema night. Maybe tomorrow. Free.
Gratis. Nice boy, be there.'
He hugged me and plowed off through the fog like a great dark tugboat.
On my way past A. L. Shrank's I saw that his door was still wide open. But I didn't step in.
I wanted to run, call collect on my gas station telephone, but I feared that two thousand miles of silence would whisper back at me of deaths in sunlit streets, red meats hung in carneceria windows, and a loneliness so vast it was like an open wound.
My hair grayed. It grew an inch.
Cal! I thought. Dear, dreadful barber, here I come.
Cal's barber shop in Venice was situated right across the street from the city hall and next door to a bail bond shop where flies hung like dead trapeze artists from flypaper coils that had been left in the windows for ten years, and where men and women from the jail across the way went in like shadows and came out like uninhabited clothes. And next door to that was a little ma-andpa grocery, but they were gone and their son sat on his pants in the window all day and sold maybe a can of soup and took horse-race telephone bets.
The barber shop, though it had a few flies in the window that had been dead no more than ten days, at least got a wash-down once a month from Cal, who ran the place with well-oiled shears and unoiled elbows and spearmint gossip in his all-pink mouth. He acted like he was running a bee farm and afraid it would get out of hand as he wrestled the big, silver, bumbling insect around your ears until it suddenly froze, bit, and held on to your hair until Cal cursed and yanked back as if he were pulling teeth.
Which is why, along with economics, I had my hair cut only twice a year by Cal.
Twice yearly, also, because of all the barbers in Cal in the world, Cal talked sprayed, gummed, cudgeled, advised, and droned more than most, which boggles the mind. Name a subject he knew it all, top, side, and bottom, and m the middle of explaining dumb Einstein's theory would stop, shut one eye, cock his head and ask the Great Question with No Safe Answer.
'Hev did I ever tell you about me and old Scott Joplin? Why, old Scott and me, by God and by Jesus, listen. That day in 1915 when he taught me how to play the 'Maple Leaf Rag'. Let me tell you.'
There was a picture of Scott Joplin on the wall, signed in ink a few centuries ago and fading like the canary lady's message. In that photo you could see a very young Cal, seated on a piano stool, and bent over him, Joplin, his big black hands covering those of the happy boy.
There was that joyous kid, forever on the wall, captured on film hunched over to seize the piano keys, ready to leap on life, the world, the universe, eat it all.
The look on that boy's face was such that it cracked my heart every tune I saw it. So I didn't look at it often. It hurt enough to see Cal looking at it, gathering his spit to ask the age-old Great Question, and, with no begs or requests, dash for the piano to maple leaf that rag.
Cal.
Cal looked like a cowpuncher who now rode barber chairs. Think of Texas cowhands, lean, weatherbeaten permanently dyed by sun, sleeping in their Stetsons, glued on for life, taking showers in the damn hats. That was Cal, circling the enemy, the customer, weapon in hand, eating the hair, chopping the sideburns, listening to the shears, admiring the Bumblebee Electric's harmonics, talking, talking, as I imagined him cowhand- naked dancing around my chair, Stetson jampack-nested above his ears, crave-itching to leap to that piano and rake its smile.
Sometimes I'd pretend I didn't see him throwing those mad stares, shuttling his love glances at the waiting black and white, white and black keys. But finally I'd heave a great masochistic sigh and cry, 'Okay, Cal. Git.'
