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9 BUDDY REPPERTON
And I know, no matter what the cost,
Oooooh, that dual exhaust
Makes my motor cry,
My baby's got the Cadillac Walk.
— Moon Martin
Our last full week of work before school started was the week before Labor
Day. When I pulled up to Arnie's house to pick him up that morning, he came
out with a great big blue-black shiner around one eye and an ugly scrape
upside his face.
"What happened to you?"
"I don't want to talk about it," he said sullenly. "I had to talk to my parents
about it until I thought I was gonna croak." He tossed his lunch pail in the
back and lapsed into a grim silence that lasted all the way to work. Some of
the other guys ribbed him about his shiner, but Arnie just shrugged it off.
I didn't say anything about it on the Way home, just played the radio and kept
myself to myself. And I might not have heard the story at all if I hadn't been
waylaid by this greasy Irish wop named Gino just before we turned off Main
Street.
Back then Gino was always waylaying me—he could reach right through a
closed car window and do it. Gino's Fine Italian Pizza is on the corner of
Main and Basin Drive, and every time I saw that sign with the pizza going up
in the air and all the i's dotted with shamrocks (it flashed off and on at night,
how funky can you get, am I right?), I'd feel the waylaying start again. And
tonight my mother would be in class, which meant a pick-ip supper at home.
The prospect didn't fill me with joy. Neither my dad nor I was much of a
cook, and Ellie would burn water.
"Let's get a pizza," I said, pulling into Gino's parking lot. "What do you say?
A big greasy one that smells like armpits."
"Jesus, Dennis, that's gross!"
"Clean
armpits," I amended. "Come on."
"Nah, I'm pretty low on cash," Arnie said listlessly.
"I'll buy. You can even have those horrible fucking anchovies on your half.
What do you say?"
"Dennis, I really don't—"
"And a Pepsi," I said.
"Pepsi racks my complexion. You know that."
"Yeah, I know. A great
big
Pepsi, Arnie."
His gray eyes gleamed for the first time that day, "A great
big
Pepsi," he
echoed. "Think of that. You're mean, Dennis. Really."
"Two, if you want," I said. It was mean, all right—like offering Hershey bars
to the circus fat lady.
"Two," he said, clutching my shoulder. "Two Pepsis, Dennis!" He began to
flop around in the seat, clawing at his throat and screaming, "Two! Quick!
Two! Quick!"
I was laughing so hard I almost drove into the cinderblock wall, and as we
got out of the car, I thought, Why shouldn't he have a couple of sodas? He
sure must have been steering clear of them lately. The slight improvement in
his complexion I'd noticed on that overcast Sunday two weeks ago was
definite now. He still had plenty of bumps and craters, but not so many of
them were—pardon me, but I must say it—oozing. He looked better in other
ways too. A summer of road-ganging had left him deeply tanned and in better
shape than he'd ever been in his life. So I thought he deserved his Pepsi. To
the victor goes the spoils.
Gino's is run by a wonderful Italian fellow named Pat Donahue. He has a
sticker on his cash register which reads IRISH MAFIA, he serves green beer
on St Patrick's Day (on March 17th you can't even get near Gino's, and one of
the cuts on the jukebox is Rosemary Clooney singing "When Irish Eyes Are
Smiling"), and affects a black derby hat, which he usually wears tipped far
back on his head.
The juke is an old Wurtitzer bubbler, a holdover from the late forties, and all
the records—not just Rosemary Clooney—are on the Prehistoric label. It
may be the last jukebox in America where you can get three plays for a
quarter. On the infrequent occasions when I smoke a little dope, it's Gino's I
fantasize about—just walking in there and ordering three loaded pizzas, a
quart of Pepsi, and six or seven of Pat Donahues home-made fudge brownies.
Then I imagine just sitting down and scarfing everything up while a steady
stream of Beach Boys and Rolling Stones hits pours out of that juke.
We went in, ordered up, and sat there watching the three pizza cooks fling the
dough into the air and catch it. They were trading such pungent Italian
witticisms as, "I seen ya at the Shriners' dance last night, Howie, who was
that skag your brother was wit?" "Oh,
her?
That was your sister."
I mean, like, how Old World can you get?
People came in and went out, a lot of them kids from school. Before long I'd
be seeing them in the halls again, and I felt a recurrence of that fierce
nostalgia-in-advance and that sense of fright. In my head I could hear the
home-room bell going off, but somehow its long bray sounded like an alarm:
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: | 
