ZIP Code 10001 Pt 2

PT 2

“More F-Words!”

I watched the taxi hurtle away down 7th Avenue, happy to have survived my ride in it. While passing a bus on the inside it narrowly missed a young mother pushing a baby stroller crossing at 26th Street. The taxi driver shook his fist at the startled mother and honked insanely. 

Which takes two hands and perhaps explains the slight collision of the taxi with a pretzel cart, scattering dozens of the twisty snacks into the street where they were crushed under the tires of 30,000 roaring, belching, oversized American vehicles within fourteen seconds! 

The pretzel man shook his fist at the taxi and cursed tremendously.

No one paid him the least attention.

Except us.

“Did you see that?” asked Suzie. “Shame.”

If you know a South African then you’ll know that “shame” can mean almost anything. Shame you had a nice holiday, shame your car broke down, shame the puppy is so cute.

“See it?” I answered. “Did you hear it? That pretzel guy could really curse up a storm!”

It seemed to Suzie and I that every one of New York’s seven and a quarter million people (at the time of which I write, 1987) were here at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street. 

The noise and bustle were tremendous!

Throngs of people pushed past us, going this way and that. People of every size and shape, speaking languages we’d never heard before and didn’t understand. Including American English. They were dressed differently too. Heavier. Warmer. Darker. 

Many people, to our surprise, were drinking and eating in the street as they hurried along. Food wrappers and paper cups littered the sidewalks. 

Men wheeled racks of clothing and fur coats up Seventh Avenue against the traffic, cursing the cars and buses which narrowly missed them on all sides. 

I stood among the chaos and looked around… it was pandemonium!

“LOOK OUT!” cried Suzie, pulling me back from the curb.

“Yikes!” I yelled as three busses, 28 taxis and eight bicycles almost ran me over.

“I think you got a little too close to the road,” said Suzie.

“Yeah and the blasted traffic is going the wrong direction too!” I laughed. “So I didn’t see ‘em coming!”

“Excuse me, Suzie,” I added, then I turned and shook my fist at the murderous traffic while I cursed up a storm.

No one paid the least attention to me.

“Boy!” I said to Suzie after the cursing, “You have to keep your eyes open around here, don’t you?”

“Just like a New Yorker,” laughed my wife. “Don’t worry, dahling. You’re doing okay. So far.”

“Did you notice no one cared that I was standing in the street shaking my fist and cursing up a storm?”

“Maybe your cursing isn’t up to scratch,” suggested Suzie.

“Never!” I insisted. I was rightfully proud of my cursing, learned at the bottom of a muddy ditch when I worked as a laborer, many years ago. 

Since then I’d stayed in continual practice. 

“It must be my accent,” I explained.

“You’ve got to use the f-word way more,” said Suzie, “to keep up with the locals.”

“Right!” I answered. “More f-words.”

New York! I thought.

What a f*cking town!

   To be continued…

Buck and the Big Mosquitoes (Pt II)

Part II

The scenery rolled by as I drove the Falcon and listened to Buck in the seat beside me. He paused to take another swallow of rum and then sat silently for a moment, looking out the window. After awhile he turned and saw me scratching absentmindedly at an insect bite on my arm.

“Ten thousand bastards!” he cursed. “The mosquitoes are bad this year! I killed one the other day that was as big as a bleedin albatross!” 

He leaned towards me conspiratorially and uttered, “It’s the female mosquito that bites, you know, lad. And, as I may have mentioned, I’m absolutely irresistible to females! Hahaha!”

May have mentioned? By now Buck had told me a thousand tall tales, many of them with benefit of stimulating and willing females, for he was fond of a good copulation, to hear him tell it. How Buck loved to spin a yarn! It was his favorite thing to do, except perhaps, if one believed his stories, fornication. It was almost as if he believed these stories he was telling, he told them with such gusto and conviction. I was a willing and eager audience, for I like tales of fornication as much as the next bloke and besides, I was young and naive and still couldn’t tell or at least wasn’t insulted when a man was telling the truth or not. 

After all, the lessons of a lifetime cannot be learned in one day.

“Blasted mosquitoes!” said Buck and he good-naturedly cursed mosquitoes in general for five minutes straight. Then he cursed, for another ten minutes, a particular mosquito who had recently attacked him. 

“Talk about persistent, mate!” laughed Buck. “I was weak from loss of blood after her first attack. She had got me in the neck,” he pointed to the spot, “right here! Blood oozed from the wound and this seemed to drive her into a frenzy! I swear she had a look of malignant evil on her horrible, ghastly face, or the thing that we would call a face, matey, if she bleedin had one!” 

Buck paused at this point for another swallow from the bottle. Then he began again, a little breathlessly, with plenty of gesturing. “Just as she came in for the kill I knocked her down with an uppercut to the proboscis. Blast her! She was so tough I had to take off my boot and hit her three times with it to finish her off! Ugh! What a bloody mess.” 

For a moment Buck’s mouth turned down in a frown of remembrance, before he lifted the bottle again and gulped down the dark, sweet rum. 

“Ha! Ha! It was her or me, mate,” he said, “but I survived to tell the tale!”

“Of course,” he continued after a bit, “the biggest, nastiest mosquitoes I ever saw were in Africa. I remember once, crossing the Kalahari, when I saw in the sky, just off the road in the bush a little way, what I took to be giant vultures. 

“They were hovering over the dead carcass of an old bull elephant, the bastards! Getting out of the car, I grabbed my gun and pith hat and sallied forth to see if I could run off those bloody, damned vultures! 

“Because I hate vultures, Rusty Boy, terrible birds of ill omen that they are!” Buck reduced his voice to a whisper. “As I silently approached, my mouth went dry and my hands started sweating. I was fair-dinkum scared mate, for Death is all around you, every minute, in the African jungle.”

Buck took another drink while I thought about death being all around me all the time. Then he solemnly uttered, “I thought to myself, ‘Buck old boy, it’s a good day to die!’” 

I glanced over at Buck. He had that look on his face now, as if it were still a good day to die. 

“I clenched my buttocks,” he continued, “sharpened my eyes, strained my ears and crept forward. Bloody hell! They weren't vultures at all, but horrible monstrous mosquitoes, buzzing and prodding that poor elephant!

“Raising my gun, I took out the biggest one with a double blast, which thankfully scared off the others. Naturally, I wasn't stupid enough to wait around and meet any of her relatives, so I buggered off just as easy as shitting in bed and kicking it out with your foot!”

Buck took another pull from the bottle while I thought about shitting in bed and kicking it out with my foot.

“Too right, mate!” he continued. “I stopped only long enough to assist that old elephant to its feet, with a native trick I learned from an old Zulu witch doctor. 

“That elephant wasn't dead at all but was merely playing possum.”

“Huh?” I said. “What?”

“You didn't know that elephants played possum?” asked Buck, pretending surprise. “Oh yes, and they also, most of them, play the accordion, too.” Buck leaned in closer and whispered, “Although that's a bleedin well kept secret, mate, you have to be an experienced elephant handler or an old Zulu witch doctor to know that one.”

I laughed, but Buck, unconvinced that I was swallowing his tall tale, continued, “You don't believe me? Well, where the blasted hell do you think all that accordion music comes from in the African night when you're trying to sleep out there in the veldt under the stars?”

“I dunno, Buck, I’ve never been to Africa.”

“Bloody hell mate!” laughed Buck. “Use your noggin! An elephant could hardly play the harmonica or the saxophone with that long trunk of his, now could he?”

Many years later, I happened through the circumstance of living to find myself under the stars on the African veldt at night, yes and in a tent close by the Kalahari dessert too, just as Buck had described to the boy I used to be. 

I’d been in Africa a few years trying to make my living as an animator. I may have mentioned that being an animator is a rather hit and miss way of making a living. Anyway, I’d run out of animation gigs, so I had come along from Johannesburg to help some archeologist friends find fossils in the petrified mud of southern Botswana. My friends spent every winter there, cataloguing bits of seashell that had turned to stone uncounted centuries ago. 

We’d worked hard in the sun all day, and now after a good dinner with lively conversation, a little dagga and some strong Cape wine, we’d said our goodnights and gone off to our separate tents for sleep. I was laying in my cot, not asleep but not awake, listening to the wind rustling through the endless African grasses (or was that the strains of accordion music I heard wafting on the air?) when it hit me that Buck was right.

It really was a good day to die.
“Keep an eye out for elephants!” I called to Death and the ghosts and the African night, and I heard my friends gently laugh at my shenanigans.

“Goodnight Rusty, you old fool,” they laughed. “Sleep well.”

“Goodnight friends,” I answered. “You too.”

Little Stevie

   “Here,” said Mick, tossing me the keys. “You drive.”

   You drive. Magic words to a fifteen-year-old boy.

   I caught the keys and ran to the driver’s door, yanked it open and slid in behind the wheel. Mick opened the passenger door and got in.

   From the driver’s seat I checked my reflection in the rearview mirror, my eyes aglow with excitement. My hands gripped the steering wheel. I pumped the pedals with my feet. I clenched my buttocks. 

   I was ready. 

   I depressed the clutch and selected first gear. 

   But nothing happened.

   “Don’t you think you had better turn the motor on first?” asked Mick, more patiently than sarcastically. 

   But still with plenty of sarcasm. 

   “Yea-ah,” I replied. “Haha. I thought she was soundin’ pretty quiet.”

   I turned the key and the motor rattled into life. 

   I again depressed the clutch and selected first gear. 

   “Easy,” whispered Mick. “Easy does it.”

   I worked my feet. Gas, clutch. Feather it out. Somehow I did it and the car moved forward.

   “Good lad,” said Mick.

   Good lad. More magic words to a fifteen-year-old boy. 

   “Not so fast!’ Mick ordered. “Slow down! Blast it all! Do you want the blasted wheels to come flying off?” 

   “Okay, Mick,” I breezily replied. “Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing.”

   I felt very grownup to be in command of a car. This was no little kiddy-car either, but a sixteen-foot long, six-cylinder, 4000cc elephantine behemoth with suicide doors, radial tires and chrome-tipped running boards.

   “How’s the brakes?” asked Mick.

   “How would I know?” I replied with a grin. “I haven’t used them yet!”

   “Well, let’s use them now, shall we?” answered Mick sarcastically. He changed his tone and added, “Blast it all! This is supposed to be a test drive!” 

   We were in Mick’s car, a 1951 Humber Super Snipe Mk III, driving it around the block for a test drive after replacing some parts on the brakes. We’d worked on the Humber together all afternoon. Now, with the work done, Mick was teaching me how to drive. Every time we worked on the Humber, Mick gave me a driving lesson. 

   Which, with the Humber, was every weekend. And sometimes more often.

  “Slow her to a stop,” Mick quietly ordered. “Yeah, right here in the middle of the road. It’s okay, there’s no one about. That’s right. Push in the clutch. Easy.”

   I stalled it.

   “That’s okay.”

   “Sorry.”

   “It’s okay. Push in the clutch. Find neutral.”

   Mick gave the appearance of being a rough and tumble workingman, which he was, but inside he was kind and patient and understanding. He was a good teacher, too. He didn’t make you feel like a dunce or a failure, like he knew it wasn’t easy and that you were trying your best, if you didn’t happen to get the hang of it right away. I admired Mick tremendously, and in my eyes he could do no wrong. Eventually, after I married his daughter Ethne, we became as like a father and son as any two men could get.

   But that was in the future. 

   I finished the test drive without much more ado, if one doesn’t count the few moments of ado stalling it twice more or the handful of ado where I lost control a little and allowed the Humber to jump the curb. Or the funniest ado of all when I switched on the lights and the car went totally dead. Just stopped. No power, no lights, nothing. 

   We were stalled in the middle of the road. A car went round us honking and calling out where’s your lights, dumb-ass? 

   I salute you, fellow travelers of the road, responded Mick, only not so politely as that. Mick fiddled with some wires under the dash and soon we on our way again, headlights ablaze, the smell of burning electricity thick in the smoking air behind us. 

   Not much ado about anything, as I said. 

   I even managed to park it right where Mick indicated, or would have if the brakes had continued to work properly after we had foolishly tested them two corners back. 

   When the time came, instead of stopping where desired the giant Humber continued coasting forward, scraping its fender on the neighbor’s wooden boundary fence. 

   That brought out the neighbor’s faithful dog, whose name I later learned was Little Stevie, to see what was up. He darted past in the glare of the Humber’s headlights. 

   Stevie was a Yorkshire Terrier. 

   Seeing his master’s fence in jeopardy, Little Stevie began to madly bark, setting up a terrific noise especially if one considers his size, finally letting loose a prolonged, earsplitting howl. A howl from hell, if ever I heard one. 

   (Which of course, I haven’t. But you get my point.)

   A terrible noise it was, causing me to wish that my assaulted ears had ceased to function immediately after they had heard the beautiful blaspheming while brake-bleeding that Mick had brayed from beneath the behemoth earlier in the day. Some hot brake fluid had got him in the eye and he’d cussed without repeating himself for five full minutes. Man, could he curse!

   We didn’t curse in my home. It was particularly frowned upon. I had tried it once when I was a kid and boy, did I get a spanking! Mick’s family probably didn’t have a rule like that because he was an expert curser. His profanity was music to a schoolboy’s ear, and my own cursing had improved tremendously since meeting him. Every Monday the other boys in my class would gather round and see what new imprecation or insult I had learned over the weekend.

  Now the brakes weren’t working at all. Was there some connection, I wondered? What commandment was the one about blaspheming? Wouldn’t you know it, the only time in my life when I could actually use any of the Ten Commandments, and I couldn’t remember even one! Oh, I lamented, why hadn’t I studied harder at Bible School? What punishment did breaking this one, whichever one it was, promise? It couldn’t be death in a car crash, we were going too slowly for that, scraping along the fence as we were. Lightning bolt from above? It had been sunny all day, not a cloud on sight. A devouring by the Hounds of Hell, or more accurately, a devouring by a single little Yorkie from H-E-double hockey sticks?  He was so small he couldn’t possibly eat much, even with Satanic encouragement. It would probably take weeks to consume both Mick and myself. 

   That promised to be a slow, grisly death.

   I never felt a thing, sitting in the giant Humber with both my feet jammed down on the brake pedal, so I refuse to believe that the howling Little Stevie was crushed by one of the Humber’s big, nasty pneumatic tires. It’s a fact that Little Stevie wasn’t seen in the neighborhood for a while after that, giving some credence to the rumor that he had been squashed, but personally I believe that he ran away in terror, his little canine head unhinged by the sight of the elephantine Humber attempting sexual congress with the master’s fence! 

   Little Stevie eventually returned home to the elation of his owners, who loved him dearly and spoiled him terribly. He was none the worse for it they said, except that after that night he would never let a full moon pass without rising up from the warm rug by the fire, trotting purposefully outside to the suburban backyard, sitting his little canine posterior down on the silvery lawn and howling like a hound from hell!

  The Humber scraped to a halt against the fence. I looked at Mick, who nodded at me to switch the motor off. 

   “Should I put on the handbrake?” I asked.

   “Are you joking?” was Mick’s incredulous reply. “We’re jammed against the blasted fence!”