What follows is a swatch of Crystal Vision (1981)–a novel of almost pure dialogue by the late Gilbert Sorrentino. It takes place chiefly in a neighborhood candy store where a cast of Brooklyn characters–Ritchie, The Arab, Irish Billy, Big Duck, Doc Friday, Fat Frankie et al.–meet to “gossip, insult, lust, brag, and argue.” Beneath their dialogue, per the original publisher: “lies high seriousness of purpose.” The book’s epigraph speaks to this side of Sorrentino’s Vision. It’s from Dante’s Inferno and reads, “Great grief seized me at the heart when I heard this, for I knew people of much worth who were suspended in that limbo.” The excerpt below may not be perfectly representative of Sorrentino’s high seriousness, but this editor is betting First readers could use Sorrentino’s dialogic wit now. A few decades back his humor helped me get through one of my worst summers in the city. B.D.
23 Be Prepared
It doesn’t surprise me at all, Irish Billy says. Not at all–I always suspected that all adults in the Boy Scouts were crazy. No, not at all. Did I say “adults”?
Surprise or not, Billy, Doc Friday says, it’s the truth. The man became another crazed Swede, just like thousands of others.
Carl Krigman is a Norwegian! Big Duck says, proudly. One might even say he throws his chest out.
How did this mania come about?
How I can’t tell you, the Doc says. What…that I can tell you.
He was a good scoutmaster. Big Duck says. I don’t care what you bastards think. He was a goddam good Scoutmaster.
Duck, do me a favor and buy a Milky Way and feed your famished acne, Irish Billy says. I want to hear this without testimonials from you–even though I know you were a First Class Scout.
Star! Big Duck says. A Star Scout. With only two more Merit Badges to make Life.
Irish Billy looks around at Big Duck, he studies him. He shakes his head and looks back at Doc Friday. Go ahead, Doc.
Are Duck’s raging patriotic fires quenched? May I go on?
Duck grumbles, buys a Mrs Wagner’s pineapple pie and sits at the counter.
You know, of course, Doc Friday says, Crazy Krigman was always slightly abnormal. “Disturbed,” as they call it.
Sure I’ve heard the stories. The semaphore contests he organized from Brooklyn to Staten Island.
You heard about the mapmaking classes in Bliss Park in snowstorms? Or teaching the new kids to build fires in torrents of rain? Then he fails them when they can’t do it, or whatever they do in the bottle suckers.
Bottle suckers, my ass! Big Duck says, his mouth filled with pie. The Boy Scouts will make a man out of you.
Ignoring this ruffian interruption, Doc Friday says, the gentleman quietly continued conversing with his companion. And, Irish Billy says, his companion gave him his rapt and undivided attention–also ignoring the meatball intrusion from the peanut gallery.
From the cheapo seats, Doc Friday says.
From deepest bleachers, Billy adds.
You know, I take it, Doc Friday says, about the swimming lessons in the bay among the garbage and the navies–the armadas–of Trojans and Sheiks?
I’ve heard.
The ten-mile hikes of which alternate miles were walked barefoot?
One trembles at the memory.
The meals–meals?–of orange peels and eggshells?
Ucckkh! Billy says, and crosses himself.
At this, Big Duck, his face flaming, leaves the store.
For this relief, thanks, Doc Friday says. Young pimple puss is no doubt on his way home to gambol away a stray hour among his collection of Mallomars and electric trains.
He needs the sugar for his yearning eruptions’ health.
But, the Doc says. Running these young saps through their paces wasn’t enough for Crazy. He then dishonorably discharged the entire Pine Tree Patrol for looking too Italian. Still not enough. He banned from all fun and games for a month the troop librarian because he refused to sob at a recitation of “Barbara Frietchie” in Swedish. Not enough. Finally–and this is a Hitler you’re talking about–he wanted absolute fidelity and faithfulness. One Friday night the troop gathers in the basement of this little asshole Baptist church–even more degenerate than the one across the street–
Yet a hallowed meeting place, Billy says, broken toilet and all.
Hallowed indeed. As the kids file in, the slobs, I should say, in all their sweaty khaki glory, there’s Krigman on a throne–a big chair, anyway, taken from the pastor’s office upstairs. And God knows how many young-lady sopranos have been bent over it . He’s in some musty and nauseating robes, he’s got on a crown made out of oaktag on his head like in a school play in the third grade, he’s wearing his mother’s or his aunt’s or somebody’s necklaces, cheap gaudy shit costume jewelry, around his neck. He’s got a big branch from the peach tree in the back yard in his mitt. Shall I go on? Or do you get the picture of a man gone totally bananas, wholly apeshit?
I have got the picture.
He’s ordering all these little bastards to kiss his feet, he’s smacking them with his peach branch, he’s telling them they spend too much time at home and that he wants them in the basement every night. He’s telling them that he’s fucking disgusted with them because not enough of them are Swedes or Norwegians or whatever the goddam hell Scandihoovian he is and he wants them to stop being what they are and turn into Swedes.
Apeshit and bananas are words too mild to describe this yo yo’s condition, Irish Billy says.
Aha! But wait. He has a list of new names for them–all the same–Ivar Andersen. He starts yelling for them–Ivar Andersen! Ivar Andersen! And all the little assholes are milling around while he bashes them with his branch because they’re not answering to their names right. He says, you’re not Ivar Andersen! You’re Ivar Andersen! Finally amid all the din and snots and tears the Assistant Scoutmaster, another rawboned Swede, overpowers him and ties him with a sheepshank or a bowline or some goddam knot and they call the cops. You are not prepared! You are not prepared you guinea mick dago bastards! he’s yelling as they cart him away to the big jamboree at Kings County.
Nothing as wacko as a sick Swede, Billy says.
He’s not crazy! Big Duck shouts into the bathroom mirror at home, pushing chocolate-covered grahams into his mouth. Sobbing? All right, sobbing.
24 Scorcher
A big afternoon in mid-August. Those who would normally be in Vogler’s candy store are instead at Gallagher’s bar, drinking beer and waiting for the free lunch.
The sun on the street is so bright that it is like a pickax in the eyes. the air like a hot, damp hand over the mouth. Exhausted pedestrians walk like phantoms in a nightmare of hell and cars seem to creep along like wounded insects. Sounds are swallowed in the overwhelming humidity like stones thrown into the sea. Like symbols in an exotic verse by a French decadent, the storefronts in the merciless glare stand out like a trompe l’oeil painted in frenzy by a madman sweating in a personal inferno of hallucination, and far-off sounds of ship whistles in the Narrows trudge through the deadening atmosphere like doomed travelers lost in a blizzard in the Klondike of an imagination suffused with a fear so intense as to be as swift and ungraspable and yet as deadly as sheet lightning illuminating a ravaged landscape with a ghastly effulgence like the glow of a sinister moon on an unhallowed graveyard. Brains seem to cook and thrash like lobsters thrust viciously into a pot of boiling–
O.K.! O.K.! Enough! Spare us! Doc Friday says.
You asked me how it is out, Richie says, so I figured I’d tell you. A beer, Martin, he says to the bartender, who is drawing one already.
How hot, yes, Doc Friday says. but do I need a crash course in vivid language? Purple prose? Flimsy similes?
This is technologically known as furor scribendi, the Arab says, according to a profound and weighted tome I keep on my desk at all times.
Said tome? The Drummer asks, doing the small shuffle of a straight man.
Richard’s Rules of Modern Mucilage, the Arab says.
Oh, a joke, Richie says. A won-der-ful joke.
The problem that inheres upon all nonfiction is that it is often joky, the Arab says. and who needs laughs in a cosmos of a world that can make gouts of hysteria for the poor human being who just ambles his feet down the street?
Pepper enters the bar, sweating. Jesus Christ, that sun is bright, he says.
Like a pickax in the eyes? Doc Friday asks?
What?
Nothing–have a beer. The free lunch will be out soon.
Well, Pepper says. The bastard did it, by the way.
Who did what? Richie asks.
The goddam landlord on 68th–he threw Mrs. Elkstrom out. She’s sitting out on the street there in all that hot sun and heat waiting to go–Christ knows where.
Threw her out? Doc Friday says. You mean he evicted her? Mrs. Elkstrom? She must be eighty-five.
She’s out, whatever she is, Pepper says. You think that bastard cares?
She’s got a son, I know, the Drummer says. I remember him when he came back from the war. He was on the “Portland.”
That’s her grandson, the Arab says. Her son has long wended his way into the pale of the other world.
They stand silently at the bar and nod their thanks as Martin buys a round.
Mrs. Elkstrom sits in the sun, hardly feeling the heat in her old bones. In her mind is a vision of cold Swedish lakes and black-green forests in the northern sunlight. She sits in an old and ornately carved wooden chair from the old country, decorated with the exquisitely rendered lions and flowers. In her right hand she holds a small sapling that she has been tending in the back yard, in her left a huge sunflower she has grown. At her feet sits her small black cat, Bjorn.
Icy ponds reflecting black trees and high thin clouds. Cold grey churches. The ghostly sun of midnight. She sees her husband falling falling from the bridge that he had been red-leading.
The sun is remorseless and suddenly she feels its power. She lays the sapling and the sunflower on the sidewalk and strokes the cat.
Bjorn, Bjorn, she says. Bjorn, there is no point to it anymore and she leans back in the chair and dies.
He’s a bastard, Pepper says. I don’t know, maybe we ought to do something? Take her into the ice-cream parlor? I don’t know.
The Sailor comes in. My God! he says. It’s like walking through a furnace out there.
Like a nightmare of hell? Richie asks.
Right! What?
On 68th St., Mrs. Elkstrom sits in her chair, as still as death.
25 An Incident on Coney Island
Jimmy Finney? the Arab says. The name is totally alienable to me. I am glutted with tragic sorrow, as is only human, by the news that the gent is demised but I don’t know him.
Sure, Arab, Fat Frankie says. The guy who wanted to be a cop. Georgie Huckle’s cousin, a little guy with a funny kind of pointy head.
Ah, Professor Kooba says. I remember him. God rest his soul, but he was an odious young fellow who insisted on mispronouncing the title of my tome and calling it “The Coise.” Yes, his head was pointed in more ways than one.
Memory now floods my cranium! the Arab says. Of course. The youth who was wont to hang from a doorframe to stretch out his scrawny body. the youngster who was prone to guzzling himself disgustingly on pounds of bananas and Hershey bars till his teeth were a maze of blackened stumps so that he could gain some weight on his skeletonish frame. This unfortunate dolt has expired?
He once asked me what a drummer did, the Drummer says. Or, to be exact, he asked me what instrument a drummer played. Would you, Arab, call him a churl?
A churl is a meet designation for James Finney, yes. It may be, in fact, too kind, too euphonistic a term for such a knucklehead.
Remember him with that goddam suit he had like kids get for Christmas to play cops? Fat Frankie says.
Ah yes, Kooba replies. It even had a little tin badge that read “Official Police.” A simple soul. Hmm. “The Coise,” indeed!
I would venture the tentacious commentary that he single-handed–or single-mouthed–kept the United Fruit Company in business for at least a year all by himself, the Arab says. But how did he die? Was the hapless moron’s shuffling off this mortal coil a natural one?
Or was it caused by a surfeit of bananas? the Drummer asks.
Or perhaps he strangled or otherwise suffocated himself by the wrong pronunciation of words? Kooba adds.
What I heard, Fat Frankie says, I heard from Georgie Huckle. He was so broke up over it that he overlooked to put a couple of beans down on a three-to-one sweetie at Bowie.
He will remember that cursed day for the rest of his obsessed existence, the Arab says.
Son of a bitch will scan the Morning Telegraph now, the Drummer says, looking for some dog with the name of Crazy Jim or something. Finney’s Ghost. Bananas.
Anyway, Fat Frankie says, two weeks ago, he takes the police test for the tenth time. He can hardly walk from all the goddam bananas he ate, he spent the whole morning hanging from the doorframe, he lays down on his back on the floor then till it’s time to get going, then he grabs a taxi and lays down on the back seat. He does everything.
A stout heart despite the idiot brain fizzling within, the Arab says.
So–in he goes. he makes the height by an eighth of an inch. He makes the weight by a quarter of a pound. The doctor looks at him, he looks at him. He takes some tests, some other doctors look at him, they ask him some questions. Then they say they’ll let him know.
The statement hangs portentious with doom and failure, the Arab says. When they say they’ll let you know you can rend and tear up your stubs.
The tests come in, Fat Frankie says. The cops let him know that from what they can see, he’s an alcoholic. No soap. Naturally. The cops don’t need no more drunks in the department.
Coals to Newcastle, Kooba says.
Black despair spears its path into young Jimmy’s heart, the Arab says. I see it now. His poor teeny brain, such as it may be termed, stews and bubbles within his pointed skull.
Yesterday, Fat Frankie says, he steals a horse and gallops the nag down to the beach at Coney with the phony nightstick he made for himself years ago in shop in high school–and of course he’s got himself his little toy suit on.
Tears are rivuleting down his blankly characterless face, the Arab says.
Also he’s drunk as a coot, the Drummer adds.
He gallops around on the beach but there’s nobody to see him the middle of winter. So then, according to Georgie, he aims this fruit peddler’s nag right at the ocean and charges in, clubbing the waves.
Clearly besides himself with melancholia praecox, the Arab says. A common ailment among horsemen, according to certain findings among…among scientists.
The nag staggers out of the drink, Frankie says. But Jimmy Finney, no.
Now this is the type of horse that Georgie should put a pound or two on, Professor Kooba says. The horses he bets on are the kind would stand in the ocean and breathe the water in.
They found his little fake hat and jacket, but no Jimmy, Frankie says.
He went as he lived, the Arab says.
You mean dumb as shit? the Drummer asks.
Well, precluding and obviating strongly the vulgarism of the phrase, Drummer, I would say, yes, affirmatively yes. I would be compulsed to harmonize with that opinion, the Arab says.
It’s a shame, Kooba says, he never made the acquaintance of that other chowderhead who comes in here and who’s always off to Delaware or some odd spot like that, God only knows why. I cannot think of his name–the tall one with no idea of personal hygiene?
You mean Eddy Ellsworth, the Drummer say. Christ yes, they would have made fine pair.
Sort of like real-life Mutt and Jeff, Fat Frankie says.
Yet, the Arab says, it behooves me a devilish advocate, if you so allow me, to hint that if the young numbskull had become a member of New York’s Finest he might slowly but surely have gotten sane, or else at leastwise smart enough to carry of his functional duties. Let us say, normal. What’s your opinion, Professor?
My opinion? My opinion is that you can’t make a silk poice out of pig’s ass.
Bravo! the Drummer says.
Bravo and double bravo! the Arab cries clapping his hands. Cute and trenchant! And perceptible. Bravissimo!