THE summer that we lived next door to Upside-Down-Emil was a long time ago. Emil was a lithe, wan youth who’d been a tightrope walker in the old country. And was determined to perfect his profession in the new.
He practiced, every morning of the week, on a cable strung from his back porch to his one-car garage: a free circus, every morning, for every kid on the block.
Wearing a red turtleneck sweater, long faded to rose, Emil traversed the air from his porch to his garage, glided to earth, then trotted lightly back to walk the air once more. We cheered. Nothing like it had ever happened on Moorman Street before.
Then, on Friday twilights, he materialized in a belted trenchcoat, cranked his Model-T: and off he went wheeling with his taillight winking mysteriously.
When Emil left it felt to me like good-bye to summer. When I heard the Monday morning cry—“Emil on wire up!” summer had returned.
Emil was back. He rode the air and we rode the fence and all the air seemed daring.
From scenes like these yet greater scenes would come, I sensed.
They did.
Emil fitted a pulley to a cable, soldered it onto an ironworker’s helmet, clapped the helmet onto his head, turned himself upside-down and rolled upsy-downsy to his garage.
A burst of applause—then the youth hit the ground on his face. Bashing his forehead and bending the hell out of the pulley.
“Emil’s balance is so good upside-down, he can’t stand straight up anymore,” my mother pointed out—and rapped me one that spun me half across our kitchen—“Let that be a warning to you.”
Neither straight up nor upside-down, nobody walked that wonderful wire that week. Emil was inside, thinking.
What he thought of was a double-cable, one drawn from porch to garage and a lower hooked from garage to porch. I saw the problem: How would he make it onto the lower strand?
He accomplished this by somersaulting, feet first, onto the lower cable; then turned himself upside-down again and glided triumphantly home.
I stood on my head. My father rapped me. “Why can’t you be a good boy like I was when I was a boy?” he wanted to know.
Hard times returned to the backyards of home. Emil had to travel farther for less money. His fees, it was said, were going into his gas tank instead of the bank.
“Emil will think of something,” I promised my mother.
“May it be to walk on his feet,” she hoped.
“When I was your age I had a job,” my father remembered.
Emil jacked up the Model-T and crawled beneath. He was converting it into an oil-burner. My father took alarm.
“The Stanley Steamer has already been invented!” he called the news to Emil down through the Ford’s open hood. “It didn’t work out!”
Emil crawled out.
“For me,” he informed the world, “works out.”
And he crawled back under. His will was forged of the same stuff as his cables. Yet it wasn’t so flexible. He lay on the freezing November earth with only his canvas sneakers visible. His toes twitched with cold. All our good times were past.
“Work in your garage,” my father instructed him, “it’s going to snow.”
“Too dark,” Emil explained from somewhere among the spark plugs.
“Now he’s saving electricity,” my father reported.
“If that young man had a mind,” my mother decided, “he’d be dangerous.”
Her washing was whipping white—when a long, oleaginous, dark and dripageous, gelatinous pall of coal-oil smog, too heavy to clear a clothes-line yet light enough to clear every fence, emerged by the yard from the hood of the Model-T. It enwrapped the sheets till they dragged to the ground, blackened slips, shirts, brassieres, pillow cases, panties and pants, and raised perfect hell with Mrs. Kowalczyk’s front-room curtains. Someone phoned the precinct captain. Someone else called the alderman. Someone else reported the disaster to the Red Cross. Finally two cops drove up. They hauled Emil out from under the Model-T.
He tottered on the step of the wagon, and would have fallen, had not one of the cops caught him.
Thirty days in the psyche ward did for that pale youth. He went to work for a factory that made endless belting; and some magic that had been in the world was gone.
The house he had lived in went empty. The wind broke the windows that nobody had boarded. A storm blew down the cable he’d walked on. It dangled loosely, rattling against the porch or the fence as the winds took it; until my father cut it down so we could get some sleep.
Emil worked on an endless belt, endlessly making endless belting, until a machine was devised for his job. So Emil went to the bars. He never tried anything again except whiskey. He became a kind of crippled fly of the tavern corners. If you’d promise him a drink he’d stand on his head for you and drink the shot in that position; letting the whiskey run down into his eyes.
Once a bartender, in an idle hour, made Emil get down on all fours and rode him around the bar, shouting, “One more lap! One more lap! Get all the money! One more lap!”
Emil begged for drinks. When a customer wouldn’t buy him a whiskey he’d beg for a beer. If he were refused again, he would stand beside the customer until a cockroach ran across the bar. He never had to wait long. Emil would scoop up the roach, throw it into his mouth and pretend to be choking.
“Give this man something to drink!” the customer would shout to the bartender, and the bartender would bring a beer and a shot. Then Emil would spit the roach out, and drink the shot and the beer while the customer watched.
“How can you do anything so disgusting?” one customer asked Emil after paying for the drinks.
“That’s show biz,” Emil replied.
People don’t have fun like they used to have, do they?