BANJO GREASE

“SKYLINE DRIVE-IN? You mean on the outskirts of Niles?”

“I think so.”

“It sure as hell’s closed, boy.”

“I know that. My uncle works there.”

“He’ll be waiting for you at 2 a.m.?”

“Yeah.”

“You ain’t ever been there?”

“No, Sir.”

A passenger seated directly behind the Greyhound driver spoke up. “Bill, that place shuts down at midnight.”

“His uncle’s meeting him there. Ain’t that what you said, son?”

Flat terrain poked by scrub pine lay in a fluorescent haze before him. No houses, barns, or industrial buildings. A sharp odor of sulfuric acid penetrated the night air. He’d noticed the many automobile salvage establishments lining the roadway entering Niles interspersed by trailer parks. The lone church he saw—outlined like a license plate in heliotrope neon—three metal trailers joined to form a cross.

He began walking. In short distances he’d spot blighted car seats, a drive shaft, lead batteries tossed into the weeds. A Pontiac grill capped a pyramid of tires man-high. Oil cans catching rain and breeding mosquitoes lay nearby. And in the far distance, an orange-rust nimbus rose liquidly on the horizon. Strings of incandescent bulbs, line after shimmering line—hundreds of them— loped effortlessly into the black sky, festooning a copper refinery like a shoaled freighter.

But most everything clung low to the ground here in Niles—including its trees. The workers now home in their trailer beds, they, too, thought Westley, lie close to the soil to escape this blanket of methane stench. The whole burg could pick up and vanish overnight, a herd of tin elephants stopping for an occasional shit in its streams. Along their roadsides.

Westley stepped out of the glare of the oncoming headlights into the scrub. Next to him lay a pair of muslin dolls about whose bisque heads coiled a vermillion jumping rope, and above, dangling from a brush-alder, a cellulose monkey, phlegm spitting out its runty eyes. The automobile slowed then stopped. Its rear door sprang open and out jumped a young man, naked waist down, laughing riotously with the nude he pulled out after him. In white plastic boots she took flight into the field, tripping over debris, then crouching behind a metal drum. Both laughing so hard now, neither barely stood upright as he drew her back to the Chevrolet, draping her against its trunk.

A Campbell’s cream of asparagus soup container, its distinctive red-and-white label still intact—the shaved-head reveler slid over his erect member then proceeded to dance a two-step towards her. Unamused, she waved him off. He gazed about him once more and spied a walker clumped together with a porcelain bedpan; clutching the walker and feigning an exaggerated infirmity of stride, he resumed his approach—the Campbell’s soup can still firmly sheathing his cock. She smiled, but no surrender.

“Get the fuck on her, will you, Pete? For Christ’s sake!” the men cried impatiently from the car.

Displaying a heightened sense of urgency, he grabbed a dinette chair missing its seat, gingerly retrieved the bedpan, looked distractedly about him until he spotted a velvet chapeau . . . but still unsatisfied, skirmished about in a pile of face creams and bathroom sundries . . . then abruptly, with theatrical flourish, placed the damaged chair before him, welcomed himself to sit, situated the bedpan under its hole, and collapsed. His ass fell several inches beneath the seat’s rim. Unruffled, he crossed his legs lady-like, the Campbell’s soup can now rising to a near vertical, brandished the sodden chapeau over his shaved pate, and archly observed:

“The service around here is lousy.”

The young woman began to giggle, sashayed over to him, and drew the soup can off his still-erect member. He didn’t remove his hat while she ate him.

At the intersection of DeForest Road and Trumbull County Highway, Westley turned eastward, approaching a commercial bakery. Its trucks he’d seen back in Hebron: a child with Shirley Temple curls biting into a slice of white bread slathered heavily with sunny butter adorning their bright red sides. The strong odor of the baking bread masked the odor of sulfuric acid to which he was slowly becoming acclimated. He felt pangs of hunger. And wondered once again if he was doing the right thing. A used trailer lot sat alongside the bakery. He’d never seen one of these. Used car lots abounded in Hebron. But a used home lot—on Firestones and Goodyears? Maybe that’s what the hell’s gone wrong in Hebron? People froze right up back there. Like a bad transmission. Here the church has wheels.

Suddenly, arcing the night sky in giant red neon and yellow script and making loud electrical noises, the massive windowless facade of SKYLINE DRIVE-IN THEATRE loomed—TRUMBULL COUNTY’S FINEST. A glass ticket booth outlined in purple neon tubes sat jewel-like and beckoning in the center of its gravel entrance. Pin spotlights shone down onto a chromium and leather chair inside, microphones suspended from the booth’s ceiling as if it were the cockpit of a giant airship. But the rest of the outdoor theater stood in ghostly darkness.

Except in the far back row. Forlorn, abutting the scrub brush meadow, sat an aluminum trailer. A modest affair on wheels, enclosed by a white picket-fence skirt, its skin rounded, riveted zephyr-like, glinting in the argent moonlight like a farm pond. Westley quickly recognized George and Min’s 1942 forest-green Plymouth coupe parked at its rear.

Westley hammered loudly on the metal trailer’s door:

“Hello, Aunt Min. Hello, Uncle George. It’s me—Westley. Westley Daugherty.”

There was no sound.

He beat harder. Suddenly a light came on near the front end of the mobile home. The vehicle tremorred slightly. It rocked as would a boat in its slip. Someone is walking down a very small hallway, he thought. Christ, it looks like a submarine.

“It’s Westley, from Hebron! Hello! Westley, ME!”

Westley waved his arms to put on notice anybody who might be looking out that it was indeed him. And not a thief. He didn’t want near-deaf George to drop him with his pistol. George couldn’t see all that well either. The last visit he had taken a right up the goddamn Baltimore and Ohio tracks over near Mahoningtown, and bounced the Plymouth over several dozen cross ties before acknowledging he’d made a wrong turn.

“Hey, Uncle George, it’s me. WESTLEY!I’M ALL ALONE!”

The small metal door opened a crack and Westley heard Min’s voice.

“Who in the hell is here?”

“It’s me! Westley. Your boy . . . remember?”

Like the lid of a can, the trailer door slowly opened. A sweet and stale odor rose out of its aperture. Min suddenly appeared, her henna shoe-polished hair curled in scraps of toilet paper with metal rollers the size of silver-dollar wrappers. Her rouged cheeks, splotched and smeared, sinking in towards her mouth—upper and lower dentures back in a jar at bedside, soaking. A floral house dress zippered frontally draped her massive frame and lard-sack breasts hung pendulously down onto her globe of a stomach—mounds of flesh cascading upon mounds of flesh, all of it indecorously veiled by a great expanse of jonquil-patterned percale stopping just short of her feet: misshapen and covered with corns and bunions like barnacles, and resting flat as pancakes on the trailer’s linoleum floor.

“There just ain’t any room for you, Westley! Whatever got it in your mind to come here in the first place?”

Your warm flesh. The mounds and mounds of it, Min. I wanted to be smothered by warmth and fed your pancakes—high stacks of them—until I succumbed and woke up a fucking man like George, perhaps.

“You told me I was always welcome, Aunt Min. You always said, ‘If they don’t want you, you get right away to Aunt Min’s. Everybody loves Aunt Min. I’ll see that you are taken care of.’” A kind of mantra I unleashed at her with a slight degree of hurt and confusion mixed in. I held my head down, staring at her feet.

“GEORGE!” she screamed.

It startled me. I stepped away from the tiny ship on wheels.

“GEORGE! Margaret’s boy Westley’s here!”

Min stepped out onto the grass like some wraith who’d escaped off one of the drive-in’s picture shows. Back in Hebron she looked pleasantly old, always nicely attired in a dress, the sort worn by older women to church on Sunday; her face all powdered and rouged up, and her hair, a kind of orange-brown, wrapped tightly about her large head. Her low-heeled shoes had, however, looked painfully uncomfortable as her wide feet spilled out over their weakened sides. (I thought they looked like eggplants stuffed with feet.)

But now, staring at me in her shoe-polished hair, clearly applied with the cloth dauber right out of a bottle of Shinola liquid several strands at a time to its dwindling mass, you could see splotches on her forehead and ears where the dauber missed. And the metal rollers catching the glint of the moonlight just like her trailer top. Her mouth—all misshapen and contorted, no teeth to assist in a more diplomatic composure—sucking in and out with quick and heavy breaths like a dream fish I’d ruefully hooked at the rear of Trumbull County’s finest, Skyline Drive-in. Min was apoplectic. Her lips pursed and angry as the ass of a simian monkey; long gray hairs rose forlornly out of her chin; a lump of flesh the size of a fist beat heart-like at her larynx. And the great breasts rolled back and forth across the top of her stomach like ball sacks while she stood waving her arms, first towards her and George’s little metal home—then back at me . . . Westley Daugherty, night intruder.

I had interrupted them at the high point of their cinematic life.

Mimicking small nocturnal animals, her feet slid back and forth on the Skyline’s grass inside the cute little picket fence.

George finally appeared at the trailer’s door. Min I took at her word. Believed until now everything she said. Also, mother never hugged me as warmly as Min always did. I liked being enveloped in all that hot and steamy, sweet-stale smelling woman’s flesh. And she could make those delicious pancakes, stacks of them the size of drink coasters. Mother made them sparingly, the size of dinner plates. I relished eating Aunt Min’s cakes: one could stack them up the height of a geometry book on end and pour maple syrup down over them like golden honey. You had to eat them early morning, too, so the sunlight rushing into the kitchen shone through the viscous liquid as it rained down over the stack’s roof then slowly dripped down off its sides.

It weren’t the same eating them after dark.

But George I liked without reserve, for he had this wordless habit of periodically grabbing my hand or arm and rolling his large thumb, index, and middle fingers back and forth across my bones—like he was kneading them. He’d scrunch up his mouth when he was doing this, but with a smile in his eyes. It was always very funny, I thought, but eventually I’d have to holler for him to let go because it soon began to hurt.

“Do you give up?”

Invariably I’d say I did.

“Good,” he’d reply. And in mock reprimand, “Don’t ever let me catch you doing it again.” Just as quickly he’d return to his newspaper.

When George awoke in the morning at our house, I could hear him rolling on the floor of my mother and father’s bedroom which they’d abandon. Once I gently opened their bedroom door a crack and peered in: George, in a yellowing pair of long johns, clear stains on the trap-door’s ass, was somersaulting on the linoleum. Two one way, two back again. Again and again. Until he finally noticed me staring at him.

“What the hell do you want?” he demanded in that mock scolding voice.

And chased me down the stairs. But it was always a joke with him. He never said but a word or two at the dinner table . . . and left the chatter to Min. He called her “Mommy.”

Mommy, do you want me to drive home?

Mommy, what time do you want to leave?

After supper one evening, he told a story to my father, my brother, James, and me once the dishes had been cleared away. Mother and Min had retired to the living room.

“One night Mommy and me wanted to make some pouchy pie. ‘George, go to the medicine cabinet and get the jar of Vaseline,’ she said. Well, I didn’t bother to turn the light on, and went in and fiddled around in the cabinet and found the jar and after I removed its lid, I slathered up real good and took it in and handed it to Mommy. And she did the same. Just as we begun doing it, Jesus Christ I felt like she had taken a blowtorch to my pecker: I hooped out of bed and ran out into the backyard fanning my cock like it were aflame. And hooping just as loud was Mommy, following me like she’d been set on fire, too.

“‘God Almighty!’ she cried. ‘Get a bucket of water! For Chrissake, George, do something.’ It was like her vagina was melting, you know. Here I was still jumpin’ around on the ground waiting for my pecker to rocket off the hinge of my ass like a $10 firecracker and her screaming to me toss water on her Abraham Lincoln.

“The poor sonofabitch had caught on fire by smokin’ in bed.”

Along about now the three of us were lying across the table laughing hard.

George solemnly continued. “I grabbed my pecker with my hand, squeezin’ it harder than I ever before dared to let it feel real pain, and ran inside and grabbed from the Frigidaire a quart of cold milk. Back out into the night I ran over to Mommy who was now lying on her back in the grass with her legs spread wider than I knew she could and crying . . . just like she’d made love to the man in the moon . . . and poured damn near the entire quart all over Abe Lincoln’s jaw.”

Then he just stared at us until we quieted down.

“What happened to Aunt Min?” James asked.

“Oh, she quieted down.”

“What the hell was in the jar?” my father asked.

“Banjo Grease,” he replied.

Now standing in the doorway, “Westley!” he exclaimed. “What the hell did you do, son?” He stepped out of the trailer, grabbed my arm and slowly began kneading the bone between his muscular fingers like he always did. Slowly a smile rose to his face. When I was about ready to holler; he held up his other hand, stopping me.

“Wait,” he whispered. “You’ll wake the neighbors. Tomorrow you and me will clean up the rubber jimmies and the panties they throw out the windows. Mommy don’t like doing that. She just gags and spits when she has to do that. We’ll look for money, too. Always some money lying about. Then when Mommy takes her long nap, we’ll go fishing. You and me, catch a raft of sunfish over at Mosquito Lake if the sulphur from the refinery don’t itch your throat too much.

“Whadaya say, son?”

“Fine.”

Then finally he squeezed real hard. I made a sound.

“Do you give up?” he demanded.

I nodded that I did.

“Good, goddamnit. Don’t ever do it again!”

He pushed me toward the opening of the metal container. “Mommy, get Westley a bed ready on our davenport.”

I stayed on a couple of days, but slept in their Plymouth coupe and rarely spent anytime at all inside the trailer. Min might invite me in for a sandwich. At night before the show I’d eat hamburgers at the concession stand or travel up the road a way and eat lunch at the local dairy. Periodically I’d knock on the trailer door to use the bathroom. Mostly I waited around for George. Once Min traveled over into the meadow behind the drive-in to pick blueberries for a pie she was going to make and asked George and me to join. We picked several quarts but the pie never got baked.

In the morning he’d start at one end of the first row of Skyline speakers, me at the other end and we’d both work our way toward its center. We carried big canvas bags like garbage men, wore gloves and picked up everything that was left behind. It was not uncommon to find half-eaten ribs of beef or pork chop bones. Potato skins, sardine cans, of course all brands of beer and whiskey bottles, and most of all, chicken bones. Just like George said, weren’t a row that we’d clean up but that he or I didn’t have to pick up several used condoms. And what set my imagination aflame was to come across a pair of ladies’ undergarments.

He claimed you could always tell what kind of panties-day it was going to be depending on what the main feature was. Ray Milland, Jimmy Stewart, and Burt Lancaster, George swore, always produced the biggest number of tossed-out-the-window underwear. But there seemed to be no correlation between the number of condoms and panties. The former remaining constant. George thought the ratio between empty popcorn boxes and used rubbers was about 5 to 1. And I did find money, a $10 bill one day.

“Keep it and don’t tell Mommy,” George said.

After the feature, we’d stand at the exit gate—him on one side, me on the other—while the cars crawled by, looking for speakers still hanging on car windows, their cords dangling alongside the doors. We’d pound on the windows to get them back. Often the drivers would just ignore us, which would piss George off mightily. I watched him several times jump on the back bumper of a miscreant vehicle, bouncing hell out of it like he were some gone-amuck chimpanzee. “Goddamnit, those speakers ain’t included in the price of admission!” he’d exclaim.

He remembered this Studebaker sedan with two couples in it who’d ignored him and went off with one of the speakers. Well, two nights later the same car showed up, same males but with two different women. George waited until the movie got started. Then went up and banged hard on the passenger door where the lady was sitting. She opened up, and he grabbed the speaker off the window. Just stood there staring at the driver. The man jumped out of the car and told him to give the girl back the fucking speaker.

“You got your own,” George calmly answered. “Use it.”

The driver threatened to beat the shit out of him.

It was then I saw George’s gun. A silver Derringer. He calmly pulled it out of his pants pocket and held it discreetly down by his groin, so the ladies couldn’t look at it. But the driver did. Who subsequently got back in his car. They sat there, all quiet-like staring at the screen for a while, George holding the speaker through which voices were coming. The driver within minutes started the vehicle and sped out of the theater.

“Ask me where I learned how to do that.”

“Where, Uncle George?”

“Alcatraz!” And he reached out grabbing my arm and kneaded the bone. “Nobody fucks with old Uncle George. Do ya give up?”

We walked over to the concession stand. “Dinner for two. My boy, Westley, and me. And plenty of gravy!” The attendant took two frankfurters, split them lengthwise, placed them on a slice of sandwich bread, squirted mustard all over them until they were no longer visible, then slapped another slice of bread on top. He deftly cut each into triangular halves, and with a big handful of popcorn, served to us on a paper plate. And asked what we were drinking.

“Two doubles,” George answered.

Reaching into the container of ice cream, the concessionaire placed two scoops into separate cups, and poured cherry soda up to its rim. “Anything else, Georgie-boy?”

“No thank you, Sam.”

“What kind of a panty-night do you think it will be this evening?”

George looked up at the screen and saw Edward G. Robinson. “At its best, three and they will all be size forty or better.”

Min’s pancakes never did get baked, like the pie. For some goddamn reason she only made them at my house back in Hebron.

But in just under a week I could see her putting the pressure on Uncle George to have me move on. He and I were spending too much time together. Making plans about going up to Pymatooming Dam to fish overnight in a couple of days. And we were pooling the money we found on the theater’s gravel floor for fishing supplies: bait and tackle and bobbers. George had rigged me up a tackle box he’d found in the drive-in’s supply shed and shared with me some basic fishing gear out of his box. It had become my prized possession. Each morning while waiting for him, I’d look inside the box and examine the lures he gave me like they were jewels handed down from mother to daughter. Earrings, things like that.

Jesus Christ, but he was a nice man. And went to Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas even. Knowing him like I did now, in a kind of perverse way I was proud of him for having done that. I wanted badly to ask him about it, but I’d been sworn to secrecy by my father. If he’d a gone to college, he sure as hell would have told me. Just to think about it pisses me off. Min too, I am certain, warned him direly if he ever let on.

Shit. What a waste.

And for him to have stolen a cucumber from its commissary on the way out says to me they sure as hell didn’t take a nick out of his spirit.

But she was winning. And the last morning of my stay, George asked me to drive over to Mrs. Nelson’s big bakery with him to load up on day-old bread. Seems Min was selling it for a small profit to some of the Skyline regulars she’d made acquaintance with. Once out of the Skyline grounds, George spoke:

“Westley, I won’t be seeing you anymore until I come back to Hebron.”

I knew it was coming. And Christ, felt all hurt. I really wanted to crawl up in the little back seat of the coupe where I had been sleeping each night and damn near die.

“What is it, Uncle George?”

He grabbed my arm and kneaded it real hard. Almost to the point of making me cry . . . which I wanted to anyway. Then he blurted out, “Do you give up?”

“YES!” I sighed.

“Goddamnit, so do I,” he said. “Fucking Mommy. You and me, we’ve been having too much fun. She wants me back there in that coffee-can of a home with her. So I can watch her shoe polish her hair and nail polish her toes. And eat canned hash with forks containing food webs. But I ain’t got no choice now, son. Mommy and me go way back. Clear to ALCATRAZ.” And he laughed ironically. Reached into his pants pocket and palmed his Derringer and slid it across the front seat to me.

“It’s yours, boy. In all its phony, fake glory. But use it like you think it’s real. If you do it right, you don’t have to be scared of any sonofabitch who’s trying to take advantage of you.

“Use it like I taught you. Not for bad things, mind you. Nope. Uncle George never would do that. You don’t frighten women with it either. It’s . . . shall we say . . . a piece of JUSTICE you’ll be carrying around in your pants.

“Use it discriminately. And I promise you, nothing will ever frighten you again.

“Not even MOMMY in the middle of the night.”

And once more he reached over as if he were going to grab my arm and knead it. But he didn’t. Instead he embraced me like no man had ever done before. And, Jesus, it felt better than all my imaginings about bein’ folded up, suffocating, in Min’s flesh. He and I sat there for the goddamnedest longest time starin’ out the window, watching the cars speed by on Trumbull County Highway. And no big screen in front of us.

“You got any good ponds in Hebron?” he asked.

“One up the street. The Croton quarry. But I don’t know whether it got any fish in it?”

“What do you and me care?” he responded. “Do you plan on going back home?”

“I don’t know,” I answered.

“Where might you be headed?”

“I ain’t figured out just yet.”

“Well, keep me informed with a postcard or something, huh?”

I nodded.

“Keep a look out for ponds. I don’t care where you end up. Fuck it, even in Kansas. I’ll go back there if I have to, just to fish with you.”

“What about Min?”

He made a snorting noise.

“We ain’t much longer on this earth. What the hell could she do to me if I slipped off for a few days? Let me worry about that. You just drop me a line. And I’ll sneak out that night. She knows how to clean the shit out of the theater.

“Soon we be closing it up for the boss anyway when it gets cold. Ain’t a damn thing to do when it shuts down. Mighty bleak when it snows, I’ll tell you, and the screen is dark night after night for months at a time. The snow piles up to the speakers. And not a damn soul in sight. Me and her in that fucking upturned washtub back in the rear. Who ever knows we’re alive? And I just sit there at our table while she lies in bed all day with shoe polish and curlers in her hair. And we’re keepin’ warm by a small kerosene stove. Jesus, how many games of solitaire can you play? So you drop me a postcard, do you hear?”

And this time he grabbed the arm and kneaded it like before.

“Do you give up, huh?” he whispered.