The Empire of Ice Cream Read online

  A Night in the Tropics

  The first bar I ever went to was The Tropics. It was, and still is, situated between the grocery store and the bank along Higbee Lane in West Islip. I was around five or six, and my old man would take me with him when he went there to watch the Giants games on Sunday afternoons. While the men were all at the bar, drinking, talking, giving Y. A. Tittle a piece of their minds, I’d roll the balls on the pool table or sit in one of the booths in the back and color. The jukebox always seemed to be playing “Beyond the Sea” by Bobby Darin, while I searched for figures, the way people do with clouds, in the swirling cigar and cigarette smoke. I didn’t go there for the hard-boiled eggs the bartender proffered after making them vanish and pulling them out of my ear, or for the time spent sitting on my father’s lap at the bar, sipping a ginger ale with a cherry in it, although both were welcome. The glowing, bubbling beer signs were fascinating, the foul language was its own cool music, but the thing that drew me to The Tropics was a thirty-two-foot vision of paradise.

  Along the south wall of the place, stretching from the front door back to the entrance of the bathrooms was a continuous mural of a tropical beach. There were palm trees with coconuts and stretches of pale sand sloping down to a shoreline where the serene sea rolled in lazy wavelets. The sky was robin’s egg blue, the ocean, six different shades of aquamarine. All down the beach, here and there, frozen forever in different poses, were island ladies wearing grass skirts but otherwise naked save for the flowers in their hair. Their smooth brown skin, their breasts, their smiles were ever inviting. At the center of the painting, off at a distance on the horizon, was depicted an ocean liner with a central funnel issuing a smudgy trail of smoke. Between that ship and the shore, there bobbed a little rowboat with one man at the oars.

  I was entranced by that painting and could sit and look at it for long stretches at a time. I’d inspected every inch of it, noticing the bend of the palm leaves, the sweep of the women’s hair, the curling edges of the grass skirts, which direction the breeze was blowing and at what rate. I could almost feel it against my face. The cool clear water, the warmth of the island light, lulled me into a trance. I noticed the tiny crabs, shells, starfish on the beach; the monkey peering out from within the fronds of a palm. The most curious item, though, back in the shadows of the bar, just before paradise came to an end by the bathroom door, was a hand, pushing aside the wide leaf of some plant as if it were you standing at the edge of the jungle, spying on that man in the rowboat.

  Eventually, as time went on and life grew more chaotic, my father stopped going to The Tropics on Sundays. Supporting our family overtook the importance of the Giants, and until my mother passed away only a few years ago, he worked six days a week. When my own bar years began, I never went there as it was considered an old man’s bar, but the memory of that mural stayed with me through the passing seasons. At different times in my life when things got hectic, its placid beauty would come back to me, and I’d contemplate living in paradise.

  A couple of months ago, I was in West Islip visiting my father, who still lives, alone now, in the same house I grew up in. After dinner we sat in the living room and talked about the old times and what had changed in town since I’d been there last. Eventually, he dozed off in his recliner, and I sat across from him contemplating his life. He seemed perfectly content, but all I could think about were those many years of hard work drawing to a close in an empty house, in a neighborhood where he knew no one. I found the prospect depressing, so as a means of trying to disperse it I decided to go out for a walk. It was a quarter after ten on a weeknight, and the town was very quiet. I traveled up onto Higbee Lane and turned down toward Montauk. As I passed The Tropics, I noticed the door was open and the old beer sign in the window was bubbling. No lie, the jukebox was softly playing Bobby Darin. Through the window I could see that the year-round Christmas lights bordering the mirror behind the bar were lit. On a whim, I decided to go in and have a few, hoping that in the decades since I’d last been in there no one had painted over the mural.

  There was only one patron, a guy sitting at the bar, who was so wrinkled he looked like just a bag of skin with a wig, wearing shoes, pants, and a cardigan. He had his eyes closed, but he nodded every now and then to the bartender, who towered over him, a huge, bloated hulk of a man in a T-shirt that only made it a little past the crest of his gut. The bartender was talking almost in whispers, smoking a cigarette. He looked up when I came in, waved, and asked me what I wanted. I ordered a VO and water. When he set my drink down on a coaster in front of me, he said, “Play much hoop lately?” and smirked. I’m no paragon of physical fitness, myself, these days, so I laughed. I took it as a joke on all three of us beat-up castaways in The Tropics. After paying, I chose a table where I could get a good look at the south wall without rudely turning my back on my bar mates.

  To my relief, the mural was still there, almost completely intact. Its colors had faded and grown dimmer with the buildup of tobacco smoke through the years, but I beheld paradise once again. Someone had drawn a mustache on one of the hula ladies, and the sight of the indiscretion momentarily made my heart sink. Otherwise, I just sat there, reminiscing and digging the breeze in the palms, the beautiful ocean, the distant ship, that poor bastard still trying to reach the shore. It came to me then that the town should declare the mural a historic treasure or something. My reverie was interrupted when the old guy pushed back his bar stool and slouched toward the door. I watched him as he passed, his eyes glassy, his hand in the air, trembling. “Okay, Bobby,” he barked, and then he was out the door.

  Bobby, I said to myself, and looked over at the bartender as he started wiping down the bar. When he looked back at me, he smiled, but I turned quickly away and concentrated on the mural again. A couple of seconds later, I snuck another look at him because it was beginning to dawn on me that I knew the guy. He was definitely somebody from the old days, but time had disguised him. I went back to paradise for a few seconds, and there, in the sun and the ocean breeze, I remembered.

  Bobby Lennin had been what my mother called a hood. He was a couple years ahead of me in school and light years ahead of me in life experience. I’m sure by the time he was in the sixth grade, he’d gotten laid, gotten drunk, and gotten arrested. By high school, he was big, and though always in sloppy shape, with a gut, his biceps were massive and the insatiable look in his eyes left no doubt that he could easily kill you with little remorse. His hair was long and stringy, never washed, and he wore, even in summer, a black leather jacket, jeans, a beer-stained white T-shirt, and thick, steel-toed black boots that could kick a hole in a car door.

  I’d seen him fight guys after school by the bridge, guys who were bigger than him, cut with muscles, athletes from the football team. He wasn’t even a good boxer; all his swings were these wild, roundhouse haymakers. He could be bleeding out of his eye and been kicked in the stomach, but he was relentlessly fierce, and wouldn’t stop till his opponent was on the ground unconscious. He had a patented throat punch that put the school’s quarterback in the hospital. Lennin fought someone almost every day; sometimes he’d even take a swing at a teacher or the principal.

  He had a gang, three other misfits in leather jackets, nearly as mean but minus their leader’s brains. Whereas Lennin had a wicked sense of humor and a kind of sly intelligence, his followers were confused lunkheads who needed his power and guidance in order to be anyone at all. His constant companion was Cho-cho, who, when a kid in Brooklyn, had been hung by a rival gang to his older brother’s. His sister found him before he’d died and cut him down. Ever since, he wore the scar, a melted flesh necklace he tried to hide with the chain of a crucifix. The lack of oxygen to his brain had made him crazy, and when he spoke, in a harsh whisper, usually no one understood him except Lennin.

  The second accomplice was Mike Wolfe, whose favorite past time was huffing paint remover in his grandfather’s shed. He actually had a lupine look to his face, and with his pencil mustache
and sort of pointed ears, reminded me of Oil Can Harry. Then there was Johnny Mars, a thin, wiry guy with a high-pitched, annoying laugh you could light a match on and a strong streak of paranoia. One night, because of some perceived slight by a teacher, he shot out all of the windows on one side of the high school with his old man’s .22.

  Lennin and his gang scared the shit out of me, but I was lucky, because he liked me. My connection to him went back to when he was younger and played little league football, before he fell totally down the chute into delinquency. He was trouble even back then, but he was a good tackle and played hard. His problem was he didn’t take direction all too well and would tell the coaches to fuck off. This was back in the days when saying “fuck” meant something, and it didn’t endear him to the folks in charge.

  One day when Lennin was in seventh grade, he threw a rock at a passing car up on Higbee and broke the side window. The cops caught him on the side of the road. My father happened to be passing by at the time, saw what was going on, and pulled over. He knew Bobby because my father had been a ref for a lot of the games in the football league. The cops told him they were going to book Lennin, yet somehow my father worked it out with them to let him go. He paid the driver of the car to get his window fixed, and then drove Bobby home.

  For whatever reason, maybe because he never knew his own father, that incident stuck with Lennin; and although he couldn’t follow the advice my old man gave him that day and would continue to screw up, he took it upon himself to watch out for me as repayment for the kindness shown. The first time I had any inkling that this was the case, I was riding my bike through the grade-school grounds on my way to the basketball courts. To get there, I had to pass by a spot where the hoods played handball against the tall brick wall of the gym. I was always relieved when they weren’t there, but that day they were.

  Mike Wolfe, eyes red, snarling like his namesake, ran out and grabbed my bike by the handlebars. I didn’t say anything; I was too scared. Joey Missoula and Stinky Steinmuller, hood hangers-on, were ambling over to join him in torturing me. Just then Lennin appeared from somewhere with a quart bottle of beer in his hand, and he bellowed, “Leave him alone!” They backed off. Then he said, “Come over here, Ford.” He asked me if I wanted any beer, which I turned down, and then told me to hang out if I wanted to.

  I didn’t want to seem scared or ungrateful, so I stayed for a while sitting on the curb, watching them play handball, while Johnny Mars explained that if you jerked off into a syringe and then gave yourself a shot with it and then fucked your wife, your kid would come out a genius. When I finally rode away, Lennin told me to say hello to my father, and when I was well across the field, he yelled after me, “Have a fucking nice summer.”

  Lennin’s interest in protecting me made it possible for me and my brother to pass through the school field after dark, whereas anyone else would have had their asses beaten. One night we ran into Lennin and his gang down by the woods, where Minerva Street led to the school grounds; he had a silver handgun in his belt. He told us he was waiting for a guy from Brightwaters to show up and they were going to have a duel. “For my honor,” he said, and then drained his beer, smashed the bottle against the concrete opening of the sewer pipe, and belched. When a car pulled up on Minerva and blinked its lights on and off twice, he told us we better get going home. We were almost around the block to our house, when in the distance, we heard a gunshot.

  Occasionally, Lennin would surface and either save me from some dire situation, like the time I almost got mixed up in a bad dope deal at a party, and he came out of the dark, smacked me in the side of the head, and told me to go home, or I’d hear about him through gossip. He and his gang were forever in trouble with the cops—knife fights, joy rides in hot-wired cars, breaking and entering. I know each of them did some time in juvenile lockup in Central Islip before I graduated. Finally, I finished high school, moved away from home to go to college, and lost track of him.

  Now I was in The Tropics, just coming out of a daydream of paradise and the past, and there he was, standing at my table, holding a bottle of VO, a bucket of ice and a tumbler, looking like someone had taken him down to the gas station and put the air hose in his mouth.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?” he asked.

  “I thought it was you,” I said, and smiled. “Bobby Lennin.” I stuck my hand out to shake.

  He laid the bottle and bucket on the table and then reached out and shook my hand. His grip didn’t have any trace of the old power.

  He sat down across from me and filled my glass before pouring one for himself.

  “What are you doin’ here?” he asked.

  “I came in to see the mural,” I said.

  He smiled and nodded wistfully, as if he completely understood. “You visiting your old man?” he asked.

  “Yeah, just for an overnight.”

  “I saw him in the grocery store a couple of weeks ago,” said Bobby. “I said hi but he just nodded and smiled. I don’t think he remembers me.”

  “You never know,” I said. “He does the same thing with me half the time now.”

  He laughed and then asked about my brother and sisters. I told him my mother had passed away, and he said his mother had also died quite a while back. He lit a cigarette and then reached over to another table to get an ashtray. “What are you up to?” he asked.

  I told him I was teaching college and also that I was a writer. Then I asked if he still saw Cho-cho and the other guys. He blew out a stream of smoke and shook his head. “Nah,” he said, looking kind of sad, and we sat there quietly for a time. I didn’t know what to say.

  “You’re a writer?” he asked. “What do you write?”

  “Stories and novels—you know, fiction,” I said.

  His eyes lit up a little and he poured another drink for each of us. “I got a story for you,” he told me. “You asked about Cho-cho and the gang? I got a wild fuckin’ story for you.”

  “Let’s hear it,” I said.

  “This all happened a long time ago, after you left town but before Howie sold the pizza place, around the time Phil the barber’s kid got knocked off at the track,” he said.

  “Yeah, I remember my mother telling me about that,” I said.

  “Well, anyway, none of us, me, Cho-cho, Wolfey, the Martian, ever graduated high school, and we were all hanging out doing the same old shit, only it was getting deeper all the time. We were all drinking and drugging and beginning to pull some serious capers, like once we broke into the grocery store and stole a couple hundred dollars worth of cigarettes, or we’d heist a car now and then and sell it to a chop shop one of Mars’s relatives owned. Occasionally we’d get caught and do a little time, a couple of months here or there.

  “We weren’t pros by any means, and so we would have to get real jobs from time to time, and, of course, the jobs all sucked. One night I was in here having a few beers, and this guy came in who I remembered from high school. Your brother would probably remember him. Anyway, he starts talking to the bartender. Remember old man Ryan?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “He served me my first drink—a Shirley Temple.”

  Lennin laughed and went on. “Well, this guy was back in town, and he’d graduated from college with a degree in engineering, had a cushy job at Grumman, was getting married, and had just bought a big house down by the bay. I overheard this, and I thought to myself, shit, I could go for some of that. But there was no way it was going to happen. And as a matter of fact, I was looking at the mural and thinking I was like that guy in the boat in the painting there, stuck forever outside the good life. In other words I was starting to see that the outlaw scene was going to get very old very soon.

  “Now, I’m not crying in my beer, but let’s face it, me and the group didn’t have much help in life—busted homes, alcoholic parents, head problems … We were pretty fucked from word go. It was easier for us to scare people into respecting us than it was ever going to be for them to just do it on their own
. It seemed like everyone else was heading for the light and we were still down in the shadows munching crumbs. I wanted to be on the beach, so to speak. I wanted a home and a wife and kid and long quiet nights watching the tube and holidays. As for the other guys, I don’t think they got it. Shit, if God would have let them, they’d still be muscling high school kids for pocket change.

  “Since it was clear I wasn’t going to get there by regular means, I decided what we needed was one big heist, one real job in order to get the cash necessary to live in the real world. After that, I’d part company with them and move on. So I spent a long time thinking about what kind of scam we could pull, but I was blank. We’d spent so many years nickel-and-diming, I couldn’t get out of that head. Until, one night, we were sitting at that table right over there, drinking, and a ragged, hopped-up Wolfey, eyes showing almost nothing but white, mentioned something, and I thought I felt the rowboat move a few feet closer to shore.

  “This old guy had just moved in on Wolfey’s block. What is it, over there by Minerva, Alice Road? Anyway, this old guy, blind, in a wheelchair, moved in. Remember Willie Hart, the guy in high school with the plastic arm? Well, his younger sister Maria, who, by the way, the Wolfeman was banging every once in a while back in his grandfather’s shed in between hits of Zippoway, went to work for the old guy. She cleaned his house and would take him out for walks in his wheelchair and so forth.

  “Maria told Wolfey that the old fart was super strange, and although he understood English, he always spoke to himself in another language she thought was Spanish. Maria, if you remember her, was no genius, and for all she knew the guy could have been talking fucking Chinese. Anyway, she said he was kind of feeble in the head, because he had this chess set he would take out and play against himself. She asked him once if he was winning or losing, and he responded, ‘Always losing. Always losing.’