‘Who a hip cat, Daddy-O?’ he asked Bobby, then grinned. Bobby grinned back. The kid with the pool-cue case made a gun with his finger and pointed at Bobby. Bobby made a gun with his own finger and pointed it back. The kid nodded as if to say Yeah, okay, you hip, we both hip and crossed the street, snapping the fingers of his free hand and bopping to the music in his head.
Ted looked up the street in one direction, then down in the other. Ahead of them, three Negro children were capering in the spray of a partly opened hydrant. Back the way they had come, two young men — one white, the other maybe Puerto Rican — were taking the hubcaps off an old Ford, working with the rapid seriousness of doctors performing an operation. Ted looked at them, sighed, then looked at Bobby. ‘The Pocket’s no place for a kid,
even in the middle of the day, but I’m not going to leave you out on the street. Come on.’ He took Bobby by the hand and led him inside.
7
In the Pocket. The Shirt Right Off
His Back. Outside the William Penn.
The Frence Sex-Kitten.
What struck Bobby first was the smell of beer. It was impacted, as if folks had been drinking in here since the days when the pyramids were still in the planning stages. Next was the sound of a TV, not turned to Bandstand but to one of the late -afternoon soap operas (‘Oh John, oh Marsha’ shows was what his mother called them), and the click of pool-balls. Only after these things had registered did his eyes chip in their own input, because they’d needed to adjust. The place was very dim.
And it was long, Bobby saw. To their right was an archway, and beyond it a room that appeared almost endless. Most of the pool-tables were covered, but a few stood in brilliant islands of light where men strolled languidly about, pausing every now and then to bend and shoot. Other men, hardly visible, sat in higa seats along the wall, watching. One was getting his shoes shined. He looked about a thousand.
Straight ahead was a big room filled with Gottlieb pinball machines: a billion red and orange lights stuttered stomachache colors off a large sign which read IF YOU TILT THE SAME
MACHINE TWICE YOU WILL BE ASKED TO LEAVE. A young man wearing another stingybrim hat
— apparently the approved headgear for the bad motorscooters residing down there — was bent over Frontier Patrol, working the flippers frantically. A cigarette hung off his lower lip, the smoke rising past his face and the whorls of his combed-back hair. He was wearing a jacket tied around his waist and turned inside-out.
To the left of the lobby was a bar. It was from here that the sound of the TV and the smell of beer was coming. Three men sat there, each surrounded by empty stools, hunched over pilsener glasses. They didn’t look like the happy beer-drinkers you saw in the ads; to Bobby they looked the loneliest people on earth. He wondered why they didn’t at least huddle up and talk a little.
Closer by them was a desk. A fat man came rolling through the door behind it, and for a moment Bobby could hear the low sound of a radio playing. The fat man had a cigar in his mouth and was wearing a shirt covered with palm trees. He was snapping his fingers like the cool cat with the pool-cue case, and under his breath he was singing like this: ‘Choo-choo-chow, choo-choo-ka-chow-chow,
choo-choo-chow-chowl’ Bobby recognized the tune:
‘Tequila,’ by The Champs.
‘Who you, buddy?’ the fat man asked Ted. ‘I don’t know you. And he can’t be in here, anyway. Can’tcha read?’ He jerked a fat thumb with a dirty nail at another sign, this one posted on the desk: B-21 OR B-GONE!
‘You don’t know me, but I think you know Jimmy Girardi,’ Ted said politely. ‘He told me you were the man to see . . . if you’re Len Files, that is.’
‘I’m Len,’ the man said. All at once he seemed considerably warmer. He held out a hand so white and pudgy that it looked like the gloves Mickey and Donald and Goofy wore in the cartoons. ‘You know Jimmy Gee, huh? Goddam Jimmy Gee! Why, his grampa’s back there getting a shine. He gets ‘is boats shined a lot these days.’ Len Files tipped Ted a wink. Ted smiled and shook the guy’s hand.
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