I was working the microphone of an eight-player race game located on the corner of 24th and the Boardwalk. I was living in a one-bedroom apartment less than two blocks away. My roommates were a pair of potheads named Jen and Heidi. Jen and Heidi had only agreed to take me on so they could afford to buy more weed.
Jen and I shared a room, and, what’s more, we shared a mattress. On certain nights, the two of us would lie awake, and we would debate what the repercussions might be if we decided to have sex. Eventually, one or both of us would fall asleep, beaded foreheads mingling sweat toward the center of our pillow.
Heidi slept alone, on an off-white futon in the living room. Heidi had recently been diagnosed with herpes, and, for a time, she would talk about this openly. Eventually, our social circle made an in-joke out of Heidi’s sexually transmitted disease. “Herpes Heidi! Herpes Heidi!” drunken hecklers would call out from behind Heidi at parties. Then one morning, Jen informed me that Heidi had moved out.
“Wow, really?” I responded. The two of us were still lying in bed.
“Yep,” Jen told me. Jen took a drag off of her cigarette.
“Want to have sex?” I asked Jen.
“Not right now,” Jen told me.
***
The day before I moved into Jen and Heidi’s apartment on 26th Street, I got fired from my job as a part-time dishwasher at Samuel’s Pancake House. I had landed the position through a friend, who was both gracious and sympathetic enough to put in a good word. What that friend did not account for was my drinking. Most mornings, the manager would either have to send someone to fetch me or gamble on letting the dishes pile up until I arrived. Once a shift, I would fall asleep while standing up. A stack of plates might shatter. The boys working the grill would look over at me and say things like, “Stupid motherfucker,” under their breath. Some days I’d arrive at work so famished, I’d sneak leftover scraps before scraping a plate into the garbage. I was entitled to one free meal at the tail-end of every shift. Other than that, I was living on a steady diet of cheap beer and nicotine, burning more electrolytes than my body could afford.
Anyway, the point being that eventually I got fired. What’s more, I had to sign over the only two paychecks I had received to a Korean girl named Ronnie, who, in turn, cashed those checks through her account for a nominal fee. I still hadn’t gotten any picture ID, and there wasn’t a check-cashing joint on the island game enough to accept the word of an 18-year old who was all cheek acne and bones.
Toward the end of July, I accepted an offer to talk to Bob Satanoff. Bob ran the Beach Grill and several other snack carts along Morey’s Pier. He also ran a water gun game on the west side of 24th Street.
“I hear you have a drinking problem,” Bob said to me, after I had introduced myself.
“Where’d you hear that?” I replied, taken aback.
“Bill Salerno,” Bob said.
“I don’t know who that is,” I said.
“Well, he knows who you are,” Bob said.
“Apparently not,” I shot back.
“You ever worked a game on the boardwalk?” Bob asked.
“No, but I can learn,” I said.
“Everybody thinks they can learn,” Bob told me.
“No, I’m serious,” I said. “I can do it. I swear.”
“You ever worked on a microphone?” Bob asked me.
“I used to be the lead singer of a band named 13,” I lied.
Bob hired me on the spot. The following morning I reported to the Beach Grill, where I collected my bank, and a set of keys. From there, I taught myself how to operate the stand.
My only full-time coworker was some slicked-back motherfucker named Dan. Dan worked the night shifts, whereas I worked the days. Dan was selling drugs out of the stand. My fourth day on the job, I found a quarter-ounce of weed buried inside a box full of plush behind the counter. One day later, some black dude with a scar across his chest approached the stand, asking where my “partner” was.
“Dan?” I said, sarcastically. “Dan won’t be around until tonight.”
The dude looked to his left, and then to his right. Then he looked directly at me.
“Yo, you holdin’?” the dude asked. He sniffled, wiped his nose clean with his hand.
“Holden who?” I wondered.
“Yo, nevermind,” the dude said.
He leaned the top half of his body over and into the stand, like a fisherman stretching starboard to reel in his catch. The dude was digging into a crate of stuffed animals now. “Anything I can do to help?” I asked. I had stashed the quarter-ounce of weed behind the stand earlier that morning.
“Nah, I’m good,” the dude said. He pulled his body from the bins, and then he shot me a knowing glance.
A few days later, Dan got fired – replaced by a 37-year old named Karen. Karen stood 5’2, tan and stocky. Karen wore a belt pack over a tanktop and short shorts. Karen was authoritative, and she liked to justify a lot of her attitude by saying, “I’m an agent, dude. The last thing I need is somebody trying to tell me what to do.”
Karen eventually agreed to let me work the stand alongside her (entirely off the clock). My goal was to attain some sense of how Karen achieved a natural rhythm on the microphone. But all I came away with was the sense that Karen wasn’t actually that good. The entire shift felt like a grind, punctuated by Karen smoking menthols in the corner, vaguely attempting to call in passing tourists between drags. There were prolonged spans of dead air time, uncomfortable periods during which Karen would school me on all the reasons people weren’t stopping by to play the game. Karen cited shitty lighting, half-ass flash, outdated stock, and a one-speaker sound system that was turned inward, rather than out.
“And I’ll tell you one other thing,” Karen insisted, “This stand’s located two blocks north of where all the real action is.”
Karen pulled a prescription pill bottle out of her windbreaker. She counted out a few whites, washed them back with a quick belt of water.
“Don’t ever get old, dude,” Karen instructed me. “Don’t ever get old, and don’t ever get scabies.”
***
I spent the next few nights wandering the boardwalk, gaining a feel for how the best microphone operators transitioned through a crowd. There was Ricky Nickels down on Midway Pier, whose nasal delivery seemed more suited to a DJ booth. There was a 6-ft Scottish chick who ran the race games down by Mariner’s Landing. And then there were Sean and E.J. Dougherty – a pair of brothers from South Philadelphia who both looked and sounded the part to a T.
Sean and E.J. ran the Gambit – a huge, free-standing race game located along the east side of 24th Street. Both brothers had second-generation ties to North Wildwood, and they also had an instinctive sense of what stood missing from a lot of the midway attractions. Gambit’s music, sound, and lighting were all fantastic. The Gambit was located one block south of Sportland Pier – a rotting piece of flotsam boasting old-school attractions like the Hell Hole and the House of Horrors. Sportland Pier was also home to Wild Wes and Lucky Lou, equal partners in an industrial-sized bushel joint situated directly across the way from Bob Satanoff’s water-gun game.
Lou was tall and fat, pot-bellied like a walrus. Wes was short and tan, with whitewash dentures and a mustache. Lou and Wes employed a molting nest of vipers, the lot of whom detested me on principle. The better I became at working on a microphone, the more those vipers hissed at me from across the boards. Every night at 6 pm when Karen showed up to relieve me, the Sportland boys would break out into applause. Most of them had worked with Karen, and they showered her with nicknames like Madame General and The Sarge.
The first Thursday in August, Bob Satanoff instructed me to hand-deliver Karen’s wages. Bob wrote Karen’s total on the outside of an envelope, which is how I discovered Karen was earning more than $600 per week (25% of her nightly gross, with no adjustment made for costs). I maxed out at $260 ($6 per hour with no taxes taken out). The revelation didn’t bother me so much as the fact that Karen sucked at what she was doing. Given the disparity, I intended upon proving that I was the bigger draw.
There was no chance of me rivaling Karen’s totals during an average beach day. But every time I caught a boardwalk afternoon (i.e. clouds but no rain), I’d throw down on that microphone much like a madman hawking cattle. I started running $3 races for $7 tigers, upselling dollar stock at $4-5 a pop. My day-time totals began to increase, and then double. Karen, on the other hand, grew increasingly frustrated, spending the first 10 minutes of every night shift dismissing whatever it was I had accomplished. “You had the clouds working for ya today,” she might comment, or “I’m guessing people spent so much this afternoon that they won’t put out a dime tonight.”
I’d taken to walking each afternoon’s total over to Bob Satanoff, thereby avoiding any risk of Karen taking credit for my work. Toward the end of August, Nick the Greek – the man who actually owned the boardwalk block that I was working on – handed me an envelope with a hundred dollars in it.
“Good work, Bill,” Nick said to me.
The day after I received that bonus, a slow and steady rain fell down upon North Wildwood. I sat alone along the counter, sifting through some old cassettes. I turned the speaker out toward the boardwalk, sang along into the microphone. Around 2 pm, Lucky Lou wandered over from across the way, leaned his back against the counter.
“How’s it goin’?” Lou wondered.
“How’s it goin’? It’s goin’ alright,” I said. “How’s it goin’ with you?”
“Aaaaaah, it’s a washout,” Lou said. He swung his body round to face me, squeezed the trigger of a water gun. “Might as well roll down the shutters and call it a day.”
“I hear ya,” I said, laughing. “I could use a few more hours of sleep, if you know what I’m sayin’.”
“So, listen,” Lou told me, completely ignoring my last comment. “I was talking to my guys over there, and we were wondering if you could do us a small favor.”
“Sure,” I said. “No problem. Just tell me what you need.”
“I, well, we, need you to stop singing over the microphone. Otherwise, the entire lot of us are gonna need to come over here and shove that goddamn speaker up your ass.”
Lou stood still and silent for a moment, sizing me up like a pitbull might a rabbit. He took a breath, then lumbered back across the boardwalk, where he fell asleep across a bed of plush.
Day 127
(Moving On is a regular feature on IFB)
