By Bob Hill

It was just past 8 pm on a Tuesday when I received word that my grandmother was dying. She had been in a coma for several hours, and her vital signs were fading. Last Rites had already been administered twice.

My father had been dispatched to collect me. He and I drove back to Swarthmore in silence, my thoughts and focus facing forward as we sped north on 55.

The doctors could not pinpoint what it was that had caused my grandmother to collapse, but they were sure it had something to do with a previously undiagnosed case of emphysema. My grandmother was not a smoker, but my late uncle was. For 30 years, my grandmother and my uncle had lived together in a two-bedroom walk-up 10 miles south of Philadelphia. My uncle had died half a decade prior.

***

My mother insisted that it would be a good idea for me to have a few minutes alone with my grandmother in her hospital room. My grandmother had been laid out in a gown. She was all purple veins and tulips. It was cloudy outside, and that made the room seem damp. I held my grandmother’s hand. The skin on her fingers felt like loose scales. After a few minutes, I began wailing, while also pleading with my grandmother not to die. My cousin Carolyn had somehow slipped into the room behind me, and she was standing in wait now. I stood up, and I stepped back out into the hall.

A half hour later, the whole thing was over.

***

In the months that followed my late uncle’s death, I’d spend entire weekends at my grandmother’s apartment – a youthful presence enlisted to lift her spirits. I’d set up shop in my late uncle’s bedroom, where there was a library along with a cherrywood desk. The refrigerator was always stocked with Pabst Blue Ribbon, which I drank while sitting on a cast-iron porch after my grandmother had fallen asleep. There were records by Nat King Cole and there were TV dinners a la Stouffer’s. There were month-old crosswords jammed between the sofa cushions, and there was a faded page-one headline hanging on the back of a door that read, “ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.”

My cousin Dave lived with his mother in a two-bedroom downstairs, and Dave was kind enough to let me tag along whenever he went out drinking with his friends. Dave had a suitcase full of cassettes featuring some of the premier artists of the 60s and 70s. Sometimes, when my grandmother would slide me a few bucks, I’d hightail it over to The Bazaar, where I’d pick out something odd and wonderful by The Who, The Doors, The Lovin Spoonful, or Pink Floyd. This is how I came into contact with great LPs like Quadrophenia and The River, Blood on the Tracks and Harvest Moon. This is how I came to realize there was more to the FM dial than the Hot Eight at Eight and Terry “The Motormouth” Young.

Somehow, it felt like that era of great discovery had officially ended now. There would be no more weekend trips to my grandmother’s apartment, no more late-night beers on her second-floor porch, no more Boxcar Willie playing loudly from her living room, no more writing by the desktop light. There would only be a three-day mourning period, capped off with beads and flowers in some dimly-lit slumber room where we would all be lined up like lemmings, made to exchange phatic pleasantries with 300 or more of our closest friends and relatives, all before driving single-file to a church, where some know-nothing preacher would stand behind a pulpit and butcher my grandmother’s first name repeatedly, all the while trying to convince us that this was not so much a day of mourning as it was a celebration.

Then we’d all line up a second time, and we’d bawl our way into the sunlight … an organ playing us out to the heartfelt strains of “Eagle’s Wings”. We’d load the old gal into a wagon, and 30 minutes later, we’d look on in tinted silence as she got lowered into the earth. From there, we’d all head off to lunch at some swanky black-tie joint. “What a fitting sendoff,” any number of people might say. “What a fitting sendoff.” Of course.

***

I do not remember exactly when or how I returned to Wildwood that Labor Day weekend. I do remember that I had two bags’ worth of groceries under each arm upon my arrival, and that the doorknob to my apartment had a medieval-sized padlock clamped down over it. The padlock had a handwritten note attached to it. That note read: “See Sam at the Shore Plaza for a key to unlock door.”

Sam was my landlord. Sam was also the owner of both Sam’s Pizza and the Shore Plaza Hotel. Sam stood 5’3 with a shiny head, and Sam spent most afternoons in the main lobby of the Shore Plaza. Whenever Sam saw me shuffling toward the apartment, he’d wander out onto the sidewalk. The building that housed our apartment was located directly across the street from the Shore Plaza. If I was walking toward the apartment alone, Sam would stare at me without saying a word. If I came shuffling down the block with a girl on my arm, Sam would call out from across the street, “She’s not living there, is she?” “No, Sam. She’s not,” I’d call back.

Sam was intrusive in an old-country way, and I was in no position to dispute that. My name did not appear on any lease, and I had recently become the only tenant left occupying our 4th-floor apartment. My lone roommate, Jen, had set out for school the previous weekend. Jen had hit me up for cash to pay off the remaining balance of our seasonal rent before she left. As a result, Sam could conceivably – and legally – double his take by kicking me out and taking on another tenant for the month of September.

I kept all of this in mind as I wandered over to the Shore Plaza to confront Sam about the padlock.

“You livin’ over there?” Sam asked, as he glanced around the Shore Plaza lobby.

“Umm, yes,” I said. “I’ve been living over there for the better part of two months. You know me. You say hi to me sometimes.”

“That place is a mess,” Sam said. He had obviously sent someone over to inspect the apartment during my absence. “You need to clean it up.”

I assured Sam that I would.

“What about the rent?” Sam said, just before he handed me the key to the padlock.

“What about the rent?” I said. “Jen paid the rest of the rent about a week ago.”

“No, no, no,” Sam said, snapping his fingers. “That was the rent for August. That girl who always live with you … What’s her name?”

“Jen,” I said.

“Jen,” Sam said. “Right. Jen told me you pay off the rest of the rent for September when she drop off her key here last Sunday.”

“How much?” I said.

“How much what?” Sam said.

“How much for September?” I said.

“280,” Sam said, flatly.

I dug into my pocket, which also functioned as a cash-n-carry, and I counted out seven 20s. “I’ll pay off the rest next Thursday,” I said.

Sam handed me a key for the padlock. “You’re a good boy,” Sam said.

***

September in Wildwood was the most beautiful thing.

September was the Stonehenge solstice, the magnetic fields of Finland; September was the pride before the fall, when thinning crowds meant fewer hours, and the island blazed in pristine shades of auburn. September was the engine cooling, the Sunday paper, the sublime sound of ebb tides rolling in outside your door. September was cold beers and citronella, deep-sea fishing on the fly. September was the month when summer suntans slowly faded, when a million grains of sand began to migrate off the jetties. September meant drunk firemen and Harley hogs, classic cars and kite conventions. September was the month when hardcore flotsam washed ashore, when motel decks, they set to buckling. September was the month when beatnik locals hawked their wares. September was the month that culminated with an end-of-season fire sale along the boards.

That fire sale was known as Super Sunday. Super Sunday was a six-hour street bazaar during which seaside merchants sold off as much surplus stock as possible, rather than box that stock up and take their chances trying to sell it the following May.

I worked in Tin Can Alley on Super Sunday. Around 6 PM, I leaned my shoulder against a pillar, and I tossed the headset microphone aside. I looked on as the night watchman fastened a steel chain across the central gateway to the pier. That steel chain had a wooden sign on it that read: “PRIVATE PROPERTY. NO TRESPASSING.”

A few minutes later, I waved goodbye to all the maintenance workers as they stepped over the steel chain en route to a nearby bar.

“C’mon, man,” one of the maintenance workers said. He turned in stride and tossed me a softball. “We’re all headed to the Tiki. You comin’?”

I caught the softball and I tossed it back. “I’ll be down there in a bit,” I said.

With that, I set to closing Tin Can Alley for the season. I took my time and I let the breeze run through me. I watched a napkin as it fumbled down the strand.

Day 182

“Saratoga Summer Song” originally written by Kate McGarrigle.

***

(Moving On is a regular feature on IFB)

©Copyright Bob Hill

By Bob Hill

And so it came to pass, somewhere in the deep weeds of August, 1992, that I began working nights along Surfside Pier. I agreed to take the job because I needed the money, and my buddy Mike needed an extra body to slot in for the J-1 Irish, many of whom were reaching the tail end of their visas. Mike and I ironed out the details over beer and cards one evening. I would work from noon to six at the water gun game on 24^th Street, then grab a bite and make a beeline for the pier, where Mike would plug me in from eight to close.

I still had no official form of ID, and the pier wasn’t willing to pay any employee under the table, so Mike offered to cut a deal with a nearby business owner who would, in turn, cash my checks through his bank deposit. That business owner was an uber-tan matchstick of a man named Gary Rutkowski.

Gary was an equal partner in Gary’s Balloons – a step-up joint that generated slick profits and a record number of fines from the state gaming commission. Gary had moved his entire family from New Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to North Wildwood, New Jersey – two generations worth of hayseed yokels speaking their minds like flatbed politicians. Gary, in particular, stretched his “oll”s into “awl”s, and his short “a”s into long ones. Dollars became dawlers. Ears became airs.

The first time I met Gary, I watched him talk a 10-year-old paperboy into giving him a free copy of The Philadelphia Daily News. The second time I met Gary, I watched him talk me out of the better part of 10 bucks.

“Do you remember the percentage that we agreed upon?” I asked Gary, as I stood signing over my first paycheck.

“Sure,” Gary told me. “I’m pretty sure it was four percent of the gross.”

“Actually, I think it was two percent of the net,” I said, without looking up.

“Oh, right … two percent,” Gary said, slapping me on the shoulder. “I was just playin’ with ya, madman.”

With that, Gary pulled the check and the pen from my still-wringing hand, then disappeared behind the counter. He reemerged a half hour later, cradling a coffee can full of change underneath his left arm.

“Here ya go, madman,” Gary said, as he pushed the canister toward me. “I was a little low on cash back there, so I had to give it to ya in quarters.”

I stood there, head tilted, counting up the number of rolls lining the canister.

“There’s only a hundred dollars in here,” I said. “My check was for 113.”

“Yeah, well, I was a little low on quarters this week, too,” Gary said, laughing. “Tell ya what … I’ll catch you with a tip the next time around. Sound good, madman?”

It did not sound good. In fact, it sounded pretty fucking bad. Even more so, given the next time around Gary not only disappeared with my check for well over five hours, but he subsequently paid me in an array of singles and dimes, shortchanging me for more than $12 in the process.

George Hull once told a reporter, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

Gary Rutkowski once told me, “There’s no such thing as a hustle in which the mark is aware that it’s a scam.”

And thus it was settled: I was a sucker, but I could not be labeled as a mark.

***

By the third week in August, I was earning enough money to afford three meals a day. Only my schedule wouldn’t allow for it, and neither would my drinking. If I woke up on 26^th Street, that meant a quick breakfast sandwich, which I’d wash down with a can of Jolt Cola and a cigarette. If I came to at the flophouse over on Davis Avenue, I’d usually go with a 50-cent burger from Snow White, which I’d devour on the 15-minute tram ride from Davis Avenue to 24th Street.

Snow White served up burgers that looked like old dog toys. What’s more, customers would hand-pick their own patties from a dozen steaming burgers left wading in a tub. Snow White was the only boardwalk eatery with a barker. During off-peak hours, management would play a prerecorded list of menu items from a pair of amped-out speakers on a loop. Once primetime hit, a microphone would be passed between veteran servers, each of whom would blurt out split-second specials. “Hot dogs! Foot-longs! Corn on and off the cob! Beef pies! French fries! Forty-five-cent sides of slaw!”

Lunch was nonexistent for me, and dinner became a toss-up. On a good day, I’d spend my break along the south side of Surfside Pier, feasting on stromboli from Sorrento’s or a bucket of french fries from Curley’s. On a bad day, I’d knock back a cold slice of pizza on my way back to the apartment on 26th Street, where I’d set an alarm and sneak in a nap.

The best pizza on the boardwalk was hiding two blocks north of Surfside Pier in a tiny Greek eatery known as Fisher’s. The Greeks cooked their pizza in a pan, as opposed to a brick oven, and they layered it with feta, the combination of which offered a refreshing alternative to the generic blend of mozzarella and ketchup most boardwalk businesses tried to pass off as cuisine. Italians, by and large, have absolutely no idea what it is Americans have done to their traditional margherita. Authentic Mediterranean pizza is flavored with various oils and lard, and every diner at the table is presented with his or her own personal pan.

Italians have no interest in sharing their slices.

Americans have no interest in sharing their pie.

Mangia! Mangia! You too-big-to-fail motherfuckers.

***

I spent my first week at Surfside Pier learning how to work the low-maintenance games … kiddie joints like the Duck Pond and the Troll Wheel. By the end of that week, I’d graduated to the Bottle-Up and the Fishy-Fish – both of which required a certain degree of hand-eye coordination. From there it was on to the Break-a-Plate, then the Ball Toss, before eventually getting called up to work in Tin Can Alley.

Tin Can Alley was a 30-foot stand located front and center across the gateway to the pier. The game attracted traffic from all sides, and it had three decades worth of rides and attractions serving as a backdrop. During prime-time hours, Tin Can Alley was a magnet for the tourists. The Gambit, which was located one block north, had superior microphone operators and flash, but Gambit was a roll-a-ball game, which meant the turnover time for a single race could run anywhere from 30 seconds to three minutes. Because of the way Tin Can Alley was set up, a lot of its races could be completed in 15 seconds. This allowed the operator to zip straight up and down the line, collecting more money, faster.

Tin Can Alley was furnished with eight brightly-colored trash cans, each of them lined up against a wall, facing a 25-foot trough of polyvinyl balls. A traffic signal rose behind each can, with a series of seven red, yellow and green lights. Once the game was set in motion, all eight lids would open in unison for a period of five seconds, then close again for an equal period of time. Players would use this down time to reload, over and over again, until one player managed to land seven balls inside a can.

Tin Can Alley was stocked to the gills with all manner of Tiny Toons plush (i.e., Plucky Duck and Dizzy Devil, Babs and Buster Bunny). Once a minute, the Tiny Toons Adventures song would ring out like a battle call: “We’re tiny. We’re toony. We’re all a little loony. And in this cartoony, we’re invading your TV …”

It was a scene. And it provided an ideal platform for me to hone my skills on the microphone. Unlike the majority of race games, which were built with a three-and-a-half foot counter that cut off above the waist, Tin Can Alley was built on a downward slope with a rolling strip of Astroturf that redirected delinquent balls toward the trough. I used that strip like a stage. I was still learning how to minimize the turnover time between races, but the counter remained packed, so no one saw fit to complain. I had a knack for putting up strong numbers during the late-night hours, hours during which most of the other boardwalk operators had either grown too groggy or too tired to bother with what little business was left out on the boards.

Late-night drunks would shuffle over to each outlet full of verve, urging every member of their tribe to follow suit. The Alpha drunks would usually attempt some half-ass headcount, then offer to foot the bill for the entire crew. Offer the late-night drunks a raucous time, and they’d reward you with big bills. Try and take them for a ride, and they might tear you, limb by limb.

Fortunately, the games on Surfside Pier were meant to reflect a family atmosphere, and – as such – full-time employees were never urged to milk a patron down to nil. With the exception of bending rims and waxing boards, management made zero effort to manipulate the odds. Most of the kids who worked the pier games were young and clean-cut, sailing through state college on their way to middling things.

These coeds held no interest in fleecing wide-eyed tourists. And yet they had no qualms when it came to stiffing their employer. Boardwalk games were a cash business, and this was long before the bean counters installed an eye in the sky to monitor every stand. As a result, a considerable percentage of the game operators were stealing. One Surfside employee who I knew that summer had enlisted a full-time partner. This partner would arrive at the game his friend was working six nights a week, then pay to play the gamem using a one-dollar bill. The friend/game operator would, in turn, dig into his apron, making change for a $10 or a $20 bill. Now and again, management might mark a bill to nab someone in the act, but this was rare, and it certainly never happened in the aforementioned case. By and large, the nonverbal agreement was that if you pulled your weight, and you hit your numbers, then management could turn a blind eye to just about anything else.

***

“You’ve got a phone call,” an operations manager told me. It was 8 pm on a Saturday, the final week in August. “You can take it inside wardrobe.”

A phone call? For me? Inside wardrobe?

Who on earth could it b …

“Bob, it’s your mother.”

It was my mother.

“How did you know to call me here?” I asked.

“It’s not like you have a phone,” my mother told me.

“No, I meant to call me here,” I said.

“I looked up the number,” my mother told me. “Listen, I’m just wondering when to expect you.”

“Expect me for what?” I said.

“The fall semester,” my mother said. “It starts in two days.”

“Yeah, well, look, I don’t think I’m gonna be doing that right now,” I said. I was staring at the wardrobe ladies. They were staring back at me.

“What d’you mean, you don’t think you’re going to be doing that right now?” my mother asked.

“I mean I’m not going back there this semester,” I said.

“Well, then, when are you going back?” my mother asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “All I can tell you is that I’m not going back right now.”

“What are you gonna do, work at the circus for the rest of your life?” my mother asked.

Silence.

“Look, I don’t have time to get into this right now,” I said. “I’m really busy.”

“Yeah, well, your father and I have been really busy for the past 18 years,” my mother insisted, “trying to put the four of you through school.”

“What?” I said.

“What?”  my mother said.

“Nothing,” I said. “Look, I gotta go. I’ll give you a call during the week, once things begin to settle down a little bit.”

“Goodbye,” my mother told me. She hung up the receiver.

“Who was that?” one of the wardrobe ladies asked.

“It was my mother,” I told her.

“At 8:15 on a Saturday?” the woman said. She was directing the emphasis much more toward her colleagues than me. “I mean, you’d think some of these people never worked.”

Day 148

(Moving On is a regular feature on IFB)

©Copyright Bob Hill

By Bob Hill

I was working the microphone of an eight-player race game located on the corner of 24^th 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 26^th 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 24^th 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)

©Copyright Bob Hill