The Captain Binkey Show
Feb. 21st, 2008 10:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hafoc
“It was red, with chrome fenders. I wanted that bicycle more than anything else in the world.”
“Yeah, sure, you told me already. Don’t you think you’ve had enough, Ace?”
He was a stocky man. He’d been strong once, and he’d known as much about style as anyone does up in the north woods, but his body had gone to flab, his clothes had gone to mismatched plaids and grime, flecked with sawdust. I knew he was my age, but he looked thirty years older. And yes, he’d definitely had at least two or three beers too many.
“Don’t give me that. Give me another beer.”
“Ace, you’re drunk. I’m sorry, but I’m cutting you off. And don’t make me call the cops again.”
“Aww, Stan, dammit!” But he got up from his bar stool and wobbled in my direction.
I was enjoying the Deluxe Shrimp Platter, one of the better choices at the Lumber Baron Inn. The coleslaw came out of a carton, the fries tasted like fish, and the shrimp tasted like nothing in particular. But it was that or try to cook something out at the cabin, where an empty propane tank meant no heat and no stove. I was just glad that the Lumber Baron was a fairly high-class establishment, as bars went around here. If I’d been in Wheelerville, thirty miles away, and it was late enough that the bar was the only thing open, I’d have been trying to make a supper out of little bags of beer nuts. Maybe a pickled egg.
The drunk wobbled past on his way to the door. But he bumped into my table and nearly fell. “You tried to trip me!” he said, looking down at me. There was no recognition in his eyes. “I’m gonna kick your teeth in, ya wuss...”
I just smiled quietly.
“Ace!” Stan yelled. “I warned you once already! Don’t make me call the police again!” He was already reaching for the phone.
“You better watch where you’re going. You’d better watch out,” Ace mumbled, and stumbled his way out the door into the snowstorm.
Stan shook his head. “Sorry about that, Mister. Ace there, he, well. He drinks a little too much, he fixes televisions for some of the old folk who still get ‘em fixed when they break down. That’s all he has. Try to forgive him.”
I looked after Ace. The snow, seen through the little diamond-shaped window in the door, seemed to be falling more heavily. “No worries. I forgive him. I’ve seen lots of people like him. Every town has one, I guess. It’s sad.”
“Yeah. Anyway, I’m glad he didn’t take a swing at you. I think you could take him apart.”
“I was thinking about it, to tell you the truth.”
“I’m glad you didn’t.”
“Not much glory in it. What would have been the point?”
I remember the first time I met Ace Slayzak. It was in the fall, our first day of school. And the first thing Ace did, when we met, was tell us about Captain Binkey and that damned red bicycle.
“It was my seventh birthday,” he said. “I wanted a bicycle more than anything, but of course the Old Man is so cheap he creaks. Always saving every penny so he can buy his own damned TV repair shop some day.” Ace was the first boy of my own age I’d met who could swear without even a guilty hitch in his voice. That impressed me tremendously.
“So the Old Man comes up with this idea to get me some WON-derful birthday present that won’t cost him a cent. He worked downtown in Flint. On my birthday he hauls me down to the shop too. Worked the hell out of me, he did, fetching and carrying. Free slave labor, that’s all I am to him. But around two in the afternoon we left the shop and walked over to the TV studios.
“They had this kids’ TV show they used to put on there. They did it live, so what you did went out on the air right then, you see? They called it the Captain Binkey show. He was supposed to be a pirate or something.
“Mostly they showed old cartoons, but in between Captain Binkey would have these games, see? Games for prizes. And one of the games was throwing these balls into buckets. The prize was a brand new bicycle. Bright red, with chrome fenders. I wanted that bike more than anything in the world. They picked me to play, so I had my chance to get my bicycle in spite of the Old Man and everything.
“I got the first two balls into the bucket with no problem. Of course I did! I’m great at basketball, I was even back then. But that damned Binkey had to cheat me. It was a dumb cheap little kid’s show and they probably didn’t have but the one bicycle. So when I was about to let the third ball fly he bumped me with his elbow, and the ball hit the rim of the bucket and bounced away.
“I said ‘Shit!’ and turned to give that cheat the what-for. And he stands there in his stupid paper pirate’s hat, and makes his eyes go wide, triple holy, holier than the priest on Sunday. He looks all surprised and says ‘Oh no! That’s a Binkey Bleepie!’
“I just glared at him and shouted ‘Bite me, Binkey!’ loud as I could. All the kids in the audience went crazy laughing. Binkey almost fainted. They hustled me out of there and the Old Man spanked me for it. But it went out on TV and everything.”
“What,” Ralph asked, “Out on the air, and everybody saw it?”
“Didn’t I tell you they did the show live? It went out, and everyone in Flint saw it, and all the other cities where they broadcast that show. And it got into the newspapers. The papers and the government got on Binkey so bad for letting swear words go out on the air that he lost his job, and that was the end of the show.”
“That’s just great!” Ralph said. “Bite me, Binkey!” He was almost disabled with laughter. Chuck and I were too.
The story really was that funny, the first time you heard it.
I’d said we were going to a movie, but instead we were cruising around on the two-tracks in the moonlight, the way teenagers will.
I said “I don’t know. I’ve got three or four colleges I could go to, at least for starters. U of M has a med school, but I don’t know if that means I should go there for undergrad courses too.”
Chuck said “And your dad isn’t upset that you don’t want to farm?”
“Of course he is, but he said he’d help me with college if that’s what I wanted. Can’t grow anything but potatoes in the miserable climate around here, anyway, and Dad knows you’re never going to get rich growing spuds. How about you?”
“I’m not sure what I want to study yet. I’m going to try for MSU, though. Most folks in my family go there, ‘cept for Jonas, at the auto shop, and my cousin Will who went into the Navy.”
“Punch in the lighter,” Ace said.
“No. You’re not smoking weed in Mom’s new Nova.”
“Since when did you get so chicken?”
“Since that stuff STINKS. You light up and we’ll never get rid of the smell.”
“Chicken.”
“So where you going, Ace?”
“I don’t know yet. Damn the Old Man.”
“Why? What did he do this time?”
“Wants me to work in his damned TV repair shop. He says I don’t need to go to college. He won’t pay a cent to help me.”
“So get scholarships, or loans.”
“I can’t. They say the Old Man makes too much money for me to be eligible. Damn him.”
We rode in silence for a few minutes. The State Highway gleamed in the moonlight, not far ahead.
“I’m going to beat the bastard,” Ace said. “I’ve started looking for an athletic scholarship. I’ll get out of this dead-end town in spite of the SOB. Just you watch me.”
I thought about that for a minute. Ace was a big noise at the High School. Class President because the star football player usually was. The best running back and kickoff return man the town had ever seen. He’d caught a kickoff in the end zone and had run it the length of the field for a touchdown, setting a record for the conference. This had been against the worst football team St. John’s Catholic had fielded in twenty years, but it was still a record.
But if he thought that made him good enough that an Ohio State, or even a Western Michigan University, would give him a free ride, he had to be smoking dope. Which, in fact, he was.
“Sure, Ace,” I said, finally. I hoped it didn’t sound as hollow to him as it did to me. “Good luck.”
“Yeah, you can bite me too. You going to let me light up or not?”
“No. I already said no.”
“Then let me the hell out here. I’ll walk home. Better than riding with a couple of wusses like you two.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“I don’t need your help! Let me out now!”
I stopped the Nova. Ace got out. In the rearview mirror I saw a match flare, then saw the little orange glow of his joint, and then he was walking away.
“You think he’ll get that scholarship?”
I put the car in gear and headed back toward town. “Not a chance in hell.”
“Red, with chrome fenders, and— well, looky here! It’s good old hymn-singing Johnny, back from romping around college with the other wusses. How you doing, little boy?”
I smiled to the girls to whom Ace had been talking. “He’s going to tell you he said ‘Bite me, Binkey!’ on live television. And it’s his only story. He’ll never be smart enough, or do anything interesting enough, to come up with another one.”
And then I was on the ground. My mouth hurt. I put my hand to it and pulled away bloody fingers.
“Stand up, you bastard. I’ll kick your teeth in.”
“That,” I said, “is Ace’s idea of a witty argument. By the way, his real name is Maurice.” I made sure to pronounce it morr-REESE, like a woman’s name.
“Maurice!” one of the girls said, with a laugh.
“Stand up, you bastard, stand up and..”
“No.”
“I knew you were chicken. Won’t fight for yourself, just going to sit there and take it. Chicken. Wuss. Won’t hit back.”
“I will hit you back soon. You won’t be able to do a damned thing about it, either.”
“Chicken,” he said, and walked off, ignoring how the girls looked at him.
The next morning, about ten o’clock, I walked into Slayzak’s TV and Radio Service. “Morning, Ace.”
“What the hell do you want? Decided to stand up to me after all? Just step outside.”
“Oh, no. Not at all. Dad asked me to come down and pick up his radio for him. Here’s the ticket. I presume you have it ready? Bring it out, let’s test it. And don’t be dropping it. We wouldn’t want anything to happen to it. What would your dad say?”
He bit his lip and went into the back. He came back and set the old Zenith on the glass counter, above the display of vacuum tubes for TVs that didn’t exist any more. He thumped it down, in fact. The counter rattled.
“There.”
“Plug it in, then.”
“What? There’s your radio. Take it and get out.”
“No. After all, you repaired it, and I’m not sure you can do it right. Besides, the way you threw it down on the counter, you might have broken something. Plug it in. Let’s see if it works.”
He looked like he was sucking a lemon, but he plugged the radio in. He yanked at the volume knob. After half a minute, the sound built up. I could hear an ad from the Ford dealer up in Little Traverse. “Satisfied?”
I squinted at the radio. “No. Look at that, the dial is dusty, and you left fingerprints on it. Clean that up, will you? There’s a good boy.”
“I’ll be damned...”
“What’s all this noise?”
“Oh, hi, Mr. Slayzak. Ace here repaired this radio for my father. I keep telling Dad he should get one of the transistor sets like everyone else has. The solid-state sets that never need to be repaired. But he likes his old Zenith. It sounds like Ace somehow managed to do a decent job fixing this set, but the dial’s all smudged.”
Mr. Slayzak squinted. “Sure is. Maurice, clean that right now. Zenith’s a fine radio set, son. Your dad is right to keep it. Those transistor sets? Forget ‘em. Solid state has its place, but transistors will never take over. No transistor set will ever have the quality of construction or the rich sound that a tube-circuit Zenith will. There will always be a place for radios like this, and for men to fix them.”
Ace glared at me. “I’m not going to be a slave and scrub.”
“Do it, boy. No lip from you.” Mr. Slayzak clenched his fist, significantly. Ace got a cloth and started cleaning the radio’s dial.
“I envy you sometimes, Mr. Slayzak. I envy Maurice too. Here he is, working in the family shop. He gets to enjoy the simple, small-town way. He’s got nothing to worry about. He knows just where he’ll be single every day for the rest of his life.”
“You’re a sensible boy. I wish Maurice had the brains and the sense you do.”
“Yes, well, we all have our limitations. Are you finished, Maurice?”
His eyes could have killed as he handed me the radio, very carefully. “I will see you tomorrow,” he said through gritted teeth.
“No, sorry, you won’t. I’m off, back to medical school. But I’ll think of you here, at this counter, in your nice secure job. I’ll think of you often.”
I made it back to town to visit the folks, but I fell out of touch with my high school friends and enemies. I still heard about Ace, though. How he took over the fading TV repair shop when his father died. How he stayed around town to care for an ailing mother.
I knew about Ace. But I never bothered to look him up. Somehow I didn’t know what I’d say, if I ever met him again.
Maybe I was starting to feel sorry for him.
I slid my glasses back up my nose. The X-rays looked as if the wrist bones had knit properly. “Do you still have any pain, Mr. Hardy?”
“Some. It’s not bad, though.”
“I might expect that for a while yet. You had a bad break there. But I doubt you’ll have to come back and see me again. Provided you keep the ice off your sidewalk.”
He laughed. “I’ll make a note of it.”
I smiled. “You know, it’s the strangest thing, but since the first time you came to this office I’ve had this idea that I know you from somewhere.”
“I get that a lot. I narrate commercials. Some movie trailers too. ‘In a world where...’”
“That’s it! National Insurance?”
“I’ve done some for them.”
“I’ve always wondered how somebody gets started in that trade.”
“Well, in my case, it was because my uncle owned a television station.”
I laughed. “That’s handy.”
“Sure is. Of course, it wasn’t much of a station. He only wanted free advertising for his Ford dealership. So he started this little, low-powered independent station, out in the farmlands west of the city.
“At first he only did news at 5:00, and then a couple old movies. The station was off the air the rest of the day. But slowly he realized he could make money at this. So he started carrying other shows. Eventually they got up to a full schedule. And then there were new networks looking for stations, and those farm lands had become suburbs. Old Uncle Mark sold the station and retired as a rich man.
“One summer when I was a teenager he hired me to read commercials on live TV. They had this kid’s show, Captain Binkey..”
“So there really was a Captain Binkey! When I was a kid I had a friend who always said he’d been on that show. He was playing some game to win a bicycle, and...”
Mr. Hardy hooted. “And he missed, and he said “damn,” or something like that, and when Captain Binkey told him that was bad, he said ‘Bite me, Binkey.’ Right?”
“You’ve heard of him?”
“Everyone’s heard of him. It’s one of the great urban legends of all time. It’s like the kid telling Bozo “Cram it, clown!” or Uncle Don saying ‘That ought to hold the little bastards.’ And like them, it never happened.”
“It was all a lie?”
“Look, Captain Binkey’s Pirate Ship o’ Fun was like Bozo’s Big Top, but without the all-star cast and high production values. We ran like they did, only cheaper.
“It wasn’t just one show, it was a franchise. There were three Captain Binkeys, one here, one out of Atlanta, and one out west, near Los Angeles, I think. We ran the show live, and we sent it out over the wire to other miserable low-budget independent stations in our general area. There aren’t any films of those shows, none. So I can’t prove that the ‘Bite me!’ thing never happened.
“But it was an old story before Captain Binkey even got on the air. I found it written in an article about radio dated back in the 1930s. So where did your friend supposedly cuss on live TV?”
“Flint, Michigan, on his seventh birthday.”
“There was a station in Flint that carried the Chicago broadcast. They’d have heard of the show up there. But we never broadcast from Flint. And was your friend your age?”
“Yes.”
“And your age is?”
I told him.
“There you have it. Captain Binkey went off the air in 1959. You and your friend hadn’t even been born yet.”
“So he was lying to us all the time!”
Mr. Hardy smiled. “You’d be amazed how many people claim that they were the kid who said ‘Bite me, Binkey.’ I’ve heard five or six myself. And you know what? They all sound like they believe it themselves.”
Mom and Dad sold the farm to some development company. Now, on the fields where we tried to grow potatoes, city people walk the overly green, overly manicured, overly fertilized, pesticide-laced turf of a golf course and think they’re getting back to nature.
But the folks kept the land along the banks of Crooked Lake. They built a cabin there.
It stands empty all winter while they’re in Florida. But I’ve changed too. I’ve started to think I should build my own cabin on the lot they saved for me. Ginny and the kids would love it. And I don’t even mind venturing into the northern winter once in a while, as long as I don’t have to stay there. When the folks ask me to check on the cabin in the middle of winter, I do it. I’m even kind of glad to go.
That’s how I ended up in town for most of the time between Christmas and New Year’s two years ago, when the first blizzard of the winter came a month and a half late, and dumped a month and a half’s worth of snow overnight.
Ace Slayzak never made it home that night. I was relieved when the local radio station said that a heart attack got him. If he’d fallen down drunk and frozen to death somewhere, after I watched him go out into the snow, after I let him do it, I would have felt horrible. As it was, I could take some comfort that any part I had in killing him had been finished for twenty years.
Still, I felt bad about it. I could have left town by Sunday. But I made some calls, made some arrangements, so I could stay in town until after the funeral.
It was quiet in the drafty little Baptist church, when it was all over. I sat there for a long time, listening to the wind outside. The preacher walked over to stand by the end of my pew. “Were you a friend of Maurice’s?” he asked.
“You did a fine job, Pastor. You gave a fine service. I’m sure Mr. Slayzak would have approved. Does approve, if your faith is correct.”
“Thank you. But I still wonder if you were a friend of his.”
“I was once, Chuck. I was yours too.”
He stared at me. “John? John Holiday?”
“In the flesh. And if you don’t mind my asking, how did you ever become a Baptist minister?”
He laughed. “I guess I raised enough hell in high school that I thought I should try raising something else after.”
“You were never a bad kid.”
“Please, leave me my illusions. Sometimes imagining what outlaws we were is all we have left. I’m surprised you came to Ace’s funeral, though. You and he didn’t exactly part on the best of terms.”
“I don’t know if he ever forgave me, but I forgave him years ago. How can you stay mad at a man who never got one thing he wanted in his entire life? Not one thing. Besides, I am his friend today, no matter what. A man should goddamned well have friends at his own funeral. Pardon my cursing.”
Chuck smiled. “God knows what was in your heart when you said that. I don’t think he’ll blame you, this time. Would you please come to the parsonage for some coffee? We should talk, now that we’ve met again after so long.”
His wife, a lovely, quiet woman I hadn’t yet met, had already gone. So Chuck and I walked out into the snow by ourselves.
“So where will they lay him to rest?”
“He has a plot in Maple Knoll.”
“In the old part? Near his parents?”
“No, in the annex.”
I snorted. “The bean field, you mean.”
“You’ve been gone a long time, John. It might have been a bean field once, but it’s beautiful now. It’s lovely and peaceful.”
“It’s half of my Uncle Ted’s bean field, the half where nothing grew. And like so many of the new cemeteries, they don’t even allow headstones. Just a flat plaque in the grass, or under four feet of snow this time of year.”
“It’s the modern sense of style.”
“It’s the fact that the caretakers don’t want the trouble of having to mow around headstones. A man lives an entire life, and even if he doesn’t accomplish any of the things he dreamed— especially if he never accomplishes any of them— he deserves to have people take at least that much trouble, in his memory.”
Chuck sighed. “Well, maybe.”
He stopped then, and we stood together. The snow cleared enough that we could see across the fields and on to the winter woods, gray upon gray upon gray.
Then Chuck laughed. “But to think of it. To think that Ace had his moment of glory. Everybody’s heard of the kid who said ‘Bite me, Binkey.’ It’s wonderful to think we knew and grew up with that very kid.”
I thought I could see Four Mile Hill through the thin wisps of snow. Maybe a hint of the flat gray and white of the Lake, beyond. It was bitter cold, though. The wind stung my eyes.
“Yeah,” I said. “It really is wonderful.”
Perhaps still to be edited, but written in one evening- yay me!
“Yeah, sure, you told me already. Don’t you think you’ve had enough, Ace?”
He was a stocky man. He’d been strong once, and he’d known as much about style as anyone does up in the north woods, but his body had gone to flab, his clothes had gone to mismatched plaids and grime, flecked with sawdust. I knew he was my age, but he looked thirty years older. And yes, he’d definitely had at least two or three beers too many.
“Don’t give me that. Give me another beer.”
“Ace, you’re drunk. I’m sorry, but I’m cutting you off. And don’t make me call the cops again.”
“Aww, Stan, dammit!” But he got up from his bar stool and wobbled in my direction.
I was enjoying the Deluxe Shrimp Platter, one of the better choices at the Lumber Baron Inn. The coleslaw came out of a carton, the fries tasted like fish, and the shrimp tasted like nothing in particular. But it was that or try to cook something out at the cabin, where an empty propane tank meant no heat and no stove. I was just glad that the Lumber Baron was a fairly high-class establishment, as bars went around here. If I’d been in Wheelerville, thirty miles away, and it was late enough that the bar was the only thing open, I’d have been trying to make a supper out of little bags of beer nuts. Maybe a pickled egg.
The drunk wobbled past on his way to the door. But he bumped into my table and nearly fell. “You tried to trip me!” he said, looking down at me. There was no recognition in his eyes. “I’m gonna kick your teeth in, ya wuss...”
I just smiled quietly.
“Ace!” Stan yelled. “I warned you once already! Don’t make me call the police again!” He was already reaching for the phone.
“You better watch where you’re going. You’d better watch out,” Ace mumbled, and stumbled his way out the door into the snowstorm.
Stan shook his head. “Sorry about that, Mister. Ace there, he, well. He drinks a little too much, he fixes televisions for some of the old folk who still get ‘em fixed when they break down. That’s all he has. Try to forgive him.”
I looked after Ace. The snow, seen through the little diamond-shaped window in the door, seemed to be falling more heavily. “No worries. I forgive him. I’ve seen lots of people like him. Every town has one, I guess. It’s sad.”
“Yeah. Anyway, I’m glad he didn’t take a swing at you. I think you could take him apart.”
“I was thinking about it, to tell you the truth.”
“I’m glad you didn’t.”
“Not much glory in it. What would have been the point?”
I remember the first time I met Ace Slayzak. It was in the fall, our first day of school. And the first thing Ace did, when we met, was tell us about Captain Binkey and that damned red bicycle.
“It was my seventh birthday,” he said. “I wanted a bicycle more than anything, but of course the Old Man is so cheap he creaks. Always saving every penny so he can buy his own damned TV repair shop some day.” Ace was the first boy of my own age I’d met who could swear without even a guilty hitch in his voice. That impressed me tremendously.
“So the Old Man comes up with this idea to get me some WON-derful birthday present that won’t cost him a cent. He worked downtown in Flint. On my birthday he hauls me down to the shop too. Worked the hell out of me, he did, fetching and carrying. Free slave labor, that’s all I am to him. But around two in the afternoon we left the shop and walked over to the TV studios.
“They had this kids’ TV show they used to put on there. They did it live, so what you did went out on the air right then, you see? They called it the Captain Binkey show. He was supposed to be a pirate or something.
“Mostly they showed old cartoons, but in between Captain Binkey would have these games, see? Games for prizes. And one of the games was throwing these balls into buckets. The prize was a brand new bicycle. Bright red, with chrome fenders. I wanted that bike more than anything in the world. They picked me to play, so I had my chance to get my bicycle in spite of the Old Man and everything.
“I got the first two balls into the bucket with no problem. Of course I did! I’m great at basketball, I was even back then. But that damned Binkey had to cheat me. It was a dumb cheap little kid’s show and they probably didn’t have but the one bicycle. So when I was about to let the third ball fly he bumped me with his elbow, and the ball hit the rim of the bucket and bounced away.
“I said ‘Shit!’ and turned to give that cheat the what-for. And he stands there in his stupid paper pirate’s hat, and makes his eyes go wide, triple holy, holier than the priest on Sunday. He looks all surprised and says ‘Oh no! That’s a Binkey Bleepie!’
“I just glared at him and shouted ‘Bite me, Binkey!’ loud as I could. All the kids in the audience went crazy laughing. Binkey almost fainted. They hustled me out of there and the Old Man spanked me for it. But it went out on TV and everything.”
“What,” Ralph asked, “Out on the air, and everybody saw it?”
“Didn’t I tell you they did the show live? It went out, and everyone in Flint saw it, and all the other cities where they broadcast that show. And it got into the newspapers. The papers and the government got on Binkey so bad for letting swear words go out on the air that he lost his job, and that was the end of the show.”
“That’s just great!” Ralph said. “Bite me, Binkey!” He was almost disabled with laughter. Chuck and I were too.
The story really was that funny, the first time you heard it.
I’d said we were going to a movie, but instead we were cruising around on the two-tracks in the moonlight, the way teenagers will.
I said “I don’t know. I’ve got three or four colleges I could go to, at least for starters. U of M has a med school, but I don’t know if that means I should go there for undergrad courses too.”
Chuck said “And your dad isn’t upset that you don’t want to farm?”
“Of course he is, but he said he’d help me with college if that’s what I wanted. Can’t grow anything but potatoes in the miserable climate around here, anyway, and Dad knows you’re never going to get rich growing spuds. How about you?”
“I’m not sure what I want to study yet. I’m going to try for MSU, though. Most folks in my family go there, ‘cept for Jonas, at the auto shop, and my cousin Will who went into the Navy.”
“Punch in the lighter,” Ace said.
“No. You’re not smoking weed in Mom’s new Nova.”
“Since when did you get so chicken?”
“Since that stuff STINKS. You light up and we’ll never get rid of the smell.”
“Chicken.”
“So where you going, Ace?”
“I don’t know yet. Damn the Old Man.”
“Why? What did he do this time?”
“Wants me to work in his damned TV repair shop. He says I don’t need to go to college. He won’t pay a cent to help me.”
“So get scholarships, or loans.”
“I can’t. They say the Old Man makes too much money for me to be eligible. Damn him.”
We rode in silence for a few minutes. The State Highway gleamed in the moonlight, not far ahead.
“I’m going to beat the bastard,” Ace said. “I’ve started looking for an athletic scholarship. I’ll get out of this dead-end town in spite of the SOB. Just you watch me.”
I thought about that for a minute. Ace was a big noise at the High School. Class President because the star football player usually was. The best running back and kickoff return man the town had ever seen. He’d caught a kickoff in the end zone and had run it the length of the field for a touchdown, setting a record for the conference. This had been against the worst football team St. John’s Catholic had fielded in twenty years, but it was still a record.
But if he thought that made him good enough that an Ohio State, or even a Western Michigan University, would give him a free ride, he had to be smoking dope. Which, in fact, he was.
“Sure, Ace,” I said, finally. I hoped it didn’t sound as hollow to him as it did to me. “Good luck.”
“Yeah, you can bite me too. You going to let me light up or not?”
“No. I already said no.”
“Then let me the hell out here. I’ll walk home. Better than riding with a couple of wusses like you two.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“I don’t need your help! Let me out now!”
I stopped the Nova. Ace got out. In the rearview mirror I saw a match flare, then saw the little orange glow of his joint, and then he was walking away.
“You think he’ll get that scholarship?”
I put the car in gear and headed back toward town. “Not a chance in hell.”
“Red, with chrome fenders, and— well, looky here! It’s good old hymn-singing Johnny, back from romping around college with the other wusses. How you doing, little boy?”
I smiled to the girls to whom Ace had been talking. “He’s going to tell you he said ‘Bite me, Binkey!’ on live television. And it’s his only story. He’ll never be smart enough, or do anything interesting enough, to come up with another one.”
And then I was on the ground. My mouth hurt. I put my hand to it and pulled away bloody fingers.
“Stand up, you bastard. I’ll kick your teeth in.”
“That,” I said, “is Ace’s idea of a witty argument. By the way, his real name is Maurice.” I made sure to pronounce it morr-REESE, like a woman’s name.
“Maurice!” one of the girls said, with a laugh.
“Stand up, you bastard, stand up and..”
“No.”
“I knew you were chicken. Won’t fight for yourself, just going to sit there and take it. Chicken. Wuss. Won’t hit back.”
“I will hit you back soon. You won’t be able to do a damned thing about it, either.”
“Chicken,” he said, and walked off, ignoring how the girls looked at him.
The next morning, about ten o’clock, I walked into Slayzak’s TV and Radio Service. “Morning, Ace.”
“What the hell do you want? Decided to stand up to me after all? Just step outside.”
“Oh, no. Not at all. Dad asked me to come down and pick up his radio for him. Here’s the ticket. I presume you have it ready? Bring it out, let’s test it. And don’t be dropping it. We wouldn’t want anything to happen to it. What would your dad say?”
He bit his lip and went into the back. He came back and set the old Zenith on the glass counter, above the display of vacuum tubes for TVs that didn’t exist any more. He thumped it down, in fact. The counter rattled.
“There.”
“Plug it in, then.”
“What? There’s your radio. Take it and get out.”
“No. After all, you repaired it, and I’m not sure you can do it right. Besides, the way you threw it down on the counter, you might have broken something. Plug it in. Let’s see if it works.”
He looked like he was sucking a lemon, but he plugged the radio in. He yanked at the volume knob. After half a minute, the sound built up. I could hear an ad from the Ford dealer up in Little Traverse. “Satisfied?”
I squinted at the radio. “No. Look at that, the dial is dusty, and you left fingerprints on it. Clean that up, will you? There’s a good boy.”
“I’ll be damned...”
“What’s all this noise?”
“Oh, hi, Mr. Slayzak. Ace here repaired this radio for my father. I keep telling Dad he should get one of the transistor sets like everyone else has. The solid-state sets that never need to be repaired. But he likes his old Zenith. It sounds like Ace somehow managed to do a decent job fixing this set, but the dial’s all smudged.”
Mr. Slayzak squinted. “Sure is. Maurice, clean that right now. Zenith’s a fine radio set, son. Your dad is right to keep it. Those transistor sets? Forget ‘em. Solid state has its place, but transistors will never take over. No transistor set will ever have the quality of construction or the rich sound that a tube-circuit Zenith will. There will always be a place for radios like this, and for men to fix them.”
Ace glared at me. “I’m not going to be a slave and scrub.”
“Do it, boy. No lip from you.” Mr. Slayzak clenched his fist, significantly. Ace got a cloth and started cleaning the radio’s dial.
“I envy you sometimes, Mr. Slayzak. I envy Maurice too. Here he is, working in the family shop. He gets to enjoy the simple, small-town way. He’s got nothing to worry about. He knows just where he’ll be single every day for the rest of his life.”
“You’re a sensible boy. I wish Maurice had the brains and the sense you do.”
“Yes, well, we all have our limitations. Are you finished, Maurice?”
His eyes could have killed as he handed me the radio, very carefully. “I will see you tomorrow,” he said through gritted teeth.
“No, sorry, you won’t. I’m off, back to medical school. But I’ll think of you here, at this counter, in your nice secure job. I’ll think of you often.”
I made it back to town to visit the folks, but I fell out of touch with my high school friends and enemies. I still heard about Ace, though. How he took over the fading TV repair shop when his father died. How he stayed around town to care for an ailing mother.
I knew about Ace. But I never bothered to look him up. Somehow I didn’t know what I’d say, if I ever met him again.
Maybe I was starting to feel sorry for him.
I slid my glasses back up my nose. The X-rays looked as if the wrist bones had knit properly. “Do you still have any pain, Mr. Hardy?”
“Some. It’s not bad, though.”
“I might expect that for a while yet. You had a bad break there. But I doubt you’ll have to come back and see me again. Provided you keep the ice off your sidewalk.”
He laughed. “I’ll make a note of it.”
I smiled. “You know, it’s the strangest thing, but since the first time you came to this office I’ve had this idea that I know you from somewhere.”
“I get that a lot. I narrate commercials. Some movie trailers too. ‘In a world where...’”
“That’s it! National Insurance?”
“I’ve done some for them.”
“I’ve always wondered how somebody gets started in that trade.”
“Well, in my case, it was because my uncle owned a television station.”
I laughed. “That’s handy.”
“Sure is. Of course, it wasn’t much of a station. He only wanted free advertising for his Ford dealership. So he started this little, low-powered independent station, out in the farmlands west of the city.
“At first he only did news at 5:00, and then a couple old movies. The station was off the air the rest of the day. But slowly he realized he could make money at this. So he started carrying other shows. Eventually they got up to a full schedule. And then there were new networks looking for stations, and those farm lands had become suburbs. Old Uncle Mark sold the station and retired as a rich man.
“One summer when I was a teenager he hired me to read commercials on live TV. They had this kid’s show, Captain Binkey..”
“So there really was a Captain Binkey! When I was a kid I had a friend who always said he’d been on that show. He was playing some game to win a bicycle, and...”
Mr. Hardy hooted. “And he missed, and he said “damn,” or something like that, and when Captain Binkey told him that was bad, he said ‘Bite me, Binkey.’ Right?”
“You’ve heard of him?”
“Everyone’s heard of him. It’s one of the great urban legends of all time. It’s like the kid telling Bozo “Cram it, clown!” or Uncle Don saying ‘That ought to hold the little bastards.’ And like them, it never happened.”
“It was all a lie?”
“Look, Captain Binkey’s Pirate Ship o’ Fun was like Bozo’s Big Top, but without the all-star cast and high production values. We ran like they did, only cheaper.
“It wasn’t just one show, it was a franchise. There were three Captain Binkeys, one here, one out of Atlanta, and one out west, near Los Angeles, I think. We ran the show live, and we sent it out over the wire to other miserable low-budget independent stations in our general area. There aren’t any films of those shows, none. So I can’t prove that the ‘Bite me!’ thing never happened.
“But it was an old story before Captain Binkey even got on the air. I found it written in an article about radio dated back in the 1930s. So where did your friend supposedly cuss on live TV?”
“Flint, Michigan, on his seventh birthday.”
“There was a station in Flint that carried the Chicago broadcast. They’d have heard of the show up there. But we never broadcast from Flint. And was your friend your age?”
“Yes.”
“And your age is?”
I told him.
“There you have it. Captain Binkey went off the air in 1959. You and your friend hadn’t even been born yet.”
“So he was lying to us all the time!”
Mr. Hardy smiled. “You’d be amazed how many people claim that they were the kid who said ‘Bite me, Binkey.’ I’ve heard five or six myself. And you know what? They all sound like they believe it themselves.”
Mom and Dad sold the farm to some development company. Now, on the fields where we tried to grow potatoes, city people walk the overly green, overly manicured, overly fertilized, pesticide-laced turf of a golf course and think they’re getting back to nature.
But the folks kept the land along the banks of Crooked Lake. They built a cabin there.
It stands empty all winter while they’re in Florida. But I’ve changed too. I’ve started to think I should build my own cabin on the lot they saved for me. Ginny and the kids would love it. And I don’t even mind venturing into the northern winter once in a while, as long as I don’t have to stay there. When the folks ask me to check on the cabin in the middle of winter, I do it. I’m even kind of glad to go.
That’s how I ended up in town for most of the time between Christmas and New Year’s two years ago, when the first blizzard of the winter came a month and a half late, and dumped a month and a half’s worth of snow overnight.
Ace Slayzak never made it home that night. I was relieved when the local radio station said that a heart attack got him. If he’d fallen down drunk and frozen to death somewhere, after I watched him go out into the snow, after I let him do it, I would have felt horrible. As it was, I could take some comfort that any part I had in killing him had been finished for twenty years.
Still, I felt bad about it. I could have left town by Sunday. But I made some calls, made some arrangements, so I could stay in town until after the funeral.
It was quiet in the drafty little Baptist church, when it was all over. I sat there for a long time, listening to the wind outside. The preacher walked over to stand by the end of my pew. “Were you a friend of Maurice’s?” he asked.
“You did a fine job, Pastor. You gave a fine service. I’m sure Mr. Slayzak would have approved. Does approve, if your faith is correct.”
“Thank you. But I still wonder if you were a friend of his.”
“I was once, Chuck. I was yours too.”
He stared at me. “John? John Holiday?”
“In the flesh. And if you don’t mind my asking, how did you ever become a Baptist minister?”
He laughed. “I guess I raised enough hell in high school that I thought I should try raising something else after.”
“You were never a bad kid.”
“Please, leave me my illusions. Sometimes imagining what outlaws we were is all we have left. I’m surprised you came to Ace’s funeral, though. You and he didn’t exactly part on the best of terms.”
“I don’t know if he ever forgave me, but I forgave him years ago. How can you stay mad at a man who never got one thing he wanted in his entire life? Not one thing. Besides, I am his friend today, no matter what. A man should goddamned well have friends at his own funeral. Pardon my cursing.”
Chuck smiled. “God knows what was in your heart when you said that. I don’t think he’ll blame you, this time. Would you please come to the parsonage for some coffee? We should talk, now that we’ve met again after so long.”
His wife, a lovely, quiet woman I hadn’t yet met, had already gone. So Chuck and I walked out into the snow by ourselves.
“So where will they lay him to rest?”
“He has a plot in Maple Knoll.”
“In the old part? Near his parents?”
“No, in the annex.”
I snorted. “The bean field, you mean.”
“You’ve been gone a long time, John. It might have been a bean field once, but it’s beautiful now. It’s lovely and peaceful.”
“It’s half of my Uncle Ted’s bean field, the half where nothing grew. And like so many of the new cemeteries, they don’t even allow headstones. Just a flat plaque in the grass, or under four feet of snow this time of year.”
“It’s the modern sense of style.”
“It’s the fact that the caretakers don’t want the trouble of having to mow around headstones. A man lives an entire life, and even if he doesn’t accomplish any of the things he dreamed— especially if he never accomplishes any of them— he deserves to have people take at least that much trouble, in his memory.”
Chuck sighed. “Well, maybe.”
He stopped then, and we stood together. The snow cleared enough that we could see across the fields and on to the winter woods, gray upon gray upon gray.
Then Chuck laughed. “But to think of it. To think that Ace had his moment of glory. Everybody’s heard of the kid who said ‘Bite me, Binkey.’ It’s wonderful to think we knew and grew up with that very kid.”
I thought I could see Four Mile Hill through the thin wisps of snow. Maybe a hint of the flat gray and white of the Lake, beyond. It was bitter cold, though. The wind stung my eyes.
“Yeah,” I said. “It really is wonderful.”
Perhaps still to be edited, but written in one evening- yay me!
