Évasion
‘Those guys are time dodgers!’
‘What do you mean, Rico?’
Peter, the part-time Down and Outer, sipped coffee at the bar of Rico’s American Restaurant and Pizzeria. He’d soon walk to the department store where his wife Katrina worked to ride home together on the northbound streetcar where they met.
‘Ray ducked out of his marriage and big corporation job in Bismarck to come back here! Stash did the same with his Civil Service career in Washington! Joey’s never going anywhere! They still live and act like kids! Holy Hannah! I saw um playin’ leapfrog on the street a few days ago!’
‘They do small things, but everything they do, they do in exclamation marks that make it sound exciting...Ray drinks coffee! Stash reads his book! Joey eats pie!’
Rico’s scowl transformed to a smile. When he spoke to the Down and Outers one-on-one, Peter became poetical, Stash insecure, Ray whimsical and Joey sounded intelligent,
‘Everyone says ‘Ray!’ with an exclamation mark! And Angie speaks in exclamation marks…always…’
‘They attract your customers because they make the mundane an adventure everyone regrets missing. They don’t dodge time; they make time stand still…’
‘And they’re change-proof…’
There was something about them…simply put, they were fun to be around…
Caprice
‘Duh yuh know what your problem is?’
‘YOU!’, answered the Down and Outers simultaneously.
‘We don’t have any problems, Angie’, Stash added.
‘Everybody has problems. Your problem’s doin’ the same things day afta day!’
‘That’s why we’re so good at them’, Joey answered, ‘and that makes us happy.’
‘And that’s no problem to us’, echoed Ray, ‘That’s why I’m not married. Women hate what men like, and they let you know alllll about it...husbands are women’s Bozo Bop Bags!’
‘Doing the same thing day after day is what life’s all about’, Stash proclaimed, ‘But if you like what you’re doing, it’s Nirvana!’
‘I’m sicka Nevada! You’ll be doin’ the same old same old the resta your stupid lives!’
Rico smiled as he watched the Down and Outers at their usual table in his restaurant. It was their hangout and where Angie worked weekdays as a waitress and fortune teller. She scored a zinger the other night when she loudly described Joey as ventriloquist Paul Winchell and Stash and Ray as his dummies Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff respectively that set the restaurant off in riotous laughter.
‘Why don’t you join the Marines like your brother? You can instruct your Drill Instructor.’
Angie didn’t snap back at Ray…she stared silently...
Rico filled the void,
‘What would you like to do?’
‘Summtin different!’
‘Joining the Marines is different…’
‘If yuh had brains, yuh’d be dangerous, Joey!’
‘If you had brains, you wouldn’t be you.’
‘Could you imagine Angie on Iwo Jima?’, Stash asked, ‘Put the flag there…No, over there! Wrong! It’s looks better…THERE!’
The boys laughed; Angie glared.
‘Maybe Angie can think of something different to do...’
‘Rico, you’re as wise as King Salamander!’, Joey beamed.
Stash flashed his tongue like a lizard.
Ray faced Angie, but his eyes looked at Rico,
‘Maybe we can eat at a different restaurant from now on...’
Ray suppressed his laughter as Rico’s eyes widened.
‘Let’s go to the End of the Liner Diner!’, Stash suggested.
‘We can watch the trains go by!’, Joey twinkled.
The boys loved trains, even Rico was fascinated by Joey’s elaborate tabletop railroad he and his late father built; they’d stare at it like deer caught in a spotlight.
The diner at the end of the streetcar line by the Glen Flora North Shore Railway station was Angie and Katrina’s favourite meeting place when Peter, Ray and Stash were away for their nearby monthly National Guard drills. They rode the streetcar to its end, conversed for hours over lunch, visited Larsen’s florist, then returned home before their Guardsmen finished soldiering. She’d always liked Katrina, but the pair were growing closer; the End of the Liner Diner was their place and their place alone...
‘The End of the Liner Diner’s OUT! I wanna go tuh Chicagah!’
The boys were surprised into silence. They rarely travelled together to Ray’s baseball games, Stash’s museums and Joey’s Brookfield Zoo; Angie never went there.
She repeated herself to tell the world that this was SO.
‘I wanna go tuh CHICAGAH!!!’
‘When do you want to go to Chicago?’
‘This Friday night, Ray. Yuh don’t have your National Guard or Navy Reserves Weekend, Betty and Connie are workin’, so it’s settled! We’ll meet at the Chicagah Northwestern Railroad station this Friday.’
Their usual Friday evening was late night shopping, meeting at J.C. Penney’s department store on Genesee Street. They’d saunter south to their city’s three dimestores, Woolworths, Kresge’s and Neisner’s, then across the street to the Heins, Globe, Durkin & Durkin, Montgomery Ward’s, and Waukegan Dry Goods department stores, fascinated at the latter watching cash-carrier cannisters of money shooting along wires to the central cash register above. Dining somewhere along the way, they finished at Sears Roebuck on Washington Street. From Sears they’d go to Joey’s or Angie’s house to watch TV.
Voyage
Angie and Joey were waiting on the platform. She wore a sharp charcoal grey business jacket with matching skirt and her usual black beret. Instead of his sport coat and Cubs baseball cap, Joey wore his best suit with his late father’s Homburg.
Ray and Stash arrived and whistled. All enthusiastically told each other how wonderful they looked.
‘Everyone who’s anyone wears a suit!’, Ray declared.
‘Abbott and Costello, the Bowery Boys, the Three Stooges…even bums wear suits!’
‘Yeah, yuh look good, Stash.’
They climbed to the top of the yellow trimmed with green double-decker passenger car on the side closest to Lake Michigan to journey South by Northwestern.
‘Whaddidyuh do tuhday, Ray?’
Ray was briefly taken aback as traditionally Angie started the time-passing conversations. He said a few words about his job but went into his usual inexhaustible supply of jokes and shared reminiscences that made everyone laugh.
He asked Joey what he did, as all vicariously lived his free afternoons.
Joey vividly related the action-packed WGN afternoon movie he watched with George Raft and Humphrey Bogart as two-fisted truck drivers, Ann Sheridan as the woman between them and Ida Lupino as a scheming murderess, providing technical commentary on the concluding courtroom trial. He excelled at making films come alive, they imagined him in black-and-white standing next to the film’s stars.
Stash related new scientific discoveries verging on wonder.
Again, Angie didn’t talk about her own affairs but joined the discussion of current news events until they arrived in Chicago. Ray glanced at Stash who returned his puzzled expression; for if Angie had nothing to say, she’d tell you all about it…in excruciating detail…
Entrée
The railway terminal was a giant temple. Stash expounded that railway stations were traditionally designed like the most important edifice in the city, cathedrals. Crowds were arriving and departing, but no one seemed to be enjoying themselves.
Ray and Stash looked as if they were taking it all in, Angie wore her mad-at-the-world expression; Joey’s smile resembled someone with a lobotomy.
Chicagoans moved fast and weren’t patient with those they regarded as slowpokes shuffling with dementia. Carl Sandberg was right; it was the City of the Big Shoulders. Chicago’s streets were more crowded than their own city at Christmastime.
‘Let’s find summtinta eat’, Angie mandatorily suggested.
Attracted by live music, the restaurant they entered was overcrowded and loud.
‘Those people can’t play! They’re flat!’
‘It’s “jazz”, Angie.’
‘It’s “spazz”, Stash’, Joey cracked.
Ray held up a menu,
‘It’s a clipjoint!’
‘It’s a creepjoint too!’, Angie observed.
They returned to the surrounding hordes and the cold skyscrapers looming over them.
‘You guys are gonna give me the business, but I wanna go home.’
‘No, we’re not, Angie. We’re all on the same page’, Ray responded.
‘This place isn’t any fun!’
Joey hit the nail on the head; it wasn’t.
In their own small city, they continually ran into friends and acquaintances, introduced themselves to strangers and played catch-up with news and funny stories. That was why they really went shopping, not to buy anything, though they did now and then.
Échappe vers l'Élysée
Returning to the railroad temple, they dashed for a homebound train, catching it just in time.
Three boys laughed in relief, their girl was pensive,
‘Thanks…’
‘We’d go to Hell and back for you any day of the week!’, Stash smiled.
Once again, Joey hit the bullseye,
‘Have you heard anything from Dean?’
‘We gotta letta…he’s gonna stay in the Marine Corps and make a career outta it.’
‘That’s just the place for him; your brother worked his way up to sergeant. That’s not easy in the Marines. We’re proud of him.’
‘Nobody makes a career outta the military, Ray!’
‘Sergeant Bilko did!’
Angie stared in disappointment,
‘I had plans, Ray, I had plans…’
‘You’ve still got us!’, Joey soothed, ‘And Rico too!’
Angie’s smile radiated,
‘Yeah, I do, don’t I?...I’m way luckier than Dorothy in Oz. All threeahyuh got brains and courage as well as big hearts…and yuh always make me laugh!’
The boys clicked their heels and repeated,
‘There’s no place like home…’
‘We’re lucky to have you because you accept us for who we are!’, Joey chirped, ‘Not who we should’ve been!’
‘Or who we’re supposed to be’, added Ray.
‘And we’ve always got Milwaukee to go to…’, Stash chuckled.
The four gleefully sang the Blatz beer jingle,
‘I’m from Milwaukee and I oughta know…’
FIN
Author Notes: 'There's no place like home...'
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Australia • 68 years old