12: Now don’t try to sell . . .
Little Follies, “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” Chapter 4 begins
4
“NOW DON’T TRY TO SELL anyone a car, Herb,” said Gumma. The group was making its way across the clamshell parking lot behind Whitey’s Tavern. “The last time Herb and I were here,” she said, turning toward Mr. Beaker, who might possibly not have heard the story, “Herb tried to sell Whitey a car, and he—”
“It wasn’t the last time, Lorna,” Guppa corrected her. “It was a long time ago. Everybody but you has forgotten it, it was so long ago.”
“Well, it couldn’t have been that long ago, because I remember it as if it happened yesterday,” asserted Gumma.
“It was before Whitey bought that jukebox,” said Guppa, the hint of a whine in his voice. “That’s why he didn’t buy the car, because he wanted to buy that jukebox and liven the place up, remember? What he said to me was ‘What am I going to do, Herb, park my Studebaker in the barroom? I’ve got to think of the business. Now look at this—’ and he brought out that brochure about the jukebox. I remember it perfectly.”
“Wait till you see this jukebox,” my mother said to Dudley, starry-eyed. “It’s real clever. It has these two peacocks on the front—”
“Oh, of course,” said Mr. Beaker. This struck me at once as a nasty remark, a dismissal, and I held it against Mr. Beaker for a long time, for years in fact. To his credit, he regretted it immediately, and told my mother so.
“I’m sorry, Ella,” he said. “I didn’t mean to belittle your pleasure in the jukebox that way, or rather, I did mean to belittle it that way, but I regret it very much. You’ll have to make allowances for my troubled state of mind. I’m afraid I gave in to the childish and self-centered idea that the gloom that envelops me should envelop you too, and that you should not be able to escape it by thinking of a jukebox, since I couldn’t—”
“It’s all right, Dudley,” said my mother, touching him quickly on the arm. “I know you’re worried and upset, and I think you’ve been doing a little drinking.”
Mr. Beaker smiled indulgently at my mother. “Thank you, Ella,” he said, “but the explanation for what I said isn’t that simple. Let me try to explain it again. Behind my remark there lurked the ignoble desire to make my companions share my suffering and unhappiness, don’t you see?” He threw one arm across my father’s shoulders and the other across my mother’s, knocking me on the ear as he did so. “The shameful desire to fill the hearts of one’s good friends with the same anguish and misery that fills one’s own, so that when they say, ‘We know how you feel,’ it will be the honest truth. That,” he pronounced, “is what we mean by commiserating.” I began to whimper and rub my ear, but no one noticed.
“I don’t know,” said my mother. “I guess so. But anyway you’ll like this jukebox, Dudley. There are lights that shine through the peacocks, and they change colors—”
“Yes, I’m sure I’ll enjoy it,” said Mr. Beaker. For a moment it seemed that he would say nothing more, and my mother seemed relieved. Then, almost reluctantly, he asked, “Do you know how that effect is achieved?”
“No,” said my mother, dreamily. “It’s real mysterious.”
“Not really,” said Mr. Beaker, driven by a force that he could not control. “Two disks of glass, or perhaps acetate, I’m not certain about that, are scribed with tiny parallel lines. These disks spin behind the peacocks and in front of ordinary light bulbs. Because of the lines scribed in them, the disks act as prisms, analyzing the white light from the bulbs into the spectrum of colors. As they spin, of course, they produce combinations of light in what seems to be an unpredictable pattern, an endless variety of moving colored lights, but is actually, I would think, repetitious, a cycle with a long period, so long that the viewer, who is probably distracted now and then by other things in the barroom, doesn’t notice the pattern.”
“It’s real mysterious,” said my mother, with little conviction, straightening my collar.
“Have you been here before, Dudley?” asked my father.
“Never,” said Mr. Beaker, surprised by the question. After a moment, when he realized why my father had asked, he added, “There are other jukeboxes like this one, Bert.”
My father narrowed his eyes. “I know,” he said. “I just wondered if you had ever been here.”
“Anyway, it wasn’t Whitey, Lorna,” Guppa corrected her, raising his voice. “It was his boy, Chester.”
“He means Porky,” said my mother. She giggled.
“Well, it doesn’t much matter which one really,” said Gumma. “But what happened was that Whitey decided that he had heard all he ever wanted to hear about Studebakers, so he—”
“Are you going to enter this establishment, Lorna?” asked Guppa, holding the door open and bowing.
“Oh, stop interrupting, Herb. You just don’t want me to tell Dudley how Whitey started—”
“Whoa!” called Whitey from behind the bar. “Hide your money, folks, here comes Herb Studebaker!”
“—calling you Herb Studebaker. Isn’t he a sketch?”
Guppa put on a smile and strode into Whitey’s, pounding friends on the back, friends who slapped their hands over their wallets in mock terror.
In Topical Guide 12, Mark Dorset considers Studebakers; Music; Records; Audio Equipment; Beaker, Dudley; and White, Chester “Porky”; Kap’n Klam from this episode.
You can listen to this episode on the Personal History podcast.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.