Spondulix: A Romance of Hoboken Read online

  1838 Old Vault Brewery 1938

  The later date was executed in a stark Futura typeface, the earlier in wasp-waisted Caslon.

  Hovering a few feet now from the triple portal, Rory listened cautiously and intently. No noise emanated from inside. This could be either a good or a bad sign. It paid to remember that some of the most insane schemes of the Beer Nuts had been hatched in relative quiet Thunder and lightning, apparitions on the Capitoline Hill, did not necessarily attend the birth of every Caesar. On the other hand, everyone could be innocently sleeping, even at this unseemly hour. Rory simply had no way to distinguish between the possible interior states of this Schrödinger’s Box.

  Suddenly he knew how Goldilocks must have felt, shifting from foot to foot outside the ursine cottage.

  Tossing caution to the coffee-scented winds, Rory stepped forward and tugged open the middle-sized door, which swung outward easily on secretly oiled hinges. He stuck his head and shoulders into the darkness.

  “Yo, folks! It’s me, Rory. Anyone home? Earl? Hilario?”

  No answer. Rory, his eyes sensitized to outdoor light-levels, could register very little inside the midnight-shrouded brewery. He had a vague sense from past visits of vast, hulking shapes: brew kettles, pipes, mash vats, all the original equipment of the long-defunct brewery still in place. Entering this place felt like stepping into a forgotten museum or carnival spookhouse.

  An image of his shuttered store with a crowd of irate customers banging on the windows propelled Rory forward, lanternless, Diogenes in search of one particular dishonest man—

  * * *

  Earl Erlkonig’s peremptory question resonated in the air. Rory found himself no better prepared to answer it after his timeless mental recapitulation of his frustrating morning. As a temporizing measure, Rory levered himself up off the rudely awakened sleeping lovers.

  “Thanks, Rory,” said Netsuke coyly. Her half-Japanese features, compact and porcelain-perfect, still appealed to Rory as much as ever. With a sharp poignancy, he regretted for the nth time ever losing her. She was one special woman.

  Netsuke’s mother had been a war bride, one Yumi Fumimoto, her father a New England Swamp Yankee named Birch Bollingen. Bollingen had demobbed with his foreign mate to a forest-isolated two-hundred-year-old homestead in Coventry, Rhode Island, after reassuring his trepidatious spouse—an urban girl more accustomed to glittering Tokyo streets than to rutted barnyard lanes—that they were going to live “within spittin’ distance of New York City.” Heartbroken by reality, but eventually reconciled to her barbarian fate, Yumi had raised three girls, among whom Netsuke was the youngest, born in 1965 and christened Susan Bollingen. Matriculating from Rhode Island School of Design in 1987, the self-renamed Suki Netsuke had promptly decamped for New York, taking up the long-deferred bohemian lifestyle her mother had once envisioned for herself.

  Despite Rory’s troubles, he found himself indirectly admiring Netsuke’s topless condition. To mix ethnicities, her skin was a subtle curry color, her nipples a light chapati brown. Propped on one elbow, she caught Rory’s gaze boldly, not even reaching for one of her nearby discarded pieces of clothing in any show of false modesty.

  “Hey, molecule,” Erlkonig now demanded, “I asked you what you’re after so bad that you’ve got to hurl yourself forcibly like on innocent napping people.”

  Hunkered down on his haunches, Rory forced himself to confront Erlkonig’s spooky, candle-lit face straight on. The queerly colored, yet not objectively unhandsome visage never failed to disconcert Rory.

  Earl Erlkonig was a young black man who also happened to be an albino. His hair was a thatch of short kinky platinum wires. His patchy complexion was the color of a cup of weak tea attenuated by pints of cream. His eyes were a watery gray.

  Erlkonig’s history was a complex and shifting one, not fully grasped even now by Rory. A lot had happened to the albino in his thirty-five years.…

  In 1964, John “Wolfie” Erlkonig, Earl’s father, had already been a US Navy midshipman for seventeen years. (In that first post-Kennedy year the elder Erlkonig had been serving on the USS John Paul Getty.) By all accounts, Wolfie was not an exceptionally industrious or talented swabbie. In fact, according to his superiors he was downright slothful and a bad-tempered malingerer and a cheating cardsharp to boot. His small stature and shifty disposition did not improve the distasteful impression he tended to make on most people.

  At this time, back home in Norfolk, Virginia, lived Charlotte Erlkonig, Wolfie’s very pregnant and somewhat errant wife. Fortunately her current condition was just barely attributable to Wolfie, he having been a-sea for a mere eight months and three weeks when Charlotte delivered.

  The first notice Wolfie received that he was a father hit him when he got home on two-week leave and found Charlotte breastfeeding what appeared to be a little white baby.

  “Woman,” said Wolfie ominously, “you got some heavy ’splainin to do.”

  “No, John, look closer, he’s your boy. See that nose? Doctors say it just happen some time.”

  Wolfie bent to inspect the baby’s features. He stood erect. “No way. That little ivory monkey ain’t mine.” Wolfie left the house then, never having even set down his duffel bag.

  The next—and last—thing Charlotte Erlkonig heard of Wolfie came six months later: he had jumped ship at the Brooklyn Navy Yards, having knifed and killed a shipmate who objected to the honesty of Wolfie’s Three-Card Monte game.

  Charlotte, bearing infant Earl, set off north, hoping to find her husband and offer him some aid and comfort in his flight from the law.

  Fifteen years later, still lingering in New York, she finally admitted she was never going to hear from Erlkonig anymore. Far from celibate all this time, Charlotte settled on one suitor and remarried, becoming the wife of Chester Hires, owner of Chester’s Chattanooga Bar-B-Q on 125th Street.

  Chester was a short, wiry, gimpy man possessed of a cue ball head and a predilection for noisome cigars. Before opening up his restaurant he had run a highly illicit pitbull- fighting arena. Upon being savaged by a rogue contestant, he had turned to tamer enterprises.

  Young Earl (still going by his birth-father’s last name; the legend of Wolfie Erlkonig, as recounted by Charlotte, had acquired a luster the real man never exhibited) did not get along with his stepfather. The extent of their philosophical disagreements was testified to by several badly healed scars each bore. Earl’s most prominent was a Lipton-colored lateral welt across his ribs.

  Surprisingly, Earl excelled at school. His favorite subject was the sciences: physics, chemistry, astronomy. Naturally sharp, he really blossomed around age seventeen. During that academic year, he had a fine public-school teacher, Mr Welch, who really excited his interest in learning.

  Nonetheless, one day after a particularly violent argument with his son, Chester informed Earl that he was being sent to a military prep school, the Horst und Graben Young Martinet Academy in Haider, Pennsylvania. “They’ll straighten you out fast, boy.”

  As Earl was later wont to encapsulate that moment, “The door didn’t hit my pale ass on my way out.”

  The year of Earl’s flight from home was 1981. For the next fifteen years, he had lived mainly on the streets of Manhattan, compiling a remarkable record of survival by whatever means necessary.

  Earl had hawked newspapers, dope and skin. He had panhandled, stolen, bartered, begged, cadged, cajoled, and, if all else failed, worked. He had slept in culverts, beneath bridges, on docks, in abandoned cars, in parks under the summer stars, and once in a while beneath an intact roof, sometimes even an establishment with hot running water and heat. He had bedded down in Grand Central, Penn Station, SROs, missions, flophouses, YMCA’s and Salvation Army shelters. He had become a doyen of dossing, a swami of surviving.

  Remarkably, he had emerged from this period disease-free—no TB or frostbite or AIDS—and with only a missing canine tooth as memento of all the violent encounters he would willingly chronicle. />
  All this time, Earl’s mind had been nourished as well, by intensive freeform reading in various city libraries. Earl estimated that he had consumed approximately a book a day over the decade and a half of his peripatetic existence, in any and all fields that interested him.

  Life had been hard, but never dull.

  One day around 1997 Earl Erlkonig had wandered across the Hudson for the first time in his life. He swore to Rory that he had walked through the PATH tunnel during a combined flood and power outage. Rory believed him entirely capable of such an insane feat. However Erlkonig had arrived in New Jersey, the place seemed to agree with him, for he had never returned to Manhattan. A month in Jersey City, a few in Weehawken, then he had blown into Hoboken. The sleepy city had offered him some kind of sympathetic accommodation, a place perhaps more in tune with a mature Erlkonig on the far side of thirty.

  With sure-footed instincts Erlkonig had homed in on the abandoned Old Vault Brewery, as spacious and weather-tight a squat as any he had ever found. Soon, like satellites accreting around a new sun, the Beer Nuts had spontaneously formed.

  Netsuke squirmed devilishly under the pile of blankets. “I have to pee now.”

  This new urgent matter diverted Erlkonig’s ire. He glared at Rory and said, “Some privacy, please? Turn around, molecule.”

  Rory obeyed.

  “Okay, eyes front.”

  Netsuke, wearing a long nightshirt commemorating the final performance of Cats, was already padding off barefoot for the bucket-flushed toilets. Erlkonig had donned basketball shorts and a stained sweatshirt.

  The candlelight and conversation had drawn a sleepy-eyed crowd, many of its members bearing their own glowing tapers or flashlights. Soon Rory found himself the focus of a circle of curious faces: a majority of the permanent Beer Nuts.

  They were a motley lot, all unconventionally housed here due to a lack of morals, money, manners or motivation.

  Ped Xing was the only man in the world to profess both Lubavitcher Judaism and Zen monkhood. Long Hasidic sidecurls framing an open face contrasted rather piquantly with his shaven pate. He wore a black robe and a rainbow yarmulke. Ped Xings father, Murray Zhink, had been a front-line rabbi during the Vietnam War, where, in a moment of existential doubt, he had fallen deeply under the influence of the famous Vietnamese monk, Thich Nhat Hanh. Sharing Thich Nhat Hanh’s subsequent exile in France, Myron had married and fathered a son he rather foolishly named Petal. Upon reaching his own majority, “Pet” Zhink had returned to the United States in search of his own roots. He discovered them in Brooklyn while visiting the Lubavitchers, where a moment of satori informed him that he must become a rootless Jewish monk and adopt a new name from the first object seen after his epiphany: a traffic sign which synchronistically echoed his given name.

  Hilario Fumento, burly and shy, was an unpublished writer with a distinctive philosophy: to craft a novel solely out of haiku-like vignettes. Perpetually unshaven yet never developing a full beard, he dressed in an unvarying outfit: carpenter pants, flannel shirts and PF Flyers. From his capacious stuffed pockets protruded slips of paper scribbled with choice bits of his work-in-progress. A half-dozen pens resided in the side pocket of his workpants normally reserved for tools. His often abstracted smile radiated intellectual goofiness.

  Beatbox loudly and frequently claimed illustrious Hispanic ancestors, and boasted the appropriate dark and brooding looks of a Zorro. Depending on the man’s mood, these noble forebears hailed alternately from Guatemala, Puerto Rico, Madrid, or Tierra del Fuego. Currently employed as a Balloon-o-Gram delivery person, Beatbox this afternoon already wore his work clothes: a complete clown suit, big feet and all, as well as whiteface makeup. His nickname derived from his remarkable ability to simulate turntable scratching and drum-machine percussion.

  Leather ’n’ Studs were an inseparable lesbian couple, ex-Downeast gals in search of liberal spaciousness. They had arrived in Hoboken towing a shabby trailer behind a beater car. This rusting caravan still sat behind the Brewery, totally unroadworthy but theoretically available if greener pastures beckoned. Both women kept their chromatically dyed hair short as that of the plebe whom Erlkonig had narrowly avoided becoming. They both favored tanktops revelatory of unshaven armpits, black denims and Doc Martens. Chipmunk-cheeked, Studs was approximately a foot taller and fifty pounds heavier than the gaunt and petite Leather. Leather compensated by displaying a larger number of tattoos, including an obscene rendering of a wide-eyed Keane girl.

  Biker-jacketed, wearing his mirrorshades even indoors, the cyberpunk-era-frozen Hy Rez (once Hyman Resnick, and still given to long Talmudic arguments with Ped Xing) was the Beer Nuts’s resident hacker and phone phreak, providing the Old Vault Brewery with certain essential stolen services. A pair of lineman’s climbing spikes dangled from his utility belt.

  Prominent among the missing was Nerfball, the one person Rory most wanted to encounter.

  Erlkonig functioned as the Beer Nuts leader, insofar as he was allowed to at all by the anarchic bunch. Under their inquisitive looks, he now felt compelled to reassert himself in the face of this visitor.

  “So, my moll, like I asked you already—what brings you here?”

  “Nerfball was supposed to open the store for me today, and he didn’t. Do you know where he is?”

  The Beer Nuts burst out laughing.

  “I don’t get it,” admitted Rory when the rude noise had died down. “What’s so funny?”

  Erlkonig ventured an explanation. “Well, you know how Nerf believes in that dumb Ayurvedic Nasal Irrigation of his?”

  The hypochondriacal Nerfball was very susceptible to any sort of holistic, organic, nut-and-berry regimen that offered to improve his health and looks. Because he was shaped like a beachball and suffered from a poor complexion and perpetually clogged sinuses, Nerf was always on the lookout for ways to lose weight and/or ameliorate his nasal troubles. He blamed his current ills mostly on his welfare-constrained single mother who had reared him on a diet of generic cornflakes, pasta, mock-Koolaid, Cheez Doodles and potted meat. This upbringing had left Nerfball an overpowering addiction to junk food, a jones he constantly battled. His plight was not made any easier by working in Rory’s shop, with its big glass jars of chocolate-chip cookies, bags of Cape Cod potato chips and individually packaged wedges of cherry cheesecake.

  “Sure, I know all about Nerfball’s sinus hygiene routine,” Rory replied. “Who do you think has to cover for him every hour while he rushes to the john?”

  “Right. So you dig how someone here—and I don’t really care who, I’m not into the whole punishment thing, moll—how someone could get really sick of listening to Nerf snorting saltwater all day, honking like a sick goose at all hours of the night while people are trying to grab some dreamtime. So this morning when Nerf stumbles around half-awake to perform his ritual ablutions, he finds out too late that someone’s spiked his water pail with Tabasco sauce. Before he knows what’s happening, he’s snarfled up a snootful of chilipepper water. Then comes this mega-scream, and we all hear Nerf rocketing up the stairs to the upper reaches of our hideout, like a wounded waterbuffalo going to cover.”

  “Ouch,” Rory sympathetically offered.

  Erlkonig seemed unconcerned by the possible damage suffered by one of his posse. “So that’s why he didn’t open the store for you this morning. He’s just sulking, I’m sure. He’ll come down eventually.”

  “But I need him now!”

  Erlkonig shrugged. “Your problem, moll. I suspect you can track him down by his sniffles if you really want to try.”

  Someone courteously handed Rory a spare flashlight. “Thanks,” he said, and stood.

  Netsuke had returned from the toilets. She jiggled attractively as she padded in a barefoot hurry across the perpetually cold and damp concrete floor. “’Bye, Rory,” she giggled. “Visit again soon.”

  Rory shook his head wearily. Life was always tossing your past follies up in your face.

  T
he dusty steps of the old enclosed wooden staircase that led from floor to floor creaked under Rory’s cautious tread. At each landing he paused, poking his head out into the open reaches of the factory to listen for Nerfball. No signature snufflings greeted him on the second, third or fourth floors. All this empty space and abandoned fixtures! How could the squatters stand this creepy place?

  Nerfball huddled in a far corner of the brewery’s top floor. Rory could hear him talking to himself as soon as he exited the stairwell.

  “Gonna book outa this place. No one likes me anyhow. Dead-end job, no girl, and now this goddamn mean trick!”

  A loud nose-blowing followed by a muted shriek of pain punctuated this lament.

  Not wishing to overhear more of Nerfball’s self-pitying soliloquy, Rory called out in warning of his approach.

  “Hey, Nerf! It’s me, Rory.”

  A few seconds of silence, then a whining reply. “What do you want?”

  Inside a partitioned office the flashlight beam revealed Nerfball wedged in the kneewell of an old oak desk, his pudgy body filling the space like a Mounds bar in its wrapper. Nerfball’s nose was gorgeously inflamed. It resembled Beatbox’s clownish beezer. Employing his sodden handkerchief, Rory’s lone employee tried to hide the token of the insulting treatment he had received from his supposed friends.

  Rory pondered the abject fellow. Not the most inspiring of sights for any boss, to encounter one’s entire workforce huddled beneath the furniture. Still, Rory knew that if he could rally Nerfball’s spirits, all would be well. For Nerfball, like Clark Kent concealing his superpowers beneath a nerdish facade, possessed uncanny skills in precisely the one area where Rory most needed help.

  Thrust on his own devices during a neglected childhood, Nerfball had developed one talent to an astonishing degree: he could craft sandwiches better, faster and more economically than anyone else Rory had ever encountered. The rotund fellow had never benefited from any formal training in the field, never studied under any acknowledged master. The ability seemed god-given, fostered by self-reliance, a cell-deep gift. A sandwich assembled by Nerfball emerged from beneath his flashing knife as a thing of edible beauty, guaranteed to draw repeat customers. This salient skill Rory now had to cajole him to apply.