Estéban's Dance: A Novella and Five Tales

By Jay S. Sherman

What if the skipper of the Pinta discovers an island in the Antilles and doesn’t tell Columbus about it? What if a Marine captain and a Navy rabbi take up residence there in 1898, if Che Guevara plays some baseball there in 1963 and a widowed director of cut-rate horror films, the son of a one-eyed Bronx cabbie, arrives in 1990 to film the revolution he believes is brewing there but discovers, instead, the Cornell roommates he hasn’t seen in 30 years, and one of them carries a gun?

ESTÉBAN’S DANCE follows Sammy Bronx and his unconventional friends from college in the late 1950’s, to Seattle and Hollywood, to Florida during the Cuban missile crisis, and finally to the curious island of San Estéban, where an unfinished Soviet hotel crumbles on the beach and most of the islanders are named Gruenfeld and Flanagan.

The tales are inhabited by a tax attorney who encounters a Vietnam veteran who’s biking home from New York after 9/11, a little boy who is banished to a chicken farm during World War II, a physicist who discovers a dollar bill in a rain puddle and it triggers a torrent of memories, a documentary filmmaker who witnesses the death of two children in the back seat of an SUV, and an old black man who reflects on his working life in a factory loft in 1950s Manhattan.

These stories are all about fathers, sons and daughters, first love and final loss, choices made amidst the chaos of our lives. And they are about reaching out from loneliness for family of one kind or another.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: May 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781642379792

Book preview

This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters and events in this book are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Estéban’s Dance: A Novella and Five Tales

Published by Gatekeeper Press

2167 Stringtown Rd, Suite 109

Columbus, OH 43123-2989

www.GatekeeperPress.com

Copyright © 2020 by Jay S. Sherman

All rights reserved. Neither this book, nor any parts within it may be sold or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

The editorial work for this book is entirely the product of the author. Gatekeeper Press did not participate in and is not responsible for this element.

ISBN (paperback): 9781642379785

eISBN: 9781642379792

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020936763

Contents

Estéban’s Dance

1 Subway

2 Phone Call

3 Graduation

4 Heavy Boxes

5 The Gold Medal

6 Stark

7 Pretty Boy Floyd

8 Ithaca

9 The Mohs’ Scale of Hardness

10 At the Straight

11 Twenty-five Below

12 GDI

13 A House on Eddy Street

14 The Implications of Explorer

15 Michael Cray

16 The Winckel’s Tragedy

17 The Forsch Procedure

18 The Stage Delicatessen, New York

19 The Tularosa

20 Lieutenant Cray

21 Seattle and Points South

22 San Estéban

23 Mr. Schloss

24 The Dance

25 Looking for the Bear

26 The Casket Makers’ Saint

27 Moskvitch 410

28 Jaime Cruz

29 A Spalding Baseball

30 Dos Equis

31 Widgeon

32 Coda

Old Tattoos

Havdalah

Driving to the Parthenon

In The Shop

Chicken Guts

For Ella

and

For RKS

who used to type my homework

Estéban’s Dance

"Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in...Its thin current

slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper;

fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars.

I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the

alphabet. I have always been regretting that

I was not as wise as the day I was born."

- Henry Thoreau: Walden, 1854

Do you wanna dance and hold my hand?

Do you wanna dance under the moonlight?

Do you wanna dance?

- Bobby Freeman, 1958

1

Subway

New York, 1990

Watch the closing doors!

Sammy Bronx went unlatched. And it was over the smallest thing, really, an insignificant detail, a sartorial affectation signifying nothing. A young man on the A train, a perfect stranger, had his pants’ legs tucked into his athletic shoes. The trousers were cut for someone perhaps seven-and-a-half feet tall, with thighs like sequoia stumps, someone upwards of three hundred pounds. Yet Sammy noted that the youth, who was black, seemed of reasonable height and slender build. But for the silky skullcap he wore - a sort of big tight condom pulled over his brow - and the diamond studs in his earlobes, he was, Sammy thought, rather handsome and quite amiable ilooking.

But, oh, the cuffs of those gargantuan dungarees were somehow captured by the sneakers; they were intricately plaited into the laces (two pair at least, red and blue) creating a pattern which would have inspired an ancient Celtic stone carver or triumphed in a fifth level competition of Cat’s Cradle.

So Sammy went all unlatched. Not unhinged, no. There had been times in his life, and likely in all our lives, when he had come very close to slipping all his moorings but these days he tried hard to not revisit them. There was no percentage in it. No, now Sammy simply began to flap like a cheaply-made picket gate in a strong wind, left open by the careless hand of a stranger, perhaps a salesman of patent nostrums of dubious efficacy who was passing through just this one time and, hopefully, would not return.

Sammy was taking the subway downtown to meet someone, a ten-fifteen appointment on the 43rd floor of a building on fifty-sixth street, near Sixth Avenue. A Mister John Morfogen. But now, unhappily, it seemed the car was filling with a thick gray pall that was throwing everything out of focus, including time, and it occurred to him that it might actually be 9:33 at night instead of the AM. The train might be barreling north from Columbus Circle (Next stop: the one-two-five. One-two-five, next. Watch The Closing Doors!) and maybe he was going to the 56th floor, somewhere on Sixth Street, near 43rd Avenue, though that would put the place in Queens. They have avenues in Queens with numbers like that, don’t they? I’ll have to change trains somewhere, he thought.

And could be the name isn’t John Morfogen, but James. I’ll call him Jimmy, just to appear friendly. Morfogen? What the hell kind of name is that? Sounds like more fuckin’. I’ll probably smile when I shake his hand, Sammy thought, turning the name around his tongue like a sourball. Maybe I’ll laugh in his face.

But those shoes, those trousers. He stared again at his fellow traveler and, though Sammy had less than no interest in the passing parade of fashion, his attention leapt to memories of how young men dressed in the gray middle of his century, when he was the kid’s age. Our pants were a lot tighter, he remembered. You really couldn’t fit more than one pair of legs at a time into them.

Back then nobody Sammy knew owned a car, much less a motorcycle, but they all saw the movies and read the hysterical magazine articles about the cycle gangs that were almost as menacing to the American Way as the Red Chinese. So every teenager in the Bronx lusted after a black leather jacket and high black boots and a heavy belt with a vicious brass buckle. (Some of the more fearsome kids, it was rumored, sharpened those buckles to a razor edge. Kalashnikov assault rifles were not yet in common use by children so, if the need arose, ordinary items of apparel had to be pressed into service). And if you couldn’t afford the coat, you would at least let your hair grow long and paste it back with Wildroot Creme Oil: a gesture of truculence. It wasn’t much, but we didn’t have a lot of money, Sammy thought.

Then, right off, a young Marlon Brando, trim and leathered and devilishly well-favored, crystallized: a perfectly eidetic eidolon, as his psych prof would describe the hallucination of the schizophrenic sophomore Sammy was capturing on film, a very long time ago. (Are you getting this, Mr. Bronkoff? Are you rolling? What’s an eidolon? It’s what he’s seeing. We’ll talk later, Mr. Bronkoff. Tell me you’re getting this. I’m getting it, he said).

That floppy little cap pulled down over one eye, it was The Wild One himself. Sammy had seen the movie so many times he would mouth the dialogue from the third row: ‘What are you rebelling against, Johnny?’ ‘What’ve you got?’ said Brando. Said 14 year-old Sammy.

But, three days back, his body had passed the half-century mark and no one noticed, not even Lubitsch who had concerns of his own. Now, because he hadn’t slept much and when he did the dreams were wretched and because things were going less than well and because he wasn’t all that eager for the Morfogen encounter and because the rocking of the car and the thrumming of the wheels usually loosened his time frame and freed it a little, Sammy let his mind waggle on to how they got themselves up in college, some of them anyhow, just a few years later. Or maybe it was just the benzedrine and two cups of black coffee that was his breakfast that morning.

The Tee shirt, pack of Luckies captured in the sleeve, became the button-down oxford shirt and silk tie with little paramecia on it. The close-fitting blue jeans gave way to roomy tan chinos (lethal belt buckles hardly ever seen on campus). The shiny black leathers became - for those who could afford them, the blue-eyed boys out of prep school, the scions of Ivy Leaguers - Scottish wool sweaters and tweeds, and big shapeless raincoats that billowed behind as you raced across the quad to your geology class, your dirty-white bucks with red rubber soles splashing and slipping in the Ithaca slush. And you’re dodging around a full-dress formation of Reserve Officer cadets - by the hundreds - a shivering cohort in Army green, Air Force sky blue, and the elite Navy boys, the fewest and smartest, in their double-breasted almost black suits, golden buttons all down the front.

And the Prussian brush-cut that was required for the ROTC spread through the male half of the student body like a pandemic. Though Sammy resisted at first, he had been told he’d have to endure two years of ersatz military training as a condition of the state scholarship he had been awarded (and without which he’d be at one of the free city colleges - probably the Hunter campus in the Bronx - and living at home with his cabdriver Pop).

So, the afternoon before his physical, he’d watched his greasy locks tumble to the tiled floor and clamped his eyes shut as the placid little barber severed Sammy’s carefully-tended sideburns while humming a medley of annoying show tunes.

But how could I have felt let down, Sammy wondered now. How was it possible, the next morning, when that Army captain banged various rubber stamps on his paperwork and pronounced - with real sorrow, it seemed - that Samuel Bronkoff wasn’t fit to be an officer in any branch of the U.S. military (on account of his eyes being unacceptably myopic), that Sammy felt bitter disappointment instead of sweet relief?

But he was 17 and had grown up playing with toy soldiers and cap pistols and he had seen all the war movies too, so he thought it would be amusing to dress up in a uniform a couple times a week and do a little marching around the quad and maybe get to shoot a gun.

After all, hadn’t Sammy’s father been in World War II? Slogged through Europe? And hadn’t he been there to liberate Dachau? Well, hadn’t he? Well, no. They’d put that one to rest, Sammy remembered now. He’d closed the book on that one.

So there was all that hair he had been tricked into losing (it had taken time to get it just so) and the ridiculous crew cut he was left with. But it would grow back. And it did.

There came a moment, ten years on, while watching some particularly ghastly footage on the evening news, when Sammy Bronx realized that some of those beaming classmates - those with capable eyes and strongly-arched feet, those who’d stuck with the program and graduated as officers and decided to build up some pension money by staying in - some of those boys came to their ends face down in Asian rice paddies. And he had marveled then at his own adolescent stupidity: how could he have felt let down?

And now Sammy was well into it. The A train was pounding its way downtown - or was it uptown? - and he could not hold them off any longer; his carefully constructed dam, meticulously engineered as it was, was beginning to give way. More memories were leaking through.

So down through the steel ceiling of the subway car and up through the sticky floor and right through the plate glass windows strutted a drum major wearing a laughably tall shako and hefting a solid gold baton. Then the whole Cornell marching band: The Big Red. ONE HUNDRED MARCHING MEN! hooting and tooting up and down the crowded car, trombone slides pumping, cymbals flashing in what could not possibly be Autumn football Saturday sunshine but somehow was, and the beat of the bass drums rearranging your viscera.

And what was it they were playing? Not Sousa. No, incredibly: Wake Up, Little Susie! In the midst of the red-faced musicians could be spotted the Brothers Everly, both of them, in skinny suits and big hair, Don and Phil, the necks of their guitars swinging in perfect unison, glittering in the crisp October air.

What’re we gonna tell your momma? What’re we gonna tell your pop?

Now Sammy could see the teams taking the freshly-lined field, Cornell in red and the visitors from the Academy. Up in the stands, in perfectly composed rank and file, the cadet corps, stunning and heroic in gray greatcoats with shoulder capes, and caps.

And what’s this? Above them in the high bleachers, raining candy wrappers and popcorn and insults down on the blameless cadets (West P’nt beasts, go home! Warmongers, West P’nt beasts, go on home...), were the Poet, the Red and, yes, sitting alone and quiet, with them but not quite, even the Innkeeper. All the ghosts of Eddy Street.

Wake up, little Susie, wake up, the band played, oblivious to the cruel indignities being visited upon their guests in the grandstand. What’re we gonna tell your momma? What’re we gonna tell your pop? We gotta go home!

But what was that they were carrying, there amongst the drums and cymbals and sousaphones? Hard to see now, what with all that Fall sunshine glinting off the polished brass and now Sammy didn’t want to see any more but they were carrying something, maybe.

And what they were carrying, maybe, was a coffin. Clear light wood, looks like ash. Quite beautiful, really and not too big, not very heavy. Not difficult to carry.

Half a century, Sammy.

He raised his eyes, away from the strutting band on the field, and way down at the blurry far end of the car, beyond the sneakerpants kid, Sammy thought he saw someone he once knew. Nostalgia, then, wrapped like a burrito in a skin of melancholy, pelted him across the eyes, which instantly welled with tears.

Wedged between a Rastaman in a huge knit beret and a Mexican mariachi in sombrero was - could it really be? I know that guy, he thought. Wait a minute. I know him. No coat, he doesn’t wear a coat. Not ever.

One bare muscular arm is up, sharing a steel strap with his traveling companions. His right hand clutches an open book. Never without a book. His head, with just a virgin wisp of curly blond beard and hair that never saw the business side of a comb, bends down to his reading.

I know his name. Wait. I know him.

Wake up, little Susie, wake up. Wake up, Sammy Bronx. Get a grip. It’s not him.

But it looks like him.

But it’s not him. Can’t you see he’s too young? He’s got to be old now, just like you. Half a century, Sammy. Can you feature it?

Can’t you fathom it?

But just look at him.

He’s gone. Over.

Wake up! We gotta go home.

Next stop: Fitty-Ninth Street. Columbus Circle, nex’. Stan’ clear the doh’s, the conductor said.

Sammy grabbed the handle of his briefcase and got to his feet. He needed John Morfogen now, to get him out of town.

Save me, Johnny, he said, and then he grinned. Or James. Jimmy.

2

Phone Call

One Week Earlier

I am a director whose scripts are always - I mean always -

rejected by producers. Even those who receive me...with

affection, invariably say to me, "This film won’t make

a lira; it’s not cinema...it’s something that will interest

four cats; why don’t you do a book?"

- Federico Fellini, 1965

M orfogen Associates. Good morning.

Good morning. I’m returning Mr. Morfogen’s call. Paradigm Pictures?

Yes, Mr. Lubitsch, I remember you. This is Marsha.

No, this isn’t Lubitsch. It’s Sam Bronkoff. Mr. Lubitsch is -

Thank you, Mr. Lubitsch. Hold for Mr. Morfogen, please.

No, this is -

DO YOU KNOW THE WAY TO SAN JOSE? I’VE BEEN AWAY SO LONG, I MAY GO WRONG AND LOSE MY WAY -

Hello, Lubitsch. Morfogen here. What do you got for me? You know, you really gotta come in, have a sit-down. Do you eat breakfast?

No, Mr. Morfogen, this is Samuel -

Do you know who’s got the finest Nova salmon in the City? See, they say Zabar’s. But it ain’t. I can do better. See, you go -

This is Sam Bronkoff.

"This ain’t Paradise Pictures? Marsha, what’re you doing to me here, with these phone calls? You’re killin’ me, Marsha!"

It’s Paradigm. I’m Paradigm Pictures.

Jack Lubitsch, no?

Sam Bronkoff. His partner.

Where the fuck is Lubitsch? Excuse my French. I spoke to Lubitsch maybe yesterday.

You spoke to him last week. He’s on the Coast. I’m his partner, Bronkoff.

"Okay, I’ll talk to Lubitsch. Marsha, why can’t you get me Lubitsch, for Chrissake?"

I got you Lubitsch, Mr. Morfogen. You’re talking to him now, Mr. Morfogen.

No, this is somebody else, damnit.

Mr. Morfogen, if I might put in a word. Jack Lubitsch is in L.A. Santa Monica General Hospital, actually. He had an episode. A small cardiac thing. I’m Sam Bronkoff. I’m the director.

The director?

Yeah. I’d like to come in and have a sit-down.

On the Coast?

No, I’m here in New York. Our office is in New York. Lubitsch went to the Coast. He had an episode. We could have breakfast, lunch, whatever you want. I want to tell you about the San Estéban project.

You’re going to pitch me Lubitsch’s project?

It’s our project, Mr. Morfogen. Jack and I are partners.

All right, already. I got it. You want to shoot a thing in Santa Monica and you want I should front you and get CBS interested. What, you don’t think I remember? I’m Morfogen!

No, PBS. Public Broadcast. Channel Thirteen.

Thirteen? Those cheap bastards? You could starve before they rub together two quarters.

They’ll like this, though. There’s a revolution brewing.

In Santa Monica? What’s this country coming to?

In San Estéban. The country. It’s in the Windward Islands. The Caribbean.

That’s near the Bahamas, yes? What I wouldn’t give to be in the Bahamas right now, burning on the beach. This town is killing me, know what I mean?

Yes, it’s a killer. New York is killing me, too. Actually, this is an island in the Antilles. An American named Blackstone is stirring up -

"Aunt Tillie’s? Marsha, this guy is killing me. Did you order me lunch yet?"

Yes, Mr. Morfogen. It’s Tuesday, you’re getting from Hunan Gardens. Double spare ribs.

Wait a minute. You’re Bronkoff?

Right. Bronkoff. Paradigm Pictures. Jack Lubitsch is -

Sam Bronkoff? Didn’t you use to be with Roger Corman?

I worked for Corman. Wrote some pictures and directed a few. Yes.

Really scary ones?

Used to scare the kiddies. Yes.

"Ah, now he tells me. Marsha, make an appointment with this guy, he should come in and see me. He’s pitching a project. And get me lunch, for Chrissake. A man could die over here, waiting."

3

Graduation

The Grand Concourse

June, 1957

On the widest boulevard in all the Bronx was the Paradise, the grandest movie palace of them all. Before the Great Depression, with cost no object, the moguls at Loew’s fashioned it to be a shrine to Hollywood excess and glitz, the place the common man had to be on a Saturday night. It had a goldfish pond in the lobby and, in the four thousand seat auditorium, faux Renaissance statuary graced the columned walls.

Painted clouds appeared to glide across a lofty ceiling set with twinkling electric stars that provided alternative entertainment, should ones eyes wander from the huge screen and upward to the heavens.

It was the poshest place to bring an important date and the dreamy setting suggested the reasonable expectation that a boy might drape his arm around a girl’s shoulder, that she’d grab his knee if the movie became intense or sad, that they might hold hands and even, later, at her apartment door, an ice cream sundae percolating in his gut, venture an awkward kiss.

But now, on a hot Sunday morning, the Paradise was hosting the commencement ceremony of the borough’s tertiary (after the Yankees and the Zoo) pride and joy: the High School of Science. Chosen by competitive examination, ambitious kids from all over the city were drawn to its old Gothic building - green paint peeling from its walls, ceiling plaster dropping onto the scarred oak desks, no playing fields, no sports teams - to receive a free public education to rival any offered by the best private academies in the country.

But Science’s sweltering little assembly hall was not up to the task of staging its own graduation.

In September, you are going to witness a wonderful thing in our Nation’s South, boys and girls, parents and friends of Bronx Science! Yes, on account of our courts and our great President, Dwight David Eisenhower, the public schools of Little Rock, Arkansas are going to welcome - just as we do in this great city - the little Negro children, for the betterment of the race!

If you were sitting close enough to the enormous stage, you could see the veins bulging in the Bronx Borough President’s neck and the beads of sweat on his scarlet forehead. He was up for reelection. He paused to mop himself and gulp some water before consulting his notes and going on.

Yes, my friends, side by side in shining classrooms, Colored boys and girls and White boys and girls will learn together what a privilege it is to live in these United States. While over there, on the Godless side of the Iron Curtain, the poor students are only learning what it means to hate.

Sammy Bronkoff turned to Benny, his friend since kindergarten, sitting beside him. Then they both twisted in their red plush seats to scan the crowd. In their class of nearly a thousand they knew only a handful of Colored boys, and no Colored girls at all. And one Puerto Rican.

And Sammy was also searching the family section for someone he knew.

What the fuck is this blowhard talking about? said Benny, who would be studying engineering at City College in the Fall.

I don’t know but I wish he’d hurry up. There’s about a hundred more people to make speeches before we get our diplomas. Sammy was nervous because he knew why he was given an aisle seat, that he would be called up an extra time and awarded his state scholarship by the lady in the blue hat from the Board of Education, who seemed to be dozing in her chair, behind the lectern.

Again Sammy looked back at the sea of parents and relatives. Mr. Dubermeyer, the physics teacher, patrolling the aisle, made a clucking sound and signed for Sammy to face front and pay attention.

Sammy waited for him to continue his pigeon-toed prowling, then whispered to Benny, Do you think he’ll make it?

You mean your old man? Benny said. Jesus, I don’t know. You know what he’s like. Don’t sweat it, man. You can ride home with us. Hey, we’re going to Jahn’s, after, for ice cream.

In conclusion, graduates of 1957, friends and neighbors, let me say how fortunate we all are to live in this great country, having the opportunities afforded by this splendid school, in this beautiful borough, and how proud I am to stand before you and to serve -

The foot stamping began somewhere deep in the forest of the senior class. Who can say who started it? But it was eagerly picked up by a few boys, and a few more, then the girls and, finally, even a lot of the parents joined in until the plaster cherubs halfway up the Paradise walls were marching to the rhythm of hundreds of slapping shoes.

The Dean of Students replaced the Borough President at the microphone. Then the Principal tried his hand at quelling the rebellion. In the end, only the deafening blasts of the gym teachers’ whistles, followed by Dubermeyer’s snarling threat of withholding the sheepskins could restore order and silence.

After the ceremony, out in the dazzling sunshine on the wide sidewalk in front of the theater, Sammy waited as his friend was hugged and kissed by sister, mother, father, aunt and three cousins. Sammy carried his diploma, which was rolled up inside a pasteboard tube, in one hand and his scholarship certificate in the other. It was his ticket out of there but he was a little afraid.

He had never been further north than Rye Playland, further west than the Jersey palisades, east to the Rockaways. His jungle was safely contained at the Botanical Gardens. For a whiff of tawdry danger there were the flea circus, the freak shows, the penny arcades of Times Square and furtive, guilty glimpses of the streetwalkers there. He had gone twice or three times, with Benny, to the strip joints on West Third Street, to stand at the stifling, blue-smoky bar, pressed in among sullen, sweat-stained men in porkpie hats, double shot of Four Roses clutched in one hand, the other in a pocket, way back, too far back from the tiny stage, the boys nursing 50-cent beers for an hour (Look at that, Sammy, they’re down to their pasties now, Benny had gasped and beer came out of his nose, down to the twirling pasties!) until they were bounced to the dark sidewalk.

And that was exciting and that was fun. But Sammy had his ticket now and he was just a little bit anxious. Uneasy, maybe.

A ten year-old yellow DeSoto taxicab rattled into view and, brakes squealing, stopped at the curb. An explosive backfire, a puff of exhaust smoke, its motor died. At the wheel was a haggard middle-aged man with a stub of a cigar, a depression cap and a three-day beard. His left arm was very sunburned.

Everyone turned to look.

I guess you don’t need a ride then, Sam, Benny said. He showed up.

The cabdriver took the cigar from his teeth and leaned toward the open right-hand window. How’d you make out, kid? he said.

No, I think I’ll walk home, Sammy said. Thanks, anyhow.

Benny punched him lightly, twice, on the shoulder. That’s two for flinching, Benny said, and smiled.

Yeah, for flinching. Look, I’m wiping it off. Sammy stuck the paper tube under his arm and brushed his shoulder with his fingertips. Hey, congratulations, man. It was a boss day, he said.

They grinned at each other and Sammy, squinting in the bright sun, turned to the rusting cab and then down the broad, straight expanse of the Concourse. It was going to be a hot summer, but pretty nice, he thought. Pretty nice.

4

Heavy Boxes

And it was pretty nice. It happened this way:

Sammy, get me a Rheingold and I’ll tell you the goddamnest thing that happened today. Where’s your mother?

Where do you think she is? What happened?

Where?

She’s in the bedroom, Pop. She went to bed.

Get one for yourself, it’s hot enough. Do we have two?

She sent me out to buy a six. Here’s your beer.

Where’s yours? You’re a goddamn graduate, I guess you can have a Rheingold with your pop on a hot day, for Chrissake.

I don’t want one. You wanted to tell something.

Yeah. Gussie!

"Pop, shut up. Don’t wake her up. She’s