Shufflers

By Frank Haberle

In the tradition of Denis Johnson and Charles Bukowski, author Frank Haberle's 21 interwoven stories will take you to minimum wage America of the 1980s, where opportunities are few and situations are precarious. Sometimes funny but always honest, Shufflers is a grand tour of a world in plain sight, a world in which no one hopes to travel.

Danny lives on the outskirts of society, traveling randomly from New York to Alaska to Colorado to San Francisco and beyond, often cold and hungry, sometimes drunk and always struggling to survive. To get by he works as a ski lift operator, fry shack manager, jackhammer operator, and any other jobs he can get his hands on. Along the way, he learns about resilience and fortitude from the usually invisible characters who populate the outskirts of our world. Danny is trying to make a path to something better and avoid becoming just one more shuffler.

 

Reviews:

"Frank Haberle is a storyteller's storyteller - down-to-earth, subtle, humble, but confident when it counts.  In Shufflers he blends experience, craft, wisdom and wit to put forth a collection of tales that will move you emotionally when you read it- and mean even more to you after you read it."--John McCaffrey, Author, Two-Syllable Men and Book of Ash

 

"I love Frank Haberle's stories and will dive into a new one any chance I can get—face first, off a cliff, without looking. I know I will land knee-deep in nostalgic music and memorable events, then swim around in painful regrets surrounded by beautiful imagery I can't shake--and I will just lie there floating happy. Open this collection anywhere and become an instant fan." --Milda DeVoe, Author and Founding Executive Director of Pen Parentis

 

I yearn for a world that embraces eccentrics and perhaps deems them prophets. Shufflers, introduces us to folks now faded into crevices –the Stickmans, Cashtown Annies, and T-Shirt Ladies who continue to struggle with dignity in a divided 21c America. Frank Haberle's skillfully rendered stories remind us to pay attention to damaged individuals, renew our capacities to have spontaneous experiences, and remember the what-the-hellishness of youth.—Lori Kent , Hunter College and Founder of Code Vert Arts

• Language: English
• Publisher: Flexible Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781736403334

Book preview

SOMETHING TO SHOW YOU

DANNY TURNS THE CORNER onto Ninth Avenue, and there he is. Just like the lady on the phone said. A little bald man in a pink alligator shirt in front of a big yellow truck. He’s slapping a clipboard and yelling at a smaller man in a dirty T-shirt.

Hi, Danny says. Are you Rusty?

You—you’re fifteen minutes late! Please, come on! Rusty throws his arms out. People, come on! My people who work get paid. People don’t work, I’m not paying them shit. When my people are late, they’re not working. When they’re not working, guess what?

They don’t get paid? Danny asks.

Rusty slaps his forehead hard. Lou, show this big idiot downstairs. Show him quickly what he needs to do. I need this truck loaded and out of here by two o’clock.

Rusty climbs into a gold Mercedes and skids into traffic, leaving Danny with Lou. Lou’s face is etched with thin white scars. He looks angry, like Danny just cost him twenty bucks.

Lou leads Danny through steel doors into a basement. Danny is wrapped in a warm, musty smell, like steamed dirt. Corridors of shelves are packed with silt-covered objects. Hundreds of Charlie McCarthy ventriloquist dolls. Dozens of water-stained erector sets. Rows of Korean police riot helmets. Two men clear whole shelves with fast sweeps of their arms, sending things crashing into boxes. Another wraps things delicately in newspaper.

This here’s the collection, Lou says.

Collection of what?

Never mind what. Mister Rusty said it goes. So it goes. It’s all gotta go by two. We pack it up fast, we load the truck fast, and we take it down to the auction site fast.

A row of Shirley Temple dolls stares down at Danny with crusted eyes. He picks one up and throws her headfirst into a dust-filled box.

You mean like that?

Lou’s gold teeth glint in the darkness.

I mean like that. Only faster.

AT 2:45 THE FOUR MEN squeeze into the truck’s cab. Lou says because Danny’s the new guy, he has to ride in back. He climbs into the truck. Lou pulls the door down and locks it. In the heat and darkness, against the shifting mountain of boxes, Danny loses his senses. He starts to panic. He can’t breathe. A horn blasts. Things crack in the boxes. The truck swerves. Danny hurtles through space, braced for a collision.

THE TRUCK STOPS. THE door opens. Rusty stands in front of Danny on a loading dock, beating his clipboard against a steel pipe.

I said two o’clock! he yells at Lou.

Yeah, Mister Rusty, Lou says, pointing at Danny. What can I say. I’m breaking in a new guy.

A huge brick building with steel-shuttered windows soars above Danny. In its shadows he unloads boxes, crates, mannequins, carousel horses. Lou pushes a button. An elevator thumps down a shaft and opens. Hunched on a stool inside is an old man in yellow shoes and a checkered hat. He pulls the lattice gate closed, then presses a button. Danny rises ten stories to a vast showroom lined with empty tables. Black curtains hang from bare brick walls between huge windows. Danny drops the boxes by the tables, then returns to the elevator for another load.

On the fourth load up, Lou starts making fun of Mister Lee.

Mister Lee, he says, I smell apricot brandy. You been drinking apricot brandy?

I’ll say this much, my friend. Nobody drinks nothing on this job. I worked in this building forty-four years. I know my job.

Mister Lee, those are some shoes. Do you play golf in those shoes?

Danny rides up and down eight more times, ten times, until the truck is empty. Rusty points to the delicate packer.

Billy, he says, slapping his clipboard. Billy and the big idiot. Get upstairs and start setting up. And the boxes better be unloaded and set up by the time we get back.

Upstairs on the showroom floor, Danny looks at the hundreds of boxes, stretches, yawns, and lights a smoke.

Man, Danny says. I never seen so much shit in my whole life.

Billy picks up a box.

I really thought I was gonna suffocate in the back of that truck.

Billy turns away from Danny.

Hey, Danny says. You want a smoke?

Billy starts walking across the room. No, he says. He pulls open a box and starts carefully unwrapping antique tea sets, wiping each delicate piece, and placing them on trays in a row on a table.

Danny pulls back a curtain and opens one of the huge windows. He blows smoke out into the hot afternoon haze. He looks down onto five-story walk-ups laced with ornate fire escapes. The sun beats down on silver roofs.

Below Danny, on the top floor of one of the buildings, he can make out an open window. In it, an old woman is crying.

She presses her face with thick red hands. Her elbows rest on the ledge. Her huge bare arms shudder, like somebody’s jiggling her from behind. She drops her hands and looks up at the sky.

She turns slowly toward Danny. Danny jumps back, waits, holds his breath. When he looks out again, the old woman’s face is back in her hands.

Danny flicks his cigarette out the window. He opens one of the boxes. It’s filled with little Victorian porcelain dolls in yellowed lace dresses, cracked and tangled. Arms and legs pop out in all directions. He closes the box back up. Another box is crammed with old copper medical equipment, now dented. Danny picks up a crate filled with surviving antique fire trucks. He walks it down to a table next to Billy. He starts to dump it on the table, then stops. He sets the box down and starts untangling the trucks. He spreads them out in a neat row, side by side, a fleet. Then he returns to the elevator landing for another box.

THE TRUCK HORN BLARES repeatedly downstairs. Let’s go! Rusty yells from the street.

Danny presses the elevator button. Mr. Lee pulls the gate open.

How’s it going, Danny says.

I’m just fine, son, Mr. Lee says, clutching the throttle. Thank you for asking.

Lights flicker on a console: nine, then eight, then seven.

This is some building, Danny says.

Been here forty-four years. I used to be floor manager. Down in the steam engine.

Steam engine?

Sure. This whole building was a printing press. Biggest in the city. We ran a steam engine down in the basement. Two blocks long, block wide. I had twenty men working for me. We pumped steam up to ten floors of print rollers, running night and day, 365. They shut it all down twenty years ago.

Really? What happened?

I don’t know. Lectricity.

Mr. Lee shifts his hat higher onto his brow, mops his forehead with a handkerchief, and stops the elevator.

Well, thanks for the lift.

Later, son, Mr. Lee says. Later on, maybe I got something to show you.

Danny works late into the night in silence, and increasingly carefully, unloading two more truckloads. Before Rusty lets everybody go at twelve, he glares at Danny.

Everybody better be back here at eight a.m., he says. The key word here being ‘eight.’

IT HAS RAINED, THEN stopped. Danny walks through packed canyon corridors, past shifting shrouded figures, uptown. Shattered umbrellas are everywhere. The streets and sidewalks hold pools of black water. Danny buys a rack of tallboys at the twenty-four-hour deli and climbs four flights to his rented room. In the living room the answering machine isn’t blinking. He enters his tiny room off the kitchen, sits on his bed, and drinks the tallboys methodically, one by one, staring out the little window into the airshaft.

DANNY WAKES UP, STILL sitting on his bed, at eight. He jogs downtown. He pushes the loading dock button, but the elevator is silent. He finds an open door and runs up the ten flights of stairs to the showroom.

The early-morning sun glares off the wide floor beams. Danny’s soaked in sweat. Rusty’s voice thunders through the showroom. Danny follows a row of old vaudeville posters to its source.

Don’t let one of these pissants touch nothing, Rusty’s saying. Not one goddamn thing. They ask to touch it, say no. They reach for it, bite their goddamned finger off.

Danny tries to sneak in behind the others, but they’re all wearing identical black work suits, Rusty’s Auction House emblazoned in pink letters across the back. Rusty catches Danny in the corner of his eye.

What time is it?

I don’t know, Danny says. My watch stopped.

Rusty reaches out and grabs his wrist. He jerks Danny’s forearm up to his face.

You don’t have a watch, Rusty says calmly, squeezing his wrist tighter.

I, um, must have lost it.

Rusty releases Danny’s arm. He throws him a jumpsuit. Danny climbs into it, but it’s too tight; the legs only come to his knees, and the sleeves barely reach his elbows. Lou looks at him and breaks into another gold grin.

Man, he says. Now you look big and stupid.

The showroom floor opens in five minutes, Rusty announces. They have one day to look over what we’ve got. The auction starts this time tomorrow. He looks at Danny. If you show up on time, some of you may still have a job tomorrow. If not, I can always find another set of idiots. And I don’t have to pay people nothing. Not one red cent. So if I fire people, they’re fired. If people finish the job, they get paid.

Rusty takes a deep breath. All right. Get to stations. No smoke breaks. No bathroom breaks. No screwing off. Remember these are our customers. And don’t let anybody break anything. They break anything, break their necks.

Danny turns to Lou. What’s my station?

Toys.

Toys! Sounds great.

No, Lou says. Not great. Toys is the most stupid ass job. Everybody wants to touch them. Everybody wants to wind them up, see if the winder works. But nobody can touch nothing. Not one goddamned toy. Got that?

Got it.

You gotta look like somebody’s gonna get smacked.

Okay.

Lou starts to walk away, then stops.

But don’t smack nobody.

Okay.

You need to smack somebody, you call me.

The toys line three rows of tables. Danny looks down at an ancient windup clown, with a maniacal face, pedaling a tricycle. Old paint flecks cling to fine brown rust. He can’t stop himself from picking it up and turning the winder half a notch. Its legs start pedaling slowly, and its head rocks back and forth. Everything works, despite the many years in the basement, despite the truck ride.

Danny pictures himself showing it to the old lady across the street. He can just knock on her door, hold it out to her, and show her how it works.

Look, Danny can say to her. It still works.

The clown stops pedaling. Danny puts him down gently in the middle of the table. He picks him up again. Slowly, as if his arm is independent of his body, Danny tries to stuff the toy into the half-zipped jumpsuit, under his arm. Just to see. But the suit is too tight. Then the main elevator doors open. Hundreds of people enter the showroom. Fifty of them head straight for the toys. Danny sets the clown down. Please don’t handle the toys, he says, walking up and down the aisle. Please leave the toys on the table.

Oh! I’m sorry, an elderly man with sunglasses says, dropping a doll.

A pair of miniature men stand shoulder to shoulder, their backs turned to Danny. They wear tweed jackets despite the heat and thick glasses perched on their noses. They’re handling an old coin bank, testing its various parts.

Please don’t handle the toys, Danny says.

They turn to Danny and look him up and down.

It’s a bank, one giggles.

Please put it down.

The elevator doors open again. More collectors file out onto the floor. They rush across the room and swarm around tables, touching everything.

A thunderous noise echoes through the showroom; one of the tea sets has been knocked over. Through the crowd Danny sees Billy fall to the floor and try to gather a few surviving pieces among the smashed shards of china. A woman stands over him, laughing. Oh, come on! It’s all insured, she shrieks. Isn’t it?

The crowd closes around Billy. Danny takes a few steps toward him. Maybe he can help. Then he remembers the toys. He turns back to his tables, now more crowded than ever. The two miniature men have found his clown. They are twisting his legs to make him pedal faster.

Put him down, Danny says. They turn away from him.

I said put him down!

They see Danny coming at them. Their mouths drop open, and they step back. Danny takes the toy from their hands. They shrink away from him. Danny takes another step. Lou grabs his arm from behind.

Whoa, now. Mister Rusty wants to have a word.

Lou leads Danny through the crowd to the loading dock elevator doors where Rusty stands, glaring at him.

I saw that. Think I didn’t see that?

Yeah.

They are our customers. They are very important customers. And you’re nothing to me. You hear me?

Yeah.

Danny wants to grab Rusty by the ears. He wants to twist and rip his head off.

"Nothing. Now get out of my suit and get out of here."

Danny wants to twist and rip his head off, but he doesn’t. He takes off the suit and walks to the service elevator. Mr. Lee pulls the door open and nods. When the door shuts, Danny really does smell it—apricots, turpentine, wet cardboard.

Man, he says. I could really use a drink.

Mr. Lee says nothing. They ride down in silence—six, then five, then four. At three he says, So now you want to see something?

Sure.

The elevator keeps going past the loading dock floor to the basement. Mr. Lee climbs from his stool. He’s permanently bent, a walking question mark. He leads Danny down a long, dark cement hallway to a steel fire door. He pulls the door open and flips a switch.

Here it is, he says.

A huge red machine spreads in all directions. Rows of polished brass pistons squat, waiting to pounce, or fire. Boilers and steam valves and pipes twist in reds and greens and blues, golds and coppers and silvers. Every square inch of the machine and the room is swept, scrubbed, and polished. Danny’s heart surges. It looks like a battleship engine. It looks like a pregnant mechanical spider.

Does it still work?

Oh, yes, Mr. Lee says. You better believe it still works.

HEADLESS IGNATZ

DANNY SITS DOWN ON a stoop on Twenty-First Street in a shady spot next to the 13th Precinct. He pulls the lid from the coffee cup. He looks down into a pool of stale cream. He takes a big slurp. He burns his upper lip, his tongue, his gums. He blows and slurps. He burns himself again.

Across the street, an old man slumps in a folding chair. A floppy tennis hat is pulled down over his eyes. Three items sit beside him on a ledge: an old dust broom, a small red rug, and a plaster mouse body, a foot tall, holding a brick and missing its head.

Danny knows that body. He knows that brick. It’s that comic mouse. It’s Ignatz from Krazy Kat. It’s got to be fifty years old. It’s got to be worth something.

Danny crosses the street. Above him there’s an ancient brick building. Red and green paint flakes spray gently on the old man’s shoulders. His eyes pressed shut. His mouth wide open.

Hello, Danny says.

The old man sucks his tongue into his mouth.

Hello yourself.

This stuff. What’s it, for sale or something?

What? This stuff? It’s for sale.

Ignatz’s neck is snapped clean. With the head he’s a collectible. You glue the head on, you fix him up, you’ve got a hundred bucks.

How much for Ignatz? Danny asks.

Ig what?

The mouse with the brick. How much?

Oh! The mouse. Five dollars.

Five dollars? Oh. Does he have a head?

Sure, I got a head. I got it in the back somewhere. The old man points toward a wooden door behind him. I got a house full of stuff.

Oh! Danny rubs the bumpy tip of his tongue against the back of his teeth.

I’ll tell you what. I’ll find the head. For free. You come back later for the head. Only you got to take the body now. I ain’t dragging the body back up the stairs. I got a hernia.

Okay then. Danny fishes the change from his pocket. I’ll take him.

DANNY’S BACK IN HIS small rented room, his door open into the small foyer that connects to the front door, the bathroom, and the living room. He’s lying on his cot, his arms folded behind his head. He licks his upper lip, still blistered from the coffee. He’s staring at the headless Ignatz. He tries to remember the face. He remembers grainy old cartoons. Ignatz has a crush on Krazy Kat and chases him, or her, with a brick. It was all very confusing. Danny thinks of the old man. What if there is no head? What if he can’t find it? What if he breaks it?

Keys rattle the apartment’s front door bolt. Before Danny can kick the door shut, Gina the Hairdresser, his roommate’s girlfriend, is standing at the door.

You’re here? she asks.

Who, me? Yeah. I’m here.

What a day, Gina says. She drops her bags and slumps against the wall outside Danny’s door. Her hair, huge untamed curls, spills across her face.

I had this guy come into the salon today? Gina says, straightening one of the tangles with her fingers. This guy wants his bangs cut, and I say, ‘How much,’ and he says, ‘I don’t know, this much,’ and he says it with all this attitude, and I say, ‘Okay,’ and I’m cutting his bangs, and he’s yelling across the room at Cody about this girl he’s screwing, and he’s married, you know, and he’s giving all the details, and Cody’s not listening, and I roll my eyes, and then I unroll them, and I look at the floor. And I realize I just chopped off this huge chunk of the guy’s hair.

Huh, Danny says.

"So the guy starts bitching at me, and I say, ‘What’s your problem,’ and he calls me a stupid bitch, and Cody says, ‘I can’t take this anymore,’ and he storms out of the place, and it’s his place. And I’m alone with this guy with a huge gash in his hair."

Great, Danny says. He reaches for his boots on top of his dirty laundry.

So I look at the guy, and the guy looks at me. And he pulls forty bucks out of his pocket, and he puts it on my chair, and he runs off after Cody.

Gina gives up on the tangle, pulls her hair back, then pulls the huge strands around her head. She wraps until she’s completely hidden, a big ball of hair sitting on a leather jacket.

I don’t get people, she says.

Danny gets up and steps toward the front door. Gina drops her hands, emerging from the hair. She looks at him.

Where you going? she asks.

I gotta go out.

I need a drink, Gina says. You want to go get a drink?

I can’t, Danny says. I gotta meet somebody.

Oh. Did Dave talk to you about the rent?

Oh, yeah, Danny says.

Cuz it’s the seventh, you know.

Seventh! Yeah, Danny says, pulling the apartment door closed behind him.

NIGHT SHADOWS BLANKET the front of the old man’s battered building. Danny sits on the same stoop, drinking a tallboy from a paper bag. A breeze blows down the street, sending paper tatters down the sidewalk. A lone yellow bulb glows above the old man’s door. A hundred bucks easy, Danny thinks. Maybe one-fifty. One-fifty and he’s bought a ticket to Boston. He knows where to take it, who to talk to. These streets are filled with treasure, collectibles, artifacts. People sell silver for pocket change. They throw gold into dumpsters.

One-fifty. Danny says it again, setting the price in his head. He tries to picture the old man rummaging through things, but he can’t. He wants to hear boxes and bags dumped out on the floor, but the avenue drowns out everything. What if he isn’t looking? What if he doesn’t even live here? What if he just conned you out of five bucks? Danny finishes his beer, digs through his pockets, digs up another dollar in change, and returns to the bodega for another.

Back on the stoop, Danny pops open the cold can. He sucks the cool foam off the rim, lets it soak into the morning’s burns. An Ignatz statue’s gotta be pretty rare, he thinks. Now he remembers the comic strip a little better. Ignatz was in love with Krazy Kat and threw bricks at him, or her. Or Krazy Kat was in love with Ignatz, who fended him or her off with bricks. There was a third character, an Officer Grupp or Gup or Pup, who was in love with the one that loved the other one and threw the other one in jail. Danny can only scratch his head over that one. Scratch his head, yawn, and doze on the stoop until the early hours of morning.

DANNY WAKES UP IN HIS room. Dave’s tapping gently on his door.

Hey, dude, he asks. You in there?

Danny waits in silence for the tapping to stop. The front door closes. He waits ten minutes, laces his boots, and runs down the stairs.

Danny finds the old man dozing in his folded chair. The tennis hat has fallen to the ground. Strands of comb-over white hair jut wildly from a freckled head. His neck is twisted hideously, like his head is slowly wrenching itself from his shoulders. There are three new items on the stoop: an empty wood picture frame, a crumpled paisley shirt, and a smiling mouse head, squinting one large eye, taking aim.

Hey there, Danny says. The old man looks up. His eyes focus. He squints at the morning sunlight. He looks to the statue head, then he looks back at the young man who bought the headless mouse the day before, and he smiles.

There he is, the old man says to the head. I knew he’d be back.

PALISADES

BIG BROTHER TELLS DANNY he should head back up to Boston, where they know people who know people. Big Brother is a part-time trumpet player and a full-time cook, passing through the city on his way out West. Danny has come up to Washington Heights this morning to find Big Brother, crashing on the floor of his ex-girlfriend Cassie’s little floor-through. Cassie isn’t there. They don’t know what to make of this. They don’t want to alert the super of their presence or of Cassie’s absence. When they go out, they pull the door shut but not all the way shut. They don’t know if Cassie took her keys.

Danny and Brother walk over to 181st Street. They enter a bodega and buy a buttered roll and a coffee for a buck. They stand on the corner, splitting the roll and the coffee. Happiness Candy, Mullers Meat Market, Rexall Drugs; boarded-up stores streak up the street and down the street. Some kids on the other corner start saying stuff. Yo! Ossifer! Ossifer! they chirp. The kids think Danny and Big Brother are cops staking them out. This makes Danny feel safe, at the same time it makes him feel unsafe. It is really, really hot. Big Brother sits down on his