STARDUST

 

Stardust

By William Chill

 

“Yeah, he comes back in town every now and then,” Dom the barber said to the graying fifty-year old man sitting underneath the sheet on the red vinyl barber chair. “I think he has a sister or someone still living in Campbell, or did she move out to Canfield? I don’t know.”

“He was somethin’.”

 “Yeah, he was. I remember him from the days when we used to lift down at Walsh’s Newport Barbell,” added the man in the chair.

“Walsh! What a con artist that fuckin’ guy was. How many people did he stiff by that lifetime membership schtick? Remember that? He collected all those membership fees, folded up, then headed to Florida with all the loot. Or was it Hawaii? I don’t know.”

“Damn Irishman. Hey, whatever happened to Frankie?”

“Frankie Z?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s still around. He took over his old man’s real estate business.”

“Oh yeah, that’s right. He was a nice guy.”

“Yep. Greek.”

Whenever Ralph came into Dom’s Barber Shop for a haircut, they went through the same routine every time -- run through names of all the people from their past and make it sound as if they were hearing the stories for the first time.  

“Who you got in the game tomorrow?” Dom asked.

“I took the Browns spotting seven,” Replied Ralph.

“Nice, Anything on the Steelers at Philly?”

“Naw, they let me down last week, lost 200 bucks. I’m staying away from gold and black this weekend,” explained Ralph.

“Not in the cards, huhe?” Dom shot back.

“Nope, just not feeling it right now. Did pretty good at Thistledown last Thursday, though. Had a hundred down on Tiger Tail for the win at eleven to four. The kid was watching some new Kung Fu movie, Crouching Tiger, Hidden something, the night before. Saw the name, Tiger Tail, in the form so I figured that was my horse,”

“That’s how it works.”

“Yep,” answered Ralph. “Gotta pay attention to the signs.”

Dom poured amber-colored liquid from a clear plastic bottle into a stiff paper towel then dabbed it around Ralph’s neck. “Well, that should do ‘er, Ralphie,” he said as he snapped the sheet away dispersing the scent of Pinaud Clubman after-shave through the air.

“That’ll be fourteen,” Dom said now standing behind the cash register.

Ralph reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of bills folded over and secured by a money clip. He flipped through the stack and produced a ten, a five, and a couple ones with the crisp dexterity of someone performing a card trick.  

 “For you, sir,” Ralph said.

 “Thanks, any big plans for today?” Dom asked. “Going to the track?”

“Naw, not feeling it for the track today. I think I’ll go over to Plaza Book and Smoke and see Gino. My cigars came in.”

“Alright then. Have a good one, Ralphie. And, hey, good luck tomorrow. Hopefully the Brownies will pull through for you.”

“Let’s hope so. With a spot of seven, I had to take it.”

Ralph started the engine of his red Cadillac CT-6 and pulled out onto Market Street, drove east for about a mile then stopped at a traffic light on the intersection of Poland-Canfield Road. It was early December, and a light snow had powdered the gray and beige landscape of brick storefronts and concrete parking lots.

Talking to Dom always left him feeling oddly sentimental. It was more than just the digging up of names from their past; these trips reminded him of the days when his father used to take him to get his haircut in the arcade of the Boardman Plaza at a barber shop run by Mike Matteo, a poker buddy of his dad’s.

The place had long since closed, but it was here where he absorbed the essence of manhood with its smell of hair tonic, the buzz of clippers, and piles of Sports Illustrated magazines. Ralph remembered how the Mills Brothers played over the loudspeakers when you first entered the Arcade, and how their footsteps echoed loudly down the narrow marble hallway.

Mike’s barber shop was the first door on the left.

Mike would always welcome young Ralph to the chair by saying something like, “Here’s our young doctor. Or is it our attorney?” Then, he’d look over at Ralph’s dad and say, “The kid’s smart, he’s going places, isn’t he?”

But Ralph resented these comments. He wasn’t sure why at the time, perhaps because he knew this was a blue-collar town and those were just silly pipe dreams. The rest of Mike’s clientele were carpenters, firemen, teachers, and sheet metal workers. They were men who slicked their hair with Vitalis and read the sports page. Some had served in World War II.

To Ralph, these were real men.  

After high school Ralph enlisted in the Navy and served on a submarine tender where they played cat and mouse with Russian subs in the Barents Straight. He served for four years and got out in 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed. When he got out, he returned to Youngstown and became a licensed electrician.

Many of the guys from his high school class were still around, a few moved away. Some went out of state to college, and secretly Ralph knew his dad wished Ralph was one of them. But college just wasn’t in the cards for him, and his father never quite accepted that.

Ralph’s father was a modern-day mix of Michelangelo and Lucky Luciano. He could play beautiful Chopin on the piano as well as a mean hand of gin.

When Ralph was eight, his father taught him how to play piano. They even played a duet together at Stambaugh auditorium as part of an Elks Club annual Christmas concert. What a sight they were, little Ralphie sitting next to big Ralph Sr. on that wooden bench up on stage playing, “As the Band Played On.” They melted every heart in the hall that night.

But young Ralph never could find it in himself to reconcile the dichotomies of his character like his father could. It wasn’t until after his father died, that Ralph realized that his father was trying to impress upon him his entire life was that the most important thing for a man to do was to be your own man.

It started to become clear when they were at a wedding reception for one his Dad’s cousins at the local VFW hall when Ralph was on leave from the Navy. The hall was filled with distant relatives sitting on folded wooden chairs where they scarfed down cavatelli’s and baked chicken dished out from large aluminum pans, drank beer, and played cards. Everyone was laughing.

Through the commotion, his aunt called out to Ralph asking where his father was. Ralph didn’t see him anywhere, so he went looking for him. He found his father brooding on a chair all alone in one of the small empty side rooms.

“Dad, what are you doing in here?” young Ralph asked.

“They’re all assholes.”

“What?”

“Not a single intelligent person in that entire room.”

Young Ralph didn’t quite understand what his father meant by that statement. He left his father to brood alone and returned to the party. It took years for him to understand what his father was trying to say that night.  

As Ralph drove down Market Street, he fiddled with the radio switching it to AM mode. His old man used to always listen to AM radio in the car, and at this particular moment, it was the muffled crackle of the low-fidelity reception he wanted to hear more than anything else.

Ralph held down the search arrow blowing past a bunch of throbbing drivel, then stopped when he heard, “…and this one goes out to Lena Liberatore of Liberty, Ohio who has been listening to us for our over 50 years. Lena, we want to thank you for being a dedicated listener, so this one’s for you…”

Then the high-pitched moan of violins filled the speakers; a swelling resonance that rose and joined hands with the mellowness of cellos, then decorated by the shimmer of cymbals finished by the angelic plucking of a harp. The buttery sound of the orchestral accompaniment gathered momentum, rose, then fell just in time for Frank Sinatra to start in with the line:

“And now the purple dusk of twilight time...”

It was Stardust, one of his old man’s favorite songs.

Ralph looked over at the old red brick building on his right. It used to be the old Walsh’s Gym, the space now occupied by a seller of marble gravestones. Ralph rubbed his right hand across the bulge of his belly. It was 25 years since he worked out. He rarely saw any of the old crew anymore: Frankie Z, Munna, Crazy Eddie, Bob the Jew…. They used to train like beasts in there, bang the weights, egg each other on, give each other shit, but they still felt like brothers.

His old man’s friend, Roy Sugar, once lived in the studio apartment on the top floor of Walsh’s for a while when he got laid off from Sheet and Tube. He lost his house when the mills closed in 1977.

They called it Black Monday, when the whole town went to shit.

For years Ralph dreamed of moving south, somewhere warm like Charleston, and opening up a place, a bar or something. It would have rooftop seating where you could smoke cigars and look out over the water. But he never had the cash.

Ralph always loved this town, but now he wondered if it were only the memories he loved. He wished he could have at least kept up playing the piano, for his old man’s sake.

Shrugging off the sentimentality, Ralph picked up the racing form on the seat next to him. He looked at today’s line-up at Thistledown. Scanning down the list of names, he saw a horse called, Stardust in the fifth posted at nine-to-one odds.

Stardust! What are the chances of that?

A car behind Ralph honked its horn signaling the light had turned green. 

A big smile spread across Ralph’s face. His cigars at Gino’s would have to wait. He now had other plans for today.

He turned right, glided past Jay’s Famous Hot Dogs, Jim’s Car Wash, and then a plethora of insurance agencies and a carpet store. These businesses had been in continuous operations ever since he was in middle school. It was amazing how some things endured, and some things didn’t.

Every kid in town was fascinated by Jim’s Brushless car wash.

You got out of the car and followed the car as it edged forward on a caterpillar track while high-pressure jets squirted foamy water at the sides and gigantic brushes maneuvered over the contour of the car as you watched from behind a huge glass window.

Then at the end, a drape of spongy strips oscillated back and forth over the top of the car for a purpose that always remained a mystery. It never occurred to Ralph at the time why a brushless car wash used brushes. But that was Youngstown.

When the car finally emerged, a crew of guys dressed in flannel shirts and tight skull caps swarmed over the car to give it a final dry while the whine of machinery and vacuums screamed in the background. The drying crew were always smiling and friendly and Ralph thought how cool it would be to some day work at that car wash drying cars.

His mother said the guys working there were mostly criminals. Ralph didn’t believe her.

When Ralph was fourteen, he applied for a job there. He told the lady at the desk he was sixteen, but he didn’t get the job. He doubted she believed he was really sixteen.

Ralph continued heading north towards Route 11. Small specs of snow flurries peppered his windshield, and he turned up the heat. Traffic was heavy as it always was on a Saturday, and he could see the line of traffic up ahead moving towards Canfield.

After a few more minutes, he pulled on to the entrance ramp of Route 11 which would take him to Interstate 80 where he would grab the Ohio Turnpike towards Cleveland delivering him to Thistledown.

Stardust. Today was going to be his lucky day. It was in the cards.