The characters in Barry Spacks’ There’s Always a Girl are poets, painters, actors, writers and musicians struggling to balance the needs of passion and sex with the demands of aesthetic pursuits, and with a need for transcendence. Beset by the present, enchanted and haunted by the past, their reconciliations come at great cost. The stories are at once gentle and tough; they shed light on our inner lives with tenderness, humor and compassion. This is a phenomenal gathering.

— Kirk Nesset, Drue Heinz winner for the story collection Paradise Road

I love the writing that burgeons forth when a poet breaks into prose. Some of my favorites are Mary Oliver, Robert Hass, Robert Graves, and William Carlos Williams. And now Barry Spacks. Every one of the five stories in THERE’S ALWAYS A GIRL is great fun—especially when a character can’t help but burst into poetry.

— Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior and Trickmaster Monkey

“Spacks’s collection of stories can be summed up as serious fun and funnily serious. Or more intently, the writing is serio-comic-whacko; these are stories of astounding realism that acknowledge how surreal all character is. Spacks gets to the nit-grit-wit of how his characters act out their whys and wherefores as a series of suppositions usually called fiction. The genius in the tone, the genial irony, the looking back and sideways and forward, keep you reading, laughing all the way through an American lesson, like Gatsby’s, only without the stiffness and with genuine charm.”

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim, author of Among the White Moon Faces and Joss and Gold

Like a better-natured Philip Roth, or a funnier John Updike, Barry Spacks in his new collection offers the best kind of page-turner: inventive, spirited, and in love with the limitless possibilities of art, song, sex, youth, and women. Especially women. And Spacks’ heroes are as breathlessly, spiritually, and often irreverently, endearing as those in his novels The Sophomore and Orphans. Indeed, There’s Always A Girl deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift and Bukowksi’s Post Office as a work whose tragic-comedy is as richly expressed as a Bob Dylan ballad. In short, Spacks remains one of this country’s greatest writers.

— Paul Kareem Tayyar, Author of In the Footsteps of the Silver King and Scenes From A Good Life

For one & only Kimberley

With thanks to the editors of the journals in which several of these stories first appeared in earlier forms:

THE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF LITERATURE

THE CARLETON MISCELLANY

VAGABONDAGE PRESS

© 2013 Barry Spacks

painting on front cover, “One-Frame Movie” by Barry Spacks portrait of Barry Spacks on back cover by Jack Smith photo of Hedy Lamarr from Tradebit, Inc.

typesetting: Diane Collins
cover: Kachergis Book Design

ISBN: 9780989099332

CONTENTS

The Beard

The He and the She of It

I Will Listen

The Unlikely Life of Crashaw Pin

Dwayne’s Movie

THE BEARD

“THIS HARVARD BOY YOU’D REPLACE,” said Uncle Tommy, “I don’t hear from him oh, four, five weeks, it turns out he’s in court, it’s probation, Harvard gives him the boot, drugs, he’s involved with some kind of weird Chinese business.” Uncle shrugged. “But that’s an exception, mostly these boys they work for me around the country, they’re young married men like you, Robert, it’s a help to them to get through school. Believe me, my boys from way back, they send pictures, letters....”

Uncle Tommy. Does even God know his real name? Two years married, I was looking for summer work through the B.U. Placement Service, wound up with an interview and as soon as he saw my beard Uncle Tommy offered me the job.

He designed and manufactured kiddies’ banks, cheap toys really, to be sold or given away as premiums by real banks. “I was first in the business,” he informed me. “Later come along a lot of schleppers, my competition, but where’s one with ethical standards or a bright idea? When I make a bank it holds up, a child can mess with it, it won’t fall apart in your hands.”

He displayed some of his earlier models, a tiny gumball machine and a red plastic cash register, an edible one in the shape of an elephant made out of flavored wax (“a dumb item, I’m ashamed of it”) a dog that wagged its tail, a monkey that tipped its hat, and a bank from the previous Christmas that danced, a typical Uncle bank, wildly-retro, I’ll have to describe it to demonstrate what sort of set-up I was getting myself into.

Made of tin, painted tin, about four inches high, with a key wind-up that caused two teenagers on a red base to jounce about. It was called “The Thrift,” they were dancing the thrift, until the boy-doll in his black motorcycle jacket tilted forward with the dime in his mouth that triggered the device and neatly shot the sidewise dime into the wide, expectant mouth (a deep money-kiss) of the girl-doll, after which the little couple fell apart, becoming as still as two switched-off seven-watt bulbs (there’s symbolism wherever you look for it).

When the girl-doll and the base were chock full of dimes, the kid or the parents were supposed to take the money out — she split right down the middle — take the coins and start an actual savings account at a real bank for the kid who’d been wheedling dimes from family friends and relatives in the first place. Thrift was the idea, the training of young people in the virtue of thrift, patience and so on, and most of these banks were sold for the Christmas season, so Uncle’s part-time salesmen did the rounds mainly in the summer and early fall.

“The Thrift” made a sound throughout the savings-operation best represented as beep-beep. There was something funny and pathetic about the sounds these banks made. But you couldn’t laugh at Uncle Tommy, not unless he started it first by joking about his own enthusiasm, because kid banks were his life’s work, produced at a small factory outside Chicago with Tommy himself going all over the country hiring salesmen and slipping them emergency supplies right out of the scaled-down box of a semi-trailer he drove, where he sometimes even slept, it turned out, on a cot in there among the bank cartons. This was before electronics made his whole business entirely obsolete.

So he took me out to demonstrate the sales approach. We went in a cab, his truck laid up at the time in a garage in Framing ham. My beard had gotten him excited. I’d been wearing this beard for about a year, partly because I’d begun balding while still an undergraduate, partly because I’d always found it a drag to shave, and undoubtedly for a hundred obscure reasons, sane or silly or depth-psychological, because in an old photo I encountered my father with a beard, a little Hungarian chinbrush (whereas mine at full flower formed a bushy semi-circle) — because I was thirty one and dying of graduate school and a wife and baby and a dinky shack of an apartment miles from campus and no confidence in my so-called talent and wasting away my life.

Death by marriage.

In any case I had a beard, and that immediately got me the summer job, because the new bank Tommy wanted to sell, this new bank also had a beard, one with a canny resemblance to my own. I had to laugh when I saw myself as a bank, but this was a laugh as if from someone who’d just been operated on for a hernia.

“Sonny,” said Uncle Tom, “please don’t be sensitive about your whiskers, you’re going to make a fortune out of this, believe me, it’s like the Planter’s Peanut Man dressed up like a peanut!”

“That’s me,” I said. The word Beatnik still retained a certain currency then, used as a vague insult for outsider types, so Uncle’s latest tinny invention was called The Banknik. It had my beard (black-dyed rabbit fur), my red-rimmed eyes, my weary rabbinical air. You pushed a coin into its mouth, the eyes opened up, the lips yielded a rubbery smile, and a sound occurred as the coin clinked down within, a sound like a single peep out of a starving baby bird.

I should mention that I was involved then in earning a Ph.D. in art history at B.U., that I hadn’t really worked hard at paintings of my own for what felt like years, that there was always a major money problem in our household, and that my wife Muriel had become rapidly ennobled through suffering mainly brought about by my own dissatisfactions and despairs — this was our situation in capsule version — and there I was sitting beside Uncle Tommy in the cab, moving along the wide sweep of river across from M.I.T., dozens of sails on the water, some blue, some white, veering and tacking out in the sweet sunshine, kids walking, summer school students strolling or reading or making out on the grass, scullers sculling, everything blooming. Tom took me off to South Boston somewhere to learn how you sell bankers a bearded kid-bank with a resemblance to the salesman’s own hungry face.

“You know what I tell my boys, my salesmen?” said Uncle Tom as we turned onto the Expressway. “I tell them a kid is better off saving dimes, getting used to the American way, otherwise he’s buying airplane glue to sniff or worse, so I say they should be proud, they’re a real part of the war on moral decadency.”

“Only you’re not going to lay all of that on me, are you, Uncle Tom? The War On Moral Decadency?”

“No,” he wheezed, beginning to laugh, “I won’t, I won’t say it, because” — I thought he would choke — “that’s a load ‘a crap.” His cough continued and after a while I started pounding him on the back. “Thank you,” he said, wiping his eyes. He pointed to a bragging sign painted large on the wall of a furniture discount house we were passing: TWENTY THREE YEARS AND NEVER A SALE. “They’re proud of it?” he joked, “with business that bad?”

He was a sweet, comical old guy at heart, his blue eyes self-mocking and sad. There was a touch of old-world coziness about him, you could picture him shambling around in carpet slippers in a house full of rocking chairs, wearing one of those cardigans with leather-knot buttons.

Okay. On the steps of this bank where I’d get my salesman’s initiation — we’d come all this way because Tom knew one of the vice-presidents — he stopped for a little lecture. “Now rule one I want you to remember, Robert, please, you call a man by his first name. Always a friend to friend basis, get it? Just watch how I sell, you’ll see. Rule two, and listen, when you know you got a disinterested party, go yourself and open a little savings account, it costs what, a few bucks, and there’s the deposit book in your hand, so you walk in on him again and you’re a customer already. Come, I’ll show you. You should see my income tax with interest from a million little pishka savings accounts I got to write down.”

We entered this bank on Congress Avenue somewhere through an Ionic portico into a hall so large it was like South Station, locomotives could have chugged back and forth in there. A century ago this bank might have serviced crowds, but now there were no customers to speak of, they’d gone on to banks that looked like high-class motels. Here the tellers stood in little cages counting money while behind a wooden railing sat minor officials looking glum, no opportunities for advancement, no inspirations forthcoming for schemes of embezzlement, just bored to tears.

It turned out that Tommy’s vicepresident wasn’t with them anymore. We were directed to an office in the rear where they had a honeycomb of partitions, and feeling like the sacrifice at the end of a short procession, I trudged along behind Uncle Tommy.

Beyond the little labyrinth of partitions we entered the office of somebody in advertising and public relations, a large bald man in a linen suit, I can’t recall his name. Tommy beamed at him like a light on the sea. The man said he was very busy but Tommy offered to buy five minutes of his time. “No,” Tom said, “believe me, why shouldn’t I pay for your valuable attention?” But then he shifted away from that offer somehow, displaying the Banknik, calling attention to my beard, telling this large advertising man that in the small town of West Wroncher, PA, population oh maybe eight, ten thousand, well, his salesman happened to take a survey among the gang-member boys and listen, talk about getting those kids back on the savings-path...it becomes painful to continue in detail at this point. Poor Tommy, he just sold and sold, pitched and pitched, he was still selling and pitching as the ad-man eased us out of there, still talking about gang-intervention via little savings banks as we retreated through the church-like hush of the main chamber, the tellers still busy counting their money, the minor officials still glum and woebegone.

I noticed that Tommy was breathing rather heavily. “Don’t let that shake your enthusiasm,” he said out on the portico. “It happens. It happens. You run into a guy with no love for children.” He laughed, coughed. “I could take it over his head, get to know the bank president on a first-name basis, but that for me is a last resort.”

“You’re going to go at him again?”

“No, Robert. You. You’re going to pester it right out of him. Say in a month’s time.”

“Me? Don’t you think he’s had enough already?”

“Listen,” said Uncle Tommy, “is that a way to talk if you want to make a sale? You’re the Banknik-man, Robert. You’re in business, you got to start taking life, you know, seriously.”

By the time I arrived home at the apartment in the late afternoon, carrying a carton of a dozen sample Bankniks and my order blanks and such, I felt entirely remote from the man I’d been — painter, teacher, husband, father — when I’d set out to meet Uncle Tommy earlier that day. Now I was the Banknik-man.

“Where were you so long?” said Muriel. “Did they offer you the job?”

“I survived,” I told her. “See? Intact. Still sound of limb.” I sat down, exhausted. “Why do you always look like you’re about to get bad news every minute?”

“Well, you were gone so long I was worried.”

Today, remembering the tremor in her speaking voice, a feeling of tenderness, a sort of wave of sweetness takes me over, lifts me gently and eases me down. But at the time I had no patience with her, I had it worked out that she was the real source of my lousy incapacities and compromises and anxieties. She asked if I’d go down the street to the store to get the baby some strained bananas. At that moment I knew what bank robbers and blackmailers and so on want to say to the police when they’re caught; they want to say, “I have a wife, a baby, we had to get married... what else could I do?”

The baby began to cry. I went to the door. “Go back to your mother-work, Busty,” I told Muriel. “Nurse the poor bastard, give him strength so when I drop out he can grow a beard to pay the rent on this crummy hole.”

The funny thing was, I really started selling the damned Bankniks, once my stomach grew strong enough to let me trade on the beard and the recommended whimsy. Uncle Tom’s approach, the survey of West Wroncher Hoodniks, went over for me like a load of sand. The bankers I ran into, the purchasing agents and advertising vice-presidents, when it came to children they seemed to figure that you were supposed to feed them and spank them and that should suffice. I would have just been ushered right back out into the carbon monoxide if I’d stuck to Tommy’s save-the-youth spiel, because it was hot, everybody I tried to sell was in danger of falling asleep, my old car moved in traffic like swimming through a pot of thick vegetable soup. All appeals to patriotism, capitalism, community service, pride, gluttony, lust, failed to work. So I started clowning. I went in not giving a damn, popped a coin in my mouth, rolled my eyes, smiled at them, making like a Banknik, and the bankers chuckled a little and signed the order blanks and I walked back out a slightly richer man, able to buy my son his little Gerber bottles of strained bananas. He was hooked on those strained bananas, I’ll tell you.

It was July, what I really wanted was to return to the apartment and have a nice pornographic dream, but I kept driving from stop to stop on my list, hitting about seven banks on a really good afternoon. (It’s unbelievable how many banks there are in a single urban area — have a look in the phone book). I amused myself between stops by working out plans for a hold-up of the last place I’d been, like through the sewers and the drainpipes (“Cripes, the Sewer Rat, he’s knocking off the First Federal through the drainpipes, this is a job for the Green Hornet, or better yet, for Submariner!”). Most of the small branch banks could have been robbed simply by cutting the cord to the air-conditioning: everybody inside would have fallen immediately into a sweaty siesta.

It wasn't only the joke of the beard and my clowning that fetched them. About the second week I happened on a device that I suppose is a commonplace to professional commission salesmen, but it came to me with the power of revelation. This was to offer to bet my commission that the kid banks would sell, or be given away to new accounts, that such-and-such a number would go before the end of the year if they’d just set them up beside the tellers’ cages like I told them, with the little posters. The bet was a joke, like me popping a silver dollar in my mouth and making ‘em crack up in the aisles (You card! You singin’ fool!). But one guy actually wanted to bet instead of being charmed by my bearded intensity. This was a man into whose office I’d been led while he was reading a racing sheet, which, with a banker, is like catching the matron of a girl’s finishing school orgying with the board of trustees.

“I have a proposition,” I told one guy when he’d expressed disinterest and failed to applaud my silver dollar stunt. “Will you listen to a proposition?”

“We hardly know each other,” this guy said.

Oh, bankers are comics too, believe me. We’re all people here. I told the gambling banker with his racing sheet that I’d bet my commission he’d move them all by Christmas if he ordered, say, two gross of Bankniks. “Gross,” he said, “appropriate word.” But he did order, and we did bet, and he actually paid off: I got a check for exactly ten bucks in the mail the following May.

I learned something from all of this: that business, the kiddy-bank business, anyhow, was a cinch, you only needed a gimmick, and if that didn’t work, you needed a different gimmick, and eventually you’d be a millionaire and your son could spit his strained bananas in your face when he came home on vacation from NYU with his roommate who would be, naturally, the head of the college anarchists. The more commission I made, the worse it became. I was suffering that summer and early fall from a sense of being a successful member of the middle class, tiny checks arriving from Uncle Tom from all over the country, along with his post cards full of exclamation points and little verbal shrugs: “A boy from Colorado College I didn’t hear from him, it turns out he commits suicide on me!”

Tommy rolled through town again in October, by which time I’d about covered my area. My son was fat on strained bananas, Muriel seemed noticeably less anxious and I was assisting in an undergraduate studio lab and painting mud on canvas and pacing around like a tenor with lockjaw and going out three afternoons a week selling Bankniks, selling them, with my routine down so sweet I only had to walk through the door and the bankers started laughing and flailing around with their fountain pens. “What do you mean you can’t sell these things?” I’d say. “Put them in a little pyramid in the lobby and immediately in comes a troop of boy scouts, they’re touring the civic facilities, believe me, I’ve got them waiting around the corner right now in mark-step, as soon as you sign, you’ll see, in they come with their money in their mouths.”

“What did I tell you?” said Uncle Tommy, elated, relaxing in the imitation Danish armchair Muriel had bought with the help of the last checks from him to come through. “Did I tell you there was a talent here, or not? What do you think of this boy, Mrs. Levi, eh? Isn’t he something?”

My wife, in her usual state of hysteria when she had to prepare supper for more than one, called in from the kitchen that I sure was something, all right. “He’s doing better than my others,” Uncle Tommy called to her. “His first year. I’m so proud of him I could bust!”

Muriel came in carrying a pan of sizzling chicken and said she was proud of me too and gave us both a deranged smile and disappeared again to continue the sound of deep-fat frying. The baby crawled all over Uncle Tommy. We ate. I poured out cheap red wine. Uncle told us about his travels, his customized semi-trailer parked illegally out front, kids writing expressive statements on its dusty sides. Into the calm as we lapped up our store-bought chocolate pudding I told Uncle that it looked like I was finished with the Banknik business.

“What are you talking?” He seemed astonished. “I plan to keep this particular bank on right through next year, Robert. You covered the local outlets, so now it’s time to spread yourself a little, wait, I’ve got good news to tell you, soon as we finish with this lovely meal.” He made a fine, hat-tipping gesture to Busty in the absence of a hat, “which, believe me, I haven’t had home-cooked like this in a month of Sundays. I got some big ideas for you, super-salesman!”

“No,” I told him, “I’m through. Believe me.” Muriel gave me her worried look, refilling the coffee cups. “I can’t concentrate on my painting, I’ve got to settle in and get some real work done.”

“Real work? What real work? Listen, you’re a genius, you’re the Banknik man, what are you talking?”

“He’s awfully good, isn’t he?” said Busty, “We’ve both been just amazed. He’s a natural salesman.”

“Of course,” said Uncle, “of course, what else? Now listen, children, consider the possibilities. First I thought I’d offer more territory, the suburbs, etcetera, but it don’t make sense. I mean, I could eventually give Robert the whole of New England, but where would that put us? So let me tell you my idea.”

He proceeded to sketch it out, drawing charts with his fingernail on the tablecloth. I was to be his promotion manager. I’d fly to the West Coast, for example, interview the college boys out there, show them how the firm wanted their beards to look. I’d train them, I’d teach them how to fake-swallow silver dollars without choking, how to roll their eyes like the Banknik, and how to slap the bankers on the back and set up displays at conventions and eventually, in addition to salary and commissions and expenses, there’d be a little share of the business for me...who else would Uncle look out for if not his Robert, practically his partner in the firm already, and in my spare time I could still paint if I wanted to, and study art and teach and like that.

What got me was how Muriel took it all in with perfect respect, and I was ready to explode from the way she listened to him, about to send fragments of my balding skull and tufts of my stupid beard to splatter all over the forsythia pattern on the wallpaper.

“A man should work where his talent is,” said Uncle Tommy.

“What do you think?” said Muriel, my good, well-meaning, big-breasted helpmate, my rib, my clumsy cross, my vinegar and myrrh.

“Look,” said Uncle Tommy, “you’ll make fun of me, Robert, but even for fun I brought along your certificate like I give the boys. I had it framed.”

He took from his briefcase a document in a Woolworth’s frame which I actually kept hanging for years. It announced impressively that I had done my stint of public service keeping at-risk children of the streets, teaching them “through the sale and promotion of entertaining banking devices,” the virtue of thrift upon which a nation’s greatness depends.

“Very funny,” I told him. “I’ll treasure this.”

“How come you’re so sad, Robert?” He leaned forward from the egg-shaped Danish chair, purchased at a discount from Muriel’s furniture-dealer cousin. The baby had begun to cry and she’d gone off to deal with him. I said: “You’re really very kind, Uncle Tom. I mean, it’s nice of you...”

“Nice? Believe me, this proposition, it’s not nice, it’s smart.” And then he surprised me, he said: “Don’t be a snob, Robert.”

“How do you mean?”

“You shouldn’t act like your work is beneath you, understand? Nothing good comes from feeling like that. Your wife can tell you, you should trust her reactions. Listen, forgive me, what kind of future do you have with this painting business? You understand me, Robert? You’re the kind of boy people like to give him a hand. It’s a gift, and some have it and some don’t, that’s all.”

“And the people who have it, they’re all set up to be great salesmen?”