The title of this collection of short fiction is taken from Doris Rowland’s famous quip upon her husband’s purchase of a railroad, “The only difference between men and boys is the price of their toys.” The line makes light of the extended adolescence allowed to males and these stories examine issues of boyhood, manhood, and what lies between.
Plots vary: a boy facing questions about his sexuality finds solace in racism, a young paralegal acts out an obsession with Richard Nixon, a widower discovers his dead wife’s clothing brings him comfort. Each involves a man facing his limitations, getting a suddenly clear portrait of himself as someone less than he had hoped to be. Arranged by age so that the arrogance of youth slowly gives way to age’s battle with despair they combine to form a mosaic-like biography of males.
Ten of the stories have been published before, in anthologies like Modern Shorts (Fiction Attic) and in journals like descant and The Santa Fe Writer’s Project. One was the winner of a storysouth Million Writer’s Award, another was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Cornerstone Press will bring out the collection in February.
The title of this collection of short fiction is taken from Doris Rowland’s famous quip upon her husband’s purchase of a railroad, “The only difference between men and boys is the price of their toys.” The line makes light of the extended adolescence allowed to males and these stories examine issues of boyhood, manhood, and what lies between.
Plots vary: a boy facing questions about his sexuality finds solace in racism, a young paralegal acts out an obsession with Richard Nixon, a widower discovers his dead wife’s clothing brings him comfort. Each involves a man facing his limitations, getting a suddenly clear portrait of himself as someone less than he had hoped to be. Arranged by age so that the arrogance of youth slowly gives way to age’s battle with despair they combine to form a mosaic-like biography of males.
Ten of the stories have been published before, in anthologies like Modern Shorts (Fiction Attic) and in journals like descant and The Santa Fe Writer’s Project. One was the winner of a storysouth Million Writer’s Award, another was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Cornerstone Press will bring out the collection in February.
Shortly after his mother drove the family station wagon into the lobby of the RKO Twin on Sunrise Highway, Martin Harrigan walked to Sam Pearlstein’s house for the first time. He circled the block with his hands in the pockets of his corduroy jacket, noticing that – though it was only May and still chilly – Mrs. Hennessey’s garden had flowers blooming in neat rows, the Santo’s lawn was cut and fertilized, and Mr. Madorsky was trimming the hedge that separated his front yard from the Friedman’s. When he got to Pearlstein’s, he could not decide whether to go to the freshly painted front door, or slip up the driveway and go to the friendlier kitchen door on the side of the house. He stood on the sidewalk a full minute, wishing he could just wait in his own back yard. His yard, with its toys and sports equipment hidden in the tall grass, adjoined the Pearlstein’s, and Martin was sure that sooner or later Sam would come out and find him. At least that had worked well enough in the weeks since the Pearlsteins had moved from Kew Gardens and their chubby, curly-haired son had befriended him. Now, however, Martin’s mother, Bunny Harrigan, needed time to fill out insurance forms, so Martin had to walk around the block and approach from the sidewalk.
Bunny had not been going fast, she explained to the officer. She had, in fact, been stopped at the red light on Morris Avenue before taking her foot off the brake to retrieve the cigarette lighter she had dropped on the floor over on the passenger side.
“I couldn’t let the car burst into flames,” she said. The officer scribbled in his notepad as Bunny gently nudged the cigarette lighter, which she had carried out of the car, into his line of vision. Martin watched the officer not looking up at his mother. “If you look close,” she said, “there’s a burn mark on the mat, so I was doing the right thing.” By then, Martin, Elaine and Milton were on the sidewalk, several yards away from the car which was still jutting into the lobby of the RKO, having pushed in the plate glass doors.
The theater manager, a teenager Martin was certain would have a sister in his grade, walked the length of the station wagon, crunching broken glass under his black shoes, waving his arms and pointing at the hanging shards of aluminum and the crack in the glass panel of the ticket booth. He described each detail he pointed at, “You’ve destroyed the front door. There’s broken glass everywhere.” His maroon manager’s jacket was too small and hunched up nearly to his elbows, exposing a tan line at his wrists. Finished with the outside damage, he crunched back across the sidewalk and pushed the hanging aluminum aside to examine the lobby. “This carpet is going to have to be replaced. There are tire treads on it.”
“Thank God no one was hurt,” Mrs. Harrigan spoke again to the officer, who still did not look up from his pad. “This really could have been much worse.” She gestured towards the candy counter, a dozen feet across the lobby where Mrs. Leviton, the silver-haired woman who worked afternoons selling popcorn and Twizzlers and who looked to Martin like she probably knew his piano teacher, stood with her arms folded sternly across her chest.
The officer continued writing.
The car had not been going very fast. It had simply drifted under the power of the drivetrain across 4 lanes of traffic, up the curb onto the sidewalk to push against the glass doors, which might have survived had not Bunny, in her panic, mistaken the gas for the brake and given it just enough extra push to shatter the entranceway and thrust the engine and the front seat into the lobby, leaving the back seat and the long trunk outside, blocking the sidewalk. Now the car could not be moved until the fire department came, though neither the manager nor Mrs. Harrigan could understand why, the repeated phrase “There’s no fire,” being the only thing they could agree on, with Bunny Harrigan waving the cigarette lighter in the officer’s face for emphasis.
Milton, Martin’s younger brother, pointed to the poster for The Jungle Book that hung lopsided by a single staple attaching its upper left corner to what remained of the “Coming Soon” frame beside the ticket booth.
“Can we go? Saturday?” he asked.
Elaine, Martin’s older sister, poked Milton in the head with all four stiffened fingers.
“Shut up, jerk face.”
Martin went to wait in the back seat of the car.
“I’m on the clock here, Bunny,” Tom Harrigan, Martin’s father, said as he paced the floor, one hand pulling at his hair, the other waving his cigarette in front of his chest as if conducting an orchestra only he could hear.
“There’s quite a lot of paperwork,” Bunny said, showing him the pile of insurance forms the theatre manager had given her. “I could use a little help. Legal advice.” She touched her husband’s arm gently, then held on when he tried to move away.
“I have the McDermott closing and the Silver contract…” Tom waved the cigarette in time to the silent symphony. Ashes dusted his bare feet. Mr. Harrigan had a law office in Manhattan, but had, for all intents and purposes, stopped going in. He announced every morning at breakfast that commuting was a waste of time, that he had too much work to bother with trains and busses, that the country air would do him good. He kept a card table and a typewriter in the attic. He wore a plain dark suit and brightly colored bowtie every day, but had stopped putting on shoes and socks. He had been working on the McDermott closing and the Silver contract for months, though sometimes it was the McDermott contract and the Silver closing.
The station wagon sat in the driveway, broken glass and scratched paint visible on the hood of the car. Bunny narrated the incident from the long grass of the front lawn, imitating Elaine’s short shriek as the car narrowly missed a Volkswagen while crossing Sunrise Highway and including sound effects for the crack and tinkle of the broken glass that hit the sidewalk as well as the deeper drumbeat of the shards that bounced off the hood of the car. Her voice was loud and dramatic in her attempt to reach Tom, who stared out the window at her, furtively parting the curtain with one hand while conducting the silent symphony with the other. When Bunny tried to get him to come outside and assess the damage, he mumbled “McDermott,” and retreated up the stairs, his bare feet slapping at each step.
When Bunny got back to the kitchen, the children had retreated to the TV room, where the set was too loud. Bunny sat on a stool at the counter and studied the insurance papers. They were full of blank lines where she was to fill in information, blocks of small print she would have to read, and several large empty squares in which she was to draw a diagram of the accident, labeling the traffic rule indicators according to a legend printed in the margin. She had not drawn anything since art school, and closed her eyes now to try to envision the intersection of Morris Avenue and Sunrise Highway, the glass doors of the RKO Twin and the length of the station wagon, as seen from the roof. She smiled and arranged the papers in a line along the kitchen counter so she could easily move from one page to the next. She went to the old Chock Full of Nuts coffee can full of pens and pencils beside the phone and – after rejecting a ball-point pen from Starburst Dry Cleaners and a crayon Milton had left there – found two pencils with nice sharp points. When she returned to the line of papers at the counter, she discovered page 3 was lying in a circle of spilled milk and a dark wet spot had seeped through the first of the boxes she was to draw in.
Bunny sucked in a deep breath through pursed lips, like whistling in reverse and began clapping her hands, slowly and loudly, calling the name of a child with each clap.
“Elaine.” Clap
“Martin.” Clap.
“Milton.” Clap.
“Elaine.” Clap.
“Martin.”
None of the children actually entered the kitchen; Elaine and Milton bunched in the doorway; Martin peeked around the frame.
Bunny Harrigan opened her mouth and took a deep breath with which to yell at her children. But she caught herself, smiled tightly and – her voice high as she spoke rapidly – said, “Too much television! Everybody out!” . She began to clap again – faster this time, more like applause. “Fresh air. You spent all morning in the car, now you are cooped up in the house? Out! Out!”
Elaine began to argue but Bunny cut her off, “Elaine, be a good big sister and take Milton to the playground. Martin, go visit that nice new boy from Queens.”
Martin knew not to argue when his mother was talking fast. He took his brown corduroy jacket off the hook by the door. “What time should we be home?”
Bunny’s voice strained brightly with false enthusiasm. “Call if you decide to eat dinner at your friend’s house. We’re having sandwiches!”
Martin knew even before Mrs. Pearlstein appeared at the kitchen door and invited him in that her kitchen would smell different than his own. Every kid’s house smelled different. They all knew it, but collectively pretended they could not distinguish the wine, cigarettes and sour milk of his own house from the Vitrov’s sweat and bacon, the Santinos’s garlic and Pine Sol or the Fishman’s overloaded electrical circuits, so Martin was pleasantly surprised by the chicken soup and paint thinner of the Pearlstein’s. He inhaled carefully and decided that the smell was gentle and inviting.
Mrs. Pearlstein was excited to see him, reacting as if they were old friends. She offered to take his jacket, bending over so that her round face smiled directly into his, though she was only a few inches taller than he to begin with. She reached out as if to help him remove the coat but stopped just short of actual contact, letting her hand hover near his shoulders as he shrugged out of the corduroy, then happily hanging it on one of the hooks by the door among other coats of various sizes and colors. Martin heard classical music playing somewhere, and noticed a pot on the stove was simmering. Maybe the chicken soup.
“Sam is upstairs. He’ll be so happy to see you – his first real friend in the neighborhood!” She gave him a plate full of Oreos and followed him with two glasses of milk through the dining room and down the hall, reaching forward with a hand that held a glass of milk and tapping his shoulder to give him directions as he tried to hold the plate steady, the cookies nearly sliding off as he made each turn.
“How is school? Sam seems to like it so far, doesn’t he? He’s very excited about the big state reports. What state did you get? He’s researching Delaware.”
“I’m North Dakota,” Martin said.
“What’s their motto?” She asked, concerned and eager. “Delaware’s is ‘Strong Deeds; Gentle Words’ which I think is nice. They were the first state to ratify the constitution. Does North Dakota have a motto?”
“Now and Forever?” Martin said, certain he was forgetting part of it.
“Really?” She tapped him and gestured up the stairs. The cookies slid forward, but he leveled the plate before any fell. “Mr. Pearlstein will want you to stay for dinner. He’s a little sick of Delaware. There must be so many interesting things you’re learning about North Dakota!”
Martin hesitated because he had not learned much about North Dakota. When it had been assigned, he had imagined mailing the governor and the North Dakota Chamber of Commerce and finding some student in Bismarck or Fargo to be his pen pal. But, so far, he had not gone beyond the almanac in the school library. He remembered that there was an official state petrified wood.
Perhaps catching his hesitancy, Mrs. Pearlstein dropped the subject, “We’re just glad you are in school with Sam. He was very popular in his old school in Queens, but he needs friends now. I hope you will be good friends. How’s your mother? Be sure to tell your mother I say hello.”
As they got to the top of the stairs, Martin could see Sam in the bathroom. He had the top of the toilet tank off and his hands were in the pale blue porcelain box. Sam could hear water running.
“This thing is still running, Mother,” Sam said, pulling his hands from the water and shaking them over the tank. “If I could use Dad’s toolbox, I could fix it.”
“Your father will work on it when he gets home.”
“I can do it.”
“He doesn’t like you using his tools.”
“I only need the wire cutter. Look at this?” Sam said to Martin. “See this chain?” He pulled at a piece of the innards of the toilet tank. “It’s supposed to lift this flap, to let the water out.” He pulled at the chain and let the rubber flap flop up and down a few times. “So that lets the water out. Then the flap closes and the tank fills up again. But this chain is cut too long” – he waved the silver line with a quick circle of his hand. “So sometimes it gets tangled under the flap, creating a little space, letting the water keep running out. The tank never fills and the water never stops.” Sam continued to flip the chain for demonstration purposes, while splashing water around the inside of the tank. “I could fix this in two seconds with a little wire cutters my father has that my stupid mother won’t let me touch because it’s some sort of sacred object.”
“Don’t be rude Samuel.” She tapped his shoulder. “Wash your hands and go eat your cookies.”
“Arrghh!” Sam growled and went into his room – slamming the door and then opening it again to let Martin in with the cookies. He took the two glasses of milk from his mother and kicked the door closed.
“Sam?” his mother called through the door.
“Thank you, Mother!” he called back with saccharine sweetness. “It’s the little things,” he said to Martin.
For the next hour, they played Monopoly and listened to Beatles records. Sam told Martin about his old neighborhood and Martin told Sam what he knew about the kids at school, warning him about bullies while Sam asked about girls.
“The guy you really need to worry about is Jimmy Jordan.”
“Julia Levin is in your reading circle, isn’t she?”
“Yeah.”
“Does that make it harder to concentrate on Treasure Island?” Sam laughed.
“My group is reading Alice in Wonderland,” Martin said, looking down at Ventnor Place.
“Yeah, I’m afraid to talk to her, too.” Sam laughed again and this time Martin laughed. “Don’t worry, I think it’s normal to be afraid of pretty girls,” Sam said, laughing louder.
“It’s normal for me,” Martin said, smiling, straightening a pair of houses on Marvin Gardens.
Sam jumped up and went to the window. “Here, look at this.”
Martin got up and stood next to Sam looking through where he had pulled back the curtains, decorated with baseball team logos. The windows looked over the back yards, and he could see his own yard, separated from Sam’s by only a short hurricane fence. The Harrigan yard was a large patch of overgrown grass and a few scraggly dogwood trees trying to bloom. There was a bicycle lying on its side that must have been out there all winter. Martin could see his mother through the kitchen window. She was standing at the counter, looking down at the row of papers, a pencil in her hand. Sam pointed to the pool one yard over, at the Fillmore’s.
“That’s Kathy Fillmore’s house, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“So, when it gets a little warmer, she’ll swim in that pool?” He pointed to the blue tarp, carefully tied over an above ground pool for the winter. “Does she wear a bikini?”
Martin remembered the hot afternoon the previous summer when Mrs. Fillmore, who also wore a bikini, had invited all the neighborhood kids into the pool and made Kathy, who was in high school and had a boyfriend, serve lemonade. Martin remembered the moisture beading up on the blue plastic cups, the bright green of Kathy’s bathing suit and the hot pink of her sunburned belly. He turned away from the pool to look down at his own backyard and smiled shyly.
“Sometimes,” he said, almost whispering. “Sometimes they let us use the pool and sometimes Kathy wears a bikini. It’s green.”
Sam put his palm out flat towards Martin and said “Cool!” as Martin slapped him five.
They stood quietly a moment and Sam turned to look at Martin’s backyard.
“How come you never mow your lawn?”
Martin looked to the corner of the yard by the dogwood tree, its white flowers obscuring the lawnmower resting in the spot where it had run out of gas last June. He knew that saying that the lawnmower was out of gas would not be an adequate explanation, but there was no other.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Sam looked from the lawn to Martin who continued to stare at the lawn, remembering how angry Mr. Fillmore had gotten in August when the tall grass had gone to seed. Sam shrugged and went to the bedroom door, carefully stepping over the Monopoly board.
“Hey Mom! More cookies!”
“Sam?” Mrs. Pearlstein called up.
“Please!”
Sam came back and plopped himself on the floor, studying the board.
“Can we stop?” he asked. “I kind of hate this game.”
Martin turned from his ragged backyard to neat rows of houses on Baltic and Ventnor and St. James Place. “I kind of hate it too,” he said. “Can I use your bathroom?”
“Yeah, but then let’s go outside and play football or something.”
“Sure,” Martin said.
Before Martin could even move from the window, Sam had grabbed a ball from under his bed and was running down the stairs, yelling to his mother that they were going. “Out!” he said, in response to her question.
Martin took care to direct his urine against the side of the bowl so the sound of his piss was muffled by the porcelain. He tried to pull the flush lever down slowly, in the hopes of minimizing the noise. He washed his hands quickly and then could not decide between a maroon or a blue towel and was finally wiping his hands on his pants when he heard the toilet stop running.
Martin lifted the porcelain lid off the toilet tank and laid it down on the seat as Sam had. Through the still settling water he saw the end of the chain snaking cleanly away from the rubber flap. It had not caught on the lip this time. The toilet had flushed correctly. Martin jiggled the handle to watch the flap stutter, a bit of water escaping each time. He watched as the chain undulated in the slight turbulence around the rubber flap, waving back and forth around the little opening he repeatedly created, until, finally, the slack end of the chain slipped under the flap, causing the gap Sam had been so upset about. Martin waited a moment watching as the level in the tank dropped, bringing the floating ball down and tripping the flow of water on again, the sound babbling like a blue porcelain brook. Quickly, quietly he replaced the top of the toilet tank, wiped his hands on his pants and ran downstairs.
Various pundits have posited that there is a “male identity crisis” in contemporary Western society. Like nearly everything else in these polarized days, it has been politicized, with some seeing it as overdue comeuppance of patriarchy, and others claiming it’s a “woke” manifestation of hyper-political correctness. Either perspective focuses more on ideology than on what it feels like to those afflicted. The arts can lend insight, and John Loonam’s topical collection, “The Price of their Toys: Stories of Men and Boys,” does just that.
Although the chronology is imprecise, these thirteen stories range approximately from the late 1960s into the 2000s—an era when this “male identity crisis,” emerged, but before it was named. Hence, these characters suffer from a nondescript confusion, yearning, and detachment. Additionally, stories are set in locations in and around Long Island and organized by the age of their main characters, from early adolescence to late-middle-age.
In “Trump,” a lad learns where he fits into a hierarchy of marginalized groups. The paralegal in “Even Richard Nixon” develops a fascination with the disgraced former president. When his fiancée cancels their wedding, the jilted man in “Returns” resents that she refuses to help him return the wedding presents. In my personal favorite, “Say a Few Words,” an MFA graduate finds an odd career path writing eulogies. The divorced man in “The Unexamined Life” sees a young woman in a bar who reminds him of his daughter, and he cannot refrain from telling her about it. And in “Make the Man,” a widower cannot bring himself to “move on” by discarding his deceased wife’s clothing.
Throughout, themes of driftlessness and dissolution prevail. Consider the following passage from “Manifest Destiny,” wherein a twenty-two-year-old living with his father laments: “I spent my days sending out resumes. I answered every want ad, not caring what job it advertised. I would be a salesman, a paralegal, a journalist. Hell, a beggar man thief. I just wanted to go somewhere else, be someone else.”
Then, the afore-mentioned divorcee in “The Unexamined Life,” reflects in numb silence: “I tried to remember the women, the laughter, that moment of tears, but it had faded. I thought of Catherine, my Catherine, but her face was fuzzy, as if I had not seen her in years.”
Overall, the men in this poignant, Cheever-esque collection evince more pathos than bravado, but, like many, they’re just trying to figure it out.