Fortune, Fate, God, Kipling, Robert Crumb, A Broken Radio, and the Father of My Friend Who Tortured Turtles

Literary Review, Fall, 1998 by Thomas E. Kennedy

Victor's reaction to his misfortune is, of course, in keeping with his character--Victor's fate is never in his stars, but in his character. His character has led him to where he is, and it is his character which continues him along the way.

He evades the thugs, puts his jacket and tie in the cleaners for a quick rinsing because his dignity will not allow him to appear to his wife and her Irish fornicator in disarray. As he agrees to return to the cleaners in an hour, the black man working the presser pulls it down with a blast of steam, and I realized that Victor was still continuing on his path to hell. (This black presser was, in fact, a figure from my youth, a man who worked for a local dry cleaners called, no stuff, Fortune Dry Cleaners, in Jackson Heights, just down from the shoe shop where I worked afternoons throughout high school. I can remember the tall, mysterious black man drawing down the lid of that presser, the steam hissing hellishly up around him, though I did not know at

that time that I wanted to be a writer or that this figure would appear years later in a story about Victor Travesti at the gates of hell. In fact, I did not quite know until this moment, writing this essay, that that was where the black presser came from.)

Leaving the dry cleaners, Victor takes a walk to kill time and sees an upstairs shop which has a sign on the door advertising a gypsy fortune teller, Esther. This shop, in fact, was occupied by fortune tellers in my neighborhood when I was growing up (at the other end of the block from Fortune Dry Cleaners--how amazing sometimes is the symmetry of the coincidental physical world which presents itself to us) and I had always wanted to visit there, but was too young, hadn't the money, and was afraid to. Now I would get a chance.

Continuing to follow fate and fortune, Victor climbs the stairs and finds, of course, three doors. There are always three doors. But two of them are locked--there is only one path for Victor; he goes through the third door.

Here to my great surprise I saw a figure from my past. The father of an old friend with whom I had grown up. This man, a plumber by profession, was a very kind man who had been enormously generous to all his son's friends. He used to drive us to the beach, buy us malteds and burgers, take us to ball games. He lived with his family in a very modest apartment although he made a good living, was more interested in enjoying life than amassing material goods. He was full of laughter and affection and just about one of the nicest adults I knew when I was a boy.

His son, too, had seemed a very nice fellow but as we grew into puberty, I began to notice some unpleasant traits in him. One day, he told me with great merriment and excitement how he had bought a bunch of heavy duty fireworks, cherry bombs and ashcans, and had used them to detonate a box turtle he had found in the woods, had blown the creature up again and again until its shell was smashed and its body destroyed and it died, but slowly. It was not so much that I couldn't understand that he could do such a thing, but that I could not comprehend how he could have told the tale with such merriment, so utterly oblivious to what a nasty, sadistic act he had performed--or conversely, taking sadism as one of the simple facts of life. After all, what are we here for if not to hurt and humiliate those weaker than ourselves.