His perch at the top of the stairs gave little Tony a bird’s eye view of the strange goings-on. He was coiled to strike but struggled to find the courage.
A crazy bongo beat bounced off the knotty pine walls and ricocheted throughout the damp room. Twisted crepe paper in gold and red spiraled the length of the ceiling. The flag with a big red sun and funny writing and several Samurai swords, spoils of war, his dad called them, held a place of honor above the tiny bar. There was a reek of Brylcreem and Wind Song, intensified by the steamy fight between furnace heat and winter frost. The tiny basement had been transformed into a place both thrilling and grotesque, carrying everyone crammed in it far, far from home. Tony loved it.
One person after another, blurred by the marbled haze of cigarette smoke, bent lower and lower, scooting under a broom stick held horizontally by his uncles, Ed and Bob. It was astounding, these adults—relatives, neighbors and, most unbelievably, his dad—would do anything so bizarre. The broom inched lower and lower. Mr. Buschbacher was the first to collapse, his beer-fed gut proving too big an obstacle. He was followed by Aunt Marge, whose body, Uncle Fred proclaimed, was better suited to bending in ways more important than the limbo. This insanity might have frightened Tony if it hadn’t been accompanied by wails of laughter. Thanks to the mass hysteria, no one noticed the pajama-clad presence looking down on this subterranean madhouse.
The crowd of fifteen or so was the center of Tony’s world. The women, never idle, usually preoccupied themselves with grocery lists, dust mops and sewing machines. The men, he knew as remote and determined, away at work or hibernating in their garages with crescent wrenches, timing chains and car wax.
But tonight! Rare times like these, Tony understood, happened because of the bottles brought out from under the bar. Displayed with a bucket of ice and stacks of glasses, this altar was an omen of good times. Drained faces transformed into jack-o-lanterns: aglow from within, eyes glazed, smiles exploding. And teeth! Huge in mouths rarely opened wider than what was needed to say no—now laughing, boisterous. Bodies, unconcerned, cracked open by life and love, moving in ways fluid and ungainly, like peacocks discovering the spectacle of their own tails. Everything was lipstick smears and pipe tobacco, savage and ecstatic. Limbo! Rhumba! Rock ‘n’ Roll! The man on the hi-fi urging them lower, lower.
Finally, like a car ignoring the flash and clang of a railroad crossing, Tony speed-bounced down the stairs on his butt and shot into the crowd, heading straight for his Aunt Sharon—younger than most and always welcoming.
Her ham-sized arm engulfed him, a safe harbor in this unsanctioned adventure. “Well, where’d you come from Tony, Tony, Bo, Boney? God, you’re adorable,” she gushed, chomping on the ice in her Manhattan. “You look just like your grandfather.”
Big fingers fished around her glass and speared a cherry: not the checkered-apron-pie-making-grandma kind, but the mink-stole-scarlet-lips-Aunt-Sharon kind that were kept in a jar under the bar where dad kept the Seagram’s Seven. She dangled it in front of Tony, dripping like a bloody Eucharist. He eagerly plucked it with his mouth and freed it from its stem. There was no better taste than what burst from that glowing orb, a whole pack of cherry Life Savers in a squishy marble, easily worth putting up with the taste of the medicinal liquid it had marinated in. He wanted more.
A new song, urging everyone to twist like they did last summer, created more chaos than the Limbo. Tony threaded through gyrating legs in his newfound quest for cherries, dodging grass skirts, Bermuda shorts and big pleated pants. He mined TV trays piled with deviled eggs, ham roll-ups and overflowing ashtrays. The glasses he found were clouded and half-full, their cherries submerged like marine life—pearls at the bottom of the ocean. He drank through these dregs to savor their sweet reward and began to feel the kind of freedom that turns normally reserved people electric and loud, careless and fearless and free from doubt.
A simple miscalculation of the distance between a thin metal table leg and Tony’s sock-clad foot ended it all. The collision sent butts and eggs, chip and dip, ice and glass, soaring before crash-landing onto the cement floor in a salad of ruin. The hi-fi needle skipped across vinyl like a rough stone on a smooth pond cha cha cha before sinking entirely. It was as magnificent as it was incomprehensible.
Tony froze, a pajama wearing incendiary device, the room mute and destroyed. His thoughts retreated to the time he had pulled the head off his sister’s Betsy Wetsy doll.
And then, like the rewinding of a dream submerged, the party began to reconstruct itself. Tables up-righted, broken glass cleared, the hi-fi found its groove again. Dayo, Daaaayyyyooooo…
Tony’s head reeled, had it never happened? Obviously, there was no way this crowd was going to let a little rug rat ruin an all-too-rare night of fun. Freed from consequences, he began to wriggle his hips to the music. His arms jerked and his hands fluttered in spastic joy. Blurry from the power of half a dozen Manhattan-soaked cherries, his focus drifted down to his own level. The sea of legs he encountered was like an underwater scene he’d watched on George Pierrot’s World Adventure Series, a forest of kelp undulating with the tides, back and forth. Tony swooned, alone in a world of . . . There! A pair of angry eyes zeroed in on him from across this ocean—he’d been recognized for the small fry he was.
His father glowered, hunched on all fours with a broom and dustpan. The reduced stature, the menial work—Tony knew this was bad. From the other side of dip-splattered bifocals, his stare pinned Tony in place like a fly trapped, awaiting separation from its wings. His curled lip, tight and distorted, had a look of pure disgust worse than any beating. Tony gasped, then faltered.
“Sissy,” his father mouthed.
He sensed he was alive only because, for his father, the one thing worse than what he’d already done would be to draw further attention to it. To, God forbid, make a scene.
A tug on his arm broke the standoff. It was the soft grip of his mother. “Okay, mister, you’ve overstayed your welcome tonight.” There was no resistance. She guided him to the bottom step where he made his way up the two flights without complaint.
Alone in bed, he squeezed his threadbare monkey. A sliver of light from the hall was disrupted by his sister. “I told you not to go down there,” she said. “It’s for adults.”
“It was so much fun,” Tony replied, wide-eyed. “It was like flying.”
