I was working at the time as a disk jockey for a failing A.O.R. station that not long afterward went all-polka and cornered a small but solid share of the market. There was a high-watt, long-established rock-and-roll station two point six notches to the right, and no one listened to WDAN except, I imagined, people in hotel rooms who chose it on their clock radio for their wakeup call on the morning they left Pittsburgh forever. I had a Sunday-to-Friday midnight-to-six slot that wrecked my social life but afforded me the opportunity to talk a lot of outrageous nonsense in a variety of voices and now and then slip in a cut by Blurt or the Virgin Prunes without fear that anyone might hear it and complain. On the air I became once more an only child in his room on a rainy Saturday afternoon with his dolls and his record player, temporarily unaware of the weight of loneliness upon me.
Very early one Tuesday morning in March — I remember it was still dark, and there were three nurses waiting for a bus on the corner — I came in from the bone-snapping cold to find several lights on and the apartment warm. It surprised me to find Harry home, and awake, since lately he had taken to spending almost every night at Kim’s, over on Beacon, but I was even more surprised that he had turned on the steam heat. Out of Harry’s chronic tightfistedness — we were responsible for half of the heating bill — and some perverse impulse of mine to test our seven years’ friendship, we had at some point during December made a tacit pact never to open the radiators, and ever since had been going around the house in our ski caps and down coats, exhaling puffs of vapor in the frigid bathroom and wearing gloves to cook dinner; the clouds of steam produced by the act of dumping a boiling pot of spaghetti into a colander in the sink were thick and billowing. It was a kind of dare, to see who would succumb first to the cold, but it did not please me to discover that I had won. Something was the matter with Harry.
“Hey!” I said, walking through the empty living room — we had one chair. I imagined that Harry would be in the kitchen, fixing breakfast, but there was no reply. I let my coat and scarf fall to the floor around me, listening for his footsteps or his voice talking on the telephone. Just as I was about to call his name again, there was the sound of a breaking dish or glass from the basement. We were on the first floor of a two-story house that had been made into a duplex, and the way to the basement was through our apartment. There was another explosion of glass, then another, then several more in rapid succession, as though Harry had set a tow of tumblers along the top of the washing machine and were now blowing them off with an air rifle. He did not own an air rifle, however, and I ran, almost falling, down the steps, knowing that at their base I would find my friend heartbroken and half in the bag.
In fact, I found him in just his boxer shorts and ski cap, holding a half-empty bottle of George Dickel in his right hand and one of my late mother’s Franciscan dinner plates in his left. His left arm was raised and cocked at the elbow, and he held the plate as for a flea-flicker into the end zone. The service for twelve was part of my mother’s legacy to me and she had intended me to present it to whatever unfortunate woman might become my bride. On the concrete floor all about him lay one hundred and twenty-seven shards of consolation. I knew at once that he’d split up with Kim; I had seen him in the mood to shatter things many times before. As usual he wore a smile, peculiar to this mood, that combined the glee of the vandal with the grim, self-loathing amusement of the drunk. The ski cap was pulled down crookedly over one eye, and this, when he whirled toward me and brandished the plate and the bottle of whiskey, gave him a piratical air. He was a big fellow, wore a full black beard, and his left eye, I saw, had been badly blackened.
“Well, she’s all yours, Vince!” he said, in an ugly voice.
“It’s my bedtime,” I said, suddenly very tired. “Why are you doing this now?”
Harry was always considerate of my hours — he suffered from intermittent insomnia, and held sleep in high esteem — and he set the dish down on the floor with a drunken gentleness.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess Kim dumped me.”
“You guess?”
“It’s one of those.”
“You mean you might have dumped her.”
“It’s possible.”
“Did she give you that shiner?” Not too long before this, Kim and a baseball bat had broken up a knife fight at the bar where she worked, the Squirrel Cage — maybe you saw that jerk Snake Fleming walking around with his head all bandaged — and she had a reputation, despite her size, for being pretty good with her fists.
“What shiner?” said Harry. He took a long swallow from the bottle of Dickel. It went down a little rough, and this seemed to sober him up for a minute. He looked around him at the wreckage of my mother’s dishes and frowned.
“It was the toys,” he said at last.
Harry was the director of research and development for Other Worlds, Inc., a Pittsburgh firm that manufactured what its advertisements called “playthings for the unusual child,” or, as Harry described them, “toys for kids nobody will like in high school.” It was a small firm, and Harry constituted the entire department. The president and other half of the firm was an elderly Orthodox man named Mr. Levinsky, a thirties socialist and tri-state sales representative for Piatt & Munk, or Funk & Wagnalls — I forget which — who now devoted his days to driving all over the eastern seaboard attending customs auctions and buying up abandoned shipments of whatever looked interesting and cheap. All manner of odd and useless items, in huge lots, are auctioned off every day in the ports of the East: twelve hundred hydraulic fan blades, nine thousand spools of orange thread, fifty-two cases of baby-food jars, a half-mile of plastic forks still on their sprues. Mr. Levinsky and Claude, the company driver, would return with these prizes, in a drug-bust-impounded Mercedes truck that Mr. Levinsky had also bought at auction, to the Other Worlds warehouse, in Monroeville.
It was Harry’s job to attempt to play with each item, to discover if it had any “intrinsic ludic value,” as Mr. Levinsky put it, apart from its intended function. Harry would devise some way of building with it, or decorating his body, or annoying his elders, and then the item would be packed in an attractive box and sold nationally for $24.95 at museum gift shops and at toy stores with track lighting and Scandinavian-sounding names. Harry’s greatest success so far had been Odd Ject. You’ve seen it — an assortment of polystyrene balls, golf tees, and those multicolored cocktail toothpicks that have a lock of curly cellophane hair at one end. This “Self-Generating Deconstruction Kit” had caught on the Christmas before, selling out eighteen thousand units in two and a half weeks, and had earned him a raise and a rare handshake from Mr. Levinsky. The chief drawback of his otherwise enviable line of work was that it led Harry to regard every object around him — his shoes, a box of brads, a woman’s birth-control-pill dispenser — as a potential plaything. In the middle of a serious conversation about the Supreme Court or chlamydia, you would catch him poking straightened paper clips into a sponge, staging a mock naval battle with dry macaroni, or rolling his pocket lint into the shapes of animals and setting them on parade. I mention the pill dispenser because this was the item that had precipitated his break with Kim.