“And don’t forget to get some NIGGER BABIES!” she would shout, to my intense mortification, across half an acre of crowded dining room, causing a hundred or so diners to look up.
Five minutes later as I returned with the purchase, pressed furtively to outside walls in a vain attempt to escape detection, she would spy me and cry out: “Oh, there you are, Billy. Did you remember to get some NIGGER BABIES? Because I sure do love those…NIGGER BABIES!”
“Grandma,” I would whisper fiercely, “you shouldn’t say that.”
“Shouldn’t say what—NIGGER BABIES?”
“Yes. They’re called ‘ licorice babies.’ ”
“ ‘Nigger baby’ is a bit offensive,” my mom would explain.
“Oh, sorry,” my grandmother would say, marveling at the delicacy of city people.
Then the next time we went to Bishop’s, she would say, “Billy, here’s a quarter. Go and get us some of those—whaddaya call ’em—LICORICE NIGGERS!”
THE OTHER PLACE TO GET PENNY CANDIES was Grund’s, a small grocery store on Ingersoll Avenue. Grund’s was one of the last mom-and-pop grocers left in the city and certainly the last in our neighborhood. It was run by a doddering couple of adorable minuteness and incalculable antiquity named Mr. and Mrs. Grund. None of the stock had been renewed, or come to that sold, since about 1929. There were things in there that hadn’t been seen in the wider retail world since Gloria Swanson was attractive—Othine Skin Bleach, Fels-Naptha Soap, boxes of Wild Root Hair Tonic with a photograph of Joe E. Brown on the front. Everything was covered in a thick coating of dust, including Mrs.
Grund. I believe she may have been dead for some years. Mr. Grund, however, was very much alive and delighted when the bell above his door tinklingly sounded the arrival of new customers, even though it was always children and even though they were there for a single nefarious purpose: to steal from his enormous aged stock of penny candies.
This is possibly the most shameful episode of my childhood, but it is one I share with over twelve thousand other former children. Everyone knew you could steal from the Grunds and never be caught. On Saturdays kids turned up from all over the Midwest, some of them arriving in charter buses if I recall correctly, to stock up for the weekend.
Mr. Grund was serenely blind to misconduct. You could remove his glasses, undo his bow tie, gently ease him out of his trousers and he wouldn’t suspect a thing. Sometimes we made small purchases, but this was only to get him to turn around and engage his ancient cash register so that a hundred flying hands could dip into his outsized jars and help themselves to more. Some of the bigger kids just took the jars. Still, it has to be said we brightened his day, until we finally put him out of business.
At least candy gave actual pleasure. Most things that were supposed to be fun turned out not to be fun at all. Model making, for instance. Making models was reputed to be hugely enjoyable but it was really just a mysterious ordeal that you had to go through from time to time as part of the boyhood process. The model kits looked fun. The illustrations on the boxes portrayed beautifully detailed fighter planes belching red-and-yellow flames from their wing guns and engaged in lively dogfights. In the background there was always a stricken Messerschmitt spiraling to earth with a dismayed German in the cockpit, shouting bitter epithets through the windscreen. You couldn’t wait to re-create such lively scenes in three dimensions.
But when you got the kit home and opened the box the contents turned out to be of a uniform leaden gray or olive green, consisting of perhaps sixty thousand tiny parts, some no larger than a proton, all attached in some organic, inseparable way to plastic stalks like swizzle sticks. The tubes of glue by contrast were the size of large pastry tubes. No matter how gently you depressed them they would blurp out a pint or so of a clear viscous goo whose one instinct was to attach itself to some foreign object—a human finger, the living-room drapes, the fur of a passing animal—and become an infinitely long string.
Any attempt to break the string resulted in the creation of more strings. Within moments you would be attached to hundreds of sagging strands, all connected to something that had nothing to do with model airplanes or World War II. The only thing the glue wouldn’t stick to, interestingly, was a piece of plastic model; then it just became a slippery lubricant that allowed any two pieces of model to glide endlessly over each other, never drying. The upshot was that after about forty minutes of intensive but troubled endeavor you and your immediate surroundings were covered in a glistening spiderweb of glue at the heart of which was a gray fuselage with one wing on upside down and a pilot accidentally but irremediably attached by his flying cap to the cockpit ceiling. Happily by this point you were so high on the glue that you didn’t give a shit about the pilot, the model, or anything else.
The really interesting thing about playtime disappointment in the fifties was that you never saw any of the disappointments coming. This was because the ads were so brilliant.
Advertisers have never been so cunning. They could make any little meretricious piece of crap sound fantastic. Never before or since have commercial blandishments been so silken of tone, so capable of insinuating orgasmic happiness from a few simple materials.
Even now in my mind’s eye I can see a series of ads in Boys’ Life from the A. C. Gilbert Company of New Haven, Connecticut, promising the most wholesome joy from their ingenious chemistry sets, microscope kits, and world-famous Erector Sets. These last were bolt-together toys from which you could make all manner of engineering marvels—
bridges, industrial hoists, fairground rides, motorized robots—from little steel girders and other manly components. These weren’t things that you built on tabletops and put in a drawer when you were finished playing. These were items that needed a solid foundation and lots of space. I am almost certain that one of the ads showed a boy on a twenty-foot ladder topping out a Ferris wheel on which his younger brother was already enjoying a test ride.
What the ads didn’t tell you was that only six people on the planet—A. C. Gilbert’s grandsons presumably—had sufficient wealth and roomy enough mansions to enjoy the illustrated sets. I remember my father took one look at the price tag of a giant erection on display in Younkers toy department one Christmas and cried, “Why, you could practically get a Buick for that!” Then he began randomly stopping other male passersby and soon had a little club of amazed men. So I knew pretty early on that I was never going to get an Erector Set.
Instead I lobbied for a chemistry set, which I had seen in a fetching two-color double-page spread in Boys’ Life. According to the ad, this nifty and scientifically advanced kit would allow me to do exciting atomic energy experiments, confound the adult world with invisible writing, become a master of FBI fingerprinting techniques, and make the most satisfyingly enormous stinks. (It didn’t actually promise the stinks, but that was implicit in every chemistry set ever sold.)
The set, when opened on Christmas morning, was only about the size of a cigar box—
the one portrayed in the magazine had the approximate dimensions of a steamer trunk—
but it was ingeniously packed, I must say, with promising stuff: test tubes and a nifty rack in which to set them, a funnel, tweezers, corks, twenty or so little glass pots of colorful chemicals, several of which were promisingly foul smelling, and a plump instruction booklet. Needless to say, I went straight for the atomic energy page, expecting to have a small, private mushroom cloud rising above my workbench by suppertime. In fact, what the instruction book told me, if I recall, was that all materials are made of atoms and that all atoms have energy, so therefore everything has atomic energy. Put any two things in a beaker together—any two things at all—give them a shake and, hey presto, you’ve got an atomic reaction.