Free The Roy Stories by Barry Gifford

months before.
    He never told anyone his business. He ran numbers from the stand and owned an apartment building on the South Side. He outlived three wives and one of his sons, my father. His older son, my uncle Bruno, looked just like him, but Bruno was mean and defensive whereas Ezra was brusque but kind. He always gave me and my friends gum or candy on our way to and from the ballpark, and he liked me to hang around there or at another stand he had for a while at Belmont Avenue, especially on Saturdays so he could show me off to his regular cronies. He’d put me on a box behind the stand and keep one big hand on my shoulder. “This is my grandson ,” he’d say, and wait until he was sure they had looked at me. I was the first and then his only grandson; Uncle Bruno had two girls. “Good boy !”
    He left it to his sons to make the big money, and they did all right, my dad with the rackets and the liquor store, Uncle Bruno as an auctioneer, but they never had to take care of the old man, he took care of himself.
    Ezra spoke broken English; he came to America with his sons (my dad was eight, Bruno fourteen) and a daughter from Vienna in 1918. I always remember him standing under the tracks outside the station in February, cigar stub poked out between mustache and muffler, waiting for me and my dad to pick him up. When we’d pull up along the curb my dad would honk but the old man wouldn’t notice. I would always have to run out and get him. I figured Ezra always saw us but waited for me to come for him. It made him feel better if I got out and grabbed his hand and led him to the car.
    â€œPa, for Chrissakes, why don’t you wear an overcoat?” my dad would ask. “It’s cold.”
    The old man wouldn’t look over or answer right away. He’d sit with me on his lap as my father pointed the car into the dark.
    â€œWhat cold?” he’d say after we’d gone a block or two. “In the old country was cold.”

 
    The Monster
    I used to sit on a stool at the counter of the soda fountain in my dad’s drugstore and talk to Louise, the counter waitress, while she made milk shakes and grilled cheese sandwiches. I especially liked to be there on Saturday mornings when the organ-grinder came in with his monkey. The monkey and I would dunk doughnuts together in the organ-grinder’s coffee. The regular customers would always stop and say something to me, and tell my dad how much I looked like him, only handsomer.
    One Saturday morning when I was about six, while I was waiting for the organ-grinder and his monkey to come in, I started talking to Louise about scary movies. I had seen Frankenstein the night before and I told Louise it was the scariest movie I’d ever seen, even scarier than The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms that my dad had taken me to see at the Oriental Theater when I was five. I had had dreams about the beast ripping up Coney Island and dropping big blobs of blood all over the streets ever since, but the part where the Frankenstein monster kills the little girl while she’s picking flowers was worse than that.
    â€œThe scariest for me,” Louise told me, “is Dracula . There’ll never be another one like that.”
    I hadn’t seen Dracula and I asked her what it was about. Louise put on a new pot of coffee, then she turned and rested her arms on the counter in front of me.
    â€œSex, honey,” she said. “Dracula was a vampire who went around attacking women. Oh, he might have attacked a man now and then, but he mainly went after the girls. Scared me to death when I saw it. I can’t watch it now. I remember his eyes.”
    Then Louise went to take care of a customer. I stared at myself in the mirror behind the counter and thought about the little girl picking flowers with the monster.

 
    The Ciné
    On a cloudy October Saturday in 1953, when Roy was seven years old, his father took him to see a movie at