Free Train Tracks by Michael Savage

mean?
    Another guy pops to mind. This was the freak, the
one-titted man. His name was Harry the Freak. Harry started out as a freak in
Coney Island. Just a regular barnyard freak. And his big attraction was that he
had one tit. Big deal. He billed himself as “Half Man–Half Woman.” As years went
on, he became fairly well off. He became a capitalist freak, and he opened up
his own sideshow in Coney Island. He employed and exploited his freak brothers
and sisters, the microcephalics, the macrocephalics, the midgets, you know, the
standard dwarf that would say a little thing with his voice and scare the kids,
“blah, blah, blah,” you know. And the bearded lady, too. But Harry’s game was
running the freak show, and he made a lot of money—and where would he spend it?
This distorted, twisted man would buy beautiful antiques; that was his
counterbalance. And he’d spend virtually all his money on such merchandise. He
lived in Long Beach, in a little Godfather -like
house. It was strange. From the outside it was a regular house in Long Beach.
You’d knock on the door—I remember I went a few times with my father to make
deliveries of, oh, a bronze figure of something, or a grandfather clock—and the
door would open, but never all the way, only just a crack through which you
would come in sideways, schlepping the thing in with you. And there it was: from
floor to wall to ceiling and back again, with no apparent order, merely a
storage house of antiques. No order, no rhyme, no reason to the display; as he
got them, he dragged them in, found a place for them, and stuck them there on
the floor, maybe moving a few things around. And this was the world he lived in.
He treated his antiques just as if they were mere objects of art. So in a sense
he had a purer vision of what these things were. He didn’t worship them, give
them a pedestal or a special place; he merely liked associating with them, and
treated them as such, as mere objects. SO you might say that Harry the Freak was
really an antiques chauvinist.
    In the beginning, the 1940s, the men at the market
earned their living primarily by buying merchandise that had been left in the
subways, unclaimed merchandise, unclaimed steamer trunks and the like. I was
told that in those days, if a trunk was unclaimed it was sealed at the wharf and
then put up at auction, unopened. Which means in the good old days of the
thirties and forties, you used to bid on the trunk according to what the trunk
looked like in value on the outside. If it was an expensive leather with brass
fittings, you bid accordingly. You could never tell what was going to be inside.
But the men liked playing the game. It was interesting to them because it was
taking a chance. They’d bid maybe seven dollars for a good trunk; four or five
dollars for a poor-looking one. And they’d buy six, seven, eight trunks at
auction, take a little truck, and haul them into the market, usually late at
night. As they proceeded to open the trunks up, everyone who went to the
auction, they’d have a kind of free-for-all, comparing who did better in the
game of chance.
    One trunk story in particular sticks in my mind.
One trunk had belonged to a nun. They could tell it was a nun’s trunk because of
the photographs inside. They had also found her habits in there—a few old nun’s
habits and articles indicating she was also a nurse.
    As they were rummaging through, looking for a few
valuable candlesticks or whatnot to put up for sale and get back their seven
bucks profit, they found a strange object at the bottom wrapped up in muslin.
Being inquisitive sorts, they proceeded to unfurl the muslin package. What would
be at the heart of this onion-like skin but an embryo. A human embryo, all
wrapped up neatly in a nun’s trunk.

TWELVE
    Hegira from New York
    M y first hegira from New York was a bus ride to Miami.
    The dining highlights I recall were the chicken bones in