John Hancock is Gone
By Paul Silverman

The embolism that strikes the sinner Muzzy Farber gives him a holy roll, and sets him off on a religious pilgrimage of sorts. But that hardly means he can’t pause and have the loafers buffed when the plane drops him at Logan. Re-entering Boston’s Fertile Crescent, he figures, you ought to have a little spit on your Sawbuck Quad Eddies. In layman’s terms, Size 10, 4EEEE – what you wear when your foot, roughly speaking, resembles a pizza slice.

Such feet can be heaven’s gift to a catcher. Width and mass to distribute the weight when you’re nine innings into a fistula-popping crouch. Muzzy hasn’t caught a ball in decades, but the old horsehide hum seizes him the instant he enters the little shoeshine enclave and finds the papers splattered all over the three chairs. Boston has gone deep in the post-season and the rags are all open to the double page sports spreads with their fat, bellowing headlines.

Then MoMo steps into the batter’s box. Yes, that MoMo. Or does he?

On the surface, it’s not so extraordinary. Nothing more than this:

Up climbs this thinhead out of the blue, uncoiling from behind a John Hancock ad kiosk like a giant brown shoelace. He has arms like whips and bony hands that could palm a basketball or span an octave, and his skin looks like the saddle part of those Gatsby saddle shoes, but true vintage, the whole surface so weathered it’s practically worn through. The sooty apron and rag-box announces that he, indeed, is the shoeshine man.
But what was he doing behind the kiosk?

With a neat swipe of the spider-fingers he scoops the papers off the center chair. A second swipe ushers Muzzy down. A wooden box opens, and operations commence. In a flash Muzzy sees that fate has swept him into the hands of an artiste. That first touch, when the fellow cradles his benchmade mahogany calfskins, it’s how Stradivarius must have cradled a newborn violin. Not what most of them do, the cretins and gorillas, seize your meta-tarsals in a WWF footlock. Like a board-certified surgeon, this guy looks before he works, studying the upper and lower, perusing the grain and welt. Then there’s that pad-and-dab he does, almost dainty, spreading the Kiwi so gossamer the eye can just about see through it. It’s like he’s French-polishing a Versailles table. Muzzy shifts the fat Porsche wallet he’s sitting on into a front pocket. The gratuity has already reached double and rising.

But fifty two seconds after the brush and rag come out, Muzzy gets smacked with a head-to-toe something, and it’s more than jet lag. The two of them have plunged deep into Sox talk, dissecting a Game Two wall-ball, slammed so hard it nearly knocked a letter off the scoreboard. All of a sudden the shoeshine man makes this little drawling speech, snapping the rag so the pop-pop-pops hang like exclamation points in the air.
“Remember Gil McDougal, the way he’d stand? Legs so far apart you’d think his pants’d split right up his old buttcrack. How did he even swing a bat? But that old stance, it don’t matter. Open legs, closed legs, bat down your shoulder blades, bat behind your head, bat up your ass. It’s bullshit, just more batter bullshit, because it’s all down here.”

And he pop-pop-pops the rag even quicker to grab Muzzy real good by the eyeballs. “Here, down here. Down in the roll of the hands, that last six inches before wham-bam, thank you ma’am. It’s the speed you give it, got to be 500 miles per hour, either you got it in the wrists or you don’t. True sluggers, they don’t just hit the ball, they push it. Stance don’t mean nothing, not one motherf...”

Muzzy pays attention and nods, but his inner eye fixes on something else. The speed of the rag as the words spill out, blurring like the fan belt of a high-revving engine. And those hands of his, the brown bones and bumps of the fingers, the knuckle-knots. The little stars twinkling off Muzzy’s loafer toes makes him think the shine’s over, but for stringbean it turns out to be only the mid-point. He drops the rag, grabs the pad, the Kiwi tin, and commences operations all over again, pausing for one deep exhale that shoots a double blast of fumes into Muzzy’s face, right up both tunnels of his nose. The waft is one part shoe polish and about six parts muscatel, the sweet-as-puke kind that rises from every derelict sidewalk in America. Pure wino antifreeze.

Now Muzzy knows what was going on behind the kiosk, and the flash of yellow-shot eye confirms it. But he also knows something else, knows it for sure, and he fights a minor war with his tongue and lips to keep from blurting it out. Hey, I caught you in the Eastie game, you son-of-a-bitch. You old flame-thrower. You’re MoMo. I know you from your hands…

Final proof comes when the fingers curl around the brush. Muzzy sees the grip – sees it as it was that day. He forgets the brush and remembers the white sphere, the red seams. His palm stings all over again, reliving the glove-slap, the smack of victory. That MoMo forkball pounding into his mitt, and the slider – the same smoke he saw in the Eastie game, which came one dribble-hit shy of a no-hitter.

These days, Muzzy drinks nothing less than Macallan 21, twenty bucks a pop at Four Seasons, Santa Barbara, so it must be the muscatel gas that does it. From somewhere he hears the crack of the bat. But it’s not the triumphant clout that won the Eastie game and set him and MoMo to hugging and kissing. It comes from some junkyard months later, dark and pouring winter night, just off the war-zone road the Afro boys used to call Jew Hill Avenue, and the beaked boys used to call Boo Hill Avenue. Muzzy’s cleats have just stomped a rib, raked a flank in the mud. The bat is whooshing through the rain. Too fast to escape it. The crack he hears is hardwood calling on his right cheekbone…

As the memory rattles his skull, Muzzy gets seized with new and darker questions, and he doesn’t blurt these out either. Hey fucker, which side were you on that night? And was it you whose bat broke my face and made my parrot nose into a turnip? That’s what they said. And why did you turn out a wino fuckhead so braindead you don’t even know who I...”

Stuck on the unasked questions, Muzzy clams up, takes his shine and dukes MoMo a mere buck, the standard. He just drops the bill in the saddle-leather hands like it’s a used Kleenex, soggy with snot, turns tail and heads for the baggage carousel and the limo-driver waving the name-sign at him.

He proceeds with the pilgrimage as planned, but in a dour, sour mood. The driver is an old Pole who claims kinship to the great wrestler, Kowalski, from the Arena days. The back of his yellow-patched head is a study in botched peroxide, and all it does is remind Muzzy of the wild yellow in the shoeshine man’s eyes, the seep of liver-poison, when he looked up at him and blew the muscatel cloud. Waste of an arm. Waste of a life. And his given name is Moses, prophet of prophets. Why? How?

Sensing the gloom in the back seat, the bleach-blond driver burbles some story about why the car-service company calls itself Satisfaction Limo. “The boss and Mick Jagger are like this,” he says, holding up two fingers intertwined. “Every time Mick’s in town we’re his wheels. I drove him myself on the Bigger Bang Tour. He can’t get no satisfaction - except with us. That’s what the boss was thinking when he named the company.”

“They told me that already,” Muzzy snorts. “Take a left on Warren.”

Maybe it’s the dark, maybe it’s the Boston fog. Same old neighborhood, but the buzz and the beat say different hemisphere. A brownstone painted garish blue seems possessed by drums, throbbing like a four-story concert woofer. Cars half on the sidewalk, doors ripped off, bumpers bent like hairpins. Yiddish signs on the old store windows are now Arabic. The deli, Klopnick’s, is still kosher but now it’s Muslim kosher, and the name is Shabazz. Everywhere the havoc of rust, broken bottles, cops at curbstones rousting bombed people: all skin colors, all makes and models.

Muzzy sees head scarves and feels he’s in Sadr City or Marrakesh, and wonders if the limo will explode. They pass a block where solid plywood covers every inch of storefront. The same plywood – he’s sure of it – that went up with the burnings, the race riots of old, and now they’re rolling past the junkyard…

Muzzy peers into the lightless rubble where the bat brained him and knows he’s had it for the night. He orders Satisfaction man to retreat to the Back Bay and the Ritz. In the lobby he calls the office park in Santa Barbara, just to hear his own voice mail greeting. Stirring a Macallan 21 he mind-fucks himself over the old tribal enigma: how two high-schoolers could be teammates by day and enemies by night. We were battery mates, he tells the ice cubes, struck glum by the phrase’s irony.

Next day he shaves poorly and half-eats an egg white omelette. He has the black limo bring him straight to the stone steps and pillars of the great temple, Ohabei Shalom, which he attended from age four to fourteen without ever knowing the name means lovers of peace. His spit-shined left loafer barely hits a step when it occurs to him that the name is no more, the carved letters are somehow eradicated from the pediment – by sandblasting or a lightning streak, who knows? In their place is a kind of billboard, a long strip of signwork that says Muslim Mosque #7. It flashes into his head that MoMo, post-high school and pre-muscatel, could well have called himself Moses X. It was what they did then. So why didn’t you ask him? Now Muzzy chews at himself for being chickenshit, for not breaking the ice. Then again, MoMo didn’t say squat either. He just bent the knee and popped the rag. Muzzy feels cheated. Soul-fucked and short-changed. He’s even mad at the temple, where he’d expected to revisit the hard benches of yesteryear. To put a hand to the wood and reach back, catching something – a wisp, a whiff. Of the long mornings he’d stood captive in the sea of old men, swaying and praying, the stench of their breath sharpening with every chant, even as they pressed their lips ever so softly to the fringes of their unfurled prayer shawls and whispered to the silk.

It’s a mosque. What’s the point of climbing another step?

As Muzzy turns a heel to head for the limo he feels a claw on his cuff. Then he looks down and sees the eye, sulfur yellow, and smells the hideous piss smell that seems to be oozing from the eye. It’s a derelict woman, white, but caked like an unswept gutter. “Look at them shoes,” she says. “Ain’t you something.” He yanks his leg away from her, but she grabs it again. “Look at them shoes. They shine like a nigger’s ass.”

He half-kicks her to get away.

Back at Logan Muzzy hounds the gates, stalks the moving walkways. But the shoeshine man is nowhere to be found. The chairs are empty, piled with yesterday’s strewn newspapers. What can you say to a chair? Even the kiosk is different. It’s an ad for Fidelity now, John Hancock is gone.