Cohen-lynch pins-5-22-18-doc.
Dear Colleagues,
Lynch Pins is a novel that explores the themes of misplaced loyalty and betrayal. Two young men meet in high school, and on a lark, one of them, severely damaged emotionally, saves the other, a wholesome, respectful child of a devout home, from a possibly fatal beating. Many of you will recognize some of the scenes and dialog from previous submissions, but make no mistake—this story is changed in many ways, as are the characters, which become far more three-dimensional due to third person omniscient narration, something Don told me to do two years ago. I should have listened to him then. The chapters are neither named nor numbered, but rather dated. Only the second chapter is non-sequential. Thanks for reading. Please forgive the extended length. The next submissions are shorter.
August 1942
The walls of Eastern State Penitentiary are exactly thirty feet high and ten feet thick, and made of solid granite. The edifice stood a grim sentinel over the row houses on Fairmount Avenue in North Philadelphia, whose residents found them depressing at best, and they were seeing them from the outside. Al Schaefer was one of those whose view was from the inside, having been sentenced to fourteen months for bookmaking. He’d made the best of his misfortune, adjusting to living among murderers and bank robbers by doing what he did best—taking bets. The currency was cigarettes rather than cash, but the clientele were willing to bet on anything. Most of Al’s action was based on the quotidian activities of the vermin that shared the accommodations, both furry and uniformed.
A week before Al was to be released for good behavior, a misunderstanding about the outcome of a bet led to the dissatisfied customer ratting him out to a guard he knew on an intimate basis. In defense of his lover’s honor, the guard retaliated with his riot stick on Al’s left kneecap. Al remained in the prison infirmary in a full leg cast for five weeks before he was released to continue his life. He passed through the gate unsure which ate at him more, the month of lost freedom and rotten food, or the permanent limp. Either way his gut was full of hatred for all humanity, but especially squealers.
August 1969
Danny Schaefer parked the Mustang and stayed behind the wheel with the engine running. Reluctant to leave the air-conditioned comfort of his new car, he scrutinized the building from the curb. When Danny’s mom gave him Al’s address the previous night, he knew he had to visit to discuss old times. Al, who he hadn’t seen in fifteen years, lived on the second floor of one of those old three-story, stucco buildings so common west of the Interstate in south Florida. This one screamed shabby—faded, rain streaked paint fronted by rusty wrought iron railings guarding the open landings.
The afternoon was hot and humid, even for summer, the clouds, like a prison cell ceiling, gray and low. His t-shirt was soaked by the time he’d climbed the steps to the second level and rang the bell next to the louvered door. TV chatter came from within, a baseball game. Al still loved his baseball. Danny turned away to lean his elbows on the shaky rail, stared at nothing, heard a toilet flush. When the door opened he turned to find Al looking far older than his sixty-one years.
“Who the hell are you?” The voice was raspy and weak, the appearance even worse—rheumy-eyed, sallow, liver-spotted head almost hairless. He wore a stained undershirt over red Bermuda shorts with a wet spot near his crotch, and slide-on sandals.
“I’m Danny.”
“Danny who?”
“I’m your son, Danny, Al. Remember me?”
“My son? Jesus fucking Christ, you’re all grown up. Come in. Sit down.” The words were hardly out of his mouth when he started hacking and coughing, then spat into a dishtowel. He turned and limped to an overstuffed armchair, dropping the towel on a side table.
“I got emphysema,” he said, with no more emotion than if he were reporting getting the Miami Herald. “The clinic says my condition is dire, whatever the fuck that means.”
There was no air conditioner—the furniture reeked from sweat. Danny sat gingerly on a Danish Modern sofa, next to a large throw-cushion, which he decided would suit his purpose.
“So why now, after all this time?” Al was genuinely interested. He didn’t get much company.
“Because I heard you might be dying.”
“Good for you, kid. You get right to the heart of the matter.”
“Why did you beat me so much?” He recalled four lashes for refusing to eat asparagus—the taste made him gag—and six for setting the venetian blinds cord on fire while fantasizing a Tarzan movie. There’d been many more.
At that point time was the only thing he was killing.
Al thought for a while. “Yeah, sorry. Things were different back then. That’s the way it was done.”
“I don’t agree, Al. It was my ass you were beating.”
“Yeah, well, it wasn’t personal. I had a lot on my mind back then. I used to get pissed off sometimes.”
“It was personal to me, Al. Don’t you remember The Holiday Dinner?”
“What dinner?”
There was no recognition in his eyes—not an iota of realization. Could he be that totally fucking ignorant? The details inundated Danny’s memory as if it were yesterday.
Mom’s family was there for some Jewish holiday. They were sitting around the dining room table, the remains of the pot roast still on the good china, gilt-edged and hand painted, fancy stuff that had come wrapped in German language newspapers in a packing crate filled with excelsior, a gift from Uncle Bill, who was stationed in Europe after the war.
Uncle Manny and Aunt Frieda were coming for dessert. Someone mentioned Manny’s name and, as if on cue, the doorbell rang. Danny ran to the front door to open it and saw Manny and Frieda standing on the stoop.
“Uncle Manny,” he said, “they’re talking about you.”
“What was that?” Al said. Faster than Danny thought possible, he limped over, grabbed him and headed for the stairs.
“Al, wait. He didn’t mean anything…” His mother’s protest faded as he was dragged up the steps, his left wrist in Al’s death grip, his right hand grasping uselessly at the spindles beneath the rail, his knees bouncing off each one of the twelve risers.
“We were wondering what was taking you so long,” someone else said.
In the bedroom, Al pulled off his belt and, as was his preference, doubled it over. Dannyknew what was coming and screamed, louder with each stroke, timing them so they would coincide with the sound of leather meeting skin. Painful though the strap was, the screams were more about gettingAl to stop, convincing him he’d done a good job. As always, Danny counted them. Danny counted everything. Somehow life made more sense when he counted. Al swung ten times, took a deep breath, added a final blow that surprised his son, resulting in a scream that was not properly timed. Whether or not he noticed, Al was done.
“Next time, you fucking little snitch, maybe you’ll keep your mouth shut,” he wheezed, panting from the exertion.
Danny heard Al open the door and return to the table. The conversation had been replaced by grim silence, his muffled screams now hanging over the dining room like a flatulent odor that no one would mention.
While Danny relived the past, Al’s attention went back to the old, black and white Motorola. The Oakland A’s were playing the Yankees. Al, not easily dissuaded, was still following the A’s two cities after the franchise left Philly.
“What happened to the woman you left Mom and me for?”
“Her? I can’t even remember her name. She was out of here in a month. Found someone younger, and richer, I suppose.” Al’s attention went back to the images on the screen.
Now visions of the morning following The Holiday Dinner came back to Danny.
Mom was at the stove making breakfast when Al limped in dressed in a double-breasted gray suit and a hand painted, maroon tie. He sat down, tucked his napkin above the long points of his white on white dress shirt and, as if last night never happened, began telling Danny how to handicap a baseball game.
“Listen kid, you’ll learn something,” he said. “There are three things you take into consideration in baseball, and they all begin with the letter ‘P’. Pitching is the most important. The pitcher is the only player on the team who can consistently win or lose a game. All the other players’ contributions are averaged out over a hundred fifty-four games to determine how good or bad they’ve been, but that is meaningless for any specific game.
“Previous is the next ‘P’. How did the pitcher do in his last few starts? Pitchers, like all athletes, have good and bad streaks, and you’ve got to play those streaks while they’re on.
“The third ‘P’ is for park. Whose ballpark is the game being played at? A team will always win more games at home than they will on the road because they’re more familiar with the field, the crowd is rooting for them, and most of all, they’re sleeping in their own beds at night.” He stopped to smile for a few seconds, and then he said, “It probably doesn’t hurt that they don’t have to stay up half the night to get laid.”
“Al, he’s just a little boy,” Mom said. She was facing the stove, her back to him. There was something in the way she stood, the way her back stiffened, the way her hands stopped moving, and in the tone of her voice, that made him know her fear. It was the first time he felt someone else’s fear. It felt good down there, between his legs.
“So what? He’s going to grow up someday—if he can keep his fucking mouth shut.”
“Al,your language.” There it was again—the stiff back—the whiny voice.
When he’d finished his eggs he said, “I’ll take you to a ball game next week, kid. The A’s are playing Detroit,” and then he disappeared through the back door. It was the last time Danny remembered seeing his father.
His musing ended, Danny was now primed for the task ahead. He continued his interrogation, bringing Al back from his ball game.
“The night you whacked me eleven times with the strap, Al—that was real personal. You don’t get much more personal than that.”
The glare in Danny’s eyes and the menacing tone of his voice finally alerted Al that his son might not be there for a social call. He turned away from the TV and Danny saw his father’s fear. His groin tingled and the blood began to rise.
“Wait a minute, kid. That was a long time ago. You gotta understand…” He began to cough again, and reached for the befouled dishtowel.
“Let me help you out, Al.” Danny casually took the throw cushion, got up, and with both hands pressed it over his father’s face. There was very little struggling, maybe a half minute. He kept it there for another minute or so, just to make sure. When he took it away Al’s hands still held the dishtowel to his mouth. His eyes were open. Pleased that he was able to end Al’s life before his disease could, Danny spoke to his father for the last time.
“Who’s stronger, Al, me or emphysema? Who’s the victim now, me or you?”
Danny replaced the cushion, carefully fluffing it up. He turned the insert on the doorknob, wiped it with his shirttail, heard a gratifying click as he pulled the door shut, and left. Back in the car, he put the air-conditioner on full blast, and waited for his erection to subside. It was hardly the first time it’d happened. Being aroused by lust was normal. Getting turned on by anger, the threat of violence, and the fear it produced was something else entirely. He was nothing if not analytical, but parsing his own instincts gave him pause.
He dropped the lever into drive and headed back to the Interstate.
September 1962
The first time Danny saw Mitch Goodman he asked him why he was wearing a beanie in high school. They’d both been assigned to Advanced Trigonometry, the ultimate math course at Central High.
“You’re in the twelfth grade now. You are aware of that, aren’t you?”
“It’s called a kippah,” Mitch said. “My father is an orthodox Jew.”
“So what does that have to do with you?” Al had split years before, leaving his wife in tears, not to mention in debt to several angry bettors.
They stood in the hallway, eye to eye. Mitch, thin, pale, scholarly, was exasperated. Danny, robust, with chiseled facial features and well defined muscles, truly curious.
“I may not agree with everything my father believes, but I honor his wishes. He feels that being a Jew is a privilege that must be earned by following God’s law,” Mitch said.
“My mother’s a Jew,” Danny said, almost an aside, a meaningless conversational gambit.
Mitch smiled and extended his right hand.
“If your mother’s a Jew, that makes you a Jew, so we have something in common. I’m Mitch Goodman.”
May 1963
The uneasy truce developed into a competitive friendship. Both were at the top of their math class, but Danny, knowing his mother couldn’t afford to send him to an Ivy League school, sloughed off his other classes, settling for B’s and C’s, while Mitch, driven by his parents’ veneration for learning and insistence on excellence, earned straight A’s.
The day college acceptances were posted, Danny grudgingly accepted that he was going to Temple, a local, reasonably priced university that placed as much weight on their entrance exam, which Danny aced, as on high school GPA’s. Mitch had been accepted to Penn and planned to major in physics.
The next morning they were on the subway. Going to school together became a routine when they discovered they lived within a few blocks of each other but had never met before that Trig class. Waiting for the doors to slide open at their stop, Danny saw the route map on his left.
“Mitch,” he said. “Let’s not get off the train.”
“Why not?”
“We’ve both already been accepted to college. There’s nothing else left for us to do there. Let’s stay on the subway. I want to ride the whole system. I want to keep on going and switch to the Market Street-Frankford line and ride it end to end.”
Cutting school was not the way Mitch did things, but he knew Danny might be upset about college acceptances. He made a fateful decision.
“Okay. Any particular reason?”
“Does it really fucking matter?”
Mitch thought about some words of consolation but decided to leave things as they were.
They stayed on the Broad Street subway to City Hall and then switched to the Market Street-Frankford line and rode to the Sixty-ninth Street terminal in Upper Darby. Once at the terminal, hunger led them outside to a street vendor on Market Street, where they bought two hot dogs each, and got Cokes to take back onto the train. It was a perfect day—bright blue sky, warm and windless. It was a day they could have been at the ballpark or swimming or just hanging out on the street—at that moment, cutting school had been the perfect move.
They’d just finished their first hotdogs when they heard them.
“Hey, Jew boys.”
Danny turned first and nudged Mitch. Four guys were coming toward them.
“How do they know we’re Jews?” Mitch said.
“Oh, I don’t know. It might have something to do with that fucking beanie on your head.”
“Shit. Maybe we can talk our way out of this.”
“They don’t look like talkers, Mitch.”
Mitch thought about an exit route. He gauged the distance to the terminal against the distance from the gang and saw it as a right triangle. For an instant he thanked God for his Geometry teacher. They had the short leg to the terminal—the gang had the hypotenuse. If they started immediately they’d be able to beat them to the turnstiles.
“We’re going to run, Danny. Get your token ready.” Mitch threw his Coke and dog into a wire trash basket.
Danny’s thoughts were elsewhere. He’d considered taking on the gang and teaching them a lesson. But four to one were bad odds and he couldn’t count on Mitch to fight. If they got to the terminal first he might be able to isolate one or two. He threw his Coke and dog at their pursuers, although they were too far away for it to matter. Then he took off, leaving Mitch in his wake.