Fiction: Sunlight in a Cave (a graphic short story)

Author in filmgrain

A “captioning” of the Mike Magliano story

By Bob Boldt

[Editor’s Note: A text version of this story appeared here on May 15. Bob had intended for some images to be included, but a series of editorial snafus intervened, and they weren’t. Today’s publication is Bob & Moristotle’s collaborative attempt to save the situation “creatively,” not just by adding Bob’s original images, but also by adding many more images and making them primary by arranging the text entirely as captions under them. Let’s see how well – or whether – it worked.]

I took the brew from the vending machine and sat on the nearest bench. The bus to Crawfordsville on that Wednesday 1958 afternoon in Chicago had been delayed. As a substitute for something more worthwhile, as I sipped the terrible coffee, I gazed around at the assorted cast of characters occupying the stage of the Greyhound bus station.

Unlike the far older Union Station, a neoclassic monument to the train over by the river, the Greyhound bus station was a not very eloquent celebration of Art Deco’s sad decline into pure utility. Gleaming elevators whisked the weary unceremoniously to the mezzanine, whose utilitarianism was minimally defended only by a newsstand, a coffee shop, and the ubiquitous storage lockers. At present one of these modern marvels of Art Deco escalation was conveying only an eternally tethered Baby Ruth candy bar wrapper up and around, up and around.

The usual, expected assortment of characters occupied the benches on the main floor: a brittle-looking secretarial type who sat nervously casting fleeting glances to either side, a guy who looked for all the world like bedraggled bluesman Robert Johnson without the droopy cigarette or battered cardboard guitar case. An older couple were having an animated conversation near the coffee machine I had just abandoned. The woman – you could tell she had once been striking, even beautiful – was upbraiding the man. Time had not spared him either. From the bruise above his left temple to the duck-taped Nikes, he was so torn at the edges he reminded me of an old, discarded photo. The only thing signaling abundance was his beer belly.

After the woman stormed off, he stood as if waiting, motionless, half of his body in an intruding ray of afternoon light. He seemed to stand for endless time, like a sculpture. For a moment the whole scene seemed frozen in time. The only thing to deny that frozen illusion was the constantly bobbing and blowing aerial maneuvers of the bits of flotsam that were lit like fairies by the late afternoon sun slanting through the clerestory windows.

It made me think of old Plato’s Cave. If our world is starting to show signs of a simulation, not a singular reality, it would mean that objects, even people who are out of sight, are literally out of mind – like that piece of flotsam there, whose existence is only known in the light. I focused on the blank expression on the face of the man by the coffee machine.
    I absently went over again what I had been reading in Plato’s Republic. What if people of whatever age are incapable of seeing the world in terms transcending their own machines – Plato’s 4th Century BCE cave wall or a 20th Century movie screen? As the slanting mid-afternoon light cut through the floating dust mites, I was having a kind of epiphany—

“Who the hell are you lookin’ at, Buddy? Take a fuckin’ picture, Buddy. It’ll last longer.” The guy I had been absently staring at during my Platonic ruminations, the statuary background for my thoughts, was now staring at me dead down. The specimen my metaphysician had been casually examining deep in the cave was now staring directly back at me, and not absentmindedly either. His voice was rising as he spoke. Ominous. I took a nervous look at the wall clock for no reason and back at the man. I decided to take a direct approach.

“Fucking women. You can’t live with ’em and you hate to lose the deduction.”
    The quip worked. The man smiled broadly and then took a quizzical look at me.
    “Hal? Hal Caulfield?”
    “The same.” I smiled back. “Who have I got the pleasure?”

“Mike, from Naperville. Mike Magliano. Ring a bell?” He swung his head side to side like a big ringing bell. I could not have been more blown away if I had been standing on State and Randolph on a windy day.
    “Mike?” Elements of the tramp’s features did begin to fall into place, along with some erstwhile mannerisms.
    “Magliano,” said Mike Magliano. He smiled, reaching out a dirty hand.

Back at Naperville Community High School, Mike Magliano had exuded an air of motorcycle-jacket danger, duck-tailed sexuality, with the scent of felony made all the stronger by how little the rest of us actually knew about him. He just showed up unannounced and unexpected at the beginning of my sophomore year.

Mike Magliano was one of those experiences whose influence only grew with time. One summer I followed my uncle all around South America. Off the coast of Venezuela we chartered a fishing boat like Hemingway’s for the day. I remember so distinctly how, as the shoreline with its trees and buildings got smaller, the mountains only grew larger as the horizon slipped away. So it seemed with my memory of Mike Magliano. It only grew larger as other memories of that time faded.

Everyone back then was in the midst of the flagrant optimism that had produced The Bomb, the Marshall Plan, the GI Bill, and the Eldorado tail fin. We were the first generation to grow up with the horrible thought that we might all become radioactive crispy critters if the Russians decided they didn’t like us.

In spite of the hormone flow, the Rock Around the Clock, and unexpected boners, all the “Duck and Cover” bullshit was just that, bullshit. Growing up in the glorious Atomic Age was not the wonderful thing they promised it would be in displays at the World of Tomorrow exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry. President Eisenhower’s fatherly demeanor was reassuring to our parents, but not so much to us. Youth opinion at the dead middle of the 20th Century was good for a Life Magazine cover story and for the manufacturers of cosmetics and pimple care products, but the world paid us less heed than they did our opinions.

Mike had seemed untouched by all the fears, insecurities, and frustrations that so troubled me and my peers. He was what Marlon Brando, Dean Moriarty, and even The Fonz came to represent – the authentic outsider. It was said of Paul Newman, women wanted to be with him, men wanted to be him.
    I will never forget the day a man from the FBI came to school with a large reel of film in a can marked, “Classified.” Government Issue, or “GI,” was a term for battle-ready inductees in the Second World War. This guy was GI all the way. Ex-marine right off the poster, he was the most impressive spit-shined and crew-cut civilian we had ever seen in a suit and tie. Our dads need not even apply. He even had white gloves that he put on to load the film onto the projector. I was the official school projectionist, appointed by our science club. I got to see a lot of boring movies. My favorite, though, was “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”

If it hadn’t been for those FBI white gloves, I might not have been set up – prepped, I believe is the word – for what transpired later. Being the school projectionist, I knew that there was no reason to wear cotton gloves to thread a projector. The strip of film leader was made for all kinds of abuse as long as it somehow got threaded accurately through the machine. I thought that the FBI guy’s making such a big deal out of threading the projector seemed more like a theatrical flourish, or an act of undeserved reverence for the lowly film leader. Both possibilities aroused my skepticism and put my BS meter on alert.
    The film was typical of the “Duck and Cover” genre so dominant in the nation’s classrooms during the Cold War. The content was predictable and familiar to us all from previous screenings, right down to its obligatory ending warning us of the dangers of the bomb our enemy, the Red Menace, was getting ready to throw at us.

And, as with all epics, there was the obligatory J. Edgar Hoover cameo, his Porky “A-the-a— The-a— The-a— That’s all Folks!” Of course, any comparison of J. Edgar to Porky Pig would have been anathema to our well-washed ’Fifties brains. Lieutenant Foster – not sure if that was his Marine or his FBI rank – clicked off the projector and, even before our eyes adjusted to room light, barked out, “Any questions?”
    Mike’s was the first hand up. “I saw where they said there would be evacuation routes set up away from potential atomic bomb targets that people can take to escape the horrors of nuclear war.” Mike shifted his toothpick to the other side of his mouth. “My question for you, Mister FBI man, sir, is, When will they set up IN-vacuation routes for those who want to escape the horrors of nuclear survival?” Susan Robinson giggled, followed by a stony silence as all eyes fixed on the red vein deepening in Lieutenant Foster’s neck.

Mike’s uncle (his sole guardian) was called to school to discuss matters with Principal Barns and Betty Burns, the school counselor. Mike’s uncle’s car and the principal’s were the last two vehicles to leave the school parking lot that evening. Mike was gone for three days. On his first Monday back, he was as cocky as ever. No sinner like an unrepentant one, we guessed. Mike not only gained a certain outlier celebrity status as a result of “The Bomb Incident,” as we all whispered it, he even pandered to it. In the popular movie, “The Wild One,” Johnny, played by Marlon Brando, is asked, “What are you rebelling against?” And Johnny answers, “What have you got?” That could have been Mike’s motto. Some of us even wrote him in for class president, as a joke of course.
    “I never did graduate,” Mike said, standing before me now. He smiled like years ago when he was about to spin a yarn – a kind of an “I shit you not” grin on his stubbled face. Not that I or any of my friends ever got that close to Mike the cool loner from the wrong side of the tracks. Except that there was that time when he conned us into driving him in to Hyde Park and the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry so that he could meet up with someone and collect a motorcycle.

“Don’t ever get on the wrong side of the law. Not for nothin’ more serious than failing to signal.” He shuffled through his pockets like searching for a specific memory, came up with a Ricola lozenge, unwrapped and popped it. “I moved into the bed, and a semi legit lunch commitment, with a lady friend at the Club DeLisa on the South Side – you know, the businesswoman who gave me the motorcycle.”
    “I remember that one, cherry red as a popsicle,” I said.
    “That was until I was busted.” He did a perfunctory repair of the duck tape on his shoe. “There was this cop who must have been down on his quota who rousted me and decided to make me one of his hobbies.” As if on cue, I noticed that two of “Chicago’s Finest” had just entered our cave of transit and were doing a lazy, routine reconnoiter. I gestured with my eyes in the cops’ direction.
    “No sweat, little buddy, I got a get-out-of-jail card now, and the fewer questions asked, the fewer lies I’ll have to tell.”

One cop stood outside the men’s room while his partner went in banging his night stick around, probably hoping to roust an addict shooting up or turning a trick in a stall.
    “Busted,” he continued, “I got the old ‘hold this package for me for a couple-a days’ deal from a junky buddy down the hall (never trust a junky!), and the next day officer friendly’s search produced enough dope to get me 25 in Joliet. Quelle bummer!” The two boys in blue left the bus station to the dust mites and the fairies.

“Unless it’s a return trip, nobody’s ever prepared to enter prison. Things happened that first week that I vowed would never happen again. So I became a tough guy fast. If it hadn’t been for early solitary, I might have been dead or as good as dead.” Mike seemed to straighten perceptibly. “I had an epiphany, if you want to call it that. In solitary. It also showed me a way of trust. Trusting the light, you might call it. I also had a lot of time to think of ways to defend myself. I knew it was no good making an instrument of retaliation and defense, like a shiv made from a heated hairbrush handle.

Those things only work if you got a defense group – a person or persons to rapidly palm the weapon from the assassin. I had to find another way. I decided to be all thumbs and began growing my thumbnails. What passed as idiosyncratic affectation became for me a deadly weapon. Supplements I ordered made the nails strong as nails and razor sharp. I even set up a couple retaliations for a Crip leader as free samples. The word was out. ‘Don’t mess with the Wop.’ In my cell I practiced day and night. My meditation, fueled with my solitary epiphany, gave me almost superhuman physical powers and psychic disguise.

Two of my roommates went mental just trying to live in the same cell with me.” He looked at the knee of his jeans, just coming frayed. “It’s a terrible thing to be forced to live like an animal in order to survive. I was only in two years. The first year was the worst, my ‘adjustment’ I called it.”
    I pulled a pack of Pall Malls from my shirt and offered him one. Smoke wafted through the even more slanted light.
    “And I never had drugs as good as like in prison. I swear, we made a couple of them guards into multi-millionaires.”

“How did you get out? Did you escape?” More people were filling the seats, waiting for the bus that had been delayed a second time according to the metallic voice of the speaker.
    “No. I turned rat, snitch, jailhouse witness. I was a likeable guy, what can I say? A solid rounder on a good day. One thing I knew, I couldn’t last another year there. And the warden offered me a deal I couldn’t refuse. And don’t judge lest ye be judged.”
    “I wasn’t gonna say a thing,” I said.

“It seemed one of the victims of my snitchery was special, an ex-CIA guy claiming insanity. I bunked with him for a week before I got what the warden was looking for, and I got a pardon, and a release, and I never need to fear any law or lawman as long as I keep it zipped – my mouth, not my fly. Heh heh.”
    I pretended to laugh. I suspected old Mike had come off his wheels. I also had to keep reminding myself that here was a man, my contemporary, at most four years older than myself. His unbelievable journey had aged him. To look at him you’d think he’d Rip Van Winkled his way out the wrong end of a time machine. Mike thrust his hand out as if looking on his bare wrist for a non-existent watch.
    “Little buddy, I got to go see a man about a dog, or a lady about a hog named Harley or some such.” When he moved to shake my hand, I slipped him a ten. Standing, he nodded acknowledgment as he stuffed it. Mike Magliano walked away with a hint of the former jaunt I had known in school.

As he moved through the lapsing light and the growing number of passengers for the next bus out, I was able to see his disappearing reflection on the store window across the street. The thing I most remember about the encounter is not so much the conversation but that reflection dodging into the beams of late Chicago sunlight 1958. Just another shadow on the cave wall.

Copyright © 2019 by Bob Boldt & Moristotle