Sea Glass (Part 3)
When they arrived at the hotel Louis was surprised by how dirty it was. Two rats were feeding off a discarded meal in the entryway. “It is budget and we are frugal with the church’s money.” The boy accepted this and they checked in. Their fifth floor room looked out over the raised subway line. Louis watched and waited for the train cars to pass, every eight minutes, until he grew tired around ten o’clock and went to sleep on the couch.
The minister let him sleep in and woke him up with warm buttered rolls and coffee. “I met someone who’s going to come around here in an hour,” he told Louis.
“What about the church?”
The minister nodded reassuringly as Louis ate. “I’m working out the details for Easter. Don’t you worry.”
But Easter came and went the following Sunday and there was no event at the church. The minister was bringing in three to five people a day to be healed in the hotel room. The demand was high. People were paying thirty dollars per healing. They could have performed more miracles if Louis had the strength for it. One day, the minister pushed the number of healings up to eight people and Louis collapsed from exhaustion before he was able to get the last monster into the kerosene-filled bathtub. By the time the minister roused him, the spider creature had balled up in the corner of the kitchen. Louis had to scoop it out with a pail in order to deposit it in the tub.
The daily traffic got so heavy that the hotel manager told them they had to shut it down, so the minister rented a brownstone in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. He paid six months rent in advance. Louis had been working nonstop for three weeks. It’s when they moved to Brooklyn that he decided to make some stipulations.
“I haven’t seen one movie yet. I’d like to go to matinee doubleheaders on Wednesdays and Saturdays. And Sundays, we don’t work.”
That sounded fine to the minister. They were in the healing business and business was booming. But a smart businessman knows his limitations. Burnout is a real thing.
Louis yearned for adventure. He believed that fortitude was a skill, and one worth developing. Inner strength that would come through the balancing of desire and effort, through focused repetition and courage. One of the old timers from the bay had once told him, “Keep at anything you don’t hate. You’ll get good at it.” That stuck with Louis.
He was wise for his age and knew that the minister was manipulating him. He was okay with a certain degree of manipulation -- he figured manipulation was part of business. In fact, from his limited exposure he was pretty sure that business was really only an unending series of manipulations. Still, there was only so much bullshit he could take. He had a natural barometer for good and bad. He lined up good and distanced from bad in most every situation.
“What happened with your church?” Louis asked as they started their third week of healings in the city.
The minister explained that he had taken a leave of absence, to follow through with the mission they were on. “The Lord works in mysterious ways. I believe he has put us together to save lives.”
Save lives and make a few bucks, Louis thought to himself. There was greed to it, no doubt. Does a virtue cancel out a sin? But he liked the minister. The food was good and the company was pleasant. This was a better life than Louis had ever imagined.
His first trip to the movie theater was for a doubleheader of The Deadly Mantis and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He was deeply absorbed with it all: the quality of the storytelling, the richness of the visuals, the jaw-dropping effects (that giant praying mantis!) and the intimate feel of sitting in a dark room with strangers, witnessing great acts of heroism and tragedy. But the science fiction movies hit too close to home for him -- he was living in one of those stories -- and after that first trip to the cinema, he stuck to Westerns and World War II movies, with their clear lines of morality.
He’d performed three healings on a muggy Saturday morning in early June. It was hot in the brownstone they were renting, and Louis came out of the sessions feeling completely depleted. There was a new Western playing that he didn’t want to miss. He drank a couple soda pops and ate a Zagnut bar and got on his way. The movie was called Black Patch, starring George Montgomery. Montgomery was one of Louis’s favorite matinee idols. He seemed more normal than the others. And Louis really envied his hair. He’d tried to comb his like that a couple times, slicked to the side with a sharp part, but the minister had said something and Louis got insecure about it.
There was a girl in the theater. Every time this one deputy character came on the screen, she would laugh hysterically. At first, Louis got pretty annoyed. The fifth time, the girl laughed so hard she snorted. Louis found this funny, and he started laughing too. From then on, every time the deputy character showed up with his ridiculous hat and bushy hair, they’d both laugh. It was a tragic kind of Western, where two friends from the Civil War found themselves, years after the war, on opposite sides of the law. It ends in a shootout. Despite the dark tone, Louis and the girl laughed the whole time.
When the lights came up and people were exiting, the other patrons shot Louis annoyed looks. The girl was milling about in the lobby, so Louis walked up and introduced himself.
“I never laughed so hard in a movie,” he told her. “And it’s all because of you. You really got me going.”
Her name was Lorelei and she was sixteen. Seven months older than Louis. She’d caught the movie after her shift at a nearby drugstore, where she was working as a checkout girl. She had big, green eyes. Louis couldn’t help but stare at them. He offered to buy her an ice cream. Things were going so well in the brownstone that the minister had started giving him a five-dollar-a-day allowance. That was a lot of money for 1957. Louis and Lorelei ate their vanilla cones as they walked through the park. She said she went to as many movies as she could because it was her version of school. She was studying the film stars to learn how to be an actress.
“When I save up enough money, I’m going to head out to Los Angeles. Give my dream a shot.” Louis thought that sounded perfect.
They parted ways at the Prospect Park monument. On his way back to the brownstone, Louis felt like he was flying. Like his feet were six inches off the ground and he was just gliding along.
When he got upstairs he had to tell the minister about Lorelei and the whole experience.
The minister said, “It’s good to have friends. Just be careful with getting too distracted. And please, like we discussed, don’t let on with what we’re doing. There are too many people in this city that would take advantage of us. Too many bad people. Wolves in sheeps clothing.”
Louis went along with what the minister was saying, nodding in response. But he knew that Lorelei wasn’t a wolf. His gift had given him a sharp intuition for people and things, and she wasn’t bad in any way. Those green eyes. She was all he could think about.
On Wednesday, when it was matinee time again, he swung by the drugstore where she was working. She was just getting off. He asked her if she’d like to go to see a movie with him, his treat, and they went to the 2:10 showing of Pal Joey, starring Rita Hayworth, Frank Sinatra, and Kim Novak. Lorelei held his hand for the last ten minutes of the movie.
As they left the theater, Lorelei said, “Sinatra was a real nasty guy. I don’t know why she decided to stay with him at the end.”
Truth be told, Louis hadn’t paid any attention to the end of the movie. He was thinking about her, with her hand in his. “I never liked Sinatra,” he said.
Just then the minister approached them from the side of the theater. “There you are,” he said in a curt tone. He glared at Lorelei. So intensely that the girl lowered her head and turned away.
“I told you I was going to the movies,” Louis reminded him. The minister took him by the arm and guided Louis away. His jaw was clenched. He said to Lorelei, “You leave this boy alone. He’s my charge. I won’t have him getting mixed up with older women.”
“We’re nearly the same age,” she said quietly. She started to back away.
The minister took a stop towards her and said, “You be careful how you talk to your elders. I’m a man of God.”
She turned and ran away so fast that Louis didn’t have time to say goodbye. He listened for her shoes, clacking over the concrete sidewalk until the sound was gone and replaced by the ever-present cacophony of street noises. Louis thought that if it were a movie, a trumpet would surely sound in this moment. Or perhaps a menacing and discordant piano arrangement.
“What’d I tell you?” The minister was hot.
“We weren’t doing no harm,” Louis said, apologetically, even though he was also mad, and embarrassed at what the minister had done.
“‘No harm.’ I’ve been there. Trust me. Feels all harmless at first and then it’s nothing but harm. Let’s avoid this kind of trouble.”
Louis looked at him. He nodded silently. And that’s the last they spoke of Lorelei.
The minister moved on: “Reason I had to come find you is that we have a big, big job. Tonight in the city. At a department store.”
They cleaned up in the brownstone and ate sardine sandwiches. The minister explained that he had been contacted by a manager at Grissoms Department Store, right off of Rockefeller Center. It seems that most of the staff had taken ill over the past month -- trouble breathing, low energy, insomnia -- and doctors were baffled. There were twelve store clerks who were feeling that way, and they were mobilizing to notify health officials, which would likely close the store down for a week. The manager, Errol Quint, couldn’t lose the business. He was going to pay the minister a hundred dollars a head, if Louis could heal them all. Tonight.
“Twelve healings in one night?” Louis asked.
“They’ve got an inspector coming in tomorrow. Has to happen. With that money, you can buy your momma a new car.”
Louis protested. He’d never done that many healings in one sitting.
“We’ll have plenty of breaks. The manager is bringing in food from Peter Luger’s. You’ll eat good, and take it slow.”
Louis warned him that he might pass out but the minister was confident. “By the grace of God, you’ll heal these people.”
Louis had never been in a store as big as Grissoms. It spanned three stories over an entire city block. They sold everything from clothing to motorcycles. Errol Quint gave them a quick tour. Louis could feel the employees watching them as they passed.
Quint took them into a large meeting room with a long, shiny wood table in the middle. He asked them if the room would be suitable for the “operations,” and the minister said it would work perfectly. Quint swung open a door to an adjoining room where a vat of kerosene awaited, “per your instructions.”
The employees were brought in one at a time. The first was a middle-aged man from the hardware department. He had a cat-sized yellowjacket affixed to his neck. Louis had never seen such a creature before. It took a bit of searching around the monster’s body to find its spores, but once he did the yellowjacket came off easily.
Each of the employees had the same type of yellowjacket monster attached to them, usually on their necks. After the fifth healing, Louis had to lie down. It was now after midnight and the store was closed. Errol Quint brought him into the bedding department, and Louis sacked out on a floor-model queen.
The minister gave him an hour before rousing him with a plate of brownies. “Come on, kid. You’re almost halfway there.”
Louis sat up. Errol Quint was ushering a woman past them into the conference room. She seemed upset, saying, “I’m not doing it. I’m not going in that room.”
“What’s wrong with her?” Louis asked. The minister shrugged. When they reentered the conference room, the same woman was sitting at the table, smoking a cigarette while she waited for them. The yellowjacket clung to her forehead.
“Sorry for the commotion,” she said as she exhaled. “I thought they were taking me to the old lounge. Where the boss does his business.”
Neither Louis nor the minister understood the context of her words, so they just shrugged it off and got on with their work.
It took Louis three hours to remove the final two monsters from their hosts. By then he was having trouble walking. The store was about to open for the morning when Errol Quint ran in and said that they needed to finish and get going now “before the FBI gets here.”
The FBI? Louis had seen enough crime movies to know that that stood for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Elliot Ness. The minister said “inspectors” were coming. He didn’t say anything about the FBI. The last employee, a janitor by the name of Riordan, waited patiently, sipping his coffee as Louis slowly, sluggishly removed the yellowjacket from his forearm.
“That kind of tingles,” the man said as Louis moved his hands over him. When the creature was finally removed and deposited in the kerosene vat, Errol Quint whisked them out and down through the service elevator. The minister had to carry Louis through an alleyway. He hailed a cab on the street and loaded Louis inside.
The boy slept for two days. The minister was afraid that he may have slipped into a coma. He woke Louis up every six hours, just to be sure.
On Monday morning, the brownstone got a visitor. A very important visitor. The minister woke Louis up and started brushing the boy’s teeth for him.
“Monty Grissom is here.”
Louis was awake but still getting his bearings.
“As in, Grissoms Department Stores. He came all the way out to Brooklyn just to meet with us.”
Louis pulled himself together, running his head under the sink faucet for a few minutes until the cold water made his temples burn. He combed his hair with a clean part to the side, like George Montgomery, and went into the downstairs parlor where the minister waited for him with Monty Grissom.
To be continued…