Sidelong Glance

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published“You ever notice no one gets diarrhea on the Hallmark Channel?” Boner said into the awkward silence of the bus.

Crudeness notwithstanding, this little paragraph is the perfect opening to “Once Upon a Time in New Haven,” a masterful short story by Paul Juhasz. For starters, the boy’s name, an indication—paired with the speaker’s excrement fixation—that we are entering the realm of the adolescent male, where a nickname can brand someone as both a dick and a bonehead. Boner is both. In one of the story’s wryly humorous moments, we learn that his given name is Bonaparte.

He and two peers are taking advantage of a day off from school by heading into downtown New Haven, first stop Libby’s, a sweets shop rife with Italian goodies. Here they encounter an infamous mafioso—pomaded black hair, sinister carriage, handgun bulging beneath his suit jacket. Boner’s friends understand the threat inherent in the man’s name; Boner does not, his cluelessness on stark display later in the story, when he identifies the mafioso to a policeman investigating a murder.

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By now, we know these boys. Boner is a goofball, a hanger-on, serving as punching bag for Jaxson, angry son of an alcoholic father and a mother who split. Gill is middle class, with an intact family. He’s shrewder than both his companions, but he won’t be able to guide them through the dangers that await. Painful disappointments will clearly shape all three as they negotiate adolescence. This jewel of a story could easily close with Boner’s fateful—possibly fatal—mistake of naming the dangerous man.

But Juhasz knows these boys better than we do. He knows New Haven, knows their day has only begun. Shortly thereafter, the boys pass Wooster Park:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published. . . man-creatures slept under benches, enfolded within layers of discarded jackets and frayed blankets, their soiled coats the corpses of the free market, the promise of capitalism lined inside lint-frayed pockets, cardboard beds slowing the seepage of wet earth and insect horde. They will arise in the dark, scouring through the leavings, fostered by detritus, scrap-nourished, but for now, they sleep . . .

This vividly detailed scene widens the context—for Boner and his companions, for us. But Juhasz has a surprise in store:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published. . . amongst them walks a man, bone thin and pale, his eyes hidden under the brim on an anachronistic top hat, feeding on this atmosphere of despair. He has been to Libby’s already; has whispered . . . in an ear beneath pomaded hair the black of the universe. . . . In due time, he will be elsewhere. In due time, he will be everywhere. He whistles. . . . And he is once again, as always, prowling, interminable.

Each time I read this story, I pause here, realizing that the grim reaper has strolled into an actual park in an actual American city. “Once Upon a Time in New Haven” is not about men without homes who spend their days in Wooster Park, but these dispossessed are part of the urban fabric experienced by Boner, Jaxson, and Gill during their day out of school. And already, they have brushed elbows with the grim reaper.

Twice more, Juhasz enriches the story with sidelong glances, once to include a destitute blind man who functions as a seer for the boys. And again, to include a prostitute tasked with her client to lure one of the boys into his grasp. You’ll want to know what happens. Get this collection into your hands: As If Place Matters. Let Juhasz’s stories shake you up.

Note:

As If Place Matters is available here ⇒

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