The devil invented the world a long time ago but not as long ago as you might think. He invented it out of spit and dust, in one of those long moments in which one asks unanswerable questions, then attempts to answer them against all odds.
He invented it and suddenly it was there: Deacon Street; a three-family house, on a block crowded with similar (flimsy looking) triple-decker houses, one pressed up against the other, all painted drab colors, their porches sagging, front steps worn. Houses like weathered marooned ships with dark hedges in front and watery black windows all the way up to the top. They were constructed a hundred years ago for the factory hands, the workers–most by now belonged to a union but some, the women at the scissors factory, did not—who measured time at conveyor belts in the noisy factory on the next street and the next street over. Factories with names like the words of an old mostly forgotten song: Remington Arms, Bruner and Ritter, Harvey Hubble, Bridgeport Tool & Die, Bridgeport Machine.
When the devil invented the world, it appeared all at once; he wasn’t like God, he didn’t have to take a whole week.
He invented it and right away the sparrows were hopping around the yard, next to rusted bulkhead doors, lined up on the telephone wires, chittering incessantly. People’s Bank opened a new branch on Main Street, not far from the twin theaters, the Polis and the Majestic. A fleet of Coca Cola trucks and another of Wonder Bread trucks appeared. The girl at the bakery, six months pregnant, was pulling string down from a funnel overhead and then tying it round a bakery box inside of which she had placed half a dozen cannoli; the machines at the factory were operating at full throttle (but occasionally breaking down and slowing down production).
Not long after the devil invented the world, someone was seen chasing someone else in the yard with a wrench; Did you hear what happened? The guys had a big beef! Yeah, he really blew his top! Grandfather and his friends–Comparo Joe, Comparo Marchio, Comparo Tommy–sat playing cards at the Roma Club. Someone paid a quarter for a cherry Italian ice in a little pleated cup. The pool game ended in a brawl; someone was playing ball, sliding into third base; someone else was hollering – “Fuck you in the heart!” — Santa Claus showed up at D.M. Read’s department store, sober or not, with his red velour costume and beard; the kids sat on his lap for their picture; old women wearing black veils occupied the first two pews at church; stockbrokers rode in the Bar Car of the train; the bathroom attendant stood offering a towel in exchange for a nickel; and the children, last seen playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey, were back, holding out their hands a devilish gleam in their eyes for Christmas presents first thing in the morning.
Someone was cooking–someone was always cooking–and the smell of oil and garlic in the back hall was identifiable as soon as you pushed open the back door and began climbing three flights to the kitchen in the top floor apartment. Someone was in the bathroom pulling the chain to flush the toilet. Well, not always.
Deacon Street, which for practical purposes, is the only invention of the devil’s that mattered, was on the south side of the city but that didn’t really tell you anything.
Deacon Street was the red apron with big pockets and the old woman turning off the water, tightening the spigot at the sink, then wiping her hands on the apron; it was the breeze that came in through the open front porch; the rusted swing set out back; the painting of Christ on his knees in the Garden of Gethsemane on the wall over the old man and old woman’s bed; aunts, uncles, cousins trudging up the stairs every Sunday; the red stitching of the baseball the young Tony, a cousin, held in one hand, in his other, the worn baseball glove; the leaves blowing in the breeze (there are, believe it or not, a few trees on this street) just as the car turned the corner with the newborn child in the new mother’s arms.
Relatives gathered in the parlor of 347 Deacon Street were all waiting for the arrival of the latest addition to the extended family. When will they get here? And then before you knew it: “They’re here. They’re here!” Children, including the baby’s ten-year-old cousin, an overweight girl in a pink dress with ankle socks on her feet and mottled chubby legs, a smile like a jack-o-lantern’s, ran out to the front porch to have a look.
Just about everyone was happy. Who knows why. Of course right away things went downhill but at first in that devilish moment of invention, the world was singing and holding the same bright clear note.
Next, they were all crowding around to have a look at the baby– wearing a bonnet, with a scalded red face (from so much crying) wrapped in a blue blanket, then another look. Let me see him. Lemme see. Peek a boo —
What else is there to say about this world that the devil invented?
Hold on, let’s give it a chance. Did it have a parlor? Yes, it did. Did it have a big kitchen with a gas stove? It did, it did. Were there mice behind the stove? Oh, yes. And was one of them holding a scrap of food in its paws, at the exact moment of creation, moving its rodent eyes left and right, its whiskers and nose quivering as it took in the devil’s world, attentive as small creatures must be to all the noise all the sights and sounds and rumbles of invention. Of course. Well, maybe.
What about the colors of this world? Was it a black and white world, the kind recorded with a stolen camera and a magnesium flash, swag provided by Uncle Steve who worked for the mob, or was it a world in full color, did it have a range, some hue and variety?
Yes. Of course the devil must have said: Let there be color.
It was the brown or rust color of the factory on Boston Avenue. The color of dead weeds, long pale-yellow tufts of grass, the green of a bottle broken into hundreds of shards. The burnt umber of railroad ties. But it was other colors too. The beige of the new mother’s brand-new dress, the beige and white of her two-tone high-heeled shoes, the speckled hazel of her eyes. It was the color of robin’s egg seen for the first time a few years later on a summer vacation, the pinkish orange of robin’s breast. It was the blue of father’s 1957 Pontiac and the Brilliantine gleam of his black hair. The chintzy floral pattern on the big, overstuffed chair in the living room; the dark red cabbage roses in the wallpaper; and all the dust that collected between the movie fan magazines on the end table which incidentally was scarred with cigarette burns. (Someone in the family didn’t always use an ashtray.)
Of course, before there was color there had to be light. It was almost as if the Devil had said–though he wouldn’t have because it had been said before and the devil was nothing if not original–let there be light.
It’s still possible, easy even, to remember all the varieties of early light of the devil’s newly invented world.
Weak transom light. Light of the inside of the bread box light on the metal surface of the colander hanging from a wall, light attached to a hunk of Parmesan cheese or the white gleaming milk in the glass bottle (with the likeness of a cow etched into its surface) delivered every morning by the milkman to the metal box on the back porch. Light coming in and bending back on itself through the second-floor windows in front of which were white paper shades. Light that beamed like the light of an egg. Summer afternoon light down at the beach on a July afternoon, visible in the sand and on the hazy horizon. Basement and old furniture light that was (and would always remain) brown like the center of a root beer lozenge held up to a lamp.
The world was so new then it was wearing a cap made of long tendrils of ivy trailing on air; or a nurse’s cap on the first day of her job at St. Vincent’s; or a policeman’s hat and gold button uniform.
It was a world in which uniforms were common, uniforms for every occasion and occupation—the uniform of the TV repairman who came to unscrew the back panel of the television and replace the burned out tube; the navy blue uniform of the gas station attendant (Leo the Deacon Street neighbor worked at the Esso station on Main Street), the gray pants and jacket and cap of the bus driver, and the red uniform worn by Margie the movie usherette. Even the guy who picked up the dirty clothes and delivered them to you clean the next day wore a uniform.
The devil’s world was so confident, so sure of itself, it could leave the doors unlocked and wait for your inevitable entrance, for the appearance of new babies with their glad tidings—at least the presence of a baby meant someone had another chance — (the way it used to wait for the appearance of Christ and other familiar figures). It was so new it kept washing itself off every morning like a dog licking itself clean at night. As new as the spittle on a baby’s mouth and someone wiping it away.
In the new world the devil had invented things that still needed to be done. You couldn’t just sit around and enjoy the invention. Even then at the very beginning, the world made reasonable demands.
Someone had to wash the floor and make it shine. Someone had to pick up after someone
else. Someone had to prepare the dinner. Sweep up crumbs with the flat of a hand, sweep up dirt with a bristly broom. And someone had to take care of the baby just back from the hospital. Someone had to change his diapers and when they were dirty wash them in a pot of boiling water on top of the stove.
There was a big bassinet, and there was–eventually–a playpen in the living room. A crib next to the bed the parents slept in. There was at the very beginning a hospital suitcase to be emptied: Here– put these things where they belong. Someone turned on the faucet and washed the nipple of the baby bottle.
In the apartment on that first day, the day of the baby’s first appearance, everyone was enjoying the long moment of that note held by everyone who sang the same note without even realizing it.
Out back there was laundry hanging from the clothesline, flowery nightclothes; in fact there was laundry hanging from three clotheslines one on top of the other; it looked like a parade.
The baby was so small — smaller than an uncooked pot roast–being passed around the Italian kitchen, everyone being extremely careful not to drop him on the soft spot on his skull. His fingers were so thin, they felt like paper, you could see the veins running through like red veins on a leaf.
The grandmother with the ankle length peasant dress over which she wore the apron with the big pockets spat on the baby three times for luck.
And speaking of luck, good or bad, what about its author, the devil. Isn’t it time to say something about the inventor of the world?
Here’s what we know. Like anyone else, he had his sources of pleasure. He liked the smell of old metal, rusted bolts and screws wafting up from a can kept on a cobweb covered shelf in the cellar. The metal of the screen in the living room window, the thick and heavy smell of unstirred cans of house paint, the sharp smell of turpentine, nail polish remover. The chemical smell of the inside of a new refrigerator (called by the people who lived in that house ‘the Frigidaire’).
He liked to watch water drip from the bathroom faucet; tomatoes wrap themselves around sticks and slugs crawl in the garden. He enjoyed watching grandfather make and drink his homemade wine kept in a cask in the cellar. He was fond of spiders, particularly small red ones, bees and wasps, sweat and dirt.
Most of all, he enjoyed people. He enjoyed the neighbors, whether they were getting along or not. The way the old treated the young and then the way the young treated the old, when it was their turn, a few years later. He enjoyed the teenagers in their leather jackets and party dresses driving around in souped-up cars on a Friday night. The creaking of the mattress overhead, the rhythmic sound of one pushing up against another on the other side of a bathroom door. The spindly fingers picking through the canister of bleached flour in search of flour bugs, all the viscous and jelly-like substances that people produced. He liked it all.
It was said the devil was in charge of waste, all those fluids and solids that spill out of the human body, the kitchen garbage with broken eggshells and soggy coffee grounds at the top, twisted cigarette butts marked with red lipstick, armless dolls, things no one wants anymore; meat gone bad; dead people; flies on flypaper. People claimed to find evidence of him in the black sludge at the bottom of the garbage cans next to the garage; in the long piece of excrement (someone forgot to flush) ridged and twisted at one end like a dark firecracker, and with a brownish halo around it.
They consigned him to death, calling him its overlord because as the inventor of the world he was the inventor of death. And understandably, too, death making such a frightening and lasting impression (which they constantly, whenever possible, did their best to deny) they forgot that he was also responsible for life.
He was responsible for the garrulous celebration that first Christmas dinner around grandmother and grandfather’s dining room table (the baby in the highchair, wearing a bib). He was responsible for the fat grandmother’s joyous shouts, her fried squid, her tomato sauce and anisette cookies and the big tray of struffuli (a mound on tin foil of golden honey covered Christmas cookies). He was responsible for the grandmother herself, so fat she looked like a wine barrel. (Of course, it’s true that the exact moment of her death was written on the inside of that barrel.)
He was there from the start, in the game of ball and jacks, the box of crayons, when the whole family packed up and went for summer outings on the beach, the waves breaking like hissing lace; he was there on cold, blue Christmas morning, the windows frosted over and refusing the warmth of your hand.
But that’s getting ahead of the story and no story should move quite that fast, not even a story that belongs to the devil who moves however he pleases, though most notably the way a crab does, sidewise.
In fact, it’s possible that there is no end to this story—the devil like God being eternal and eternally cyclical—or that the end will remain elusive for a long time, and then it will suddenly occur, eliminating the storyteller and the possibility of an ending.
For now, it is enough to remember the invention of the world and its inventor.
It’s enough to say that the devil invented the world, and it was like the sound of a church bell tolling reversed. Suddenly purple blue morning glories wrapped themselves around a rotted porch column on Deacon Street. The devil was the wide-open mouth of the flower, the gradation from purple to blue, of the morning glory; and the morning glory was the open mouth of the world. He was the red sky at dusk, the gutted fish entrails at the top of the trash, and all the flies, horseflies and houseflies attracted, the fish blood on the burlap sack brought back from a day at the shore. He was the smell of the elephants when the circus rolled in and set up tents on the east side of the city, the pink of cotton candy, the clowns in their baggy pants that made one child laugh and another cry and want to go home.
He could be found in the barbershop, in the fast-moving scissors in the barber’s hands, and the dark curls clipped from the child’s head – two three years old already – seated in a special chair in the barbershop chair while the barber gave the boy’s attractive mother compliments—“Get outa here! You can’t be his other! You’re too young! You look like a Hollywood movie star?” that he hoped would lead to a satisfying conclusion somehow, somewhere.
The devil was everywhere at once and as if to make the point he was on every one of thirteen channels on the squat black and white television with its gold capped feet sunk in wall-to-wall carpeting.
Of course, this is only speculation. This is only the voice of Deacon Street trying to make the best of things.
It’s a story that wants to be original as we all want to be original — but isn’t. The baby delivered to Deacon Street is like other babies born who showed up on that street or on any of the surrounding streets at the end of the 1950s or the beginning of the 1960s. In a few years the factories would pack up and move elsewhere to places where labor was cheaper and unions outlawed, but that’s another story. The devil was always reinventing the world.
A few weeks after the baby showed up, his mother dressed him in a long lace christening gown, and mother, father and aunt and uncle (the godparents) took him to the church. The old church, constructed of fieldstone with a tall cross-topped steeple, marble altar, vaulted ceilings, was familiar to the devil, an old haunt. While mother and father stood by watching, the priest poured holy water over the baby’s hairless soft oddly shaped (as if dented) head. Of course, the baby began to cry. And his aunt and uncle answered the priest’s questions on his behalf. One of the questions had to do with the devil.
The priest asked: Do you renounce Satan and all his works?
Yes, they answered. Yes.
But what a question. Who could renounce the inventor of the world? Who could renounce the world itself?