“Show us Lieutenant Leto!” they demanded. “We want to see Lieutenant Leto!”
“The lieutenant is still sleeping,” Len replied, trying to calm them down. I could tell from his impish demeanor that this was not the first time he had rebuffed such a request. “He’s not coming out today. He needs his beauty sleep.”
“Please show us Lieutenant Leto!” the boys insisted. “Please!”
“The lieutenant has gone AWOL,” Len would tease them.
“Please show us Lieutenant Leto!”
This was a ritual that was repeated again and again throughout my seven-year stint in this far-flung corner of the retail sector. Boys would clamber for an appearance by Lieutenant Leto, and Len would act completely uninterested. He was not going to respond to pressure just because of the blandishments of a few rowdy teenagers. If they expected him to give in, they were going to have to show him that they really meant it. Only if they literally got down on bended knee and begged him would he drop his blasé attitude and accede to their requests for an appearance by Lieutenant Leto. As soon as he felt that the charade had gone on long enough, he would reach down under the counter and extract a filthy, decaying brown paper bag. This he would plunk down onto the counter. From within, he would now produce a human skull, which still had a few teeth dangling from the roof of the mouth.
“He must have been in a crap game that night,” Len would say, chuckling as he brandished a wad of bloodstained Japanese bills lying at the bottom of the bag. “That was the last time he felt lucky.”
He would then allow the boys to play with the skull, provided they did not rattle the teeth, several of which were coming loose. After the boys left, Len would return the skull to its final resting place beneath the cash register.
“He was the first man I killed,” Len later explained when I asked for more details about the strange odyssey of Lieutenant Leto. “We came up behind the Japs and shot them, then I chopped off his head, dipped it in high-octane gas, and wrapped it in a canvas bag. It’s called a marine’s pillow.”
What I remember most vividly from this incident, and from many subsequent appearances by Lieutenant Leto, was how natural it seemed at the time that Len should have a human skull wrapped in a brown paper bag stuffed away under the counter in his store. I was not horrified by Lieutenant Leto’s residence in the store, nor did Len’s behavior strike me as ghoulish; I had no frame of reference for this experience. V-J Day was a scant fifteen years in the past; the Japanese had waged a barbaric war against us; this being the case, the act of decapitating a stranger and bringing his skull home as a combination trophy and conversation piece seemed a perfectly acceptable course of action. To this day, when I hark back to Lieutenant Leto’s splashy debut that afternoon, I do not feel the revulsion I should. This is because it is impossible to retrofit emotions: If I was not horrified then, it is difficult to be horrified now. But I also think it may have something to do with growing up in an environment where abnormal behavior was the norm.
My father was highly upset when informed of the whereabouts of the unfortunate Lieutenant Leto’s noggin, and for a while there was talk about making me quit my job. But my parents needed the $6 I brought home every week, and in the end my father, who had served in the less overtly theatrical United States Army, simply wrote off this incident as macabre but predictable Marine Corps behavior.
“Those guys are so rah-rah,” he would say.
Rah-rah, indeed. But I liked the rahness of Len’s rah, and my father knew it. I liked everything about Len: his breathtaking mane of brown hair, his Ban-Lon sweaters, his scuffed Hush Puppies. Most of all, I liked his medals. Almost from the moment I began working in the clothing store, I was aware that he was taking on the role of a surrogate father. At several points, he offered to adopt me, an idea I sometimes encouraged, even though there was little likelihood that I would ever leave my mother and sisters behind. The truth was, a defection like that would have looked bad on my record; it would be like slipping away from the stagecoach station under cover of night, abandoning the wounded to a grisly fate at the hands of the Apaches.
While Len probably knew all along that adoption was not in the cards, he still acted very much in loco parentis. He taught me how to banter with strangers in the way that men do but boys don’t. He taught me how to tell stories, piling up detail after detail, occasionally taking a brief parenthetical detour, always making listeners wait for the big payoff; though because I was Irish American, I already had a head start on this sort of thing. He taught me how to throw a curveball, how to dance, and how to box, never failing to remind me, “Lead with your left.” Once he even cut my hair. This was during a period when I briefly disliked my hair more than I disliked my father.
My hair was perfectly straight and blond until the age of thirteen; it had the texture of braised straw. First it was blond, then dirty blond, then brown, but it was always entirely inanimate and never did anything but droop down over my eyebrows in a style evoking Teen Hitler, Austrian Cornball. Throughout this era, I dreamed of waking up with jet-black hair—to go with my jet-black suit—a raven-hued mane that I could slick back like Ricky Nelson or the hotshots on
Route 66.
I conducted various experiments to make my hair look better—pompadour, bangs, wispy sideburns—but nothing worked. Out of the blue, Len suggested a buzz cut, using a pair of electric shears he just happened to have lying around, as if he were holding them in reserve in case a battalion of hirsute paratroopers stopped by, desperate to get spruced up for the woodchopper’s ball. Len assured me that a buzz cut would not only keep me cool but make me look cool. This theory, I soon learned, had no basis in fact; the buzz cut made me look like Jimmy Crack Corn incarnate.
During the dog days of summer, Len and I would spend the long afternoons tossing a tennis ball back and forth, listening to the radio, straightening stock, waiting for customers to straggle in. We also did quite a bit of wrestling, madly careening around the store, sending the clothing flying this way and that. On days when business was slow, which it often was, Len would give me boxing lessons. All afternoon we would slug it out, pummeling each other from one end of the store to the other, with Len ceaselessly preaching, “Lead with your left, jab with your right.” Or maybe it was the other way around. Len insisted that even a man of the cloth might have to defend himself from time to time, but this flew in the face of everything I had ever been taught about Christ, whose pugilist skills, if they existed, were never mentioned in the scriptures.
Despite Len’s best efforts, these boxing lessons came to naught, as I was puny and weak, and had already noticed that all the people who liked to fight were bigger than the people they liked to fight with. Len maintained that the bigger they came, the harder they fell, but this I did not find to be the case. To the contrary, what I observed as I grew up was that the bigger they came, the faster everyone else fell. While I was still marking time in East Falls, waiting to bulk up, I learned to align myself diplomatically, often tenuously, with boys who were bigger and meaner than me, boys who could use help with their homework. The mythology of urban survival asserts that boys from bad neighborhoods grow up to be tough, but in my experience, boys who grow up to be tough sooner or later get flattened by boys who grew up to be tougher or who have more tough boys in their entourage. The boys who survive growing up in rough neighborhoods are the ones who become cunning, who see trouble coming and either befriend its practitioners or get out of their way. Len could not fathom such timidity and tact, because he was a marine, and marines believed in slugging people.
Len was also determined to take my education in hand. He was a voracious reader, but, like many men who embark on a lifetime program of self-improvement, he rarely read anything worth reading. He was the only person I ever met who had a subscription to
U.S. News & World Report
and actually seemed to enjoy it. Even then, this was unheard of. Graphically stultifying,
U.S. News & World Report
was the consummate symbol of the Eisenhower era. It was dry. It was sober. It was about as interesting as a thumbtack. But every week Len read it devoutly from cover to cover. It spoke his language, and he its.
Stacks and stacks of motivational guides by droll pinheads like Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale were piled high on the counter, right beside the cash register. Len would read them and reread them, convinced that each time he plunged back into their well-thumbed pages, he would unearth yet another pearl of wisdom that had previously escaped his gimlet eye. Often he would tell me to go back to the shoe department, sit myself down, and feast on the adventures of that irrepressible go-getter Henry Alger or that indomitable tycoon J. P. Getty. But even as a child, I found these books sappy and hackneyed and smug, so I read
Aquaman
instead.
“Can’t means
won’t
!” was the sort of Babbittian flummery these books purveyed. “Get there the first-est with the most-est” was another axiom. “There are no atheists in foxholes” was Len’s favorite, though this flew in the face of everything Americans believed about all those Red Chinese soldiers advancing the cause of godless communism in Korea, and seemed doubly illogical because Len himself gave no evidence of believing in God. These exhortations and bromides were of varied provenance; some sounded like they had emanated directly from the lips of Benjamin Franklin or Madame Curie or Ethan Allen, the good old Green Mountain Boy himself; others sounded like something Yvonne De Carlo or Ethel Merman might have said.
Len also devoured weird, pseudoscientific books illustrated with elaborate cranial charts and cephalographs depicting the interests, passions, and capabilities one could “scientifically” detect in the brains of Johann Sebastian Bach, Napoleon Bonaparte, Robert E. Lee, Henry Ford. These diagrams, visual paeans to one-dimensional men, persuaded Len that captains of industry never read novels, that fiction was for women and wastrels, that successful men shunned any reading material other than books that would make them even more successful. The diagrams and graphs suggested that Bach was a shallow, narrow-band doofus whose only real talent lay in the field of music, an idiot savant who would have had a hard time cutting the mustard in any other line of work. But that was hardly a criticism; shallowness was fine as long as it was profound shallowness, focused shallowness, passionate shallowness. Len could never understand why I gave the thumbs-down to his reading suggestions, preferring the escapist fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson, Lew Wallace, Percival Wren, Zane Grey, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and the rest of that crew. But then again, I suppose that anyone who got revved up reading
U.S. News & World Report
didn’t need Edgar Allan Poe to supply any thrills.
Throughout my seven-year apprenticeship at the store, my father came in no more than a handful of times. Once, when he was out of work and we were close to starvation, he asked Len to lend him ten bucks. A few weeks later, he gave me two fives and told me to repay the loan. Len made no comment at the time, but a few days later he said that my father had rubbed him the wrong way because he had borrowed $20 and repaid only $10. I had no way of knowing if this was true but suspected that it was. Len never asked for the other ten bucks; it was the last time we discussed the subject. Their only other contact occurred when my father miraculously amassed enough cash to buy a 1935 Buick that Len’s son Bing had raised from the dead. Bing was a master at restoring seemingly defunct junkers to a reasonably functional state, but he warned my father that if he pushed the Buick past the 45 mph mark, it would die on him. It was the first car we ever owned, so we were overjoyed when he forked over $35 for the roomy Capone-era conveyance and brought it home. He wrecked it in two days. He confiscated my wages to buy a new battery, but it was no use; the Buick was down for the count. Afterward, the cruddy old bomb sat at the bottom of our cul-de-sac for a few weeks. We tried playing in it, but the upholstery was prickly and retained the August heat, so it wasn’t much fun. Eventually, this glaring symbol of my failure as an intermediary got towed away, though the afterglow of my complicity in this disaster lingered for years.
Even to a child, it was obvious that there was something unusual about the Len Mohr philosophy of commerce. For example, he was always ready to drop everything, lock up the store, and drive over to Connie Mack Stadium a few hours before a ball game. Len had once owned three parking lots a few hundred yards from the stadium; the lots had provided a steady stream of income back in the early fifties, when the A’s were still in town and Robin Roberts and the Whiz Kids were fielding a string of uncharacteristically competitive Phillies squads. But those days were gone, as were the A’s. Two of the lots Len had sold off; the third was on the block. So far, no takers.
It wasn’t merely the fact that he liked to close up shop in the middle of the day that branded Len an iconoclast. It was his attitude toward the Phillies. True, the summers were equatorial, making it pointless to hang around waiting for customers to drag their carcasses in. True, down at the stadium, after wrapping things up on the parking lot, we could at least take in the last few innings of the game. But the Phillies, a Chaplinesque aggregation of bozos, invalids, and slobs, always lost. Two years after I began working for Len, the hometown heroes dropped twenty-three games in a row, a record that will never be broken, and if it is, only by the Phillies. One year earlier, manager Eddie Sawyer quit after the first game of the season, declaring, “I’m forty-nine years old and I want to live to be fifty.” In light of these facts, Len’s attitude confused me. I could understand why he would close the store in the middle of a boiling hot summer day. But why he would close up just so we could drive over and see the Phillies is beyond me. He hated the sons of bitches.