Emile Laurent got away with it, every day. How is it that some people get away with things on a regular basis, while the rest of us don’t? It requires both the means and the opportunity. What my friend Emile got away with every day, I would have loved to have gotten away with even half of, once in a while. But at fifteen, I’d never had the means, therefore never the opportunity. He had both, and he sauntered right up to it every day.
Good-looking kids get away with things us plainer and meeker do not. Bat-blind I may have been without my glasses, but I always saw this clearly. The teacher who surreptitiously changes the C- to a C+, or the principal who gives a warning when other kids would get detention. Just look at Emile’s yearbook picture. The sun-buttered blond hair rippling away from his face as if he’d reversed the tide just a few miles from our Southern California junior high school, the tan of his forehead like the shore creeping into the waves instead of vice versa. He leans to the right while his gaze goes to the left, just as Troy Donahue-like as the man himself. I didn’t hold it against him. He didn’t have an atom of hubris in him, just a benign kind of social ignorance that took its time to dawn on me.
Our junior high was brand-new because it was 1962 and the older schools were bulging with all us post-war babies. The school drew from a large area, meaning I spent my days amidst kids from luxury homes up in the hills, those from broken-down neighborhoods with junk-strewn yards, and teeming variations of in-betweeners. I didn’t know where Emile fit into that picture when he and I met the first day of seventh grade. I only knew that we took to each other immediately.
“I like your name,” he said.
My eyebrow twitched; surely he was teasing me. “It’s Steve,” I replied, thinking he’d mistaken me for someone else. Every third boy in our class was named Steve.
He nodded. “No way to mispronounce that, is there? Luck-out.” A second-grade teacher at St. Mary’s calling roll on the first day of school had flubbed his name. Em-i-ly Lor-rent? The playground teasing went on for years.
But who can really say why twelve-year-olds of such different upbringings hit it off? Perhaps it was that we both viewed ourselves as escapees from parochial grade schools, now giddy with the freedoms of public school. Or just that he was fun to be with. He taught me to thigh-drum “Wipe Out” as good as The Surfaris. “It’s just single stroke left-right-left-right-left-right really fast,” he advised, demonstrating. I taught him to towel-whip flies in mid-flight, coaching him to wet the striking tip of the towel and stand sideways when spotting the target. “The towel will travel faster than the speed of sound when you snap your wrist, faster than any fly.” Before our first week of school was out, he invited me to go to Newberry’s with him on Saturday. He wanted to see the new Duncan yoyo. I jumped at this chance to get a close-up look at Revell’s new model of the Convair B-58 Hustler supersonic bomber that I’d only seen in ads.
From the casual quips of friends, I’d guessed that Emile’s dad had a position of some importance at Convair Astronautics. You could say my dad was in the aviation industry too. He worked the ticket counter of one of the big airlines, crazy swing shifts, extra shifts when he could get them. He left for work by the time I came home from school, was still at work when I went to bed, and was sleeping when I left for school in the mornings. In time, I realized how much Emile took for granted, like having a father actually present in his life, who sat across the table from him at breakfast and dinner. And in time, Emile and his dad both had to admit the consequences of their nonchalance about that.
But that day of reckoning was years in the future the weekend Emile and I met at Newberry’s. In the Hobby Shop, I longingly examined the B-58 Hustler model in its silver-blue box. What could be cooler? Well, having 79¢ to buy it would be cooler, but today wasn’t that day.
Emile didn’t share my fascination with the B-58 but he waited patiently while I indulged mine. Then we continued on to the toy department and his version of cool supersonic aviation—Duncan’s new Mark II Shrieking Sonic Satellite Yoyo. A red glitter-dusted orb surrounded by white rings, a sprinkling of holes in the rims created an eerie whistling as the yoyo bobbed up and down. I could see that the dollar bill Emile handed over to pay for it wasn’t the only one in his pocket.
I didn’t think about it much until our last year of junior high. By then I’d figured out that whoever said money isn’t everything obviously had enough. Emile had enough, handed to him, seemingly without question by his parents. Did they ever ask what he did with his daily lunch money, or did they blithely assume it went where they intended?
I wondered about that, because while I’d find a spot on a bench in the outdoor lunch court at our junior high with my bag lunch, Emile moved through the cafeteria line. While I extracted my wax paper-wrapped sandwich—two thick slices of my mother’s homemade whole wheat bread smeared with equally thick lentil soup—Emile emerged from the line with the same thing every day. A perfect four-inch square of thickly frosted chocolate cake and a chocolate milkshake.
“My folks don’t care what I eat,” he said when it became apparent to our lunch group that this was now going to be a daily habit.
“Do they know?” I asked. His eyes bulged as he downed a huge swallow of shake and took a while to recover from the brain freeze. He didn’t answer, just stared past me, contentedly sugar-buzzed. The conversation around us moved on, one of the guys asking if anyone was up for the Padres game on Saturday. Emile snapped to. Sitting inert in the sun with a stadium-sized box of Cracker Jack appealed to him. I kept silent as they made their plans and made for the door back into the building the instant the end-of-lunch bell rang.
Emile caught up to me. “You’re coming with, aren’t you? You don’t have to like baseball. You can just check out the girls and eat peanuts.”
I gave him a sharp look and pulled the pocket of my chinos inside out. Bare as a baby’s ass.
He persisted. “Can’t you ask your dad for the money?”
“How about I ask your dad?”
“What do you mean?”
“You still don’t get it, man? You know we never have that kind of money.” The repo man came for my mom’s car last week. Did I have to spell that out?
“Well, how about we sneak into the bleacher seats?” His face reflected an easy certitude that he could get away with it. Flirt it up with the girl in the ticket booth while his friends slipped through the gate.
I told him I’d think about it. And I did, didn’t I?
As he and I would both soon learn—he firsthand and I, through him—we can get away with something until we don’t. Then we find out something we may not have considered before—what we have to lose. It turned out Emile had a lot to lose.
I dropped in at Emile’s house on a Saturday morning in June, one of those So Cal mornings so nondescript in their perfection. Gulls wheeling in the cerulean sky, 74 degrees. I had a little money in my pocket for once, from neighborhood lawn-mowing jobs. Since I could only offer my services within the small radius of how far I could push our creaky old mower down the sidewalk, it was a limited enterprise, ending where the sidewalk did. But maybe today Emile and I could go to Jack in the Box and I could enjoy a milkshake with Emile instead of just looking on while he chugged one.
Emile’s girlfriend was in the kitchen with him, watching his mother make lunch. Linda Miller was the prettiest girl in our class. She knew it, and had subtle ways of letting us know she knew it. She smiled but never grinned. She radiated energy but never hurried. She was never unkind but often silent when she could have been warm. She smelled of peach lip gloss liberally applied, so you couldn’t miss seeing it while knowing you would never taste it. And it was those glossy lips that sank Emile’s ship.
Mrs. Laurent waved me in with the familiar tinkling of the charm bracelet she always wore, never breaking in her motion of slicing avocado for her signature chef salad. Lettuce, chicken, tomatoes and hard-cooked egg slices were already in the bowl while an aromatic homemade dressing waited in a bowl nearby, next to a plate of fragrant oatmeal muffins.
It wasn’t so different from the kind of fresh food my mother made. But Linda Miller seemed surprised. She hadn’t even acknowledged my presence before popping off with “So that’s how he can eat chocolate cake and ice cream every day and stay healthy!”
I swear, it was like a bad cliché out of a movie, the whole scene seemed to blur at the edges and tilt sideways. There, Linda. There, Emile, and there, Mrs. Laurent, all wearing the same missile-struck expression, all for very different reasons: Linda, the inadvertent betrayer. Emile, the exposed. Mrs. Laurent, the now dangerously enlightened.
Of course Emile saw those stricken looks, caught in the crossfire between them as he was, trapped like a hair in an oatmeal muffin. What he didn’t seem to see was me. I suddenly remembered another lawn that needed mowing and slipped out as unobtrusively as I’d arrived only moments earlier. Maybe he wouldn’t even remember I’d been there, maybe I could give him that small gift of dignity.
But no, he knew, and didn’t try to shy from it. We met at the beach a few days later. We sat on our towels in the sand and he watched dispassionately as the waves performed their relentless routine, shaking his head when I offered him one of the Pall Malls I’d nicked from my dad’s pack. He told me the story straight, the cold sock to the stomach at the moment of Linda’s betrayal, then the sinking second-by-second wait for the consequences, and I realized he wasn’t detached, just numb.
You have to know this about Emile’s parents: they had some mysterious inner thermostat set to “unfailingly pleasant,” from which neither of them ever deviated. Never elated, never irritated. They embodied the laid-back 1960s California beach vibe as if they’d bought a subscription. So when Emile’s artifice came to light, they didn’t get angry. Calm as the sea breeze in the palms outside the window, they explained that, by opting to interpret the lunch money they’d given him as gâteau et glace money, he’d made a foolish choice. Clearly, he required a kind of education not offered in school.
And because the end of the school year was only days away, he would get that education over the summer. He could think of it as a math class, they said. With paper and pencil, they multiplied out the cost of all those cakes and shakes, circled the total, then doubled it. This was the amount that Emile would earn and repay. He would work in his uncle’s commercial laundry, at an hourly net wage equal to the cost of one cake ’n’ shake lunch. The ten weeks of summer would be just enough hours to repay his parents, and to bank enough for the coming school year’s lunches. His plans to spend that summer on the beach with his friends evaporated like the steam in which he would spend the coming months.
He related all this to me the night before he was to report for work. His voice was hollow, as if he didn’t yet believe it, that a few pieces of cake would cost him an entire summer.
But that wasn’t the worst of it.
“My dad apologized to me,” he said, his voice almost breaking. His parents had escaped France during the war. Now he learned they’d thought they couldn’t have children. When he came along, they wanted nothing more than to give him a life of serenity and ease. “Pop said they never wanted me to know what it was like to go to bed hungry, wake up hungry and scared, and go through the day hungry, scared, and trapped.” Emile’s eyes followed the thread of smoke escaping from the corner of my mouth. “He actually teared up when he said they’d failed me as parents. Hadn’t taught me how fragile trust is or what a work ethic is. What it’s like to live without fearing for your freedom. Or life.”
“I’ve gone to bed hungry and scared,” I told him. It came out more sharply than I intended. Our home life, while not a war zone, was far from serene. “You just gotta get up each day and keep going.”
*
The laundry wasn’t far off my path as I headed for the beach each morning. One day I detoured a couple of blocks off the boulevard to stand across the corner from the imposing three-story, brick-columned building. With its screenless windows wide open, I could hear the rumble of heavy machinery. No voices made it through, no faces appeared in any of those many windows.
The sheer din of the laundry made me think the work must be exhausting. And this was exactly how Emile avoided me for some weeks. I’d call, he’d say he was too tired for friends in the evenings. Did I detect a tinge of shame in his voice? Finally, he agreed to meet me in the park outside the nearby community center where we liked to go to listen to garage bands play. But he wouldn’t go in. We sat on a bench in the dusk, his eyes flicking briefly over my hair, now blonder than his. Again he declined my purloined cigs. He did seem too tired to talk, so finally I asked, “What’s it like?”
He took a deep breath, like he was fueling himself for what he had to say. “The start time” he said, “is 7:00 a.m., and that doesn’t mean 7:02. That means 6:58.” We exchanged glances of wordless understanding of how extraordinarily hard this was for a teenager.
His work began with loading up five big giant washing machines. To do that, he’d climb a very steep flight of steps, like ship stairs. Big giant loaded bins of dirty laundry waited on the upper floor, to be handloaded into chutes that fed into each washer below. Then he’d fly down the stairs back to the washers, hands sliding on the slick rails, plummeting to the lower floor. He’d open up the big giant lids to these stainless-steel washers and pull the ropes hanging above to open the chute and down would come acres of dirty, smelly sheets from numerous hotels and hospitals around town, all to be fed into the washers by hand.
At this point, he paused in his monotone narrative, looking past me, his jaw tight. He reached for my cig and took a deep draw, letting the smoke leak from his lips for a good half-minute. Then he told me that sometimes he’d find small body parts in the hospital sheets, like chunks of umbilical cord. Or blood and bits of unidentifiable flesh. It creeped him out the first few times, but he was getting used to it. Sometimes from the hotels he’d find raunchy sex magazines.
When he clammed up and didn’t elaborate, I blurted, “Like . . . what?”
“‘Young Beavers.’” He flinched a little saying it. Then he plunged on. “Pages and pages of women with their . . . legs spread.” At this, we did not exchange knowing looks. Neither of us had ever seen anything like it before, and we knew we were too young for it.
He droned on, talking about measuring out scoops of soap so caustic it burned his nose if he breathed the dust. Then he’d pull down the double doors on each side of the washer, be sure they were latched tightly, then pushed a couple of buttons to get it started. Then back up the ship stairs to load more washers, then back down the stairs, pushing the big giant drums of wet laundry not yet spun to the extractors, where other workers would take over. That was his life, an endless loop running up the stairs and down, back and forth all day, at a killer pace. It was a fast-moving industrial operation; he was part of a chain and had to keep up.
“If people down the line are tapping their feet because of me and the floor manager sees it,” he told me ominously, “that’s not good.”
Emile’s Troy Donahue looks weren’t buying him any slack in this job. And because of that, he didn’t look so Troy Donahue anymore. “Do they know you’re . . . a kid?” I asked.
“My uncle told them I was eighteen. Why should they care as long as I keep up? They have plenty of problems of their own.”
I knew about those kinds of problems. Our family had moved more times than I could remember. The repo man wasn’t our first humiliation. Power turned off when bills went unpaid. Meat loaf stretched with oatmeal until unrecognizable as meat loaf.
“What do you eat for lunch at the laundry?” I asked, curious, since his lunch choices were the cause of all of this.
He kind of snorted and sighed at the same time, and then said he hadn’t known he could feel so small. I could see it on his beat face, the big giant harshness of his summer education. Feeling a little of what his parents had wanted to spare him. A little scared. A little hungry. A little trapped.
Harsh, too, to realize that some of the workers there were lifers, union laundry members since forever. “Their wives work there too,” he added. “Folding sheets as they come out of these big giant spinning steam roller presses. All the folding done manual, by two women. Can you imagine folding sheets all day?”.
“I can’t,” I said. “I don’t even like folding one sheet at home. I just make my bed up again the same day Mom washes the sheets.”
“You make your own bed?” he asked.
“You don’t?”
I could almost feel something between us expire.
We drifted home that night and I knew I wouldn’t see him again for the rest of the summer. I did see Linda Miller, at the community center, with a new beau in tow. On a hot evening when she glided by on the sidewalk an arm’s length away, she seemed to shrug without ever budging her shoulders. I guessed there’d been no break-up message to Emile. She just moved on, like she was doing right now, like it was a given that the rest of us should watch her back recede into the distance ahead of us. She was just another loss against the bottom line of Emile’s summer of reparation.
*
On the day my mother turned the calendar page over to August before she left for work, I put my cereal bowl with its dregs of soggy cornflakes in the sink and realized I was bored. Going to the same beach with the same friends every day, making the same jokes, sometimes running out of things to talk about. Endless freedom had turned into too much of a good thing. I was now acutely aware of the dangers of that. I went out to look for work.
A local builder took me on with a wink and a cash-payment arrangement. He taught me to make adobe bricks. I learned the difference between sandy loam, loamy sand, and sandy clay loam, and spent my days in the sun with a hoe, shovel, and wheelbarrow. I thought about Emile, more or less enslaved in his work while I found mine exhilarating. The opposite of feeling imprisoned, work sprung me from the dispiriting cloister of home. I loved it, body and soul. The mindset that I could create useful things with my hands—and get paid a real wage for it—became a kind of home in itself.
Emile returned to school in the fall looking more or less like Emile, but an oddly faded version. The laundry had steamed the blond out of his rippling waves into a dullness that matched his sun-deprived skin. His arms stood out, though, ropy from work. Neither would last, I knew. His golden tones would return and the muscles slacken as he returned to typical teen life. He was dressed impeccably, his new olive-checked Dacron-blend shirt, the latest in so-called easy-care attire, which I knew only because my mother had seen it in the Walker Scott department store ad, disdaining any shirt that didn’t require ironing. She loved ironing; it was her time to sing with abandon in her lush alto. She made “Mack the Knife” sound like a lullaby. I couldn’t imagine Mrs. Laurent singing over an ironing board any more than I could see my mother buying a Dacron shirt. On our first day of high school, I wore last year’s shirt pressed to perfection, and a well-maintained tan.
Emile had been my friend, but not my best friend. He was still unfailingly pleasant, but there was a distance to it. In the larger labyrinth of our new high school, it was easy to avoid old discomforts, lose oneself in a crowd of clean-slate friends. I faded to the periphery of his new existence, and he to mine. Before the end of the year, my family had moved again, and my junior high memories stayed behind, falling to the back of the line of what mattered to me.
Four of those teenage lifetimes later and 1,300 miles north, Bernie’s Diner in Montana gleams, sun glinting off the chrome-legged chairs with bright red vinyl seats. Even the immaculate red and white menu shines in laminate Sunday-morning welcome. My wife and I chuckle at the breakfast entrée called Cardiologist Cakes, pancakes stuffed with bacon, ham, and sausage. We gag over something called Captain Crunch French Toast. But the best is yet to come. My wife taps the bottom of the menu, and there it is. Vacation Breakfast, they call it: chocolate cake and a milkshake.
I’d told her the story years ago. Now her eyebrows climb high in amused expectation as she cocks her head toward the swinging porthole-windowed kitchen doors behind the counter and quips, “Do you think Emile’s back there?”
“Could be,” I agree, realizing that in all of my long career as a finish carpenter, all the countless public buildings I worked on, the countless people streaming by, I never wondered where Emile might have landed. Easy to assume it was mutual.
My wife taps the menu again. “You gonna do it?”
I have the means. I have the opportunity.
Too much of a good thing. I silently thanked him, wherever he was, heaven or earth, for a lesson he’d lived that had served me well.
“No, thanks.” I smile, warmed by Bernie’s coffee, and the affirmation in those two little words.
–
Ellen Notbohm’s internationally renowned work has touched millions in more than twenty-five languages. She is author of the award-winning novel The River by Starlight, the nonfiction classic Ten Things Every Child with Autism Wishes You Knew, and numerous short prose pieces appearing in literary journals, anthologies, and other publications.
© 2024, Ellen Notbohm
Halfway Down the Stairs 