THE PALE LIGHT OF SUNSET: SCATTERSHOTS AND HALLUCINATIONS IN AN IMAGINED LIFE

Booze Runner - 1955

78 1955 Booze Runner I lean against the railing at the edge of the open-air dance floor, three stories above the huge Dreamland swimming pool, looking out over the acres of empty grounds, most of it lush with grass. The grounds surrounding the pool are bigger than anybody’s yard I’ve ever seen. Acres of thick, rich grass stretch away toward the bank that rises gently to the top of the floodwall, capped by a chain-link fence. Beyond the fence and across the Big Sandy River, the late evening sun drops down behind the low mountains of Kentucky. To the south, a two-lane highway bridge rises from the street and flies above the grounds, soaring in a short arc over the brown, sluggish river and then dropping sharply down into Kentucky. During the day, when Dreamland is open, drivers sweating in their old cars always drive slowly across the bridge so they can look down on women in pink bathing suits lying on the cool grass. There are some buildings scattered around the edge of the grounds— dressing rooms, maintenance buildings, tennis courts, things like that. A chain-link fence surrounds everything, and each day one of us pool The Pale Light of Sunset 79 humps has to walk the fence to make sure no one has pried it up and made a place to slide, free, into the pool grounds. The dance floor, on the roof of the main building, must be fifty yards long and ten yards wide, a hard tile floor with metal tables and chairs and a bandstand tucked into one side. There is a curved metal roof, and that is all. Everything else is open to the world. I lean out over the railing. There is a wide sidewalk directly below, far below, and then the pool. The thick evening air is so still it is almost gone and the surface of the water seems to disappear, a pale blue color that drops instantly to the bottom of the pool. The pool is big, very big, so big that two concrete islands rise above the surface in the center, with plenty of room left over for a hundred people to swim. Frank Rizzo tells us that the pool is the biggest public swimming pool east of the Mississippi River. We know that it isn’t—there’s a bigger pool in Miami—but nobody is going to tell Rizzo that he’s lying. We are scared shitless of Frank Rizzo. Frank Rizzo owns the pool, the grounds, the buildings. He owns Dreamland, and it’s the only thing in this part of the state worth paying attention to. And Frank Rizzo owns our asses. I work for Frank Rizzo. I’m a pool hump. I do anything Rizzo tells me to do. Seven days a week I’m at the pool at 5:30 in the morning, picking up trash, hosing down the sidewalks, painting anything that needs painting, patching holes in the chain-link fence, making sure there aren’t any used rubbers stuck to the walls of the crappers. Sometimes, I put on an ancient metal diving helmet hooked to a leaky hose and clunking air compressor, go underwater and clean the bottom of the pool. While I’m down there, I look for errant turds that might be suspended in the water. When the pool opens for the day I do a magic change—I become Lee Maynard 80 a lifeguard, strutting around as though I’m above all that other shit work, never telling the girls that I’m the one who looks for turds in the water, spending hours underwater long before they have gotten up to take their morning pee. And on Saturday nights I’m one of three bouncers at the weekly dance on the open-air dance floor. And this is Saturday night. Seven days a week. And Rizzo doesn’t pay overtime. I’m just a kid, just out of high school, but I’m a big kid and I’ve always looked older than I really am and Rizzo thinks it’s funny, having a high school kid as a bouncer. Anyway, I hardly ever have to bounce anybody, and they’re usually so drunk that it isn’t hard to do, and Rizzo pays me more for being a bouncer than for being the guy who looks for...