21st Century Bogatyr: An Arcade and a Penny for Your Thoughts

"The story of my life is about back entrances, side doors, secret elevators and other ways of getting in and out of places so that people won't bother me." ~ Greta Garbo

This is a fictional work in progress. Links to the rest of the story are at the bottom on this page.

by Zvi Baranoff

By the time Frank got back from sorting things out with Zuhrah, I had already found the command center and lounge of this Piney enclave and had introduced myself to Bo, the nominal patriarch of this particular Piney clan. We were comfortably seated in lounge chairs, drinking moonshine from Mason jars, smoking Cuban cigars and listening to Beethoven on a fantastic sound system.

This was an extended family with deep roots in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. From the earliest Colonial Period this clan spawned and nourished smugglers, moonshiners, poachers, draft dodgers, highwaymen and other highly resourceful and independent sorts.

For centuries they managed to outrun the Revenuers and other sorts of authorities as well as outmaneuver the gangsters and mobsters and bikers and thugs that tried to muscle in on their turf. They knew every nook of these twisted forests. A dark, brackish muck ran through their veins. The Pine Barrens were encoded into their DNA. These were my kind of people and I felt right at home.

Throughout the centuries, they always made their own whiskey. Most of that time, they supported themselves from it. Now, there is no longer any money in bootlegging. Nonetheless, these folks maintain and operate a still and continue filling Mason jars with smooth corn whiskey...because that is a family tradition. The product is smooth with a fine texture. The family business, however, is Cuban cigars.

Frank helped himself to some White Lightning and before long Bob and Spider found their way to the lounge as well. We each were quite ready to let go and seek some level of numbness. With the help of that Piney Elixir we reached that stage without much delay.

I drifted into a fluid sleep and dreamed I was cruising through the Pine Barrens in a high speed hovercraft. I drifted through nights and days. The sun filtered through the twisted trees and when darkness fell a bright moon and crystalline stars guided the way. Everywhere I went felt familiar as if I had been there before and quite recently.

I woke, feeling surprisingly refreshed. The lights had been dimmed and the music had been turned off. Spider and Bob were both sleeping comfortably and snoring in syncopation. Frank was nowhere to be seen.

I went to find the pisser. Most of the underground compound was surprisingly light and airy. It was easy enough to navigate and I easily found the facilities and then headed back towards the lounge where I had left my compadres.

On the way back, I found an alcove with a sign reading "Penny Arcade" and could see that one wall was lined with ancient Mutoscope machines.

I remembered similar devices on the Boardwalk from my childhood. When I was growing up, these things were already an oddity and an anachronism. However, at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, they were the cat's pajamas. These contraptions offered the first semblance of motion pictures.

I stepped in to have a closer look. In the Arcade the lighting was much more diffused than the compound as a whole. The flooring seemed to be of wooden planks reminiscent of the Boardwalk of my childhood, although it was likely imitation wood. The air was filled with the smell of salt water and cigarettes and stale perfume. I think I heard the sounds of waves peripherally, and some tinny music filtered into the Arcade from somewhere beyond my sight.

Above the row of Mutoscope machines there were posters advertising the Zeigfeld Follies and other theatrical performances, all from the 1920s and each featuring a contemporary, scantily dressed beauty.

Each machine had a coin slot to activate and a crank to operate. I found several pennies in the coin return cup of the first machine I approached. I remember pennies from my childhood. They weren't worth much then, but in this Arcade pennies were the Coin of the Realm.

I fed a coin into the slot of that first machine and looked into the viewer as I turned the crank. The images jumped as cards flipped. They created the illusion of motion. A buxom beauty wearing little to nothing moved about in sepia tones, climbing into bathtubs or out of a bed or through palm leaves. I was captivated by her allure. I moved from machine to machine and the same vixen revealed herself to me in each, with feathers or silks or bubbles or other sorts of ephemeral cloaking of her otherwise nakedness.

With each view I became more enamored with this beauty of another time long gone. It briefly crossed my mind that she was a contemporary of my grandmother. I assumed that my grandmother and she moved in very different social circles. My grandmother did not seem to be the sort who would pose semi-clothed, even in her youth. I don't think she would have approved of that sort of thing. Of course, Grandma was quite old when I knew her.

The woman in the Mutoscope would be the same age as my grandmother...that is long dead. Nonetheless, to me, in that arcade, she was very much alive and with every coin that fell in the slot and every viewing of her nearly naked form, I became more obsessed and infatuated.

"You naughty boy, you!" came a voice from across the arcade. I looked up from the viewer. Standing there with her hands on her hips was a woman with the face of the woman in the Mutoscope.

My mouth may have been hanging agape. I was assuredly startled and confused and I wasn't in much shape to hide it.

She was fully clothed, including a coat and what certainly was a fashionable hat in the 1920s. She was definitely the same person as the woman in the machines that I had been oggling.

She pouted in a most lovely way, began wagging her index finger clearly in my direction and continued speaking.

"How long have you been in town?" she asked. "Why are you here watching me on the peeps when you should have just come by the hotel and up to my room?!?" This was probably more of a statement than a question. This she said as she walked in my direction, still wagging her index finger.

"I am angry with you." she said as she stood at my side. "Furious," she whispered in my ear and then took my earlobe gently between her teeth in what seemed to be a very friendly bite. She kissed me on the cheek and hooked her arm around mine. She implied a possessive claim on me with absolute surety.

I got the feeling that if she was really angry with me at some point she was mostly over being angry by that point. She led me out of the arcade and onto the Boardwalk proper, which was, of course, quite surprising for me although my young companion seemed right at home in our surroundings.

The air was cool and the sky was overcast. She led me past a doorman into the lobby of a hotel with plush furniture, brass furnishings and carpets. There was an antique elevator door with an electric button on the wall. She pushed the button and impatiently tapped her foot.

The doors of the elevator opened. An old Black man wearing a red cap and uniform operated the curious mechanism of the elevator. He greeted my companion with a broad smile, a slight tip of his cap and a particularly polite "Mam".

We entered the elevator. "Fifth floor, James," she said to the fellow.

Then she turned her head in my direction and said to me, "Give the boy a nickel, why doncha." It took me a moment to remember what a nickel was. Meanwhile, I was looking about the elevator for a child, but found none. I must have appeared baffled.

"Oh!" she continued, while looking at me. "Mister Big Shot, you are! You don't even have a nickel, I bet!" She said this as she fiddled about in her purse. She found a nickel and handed it to the old man.

All this time she kept one arm hooked around my arm as if to assure that I wouldn't slip away. Clinging to me was not necessary at that point to assure my compliance and submissiveness. I had nowhere else to be at that moment. I also had no way of getting out of that elevator other than to wait for the doors to open when we reached her floor. Besides, I was looking forward to spending some time with the woman from the Mutoscope.

Mostly, however, standing there in that elevator, I wondered what my connection was to this beautiful young woman. I couldn't remember her in any sort of way. I wondered how I would go about even finagling a name to hang on her as it seemed that I was heading to her room for the night and it might be appropriate to know something about her.