THE WHORE IN THE BASEMENT by
Don Berry
Few men achieve true contentment in life. I am one of that happy few. Decade after decade, my children and the children of my children have asked, cajoled, and sometimes pleaded for me to reveal the secret of my serenity. Until this moment I have declined, usually politely, feeling it better for each individual to seek out his own salvation catch-as-catch-can. But now, knowing I am in the last years of my life, I wish to set down for the benefit of future generations the teaching I received almost by accident.A master teacher can transform a life almost instantaneously, but it is rare indeed to meet such a teacher, (or at least it is rare to recognize one.) I was fortunate. I was only sixteen years old when I met the teacher who would, through example, shape my life. His name was Uncle Beaky Killeen.
The summer between my junior and senior years of high school was a time of magic and promise. The Second World War was just over, and America had entered a marvelous kind of in-between period when everything seemed possible. The years between 1946 and 1950 seem, from this more cynical era, to be a time out of time. The real war was over, Korea and McCarthy and the Cold War were still below the horizon, and the fate of us all was spinning like a roulette wheel before the little marble drops into its final slot. Until then -- hey, anything could happen.
I was sixteen, swelled with ambition and optimism. I took for granted that I would make my first million before I was twenty-five, and gathered anecdotes about those who had done just that. The one I treasured most was a man who started out as a poor man selling junk, and thirty years later was a multi-millionaire selling junk. It seemed to me capitalism at its best; start out with something worthless and keep at it until you're rich.
In the meantime, the minimum wage (astonishing idea!) had been raised to seventy cents an hour. Wealth was in the air. Anybody could make better than thirty dollars a week with only the strength of their back and a willing spirit, both of which I had in plenty. In Portland two good horsemeat markets downtown charged 29 cents a pound for tenderloin, 20 cents for lesser cuts. Thirty dollars a week went a long way in the late forties.
Then I met Uncle Beaky Killeen, who was the embodiment of everything I hoped to become. Uncle Beaky was a perfect dynamo of energy and ambition. He stood only about five feet three, and hadn't even served in the military during the War. He wore thick glasses, and I think it was his eye-sight that made him 4-F, rather than his height. He had a thick head of prematurely gray hair, swept back from his forehead in a tall pompadour, oiled to perfection, with never a hair out of place. His eyebrows, by contrast, were almost black, and met just above his nose like two dark woolly bears meeting on a branch.
Uncle Beaky was the first adult kindred soul I ever met. He had the ambition, he had the drive, he had the insatiable desire for success I knew was necessary. Uncle Beaky wanted a million dollars as bad as I did. The big difference was that he knew exactly how he was going to get it.
"Wartime's tough times, kid," Beaky said. "People want to take it easy now. They want to eat good with no ration stamps, and drive their cars, and have other people do for them."
And what did Uncle Beaky's entrepreneurial intuition tell him they didn't want to do for themselves any more? The most pedestrian of all mundane chores:
Mow their lawns.
Uncle Beaky visualized a kind of mega-cartel of lawn mowing services, starting out with Portland, and gradually expanding over the whole west coast from Vancouver up in Canada to San Diego. I was fortunate enough, that summer of my sixteenth year, to get in on the bottom floor of this million dollar monopoly-to-be.
That made three of us; me, Uncle Beaky, and Billywit. Billywit actually was Beaky's nephew. He towered over Uncle Beaky by more than a foot. Billywit must have been six-foot six, and skinny as a scarecrow, which he resembled in other respects as well. But he was strong; working for Uncle Beaky you had to be strong.
Billywit was a half-wit. That was what we called them in those days. It wouldn't do now, I know that, but I don't know what we are supposed to call half-wits now.
In all the decades since, I have never met a man who was better to work with than Billywit. He was always cheerful, always willing, always strong, and always friendly. We made a first rate team, and I decided if I ever left Uncle Beaky to form my own business I would employ only half-wits.
Billywit and I, of course, did the actual mowing. We had three old push-mowers, of which one was always broken down for some reason. We started work at 7:00 in the A.M. and quit whenever it got too dark to see.
Uncle Beaky had bought a tan Studebaker right after the War, hypnotized by the strange two-headed creature. It was a time when half the jokes on the radio were about how you couldn't tell which direction a Studebaker was going. Every time Bob Hope made some dry little comment about the Studebaker, the three of us felt a swell of pride; he was talking about us.
Every morning that summer we loaded the two currently working lawnmowers in the trunk of the Studebaker, and took off for our first contracts of the day. (Uncle Beaky always referred to customers as "contracts.")
We specialized in the west side of Portland -- that was both where the money was, and where the lawns were hilly. Uncle Beaky's theory was that people with their lawns on a hill were more likely to hire us, and he was right.
Uncle Beaky drove like a madman, with the trunk lid of the Studebaker waving back and forth in the air, as it couldn't be closed over the lawn-mowers. He leaned far forward over the steering wheel, his nose just above dash level, peering with great intensity through the windshield.
I never did know how much he was able to see through those thick glasses, and was afraid to ask. His eye-brows crowded together in his concentration, until the two woolly bears appeared to be eating each other. He paid no attention whatever to stop signs or any other form of traffic regulation. I don't know whether he couldn't see them or just plain didn't care. Anything that got in the way of doing business was either to be ignored or conquered, and traffic signs somehow fell into that category.
Uncle Beaky did everything with the same intensity he drove. He had his eyes set on that million dollars, and if he had to run full tilt from now until then, that's what he would do. And as for me, I fell under the spell of Uncle Beaky's ambition willingly.
While Billywit and I mowed, Uncle Beaky spent his day going door to door in the neighbor-hood, setting up contracts for the next day, and Billywit and me had more work than we knew what to do with. I never knew what he charged the customers for each contract, but I was happy enough with 70 cents an hour, and the boss has to make money, doesn't he? That's how it works.
Fact is, we made a lot of money. Sometimes, toward the middle of the summer when there was a lot of light, Billywit and I could get through seven or eight lawns in one day. We were limp and exhausted by the end of the day, of course, but we didn't care. We believed in what we were doing, and were young enough to do it, and that was all that mattered.
Uncle Beaky and I spent that summer in a rosy glow of capitalistic ambition and optimism. Billywit, more sensible than the both of us together, simply enjoyed every day as it came. I never really knew what he thought about my hyper-ambition. The only clue I got was one evening when we were stroking the blade edges of our mowers with a flat file, as we did every night, and he asked me rather hesitantly:
"You ever count up to a million?"
"No," I said.
"How you going to know when you got yours?"
I thought about it for a minute. "They'll tell me," I said. I was pretty sure of it.
"Oh," Billywit said. "That's O.K, then."
It had been a long day, and I was grousing about the condition of the lawnmowers. Uncle Beaky wouldn't spend a dime on the equipment. Billywit and I spent more time than I thought it was worth just to keep them running.
"If Beaky had to push these things himself, we'd have new mowers in the morning," I grumbled.
Billywit smiled.
"The old penny-pincher," I went on, not expecting an answer. "Why won't he just get us one new mower? We could trade off."
Billywit cleared his throat softly.
"Uncle Beaky got no money," he said.
"He's got a ton of money," I said. "We make him a lot of money, Billywit, don't you know that?"
Billywit shook his head. "Uncle Beaky got no money," he repeated patiently. "He give it all to the whore in the basement."
"What? What?" What he said was so shocking I dropped my file down into the spiral blade of the mower.
"Uncle Beaky give all his money to the whore in the basement," Billywit said.
"What basement? What whore? What are you talking about, Billywit?"
"Our basement at home," Billywit said. "Uncle Beaky got a whore in our basement at home and he give her all his money."
"Billywit, do you know what a whore is?"
Billywit shook his head. To tell the truth, I wasn't dead-on sure myself, it being 1948 and me being 16 years of age. It was a different time. I had a kind of rough idea of a woman who did Babylonian things, but nothing in my imagination could encompass the idea of Uncle Beaky keeping a whore in the basement, from Babylon or not. What the hell was Babylonian things anyway?
"Want to see?" Billywit said. "Sometimes I watch through the window."
"Sure," I said, trying to sound knowledgeable. "Why not?"
"You come to the back porch at bedtime," Billywit said. "I show you our whore in the basement." He sounded modestly proud, like when Uncle Beaky talked about his Studebaker.
Well, I had to do it, of course. Whatever it was Billywit had gotten confused with a whore, the only way to find out was to go and see.
By "bedtime" Billywit meant 9:30, just after The Shadow. "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows..." And after tonight, perhaps I too would know.
There was still a faint purple glow in the western sky when I got to Beaky and Billywit's house. I was, by then, feeling very conspiratorial, so I leaned my bike up against a tree a full half-block away, and slipped up the alley, invisible as the Shadow himself. Billywit was waiting for me silently on the back porch.
He smiled his usual beaming good nature, and put his finger to his lips in an exaggerated gesture. He came up close and whispered in my ear, "Uncle Beaky down in the basement with the whore."
I nodded. Together we tip-toed around the house to the basement window, a narrow, four-paned rectangle of dusty glass set exactly at ground level.
The grass was beginning to cool in the coming of the evening. I remember with great clarity the coolness on my belly, and the quality of the dusk light, and the mystery that lay beyond the gray panes.
The glass was so dirty it was almost opaque. I have the vague impression of a little apartment, but one wall was entirely clear of furniture. As my eyes accustomed themselves to the darkness, I could make out two ghostly white forms.
On the empty wall, to my gaping disbelief, Uncle Beaky hung by manacled wrists. His usually-slicked-down hair was wild and crazy, and he wasn't even wearing his glasses. He was dead buck naked. His head was thrown back and his body was writhing like a worm on a hook.
In front of him, prancing back and forth on the highest heels I had ever seen, was the incredible orange-haired Whore of Babylon. She was not quite naked, but near enough. My forehead was suddenly wet, and the hair at the back of my neck prickled. I had never seen anything like this in my life.
As the whore capered in front of Uncle Beaky, she jiggled in the most amazing manner. In some sense, even in my sixteen year old hypnosis, I knew there were some places jiggling that ought not to be, but that barely registered.
Suddenly, the whore turned with a little riding crop she was carrying, and tapped Uncle Beaky on a naked thigh. Even through the window I could hear him moan.
"Billywit," I said, and my voice was strangled. "She's hurting him."
"Nah," Billywit said. "He likes it. That's what they do, and some other things."
"It looks like it hurts," I whispered.
"Nah," Billywit whispered back. "See them rings in the wall? He put them in there his ownself."
That night Uncle Beaky Killeen, writhing in ecstasy before the Whore of Babylon, illuminated for me the truth of human striving and ambition. It was branded on my spirit with the all the searing heat of wild hormones. In the five decades since, I have found few occasions on which it proved either untrue, or unhelpful. This is the Truth of Uncle Beaky:
All worldly ambition is ultimately illusory. In this world nothing is gained and nothing is lost. Life is always and ever a perfect balance, from moment to moment. For every million dollars you think you're going to make, there is a whore in the basement to whom you will give it all, and gladly.
In that one luminous vision of Uncle Beaky on the wall, all the positive and negative opposites of the universe resolved into perfect wholeness, and with that wholeness came consummate satisfaction.
I cannot adequately explain how this realization led to the serenity that has characterized my life. Certainly those who worship at the Altar of Ambition throw up their hands in despair at my apostasy, but that is their problem. There is no gain and no loss, and if the apostles of ambition cannot perceive that truth, it's not my fault.
Oh, yes, and there was a second, somewhat less cosmic truth as well: Whenever you see a man manacled to the wall, chances are he put the rings in himself.
Thus the teachings of Uncle Beaky Killeen.
end
The Whore in the Basement
©1995 Don Berry