By Victor Greto
“Feel the wood,” Harold breathed.
His hands – the tips of his knotty fingers – ran across the lid.
“That’s oak,” he said, before Nick had the chance to touch it. “Solid oak. Feel it.”
Harold’s voice whispered both sharp and full, Southern and pointed. He ended each spoken thought with an exclamation, a short breath that covered each sentence, or long fragment, with a thick caress.
Nick’s eyes started to roam over the musty wood. But Harold wouldn’t just look at it or touch it; he put his nose right up to the lid of the tall yellowed Victrola and sniffed at it like a dog checking out a bone.
Although he had been looking at the piece for several minutes already, he kept opening and closing the lid, his darting fingers roughly feeling the inside, nudging the turntable, rubbing the small circle-nub of the silvered arm.
“1917,” Harold said, looking up at the numbers dancing in his head, and then over at the old man standing by another Victrola, a shiny red mahogany one that he had just refinished.
“Yes,” the old man said. “That sounds about right.”
Harold sniffed again, either at the Victrola, or with contempt.
The cabinet needed work. The top of the lid had been neglected, was peeling. But the molding around the lip of the lid was solid, if flawed in spots with bumps and decades of grime and crumbly-curled varnish. Harold shook his head for a few seconds at a time as he dramatically pointed to, touched and sniffed every flaw.
Even when Harold opened his wallet he sniffed at its contents. Everything was fair game for Harold, to be sniffed, touched, valued.
Harold handed the man money. Nick couldn’t see how much because Harold’s callused hands covered it. But the old man smiled and nodded.
The oak was theirs. As if in benediction, Nick caught a wave of old, woody smell. At first offensive, he had grown to like it, cozy, old, safe, the moldy, womblike smell of another time, out of time, of deep brown tones and cigars and handlebar mustaches and suits and short ties and hats and smoky rooms and everything, everywhere wood and elaborate patterns of upholstery and the soft light of the radio and thick rugs and gaudy wallpaper and mother and father at the huge dining room table.
Harold turned to look at Nick and smiled, his spaced and nubby teeth the color of the oak of the Victrola cabinet he’d just bought, in need of refinishing.
Nick smiled, too. He couldn’t help himself, because Harold was so ugly and so utterly focused he was beautiful. Forget the fleshy nose, the pocked face that continued to stubbornly push out pimples, the kinky black hair as tight on his head as a fist around money – forget all that and look at Harold’s eyes, filled with a tender love for clawed feet and baroque scroll work, oak record cabinets and Edison cylinder players and the greasy, primitive motors that drove them toward their naïve, crackling, ancient sound.
In its mid-twenties, Harold’s body was both muscular and peculiarly curved, as if it were about to bend over and lift a piece of furniture, his hands, large, with scoop-long, veiny fingers and yellowed nails.
Harold didn’t walk; he shuffled, his upper body ahead of short, powerfully tight legs. His large eyes, with so much white, made his small brown pupils more intense, and his full lips stayed a moist red, habitually licked by an oversized tongue.
Harold’s mother was Nick’s mother’s sister, Cetta, a couple of years older than Grace, but stronger, wiry, her skin leathered from Florida sun. She and her husband, Joseph, had moved to central Florida from Delaware in 1960, and raised their two children there. A farmer in Delaware and Maryland, Joseph had been a welder and then a roofer. Nick had visited them once with his mother and younger brothers Anthony and Paul when he was ten, and they had swum in their pool and visited the recently opened Disney World an hour’s drive away.
But Nick only recently became conscious of Harold because his cousin had started to make annual treks to Philadelphia to root out antiques, and took Nick along.
It was great because it was all about getting away: driving shotgun in Harold’s yellow Datsun truck, as early as sunrise when the streets were empty and wet from dew, the two-lane, curving roads overshadowed by leafy trees, bird song and silky noiselessness. Harold never turned the radio on in the cab of the truck; he never said a word, driving with his left arm out, nervously picking at the tight curls of his hair with his thick fingers, his face looking down, his large round eyes looking both up and sideways at the traffic ahead. Just the silk-tearing sound of the rubber wheels on the road, air rushing through the open windows, relentlessly self-adjusting its volume by blocking and arcing around concrete barriers, trees and cars.
They drove to small towns in Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and New Jersey; the states seemed to have thousands of these places, their scattered farm houses with irregular porches leaning on hills for two-three-four blocks before disappearing again.
Rural and out of time, the towns clasped themselves around Nick’s heart like an old lady’s bony fingers around his wrist.
The shop doors still had bells that tinkled when they opened. Not the barbershop rattle that reminded him of men and resignation, but an eager-to-please ring that jangled honest commerce and money changing hands and deals to be made.
But even within that eagerness, there was no hurry. Its laziness fascinated Nick. Rural Pennsylvania reminded him of a time he never knew, anti-ethnic and rustic as he imagined much of the Midwest to be, comprised of stoic, hard people with stark-white faces who looked askance at him and Harold’s dark faces, but who instinctively knew they had come to buy, and smiled disarmingly to show they made an exception just for them.
The America that made these heavy pieces of furniture and talking machines, its men who wore derbies and caps and fedoras over greased-back hair, who huddled in overcoats and inexpensive suits and ties, who arm-walked girls adorned in breezy dresses down a street as thick with foliage as with concrete filled him with an inexpressible longing.
He was silent before it. All he could do was watch and smell and touch and be patient, like an amateur aficionado standing before a painting and wanting to become a part of it.
The old man did not ring up Harold’s purchase, but stuck it quickly into his pocket and smiled, his tobacco-stained teeth showing between lips as curiously long and thin as his fingers.
“I’ve known Tom here for a long a time,” Harold said to the Victrola. He was talking to Nick, who caught himself staring at the old man’s fingers.
Nick looked at Harold, who again brought his eyes close to the wood of the furniture he had just bought.
“Five years,” Tom said, and smiled because that wasn’t long at all. But he was in the mood to entertain, cozy up to the kids, and he just had made a handful of cash.
Tom reminded Nick of those kinds of older guys who belonged to a type of man from a past age, just beyond the Victrola and before TV: dumpy with flat asses dressed in nondescript suits and hats who blended so naturally into the swarm of people walking down a city block – so much so that it was his kind that had helped define the word swarm.
Like the lights of houses he rode by in a car or on a train, Nick just couldn’t imagine that these sorts of people had lives as rich as his own. Did they really think like he did? Have passions and longings and sadnesses and were curious about ultimate meanings?
Or, were they what they seemed: colorless and clueless, sexless and mundane, modern man the way philosophers had feared he had become since the early nineteenth century, atomized beyond recognition, alone, but not smart enough to realize their aloneness, satisfied by little luxuries that appealed to the lowest common denominator?
No, it was something else.
Nick saw Tom as a straight arrow in his youth, a husband and father who worked each day to come home to a bungalow his job paid for, to the meal his wife cooked and where he talked to her and the kids while they ate.
There was that, too. There was a comfort in sexlessness, in fucking only to reproduce, in sitting back to watch the flowers of what you planted grow, reading the newspaper, watching TV, eating, sleeping and going off to work.
“Take a look at this,” Tom said, and walked them both over to a machine, a console, with a huge screen that seemed like an oversized television.
But the whole thing was too bulky. It looked like something out of a previous time’s idea of what the future would be.
Tom was short, and he walked as if he wanted his legs to be as far apart as possible. His feet were small, and he was dumpy-looking, sad, as if he had given up on caring about what he looked like years ago, and for reasons that perhaps once had been important.
Tom dug change out of his green pants and put a coin in a slot on the machine.
Nick heard the whirl of a projector, or something like it, then a dark, small stage and a woman naked from the waist up. The manic theme from the 1960s “Batman” TV show blared, and the woman gyrated, flinging her breasts up and down and sideways. Her face, masked, held no expression. Neither did Tom, who looked at the screen with a pencil-line mouth, nodding at something.
When the performance stopped, Nick heard Harold laugh – guffaw – and watched his scarred face turn red, the remains of pimples coming to glowing life, trying to look at both Nick and Tom and look away all at the same time.
“A Victrola of the modern age,” Harold said, which was as funny as the way Tom smiled at him, as if Harold hadn’t a clue about a goddamn thing, as if the stark differences in time periods could not possibly have anything to do with each other, and it bothered Nick, the condescension, and he felt his own face forming what was on Tom’s.
As soon as he looked at Nick, Tom as quickly stopped smiling and reformed his pencil-line mouth. His eyes seemed angry. What the hell?
“How about this one?” he said. “There’s other stuff than just a girl bouncing her tits around.”
The word “tits” sounded so incongruous to Nick he took a step backward.
Tom dug into his pockets, pulled out more change, and started the machine again.
Nick could hear the projector-like whirl, and there appeared on the screen an empty stage. Candy-colored, stark, minimal.
Suddenly, in time to the familiar electric whine of a tune he knew as a boy, women with bee-hive hair and knee-high black boots began marching out.
You keep sayin’ you got somethin’ for me,/ Something you call love, but confess/ You’ve been a messin’ where you shouldn’t have been messin’/ And now someone else is gettin’ all your best
Nick smiled the way an old man might smile after unexpectedly getting a whiff of the past.
“I remember this,” he said, for the benefit of Tom, who was looking at him.
“Nancy Sinatra,” Tom said, without nostalgia. To Nick, coming from the old man the name sounded like there should have been a pointed “Ha!” right afterward.
Tom said nothing, just watched Nick.
Harold had disappeared, but Nick could hear his noise in a room behind them, imagined his fingers digging though dusty bins.
These boots are made for walking/ And that’s just what they’ll do/ One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you
That sent a chill through Nick’s body, and he had to look toward Tom to see if the old man noticed. Tom’s eyes were now focused on the video screen, but Nick knew he had seen him shiver. He felt weirdly unsure.
He realized now that Tom’s appearance had been a deceptive façade: Tom knew who Nick was, had guessed and figured him out in a matter of minutes, and there was such an echo-like feeling inside his stomach and head that Nick felt like he had to surrender to the video screen.
You keep lying, when you oughta be truthin’/ And you keep losin’ when you oughta not bet/ You keep samin’ when you oughta be a changin’/ Now what’s right is right, but you ain’t been right yet
This stuff made no sense. Nick didn’t remember this part. He remembered the boots, when he was six years old and didn’t understand why this song and her voice and the image of those boots made him a stranger to himself. But he liked this part now, it seemed truer to him.
These boots are made for walking/ And that’s just what they’ll do/ One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you
It was absurd to the point of cool the way the woman walked-danced so deliberately on the stage, like she was beyond irony or camp, that the methodical movement, after all, was about neither her nor you; it was way over his head, so painfully value-neutral that he felt lost, again.
You keep playin’ where you shouldn’t be a playin’/ And you keep thinkin’ that you’ll never get burnt/ Ha!/ I just found me a brand new box of matches, yeah/ And what he knows you ain’t had time to learn
See, this is what I mean, Nick thought desperately. A handful of words, held out like ashy grains of coal in a deep palm, clinging and rubbing and becoming something else altogether, full of innuendo and literalness and metaphor quickly grasped and as quickly lost, like glancing at your old man or mom in an unguarded moment, when they suddenly have become a man and a woman, not a father and mother – you just can’t hold on to it. Whatever you had been thinking is lost, and you only feel emotion, loss, perhaps, or lust or pain or hunger.
These boots are made for walking/ And that’s just what they’ll do/ One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you/ Are you ready boots?/ Start walkin’
The image went black, the whirring sputtered, stopped.
Nick noticed his mouth was open; he felt its dryness.
Tom, leaning obscenely forward and around the machine, retrieved his change.
© 2026 Victor Greto