Lost Moon Summer (eBook)

Stu Lisson (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
308 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3178-1217-1 (ISBN)

Infos

In 'Lost Moon Summer' young Sammy Walters spends the dog days of summer dodging neighborhood bullies, trolling the deliverymen, indulging in endless mischief, and teaching his rowdy posse the art of making flame-throwing match guns. Equal parts idyllic and tumultuous, this period of Walter's life was never far from his thoughts in later years. Returning to the scene of his boyhood misadventures, Sam rekindles memories of simpler times and the magic summer he shared with his extended family and a handful of youthful delinquents.

Stu Lisson is an Emmy award winning video producer, director and writer. He's also written and directed special features for Universal Pictures and 20th Century Studios. He resides in the picturesque Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York with his family.

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Childhood memories burning bright, Sam Walters journeys back to his hometown, scene of a misspent boyhood. Equal parts idyllic and tumultuous; this period of young Sammy's life was never far from his thoughts in later years. Revisiting places of elusive hopes, fears, and dreams where he spent hours dodging neighborhood bullies, trolling deliverymen, indulging in endless mischief and teaching his rowdy posse the art of making flame-throwing match guns, Walters rekindles recollections of simpler times and the magic summer he shared with his extended family and a handful of youthful delinquents. "e;If you liked The Christmas Story by Jean Shepherd, you should try Lost Moon Summer. You'll encounter the perilous sport of ice cream truck trolling, sleepaway camp, bicycle dreams and wistfully wonderful lists: if the Iliad had been written in the Eisenhower era, Homer's catalogue of ships might have been replaced by these inventories of Swanson TV dinners, movie theater candy, pulp magazines, and macabre TV series. Lost Moon Summer is an elegantly evocative tale that unfolds in some place resembling New Haven, Connecticut at some time resembling the late 1950s revealing some corner of the twentieth-century American soul."e; Robert Thompson

Textauszug

 

THE JOY WHEEL AND
JUST DESERTS

Full of anticipation, we hopped on a bus and headed over to “the Rock,” a tired, turn-of-the-century, oceanside amusement park that was once billed as Connecticut’s Coney Island. Its aging, whitewashed wooden structures had gone one-on-one with the salty spray of the New England Sound for nearly a century and lost. An out-of-tune calliope’s shrill whine filled the night air as the old diesel coach we were riding on pulled up to the boardwalk. Spilling out under a canopy of sputtering neon, our eyes were white-hot as we stared up at one million watts of incandescent Xanadu burning there just for us. Gleeful screams echoed over our heads as the Thunderbolt roller coaster snaked its way around the evening sky, causing me to shout over the ruckus.

“Where do we go first?”

“How about the Wax Museum?”

“That place gives me the creeps. Wanna try Peter Franke’s Fun House?”

“Sure, but let’s do Laff In The Dark and the Thunderbolt on the way.”

For the next couple of hours, we wandered around the park, being whipped, jostled, and flung about by the Jitterbug, Mill Chutes, Tilt-a-Whirl, bumper cars, and roller coaster. This was followed by several rounds of Skee-Ball and frightening ourselves silly in the House of Horrors. After stuffing our faces with hot dogs and fries, we strolled along the boardwalk. A stiff breeze off the Sound mixed with the dank smell of cheap lager as we passed under a grimy red neon sign announcing Bellamy’s Place. I’d always fantasized about the dark, cavernous taproom as a pirate’s lair, so we briskly crossed the street over to a whitewashed building with a wild-eyed homicidal clown hovering over the entrance.

“Fifty cents, and don’t forget to sign up for the drawing,” the ticket taker barked.

“Drawing?”

“For a new five-speed English racer!”

Swooning over those words got me thinking that this could be a shortcut to nirvana. Steve panhandled the cost of admission off me. Upon entering, we brushed against the grinning clown’s tonsils framing the doorway, and a jet of compressed air shot up at our feet. To my wingman’s delight, the gust partially elevated the dresses of several teenage girls who were nearby, leaving him gasping for air. It was all very reminiscent of that scene in The Seven-Year Itch where Marilyn Monroe stood over the subway grate and got blasted.

“Did you see that?”

“They’re way too old for us! Hey, let’s take a chance on The Joy Wheel.”

I pointed to an archway beneath a demonic, leering “Tillie” happy face.

“Come on. Don’t be a fink!”

The slowly revolving oak leviathan was burrowed in a murky, airless corner of the pavilion. A low-octave, malevolent rumble emanating from somewhere deep within the amusement’s base seemed to both attract and repel thrill-seekers like the poles of a magnet. I clutched at Steve as we approached the massive beast that reeked of Butcher’s wax and stale beer. Over the years, the number of servicemen, beauticians, bus drivers, waitresses, and sweethearts that tried to tame that ancient, revolving monster must have been legion. With caution not part of our vocabulary, we both jumped on, scrambling for the center of the wheel as it gathered momentum and clawing at the hub for dear life. In short order, a bell-bottomed sailor went flying by us, like a denim missile, careening into the leather cushions that ringed the turntable with a thud. He lay there, stunned and motionless, before staggering away. Suddenly, everything became real, with The Joy Wheel morphing into something more Dante than Disney.

“Hold on, or we’re toast,” I stammered as the amusement from hell continued to pick up speed, flinging panicked riders off pell-mell. WHOOSH! A shot of compressed air lifted the giant disc up and started it wobbling to the anguished cries of surviving riders. Steve lost his grip and was flung from the speeding turntable like a toy doll.

The ride’s operator hollered at me from a podium in the corner.

“Yah want more, kid?”

Before I could open my mouth, he nodded, heeding some unseen demon’s reply from another dimension.

“Sure thing, but I’m warning you, the Wheel’s never gone this fast before!”

Fussing with some knobs, the guy at the controls had the same look on his face that Dodo had when he set fire to Missus Gillespie’s laundry. A line of light bulbs overhead abruptly illuminated, moving from a yellow zone into a red one, marked with a skull and crossbones. A mob gathered around the Wheel and began cheering. The turntable was now traveling at a bone-breaking speed, with me the lone survivor. I tried to scream, but nothing came out. Too scared to let go, I felt like Alan Banks clinging to that speeding ice cream truck. WHOOSH. The crowd gasped as the giant turntable took another dizzying pitch, and the deafening sound of another shot of compressed air filled the Funhouse. Losing my grip, I catapulted off the gyrating disk, bouncing over the leather bumper like a pinball, and careened through a group of onlookers, smashing into the English racer raffle display. Wide-eyed and out of breath, the amusement’s operator was first on the scene.

“Are you okay, sonny? They lubed the wheel last Thursday, and I didn’t realize....”

Suddenly aware that my hand was gripping the silky-smooth gearshift of that nimble, new, five-speed Raleigh door prize, my heart started pounding. Steve helped me to my feet, still clutching its gleaming handlebars.

“Man, you shot off that wheel like a bottle rocket!”

“Let’s sign up for the drawing of this racer. Maybe one of us will win!”

Now I really had to have one of those slick little numbers from across the pond. A man in a white ice cream suit stepped in front of us.

“You’re a pretty brave young man.”

“It was just a ride.”

“I couldn’t help but overhear. You’d really like to win that bicycle, wouldn’t you?”

“It would make my year!”

“You don’t have a chance, son. No one does, except the boss’s kid.”

Steve lunged forward, eyes bulging.

“That’s cheating! Rigging stuff is illegal!”

“Yeah! How do you know?”

“I have a stand on the strip and play cards with the owner every Thursday. How’s about some passes for some free frozen custard?”

“We’re interested in taking that bike home, not some crummy soft serve.”

Steve pushed me away. Glancing at my Scout watch, I noticed the crystal was broken.

“Mom’s going to kill me! I probably busted it on the Wheel.”

“Jeez, the clock on the wall says ten fifty-seven!”

“So what?”

“The last bus is at eleven! We’ll never make the connection to get home!”

We flew out onto Ocean Avenue and paused in front of a stand whose sign screamed Jake’s Hot Dogs. The man in white called out to us from behind the counter and burst into song.

“A loaf of bread, a pound of meat, and all the mustard you can eat. Jake’s Vienna Dogs!”

An elderly woman came by, interrupting his serenade as Steve yanked at my arm.

“Come on; we’re going to miss the bus!”

The dowager, ignoring our presence, sniffed the night air and stared at the grill.

“Mister, are these hot dogs Kosher?”

The man flipped a link off the griddle and deftly sliced the end off.

“Now they are, lady!”

We took off again, tearing down the midway and catching up to a bus stopped at a light. After banging on the door, the driver glared at us, released the air brake and opened the door.

“Where’d you two think you’re going?”

“Westville,” we shouted in unison, tossing our tokens in the coin box.

“The buses downtown stop running at eleven-thirty. You geniuses won’t make it.”

“If we can’t transfer, we’ll be stuck on the New Haven Green all night!” Steve moaned as we rolled through the misty darkness of the tiny coastal town. The thought of being stranded downtown in the middle of the night was frightening, matched only by a sinking feeling that we were going to catch hell.

A forest of streetlights illuminated the heart of the city as we pulled up to the Green. Across the street, two lime-colored globes framed the entrance to the police station. Spilling out of the protected warmth of the bus onto a deserted street, I felt like a skydiver freefalling into some uncharted territory. The crisp night air started my pal jabbering.

“Hundreds of people are buried under that Green, including Benedict Arnold’s wife.”

“Who told you that?”

“Mr. Nofsinger.”

Rudolph “the red-nose” Nofsinger had been our fifth-grade history teacher and a real pain in the ass. He made it a practice of inspecting everyone’s hands before class. Anyone caught with dirty fingernails was hauled off to the lavatory and ministered to with a steel brush. Equally unrelenting was his spreading of the obscure minutia he picked up as a trustee of the New Haven Museum, inundating us with gigabytes of useless trivia.

“He also told our class that when a storm knocked over a tree on the Green a few years back, a skeleton was attached to the roots!”

One could easily understand, after listening to Steve recite Nofsinger’s pablum, why none of us gleaned so much as a scintilla of useful information in old...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 25.8.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3178-1217-1 / 9798317812171