Him I can vouch for. He, which is to say me, never got a dime of that blood money.

But who did?

BOOK TWO

St. Louis Blues

August 1958

CHAPTER NINE

On a hot August day, I took my almost eleven-year-old son to Disneyland. He’d spent July with me in Chicago, going to boxing and ball games and museums and street fairs, and now I was returning him to his mother and her husband, the supposed film producer; but first Sam and I were having a father-and-son day in the Magic Kingdom in Anaheim, California.

I looked like any other tourist in my Bermuda shorts and polo shirt with a straw fedora topping it off; my son was dressed similarly, right down to the fedora—Nathan Heller’s son being too cool for mouse ears—and we looked enough alike in our Ray-Bans to get amused looks. He was in fact my spitting image, although we both had too much class to spit, with only Sam’s lack of a reddish tinge to his brown hair to differentiate us. That and one of us had clearly been through puberty.

This was my first visit to Walt Disney’s Magical Money Maw, and I initially had a typically cynical Chicagoan’s reaction. This place was an amusement park posing as a Disney movie come to life, with college kids in big-headed cartoon-character costumes mingling like monsters among children whose reactions veered between disappointment and terror. Here, the creator (not God but the beaming mustached one on TV) served up turn-of-the-century childhood memories painted with a pastel brush, inviting visitors into a fanciful American past sprinkled with pixie dust to banish actual memories of an era awash in financial failures, railroad strikes, immigrant tenements, racist lynchings, and social protest, right and left.

What a bunch of bullshit, I thought.

And then my son slipped his hand in mine.

It had been some time since my boy had done that simple thing. At nearly eleven, he was just too old for such sentimental slop. But Disneyland was overwhelming, and for every kid there were four adults, so the view moving through the throng was mostly of grown-up asses.

I’d parked my latest Jag in the vast parking lot for a quarter before paying a buck for myself and a half dollar for Sam at the gates. We’d promptly entered a tunnel taking us under the Santa Fe and Disneyland Railroad tracks into the Town Square and Main Street where awaited gas streetlamps and brightly colored Victorian buildings that housed shops with no resonance for a kid like Sam. That Uncle Walt was playing to grown-ups like himself, as we entered his Kingdom, was obvious—firehouse with horse-drawn wagons, Keystone Kops, general store, apothecary, penny arcade, with only the soda fountain not quite yet a thing of the past. Even the movie marquee would mystify a kid like Sam, ballyhooing a Buster Keaton comedy and a D.W. Griffith cowboy picture.

But then Main Street emptied out into pathways to worlds where Sam could immediately relate—Frontierland (Davy Crockett!), Tomorrowland (moon rocket!), Adventureland (African safari!), and (as Sleeping Beauty’s castle in all its looming presence promised) Fantasyland.