Author’s Note
THE MAN WHO’D BOUNCE THE WORLD was originally published by Turtle Island Press of Philadelphia, in 1979. On the 30th anniversary of its publication, the illustrations are as luminous as ever, thanks to the care of the publishers, Daniel Tucker and Claire Owen. To my surprise, the story has aged well, and both schoolchildren and adults seem captivated by it. This year, Stanley Scuka’s attempt to “bounce the world” is perhaps more poignant, in the light of the current economic crisis, with millions out of work and many losing their homes. But the message of giving is timeless.
Thank you for taking time to savor the illustrations and read the unabridged text, below, at your leisure.
— Jonathan Freedman
Text & Illustrations © 1979 Jonathan Freedman
Published by Turtle Island Press
Designed by Daniel Tucker & Claire Owen
THE MAN WHO’D BOUNCE THE WORLD
A Story of Giving
Written and Illustrated
By Jonathan Freedman
Once, long before he met Vera, Stanley Scuka stood before his refrigerator and dreamed of thumping Harlem.
For months he had pictured the ghetto as an immense tom-tom beating in the night.
Now he imagined two hands falling upon it, whacking the drumskin as it had never been whacked before. He wondered what a real thump would do, booming across the earth.
Bouncing the world was for Don Quixotes, he knew. And though he was a Don Quixote, a man who awakened from sleep bombing Calcutta with riche, he knew the world didn’t like that; and furthermore, the Don Quixotes he knew he didn’t trust.
Stanley was thirty-four: a midnight dreamer, an ice cream eater, a closet revolutionary, a graduate of night school. He was a wan, watermelon-shaped man with bright eyes whose dreams all opened into his refrigerator.
But underneath lay a shy, big-handed fellow with creases between his toes that sometimes cracked and bled during work at the coffee warehouse.
Stanley worked regular hours hauling bags of coffee from loading docks to shelves and then from shelves to counters. After each haul, he would mark what he had hauled where in a black book and pick up a phone and report. Details aside, that was Stanley’s job. When it was over, he’d take a bus through the jangling, trash-laden streets of Manhattan to the fifth-floor apartment where he lived with his icebox, his bed and the papers from his correspondence course in economics.
At night, leaning over his books with a sandwich in hand and a piece of pie wilting on the table, he studied the intricate fabric of finance that stretched form Manhattan to Moscow and around the world.
Men were rich or poor because of the way the fibers wrapped around them, he knew, and the cord that day-by day tightened around the throat of New York was attached to nooses in Warsaw and Bangkok. Studying, Stanley learned that he was not a Capitalist or a Communist or any other kind of artists with ropes and knots. He was a human being, who from his perch above Harlem saw the cords tightening, the face growing red, the earth’s feet kicking out and striking air.
If he saw a drum to beat a warning on, he never told anyone about it.
He kept to himself.
Except for his boss, for the doorman, and for the waitress at the corner drugstore, no one knew Stanley’s name.
To the dozens of people he would greet each day coming to work, or to the merchants he would hail while buying a newspaper, or a can of soup, he would always be just a face; and of the faces people met in a day he would always be one they liked and recognized, but never knew.
Riding to work, riding home, eating, soaking his feet, studying economics, watching over Harlem, staring into the eyes of the refrigerator… until Vera, this was Stanley’s life.
They met one day in August when a pale girl in an army surplus overcoat with a too-wide smile asked if she could sit down on the bench beside him.
“It’s a free country,” Stanley said, moving over the bag of crumbs he’d brought for the pigeons.
She brushed the hair from her face and hungrily eyed the bag.
“You don’t mind?”
“Of course not. What’s your name?”
She told the truth – Vera – but the rest of her identity she hid. She was fifteen: an only child, a midnight reader, a worker for partisan causes, a sophomore in Catholic school.
She was a thin, fly-haired girl with bony knees whose loneliness in over-furnished rooms led her to act out fantasies of poverty on working-class streets. But underneath her gawky form lay the bones of a tall, swan-necked woman with pale green eyes that gleamed before objects of modern art and cried during avant-garde films. Vera studied sophomore English, junior History, freshman Biology and senior Art, lifting sweeping generalizations from textbooks to notebooks, and then transferring them from notebooks to tests. After each hoist, she’d receive a card with her grades marked in ink like the temperature – numbers that alternately made her mother threaten boarding school or private tutors. Details aside, that was Vera’s schooling.
After school, she’d take a subway under the d ripping streets to the fashionable apartment where her mother lived with her cracked Ming vases, her silver tea service and her maid. At night, Vera would barricade herself behind mahogany doors and read poverty treatises and social tracts beneath the picture of her father, a thin lawyer photographed in a rumpled shirt with rolled-up sleeves. He had died when she was eight, of a heart attack at his downtown office; and though she could barely remember him, the causes he’d once espoused shone like beacons above her flowered bedspread.
Vera’s mother shunned this secret inheritance. She wanted Vera to meet boys, but the father’s legacy burned with brighter light. Vera wanted to go to college and then law school and become a famous public defender: dreams that she kept hidden in the bedroom with the yellowing photograph.
On occasional Saturdays, she took the bus to certain decaying parks to mingle with the downtrodden, but she was shy and rarely spoke or entered the circles of conga drummers. Like a suspended bridge, Vera dangled between worlds. Attending private school, riding to her mother’s apartment, reading her father’s tracts, dreaming of social justice… Until a watermelon-shaped man with big hands offered her a bag of bread, this was her life.
Want some? It’s good for digestion,” Stanley said, holding it up.
“No… Thank you.”
“Okay, but don’t feel bad about asking. Everybody runs way from home at least once.”
“I didn’t run away.”
“Then what are you doing?”
“Fasting.”
“For Lent?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Political reasons.”
“I see,” said Stanley. “You’re a nut.”
“I’m not a nut. I’m a radical.”
“Radicals are nuts.”
“Why? Because they want to change the world?… What do you believe in?”
“I don’t like big talk on park benches, “ he said. “It’s pretentious.”
“Well, I don’t like fat people flaunting food. There are kids starving out there while you’re feeding the birds.”
“Well, birds eat too.”
“Fine. Feed them.” Vera turned up her nose and walked off, leaving behind a dirty satchel of books. Stanley stared at the titles: Kant, Hobbes, Engels. Good riddance! She could find more wisdom at the zoo. He turned and frowned at the pigeons. Suddenly, he picked up the satchel and pounded after the retreating girl. By the time he caught up, Vera was standing on a corner waiting for her mother.
“Here. You forgot your handkerchief,” Stanley said, handing her the book bag like a sack of soiled linen.
“Thanks” Vera apologized. “I’m sorry about what I said about fat people.”
“That’s all right. If the truth hurts, wear it.”
She looked at him. The corners of her mouth turned up like a pagoda.
“Do you really want to change things?” she asked.
“Just because I said radicals are nuts doesn’t mean I’m not a nut.”
She laughed. “You are! I like you.”
A woman with tortoise-shell glasses drew up in a car.
Pretending abruptly not to know Stanley, Vera climbed in with her mother. Stanley balanced on the curb, feeling like he’d just collided with an open door.
***
Days passed. The pale green eyes haunted him. Vera appeared at the bench a week later and then the next, each time with a different threadbare outfit, a grander, more desperate cause. By October, Stanley’s feelings began to scare him. He debated with the nut in the mirror.
“She’s only fifteen.”
“So… She has a mature social conscience.”
“What does she care about?”
“Poverty. Discrimination.”
“You’re fooling yourself. You like her.”
“I’ve got platonic feelings!”
“Yeah? What does she want?”
“Test her. Show her the Thump.”
***
One evening, after Vera came to the bench and the air itched with silence. Stanley popped the question:
“Are you really interested in changing the world?”
“What do you mean?” she asked. “I…”
“Not these gimmicks. Real change.”
Vera looked uncertainly at him. Stanley changed his expressions.
“I mean, do you want to see things different, or is this just a game with you?”
She shut her eyes. “You really know a way to change things?”
“Of course… guaranteed! I’ve developed it myself!”
They walked uptown, passing dilapidated buildings, to the barren heights overlooking Harlem. Stanley led Vera to the railing. Beyond the blot of Morningside Park, the ghetto glimmered.
“Turn around, bend down, look between your legs,” Stanley said smoothly. “Squint hard and you’ll see it.”
Vera bent over and stared hard. Her face turned red. “What am I supposed to see?”
“Imagine that’s a big drumskin,” said Stanley, sweeping out his hands. “Imagine if you hit it, it would make a boom. Now if you hit a drumskin that big, big as Harlem, wouldn’t you hear it around the world?”
“That’s the Big Thump! You can stand up now.”
“What does the Thump do?” she asked.
“Disrupts the money cycle.”
“What?”
“Look. Money makes the world go round… Right? Think of it this way: Harlem is the Drum and money is the Thumper. Funny money. Money that shouldn’t be there. If you drop enough down in Harlem with no reason, plunk; it’s set up a vibration. Drop in more and Harlem will shiver and shake…
“More, and things’ll thump…
“They’ll bang and bump… The financial shockwaves will bust things from Wall street to Hong Kong!”
“How much money?” Vera asked.
“A million.”
“How are we gonna drop it in?”
“Helicopters.”
“Come on. Where are we going to get a milling dollars?”
“I don’t know.” Stanley rubbed his nose. His eyes gleamed. “How about a thousand?”
That Saturday, Stanley led Vera down the palisades to the ghetto. They listened to the leaves. It was a brilliant fall day, full of wind and color, and beneath their feet the crisp, red leaves rustled like excelsior paper. It was like opening a present, he thought, and when they reached the bottom of the park where the leaves ended and the earth was carpeted in concrete, he took Vera’s hand and led her through the moldering streets of Harlem. Stanley had ideas. He had to find the spot where the drum beat, and he had to learn when to lift his hand and strike. He had come with Vera, a map and one hundred dollars.
They crossed the ghetto and headed east, stepping between broken bottles and shadows of fire escapes. The streets were empty, flushed by wind; and when they reached a crowded avenue they turned left and headed uptown, avoiding the eyes that followed them from inside cars and store fronts.
At the third corner, they stopped inside a drugstore and stat down at the counter. Across the peeling wallpaper, the fr3shly scraped griddle, the hand-painted signs for blue-plate specials, Stanley called for coffee.
“We’ve already passed inspection,” the waitress said, lighting a fire beneath a pot of brown water.
“Got any chitlins?” asked Stanley.
“At ten-thirty in the morning?” She put her hands on her hips. “Jake.” Her voice rose. “Jake! Come out here with that certificate. A man here’s causing trouble.”
An electric latch buzzed. A thin grasshopper-like man, carrying a wooden frame in his hands, emerged from behind a Plexiglas door. He stopped before Stanley and lay down the inspection certificate.
“We’re all right, inspector. Just a couple months late.”
Stanley gazed at him. “You’re confusing me with somebody else,” he said, reaching for Vera’s hand beneath the counter. “I’m not an inspector. I’m here to… to deliver ten dollars.”
The druggist straightened.
“We’ve already paid our protection money!” piped in the waitress. “Please leave us alone.”
Stanley glanced from the lady to the druggist. Slowly he laid the bill on the table and stood up. “Sorry,” he mumbled, straightening his jacket. “Thanks for the coffee.” Warily, he and Vera walked out. At the door they heard the ten-dollar bill rip.
The druggist was the only person who destroyed money, but he wasn’t the only one who refused it. By five o’clock, when the shadows of building lay like hands across the drumskin, Vera and Stanley had walked fifty blocks, given away eighty dollars and still hand not heard the faintest Thump. Where they were not ridiculed, they were welcomed with too-open arms, and in the places they did not meet suspicion, people spoke with irony, sarcasm or merely disbelief.
But mostly, Stanley and Vera were ignored.
The shadows lengthened, the wind rose, the figures standing in doorways loomed more starkly. Silent, huddled in their coats, Vera and Stanley passed housing projects, religious temples, abandoned firehouses. They lingered in doorways, on street corners, crossed alleys where hedges stank of urine, where billboard rainbows blotted out the sky.
They walked east to a highway, meandered through blocks where the street signs were blown full of holes, were bent around poles, where men leaned and spat. They walked. They held hands. They emptied their pockets.
They listened.
Jumbled as a jam session, Harlem sang to them, tooted its horns. Despite the roar of subways and the spattering of guns…
They heard no beat of drums.
The newspaper article appeared the next day. It wasn’t very long, but it did exaggerate essentials to Stanley’s satisfaction.
More than $1,000 was dumped on Harlem streets Saturday by a mystery couple, sources said. An unidentified man, accompanied by a young female, disappeared before onlookers could find out why they were giving away the green backs. Beneficiaries conjectured religious meanings. But police say they suspect terrorist motives.
One grateful recipient distributed free subway tokens at the 125th Street station after receiving his money. Crowds gathered on corners, and a brief flurry of spending boosted sales in local stores.
“I don’t care who they are,” said one man entering the subway with a free token. “But I’m glad they’re giving it away.”
Police say they have no leads, but are investigating the incident.
Stanley upset his coffee, picked up the paper and tore out the article.
“Wait till she see this!” he shouted, snapping open his briefcase.
His bank savings of $3,720 lay before him in blowing green stacks. He folded the clipping and closed it carefully with his hopes in the Thumper.
What does it feel like, working around all these tons of caffeine?” Vera asked the next day, striding in to the warehouse. “Doesn’t it make you hyper?”
“No, not really,” Stanley said, shutting the door. He turned the key and dimmed the lights, leading her back to where various maps and drawings were arranged beneath a sign magic-markered THE BIG THUMP.
“Sit down,” he said, picking up a pointer ominously.
Vera tangled her knees, opened her notebook, unwrapped a piece of gum and offered a stick to Stanley, who declined.
“You ever heard the expression, ‘Tight Money’?” he asked.
“No.”
“Doesn’t matter. Just a term, that’s all. Like ‘Loose Women’—“ He laughed nervously and stopped. “Why don’t you put down your legs and spit out that gum. I’m trying to teach you something.”
Vera obeyed, her eyes narrow and angry.
“Let me run through the theoretical side just a minute before giving you the plan. Okay?”
She nodded. Stanley picked up a dusty notebook, and pulled out a hastily drawn diagram. It showed a Muscle Man labeled WORK standing under Clouds labeled TAXES. Beneath them, building shaped like Cactus Plants were called DESERT.
“See this… This is the money circulation cycle,” he said. “It starts here as hard labor, collects into gold and silver, heats up people’s pockets, evaporated into taxes and finally precipitates into, um… rain.”
Stanley set down the diagram. “Problem is,” he said, picking up a drum. “It doesn’t rain in the desert. The desert is Harlem, see?”
He pointed to a pile of bills suspended in a net above his head.
“What we’ve got to do,” he said, raising the drum beneath the net, “Is shake open those clouds.” Stanley the money-cloud shaker stuck the drumskin. The sound boomed, vibrating bills. Gently, like rain, money showered over Stanley to the floor.
“Well, what do you think?” he asked, rolling the drum under THE BIG THUMP sign and shrugging in the garden of green.
Vera squinted skeptically. “What’s gonna make it work?”
Stanley picked up the briefcase.
“This,” he said, pulling out a pack of printed papers the size of Chinese cookie fortunes. “Go ahead, read one.”
Vera picked up the pack.
“’Spend this dollar between 123rd and 124th streets not before eight p.m.’”
“Okay. The next,” said Stanley.
“’Buy five dollars worth of subway tokens and hand them out before five o’clock.’”
“Wait a minute! What is this?” she asked.
Stanley gathered the papers. “Thump Control. Don’t you see? By handing out instructions, you aim the rain. We’ll bounce this place like a bad check!”
“How much do you have?”
He handed her the briefcase. Vera’s eyes widened. Slowly she touched the stacks of 3,720 one-dollar bills. “Stanley, did you steal this?”
“Yes.”
“Liar!” She stood up, tugging Stanley’s sleeve. “It’s your savings, isn’t it!”
Stanley didn’t answer. He could smell her now, a combination of sweat and soap, and she was hugging his arm.
“Stanley, you’re the biggest fool in the world,” she said, squeezing his ribs. “Do you know that? You can’t give away all your money.”
“Hey,” he said, holding her head. “I—” Her face blurred.
“Stanley,” she whispered, squeezing him. She squeezed harder and he squeezed back, smelling her hair and her skin. He stopped trying to control himself. He reached. Vera stiffened.
“Stanley?” she asked nervously, pointing over his shoulder. “What are those envelopes?”
“But tickets.”
“What?”
“I thought… if things worked out… after Big Thump we’d take a little trip.”
“Oh,” Vera whispered. She forced her lips into the shadow of a pagoda. “Where?”
All night, Stanley worked on a draft of the manifesto, he would distribute to newspapers after the Thump. He borrowed nothing from Karl Marx or Thomas Jefferson. This must not be a call to arms, or any kind of threat. Once triggered, the Thump would go on its own like an atomic reaction.
Though he flirted with phrases like “A spectre is haunting Harlem,” or “the Thump heard ‘round the world,” when he wrote them down they stared back at him with empty bombast. The less he said, the more people would invent.
Huddled over a table with a TV dinner charring in the oven, he wrote and crossed out and wrote again. At dawn he set down the pen.
Dear Friends,
Please take your hands off your ears. The drum beating out there is also beating in Caro, Tulsa, Panama City and Timbuktu. We are thumping everywhere, in the walls, the floor, the ocean, the sky – even in your veins. Relax, breathe deep, tap your feet. There is no way out. Big Thump turned the money in your pockets into paper more than 24 hours ago, and the reverberating have bounced the earth out of orbit. Close your eyes, set your feet, listen for the signal. This is your chance.
Stanley put down the paper and leaned back, exhausted. The manifesto was a little off, he knew, but maybe that was how it was supposed to be. He blinked…
From Amsterdam Avenue to the farthest reaches of Harlem, the sky was swirling with snow.
It was two inches deep when Stanley awoke, four inches when he went out to eat. He came back, brushed himself off, sat down and started taping piles of instructions to stacks of bills. On one side was his pile and on the other, just as big, sat Vera’s.
“I’ll make some tea,” he thought, laboring to his feet.
At noon, when the pot was empty, Vera still hadn’t come. Stanley arranged the bus tickets, restacked the bills, inspected his coat and galoshes, and looked out the window.
Soft, silent, white… the drumskin stretched before his eyes, blanketed by cotton. “Maybe they’ve shout off traffic,” he thought, looking around nervously. “Better call her.” As Stanley picked up the phone, the doorbell rang. He hurried to the door.
“You’re not snowy?” he asked, smiling at the girl huddled in the dry wool coat. Vera shook her head.
“I got a ride.”
“Fine day to Thump Harlem, eh?” Stanley joked, letting her in. “Well, I’ve been thinking about it. We could wait till this storm’s over. But if you ask me, with the city shut down we’ll get a much bigger Thump… Thing so?”
Vera passed the stacks of bills and sat in the corner. She looked at a strange blank rectangle on the kitchen wall. Her knees flushed and her face turned white.
“Stanley, where is your refrigerator?” she blurted out.
“Oh, I returned it to collect more money. We’re up to 4,000 bucks for the Thump today,” he answered from the kitchen, putting on a kettle. “Or do you think it’s too cold to Thump?” He came in. “Well?” He stopped short. Vera had opened her purse and was holding a letter.
“Stanley, I wanted to explain,” she said, her voice tightening. L “It’s not against you. It’s not against the Thump. It’s just…” He mother honked. “Can’t go on with this anymore.”
“Why? Won’t she let you?” he protested, thrusting his hands against the window. “We’ll leave. We’ll ride to Florida!”
“No,” said Vera. Her nostrils tightened. Trembling, she faced the wall. Slowly, Stanley approached and stood helplessly before her. He had seen before this plaster mask called age and maturity. Tears leaked through the chinks and ran down her stony cheeks. He touched her. She was cold as ice.
“Tell me!” he pleaded. Her eyes trembled, darting toward him.
“If I left school, how would I get into college?”
“That’s no answer!” he shouted. “Give me a reason beyond yourself!”
“I can’t…” She stared at him defenselessly. She stopped trying to explain and ran out the door, her footsteps dying away into her mother’s honking.
Stanley stood in the empty room and stared at the space where the refrigerator had been. On the table, Vera’s stack of bills lay with its instructions attached. Holding back tears, Stanley picked up Vera’s pile and put it in his bag.
“If you can’t take a joke,” he said to the empty space on the wall, “I’ll Thump… myself.”
***
The park was silent.
Stepping slowly, Stanley slung the moneybag over his shoulder and pushed through the drifts.
He wondered why he had never thought of skiing through here. “Maybe I’ll buy some skis for the kids,” he thought, treading off the palisades and breaking tracks in to the pale blue streets of Harlem. He stopped thinking. The wind was cold, the bag heavy; his feet made no sound. When he reached the drugstore, he pushed through the door and stopped at the counter.
“How much is that health license you need?” he asked, dripping before the waitress.
She looked resentfully at him.
“Here’s twenty-five dollars,” he said. “That enough/”
The waitress didn’t speak. Stanley turned away and pulled his cap over his ears, not hearing her pick up the phone and dial the police. Back in the storm, he lumbered past stacks of empty wine bottles and turned north on the grand drumskin. A girl stood on the corner, her thin shoulders trembling in wool. A striped scarf flapped across her face. He rushed toward her.
“Vera—“
She was not Vera. She looked at him strangely. He faltered, unable to explain, then turned away. An old woman carrying a bag came toward him. He gave her a packet, feeling warmer now, sirens calling to him like an approaching army. L The streets were empty. He could picture clearly the face of Harlem lying back to soothe its wounds with snow, little pulses passing out through its veins to heal heads battered in riots, bodies charred in overseas wars. The oppressed were not a body strung by ropes and knots held in the hands of Capitalists and Communists, he saw, hearing a faint thunder of drums. The oppressed were a network of people weaving a blanket of warmth against the approaching Age of Ice. And yet he wanted to stop weaving and do something with his money. Not prove a theory, but alter the world inside, minutely, one person at a time. And suddenly, as he walked into the tunnel of white, he felt happy because he knew no one here. He was safe.
He wheeled… Something struck out of the white and hurled him sideways. He skidded back.
A man swaddled in newspapers reached for his bag.
“No – Please!” Stanley shouted, holding on to the money. “I’m giving it away.”
“Then give it to me!”
A knife flashed, but Stanley held on. The snow swirled, blinding him. He struggled, then the knife dropped and they were both holding the money and dancing like polar bears and the earth slipped and Stanley hit the ground and the man tumbled on top of him. Suddenly two new hands entered the fray and the man in newspapers leaped up, yowling, and disappeared in the snow. The second man picked dup Stanley and looked cynically at the bag.
“You hurt?” asked the second man.
“No… Just shaken up.”
“You sure are causing trouble. What are you trying to pull?”
“Give away money.”
“Here? Are you crazy?”
It’s a way to… bounce the world.”
“Bounce… I see. Looks like it bounced you.”
Before Stanley could explain, the man stomped off, disappearing like a spot in the snow. Stanley stood in the empty street with his watermelon body crusted with ice and threw bag frozen in his hands. He’d come to Harlem to liberate the world and all he’d succeeded in doing was to scare off a destitute man. The street was devoid of people, the empty storefronts reaching like a cliff to the sky. He teetered like a man ready to jump off, and then turned away, ready to go home. But suddenly a shadow, like the form of the second man, passed down the street. Stanley ran behind, but the shadow melted in the snow. The footsteps were deep, troughed with soot, leading east. He turned the corner and kept trudging, passing tenements, which the snow had bearded, into twisted old men’s faces.
The footprints were fresher now and the bag weighed heavily on his shoulder. A form emerged from the white –
But it wasn’t the second man.
He kept running. Suddenly the prints turned up the stairs to a boarded-up building. He climbed the stairs. Eviction notices covered the walls with an order for demolition. A cold candle flickered from an upper room. Clutching the bag, Stanley climbed the stairs and edged toward the flame. Suddenly the door snapped open and a man with narrow eyes peered out.
“What do you want here?” the man challenged. “We’ve got problems enough!”
“I just wanted to thank you.”
“Me? I’ve never seen you before.”
The narrow-eyed man stepped closer and examined Stanley, then turned back and comforted a frightened young woman with glazed eyes who shivered in a makeshift bed. She lifted and elbow and the bedsprings groaned.
“Who’s that man?” she asked weakly, hiding a swaddled infant. “The police?”
“Not yet.”
“The eviction man?”
“Some crazy hobo with a bag.”
“Tell him I’ve just had a baby – Leave us alone!”
From the street, a sired wailed, making the mother shudder.
Stanley turned, confused by the noise. He looked at his bag and then at the baby. Groaning, the mother rolled from the sheets and raised herself to the window. Fearfully, she peered out.
“Shut the door! They’re coming!”
Stanley stared at the woman, and then at the stairwell. Were the police coming to evict these people, or were they coming after him?” He remembered the police in the news article. What wrong had he done? The siren wailed again, egged on by another. A comforting sound of drumming rang down the stairs from above. Stanley looked up. Through a broken exit on the top landing he could see a swath of sky and a snow-covered water tower. He pushed $100 and the Florida bus tickets beneath the door and ran up the stairs fighting over fallen plaster to reach the roof before the police. Snow blew through the broken exit.
Outside he could see the blizzard.
Ankle deep in snow, an aged man sat on a pile of tires, beating an African drum.
Gripping the bag, Stanley walked along the edge of the parapet and stared out at the water towers perched like broken 1930s rocket ships on the roofs. The towers looked as if an escape from the planet had once been planned, but people had found no place to go and had stayed on earth to struggle and suffer.
He looked down at the street. Friends crowded below, their head raised, hands pointing at the roof. Sirens wailed from opposite directions while calmly the old man drummed.
“So it was your drumming I always heard,” said Stanley, facing the drummer.
The man lifted a rusty gas can and smiled.
“Play it!” he shouted, whacking the can.
Stanley gaped. From opposite ends of the street, a toy police car converged on a miniature ambulance and skidded before the condemned building. Out of the swirling snow policemen charged with guns raised at the rooftops. One shouted, “Halt!” as stretcher-bearers disappeared through the door and brought out the mother cradling the baby, while the father clutched the bus tickets and peered strangely upward. A blaring bullhorn drowned out the drummer.
“Come down with your hands up!” shouted the cops.
Stanley stared down at the crowd. He had earned money lugging coffee from loading docks to counters, had wasted it on plans with Vera, and now people were waiting for him to give it a purpose beyond himself. Frozen, he wavered on the icy ledge. Footsteps echoed up the stairs and pounded closer. Suddenly the police burst against the door.”
“Don’t jump!” shouted the drummer.
Stanley teetered over the swaying crowd.
“It’s my money!” he shouted, suddenly emptying the bills into the wind.
He was planting the desert!
The sky was snowing money!
He had found the drum!
Quickly people ran, gathering bills. But the wind took the dollars from their hands, gusted them upward, dropping them again a block off… sweeping them away.
Thunder sounded. The city echoed. Stanley felt himself skipping with the bills from Harlem to Brooklyn to the sea. A huge wind blew him west, high, around the planet, naked, beloved by snow. People clapped below, a rhythmic chant building up.
With a sudden clarity, he passed the strangely pacified police and walked to the edge. Standing above the crowd, he looked for Vera, but found no trace. Behind every window a person waved. He met their eyes. He joined their clapping.
And then it came.
It came with a Thump.
A Bang and a Bump!
He gripped the planet and reached upward. A single green snowflake fluttered down the drumskin of Harlem and set off a tiny vibration. The sound grew louder, beating with cries form Cairo to Timbuktu. Stanley joined in, thumping with his watermelon-shaped heart.
THWACK! PAH! THUMP!
“Don’t jump!” someone shouted.
‘Ahhh…eeee…iiii…gggg…hhhh!’
The world bounced.
The End.
Author’s Note
THE MAN WHO’D BOUNCE THE WORLD was originally published by Turtle Island Press of Philadelphia, in 1979. On the 30th anniversary of its publication, I want to thank Daniel Tucker and Claire Owen for their caring, attention to detail, and the extraordinary quality of the printing. The brightly colored illustrations, each an original lithograph, are as luminous today — a truly lasting book.
To my surprise and delight, the story has held up well over three decades. It may be especially poignant this year, the year of the Crash, with millions thrown out of work and/or losing their homes. Stanley was prescient in predicting the crisis of capital, when the fabric of finance around the world tightened like a noose, strangling from New York to Tokyo. Stanley didn’t bounce the world, but he did try, and that counts for something.
On the 30th anniversary, I want to thank: my parents, Betty and Marshall Freedman; my cousin, Lois Rivkin, and Maggie Locke, who believed in this book; my four children, Madigan, Nick, Genevieve, and Lincoln, and my wife Isabelle Rooney…
You bounce my world!
— Jonathan Freedman
