Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[johnm]

This short story was the basis for the movie My Summer Story.

Jean Shepherd reading from his short story "Scut Farkas and the Murderous Mariah". Originally published by Dorset House, 1990, on cassette tape, as "Shepherd's Pie - Slice Seven"

link = Scut Farkas and the Murderous Mariah

[yollector]

one of the BEST movies ever !!!!!!!!!!!
                RFC

[lincolnrick]

Just got back from the Flatland Juggling Fest in Omaha and we talked a lot about this movie.  Seems to be the season.

[ta0]

I think the original short story is very well written. I have not yet listened to this recording by the author, but it sure is a great find.

 "The two insane tops, grimy, covered with mud, leaped like live things - ricocheting, leapfrogging, hovering over each other, behaving in a way that no top before or since has ever acted. They hated each other . . ."

The original story covered seven full pages of Playboy magazine.  I wonder how many readers of the magazine paid attention to the story considering that inserted between the start and end pages there was a naked play-off between the playmates of July, August and November 

[ta0]

This short story is incredibly good.  I was planning to do some work while listening to it but I had to stop everything and just enjoy it.

[lincolnrick]

Very nice audio story.  I especially liked the description of the little shop and owner where he found Wolf.

[the Earl of Whirl]

This is so cool.  I have dug this up because at the Burg Top Fest there were several people at Bullwinkle's Top Hat Bistro who confessed that they knew nothing (or very little) about My Summer Story, Lug Ditka, Scut Farkas, Ralphie or the Black Mariah.  I looked at them with the most shocking glare I could muster saying "and you call yourselves top spinners".

Actually, after listening to this I guess I have forgotten a lot about it.  So, shame on me too.  And to think I dare to call myself a top spinner!!!

If you don't have the time to listen to the whole thing, try to catch the last ten minutes or so.  Maybe some of the beginning?  Maybe some of the middle?  I guess I am saying that it would be great to at least catch a bit now and then catch some more later.

[the Earl of Whirl]

From page 95 of my book by Jean Shepherd "Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories".  This is on the third page of the short story "Scut Farcus and the Murderous Mariah".

Ralphie has just seen a display with an old top in it and he started reminiscing......

As I gazed at the top, old spike wounds itched vaguely beneath my tapered Italian slacks - old wounds I had sustained in hand-to-hand spikesie combat with antagonists of my dim past.  Well did I remember Junior Kissel's economical, slicing sidearm movement, his green top string snapping curtly as he laid his yellow spikesie down right on a dime with a hissing whir.  Flick, on the other hand - more erratic, more flamboyant - had a tendency to loft his spikesie, releasing it after a showy, looping overhand motion a good two feet above the surface of the playing field.  His top spun with an exhibitionistic, wobbling playfulness and usually bounced hesitantly two or three times before settling into the groove.  I myself preferred a sneaky, snakelike, underhand movement, beginning at the hip, swinging down to around the knees, upward slighty, and then the quick release after a fast, whiplike follow-through.  Flick was great to watch; Kissel, methodical and clean.  I was deadly.

[the Earl of Whirl]

Continuing on the bottom of page 95....

In my day, there were two types of top spinners: those who merely played with a top - dilettantes, hap-hazard, sloppy beneath notice; and those to whom a top was a weapon in the purest sense, an extension to the will, an instrument of talent and aggression.  Anything but a toy.  I was one of that lonely breed.  In combat, the top was used for only one thing: destruction.  A top in the sweaty, tense hand of a real artist was capable of splitting his rival's top down the middle in the flickering of an eyelash.

On page 97....

Scut Farkas' top, known throughout the neighborhood as Mariah, had at least 50 or more confirmed kills to its credit, as well as half a dozen probables and God knows how many disabling gashes and wounds.  Rumor held that this top had been owned by Farkas' father before him, a silent, steely-eyed, blue-jawed man who spoke with a thick, guttural accent.  He ran a junk yard piled high with rotting hulks of deceased automobiles and rusting railroad-train wheels.  Some said that it was not a top at all, but some kind of foreign knife, and not large, as tops go, being of a peculiar squat shape, a kind of small, stunted, pitch-black mushroom, wider above than most and sloping off quickly to a dark-blue, casehardened, glittering saber tip.  Not only was the top strange in appearance; it spun with a mean, low humming-a truly distinctive, ominous note, a note that rose and fell, deep and rumbling, like the sound of an approaching squadron of distant Fokkers bend on death and destruction.  Farkas, like all true professionals, rarely showed his top unless in anger.  Skulking about the playground his back pocket bulging meaningfully, just the trace of top string showing, Farkas was a continual, walking living, surly challenge.

[the Earl of Whirl]

page 98......

Farkas' secret was not in his choice of weapons alone.  He had the evil eye.  We all have seen this eye at one time or another in our lives, glimpsed fleetingly, perhaps, for a terrifying, paralyzing moment on the subway, among a jostling throng on the sidewalk in the midst of a riotous Saturday night, peering from the gloom through the bars of a deathhouse cell in a B movie at the Orpheum, or through the steamy, aromatic air of the reptile house.

page 99.....

He was the only kid I had ever heard of who rarely smoked cigars, cigarettes or corn silk.  Farkas chewed apple-cured Red Mule Cut Plug.  In class and out.  As a spitter, Farkas unquestionable stands among the all-time greats.  During class he generally used his inkwell as a target, while on the playground he usually preferred someone else's hair.  Few dared to protest, and those who did lived to regret it.  Farkas' glance boring gun-hard across the classroom carried a message to every male in the class, save one, at one time or another.  It read: "I'll get you after school."  The kid, knowing he was doomed, often wet his pants right there and then.

page 100.....

His only known rival in pure thuggishness was the equally infamous Grover Dill.  The two had formed an unspoken alliance, each recognizing the other as extremely dangerous - an alliance that held the rest of the kids in total subjugation.

As a competitive top spinner, Farkas was universally recognized as unbeatable.  The combination of Mariah and Farkas' short, whistling three-quarter-lash movement was devastating.  He sacrificed accuracy for sheer power, like a fast-ball pitcher with a streak of wildness.  When Mariah hit, there was no return.

Week after week, month after month, we stood by helplessly as Scut Farkas and Mariah made wreckage of the best tops in Hohman, Indiana.  Not only that; we were forced by a single scythelike sweep of his evil eye to applaud his victories.  This was the unkindest cut of all.  I remember the hated words rattling in my throat as I banged Flick on the back.  "Old Farkas sure did it."   Flick hollowly answering: "...Yeah."

[the Earl of Whirl]

page 101.......

This was the nature of my enemy as I practiced day after day in the basement next to the furnace, perfecting, honing, polishing my burgeoning technique.  Why I did it, I cannot tell.  Some men are driven to climb Everest, others to go over Niagara Falls in barrels or beach balls.  Some are driven to wrestle crocodiles barehanded.  I only know that in the end there would be just Farkas and me, and our tops.

[the Earl of Whirl]

continuing on page 101.....

One thing was sure: To get hold of a top that could even stay in the same ring with Mariah, I would have to do better than the measly assortment that Old Man Pulaski kept in the candy case among the jawbreakers, the JuJu Babies and the wax teeth.  Pulaski's tops were not fighting tops.  They were little-kid playing-around tops; weak, defenseless, wobbly, minnowlike, they were even used by girls.

"Do you have any other tops but them little ones?"

"D'ya wanna top or don'tcha?" Old Man Pulaski glared down at me from behind his bloody butcher's apron while the jostling knot of Lithuanian and Polish housewives clamored for soup bones. 

"Yeah, but I got that kind."

"Here, how 'bout a nice red one?"  He reached into the case, trying to hurry the sale.

"Ya got any black ones?"

"Aw, for Chrissake, black tops!!  Come on, kid, I wain't got not time to fool around!"

"Scut Farcas got one."

"I told Scut Farkas if he ever came in again I'd kick his behind.  He didn't get no black top here."

"Well, he's got one."

"Ask him where he got it."  He roared off back to the meat counter.

Obviously, that was out of the question.  Asking Farkas where he got Mariah was about like asking King Kong where he got his fangs.  So I began methodically to visit candy stores, dime stores, toy stores - any kind of store where they might conceivably have tops. 

[the Earl of Whirl]

on the bottom of page 102 and on 103.........

Then , late one balmy day, slowly pedaling home on my Elgin bicycle - the pride of my life - its foxtails hanging limply in the soft air, my mind a good five light-years away, I came unexpectedly to the end of my search.  I was at least four miles beyond my usual range.

TOTAL VICTORY NEWSTAND AND NOTIONS.  It was a tiny, dark sliver of a shop, wedged in between two gloomy red-bring buildings, about the size of those places where a man sells celluloid combs and hunches over a lathe making keys......For a second or two, once inside, I couldn't see a thing, it was so dark and dingy.

parts of pages 104, 105 and 106...........

"What d'ya want, sonny?"

An ancient lady wearing a black shawl over her head, the way most Polish ladies did in our neighborhood, stared piercingly at me.

"Uh...."

"D'ya want some orange pop, sonny?"  She spoke with the slightest trace of a European accent.

"You got any tops?"

"Why, yes, sonny."  She hoisted a cardboard box of tops onto the counter.  I might have known it.  She must have got these tops from the same place Pulaski got his - weak-kneed trifles that you saw everywhere.

I started to leave, as I had done so many times in the past, from every dinky candy store in town.  Just as I got to the door:

"Hey, sonny, come back here."

Vaguely uneasy, I turned, one foot out on the sidewalk, the other on the greasy floor, my Keds ready to spring for the Elgin.................She pulled out a tangled mass of rubber bands, string, a couple of old clothespins and what looked like a dead mouse.  A switch engine breathed asthmatically in the ambient air outside - followed by muffled curses from the brakemen.

"Aha!  Here she is!"  She fished scratchingly, unable to grab whatever it was.

"I wouldn't sell this top to everybody, sonny."

Great Scot!  Cradled in her talons lay a malevolent duplicate of Scut Farkas' evil Mariah.  A duplicate in everything - spirit, conformation, size, everything - except color.  It was a dull, burnished, scuffed silvery-pewter, a color I had never seen on a top before.  But then, except for Mariah, I had never seen a black one, either."

"It's been used, so it won't cost you much, sonny."

"How much?"  I was almost afraid to ask.

"I'd say ten cents, sonny.  It's imported.  She's a Gypsy top."

I was in.  It was one of those few moments when I was well-heeled, carrying a full 12 cents in my jeans.  I forked over my two nickels as calmy as I could and took possession of what was to prove to be a historic find.

"Good luck, sonny.  Careful, she's a mean one."

[ta0]

Wow! Thanks for transcribing all that. Each time I read the story I am impressed by how good it is and I enjoy it like the first time.

I was planning to one day OCR the story from the magazine and post it on my site, but you are saving me the work!

[lincolnrick]

Yup.  Thanks Mike, you've preserved the 'top' part of this story for everyone to enjoy.  I still hear it in Jean Shepherds voice when I read it.