Tales From Gavagan's Bar (37 page)

             
The guy had just vanished, and all Joe Kozikowski would do was stand there, croaking, "He gone." Well, it was obvious
that if the old man had gone somewhere, Joe was going to have a hard time getting along, because there'd be a new janitor in the place. I have an extra room at the apartment, which I had been using mostly for storage, so I took the kid back upstairs and managed to get the idea over that he was to live there. He was pathetically grateful; actually got down on his knees before I could stop him, and would have bumped his head on the floor if I hadn't stopped him.

             
["I see," said Doc Brenner, "why you don't think he just quit on you. Unless you did something to wipe out the previous good impression."]

             
Not at all [said Medford, drinking], it was something he did. At a cocktail party. For no reason at all, I thought it was time I threw one. I like to give parties that are off the beaten track one way or another, and although Joe was working his head off for me—I couldn't get him to quit working till he was ready to fall asleep after I gave him that room—he wasn't quite up to doing tricks with canapes like my Jap.

             
A friend of mine named Clark, who's a chemist, suggested that I make cocktails that were really dry, no ice in them at all. The trick is to get some dry ice—most of the big dairy companies sell it—and drop it right into the shaker with the liquor. It makes the coldest cocktails in existence, because the temperature of the dry ice is so low, and doesn't dilute them a bit, because the dry ice turns to gas without any liquid form. Spectacular business, too. When you drop the dry ice in the shaker, it fizzes and a devilish-looking smoke pours out and flows around the room, which is something to make conversation all by itself.

             
What I forgot, though, or what Clark didn't think to tell me, is that those dry ice cocktails, without any ice to dilute them, have real authority and use up liquor fast. Right in the middle of the party, with about thirty people on hand, all talking at the top of their voices, I started to fill the Martini shaker again, and found I had only about half a bottle of gin left.

             
I went into the kitchen, where Joe was arranging canapes from the caterer's, and said: "Joe, can I depend on you? This
is an emergency."

             
"Yess, Mr. Medford," he said, as usual.

             
I said: "I want you to go to the liquor store and buy six bottles of gin. Here's twenty bucks. This is special. You understand?"

             
"Yess, Mr. Medford," he said.

             
With Joe it's always a good idea to run a check-back, because you never can tell how much he actually gets of what you're saying. So I said: "All right, Joe, what are you going to do?"

             
"Sstore, get special gin."

             
"Six
bottles," I said, holding up that many fingers. "And fast."

             
"Yess, Mr. Medford," he said in a way that sounded almost intelligent.

             
"Okay, boy, on your way," I told him, and went back in to try to hold my guests with my glittering eye until the reinforcements arrived.

             
They were a long time coming. It didn't matter too much, because there were plenty of Manhattans and Scotch; and besides, the unusual strength of the cocktails was getting everyone comfortably fried. I noticed myself that when anyone dropped a match on the floor, I had a slight tendency to stumble over it, and decided I'd better pull up. But even so, I saw someone pick up the empty Martini shaker, and then one of the girls went home, and I began to worry about the party laying an egg after all.

             
But just as I reached the point of desperation, Joe showed up—with one bottle.

             
"For God's sake," I said. "Where's the six bottles I told you to get?"

             
"Thiss all," said Joe. "Special gin."

             
I cursed myself for having used the word "special" on Joe, but there wasn't anything I could do about it now except send him back again, and I was in too much of a hurry to get the Martinis replenished to bother. Now about the rest of it, I want you to remember that I had tipped over one or two myself, and my powers of observation weren't quite as sharp
as they had been, and I was in a hurry.

             
But that bottle of gin was special, all right. I would guess it was an imperial quart, and it was in one of those earthenware bottles, with a stopper sealed over with a wax seal. I remember hoping my idiot child hadn't brought me some of that Hollands gin, which is no good for cocktails; but there was nothing to do except try it, so I dropped the dry ice into the shaker, poured in the vermouth, snaked the stopper out of the bottle, and put in the gin.

             
Somebody said something to me just then, and I turned my back on the table where the shaker was to answer. I could hear the stuff sizzling away behind me, and pretty soon the vapor began to come out. The first thing I noticed was that it was a lot thicker and darker than on the earlier rounds. It came flowing down past my legs and around our feet like a fog, and the girl I was talking to stopped what she was saying to look at it, and said: "Oh, Mr. Medford, that's going to be a strong one!"

             
I turned around. The shaker was still fizzing and the smoke coming out, thicker than ever, but more of it going up toward the ceiling than down. It was a kind of black, but a thin black, so that as it billowed up I could see the pattern of the wallpaper through it. The talking in the room was dying down; everybody was watching it. I remember looking at Clark, my chemist friend, and wondering whether he knew what had gone wrong; but he was staring, as goggle-eyed as the rest. Someone said: "I don't like it," and someone else: "It's a great trick; how in the world does he do it?"

             
I was just wondering that myself, when the smoke stopped coming out of the shaker. Only it didn't fade away as the vapor from the other dry-ice drinks had done. It seemed to bunch together up above the table and grow more solid in what seemed like a bulbous approximation of a human figure. If I hadn't had so many drinks at the time, I'll swear there was one portion of the cloud that looked like a ferocious human face. I think one of the girls saw it, too; she gave a little scream. At the same moment, there seemed to be an unintelligible rumbling sound, like a train in the distance
coming nearer, from the thing.

             
I didn't know what was going on, but it wouldn't do to let the party get out of hand; so I put on as much nonchalance as I could and stepped over to the table, saying: "Well, I want Martinis; a hell of a lot of Martinis."

             
Just at that moment Joe Kozikowski came through the door behind me with a tray of canapes. He looked up, gave a yell, dropped his canapes on the floor and bolted through the kitchen door. I haven't seen him since.

             
At the time it didn't seem to matter. By the time two or three of us got the mess of the canapes cleaned up and I looked round again, the spook or smoke or whatever it was had disappeared. The funny part of it was that, when I went back to the table, the Martini shaker was full of Martinis clear to the nozzle; and so was the shaker that had held Manhattans and the bucket for the ice for Scotch and sodas. Everybody was starved for Martinis before, but now everybody had to drink them.

             
I suppose it's not polite for a host to get boiled at his own party, but that must have been what happened, because when things cleared up, I was lying on the couch with the bath-mat over me and a head the size of a New York railroad station. It was several hours before I got clear enough to try to figure out what had happened. Then I realized there wasn't any Joe around; he had vanished just like old Kozikowski, leaving everything he owned behind.

             
I don't know how he'll get along where he's gone without someone to take care of him; but maybe where he's gone, he won't need anyone to take care of him. I guess there never seemed to be more than part of him in this world, and after I saw the bottle he brought, I was sure of it. It got broken in the rumpus, but what there was left of it had little symbols, all dots and curves, worked into the material. Clark says they're Arabic. The only way I can possibly figure it is that Joe wen
t some place of his own and got a bottle of gin, only instead of g-i-n, gin, he got j-i-n-n, jinn, right out of the Arabian Nights. I'd be glad to get Joe back.

#
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Mr. Witherwax said: "Like I was saying. If everybody spoke this Esperanto, nothing lik
e that could happen."

-

             
Mr. Witherwax, who had been pursuing his investigation of literature, was summarizing the result across a Martini: ". . .so this guy says the trouble is that nobody hasn't worked out how all these inventions are going to change people's lives, like putting coal miners out of work, see? He says there ought to be a law against new inventions till some scientific committee figures them out, see?"

             
"You can't stop people from making inventions," said Doc Brenner.

             
"My nephew Milton," said Mr. Gross, "he invented a cigarette-smoking machine once." "A what?" asked Brenner.

             
"A cigarette-smoking machine. For them companies like the Lucky Strikes that want to know how many puffs it takes to smoke their cigarettes, so they can put it in the advertising."

             
"He says," continued Witherwax, "that invention has become the Frankenstein in civilization, sort of a menace—"

             
"You're mixing up Frankenstein with the monster," said Brenner, "like most people who haven't read the story. Frankenstein was the man who made the monster, and—"

             
". . .but he couldn't interest any capital—" said Gross.

             
Mr. Cohan, Gavagan's Bar's bartender, said heavily: "Now, now, gentlemen, if you will not all be talking at once, there will be more of you listening, which with a drop to drink makes the better time. Will you be having anything now, Mr. Gross?"

             
"Another Boilermaker for me."

             
Doc Brenner shook his head. "Still working on this one—It's just an attempt to rationalize prejudice on the part of a conservative who fears change."

             
"You can sling the English better than me," said Mr. Witherwax, "and I ain't got the book here to prove it, but it says how about electric lights? Since we got them, people can stay up all night, and maybe that's why so many people get nervous, because they ain't living natural, see?"

             
Brenner swished his drink around in his glass. "It's pretty, but there isn't the slightest bit of evidence that any invention has really proved harmful. Of course, if the atom bomb—"

             
"Oh, yes, there is," said a voice.

             
Four pairs of eyes swiveled toward a youngish man sitting a little farther down the bar. A glass of neat vodka stood before him.

             
"What did you say?" asked Doc Brenner.

             
"I said there was evidence of a harmful invention. I have it on the best authority, since I am both the inventor and the person harmed."

             
"See?" said Witherwax accusingly to Brenner. "What invention was this?"

             
"It's my dressing machine." "Your what?"

             
"My dressing machine. Thoroughly practical, I assure you. There'd be thousands in it if I could only go into production on the orders I already have. But I can't."