The Clarinet Polka (17 page)

*   *   *

I don't know if I've told you much about Jacobson. He was just about the best damn bullshit artist I ever saw. His stories always started out perfectly believable, and he told them in this quiet apologetic voice. He'd get this sad, worried look on his face, and he never cracked a smile. He could haul people in about ten miles before it dawned on them they were being had.

Like one night in a bar in Fort Worth he was telling a bunch of honeys how he'd been stationed for a while in the old Kingdom of Seram. The U.S. had just a tiny little base there so most people didn't know much about Seram—that's what he said—but it was a fascinating place. And he made up all these details about the Kingdom of Seram that were, you know, just totally convincing. He even had me sort of half believing it was true. Then, after about an hour of this shit, he tells us that the people who live there are called “Seramics” and they live in huge golden castles made out of pottery.

After basic, the first place I got stationed was out at Carswell, and if you're a young single guy, you can have a lot of fun there. I used to think that all the shit you hear about Texas can't be real—just something in the movies—but it's real all right. They've got real cowboys, and naturally, if you want to have real cowboys, you've got to have real cows. I never saw so much beef on the hoof in my life. And Carswell's where Doren and Jacobson and I got to be tight. Jeff was from Austin, and he was like our tour guide to Texas. He kept telling us that Fort Worth was nothing but a two-bit cow town and Austin was where it was happening, and he was right.

We went to Austin every chance we got, and it never let us down. It's hard to think of anyplace in Texas as mellow, but Austin was mellow. To give you an idea, let's say a gay guy walked into a bar in Fort Worth, he'd live, oh, maybe fourteen and a half seconds. Gay guys walking around Austin, nobody gives a shit. The first super-short miniskirts I ever saw were in Austin. And the first real hippies. Hanging out in a place called Hippie Hollow. And chicks walking around topless, people drifting up to you, offering to sell you grass. And you've got your coffeehouse scene with folksingers. And you've got some of the best damn country music you'd ever want to hear, twanging away in those good-time saloons, and you've got these great Mexican hole-in-the-wall joints where you can go at two in the morning and wolf down flaming-hot chili or a whacking-big spread of tortillas for a couple bucks. And then there were the Texas honeys— Well, that was the height of the peace and love scene, and the Texas honeys were a real treat.

I've had people tell me I should have seen San Francisco back in the sixties, and maybe I should have, but Austin's where it was happening for me—my idea of paradise. Golden sunshine and sweet girls and just floating along, going with the flow—yeah, we really did talk like that. “Good vibes,” we said, and “making the scene,” and all that other sixties bullshit that was, I swear to God, really real and meant something for a while. Well, it never occurred to me it could change. In my head, it was always there waiting for me exactly the way I remembered it.

*   *   *

Sometime in October I got a call from Mrs. Constance Bradshaw. Just like that other time she'd called me, it was right smack in the middle of dinner. My mom grabs the phone, hands it to me. “It's a young lady,” she says, and I'd got Connie so totally out of my head, I'm thinking, young lady? What young lady? And this little voice says, “Jim? It's me, Constance.”

It wasn't anything I thought about. It was more like a reflex. I was almost ready to say something, but I just couldn't do it. Very quietly I hung the phone up. Mom's looking at me, and I go, “Wrong number.”

Then about a week later I'm in the shop, and it's like two minutes to five, and the phone rings. I'm the closest one to it, so I grab it. I never could answer the phone straight, so I do one of my goofy lines, “Dobranski's world-famous TV repairs, all your electronic problems taken care of,” and I hear, “Jim? This is Constance.” She's being firm this time. No nonsense.

Vick's looking at me, wondering who it is, if he should take it. “Jim, I really think we need to talk,” Connie's saying, and it hit me, you know, that I wanted no part of her. It was really clear to me.

We were always getting calls for the florist's, so I say, “Oh, no, no. We're
the TV repair
. Try six seven
four
.”

“Don't do this to me, goddamn you!” Connie yells in my ear.

“No problem,” I say and hang up. I was really hoping that time she'd get the message.

*   *   *

What else can I tell you about that fall? I wasn't feeling half bad, and— Oh, yeah, there was a period of, I don't know, maybe a month when my sister took to hanging around with me and Georgie. Linda still hadn't patched her heart back together from Mr. Graduate School Asshole in Morgantown, and one of the results of Georgie's head being twisted in Vietnam was that he was afraid to get involved with girls, so the two of them made a pretty good pair.

But Mom was nervous as all hell about it. She liked Georgie—everybody liked Georgie—but since he'd turned into South Raysburg's original whacked-out weirdo hairy freak, he'd sunk a few notches below zero in the potential son-in-law department. “What's with Linda and George Mondrowski?” she asks me.

“Absolutely nothing, Mom.”

She couldn't believe it. Georgie had been the heartbreaker of Raysburg Central. “What do you mean, absolutely nothing?” Mom says.

“Nothing means nothing,” I told her. “Look, Mom, he gourded out in the war effort. He's not ready for—you know, something normal with a girl. He just wants somebody to hang out with.”

“Hang out with?” She just looks at me with her eyebrows raised like she can't believe anybody could possibly be as dumb as me. From her point of view, if you leave any healthy boy and girl in their twenties alone together for longer than about ten minutes, they naturally start screwing like rabbits. I never could convince her it was totally harmless.

But Georgie and Linda and I would go out for dinner sometimes, or go to a movie, or sit in the PAC and have a beer. One night we just walked along the railroad track throwing stones in the river. Only once I remember that George said anything about Vietnam. He said that when he first got there, he thought it was like football.

“You know that crap you get from the coach? ‘You can't hold back, boys. That's when you get hurt. You go in there, give her your best shot, you'll never get hurt.' And you know, it sort of works. Okay, so it's my first time in country, and I'm stone-cold cherry. We're humping a million clicks through this god-awful terrain. Thorns? You never saw thorns like that. Every damn plant that grows in that goddamn country has thorns on it. No sign of Charlie, right? I'm starting to think Charlie doesn't exist, like it's all a bad joke.

“So finally we make contact, and who's Charlie? Charlie is a bunch of little gooks running away like the track team. And I'm firing at anything I can see, having a great time. John Wayne, right? Not holding back a thing, because, shit, that's when you get hurt. And damned if we don't come out of that one smelling like roses, and I think, hey, it's just like football—only a little more exciting. I'm going to do just fine over here.

“Well, about a week later, we're humping the boonies, and we're back to zero Charlie. Not a sign of the little bastards. And then, ka-BOOM—trip wire rigged to a Claymore, and all hell breaks loose. We're pinned down. We've got gooks everywhere. We've got incoming mortar fire, for Christ's sake. You don't know which way anything's coming from, you don't know what to shoot at, you don't know nothing.

“Well, ol' John Wayne here, he's hit the dirt, making like a worm. Three-quarters of the guys bought it, and I got out without a scratch on me—well, except for the thorns. And it was nothing I did. Just the luck of the draw, that's all. Nothing you can prepare for. Nothing you can make go away by—you know, by having the right attitude. And I'd thought it was like football? Well, shit.”

“Was it really bad over there?” Linda asks him.

He just looks at her a minute, and then he says, “Linda, honey, I know you're trying to be nice, but, you know, I'd just as leave not talk about it anymore.”

“I'm sorry,” she says.

“Oh, don't be sorry for asking,” he says. “I'm kind of glad you asked. You'd be surprised at the people who never mention it. They just pretend Nam doesn't exist—like maybe you were away on a nice vacation somewhere. But here's what's happening—I got all these pictures in my head, and they're not lots of fun. And I don't see any reason why you should have those pictures in
your
head, you know what I mean?”

I've met a lot of guys who came back from Vietnam angry, but somehow Georgie didn't. Well, that's not exactly right. He could get plenty angry sometimes. I think if he ever walked into a bar and saw McNamara sitting in it, he'd murder him with his bare hands. But the main feeling you got from him about Vietnam was—I guess you could say, it made him really sad.

*   *   *

And meanwhile, the band was getting off to a good start. Janice took it dead serious. Every Tuesday Linda would lend her some more records and tell her which songs to work on, and Janice would come back with the clarinet parts memorized note for note. “Nothing seems too hard for her,” Linda said.

Naturally Mary Jo thought Perfect was the greatest thing since the invention of
pierogi
, and she kept asking Linda when they were going to get together with Patty and Bev. Mary Jo figured they should be getting some gigs. “No point in us just sitting around playing for each other,” she said. She was just dying to go into the fabric department at Eberhardt's and start looking for some nice white satin with red polka dots, you know, for the miniskirts.

Perfect, of course, being the little goody-two-shoes she was, would play anything they told her to, but Linda and Mary Jo kept getting into arguments about what they should be doing. Mary Jo wanted to do a bunch of the good old tunes that everybody knows, like “The Pennsylvania Polka,” and “Just Because,” and “The Blue Skirt Waltz,” but Linda said, “No way. We're not doing pop polkas. We're doing Polish polkas,” and just in case Mary Jo wasn't up on Polish polkas, Linda had, oh, maybe fifty records she could lend her.

Well, hell, Mary Jo said, she knew plenty of Polish polkas. She'd been playing Polish polkas when Linda hadn't even been born yet, and if we're talking records, she had maybe two hundred she could lend Linda. But if you sing in nothing but Polish, you cut yourself off from the younger generation. Tough, Linda said, that's the younger generation's problem, and besides, do you think the younger generation wants to hear “The Pennsylvania Polka”?

“Fine and dandy,” Mary Jo said, or words to that effect, but if she didn't see this band turning into something real, she was going to take her accordion and go play it in somebody's bar for a few bucks just the way she'd been doing for the last thirty years, and Linda and Janice could play trumpet and clarinet duets with each other in the basement of the church to their hearts' content.

*   *   *

I gave Janice Dłuwiecki a pretty rough time. I remember thinking, hell, everybody in the world thinks Perfect's perfect, but that doesn't mean I have to. She kept trying to engage me in conversation, and I'd answer her in monosyllables or maybe grunt at her like, you know, your basic Neanderthal. Pretty soon she got the picture, and we'd just ride along in my car in dead silence with me staring through the windshield like I'm lost in some deep and profound thought. Yeah, I was a real asshole.

So one Tuesday night I pull up in front of her fancy-ass house out in Edgewood, and she said, “Would you like to come in?” She usually asked me that, and I said what I always said, “No, I don't think so. Thanks anyway.”

But this time she goes, “Dad doesn't think you're very polite. You drive me home every Tuesday and you don't come in. Dad says if you were a polite boy and you'd been brought up right, you'd come in and say hi. I just thought I'd better tell you that.”

My first thought was that her dad could take his polite and shove it, but then I had a second thought, which was that I owed it to my sister to make sure the Dłuwieckis stayed cool with the polka band, so I said, “Oh, yeah? I guess I better come in then.”

I swear to God, her dad must have been waiting to pounce on me the minute I stepped through the door. “
A, witam cię,
Jimmy,” he says, and he takes my coat and steers me into the living room. Perfect follows along behind us.

If her mom and brother were in there somewhere, they must have wrapped themselves up in cotton balls or hung themselves in the closet or some damn thing. It was the quietest house I was ever in. Perfect and I plunk down on either end of the couch, and her father sits down in a big chair opposite us. The room looks like something out of a magazine. All the furniture is this modern squared-off stuff, and there's about six lamps going and they're all aimed off in screwy, useless directions, you know, shining on the wall or on the ceiling or off into a corner. I'd never seen indirect lighting before, and even after I knew what it was, it never impressed me much. All I could think was, what a waste of lights; you couldn't read by any damn one of them. A big gray cat comes in, quiet as nothing, and jumps into my lap. I hate cats, and they always know it and come straight for me.

There's a real oil painting over the mantel, a pretty scene with some hills and clouds and a cow, and there's family pictures in frames sitting around all over the place, and I have a weird moment because I'm just glancing around and I see a picture of Dorothy Pliszka dressed like for her first Communion, and I go, hey, that doesn't make any sense. Why the hell should the Dłuwieckis have a picture of Dorothy Pliszka in their living room? And then I take another look, and of course it's not Dorothy, it's Janice. And I think, what's the matter with me? Am I an idiot or what?