The Clarinet Polka (31 page)

Well, you've got your sugar, and you've got your caffeine, and you've got your toot, so the rhythm section is higher than a couple jet-propelled bats. Off they go in this weird drum-and-bass duet. It lasts, swear to God, damn near half an hour. Super-colossal quadruple-time, lickety-split, power-charged, rocket-assisted, full goddamn tilt. Bev's all up and down her fingerboard. Patty's trying out all of her drums and cymbals and toys. They're both getting in every tricky maneuver they ever learned in their lives. The windowpanes are rattling in their frames. The walls are shaking right down to the bowels of the earth. They achieve this avalanche of sound like, you know, your basic earthquake maybe twelve notches above the end of the Richter scale, and then bring it down to a halt like a B-52 has just crashed and burned. They're going, “Hey, wow, too much, far out, yeah, man, out of sight,” and other similar original comments.

“Hey, stud,” Patty yells at me, “you got another one of those cancer sticks?” So I throw her a cigarette.

“Who plays the box?” Bev says, pointing at the accordion case.

“I do,” Mary Jo says. Real grim.

“Hey, wow, that's great. Get it out. Let me tune to you. Hey, I didn't catch your name.”

“That's Mary Jo, the polka lady,” Patty says. “I heard you play a million times when I was a kid,” she says to Mary Jo. It's the first good word she's had to say since we showed up.

“Yeah, you probably did,” Mary Jo says. “Yeah, I know you too, Patty. I went to school with your mom's dad.”

“Oh, did you?”

“Yeah, I did. He was a few grades ahead of me. I played at your parents' wedding.”

Patty had started out friendly enough—well, friendly enough for Patty—but now they're giving each other the evil eye. Mary Jo's look says, how can you live like this, a girl from a nice Polish family like you? And Patty's look says, piss off and die, old lady.

Bev isn't catching any of this. “Come on,” she says, “let's play something.”

So they get out their instruments and tune to the accordion. I've got nothing to do but sit there with Don and smoke cigarettes and watch the action. Patty's still cranked to the eyeballs—she's twitching and tapping on her drums and gnawing away on her fingers—and she's not happy. Mary Jo's usually laughing and talking, but now she's silent as a stone, and she looks like she's been gargling with vinegar. My poor sister's so nervous she's sweating buckets. She keeps wiping her hands on her pants. The only one who seems completely unfazed is Janice.

“Okay, polka lady,” Patty says, “squeeze out a good one.”

Mary Jo kicks into that old standard,
“na około czarny las.”
Only somebody who's been playing their whole life could play like Mary Jo. She doesn't have to think about a thing. It's just down in her bones, you know, like she owns the damn tune. Like she's always owned the damn tune.

The first one to join in is Janice. She slides in over the accordion like honey, and you can see Patty light up a little when she hears the sweet sound Janice gets out of her clarinet. And then Patty slips in underneath, nailing it down. A lot quieter now so she won't drown anybody out—nobody's amplified but Bev—and she's really inside that polka beat. I mean, she's
there
. Bev's turned her Fender way down, and there's a couple bongs till she finds the key, and then she's putting her boom, boom right where it ought to be. You can hear them listening to each other and pulling it tight. They haven't been playing together longer than a minute or two, and already they sound like a perfectly respectable polka band. Then Linda tries to come in.

Maybe she waited too long. Maybe she was hearing how good Mary Jo and Janice sounded with a good solid rhythm section under them and figured she couldn't possibly come up to that. Maybe she was just nervous as all hell. But she sounds terrible. I mean, she sounds even worse than that. Out of tune. Fluffing her notes. When she does manage to squirt out a note, it's like the horn on a forties Buick. I can see the sweat just pouring down her face in buckets, and I'm kind of, you know, wincing inside on her behalf, thinking, oh, you poor kid, come on, you can do it.

They get to the end of the tune, and Linda's going, “Oh, sorry, sorry. I don't know what's wrong with me,” and you can see how embarrassed everybody is. Patty is just sitting there with her mouth shut, but everybody else is going, “Don't worry. Take it easy. Happens to the best of us,” and like that. Linda gives me this horrible look—
help!
—and says, “Jimmy, can you get me a glass of water, please?” so I get her a glass of water.

Maybe Patty's coming down off her coke high, I don't know, but it's like there's this big cloud of gloom settling over her. You can almost see it pressing her down. “At the end of a polka,” she says to Bev, “you don't leave nothing hanging out. It just ends, whoom,” and she makes a chopping gesture to show how sudden it ends.

“How am I doing?” Bev says.

“You're doing just fine. It's not too different from country. The beat's got to bounce. Like, you gotta dance to it, you know. But you don't have to be so bare. You can fill it in, like at the ends,” and then Patty turns to look at Mary Jo— Okay, what next?

“Sing something,” Linda says to Janice.

“I will. But not yet. Let's just wait a minute.”

Mary Jo has a disgusted look on her face like she's thinking, come on, what are you guys farting around for? and she just starts belting away on “The Clarinet Polka,” so there's nothing for Janice to do but jump in with her clarinet. It's a show-off piece for Janice, but there's a trumpet part in it—they told me that later—and Linda doesn't even try it. She just takes her trumpet mouthpiece and walks away and stands looking out a window, going buzz, buzz, buzz.

Patty and Bev are real pros—you can hear it. They're making a nice solid polka groove for Janice to ride on, and Mary Jo's doing the bellows shake, filling in the middle and pushing the tune along, and Janice blows through the melody as easy as whip cream, and then she blows through it again, taking it apart and putting it back together in a different way. Some of those runs, she starts down with the lowest note she's got, and then she shoots it right up into the ozone layer. It's really something to hear. Patty doesn't smile much, but Janice has got her smiling. “Do it again, sweetheart,” she says.

Janice has another go at that old tune. This time she really flips it around backward, upside down, inside out, every which way. You keep wondering if she's going to come out right, and she always does. It's really fun. Bev's laughing at her. They wind it up and Patty says, “Hey, doll baby, you're far out on that stick. How the hell old are you anyways?”

“Sixteen.” Janice has got a real offended look like a cat you've just tossed water on.

“No shit? A lot of people wouldn't believe that.” Patty turns to Mary Jo. “How you gonna play in bars with her?”

“We're not gonna be a bar band.”

“Oh, yeah. Is that right? Where you gonna play?”

“Well, for one, the church.”

“The church, huh? Does the church pay?”

“You bet. The church pays good.” And Mary Jo goes through her thing about lawn fetes and street fairs and county fairs and Polish days and anywhere people like polkas. “Weddings,” she says, “you get the real big bucks.”

Patty sits there behind her drums thinking it all over. Or thinking something over. The gloom is pressing on her good now. Linda comes back with her trumpet and takes a deep breath and says, “Let's do Eddie Zima's.”

So they play through that one, and Linda manages to get most of her notes, and she manages to stay in tune most of the time, but she's working hard at it, and that's exactly what she sounds like. I've heard her playing a million times better just standing in her bedroom with the door shut. They finish that one up, and Patty says, “Okay, you got an
oberek
?”

“Sure,” Mary Jo says, “we got lots of them.”

“You going to play for dances, you need a couple
obereks
.”

“You don't need to tell me that, Patty. I been playing Polish dances for forty years.”

How much Patty and Mary Jo hate each other's guts is showing all over them. “I never got no awards for diplomacy,” Mary Jo says. “Whatever I'm thinking, I just speak my mind.”

“Well, far fucking out.”

“Yeah. Right. That's some mouth you got on you, Patty. I'm sure your mom and dad would be happy to hear the stuff coming out of your mouth. But that's neither here nor there. Let me ask you something. Is this the kind of music you want to play?”

“You saying I'm not playing it right?”

“No, I'm not saying that. You're a good drummer. You're a real good drummer. But I just don't know why the hell you'd want to play polka music.”

“Look, polka lady, I don't give a shit what you think of me. And maybe I don't want to play polka music. I don't know. I'm just seeing if I can get behind it, you know what I mean? But let me tell
you
something. I grew up on this music. My dad had a stack of records a mile high. Old 78s. That's all he played. I don't know the names of the tunes, and I don't know the names of the bands, but it's all in here,” and she pats her heart, looking at Mary Jo like she's daring her to say it's not true.

“Come on, Patty,” Bev says, “be nice. Don't fight. Come on. Let's just play.”

Linda kind of takes a step forward with her trumpet and says, “How about ‘The Iron Casket'?”

I don't know what Patty was thinking, maybe just that she was sick of Linda not playing very well, and standing there sweating and gulping water and going, “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” and I think Patty was trying to be kind in her weird way, but what she said was the wrong thing—or maybe the right thing, depending on how you look at it. “Mellow out, sweetie,” Patty says, “this ain't Carnegie Hall.”

Linda goes white. I mean for real, the color just goes whoosh right out of her face, and I see something go flash in her eyes. If you think my sister can't get mad, you don't know her.

“An
oberek
's in a weird kind of three,” Patty says to Bev.

“Yeah,” Linda says to Bev, “that weird kind of three's called three-eight. The bass should take it in two.”

They kick into that
oberek
, and Linda's so pissed off it's improved her playing about a thousand percent. She's still kind of stiff, you know, but she's getting it all in, and there's even a kind of punch to it. They sound like they could go play the Pączki Ball that night if they had to. They finish up, and Patty says, “So what do you think, Beverly? You like this Hunky music?”

“Oh, yeah,” Bev says. “I like it just fine.”

“How about you, Don?” Patty says. “What do you think? Us Polaks got soul or what?”

Don's an agreeable guy. “Sure, babe,” he says, “you got lots of soul.” He fires up a couple smokes and hands her one of them. I don't envy him, if he's trying to have something like you'd call a relationship with Patty Pajaczkowski.

Nobody knows what to do next. Patty looks at Bev, but Bev's run out of the good word. Then she looks at Mary Jo. Then she looks at Janice and Linda. They're all looking at her. “You got enough tunes for a set?” she says.

“Sure,” Mary Jo says, “we got enough for two sets.”

“You got any waltzes?”

“Sure, we got lots of waltzes. Some real pretty ones.” Now you'd think Mary Jo would play a waltz, wouldn't you? But she doesn't. Patty finishes her smoke. The gloom is hanging heavy on her.

“Don't any of those tunes have words?” Bev says.

Instantly, like answering Bev's question, Janice starts to sing. It's a good old polka tune going back to the year zero. Being perfect, she doesn't need anybody to give her a note; she's got the note in her head.

She's clapping and stomping down on the beat. There's no sound but what's coming out of her mouth and her hands slapping together and one of her little-kid shoes banging down on the floor, but she's laying out that beat so strong she's a polka band all by herself. She's singing with a real strong rhythm like this—

“POD MOS-

  
tem NA MOŚ-

  
cie stoją róże dwie czerwone.

  
POD MOS-

  
tem NA MOŚ-

  
cie stoją róże dwie.”

What that means in English is, “Under the bridge, on the bridge, there's two red roses.” In a lot of those old Polish songs, a rose isn't really a rose, you know what I mean? They just say it that way to be poetic. These two roses are a couple kids—young half-baked teenagers they always seemed to me—like Dorothy Pliszka and me back in high school. And what they're doing on the bridge, or under it, is having exactly the kind of dumb fight you'd expect a couple kids to be having—he's trying to get somewhere, and she's saying no.

So I'm sitting there listening to this incredible voice singing this old song, and it's like my brain cells got hit with a power surge and shorted right out. It was the first time I ever heard Janice sing, and— Well, you'd think I'd know what to say about it, wouldn't you? I just wish you could have heard her.

You ever hear little girls yelling at each other when they're playing a game and they don't know you're paying any attention to them? Yelling something like, “Hey, it's my turn!” Well, she was singing like that, kind of like yelling in tune.

No, but that's not right. It was more— I don't know. It was more than just a little girl yelling. It was beautiful and, well, I guess you'd have to say, beautiful and wild.