The Clarinet Polka (65 page)

Okay, so there's Step Nine. That's when you make amends to people you've hurt, and I'd been pretty thorough there. Guys I'd owed money to back in Raysburg, I'd sent it to them. I'd paid back Linda her five hundred dollars and Old Bullet Head every cent he'd spent on me. I'd told my mom and my sister I was sorry for the way I'd just vanished on them, and I'd promised I'd keep in touch—which is what they'd both asked for—and I had kept in touch. I'd called Georgie Mondrowski and told him how sorry I was I hadn't been more help to him, and he'd told me I'd been more help to him than I knew, and the best amends I could make was to stay sober. I'd even called up Vick Dobranski, if you can believe that, and apologized for being such a jerk-off. Connie I couldn't make amends to for the simple reason that I didn't have a clue where she was—and besides which I figured maybe the best amends I could make to her was that she'd never see my sorry ass walking through her door ever again as long as she lived. And that just left one person.

Well, I'd tried to write Janice three or four times since I'd come to Austin, but I'd always given up. That time I sat down and wrote her a six-page letter. I got it done, and I wasn't sure about it, so I didn't mail it right away. Then about a week later I read it over, and you know what it was? Six pages of real complicated excuses why I'd behaved like an asshole. I tore that sucker up.

*   *   *

The longer I stayed away from Raysburg, the more reluctant I was to go back there. Some part of me was convinced that the moment I set foot in West Virginia, I wouldn't just fall off the wagon, I'd get shot off, like rocket assisted. The first Christmas, I explained it to Old Bullet Head on the telephone. “Look, Dad, Christmas is a heavy drinking time, and I'm just not ready to face it.” He said he understood perfectly. My second and my third Christmases, he was a little less understanding.

My sister wrote to me regular as a clock. I've never been big on writing letters, but I'd send her little notes or funny postcards, and I'd call her up maybe once a month. We'd talk sometimes for an hour or more, and she'd keep saying, “Jimmy, this must be costing you a fortune,” and I'd say, “Hey, what else do I have to spend my money on?”

Naturally I heard all about the progress of the polka band. Their name got changed pretty much the way they'd got the name in the first place—it was just what people said—and nobody bothered to say “My Sister's Polka Band,” and so they turned into “the Polka Sisters.” And they were doing real well. Just like Mary Jo always wanted, they were playing for damn near every event anywhere around the Ohio Valley where people liked pretty girls and polkas. And they started getting invited to polka festivals way far away—Pennsylvania, Michigan, New York, even up in New England. Everywhere they went, people seemed to like them. “There's even Polka Sisters fan clubs springing up,” Linda said. “Can you believe that? We get letters, asking for our pictures.”

Linda always kept me up to date on how everybody was doing. Mary Jo was happy as a clam. She and old Gene Duda were living on his pension, so any money she made with the band was pure gravy. And Bev Wright's famous brother got her a job at the Jamboree Shop, so she finally got out of Barnsville and moved into town. And Patty Pajaczkowski? Hell, you expect weird things out of her, right? But still Linda couldn't believe it. “My God, Jimmy, she's gone straight!”

Well, not straight exactly, but it seems that Patty had given up all unnatural substances. That meant not just drugs, it meant cigarettes, coffee, tea, Coke—you name it. And meat too. What turned her around on this, I don't know—maybe her lizard told her to do it—but Bev Wright had a little apartment over in East Raysburg, and Patty turned up and said, “I'm kicking the whole works,” and Bev said, “Go to it, Patty Cakes,” and Patty crawled into bed and turned green.

I didn't see her myself, so I can't tell you if she turned a pale delicate green or if she got as green as a bullfrog, but I've talked to a number of people who did see her, and they all swear it's true. So she lay there in Bev's bed—Bev slept on the floor; that's some friend, right?—oh, for maybe a month. Anyhow until she turned back into her normal dead-white self, and then she got up and said, “Thanks a lot, Beverly, I feel great,” and she got herself a job working at that hippie health-food store down by the lower market, and since then, she'd been living on brown rice and strange bags of slime imported from California.

I didn't ask about Janice, but Linda told me anyway. Janice graduated from Central and started going out to Brooke College. Her playing and singing just kept getting better and better, and she'd developed an incredible charisma on the stage. That wasn't hard for me to believe. And she was still dating that kid Tony. Linda said she wouldn't be too surprised if the wedding bells weren't going to be ringing for them, you know, a few years down the road.

When I was going into my third year in Austin, Linda told me the girls were thinking of cutting a record. Wherever they played, people were always asking them if they had a record, and there was this wonderful studio in Youngstown, but the problem was, they couldn't quite get the scratch together. “Look,” I said, “if it's not a million bucks, I'll pay for it.”

I had to really work at talking Linda into taking my money, but she got a quote from that studio, and it wasn't all that much, and I'd been really socking the money away—hell, I even had some bonds and blue chips—and I said, “Come on, kid, I'll never miss it.”

*   *   *

So life was rolling right along, and a lot of things changed while I was in Austin. Somehow it felt like the whole mood of the country had changed. Like what? Well, like you never heard anything anymore about student protests. And if you'd hear guys at work talking about drugs, it wouldn't be grass or acid they'd be talking about, it'd be reds or blow. And if you'd hear the Beatles on the radio, they'd sound like they were back with the pterodactyls. So what was a big hit? One I remember was Melanie and “The Roller Skate Song.” Who knows why anything's a hit, but there's one thing you could say about that song—it sure didn't sound like the sixties.

Then if you're fond of the honeys like yours truly, there were a few things to notice. You remember hot pants? All they were was what we used to call short shorts, but real short, and real tight, and I've got to admit I enjoyed the hell out of them while they lasted. Bright red lipstick came back, and skirts got longer, and then there were those dumb platform heels. I always thought they were just about the most ridiculous things anybody ever invented. And the girls stopped trying to look like little kids, so if you saw a girl dressed like she was ten, she probably was. And— Well, I don't know. More than just the fashions had changed, but it's hard to— Hell, it's kind of obvious, right? They signed the Paris Peace Accords, so the Vietnam War was over—the American part of it anyhow.

*   *   *

Of course there were girls wandering in and out of my life the whole time I was in Texas. What? You didn't think I'd turned into a monk, did you? When I first got to Austin, I thought I wouldn't get involved with anybody—not until I'd got my shit together—but I didn't make it more than a couple weeks and there was this stewardess and she was just so damn cute. It wasn't like she was a party animal or anything, and she was real sympathetic about me being in AA, but like any other girl in her twenties, she wanted to go out—out to a restaurant, out to hear some country music, you know, just
out
, and the best I could offer her was a movie because they don't sell booze at movies. Eventually she stopped being sympathetic. “At what point,” she said, “do you turn back into a normal human being?” I didn't have any answer to that.

And then there was that totally insane hippie chick I picked up at Barton Springs, but that really didn't last very long either, and— Well, I'm not going to list them all. It's not like there were that many anyway. And you know what kept happening with a lot of those girls? The word “commitment” kept popping up, and when it did, I'd hit it on down the road just about as fast as I could get my ass in gear.

I've got to admit I did think about it. Like, okay, Koprowski, just what is it you want out of life anyway? You want a family, don't you? So one of these days you're going to quit running and settle down with one of these girls, and then the kids will start coming, and there you'll be in a little house somewhere with a honey and some kids, working at Braniff and living in Austin until you turn into an old crock, retired and drawing a pension. So what was wrong with that picture? Nothing that I could see. Except maybe I just hadn't found the right girl.

*   *   *

The next thing I know, I'm turning thirty. I didn't like that one little bit—
thirty
. It scared the bat piss out of me, if you want to know the truth, and I'd been feeling sour and depressed for awhile anyway, and I couldn't figure out why. I thought maybe it was just because I wasn't going out with anybody right at that moment.

So sometime early in the year, I decided it was about time for me to take stock of my life again, have another hard look at the Twelve Steps and like that. I drove to one of my favorite spots out in the Hill Country. I went for a nice run, and I drank about a gallon of Perrier water, and I cooked a steak on my primus stove, and I put some Merle Haggard on my tape deck, and I did my lonesome cowboy number. It'd been a long time since I'd gone off by myself like that.

One of the things I loved about the Hill Country is it looks so different from West Virginia. Lots of room—plenty of room—and you've got your basic beautiful nature stuff, little streams and rolling hills and spectacular sunsets and stars and all that, and not a sign of a blast furnace anywhere. Well, it did make me feel better being out there, and at the same time I ran smack into this thought I'd been having for awhile—shit, Koprowski, maybe you don't belong in Texas. It was a sad thought. I'd been trying like hell to belong in Texas, but all the time I was there— Well, to give you some idea, I'd be walking somewhere and I'd see a scruffy old aloe plant sticking up, and I'd think, come on, Koprowski, who are you kidding? You don't belong in a place where something as goofy as that can grow right out of the ground.

The reason I'd gone to Texas in the first place was because of Jacobson and Doren, but Jacobson was dead and Jeff Doren I hadn't seen in over a year. He was an alcoholic and a coke head, and he had no real desire to quit that I could see, and I was so far away from being able to Twelve-Step him—that's when you help other people—I just couldn't deal with him. I'd made a lot of other friends in Austin, but except for Art, my sponsor, I couldn't think of a single one of them I'd feel too bad about leaving.

But if I didn't belong in Texas, where did I belong? The Ohio Valley? It wasn't like I didn't miss my family, but— Well, drinking's so much a part of the Polish culture, it felt like asking me to go back to the valley was like asking me to make a little visit straight to Hell.

I lay there for hours in my little campsite under the stars and went over and over everything. If you don't know where you belong and what you're doing by the time you're thirty, maybe you're never going to know. I just couldn't shake the feeling that something wasn't right. Like something wasn't ever going to be right. It was like an empty feeling inside—that I kept bumping into at odd moments. I read somewhere in one of those AA books—I wish I could remember who said it, but naturally I can't—but anyhow, it's that some alcoholics get
spirits
confused with
the Spirit
. And the minute I read it, I knew it was true.

It wasn't just all those times when I used to get dead drunk and go stumbling into the church to pray. I mean that was part of it, but there was something else too. Drinking used to give me something that felt—well, you know, religious. Like right around the corner was an angel or something that was going to change my life. Drinking used to give me the feeling that life matters. That's how I felt when I started drinking anyway—you know, back in high school. Later on, after you've been doing it for a few years, the only feeling you get from drinking is that you're drinking.

But one thing I'd learned in Texas was that you could get those heavy mysterious feelings when you're sober. Sometimes running. Or sometimes just out of nowhere, maybe just walking down the street, and zing, there you are. My religious feelings were mainly going into AA, and somehow it never occurred to me to go back to the Church, but I started going to the library— You probably never took me for a reader, right? But there's been times in my life where I read a lot. So I read all the AA stuff and then—

Well, I read things I thought Janice might have read, and I'd wonder what she'd thought about this or that, if it'd helped her on her spiritual quest. I read some history books about Poland, and I read some books about the Second World War and even some religious books—like about these priests who'd died in the war and like that. I'd see something on the shelf, and I'd think, yeah, that's something Janice would like, so I'd read it. I guess it was my way of trying to stay close to her, if that makes any sense.

She'd pop into my head out of nowhere, or maybe I'd see a girl who reminded me of her—a blonde, or maybe a kid in pigtails—and I'd go, yeah, it still hurts, all right. It was like I used to feel about Dorothy Pliszka—only a million times worse because with Janice it was real. But I kept thinking about how little girls are with their crushes—they get over them—and I figured she'd got over me. I mean, Linda kept telling me how serious Janice was about that kid Tony, right? And so the best thing for me to do was get over her, and maybe if I gave myself a chance, I could do it. But hell, it'd been over three years. How much more of a chance was I supposed to give myself?