The Clarinet Polka (8 page)

*   *   *

It must have been the Jim and Connie Show that kept me stuck in Raysburg those first few months. I don't know what else it could have been—and yeah, I've got to admit that I took a certain interest in our little escapades. Of course it couldn't last forever. But we did make it till damn near September before we blew up, or imploded, or whatever the hell it was we did. The excuse for the fight we had was Vietnam, of all damn things.

Connie was more than a dove; she wanted the Viet Cong to win, and I just couldn't go there. Georgie Mondrowski used to say, “Don't tell me Charlie's a nice guy. Charlie is
not
a nice guy,” and that's exactly the way I felt too, and I haven't changed my mind any over the years.

I don't want to give you the impression that everybody and their dog talked constantly about the war back in those days. A lot of the time you just tried to forget it. But it was always there, like—I don't know, some kind of dull roar in the background. A kind of muddy dirty feeling about it. You'd turn on the news, and there'd be the latest installment of death and destruction, and then some asshole from the government would be lying to you about it, and then there'd be some protest going on somewhere.

I had nothing against protests. At least when they were starting out I didn't. When I was in the service—well, even in my alcoholic stupor, I did manage to notice that the times they were a-changing. Martin Luther King got killed and Bobby Kennedy got killed, and there was all that shit going down at the Chicago convention, and Johnson threw in the towel, and Nixon got elected saying he had some plan to end the war, but the war was still going full tilt. Then by the time I got home you'd start seeing these protests where the kids weren't just chanting and singing songs, they were trashing the campus, and I couldn't buy that.

It's funny how something you see on the tube can stick in your mind for years. There was some protest somewhere, and there's this guy about my age, right? And he's got hair down to his asshole and these John Lennon glasses, and just looking at him you know he's never worked a day in his life. And he's got this big, smug, self-satisfied grin on his face. He's playing for the camera, right? And he takes his draft card and he
eats
it. I wanted to jump right through the tube and strangle the son of a bitch with my bare hands.

But on the other hand there was Gene McCarthy, and lots of ordinary people were coming out against the war, and I don't know, I think most people were just plain getting sick of it. The guys my father's generation had been in the big one, so they had a knee-jerk reaction, you know, my country right or wrong, and we got to go stop the Commies—especially if they had any feelings for Poland they thought that—but not too many of them was exactly saying, “Well, son, it's your patriotic duty to go get your ass shot off.” I mean, my old man talked a good game, but the feeling you got from him was more like that World War II thing I heard him say a million times—“That's all well and good, Jimmy, but don't volunteer for anything.” You know what's funny? He cared more about my hair than what I thought about the war.

And the guys I went to school with— The best I can tell, most of us felt— Well, it was like what the hell can you do about it anyway? Nothing. So if you had to go, you went, and if you could get out of it, you got out of it, and it was kind of the luck of the draw whichever it was, and all you could do was try to survive the best way you could.

The closest I'd come to the war had been seeing the bodies unloaded on Guam. There they were, in uniform, and they just looked like ordinary guys, except they were dead. And then there was Hewitt, Foley, and Jacobson. And if you want to know the truth— Well, okay, this is not one of those well-informed, well thought out, highly reasoned opinions we're all supposed to have in order to function at our very best in a democracy—this is your hairy, no-bullshit, four-in-the-morning take on things. What I
really
thought about Vietnam was that the whole goddamned country was not worth the life of a single one of those guys.

Connie told me that thinking like that made me a racist. “I'm sorry, honey,” I said, “but I don't have a lot of sympathy for the Viet Cong, and I don't have a lot of sympathy for whatever bunch of clowns we're propping up in Saigon this week either.”

We're in the back of the truck out on a dirt road where I'd pulled off by some cornfields. I've got the doors open to try to get a breeze, but there's no breeze, and Connie and I are sitting there stark naked, drinking beer out of the picnic cooler, and she's telling me how I'm wrong about Vietnam.

I've got just enough beer in me to hit that point where you say, piss on it—like getting back to the shop before Vick goes home, like getting Connie back before her husband gets home, like driving somewhere and getting something to eat so maybe we won't get totally shitfaced, like doing anything the least bit sensible—just piss on it.

To celebrate my arrival in the Land of Piss-on-It, I got the Jack Daniel's out of the toolbox and took a hit, and then, as a joke, I offered it to Connie. She didn't drink out of the bottle, but that day she did. “You're terrible, Jim,” she says, “the things you make me do.”

If you're a real drinker, there's a point when the rush starts, and you can't beat that. For a real drinker, nothing can beat that, and I'm feeling totally satisfied and pleased with myself, and the sex is over for the day so I'm off duty and we can settle down to some serious drinking, and I'm feeling that wild burst of happiness—that crazy drinker's rush—and I remember thinking, this is it, Jimmy boy. Life doesn't get any better than this.

I get it into my head that I'll tell her a story that will make it clear to her what I thought about Vietnam. “So I've only been on Guam a few weeks,” I say, “and I'm checking out a system because the commander of the ship reported a malfunction—the power supply to the fuel-quantity gages. It's one of the systems can ground an aircraft. And the commander—the captain or major or whatever the hell he is—wants to know if I can get the system corrected in time for the takeoff. They're about to make a bomb run, you see.

“Well, there's nothing wrong with the system. Where I'm working puts me right behind the copilot, so he can't see me, but the captain's looking straight at me, and I say, ‘Can't find a thing wrong with it, sir.'

“‘Listen,' he says, ‘I'm not going to take up an aircraft that's unsafe.'

“And then something happens. He doesn't wink or smile or anything, just keeps looking at me, but all of a sudden I know he doesn't want to fly. There's two currents going into that system, an AC and a DC, so—right there with him watching me do it—I jump the AC into the DC and torch the thing out. Sparks, puff of smoke, while it burns its little heart out. And I say, ‘Yeah, you were right, Captain. It's malfunctioning.' And he gives me a big shit-eating grin. ‘I said I wouldn't fly an unsafe aircraft.'”

“I don't get it,” Connie says.

That stops me because I thought it was obvious. “He didn't want to fly,” I say.

“Right. He didn't want to fly. Why?”

“That's the way it was—like, you know, just the way it was.” I don't know what else to say to make her see it.

“You mean, nobody wanted to fly?” she says.

“Of course there were guys who wanted to fly. There were lots of these gung-ho—”

“You mean, he was sympathetic to the Viet Cong?”

“Oh, for Christ's sake, no, he wasn't sympathetic to the Viet Cong.
Nobody
was sympathetic to the Viet Cong. Jesus, Connie, what do you think? He just didn't want to fly. It's like, honey, when you don't give a shit—”

“What are you trying to tell me, Jim? I really don't get it.” She's staring me right in my eyes, and she looks real puzzled. “Oh,” she says, “
you
don't give a shit? Is that what you're trying to tell me? Everything's a joke with you?”

That was the first time with Connie when I felt—I don't know how to describe it. Something like a tilt, and then the world starts to drop away from under your feet. But I thought, hell, she's a smart girl and what I'm saying's real simple so if I start over again and tell her the story all over again, she'll see how simple it is, so that's what I did.

Everything I said was wrong. “You're being patronizing,” she said. “Just who do you think I am? You do know what it means to patronize somebody, don't you, Jim?”

Well, that really pissed me off—that she'd think I'd never heard the word “patronize.” We're chugalugging that bottle of Jack Daniel's like soda pop, and she's started giving me a lecture on American foreign policy—I mean a
lecture
. She starts with George Washington and works her way forward. I sit there and listen as long as I can, and then I say, “Hey, wait a minute, honey. Now who's being patronizing?”

She stops talking and looks at me like she'd never seen me before. She looks like somebody when you yank them up straight out of a sound sleep. Then she starts screaming. “Who the hell are you? Jesus Christ, just who the hell
are
you?”

I reach out to touch her, and she bats my hand away. “Who do you think
I
am? Some little slut? Jesus, what am I doing here?” And before I know what's happening, bang, she's out of the truck and running.

It's so quick I just sit there and watch her go—this girl, completely bare-ass naked, running off into some farmer's field, screaming her head off. It's late in the season and the corn's ready to harvest, and she's crashing the stocks and knocking them over, and stumbling and falling down, and scrambling up and running and crashing into more stocks. Screaming the whole way—no words that I can make out, just this horrible wailing, loud, and I keep watching it like a movie, and I'm thinking, Christ, I wonder where the farmer is.

Eventually some sense of self-preservation must have got me moving. I didn't know how drunk I was until I pulled my pants and boots on and jumped out of the truck, and then, hey, wow, I can hardly stand up, and then there we are—me and Connie—and we're both of us totally shitfaced in the middle of the afternoon, running around in somebody's cornfield, and she's buck naked. I catch up to her, and she bites my arm—I mean,
bites
it like a dog.

I let go of her, and she's crouched down on all fours, screaming, “Don't hit me. Don't you ever hit me.”

It hadn't occurred to me to hit her. I spread my hands open and say, “Connie, this is ridiculous. Get in the truck, okay?”

Well, she stayed where she was, screaming and crying, and I thought maybe I
would
have to hit her to get her in the truck. But finally when I reached out for her, she didn't do anything, so I got her over my shoulder and started carrying her back, and she threw up all over me.

I got her clothes back on her. She didn't help at all. She kept crying and talking, but nothing she said made any sense, and I was so drunk myself, it took everything I had just to function on the most basic kind of level—like one cut above a chimpanzee. She kept saying, “I'm a slut, a real slut, a real little slut.” It's ninety-some degrees, and not a breath of air, and the whole world smells like whiskey and vomit. “Oh, God, I'm such a slut,” she says.

“Jesus, Connie,” I say, “give me a break.”

I drove into some dumb little town and made her drink a milkshake and some coffee, and I thought she was getting herself back together. “Oh, God,” she said, “I feel awful. I don't know what happened to me.” Then I drove her back to the mall where she'd left her car. “Do you expect me to go home like this?” she said.

“Honey,” I said, “if there's someplace else you want to go, you tell me about it and I'll take you there.”

She looked at me for a long time like she was getting ready to say something, and I kept waiting, but nothing. Then, all of a sudden, she jumped out of the truck and went storming over to her Mustang. She was obviously really pissed off at me, and I didn't know why. I hadn't held her nose and poured the Jack Daniel's down her throat.

I walked over to her car and leaned down to look in the window at her. “Hey, can you drive?” Thinking, you know, that maybe I could drive her home and she could say the Mustang broke down or something.

“Of course I can drive,” she says. Her voice is like somebody else's. I mean it. She doesn't sound like herself. She doesn't even sound real. She sounds like she's in a bad movie. “I can see, Jim,” she says, “that you have a lot to learn about relationships.”

“Oh, to hell with you, Connie,” I say.

“Fuck you, you goddamn pig,” she says. I'd been leaning on the Mustang, and she pulled out so fast if I hadn't jumped back as quick as I did, she could have run over my foot or some damn thing.

*   *   *

I didn't know whether I'd ever see Mrs. Constance Bradshaw again, and to tell you the truth I didn't give a shit. A couple days later, Vick says, “Some girl called up here asking for your home number. I think it was that girl in the miniskirt.”

“Oh, yeah? Did you give it to her?”

“Hell, no. I figured if you wanted her to have your home number, she'd already have it.”

“That's right, Vick,” I said, “that's exactly right.”

The next week I ran into my uncle Stas in the PAC, and he said, “Hey, bill collectors after you or something?”

“Not that I know of. Why?”

“Some broad called up asking for you. I told her I never heard of any Jimmy Koprowski.”

I thought that was really funny. Connie must have figured out how to spell my name right—that it's a W, not a V. There's only three Koprowskis in the phone book, and I knew I'd be hearing from her eventually.