The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato

ALSO BY KATHY GIUFFRE:

An Afternoon in Summer: My Year in the South Seas

Collective Creativity: Art and Society in the South Pacific

Communities and Networks: Using Social Network Analysis to Re-think Urban and Community Studies

John F. Blair, Publisher

1406 Plaza Drive

Winston-Salem, NC 27103

(800) 222-9796 |
blairpub.com

Copyright @ 2015 by Kathy Giuffre

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. For information, address John F. Blair, Publisher, Subsidiary Rights Department, 1406 Plaza Drive, Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27103.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Giuffre, Kathy, 1962-

The drunken spelunker's guide to Plato: a novel / by Kathy Giuffre.

       
pages cm

ISBN 978-0-89587-651-5 (alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-89587-652-2 (ebook) 1. Single women—Fiction. 2. Bars (Drinking establishments)—Fiction. 3. Subculture—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3607.I68D77 2015

813'.6—dc23

2015016052

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Cover design: Brooke Csuka

Book design: Anna Sutton

To Alvis, Meg, Taylor, and Herb with love and gratitude

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

THE CAVE

ORIGINS

DANNY

MADNESS

SUMMER

AUTUMN

STORM

DISSOLUTION

JAKE

HELL

SNOWFALL

PANDORA

HALCYON

THE ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PROLOGUE

IN BOOK VII OF
THE REPUBLIC,
the Greek philosopher Plato recounts a dialogue between his younger brother, Glaucon, and his teacher, Socrates. The dialogue is an allegory about a cave. It is the duty of the philosopher, Socrates says, to lead us all from the darkness of the cave, with its false understandings built only on shadows and echoes, into the sunshine, where we will finally see the truth. In the light of true knowledge and reason, humans will at last come into our own. This, anyway, is what Socrates argues.

1

THE CAVE

THIS WAS IN THE DAYS WHEN NIGHTTIME
used to mean something. At midnight, the television stations all played “The Star-Spangled Banner” and then went dark until time for the Farmers' Weather Report at dawn. You couldn't go to the grocery store after nine. All the other stores closed at eight. It might be hard to find an open gas station. Last call was taken seriously at all the local bars—people were known to get busted running red lights, trying to make it in time.

In Waterville, the only all-night restaurant of any kind was Clyde's Chicken, a brightly lit fried-chicken joint that usually had only one thing on the menu—Chicken and Biscuits. Sometimes a handwritten sign taped up on the wall announced the temporary addition of Fried Livers and Gizzards. I never saw anyone eat them, although I have heard some, such as Stinky, claim to. He felt it gave him an air of distinction.

Some men woo women with wine or with roses or with dates to see movies in which the heroine, despite being movie-star
beautiful, is saved from a loveless future only by falling into the last-chance arms of the sweet and quirky hero, who is inexplicably available despite also being movie-star beautiful.

These men show a lack of imagination.

Danny wooed me with a handful of early-spring violets and a 2
A.M.
trip to Clyde's Chicken.

“Are you going to eat the gizzards to impress me?” I asked.

“Lord, no,” he said, and shuddered.

The Cavern Tavern was underground. You entered the front (where the bar was) down a dingy flight of concrete stairs from the street above, breathing in an updraft of cigarette smoke, dampness, stale beer fumes, and subterranean cool. You entered the back (where the pool tables were) down a set of wooden steps jutting out of the wet alleyway asphalt next to the dumpsters. Over the back door was a sign that read, “Ballroom Entrance.”

The Cave should have been a sad place in the late afternoons when Rafi, the weary first-shift bartender, opened both doors to try to let some air in while he washed out last night's dirty ashtrays in the tiny cold-water sink next to the toilets. It should have been happy—happiest—at night when the red-colored light bulbs strung across the ceiling were turned on and the place was packed tight with tipsy, laughing people who had come to hear the bands play. We passed the hat and, on a good night, the band made sixty dollars altogether, plus the right to stay around after closing and drink free beer.

But in the afternoons, before opening time, if Rafi liked you, you could sit at the bar and smoke cigarettes and read the newspaper or listen to the call-in shows on the radio or to the
preachers who made me laugh out loud and made Rafi grin and shake his head in disbelief, which was the closest he ever got to laughing out loud himself. Sometimes, if you felt like it, you could help Rafi out by taking the green plastic covers off the pool tables and folding them and brushing the tables down with the pool-table brush and then, while Rafi had their coin boxes open and was busy raking out all the quarters and counting them and putting them into rolls to take to the bank, you could play a free game of pool. In the summer especially, it would stay light so long that sometimes the afternoon didn't end until late at night.

I used to hang around with Rafi when I first came to Waterville, and I was on hand when the regular weeknight bartender, Roscoe, quit unexpectedly after passing the bar exam. It was his fourth stab at it, so everyone was caught off guard. The next we heard of him, he had been elected to Congress and moved to Washington.

The afternoon when Roscoe came in with the happy news, I was there.

“How about hiring Josie?” Rafi said.

I took the job because I didn't have another one.