((A
Neighborhood Escapade) (1967))
…
The church
steeple drifts off into the darkness.
The trees in the adjacent cemetery, across Jackson Street, can only be
seen by the fleeting headlights of cars. The mist whitens the trees. Everyone
is at the corner bars, Bram’s or the Mount
Airy. Chick Evens
straightens up, takes out a cigarette, a light drizzle of rain fills the
atmosphere, as he walks slowly up Sycamore Street, turns—sees the corner bars.
A few run-down looking busses, pass him, but are soon lost, once they
turn the corner—he notices a few black faces on the bus, hateful, looking faces
(perhaps it’s the
times, he senses).
He hears voices coming from both bars, music is loud. He opens his eyes
wider, leans his neck back, his belly is a little sour from the drunk he had
the night before. A taxi goes by, stops in front of Bram’s, it looks like
Nancy, David, Carol and Rockwater.
Now standing in-between the two doors of the Mt. Airy, he can hear the
blind noisy street behind him. There are a few familiar faces in the bar, so he
notices looking over the western style, swinging doors. He thinks it would have
been better had he come later—more people, but he’s here now. He heads for the
bathroom, urinates and combs his hair, washes his face. He’s been drinking half
the day, up at Jerry Hino’s house, a half-mile past the church (he had been playing cards with Jerry and his
brother Jim, and Mike Gulf, and Betty—Jerry’s wife, who had to feed the kids
her kids as well as Jerry’s kids, so he decided to leave.)
He comes out of the bathroom, his light
jacket laid over his arm, his friend Al Juneau is in one corner of the bar, he
nods his head—I mean they both nod their heads for recognition of the other;
he’s getting lit up, half drunk. Bill and his wife Judy are in a booth to his
left, Bill had just come back from the war in Vietnam. John St. Clair is in another corner of the
bar, his girlfriend is by herself at the bar opposite him. Big Ace, close to
six-foot six inches tall (the
neighborhood mannequin), no
teeth, 210 pounds ,
ten-years everyone’s senior, or thereabout, not all that bright, is sitting
next to Doug, singing his weird song: “Twenty-four black birds baked in the
pie…” then he forgets the rest of the verse, he always does, and goes into a
humming episode, as if lost inside his own head—pert near dancing on his padded
stool, pounding on the bar with the palms of his hands, his feet kicking the
lower part of the bar some.
Doug and Ace are sitting in the middle of the horseshoe shaped bar, like
most everyone else, drinking beer, it would seem a beer fest was going on; but
it’s really a normal everyday thing, and on the weekends the only difference is
they all get drunker. The bar is not much more than a dive: no, it is just
that, a dive. Chick Evens feels a tinge lousy but knows with a few more beers
he’ll not feel anything, anyway, that will fix him up. As he orders a beer,
drinks it down, his headache disappears. He runs his hand over his forehead, as
if to wipe the beer sweat off of it.
The worst thing for Evens is that he has spent all his money but a
dollar, buying beer at Hino’s house. He is Not sure how he’ll get by tonight,
but there is always someone to buy a fellow neighborhood buddy a beer or two or
three…. He’s good for it he tells himself.
He hears Doug’s voice, far, far away—or so it seems, he’s dating Jackie,
Evens’ old girlfriend. He now joins Bill and Judy, he knows he can borrow a few
bucks from Bill if he has to, needs to. The side window has a light chunk of
the moon showing, all around it is a dark sky, and he falls down—purposely,
onto the soft cushion at the edge of the booth, by Judy.
This whole business of drinking night
after night has made Evens thirsty. Bill notices Chick’s glass of beer is
empty. Bill says—in a wholehearted way, “Come on let’s get another round,” he
is smiling, waves the waitress over—
“As long as the glass is cold, and the beer is cold, I like it,” say
Evens.
These two bars have been a place for the neighborhood boys to drink at
—from the cradle to the grave (or for
most of them it will be); they are
drunks and they don’t even know it, at such a young age too. Chick is but
nineteen-years old, Ace is twenty-nine, and Jackie is his age and Doug perhaps
five years older, and Roger is Doug’s age, thereabouts (Bill will die before his 40th
birthday—electrocuted; Roger at 65, or thereabouts, Al Juneau at 63—in all
cases alcoholism will play a part in their deaths: Don in his early 40s from
alcoholism; Jerry Hino in his mid-forties—a car transmission will fall and
cave-in his chest; Dave in his mid-sixties from cancer; Kathy S., Evens’ old
girlfriend will die in ten-years or less, a car accident; Betty will die of
alcoholism a short while after her husband, in her 40s; Lorimar at 66 of
cancer), and on and on. From
the looks of things—should a bystander take notes—the so called Donkeyland Neighborhood Gang, so
named by the police, the Cayuga Street neighborhood, in essence, one would
think they were all weaned from infancy to infinity at these two bars, on beer,
wine and whiskey—and cigarettes.
Inside the Mt. Airy bar, is an
inexorable dampness, grayness like a mist that lingers, it reeks (The Great Northern Railroad is down and
under the Jackson Street Bridge—and just
outside the bar, you can hear the trains coming and going sporadically. On the
other side of the bridge are the warehouses).
The jukebox is playing “I’m Sorry,” by Brenda Lee (Gunner’s song, whom is now becoming a truck
driver, he was the one that likes to gun his car, especially his black 1940
Ford up and down Cayuga Street, racing his pal, Mouse, waking up the dead at
the nearby Oakland Cemetery). Now the
jukebox it was playing something by Jack Scott, Elvis
of course will be playing soon, a half dozen times along with Ricky Nelson, and
thereafter the Beatles—no one really cares for the Beatles all that much in
Donkeyland, a group that’s been out a few years—Tom T. Hall is singing
something called, PTA or is it something about old dogs and children, not sure.
Most all the males in the bar have their shirtsleeves rolled up, past their
elbows, some are chewing tobacco—a noisy veracious lot, but more under control
than Bram’s across the street—over there, there is a pool table; some of the
boys will shift bars later on, as to break the monotony, those in
Bram’s—bumping into each other as they crisscross Jackson street to reach the
other waterhole.
The waitress is in her forties, has a shabby apron on, the Italian owner
is her lover, he’s married, but after they close up the bar, she settles down
in his office with him, they’ll not leave until close to three o’clock in the
morning.
The jukebox goes louder, a few folks are dancing. The bar is filling up,
with smoke, multicolor white to pale faces, Native American faces, copper color
faces, one Mexican, no blacks or Asians.
Armpits are starting to smell like old rotting fish. Bill hands Evens his beer, Fran, the
waitress, just brought it over.
“Shut the door,” a voice yells, “you’re leaving in the flies!”
That was Larry and his wife Jeannie who had come through the swinging
doors. There’s an empty booth alongside Evens’, they grab it, everyone shaking
hands or hugging one another, as if they hadn’t seen one another for ages, and
ages in these two bars are simply days.
“Two bottles of beer,” says Larry, he likes bottle beer, as does his
wife, she’s Native American, like Jackie her sister, and John St. Clair, their
brother.
The neighborhood factory, “Structural Steel,” its second shift is
letting out now, and Jack T, and Danny Knight (in
due time Danny will go up for murder charges) the
Crazy man (pleasingly plump), so he is known—are now walking through the
bar door, Jack is now going with one of Chick’s old girlfriends, a Mexican.
Bunches of the neighborhood boys still work at the factory, for most all of
them have at one time or another. Old Charlie, even got Evens a job there once,
and then Charlie retired, he was Mexican, the only one in the neighborhood.
Now there are more people in the bar, and the fish like smell is
becoming undecipherable, it weakens the stomach although, nauseates it.
“What a sickening job,” says a voice, it seems to come from the area
where John L. is sitting, and his girlfriend Karin. John L, had traveled to
California with Evens recently, as Jerry Hino had a year back, went to Omaha,
Nebraska, with Evens, and Ace’s brother
Keith, had went to Seattle with him; all wanting to rush back to the
neighborhood but—but Evens.
The only relief from the squeezing smells in the bar—if you are not
totally drunk—is to leave the bar for
fresh air, so, Evens picks himself up, excuses himself, he hears the collective
voices, the motors and horns coming as he opens the bar doors, that faces
Sycamore and Jackson Streets. His ears clear out all the deformed thick noises.
His memory fades from all the prominent cheekbones, dead looking, red-eyed
drunks, all those drowsy looking bodies that had clustered around him, and
everyone else.
He lights up his 40th cigarette for the day and night, he’s
working on 60. He sees the accumulated garbage along the side of the bar, in
the street. The music from the bar jukebox mingles with the live band across
the street. He sees Sonny playing the guitar (Sonny
had taught him a thing or two about finger picking, in his younger days: and
that’s not all that long ago. He also played for a short while with one of the
national Country, Rock and Roll bands)
The door to Bram’s is wide open, he can see his older brother Mike,
drunker than a skunk, sitting at the bar—his elbows leaning on the bar, his
back to him. He throws the butt onto the sidewalk, buries it under his heel. He
had sucked it down to half an inch, a Lucky Strike.
He thinks: why don’t I leave, and never come back?
He thinks: I have dreams, other than drinking myself to death here in
these two dives. I want to go to San Francisco. (But
he really wants to travel the whole world, and get a college degree, and write
poetry, and books but he doesn’t say this—nor does he quite understand his
wants and needs to survive in this world, because he’s from this neighborhood
and people would think he’s insane to bring such delusions to surface, and can
such things really be possible? I mean, are these dreams not for other folks,
not like him, folks you read about, or see on television, not really for folks
like him; but only time will tell. He senses something, and thus, unknowingly,
perhaps he’s willing to wait and willing it to be, even if it takes a life
time. He doesn’t know all this remember; only I do—now looking back. He’d like
a home by the ocean and one in the mountains, this too seems to come out of the
movies, perhaps he can follow his dream and make it come true. Between you and
me, he makes it come true, or should I say, the Holy-One listening to him…)
He watches the circle of foam from a pitcher
of beer being carried to a table of five people at Bram’s; he sees an old man
vomiting alongside the bar. He sees cars in the parking lot disappearing into
the night under a gibbous moon.
He thinks: We’re all frightened to go away—to leave forever this
neighborhood; constrained by our minds. Defeated before we’ve even tested life;
and then we grow old. A thousand times we say: if only. These are not really
his words, he doesn’t even know such words yet, but if he could say them, he
would have.
The music on the jukebox is playing a sad song, “Lonely Street,” by
Ricky Nelson, that’s Chick’s song, and Bill likes it, they’ve played guitars
together, ever since they were fifteen years old, in Bill’s basement, they were
going to start a band up, called: “The Blue Dreamers,” they figured out the
name together, but never did; they practiced Karate in Bill’s backyard
together, Chick being the instructor—
His world grows quiet, more intense—he looks inside the bar, stinking
armpit smells, and more beer being passed from one hand to another: garbage on
the floor, smoky clouds from cigarettes are settling overhead like cobwebs
throughout the bar, the same images every night—this weekend night is no
different.
This bar is a can of worms, he tells himself, a brain twister, but he
walks back inside: as if it were home; although he doesn’t say that, but if he
listens to his second self—the voice of the mind, he’ll know the truth, and the
truth is, it’s not home (although
the devil would like him to think so),
it’s just a dive, and that he will have to learn quick, because time is
concentrated in the moment; and life is short at best: and dreams do come true
if you activate them—follow them, do the work, write out a plan in your head,
and if you do not have one, then surely it will never materialize; prayer
without a plan is dead, only if you work the dream and follow it grab the
opportunities on the way will it come to pass: will he pick up on this? The sooner the better!
No: 631 (12-11-2010) /Also, in memory of
my old friend Al Juneau (died, 2011/63-years old)/ an Old Donkeyland Friend and
Father Washington
