Callahan's Place 07 - Callahan's Legacy (v5.0) (26 page)

But cursing Him is not a real productive attitude

Just laugh—you might as well, my friend,
 

’cause either way you’re screwed

I know: it sounds so simple, and it’s so hard to do

To laugh when the joke’s on you

I glanced at Eddie; he was already seating himself at his piano stool and flexing his fingers.
 
He jumped in at the top of the second verse, and landed running.

God loved Mort Sahl, Belushi, Lenny Bruce—He likes it sick

Fields, Chaplin, Keaton…anyone in pain will do the trick

’Cause God’s idea of slapstick is to slap you with a stick:

You might as well resign yourself to stepping on your dick

It always sounds so simple, but it’s so hard to do

To laugh when the joke’s on you

Again I looked at Eddie.
 
He was grinning like a pirate.
 
“Take a chorus,” I hollered, and he did it Dr. John style, scattering notes like buckshot, going out on fantastic limbs but always finding his way back by some impossible route that was in retrospect inevitable.
 
“Again,” Zoey called out, and gave him a push with her bass.
 
Twice in that chorus he did things that made me laugh out loud.
 
“Bridge,” I called as he brought it back to the root, and to my surprise Zoey sang a harmony to it.

You can laugh at a total stranger

When it isn’t your ass in danger

And your lover can be a riot

—if you learn how to giggle quiet

But if you want the right to giggle, that is what you gotta do

when the person steppin on that old banana-peel is you

That exhausted her memory of the lyrics; she left the verses to me, coming in only on the last two lines.

A chump and a banana peel: the core of every joke

But when it’s you that steps on one, your laughter tends to choke

Try not to take it personal, just have another toke

as long as you ain’t broken, what’s the difference if you’re broke?

I know: it sounds so simple, but it’s so hard to do

To laugh when the joke’s on you

Fast Eddie caught my nod and took another chorus, and this time I laughed all the way through; he kept deliberately playing clams, teetering on the verge of a train-wreck, like a matador letting the bull put a couple of stripes on his ass.
 
I was still chuckling as I took the final verse:

It can be hard to force a smile, as you get along in years

It isn’t easy laughin at your deepest secret fears

But try to find your funny-bone, and have a couple beers:

If it don’t come out in laughter, man, it’s comin out in tears

I said it sounds so simple, but it’s so hard to do

To laugh when the joke’s on you

Fast Eddie had found the third harmony for those last two lines by now.
 
It sounded so sweet, we did it again.
 
And then we did it a third time, with little bluesy variations that dovetailed perfectly.
 
And the fourth and final time we repeated it, everyone in the joint who could carry a tune climbed on with us and we rode it into the wall together.

Boy, it felt good.

***

Of course there was applause and laughter, and some slightly manic chatter, when we were done.
 
We all felt relieved to be back on track, eager to get back to being merry again.
 
A competition developed to buy me and Eddie a beer.
 
I put Lady Mac back down on the bartop, and went to relieve Zoey of her bass.

“Yo, Boss,” Eddie called over the noise.

“Yeah, Eddie?”

He began playing a slow intro riff in a minor key.
 
Another of my songs; I recognized it at once.
 
And frowned.
 
“Evelyn’s Song,” I call it.
 
It’s not a merry song.
 
In fact, it’s so short and so sad I seldom perform it.

“Laughin’s good,” Eddie said.
 
“But
just
laughin’ don’t cut it sometimes, y’know?”

I mentally shrugged, found a safe perch for Zoey’s fiddle, and reclaimed Lady Macbeth.
 
There was a kerfluffle when I tried to join him; he was not in the key I was expecting, the one in which I had written the song.
 
By the point at which I was supposed to sing the first line, I had just located the key he was using, so I gave him an indescribably eyebrow-signal that meant,
Go around again, I’ll get it on the next pass
.
 

Instead,
he
started singing.
 
He had transposed the song to bring it into his own range.
 
Just as the Beatles sang with American accents, Eddie sings without a trace of his Brooklyn accent.
 
He has one of those Tom Waits voices, like Charlie Parker doing his best with a broken sax.

Snow is beginning to melt

Like an emotion I once felt

The cards have already been dealt

The hand has been played

The arrangements have been made

Icicles hide in the shade,

Awaiting their turn

For a bad case of sunburn

Ain’t it something to learn

even good people die?

At that point the song quotes eight bars of an old Irish funeral chant, one of those “Aye-diddly-eye-die, diddly-eye-die, diddly-eye-die-die” deals.
 
A minor, A minor, C major, D, over and over.
 
I was ready to take the harmony, but Eddie did it instrumentally, and after the eighth bar he launched into a solo.
 
I concentrated on staying out of his way.

It was a helluva solo.
 
Somewhere in there I heard magazine pages turning, and a boy saying, “Well,
I
ain’t doin’ it ever again!” and a man crying, “Don’t worry, Eddie, it isn’t your fault!” and an El train coming in the window.
 
At one point it became so childishly simple that I knew without asking he was quoting the first melody Uncle Dave ever taught him on the piano—then he repeated it with sophisticated embellishments, as if showing off his progress since then.
 
And then he segued back to the simple melancholy chords, and sang the second and final verse:

I hope you knew

All I never could tell you

Any time that I grew

It was under your eye

But I let the chance go by

Never got to say goodbye

Guess it’s time to make a try

Hear me sing and hear me cry:

Bye-bye…

My words sounded so much better coming from Fast Eddie’s cracked pipes that I marveled I had never thought of having him sing it before.
 
I guess I had thought my pain for Evelyn to be too personal.
 
Perhaps nothing else could have brought it home to me so clearly that my pain was Eddie’s, and Eddie’s pain was mine.

He caught my eye and signaled me to sing the aye-diddly-eye-dies.
 
As I did, he came in behind me with the third harmony—the one most people can’t find unless someone else is already singing the more natural second line—and it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

I didn’t need any more eye-signals; I knew he wanted to repeat it eight times, so I did.
 
The melody line was
designed
to be so simple even an untutored peasant can sing it, so people jumped in as the spirit moved them, and for awhile there it got to be like an Irish funeral.
 
I mean, fifty or sixty strangers singing something as essentially meaningless as the coda to “Hey, Jude,” can bring tears to your eyes: imagine a whole barful of micks—native, collateral and honorary—howling back at the banshee.

When we were done, there
were
dry eyes in the house, four of them—but only because Tanya Latimer and Acayib Pinsky suffer from lacrimation deficit.

And Fast Eddie was right.
 
Tears, in their place, are just as important as laughter.
 
You can’t tell a story like that and then shuffle away with a few giggles.
 
Having invoked Uncle Dave, it was necessary to say goodbye to him.

“Eddie,” I said, when the applause had died down, “what was Uncle Dave’s last name?
 
I want to remember him as long as you do.”

The question seemed to confound him.
 
“Whaddya mean?
 
His name was Costigan.
 
Whaddya tink?”

I nodded.
 
“Ah.
 
I should have guessed.”

“What was your biological parents’ name, Eddie?” Merry Moore asked.

“I don’t rememba,” he said flatly.

Merry opened her mouth, closed it again, and finally settled on, “Oh.”

Long-Drink McGonnigle was smiling as he brought Eddie a beer.
 
“Eddie, what was that thing Roland Kirk said about dying?”

Eddie’s forehead furrowed…then relaxed as the quote came back.
 
“He said, ‘Nobody dies…dey just leave
here
.’
 
Dat de one?”

Long-Drink nodded.
 
“See what I’m gettin’ at?
 
As long as you’re walkin’ around with that name on your bank card, David Costigan ain’t dead.
 
He just ain’t
here
.”

Eddie blew the foam off his beer, and smiled his beautifully hideous smile.
 
“Well, I wish ta God he was here…but youse’re right, Drink.”
 
He lifted his glass in salute.
 
“Tanks.”

And a cheer went up.

***

As I was on my way to restore Lady Macbeth to her case in the back, I heard Solace call my name.

“What’ll it be, Mac?” I punned, incautiously.

Her icon became the Sad Mac that warns of a boot failure.
 
“Job’s curse on you for what you’re Raskin,” she riposted.
 
“Quadra have to go and Performa pun like that for? That Woz awful.”

Punning with a savvy computer is like showing a few little steps you’ve invented to Baryshnikov.
 
I’ve seen Doc Webster keep up with Solace for as long as ten minutes, but even he can’t sustain it.
 
She can pun in every language there is.
 
It had been sheer bravado to even attempt it.
 
Nonetheless, I felt obliged to go down swinging.

“Nothing I hate more than a moaner Lisa—don’t be such a crab Apple.”
 
See?
 
Pee-yew.
 
“Tell me, is it true that Microcomputer is Patrocomputer’s brother?”

“Yeah, and I’m their sister Minicomputer.”

Doc Webster, gravitating naturally toward horror, arrived and gave me covering fire.
 
“Data way, Solace.”
 
He reached out and caressed her monitor screen.
 
“What’s a nice pearl like you doing in a glaze like this?”
 
Somewhere nearby, Tesla groaned.
 
“Say, you know those little fish that swim across your face whenever the screen-saver’s on—are those Finder’s kippers?”

“Yes,” she said, “and the little bouncing snowman is my graphic winterface.
 
And one of the things that makes a man different from a woman is, every time he takes a WYSIWYGgles it.
 
Because it’s floppy.
 
You know, if I’d only had a diet cola, I might have joined you all on that last song.
 
I could have been the mourning Tab and Apple choir.”

Tesla was helpless with laughter, now.
 
I decided the only hope of retreat was a diversion.
 
Hearkening back to my last volley, I said, “So the boss tells Pat and Mike to measure the telephone poles before they install them.
 
Pat says, ‘Mike, I’ll stand the poles up on end, and you climb up there with a tape measure.’
 
‘But Pat,’ says Mike, ‘why don’t we measure them here on the ground?’
 
‘Why, ya eejit,’ says Pat, ‘the boss told us to find out the
height
, not the
length
.’”