The Bartender's Tale (46 page)
Furrowed with thought, Pop reached in his shirt pocket for a cigarette and pulled out an empty pack. “Cripes”—he crumpled it and tossed it into the rest of the trash in the back room—“the joint needed cleaning out anyhow.” Squinting at the redheaded figure standing on one foot and then the other down there at the bottom of the steps, he came to life, and Zoe and I with him. “Okay, it’s a deal,” he said gruffly, rising to his full height and smoothing his pompadour to blend the white with the black. “Let’s take that front door off its hinges and get our aprons on, Delano. Rule number one, you can’t do business if the joint isn’t open.”
—
IT IS ALL THESE
years later, long after my father in great old age joined generations of the Medicine Lodge’s customers in the marble farm on the knoll overlooking Gros Ventre—“That’s another story,” as he would have said—that the chance of a lifetime has come to me. What a set of chapters our lives have been, imbued with Pop’s historic one, since we have all gone on from that phenomenal year of 1960. Delano Robertson to become the latter-day Alan Lomax, the now gray crew-cut eminence of sound portraits and
lingua america
, presiding at the Library of Congress Archive of Oral History. Francine to knock around San Francisco in ways that probably should not bear inspection, until she found her niche as stage manager at the Fillmore West and grew to be a mother figure to bands of tie-dyed musicians and their raucous successors ever since. Proxy to disappear into her own style of business one more time, leaving us with those unbelievable tales of hers and the remarkable coincidence that when the filming of
The Misfits
was finally done, early in it Thelma Ritter yanks the lever of a slot machine she and Marilyn Monroe happen to be passing in a Reno casino with the explanation, “This machine loves me.”
And Zoe and I? I suppose ours has been a combination of the stories of lovers since time immemorial, of unrequited longing—the Gros Ventre school years—and of separation—college plus my military service—and of reuniting, falling for each other all over again when Cloyce Reinking saw fit to invite us both home, unbeknownst to each other, to her New Year’s party after I came back in one piece from Vietnam. No sooner were we married than our luck held and our acting careers found their arc, in repertory theaters across much of the country ever since.
We have gone from being those young snips Algernon and Cecily in summer stock, to performing our goodly share of Shakespeare together, to gray-headed roles such as George and Martha butchering each other’s nerves in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Now, though,
there is one play that is going to be mine alone. Zoe simply tickled me in the ribs and said, “Go for it, kiddo.” I successfully auditioned for the much-anticipated Chicago revival of
The Iceman Cometh
. And in the time it has taken me to tell this, it is now opening night. Famously, Eugene O’Neill gave the lead actor, Hickey, one of the most sought-after roles ever written: bravura speeches, mocking the pipe dreams of the other customers in a saloon. I have the credits to play Hickey, a cinch and a stretch, both. But when tryouts came, I chose something else. The actor woven into everything that happens onstage, the bartender, Rocky. He pours the drinks for the lost dreamers, eternally swabbing the bar while listening to their stories, ever listening, and, yes, in the end has his own tale. It is my chance to give the performance of a lifetime. After all, I know the character by heart.
—
ALSO BY IVAN DOIG
FICTION
The Sea Runners
English Creek
Dancing at the Rascal Fair
Ride with Me, Mariah Montana
Bucking the Sun
Mountain Time
Prairie Nocturne
The Whistling Season
The Eleventh Man
Work Song
NONFICTION
This House of Sky
Winter Brothers
Heart Earth
