The Clarinet Polka (11 page)

So anyhow, after we do the childhood nostalgia number, we move up to the present. Now if I'd been paying the least bit of attention to Linda before that, I could have guessed that some asshole had broken her heart. He was a grad student down at the university, and he must have talked a good line because he had her convinced he was going to marry her. As she's telling me about it, two great big tears come rolling out from under her glasses. “Naive?” she says, “I should get some kind of major award. Well, that's what I get for spending my life glued to a piano stool. Oh, well, it's probably for the best. He wasn't even Catholic.”

“Aw, Linny. Boy, would you have been in deep shit.”

“Yeah, I know. Mom would have killed me. But it's left me feeling— I really thought he loved me. I don't know if I've got any love left in me for anybody else. I don't know if I can trust anybody again.”

So I've got to come up with all the usual dumb things—of course you'll fall in love again, just give yourself time, and so on. It's like a rerun of the conversations we used to have in high school. You see, Linda's one of these girls who's totally convinced she's not pretty even though she is.

She got the old man's coloring, and on her, it looks good—dark ash-blond hair and clear blue-gray eyes and pale skin with those naturally pink cheeks that make her look like she's just come in out of the cold. But she didn't get his big nose, thank God.
I
got it. Linda got Mom's features. I was going to say they're Slavic, but what the hell's that mean anyhow? Okay, there's a look some Polish girls have that you know in two seconds they're Polish, but I'll be damned if I can describe it. It's sort of like they have faces like little cats. So anyhow I always thought Linda was a very pretty girl, but no matter how much I told her, it didn't do any good.

The way she dressed didn't help any—and it wasn't Mom's fault. Mom used to yell at her, “Linda, for God's sake, do you mean to tell me you
paid money
to look like that?” Maybe it was because she spent her whole life at the piano, but she was completely out of it when it came to clothes. Whatever was in—like go-go boots or bell-bottoms—she wouldn't wear it until she was totally convinced it was safe, and by then, of course, it'd be out. Even back then, when skirts were just about as short as they were ever going to get, just above her knees was the most Linda would allow herself.

So I did my best to cheer her up, and I got her to tell me about getting her B.Mus.—that's one thing she's really proud of—and finally I asked her, “Hey, so what's with the trumpet?”

“I'm starting a polka band.”

“Oh, yeah? Who else is going to be in it?”

“Well, so far, there's just me and Mary Jo Duda.”

I had to laugh at that one. Mary Jo Duda was a real character, an old gal who called herself “the Polka Lady.” She was our parents' age, maybe older. She'd been playing in bars when Linda and I were still kids. Any bar you'd walk into where you'd hear an accordion in the back room, chances are it'd be Mary Jo, and any polka you'd ever heard in your life, you'd call out the name of it, and she'd sit there and think about it for a few seconds and then she'd belt it out for you. She played weddings and lawn fetes too, and she'd been the accordion player in three or four different bands. She was a big lady, bleached her hair out into that real brassy hooker's blond, and she wore gobs of blue eye shadow, and she was married, had grown kids—even had grandchildren—and what old Gene Duda thought about his wife sitting around in bars every night playing her accordion and getting loaded I really couldn't tell you.

I don't mean to say there was anything disreputable about Mary Jo. She'd been a mainstay in the sodality at the church for years, but if you mentioned her name to anybody, they'd usually laugh, and the thought of my little sister—my shy, conservative, straight-A little sister who'd busted her ass to learn to play Chopin—the thought of her playing
anything
with Mary Jo Duda just seemed to me absolutely ridiculous.

“Okay, Linda,” I said, “let me see if I've got this right. You went to West Virginia University for four years and got yourself a degree in music so you could play polkas with Mary Jo Duda?”

Linda was laughing, but she was annoyed at me too. “So what are you going to do,” I said, “accordion and trumpet duets?”

That's how I got the Polka Lecture. There was absolutely no way I could get out of it. We had to go home right after dinner, and I had to sit on the end of Linda's bed while she paced up and down yacking at me and played me a million polkas on her stereo. Because Mom and Dad were out, she played them really loud.

*   *   *

Okay, so here's Linda's story, the best I remember it. When she was about ten, she went to the Pączki Ball at the parish hall, and there wasn't anything unusual about that—she'd been going to things at the church with Mom and Dad her whole life—but it was the one and only time that Li'l Wally Jagiello ever played in South Raysburg, and it was also the first time they'd had a real good, red-hot, pure Polish polka band playing at St. Stans since before the war. I have no memory of this whatsoever. I don't know where I was—probably off with the boys somewhere pretending I was a South Raysburg Rat—but anyhow I missed it. Linda sure didn't. If she had to list the most important events of her life, it'd be right up there, not far below her first Communion and getting married and having kids.

Li'l Wally was this little guy in checked pants. He played the drums, and he was absolutely nuts. He was banging away on the drums and belting out all these songs in Polish and yelling in that way musicians do to get the dancers going—
Hop, hop, hop, hopla!
—and just yelling period, high-pitched yips and yelps. Now Linda had been playing the piano since she was six and she was already up to some high level at it, and whenever there was any kind of concert anywhere in Raysburg, Mom always took her to it. So Linda was used to seeing guys read music, but with Li'l Wally's band, there was not a piece of music to be seen, and that really impressed her. She thought it was amazing that the guys had all those tunes in their heads. They had a trumpet and a clarinet and I don't know what all—a concertina probably—and they were just wailing away like crazy, sweat pouring down their faces, and the people in the hall were going berserk.

The place was packed and the word had gone out, so there were people piled up outside trying to get in, and they threw open all the doors even though it was a cold night because they just had to get some air through there. People dancing like total fools. Old folks jumping up and dancing who hadn't danced in years. Young kids dancing on the tables. A couple Raysburg cops showed up thinking there was a riot going on, and they ended up sticking around and dancing their asses off, and they weren't even Polish. The beer was flowing by the gallon, and the people in the back were eating up a million
pączki
, and even Father Stawecki was grinning ear to ear—and it took a lot to get him grinning, believe me.

Just like me, Linda had grown up hearing polka music, but she'd never heard anything as wonderful as that. She said the music burned straight through to her soul. Everybody loved everybody, people were hugging each other, people were weeping for joy, and when Linda saw that, she started crying too, and she was standing there with the tears running down her face, and Old Bullet Head leans down and whispers in her ear, “Hey, Lindusia, I'll tell you a secret. This is
the real thing
.” She said she'd never in her life been so proud of being Polish.

So what Linda learned the night Li'l Wally played the parish hall was that there was a kind of Polish music that was unbelievably wonderful, and the minute Polish people heard it, they knew what it was, and that was what her father had told her it was—
the real thing
.

*   *   *

Now we jump ahead a few years, and Linda's down at Morgantown getting her B.Mus. and she takes a course called “Ethnomusicology.” What they do is, they get tape recorders and they drive out into the hills of West Virginia and find old crocks who know a tune or two from the old days, and they record them and go back and write the tunes down and compare them to all the other tunes people have yanked out of the hills. The professor who taught the course was writing a history of old-time music in West Virginia, and Linda liked the course so much she took the next one, “Advanced Ethnomusicology,” so she would get to do some fieldwork of her own. She asked the professor if she could do her work on Polish music in America, and he said he didn't know what she meant, so she started explaining it to him, and he got a funny look on his face and said, “Oh. You don't mean
polkas
, do you?”

This really pissed her off, so she said to herself, I'm going to show him, because she knew that there was
the real thing
out there somewhere and all she had to do was find it. So the first thing she did was interview everybody in the Ohio Valley who'd ever played a polka.

Well, it turns out that back before the war, the valley had been a real hotbed of polka music, and Linda found lots of musicians who played the real thing. For starters, there was Mary Jo Duda—you know, the polka lady—and Linda asked her where she'd learned all the tunes she knew, and Mary Jo said the first ones she'd learned went straight back to Poland because an old guy named Pete Ostrowski, now deceased, had taught her when she was a kid. He played the old Chemnitzer button box. And Mary Jo played for Linda the first tune she'd learned from him, “The Krakowiak,” and it wasn't exactly a polka, but you could hear that it was like maybe the grandfather of the polka.

Later on, Mary Jo said, she just learned the tunes off records. Linda was very impressed because she is, as she says, “a paper musician,” and anything she has to write down from a record, it takes her a million years, and she thinks that people who can play by ear are specially blessed by God.

So Mary Jo gave Linda the names and phone numbers of every polka musician she knew—and she knew them all—and Linda went and interviewed them. A lot of them were out in Ohio, like in Mercersville and Crestview and out that way because there's a big Polish community there, but some of them were in South Raysburg too, and everybody loved Linda to pieces and talked her ear off. She interviewed the old guys who used to play in Joe Marchewka's Warsaw Orchestra back before the war, and the Andrzejewski brothers who everybody said had the best band going these days, and Ray Pahucki and Ray's mom who'd taught her kids all the tunes she knew from Poland—and I don't know who all else she interviewed. She has a whole list of them if you want to ask her.

She loved hearing about the old days. All those musicians had regular jobs—like Joe Marchewka worked his whole life for Raysburg Steel, and the Andrzejewski brothers worked in the rolling mill in Crestview, and they'd work their last shift on Friday, then they'd play the whole weekend. Get maybe an hour's sleep and be back on the job Monday morning. You played for a Polish wedding back in those days, you didn't take a break like the kids do today. They wanted you playing nonstop for four or five hours at a clip—and those weddings went on for three days.

Well, it was, Linda said, like everything was leading her right back to where she'd started because everybody she talked to mentioned Li'l Wally Jagiello and said what a big influence he was. Before Li'l Wally, they'd all played Eastern style—you know, real fast—and Li'l Wally had been the one who'd introduced that slower Chicago style, that down and dirty style played from the heart that we call honky. So Linda figured she wasn't finished with her research unless she went to Chicago.

The person she should be talking to, our mom told her, was her own Ciocia Jean—Mom's big sister—who'd lived in Chicago for years and had probably sung every Polish tune there ever was. “It was amazing,” Linda said. “Everything I needed was right in front of my nose.”

Jean had always been our favorite aunt. When we were little, she came to visit about once a year. Sometimes she'd bring Uncle Johnny with her, and a kid or two, and sometimes she'd come by herself, and it was always a big occasion. She liked Linda and me, and she'd yell, “Come on, kids, hop in the car,” and she'd take us for a drive, and she'd always stop somewhere and buy us banana splits. She drank Miller's Highlife for lunch, and she had a huge laugh that started down in her toes, and Mom said, “Jean's always been lots of fun.”

Of course we knew that Auntie Jean had been a singer. It's the family legend that Auntie Jean has been singing since she'd learned to talk. Dziadzio Wojtkiewicz would stand her up in the center of the table and she'd sing
“Pockaj, pockaj, powiem Mamie”
in her little-kid voice—four years old and perfectly in tune—and by the time she was a teenager, she'd learned every Polish tune anybody knew, and when the Depression hit, she started singing in bars because people would always throw her some change. She didn't sing American music until she got hired by a band playing in a gangster joint up in Staubsville, and she did so well there she went out to Chicago and got in with a famous jazz band. “The only reason I got to finish high school was because of that money she sent home to us,” Mom said. “God bless her.”

So Linda called up Auntie Jean, and she said, “You hop the hound, honey, and get your pretty little butt out here,” and my shy little sister went sailing off to Chicago with her tape recorder.

There's so many Polish people in Chicago, Linda says, you wonder if they've got any left back in Poland, and everywhere she went, Linda kept running into
the real thing
. She met Eddie Blazonczyk, a nice young guy who'd started a polka band, and oh, boy, was that a hot band. And Linda didn't get to meet L'il Wally because he'd moved to Florida, but she met Marion Lush and heard that two-trumpet style of his, and she sure liked that too. And she met a lot of the old-timers who told her all about the music in the good old days, including a nice old guy who ran the Polish music store, and he had every Polish-American record ever recorded going all the way back to the year zero, and he let Linda tape a lot of them, so she stayed there a month and came back with a million tapes she'd recorded, and a million records, and she thought she'd been to heaven.