The Clarinet Polka (23 page)

In Staubsville they've got this famous club called the Night Owl, and that's where Auntie Jean used to sing for the gangsters back in the thirties, and when I started telling Connie that story, I saw her eyes glaze over. She never showed much interest in a lot of the things I tried to tell her, so eventually I quit trying to tell her anything. “It's an old-time Italian place,” I said. “Been there forever, and the food's terrific.”

“Oh, they make good pasta?”

“Screw your pasta, baby, I mean a goddamned plate of spaghetti.”

It wouldn't have mattered what they served; the minute Connie saw the place, she loved it to pieces. There's a huge parking lot wrapped around two sides of the building, and not a light in it, maybe because the kind of clientele they had back in the old days liked their parking lots a little on the dim side. Out front there's a neon owl with a top hat and a walking stick. I remember him from when I was in high school. When all the neon was working right, the owl was supposed to wink at you, but by the time Connie and I got there, a lot of his tubes had burned out and he'd developed a short so all he did was crackle every few seconds.

The restaurant inside was damn near as dark as the parking lot. Walls lined with booths, little pissy lights in them, like a quarter of a watt. A bunch of tables. A few candles in those glass things scattered around. A dance floor and a bandstand. On the weekends they still had live music—country bands, mostly—but if you wanted music on Wednesday nights, you played the jukebox. We'd stop just inside the door because you've got to let your eyes adjust, and then eventually we'd be able to make out this shadow that turns out to be Joanne, the waitress. She floats over like she's just dropped her fourth Quaalude, which probably she has. She's got your classic hoopie accent, and after she gets to know you, she says things like, “Youins goina have yourself a real ball tonight, huh?” Her skirts are so short her panties show, but it doesn't matter a whole hell of a lot in the—what was it Connie called it?—oh, yeah, the stygian gloom.

Whatever Connie ordered to drink, even Scotch on the rocks, it always came with a little pink umbrella in it because it was, you know, for the lady. The spaghetti was always terrific. We'd sit in a booth, and we'd sit side by side so we could play with each other under the table because our main purpose in going to the Night Owl was to get each other as hot as a couple shithouse rats.

Yeah, it was sex that got us together in the first place, but now we pretty much stopped pretending we were interested in anything else. I knew she still had a husband because she called him up from my damn telephone, and I assumed she still had a couple kids, but she never mentioned them. She sure didn't want to hear about anything I was doing in real life.

“All men have fetishes,” she says. “What are yours?”

We're talking a guy who taped up
Playboy
centerfolds all over his ceiling when he was in high school, so my fetishes are fairly standard issue, but when you've got a girl with a figure like Connie's, it doesn't take a whole hell of a lot to get me going. I say the first thing that pops into my head, “Well, that black leather minidress you had on—you know, when you were waiting for me in my car? Well, that was pretty hot.” The next Wednesday she turns up wearing it, and when we're in our booth at the Night Owl having our first round of drinks, she says, “Guess what I'm wearing under this dress?” and I say, “Gee, Connie, I couldn't tell you,” and she says, “Nothing.” That information, of course, has the desired effect, and I guess you could say, it established a precedent.

Somewhere in the middle of the sixties some sorry asshole invented pantyhose, and like a lot of guys my age, I always thought that was one of the great tragedies of Western civilization. I expressed this opinion to Connie, and— Okay, here's what's happening most Wednesday nights. Connie likes to have a bite of dinner with a couple of the girls from The Italian Renaissance—that's what she tells her husband—so the lady she's hired to take care of her kids and do her housework for her stays late and makes dinner. Connie takes off about four, and I leave work early, and we meet at my trailer. If she gets there ahead of me, she has a key so she can let herself in, but she always waits till I show up to do her little show. Then, with me sitting there watching her, she takes all her clothes off. She lays her bra and panties and pantyhose very neatly on my table. She puts on stockings and a garter belt and gets dressed all over again in whatever she'd been wearing, and I don't mind this one little bit.

We hop in my car and drive up to the Night Owl. We have a couple drinks and eat dinner. We talk dirty to each other and play games under the table. We stumble out to my car and go sailing back down to Raysburg—it's amazing how fast you can drive if you put your mind to it—and go leaping into my bed. No matter how hard we try to make it last, it's usually over pretty quick, which is a good thing because there's only enough time for one more drink. She puts her underwear back on and gets dressed again. She calls her husband on that phone I'd had put in for her—and paid for—and she tells him she's so sorry how late it's got but it was a wonderful class and she had a great dinner with the girls and she just stopped for a quick drink with one of them but she's leaving right now and she'll be home in twenty minutes. I walk out to her Mustang with her, give her a kiss, and ZAP, she's gone. I walk back into my trailer and get loaded.

Even after we'd just had it, sex was pretty much all we talked about. She was big on sexual fantasies, and she wanted to hear all about mine, but I was a washout in that department because my fantasies are usually just about me screwing somebody. She had some dandies. Some, she said, were fun to act out, but others should just stay fantasies. Like the German shepherd. “You don't want a real dog,” she said. “No, a real dog slobbers all over you and barks and has fleas and might give you anthrax. The dog you want is the dog in the mind.”

That got to be a joke with us. I'd say, “I know what you want, baby. It's the dog in the mind.”

Connie subscribed to about a million radical newspapers, and whatever was going in the women's lib department, she was for it, and one thing that all the women's libbers agreed on was that marriage was the pits and the family was fucked. Marriage had been invented by men and was run by men for the benefit of men, and women were just bought and sold like cattle. And another big problem was that a man's sexuality is totally different from a woman's. A man comes once—squirt—and it's all over, but a woman, if she's allowed to, will go at it until she drops from exhaustion, so women should have multiple sexual partners. In an ideal society, there'd be no marriage. The women would screw lots of guys, and it wouldn't make any difference who a kid's father was—most of the time you wouldn't even know—and the kids would be raised by trained professionals who liked that sort of thing.

This stuff was all news to me, and I listened to it go by, and it was like— Well, let's say you're stationed on Guam where there's not a damn thing to do—as I'm sure I must have told you before, seeing as that's the main thing there is to say about Guam. First thing you see when you get there is a big sign that says GUAM IS GOOD. The joker who put that sign up should be beaten to death with baseball bats and his body left for the crows. But anyhow, let's say you're stationed on Guam, and you've just come off duty, and you've cracked open a brand-new fifth and sat down and started to work on it, and some guy says to you, “Hey, Jimmy, I just read in the
National Geographic
how over in Siam they've got cats with two heads,” and you say, “Oh, yeah, is that right? That's really
interesting
.” That's how I was with Connie. She used to accuse me of not taking her seriously, and she was right. If I had taken her seriously, I would've said, “Connie, honey, all that stuff you're spouting is the biggest pile of horseshit I ever heard in my life,” and where would that have got me?

*   *   *

If you're talking party time, the biggest Polish event of the year is the Pączki Ball. It used to go on for three nights in the old days, but by then it'd shrunk down to just one night—Shrove Tuesday—and in case you're not up on your liturgical calendar, Shrove Tuesday is the day before Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent. Well, Easter came early that year so Lent came early, and the Pączki Ball was in the middle of February. I kind of cringe now when I remember it, because, boy, did I ever distinguish myself that night.

Pączki
is the Polish word for “doughnuts,” and that's what you eat at the Pączki Ball. Now the Polish doughnut hasn't got a hole in it; it's just a round blob, sometimes with jelly inside, deep fried, and it's a fairly heavy-duty little hunk of starch. Yep, you can sure soak up a lot of beer with a
pączek
or two. The Pączki Ball's in the parish hall, and it's a fund-raiser for the church, so you don't mind spending your money, and they always try to get in a good hot band for it—the best they can find—and if you're inclined to dance the polka, that's the night you're going to do it, and you always make sure to get good and loaded so when you're at eight o'clock Mass the next morning and the priest marks your forehead with ashes and tells you that
you
are nothing but ashes, you're in the proper state of mind to believe him.

My mother always said, “If you don't have fun at the Pączki Ball, it's your own fault.” So I guess that year it was my fault.

Janice wanted to go—she wouldn't have missed it for the world—but her family wasn't going because the Pączki Ball was a perfect example of what her father called our “degenerate peasant culture,” so she came over to our house after school and changed into a party dress, and she and Linda and I walked over to the church. The girls were in a good mood. I wasn't.

What I needed was to loosen up. That's what I told myself anyway. They'll sell you beer or setups, and if you want something hard you bring it yourself, so I've got a fifth of ol' Jack in a brown paper bag. I pour myself a good jolt into a plastic cup, down it, chase it with an Iron City so I can get the evening started off right.

Janice and Linda have connected up with Mary Jo Duda, and they've nailed down a table up close to the band where they can check it all out, because the Pączki Ball is exactly the kind of event they want to play at, and they want to see what kind of competition they're going to get.

The best polka band in the valley in those days was the Andrzejewski brothers—the Jolly Gentlemen, they were calling themselves—and they were the first band around here to play that Marion Lush two-trumpet style. And the second-best band was probably Norm Kolak's boys. But what we had at the Pączki Ball that night was neither one of those bands because they'd both been asked, but they'd both been booked elsewhere, so we had the third choice.

“This here's what's left of Ray Pahucki's old Polak orchestra from out in Mercersville,” Mary Jo tells me. “You should have heard them thirty years ago—whew, they were hotter than chili powder.”

It was a weird outfit, like if you took the top off an old-time Polish polka band and the bottom off a country bar band and tried to get them to fit together. So you've got your old crocks on accordion, clarinet, saxophone, and fiddle and your younger guys on rhythm guitar, bass guitar, and drums, and they don't quite merge. The guy on rhythm guitar seemed to be their main singer, and he was singing in English. They were big on your standard country tunes, polkasized. Linda wasn't impressed. She said they were just a step away from being a Slovenian band.

I guess I've got to tell you something about Slovenian polka music. That's a style that started out in Cleveland, and the guy you usually think of who plays it is Frankie Yankovic, and what he was trying to do was get rid of anything the least bit wild that might have snuck in from the old country—you know, just basically smooth out and Americanize the sound so he could slide into the pop mainstream. And it worked because he sold a zillion records right after the war. Nobody in a Cleveland-style polka band has been known to sing a word of Slovenian recently—no, they always sing in English—and Slovenian polka music blends right in with country music so you'll get these polka bands that the only difference from a country bar band is that they've got an accordion in them. They'll use a lot of country tunes and turn them into polkas. So you get this smoothed-out, laid-back, countrified kind of polka that's real popular in the valley.

Well, Linda is not real big on Slovenian polka music, and I've got to admit I'm not that big on it either. But I don't want you to get the wrong impression here. It has its avid fans. Yep, there are sure those who love it. And this is a big country, so they're welcome to it. But I'll tell you what Slovenian polka music has always sounded like to me.

Let's say your wife has just left you. For the third time. But this time she left the kids with you. And you're a couple months behind in your rent. And you've just come off shift at the Staubsville Mill, and it's been a really shitty shift. Even shittier than usual. And you're walking because you can't afford the insurance on your car. And you duck into the first bar you see. Well, along about the time you're drinking your fourteenth beer, what you're going to want to hear is Slovenian polka music.

But that band we had playing that night hadn't got totally Slovenianized yet. They still had a bunch of good old Polaks on top. “The old guy on the fiddle,” Mary Jo says, “that's Ray Pahucki. The nice-looking fellow playing guitar, that's his son. The kid on the drums, that's his grandson.”

“Yeah, it's always been a family affair,” Linda says. She'd interviewed most of those guys when she was writing her paper. “It's a crime that nobody ever recorded them. What did they sound like in the old days?” she asks Mary Jo. “Were they good?”