The Clarinet Polka (30 page)

Janice kept asking us questions about what the neighborhood was like when we were growing up and what we remembered about our grandparents, where they'd come from and all. “Babcia Wojtkiewicz is right there in the living room,” Linda said. “You should ask her. She'd love to tell you about being a little girl in the old country.”

“Maybe I will,” Janice said.

And so we just sat there and chatted and drank our coffee, and I heard myself saying, “You know, this was a great place to grow up.” It surprised me that I'd say that, but you know what? It
was
a great place to grow up. It's not like we enjoyed living a few blocks away from a blast furnace—that's not what I meant. It's the old Polish community I was talking about.

Well, it was a wonderful Easter morning, the sun shining down on us, and I could feel some of my old optimism coming back. If I'd had half a brain in my head, I would've known what was happening, right? But I'm the king of denial. You give me anything the least bit heavy, I'll deny it, right, left, and center. About all I'd admit to is that I couldn't think of anything in the whole world anywhere near as pretty as Janice Dłuwiecki's hipbones.

ELEVEN

Easter changed something for me. It's like I'd sunk right through the soggy bottom of the Dixie cup and there was no place to go but up. And somehow I'd got some of my old hope back, and somehow that hope had something to do with Janice, but I couldn't tell you exactly how. It's not like I thought anything could happen between us. I was still thinking of her as a little kid, just obviously way too young for me, and— Hell, I wasn't thinking real clear about it, but it was— Okay, let me try it this way. You know how you want to do your best for your little sister? Because she's looking up to you and admiring you and respecting you? Well, somehow I wanted to do my best for Janice. I wanted to be the person she thought I was. Does that make any sense?

So I made a plan and stuck to it—for a while, anyway. I talked to Georgie, and I said, “I want to do something about my drinking. Can you give me a little help with it?” and he said no problem, what could he do?

I explained to him how the worst time for me was right after I got off work. Tuesdays were cool because I was driving Janice around and I had to stay reasonably sober for that, but every other weekday, I'd head straight over to the Greek's and knock back a boilermaker or two. Then going home for dinner was just a minor pause in the festivities, like as soon as I've got the food shoved down, I'm in the PAC having a couple shots—you know, to aid my digestion—and it's straight down the tube from there. So I told Georgie, “Right at five, you pick me up, and like you said, let's hit the Y.”

First time, I go sailing through all the fancy new exercise machines they've got, and I'm pumping out twenty reps here and forty reps there, and moving the weight up, and saying, “Hey, you know, Mondrowski, I'm not in as bad shape as I thought.” The next morning I wake up and I can't move. Hobble around like I'm ninety years old. So after that I started easing into it gradual.

But the plan was working. Every day right on the dot, there's Georgie. He never missed once. We're in the gym for a couple hours, have us a good long shower, and then we go catch the leftovers at his house or my house, and by then I'm so bagged the last thing I want is to perch upright on a bar stool at the PAC and inhale everybody else's cigarette smoke. I won't say I wasn't drinking at all. Oh, hell no, stopping completely would have been way too radical for me. I'd end up back in my trailer watching the telly and sipping a couple shots so I could sleep. But I'd cut way back and I was feeling pretty good about it.

So I'm in bed one night watching the eleven o'clock news, and I'm about half asleep, and the phone rings. That first time, I was reaching for it, like automatic. The phone rings, you answer it, right? But I caught myself. Georgie's over on the Island getting stoned, and Mom and Linda and Old Bullet Head are in bed by now, so who could it be? Yeah, I know who it is. Twenty rings. Stops. Starts over. Twenty more rings. Then the next night, same thing. The night after that, same thing.

Then it starts ringing at one in the morning. And if it's not one in the morning, it's four or five in the morning. When I go to bed, I take it off the hook. Then one day I get up to go to work, and I put the damn thing back on the hook, and the minute I hang it up, it starts ringing. I jumped about a foot. Well, that day I called the phone company and had that sucker yanked right out of there.

*   *   *

Georgie had taken to hanging out with a bunch of potheads over on the Island—this motley crew of Vietnam vets and their chicks and assorted other freaks and whoever else fell by who liked a bit of smoke—so one night we're pumping iron and he says to me, “Patty wants to know when she's going to get to play some polkas.”

“You're putting me on,” I say. But, no. Seems like Patty Pajaczkowski was part of that bunch he was hanging out with. The all-girl country band had broken up. The lead guitarist had been married to the manager, but he ran off with the rhythm guitarist, and everybody went their separate ways, and Patty had nothing to do with herself except complain about life and smoke a lot of weed. She was looking to play music with somebody. “She was waiting for your sister to call her,” George says. “She loves playing polkas.”

“She does?” Linda said when I told her. She couldn't believe it.

It took about a dozen tries, but Linda finally got Patty on the horn and Patty said far out. They arranged to meet at Patty's place on Sunday afternoon. “When?” Linda said. “After Mass?”

Now I wasn't the one talking to Patty, and I couldn't claim to know her all that well, but I was pretty sure a girl like Patty Pajaczkowski would not want three-quarters of a polka band turning up on her doorstep right after Mass. “What did she say exactly?” I asked Linda.

“I don't know, Jimmy. I think she said, ‘Come over sometime in the afternoon.'”

“Yeah, right. So just cool out. Read the paper or something.”

Linda was too nervous to read the paper or something. She went in her room and started blatting up and down a bunch of scales on her trumpet. I was sitting in the living room with Janice and Old Bullet Head. He looked at me over the top of his glasses and said, “It could be worse. It could be a trombone.”

“It could even be a tuba,” Janice said. She had a real knack for saying things you didn't expect her to say, and it was just starting to dawn on me that she had a sense of humor.

Then Mary Jo showed up, and my mother was required by the ancient rules of Polish hospitality going back to somewhere around the time of Casimir the Great to make a gigantic lunch for everybody, and by the same rules we were required to eat it. By that time Linda was a basket case. “Come
on
, Jimmy! It's going to be
one o'clock
before we get over there. We've got to get
going
.”

So we all pile into my Chevy and I drive over to the Island. The address Patty gave my sister is an old beat-to-shit house on the south end down by the Downs. The lawn didn't get cut much last summer, and then it got rained on and snowed on all winter so it has this mud-brown, crapped-out, halfhearted jungly look to it, and then there's an old Chevy Impala up on blocks, rusting away. And a three-quarter-ton pickup truck painted with red primer, looks like about a '48, but at least it's running. You can tell that from the tire tracks through the grass. A bunch of spare car parts are thrown around here and there for decoration. The house is one of these things divided up into two apartments. I try the front one first.

I press the doorbell and don't hear a thing so I knock. Nothing happens. No curtains on the windows, so I peer inside, and what I see is the front room stacked from one end to the other with cartons. Cartons of what, I couldn't tell you. A big fat white bulldog—you know, one of those things with the ugly pushed-in face and the bow legs—comes waddling over, lurches up, plants his front paws on the windowsill, and looks me straight in the eye. You could see him thinking about it, and he's going, oh well, what the hell, I am the bulldog, aren't I? And so he just gives me one big woof. I decide to try the rear apartment.

Linda can't stand waiting in the car anymore, so she jumps out and follows me, and then Mary Jo and Janice jump out and follow her. Linda keeps going, “Jimmy? Are you sure this is the right place?” The house looks like if you gave it a good swift kick at foundation level, the whole thing would come down. I knock on the back door. I don't expect much to happen, and nothing much does. I look through the window right into the kitchen. I know it's the kitchen because the folks who live there, every takeout food known to Western civilization, they've taken it out, and all the boxes and bags and cartons are all over the place. I give the door another good swat, and from somewhere deep within the recesses of the house, I hear a thump.

You've got to see this picture, right? Mary Jo, Linda, and Janice are all wearing what they wore to Mass, and that grown-up dress Janice had on at Easter was just for the occasion, so she's back to normal. So you've got Janice in her pigtails and kneesocks, and she looks like they've just let her out of the convent school, and you've got a fat lady in her sixties with bleached blond hair and bloodred lipstick, and she's wearing a white pantsuit, and you've got my conservative little sister with her glasses and her real earnest look, and she's wearing a blue pantsuit. And they're all holding their instrument cases and standing lined up staring at the back door of this rat's-ass little house.

The door finally swings open, and there's Patty Pajaczkowski. Her hair's all in her face, and her eyes are like two thin red gashes. She's got an old, stained, gray blanket wrapped around her shoulders, holding it shut over her chest, and all she seems to be wearing is a pair of pink panties. Bikini cut. With a little pink bow in the front.

“Shit,” Patty says and just turns and walks away. Inside we hear her yelling, “Hey, Don! Get up.”

“Come on, ladies,” I say. “I think we're supposed to go in.”

I lead everybody through the kitchen and on into the living room. There's nothing in there but a little table and a bunch of old chairs with their stuffing coming out and Patty's drum set. It's a pretty big drum set, and I bet the neighbors just adore her. There's a couple ashtrays on the table and enough roaches in them to stone out the whole Island for a day or two. And just at the point we're walking in from the kitchen, there's a guy walking in from the hallway. I got to know him years later when he was working with Georgie in his Vietnam vets' trash removal service, and his name was Don Henderson, and he was a hell of a nice guy, but right then we don't know who he is or that he's a hell of a nice guy. All we see is an enormous black man with no shirt on. He gives us a little apologetic smile and says, “Hey, uh, just make yourself at home. Patty'll be with you in a minute.” That doesn't seem very likely because Patty has thrown herself down on the couch and wrapped herself in her blanket, and it looks like she's just died.

I don't know what Janice is thinking. Her eyes are big as saucers. But Linda and Mary Jo are exchanging the meaningful glances, and I know perfectly well what they're thinking. They've just stumbled into one of those hippie dens of iniquity you read about. You know, one of those places where the Ten Commandments and every other rule or regulation ever devised by God or man to assist us all in living together in peaceful accord are broken routinely on an hourly basis.

“Come on, babe,” Don says. “Get it together. You got guests.”

Patty reaches one hand out of the blanket and sticks it up into the air. Don grabs ahold of her hand and yanks her up onto her feet. He wraps his arm around her and guides her out of the room.

“I don't think we should be here,” Linda whispers.

“We're here, ain't we?” Mary Jo says and plops her big bottom down in a chair.

We all look at each other for a minute, and then—bang—like the curtain going up for the next act, here's Bev Wright kicking through the back door. She's like a little whirlwind. Mop of brown hair, nonstop smile like one of those happy-face drawings. Got her Fender bass in its case and a big box of doughnuts. Yelling, “Patty Cakes, where the hell are you?” Running around shaking everybody's hand, “Hi, I'm Bev. I'm the bass player. I love playing polkas. It's such happy music. Hey, guys, give me a hand with my amp, will you?”

So Don and I haul in the amp and this speaker box that's not quite as big as the wall. Bev whips out her bass, plugs in, goes caBUNG, BUNG, BUNG-BUNG-BUNG. She's got it so loud the whole house shakes. In between notes, she's telling everybody about her famous brother, Jumping Jack Wright, and about how sad it is the all-girl country band broke up, and about how she loves playing with all girls, and how she's bored out of her skull living back at home in Barnsville, Ohio, a fate worse than death.

Patty stumbles in. She's put on cutoffs and a T-shirt. Her eyes are all glittery, and she's going sniff, sniff, sniff, like she's got a bad cold, and shaking her head and going, “Wheww, wow,” and Bev takes one look at her and yells, “Hey, Don, you got any more of that shit?”

“Sure, babe,” he yells, and Bev's gone like a shot.

Patty sits down at her drum set and goes caBANGA caBANGA BLAM, caBANGAcaBANGAcaBANGA BLAM. Bev pops back in and now
she's
going, sniff, sniff, sniff, “Wheww, wow, far out.” Don's managed to make a pot of coffee, and he's passing out mugs of it. Then he and Bev and Patty are slurping back the coffee and scarfing up the doughnuts like it's the last food on earth. The rest of us are still trying to digest Mom's scrambled eggs and fried potatoes and
kiełbasa
, so we're going, “No, thank you. We just had lunch.” Linda's perched on the very edge of her chair like any minute she'll break into a thousand pieces.