The Night Listener and Others

by Chet Williamson

  I could feel phlegm in the back of my throat, draining down from my sinuses, as I had after the other Mooney gigs. I suppose I’m allergic to smoke, though not so bad that I still couldn’t sing for four hours, bellowing out the songs until one in the morning. But now I hawked up the thick stuff and spat it into the water that swirled down the drain. When I saw it land I almost jumped.

  What came up from my throat was dark, like the darkness of the smoke-stained crossbeams of Mooney’s ceiling, and when it hit the tub the swirling water made it crawl into the drain as fast as a centipede, and it was gone. It wasn’t bright bloody, so there was no worry there, but the darkness of it was almost more disturbing.

  Hell, I thought as I lathered up, miners coughed up black coal, and there had been times when I’d worked outside on a dusty day that I’d hacked up gunk the shade of dirt. This was probably similar. Tomorrow, after breathing some smoke-free air, I’d be fine again.

  The goddamned smoke got into everything. I swear, after just two Friday nights, both guitars had smelled like lifelong residents of Mooney’s Pub. I’d left them out when I’d gotten home, even set them by an open window so fresh air would blow into and around them, but it didn’t help. My new Taylor had lost its showroom smell for good. Even the case, which had smelled like some woody-sweet candy, smelled like smoke.

  It wasn’t just cigarette smoke, either. Mooney’s smoke had a distinctive bite to it. It had been a pub and nothing but for well over a hundred years, from the time the Irish had come into their own ghetto of the city and established their own saloons, and kept out others the way they had been kept out. Pipe smoke was the first, I suppose, then cigars and cigarettes, but through it all there was a tang of peat too. I don’t even know if they used peat for fuel outside the old sod, but I’ve smelled burning peat at festivals and in Ireland itself, and damned if that wasn’t what it smelled like.

  After our first gig I asked Kevin O’Toole, the owner, if he ever burned peat in the pub to add atmosphere, but he just laughed. “Hell, no. Irishmen have been smoking in here since 1883. They had peat in their blood. When they breathed out tobacco smoke, the peat came with it.” I laughed too, though I don’t know as I believed him, not then anyway.

  After I toweled off and dried my hair, I crawled into bed beside Molly. She turned towards me, then changed her mind and turned her back. “God, you smell like smoke,” she said.

  “I took a shower and washed my hair. Don’t know what else I can do.”

  “Quit playing there,” she said into her pillow.

  It was almost three in the morning, and I didn’t feel like arguing, but Molly’s attitude pissed me off. It was easy for her to be cavalier about jobs, since she didn’t have to worry about one. She had a good, solid position as vice-president of a small but busy ad agency, a salary to match, and great medical benefits which fortunately covered me too, since I had no permanent employment. I was a gigging musician. That said it all.

  I’d tried teaching full-time, but I hated the bureaucracy of the city’s high schools, and the bureaucracy didn’t take to me either. So I’d left the jazz bands and orchestra rehearsals behind, and decided to see what I could do on my own. As it turned out, I did a lot. The only problem is that a lot of music doesn’t add up to a lot of money.

  I played in three different groups around the city, a jazz trio with a bassist and drummer, a bluegrass quartet in which I doubled on mandolin, and the Phat Rogues, the Celtic band with Hugh and Jack. I did solo guitar gigs too, primarily for brunches in upscale restaurants. They paid the best, since I didn’t have to split with partners. I even had several private students who I taught in our apartment for thirty bucks an hour.

  Still and all, when the accountant tallied things up at the end of the year, I made less than half of Molly’s salary, which didn’t bother her, but bugged the hell out of me. I scuffled to make my money, and when I wasn’t scuffling I was gigging and practicing. When Molly came home, ready to chill, was when I usually went to work, and although we spent the time we had together together, it wasn’t enough for either of us. Still, she tried to be understanding, so I was a little unnerved by her telling me to quit the Mooney’s gig.

  “I can’t quit it, it’s a hundred-and-fifty-dollar evening.”

  “We don’t need it.”

  “Hell we don’t.”

  “Not if you don’t like it.”

  “I do like it.” And I did. It was a fun night, despite the smoke. Nine to one, four sets, fifteen minutes of stout in between, a rowdy, receptive audience, and no delicacy required, since they got bored and noisy during the finger-picking and the fiddle airs. The second week we were there we tried one of Niel Gow’s laments, and by the time we were done you couldn’t hear a note, so we swung right into the loudest “I’ll Tell Me Ma” we could play, Jack banging away on the bodhran, Hugh on his accordion, and me slapping the guitar like it was a Stratocaster, and got them back in the nick of time and never made that mistake again.

  No, $450 for four hours playing was as much as any pub band made in the city, and even if I’d wanted to give it up, I knew damned well that Jack and Hugh wouldn’t. The reason Hugh and I had brought Jack on board in the first place was because of Mooney’s. There was an opening for a new house band there, since the last one had broken up, as so many of them did for one reason or another. When Hugh and I auditioned for Kevin, he told us we’d need another player to fill out the sound. “It’s a noisy room we’ve got, lads,” he said in what I suspected and later learned was a phony brogue, used to add atmosphere. “Gotta fill it up. You get yourself a third, and I could book you every Friday.”

  We already thought we were two loud Irishmen, but apparently we weren’t loud enough. Hugh Kennedy and I had played together for two years, Hugh’s accordion and whistles taking the lead lines on jigs and reels, and my guitars backing him up. On vocals the accordion and guitar provided powerful backings for our harmonies, but we’d long been thinking about adding another member, and this tipped us over the edge.

  Jack Randolph was a tall, good-looking, blond-haired kid in his mid-twenties who’d been coming to local Irish sessions for the past few months. He played a wicked bodhran, and could hold his own on fiddle with nearly all the other session players, most of whom played in small bands, so he was the first person we thought of.

  Jack was interested, and brought his fiddle and drum over to Hugh’s apartment, and we played together for a couple hours. Hugh and I were pleasantly surprised to hear his strong tenor voice, and immediately started salivating over the possibility of three-part harmonies. At the end of the audition, Hugh and I looked at each other and nodded, and offered Jack the job, if he’d be willing to make the gigs and rehearse regularly.

  “One thing,” Hugh said. “We’ve got a Hugh Kennedy here and a Timothy Corcoran there…” Hugh gestured to me. “But John Randolph? Is that Irish?”

  Jack smiled. “English. Sorry.”

  “English,” Hugh said, trying to sound like Barry Fitzgerald. “Christ and bejabbers, what’ve we sunk to?”

  We never sounded better. We went back to Mooney’s and played for Kevin and he hired us on the spot at $450 a night plus all the Guinness we could drink without endangering the performance. I was delighted, since it would increase my annual take by $7,500 if we played fifty weeks, and there was no reason we shouldn’t. Jack learned the songs and tunes like a man possessed, and when we took the little stage that first night damned if he didn’t know all the lyrics by heart, and nailed the tunes as well. We had a helluva good time, and the crowd liked us too.

  There were more people the second week, and by the third Kevin and his barmen had to put up extra tables. It was an eating-and-drinking crowd, and though they didn’t pay constant attention to the music, they dug it the way they relished the mulligatawny soup and gulped down their pints, as part of the total experience of Mooney’s Pub. They always sang along on the choruses, and frequently called out requests (one poor sod yelled for “Danny Boy,�
�� and got a raft of catcalls that, “It’s an English song, ya shite!”). They got up and danced in the little space they could find between the tables when we played fiddle tunes, and many of them stayed until the place closed at two.

  But Jesus, did they smoke, cigarettes mostly, though there were some with pipes and cigars. They smoked while they drank and even while they ate, taking puffs between bites, going from fork to plate to cigarette to ashtray in a taste-stultifying cycle. Some of our mates from sessions and other Celtic bands cruised in for a pint and a listen, but none of them lasted long, and more than one waved his hand in front of his face and mimed not being able to breathe before they bade us an early goodnight and vanished into the screen of smoke that hid the rear of the room. I didn’t blame them. By all rights I too should have been hacking my lungs out.

  Still, though I was aware of the smoke, it didn’t seem to bother me when I was inside Mooney’s, only when I left it and went home. That’s when the river of phlegm started to rise. Maybe, I thought, it was because when I was at Mooney’s I just went with the flow, like Joseph Conrad wrote, To the destructive element submit yourself. Yeah, and spit your lungs up later.

  “It’s a great gig,” I said now in the darkness to the back of Molly’s head, but she didn’t respond, and I turned over and tried to bury my resentment and go to sleep. I couldn’t, and just lay there getting angrier at Molly for no good reason. So I got up and read quietly until I calmed down, then went back to bed, put my arm around Molly whether she liked it or not, and went to sleep.

  The next week the three of us got together and rehearsed some more rebel songs that Hugh and I already knew, but which were new to Jack. We worked up “Legion of the Rearguard,” “Johnson’s Motor Car,” and “Kevin Barry,” which was a bit slow, but was a song which any true Irishman (or Irish-American) would pay heed to, about a youth who had given his life for Ireland in 1916. Jack came up with a nice martial rhythm on the bodhran, I soloed on the verses while Hugh played the melody on the whistle, and we all sang on the choruses. We took it a little quicker than usual, with more of an angry tone than a mournful one, but we thought it would work better that way for the Mooney’s audience.

  As we set up that Friday evening, plugging in our mic cables to the pub’s sound system and returning the greetings of the gathering audience, I noticed that my nose and lungs seemed clear. “Does the smoke bother you while we’re here?” I asked Hugh.

  “Nah, not really,” he said. “Just when I leave, I start spittin’ up crap.”

  The response surprised me. Hugh unfailingly complained about smoky venues, claiming that they cut his wind, though I never heard any evidence for it, and especially not in Mooney’s. That night, as at all the other Mooney’s gigs, his voice boomed out with nary a catch or a break from a clogged throat. What happened in the third set, however, was more alarming than a cracked high note.

  We were playing “Kevin Barry,” and the crowd was zeroed in, thank God.

  We’d just finished the line in the chorus the second time through:

  Shoot me like an Irish soldier,

  For I fought to free Ireland.

  We were holding the last note when suddenly there was a clatter from where Jack stood at the left of the stage, and when I looked, his mic stand was yawing out over the audience, and before anyone could grab it, it came down, glancing off the shoulder of a heavyset older man who dropped his pint in surprise, and then continued falling onto the table, where it knocked over several glasses to a chorus of shouts and wails, some serious, some good-humored.

  We stopped singing, and Jack, red-faced, knelt and grabbed the heavy base of the stand, then lifted it back up until it was vertical, and set it on the stage once more. “Apologies!” I said into the mic. “Could we bring these nice folks a round of whatever they were drinking and put it on the band’s tab, if you please?”

  The heavy man, whose party we’d seen before and who had always enjoyed our music, called up, “That’s all right, son—shite happens!” which set the crowd to laughing, though Jack still looked embarrassed and Hugh looked pissed.

  “Grab your fiddle,” I said off-mic to Jack. “Let’s do ‘Munster Buttermilk.’” It wasn’t long before everyone was clapping along in rhythm and all was forgotten and forgiven.

  At the break, when we went off the stage, Hugh snarled so that only I heard, “Fuckin’ idiot,” and walked through the smoke toward the rear of the pub.

  “What happened?” I asked Jack as he climbed off the stage and picked up one of the pints a barmaid had set there for us.

  “I dropped my stick,” Jack said, taking a long swallow. “Went to grab it and knocked over the mic.”

  “Were you sweating?” I asked. I’d dropped picks in warm venues, a damned humiliating experience, especially when they slipped into the sound hole. One time a guitarist in the crowd saw what had happened and yelled out, Look, he’s playin’ a two thousand dollar pick case! Ha ha.

  “No,” Jack said. “I just…it was nothing.”

  I could tell it was more than nothing. “Bullshit. What happened?”

  He looked down, then sort of shook his head as though he couldn’t trust his memory. “Hugh, uh…” He shook it again and shrugged. “It was stupid. He just gave me a look, and I…it threw me.”

  “A look? What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know how to describe it. It was my fault, I shouldn’t have let it—”

  “What kind of a look?” I picked up my own pint and took a gulp. It tasted of smoke, and I wondered how long it had been sitting there.

  Jack thought for a moment. “Not pleasant, okay? We were singing the last line of the chorus, I look at him, and he gives me this…glare, like he wants to kill me.”

  I was puzzled. Jack hadn’t screwed anything up. His vocal harmony had been fine and his bodhran had been right on the beat, not too loud, not too soft. And even if he had screwed up, hell, it happened. Playing pubs is an imperfect art, and we’d all had our share of clams. Whenever I played a wrong chord or blew a lyric, Hugh had always responded with mocking humor rather than anger, and we just soldiered on. But that was all moot anyway, since Jack hadn’t done anything wrong.

  “Want me to talk to him?” I asked.

  “No. I’ll see if I can find him, see what was the matter.” Then Jack too got lost in the cloud of smoke as he headed for the rear. In the meantime I played Nice Guy and apologized again to the people at the table where Jack’s mic had landed. They were fine about it and thanked me for the round, which I’d already decided I was going to try and get Kevin to swallow. Of the six of them at the table, four were smoking.

  I chatted with a few other regulars and some new folks in the crowd, and pretty soon I saw Hugh and Jack returning through the haze. From their body language, they didn’t look as though they’d kissed and made up, but when I asked Jack if everything was okay, he nodded yes.

  Hugh walked past us and climbed onto the stage, where he took his place in the center and strapped on his accordion. Jack edged past Hugh, and then I climbed up. “You feeling okay?” I asked Hugh softly.

  He looked at me with his usual expression of wry scorn, and cracked a smile. “Sure, ya dumb Mick. Let’s play some music.”

  I laughed in spite of my concern, and the last set went well, with no dropped instruments or knocked-over mic stands. If dirty looks were passed, I didn’t notice them.

  We did a rousing “When I Was Single” as our penultimate number of the night, and I introduced it as “a study in Irish marital codependency.” Most of the crowd had remained, and after I sang:

  He brought me to an ale house and bought me some stout,

  But before I could drink it, he ordered me out…

  They all joined in on the chorus:

  Oh but still I love him, I’ll forgive him,

  I’ll go with him wherever he goes!

  And I ran through the series of humiliations and abuse this poor, dumb Irish wife suffers, and after ev
ery one she keeps singing how she forgives this asshole because she loves him. We finished with “The Parting Glass,” the traditional closer and only slow song of the night, but I kept thinking about that stupid Irish wife and all the shit she had put up with, and how, when I got home that night, I wasn’t going to be welcomed with a wifely embrace, but rejected because I smelled like a smoky pub. When we ended with the line “Goodnight, and joy be with you all,” it wasn’t joyful I felt at the prospect of leaving Mooney’s, but damned gloomy.

  “One for the road, lads?” Kevin called to us, and as I packed away my guitars and we wound the cords and stuffed them in the gig box, I thought that one for the road sounded like a fine idea, and that two sounded even better. Jack didn’t share my sentiments, and as soon as he got his share (Kevin did indeed pay for the spilled table’s round), he headed home with a Goodnight to me and just a nod to Hugh. The two of us sat at the bar and started drinking our pints.

  “So what went on between the two of you up there?” I asked Hugh in a voice that showed I wasn’t joking.

  “What’d he say?”

  I told Hugh about the look that Jack claimed he had given him, and Hugh sneered. There was no humor in it.

  “A look,” he said. “Christ, that fucking pansy, that faggot…”

  Now that surprised me. I’d never seen any sign of Hugh being homophobic, and had never heard him make any intimation that Jack might be gay. He was single, but he was also young, and he dated frequently. “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “You talk about looks,” Hugh said, “you shoulda seen the look he gave me. There we are, singing our hearts out about an Irish martyr, and I look at him, and he’s got this poncy, prissy little smile on his tight little face, like he’s making fun of it, and I gave him a look, yeah, damn right I did, the British bastard…”

  “Whoa, whoa,” I said. “British bastard? Where the hell did this come from? We’re all Americans, Hugh—you, me, and Jack—hell, so is Kevin, with his fake brogue. You taking these rebel songs too seriously?”