The Callahan Touch

by Spider Robinson

  Kids, don’t try this at home! Every weekend a thousand morons, under the sincere delusion that they have achieved this rare state, get behind the wheel of a car—and all too often kill other, worthwhile human beings rather than just themselves. One of the proofs that you have actually achieved the real thing is retaining the wit to eschew driving or operating heavy machinery. I repeat: it’s not something you do; it’s something that happens to you, once or twice in a lifetime. If you’re lucky. All you can do is try to be worthy, and wait.

  Callahan claimed to hold the world’s indoor record in sustaining this condition. Furthermore, he offered the name of a witness who could substantiate the story: the man he’d been drinking with at the time. And who should it be but one of my musical heroes: “Spider” John Koerner of Minneapolis, one third of the old Koerner, Ray & Glover “Blues, Rags and Hollers” team—the original white bluesmen—and solo author of such immortal albums as “Running Jumping Standing Still,” and “Music Is Just A Bunch Of Notes.” (His current release, on Red House Records, is called, “Nobody Knows The Trouble I’ve Been.”)

  “This goes back quite a few years,” Mike said, “Spider John had just cashed a fat check from his record company, Sweet Jane; he showed up at the Scorpio Room in Setauket as I was havin’ a quiet drink, put a fat wad of cash on the bar, and said to the barkeep, ‘Let me know when that’s gone.’ I was on vacation, and I calculated his stake at over three grand, so I volunteered to keep him company, sorta ride shotgun. We started drinking at about eight on a Monday night.

  “At four AM, the bartender left us the keys and went home. The day man was a little surprised to find us there drinking when he came to open up, but he got into the spirit of the thing pretty quick. The third harmony sounded good: he had a nice tenor. Then the owner showed up again for night shift, and we were able to get into some barbershop stuff, until he and the day man flaked at four again.

  “It went like that for days. On Wednesday, the day man couldn’t take the gaff any more, so he went home and Koerner and I ran the bar for him in between drinks. By Thursday, we were covering for the night man, as well, bein’ as we felt a little responsible for him bein’ in that condition. We made money for him, too; by that point the word had started to spread, and people were comin’ in just to watch us drink and hear us tell lies and sing. Lots of ’em wanted to buy us drinks, but the Spider wouldn’t let ’em. Oh, if anybody wanted to challenge him to a chugging contest, he’d take their money, but other than that he drank his own drinks. And paid for mine besides…except for what I won on chugging contests.

  “A week to the day after we started, Koerner kind of disappeared off into the back room with a lady named Slippery Sue. He was gone about an hour and a half, and some people tried to claim he’d caught a quick nap and broke the string. But Sue swore he’d been…active the entire time, and we all knew she’d never lie about a thing like that. He came back to the table kind of steadied down and mellowed out, and settled down to some serious drinking.

  “On the twelfth day the bartender swam up out of the mist with a sorrowful expression on his face. ‘I’m sorry, Spider,’ he says to Koerner, ‘but your money’s spent. These two here is on the house.’ ‘No problem,’ says John. ‘Wait right here, Mike, and nurse these last two drinks.’ And he gets up and goes around the corner to the nearest joint with a stage, the Ratskellar, unpacks that whacky guitar of his—he had it up to nine strings at that point, I believe—plays a sixty-minute set, passes the hat and collects a couple of hundred bucks, comes back to the Scorpio, puts the deuce on the bar, sits down across from me again, and we go back to drinking.”

  “Jeeze,” Fast Eddie said in tones of awe. “How long did youse last altagedda, Mike?”

  “Well, that’s a little hard to say, Ed. The last one to see us was the bartender, when he went home at two in the morning on the fourteenth day. I remember a couple of hours of conversation after that—Koerner explaining the more obscure metaphysical implications of his famous discovery that the meaning of life is, Do The Next Thing—and then I blinked. And when my eyes opened from that blink, at least that’s how it seemed to me, I was on horseback, stark naked, galloping through Central Park at high speed.”

  △ △ △

  Fast Eddie blinked, experimentally, opened his eyes, looked around at his unchanged surroundings, and shrugged. “How’d you get home?”

  “Well, it turned out to be a cop’s horse, so naturally the first order of business was ditching the NYPD saddle. And I found a plaid horse-blanket in a saddlebag, so me and the horse didn’t both have to be bareback. Wrapped it around me like a toga and we cantered to Sally’s House together. I didn’t see any sign of Spider John anywhere.”

  “Riding a stolen cop-horse bareback in a plaid toga from Central Park to a whorehouse in Brooklyn,” Doc Webster mused. “You attract any attention?”

  “Hardly any,” Mike said. “The few times anybody looked at me funny, cops and so on, I’d just start bellowing as loud as I could in all directions, ‘“Attack of the Horseclans,” coming soon from United Artists!’ I suppose we might have caused a traffic jam goin’ across the Brooklyn Bridge, but there was already one goin’ on when we got there. We picked our way through it. I did have one spot of almost-trouble as I was going through Bed-Stuy. A street-gang got real mad at me when they saw the welts and scars on the horse’s flanks, and wanted to kick my ass. But when I explained I’d just stolen him from a cop, they smiled and shared some Mogen David with me and busted a hydrant so I could water the horse. While he was drinking out of a hubcap, a few of the boys found some health food in a trash can that he liked just fine, and one of them bought me a Big Mac. We parted friends.

  “Oh, by the way, I checked the date with them, and found out it was now sixteen days since Spider John and I had sat down to have some drinks.

  “By the time I got the horse safely through the door and into Sally’s Parlor, I was so exhausted I fell asleep right then and there, sitting upright on his back. I woke up thirty-six hours later on a soft mattress, feeling as good as I’ve ever felt in my life.”

  “What finally happened to the horse?” Long-Drink McGonnigle asked.

  “He stayed on at Sally’s for several years,” Maureen said.

  “Zo dot’s how Scout came to Lady Zally’s!” Ralph von Wau Wau exclaimed.

  Maureen nodded. “Young lady on Sal’s staff named Cathy, very telepathic with animals—”

  “She zertainly vass,” Ralph agreed reverently.

  “—she helped Scout work through some colthood trauma stuff, and they ended up forming a team together: she started billing herself as Catherine the Really Great. Very impressive, actually.”

  “How do you housebreak a horse?” Long-Drink asked.

  Fortunately Doc Webster interrupted. “What happened to Koerner? How did his drunk end up?”

  Callahan shrugged. “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know. Witnesses disagree. The next I heard of him, he was in Norway, married. He’s back now, tending bar in Minneapolis, and he claims to have no memory of that period. I hear his guitar is up to twelve strings now.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “He reinvented the twelve-string…a string at a time, over twenty years.”

  “Don’t worry,” Callahan said. “He’ll put a thirteenth string on it any day now.”

  “So, as far as can be documented,” Doc Webster said, “the indoor record is fourteen days.”

  “Well,” Callahan said judiciously, “I don’t see how getting from the Scorpio Room to naked on horseback in Central Park leaves much time for a nap, so I’d be inclined to say sixteen. But you’re right, fourteen is all I can prove.” He gestured respectfully toward the cluricaune with his glass of beer. “I speak, of course, of human beings,” he clarified. “As for yourself, Naggeneen, I venture to guess that you’ve never been sober for fourteen consecutive days in your life.”

  The cluricaune laughed merrily. “How I wish you were right, Mister Callahan. I mind me a publi
can over in England, got tired o’ me drinkin’ his liquor and sold off his pub to some Muslims who turned the place into a mosque. I lasted a month before finally givin’ it up and relocatin’, quite the most terrible month in me life. Small wonder them people are so goddam irritable! Oh, I grant yez the Irish are bellicose people themselves—but by Harry, at least we ain’t humorless.”

  “Me, I agree with Stevie Wonder,” Doc Webster said. “Heaven is ten zillion lite beers away.”

  Long-Drink hit him with a handful of beernuts. “Physician, heel thyself,” he said. “And meet me out in front of the saloon at high noon, with puns blazing!”

  “You got a duel, podnuh,” the Doc said. “Say, did I ever tell you about the breath mint I invented?”

  “Aw, hell yes,” Long-Drink said. “Your slogan was, ‘breath is no longer the wages of gin.’ That’s an old one, Doc.”

  But Doc Webster was shaking his head. “No, this one only worked on beer. But it did more than just counteract beer-breath: it made your mouth taste delicious—as long as you’d had a couple of beers before you chewed it. Remember the fun we had testing it, Dorothy?”

  Dorothy, an alumna of Lady Sally’s House—who is exclusively gay, and has a wonderful sense of humor about it, clearly didn’t know what the Doc was talking about, but was willing to play along. “Sure do, Sam. The only heterosexual night of my life so far.”

  “As a matter of fact,” the Doc agreed, “we were thinking of marketing it for Lesbians who wanted to go straight…only we couldn’t find any.” Dorothy broke up at that.

  “What were you going to call it?” Long-Drink asked suspiciously. “‘Dyke-otomy,’ right?”

  “No, ‘Iatrogenia’,” the Doc said. “That’s the correct technical term for a physician-induced, de-Bilitating ale mint.”

  A howl of outrage went up, and the Doc nearly disappeared in a blizzard of beernuts and crumpled napkins. Glasses shattered in the hearth.

  “That’s Mytilene humor, Doc,” David said, and was awarded a lesser howl of his own. Lot of classical educations among my clientele.

  “Then Lesbos have a drink on it,” the Doc replied without hesitation, and the outcry threatened to become a full-scale riot.

  “Me,” Long-Drink said, “I nearly marketed an aerosol, once.”

  The group fell relatively silent, giving him rope. Dorothy, sensing that Fate had decided to pull a pun of its own and make her the straight man tonight, obligingly called out, “What did it do, Phil?”

  Long-Drink inclined his head in thanks. “Altered your chromosomes, so that your children had a high probability of growing up to be Groucho Marx’s assistant. Surely you’ve heard of it? The famous Fenneman high-gene spray…”

  A pause, of about three beats’ duration…and then a roar of horrified approval rang the rafters.

  Well, from there it got worse, of course. (It nearly always does.) The topic having been more or less established, the Duck said he had always thought female medical problems a fertile field for study—“If we invested a little dough in yeast infections, for example, I’ll bet we could make a lot of bread.”—and Fast Eddie warned him he’d be sure to end up in the hole, and former minister Tom Hauptman got off a tortured literary reference to himself as the E*D*U*C*A*T*I*O*N O*F H*Y*M*E*N C*H*A*P*L*A*I*N. So naturally the ladies started coming back with lines about guys with microcephalic cymbals, and boyfriends who wore shorts in the shower to keep themselves from looking down on the unemployed, and so on. As far as I can tell, Mary’s Place is the only place left in North America where it’s safe for men to make women jokes and vice versa. Somehow, we seem to have the Battle of the Sexes down to a friendly arm-wrestle. My theory is that hanging out with us tends to cure fear, and you can’t sustain rage without fear to fuel it. All I know for certain is that it’s a precious pain, when your stomach aches from laughing that way, and that it’s nice sharing that pain with female persons.

  Maybe you had to be there. I sure did…

  △ △ △

  By Monday night, the few who wandered off to rejoin lives in progress began to be counterbalanced by newcomers showing up. I had put out the word that for the first two nights of Mary’s Place’s existence, attendance would be limited to just the hardcore Immediate Family, the survivors of that last night at Callahan’s Place. But most of us had acquired at least one new friend in the time we’d been apart, and some of them began showing up on Monday night. A lot of them, it was soon apparent, were going to become regulars: Jeff, Christian and Donna come to mind offhand, and there were at least half a dozen others. A writer named Chris McCubbin came in claiming to be suffering from what he called “carpal tunnel vision,” and with him was a programmer named Steve Jackson who bought a round for the house, saying he had a “persistent-hacking coffer.” They earned grim laughter with their theory of the Worst Possible Merger: F.B.I.B.M.

  As the week unfolded, an astonishing proportion of the newcomers were musicians of one sort or another—enough that after a while I just left a couple of amps and three or four mikes hot all the time. There was an alto sax player named Fast Layne Francis who was so nimble-footed and knowledgeable even our resident Fast, Eddie, couldn’t manage to lose him. At one point, possibly Wednesday, an entire jug band walked in—jug, washtub bass, washboard, guitar, harmonica and spoons—did a twenty-minute unamplified set, passed the hat, and then disappeared into the night again. Nobody knew them: apparently the rent-party atmosphere we were generating had just synthesized them out of the ether. And a guy from Manitoba named Léo Gosselin knocked us all out with an amplified instrument I’d never heard of before, called a Chapman Stick. It looked like a fencepost, and was strung with ten strings: a guitar and a bass on the same neck. He played it like Stanley Jordan plays guitar, hammering with both hands, dueting with himself. He told us Chapman, the inventor, had made fewer than a dozen of the things so far. Fast Eddie and I both fiddled with it a little, but Eddie got more out of it than I did; I’d spent a lifetime training my right hand to be stupid. The thing is sort of a vertical piano, folded up like an old-fashioned hinged measuring-stick, and I hope Mr. Chapman makes a million of ’em.

  Each time Eddie’s hands gave out, someone craved permission to take his chair, politely enough to get it—and then blew well enough to hold it until Eddie was ready to come back to work. There was a longhaired R&B cat named Ron Casat, and a shorthaired R&B cat named Bill Stevenson, and a show-tune guy named John Gray and a boogie-woogie guy named Raoul Vezina who accompanied himself on blues harp, and a stunning brunette named Kathy Rubbicco who used to run Dionne Warwick’s orchestra and could play anything, brilliantly. Eddie actually hid, listening, so that she wouldn’t stop until she was tired; he kissed both her hands when she got up.

  At one point—Thursday, I think it was—I swear we had not one but four dulcimer players in the house at once, all terrific—Carole Koenig and Karen Williams on hammer dulcimers, and Fred Meyer and David Schnaufer on mountain dulcimers, the former accompanied by a banjo player named Jeff Winegar. (He mentioned casually that when he improvised, it was called Winegar’s Fake, and Doc Webster nearly choked on a drink.) All four were terrific, in different ways. May you be lucky enough to hear four dulcimers in concert before you die, that’s all I can say. Intricate embroidery with threads of crystal, ethereal and sparkling. Naggeneen the cluricaune wept…and bought them all a round!

  And of course there were several guitarists. Two guys named Steve Fahnestalk and Randy Reichardt came in together, from somewhere up in Canada, who knew every song the Beatles ever recorded, together or separately, dead bang perfect—they even had their guitars tuned down half a step the way the Fab Four used to do. Either one could be Lennon, McCartney or Harrison at will, take whichever harmony nobody else knew. That singalong lasted most of Tuesday afternoon. There was a guy named Pete Heck, with a fabulous Martin, who had John Prine and the Eagles down cold, but did them in a smokey voice that was all his own. A guy I’d been hearing about for years, Nate Bucklin, sh
owed up from Minneapolis and did two hours of original material that was, in its way, both as musically interesting and as deep-down-inside as anything James Taylor’s ever done. With him was a five-piece group called Cats Laughing who, among other weird and wonderful things, blew Lady Day’s classic “Gloomy Sunday” in Hungarian. A fellow named Andrew York did a solo set, switching back and forth from electric to acoustic, and among other things had an arrangement of “Waltz of the Sugarplum Fairies” that was completely different from Amos Garrett’s but just as good. And a couple from Florida named Dolly and Donn Legge showed up; he played hot jazz guitar, and I swear she could scat just like Annie Ross used to, and neither of them looked old enough to remember jazz, let alone Annie Ross; I was tempted to card them. Eddie really enjoyed jamming with them a lot. And two guys named Chris Manuel and Bob Atkinson, who’d never met before, both hooked their MIDI gear together, and booted some of Bob’s software, and did some amazing electronic guitar duets together. I’d never dreamed you could make a guitar sound like a Hyacinthine Macaw. (Nor, until I heard it, would I have thought you’d want to.)

  And Jordin and Mary Kay Kare did a set of what science fiction fans call filksongs—clever new lyrics on popular tunes. A couple of them required a reasonable familiarity with sf, but others did not. I remember one in particular, to the tune of “Oh, Susanna”; people were roaring with approval by the end of the first line. Jordin, a mildly furry brunet with blue-grey eyes, took the first verse: