“Well, I said I picked the three nicest guys I knew,” the Doc said. “Where the hell did you think I was gonna find ’em? The hospital? Helen had already had enough medicine in her life to last her the rest of her days.”
Isham Latimer came up behind Long-Drink and laid a huge hand on his scrawny shoulder. “Drinkus,” he boomed, “you’re a hell of a man.”
Long-Drink nodded. “I’ve been telling you that for years.”
“It’s true nonetheless.”
“Aw, horsefeathers. A miracle fell in my lap, and I was smart enough not to let it get away, that’s all. You know that stuff about what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger? Helen was damn near as strong as her old man. Not many guys get to have a wife that strong.” He blinked and glanced up at Isham. “You do, come to think of it.”
“Thank you, Phil,” Tanya Latimer said. For the life of me I had forgotten that Long-Drink’s square name was Philip.
He was staring reflectively around the room, catching my own eye and others. “Now I think on it, there ain’t a wife in the room that ain’t. Nor a husband who ain’t man enough for her. And most of us who ain’t married are fixed pretty good, too. Jesus, Duck, you’re wasted here—we were a lucky bunch before you ever walked in our door.”
“That’s why I walked in your door,” the Duck explained acidly.
“Who were the other two guys you picked out, Doc?” Tommy Janssen asked. “The two who lost out.”
The Doc frowned. “I don’t see any point in—”
“Aw Jeeze, Doc,” Fast Eddie said. “I don’t give a shit. And Tom’s inna ground now, he don’t care needer.”
My jaw dropped. For one thing, this was the first I’d heard that Tom Flannery was bisexual. Thank God this had all happened before AIDS. For another thing, I wasn’t used to thinking of Fast Eddie in terms of husband material. Maybe the Doc knew something I didn’t…
“It wasn’t a competition,” Long-Drink said. “I just got lucky, like I said. Helen and I meshed.”
“Let me get this straight, Drink,” Mary said. “You were coming to Callahan’s Place before the Doc got there?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Well…” Mary hesitated, and then curiosity won out over tact. “What was it like, having the title all to yourself?”
(For as long as I can remember, Doc Webster and Long-Drink McGonnigle have been ferociously contesting the title of Best Punster in the House.)
“I wish I could tell you,” Long-Drink growled. “Callahan started the Punday Night competition the very first night Dr. Feelgood there rolled into the joint. Him and me had swapped a few puns right from the start, kind of taking each other’s measure—but a few hours in, a fella named Lonegan wondered out loud why theater people are always saying, ‘Break a leg,’ and without batting an eye, Doc says, ‘Well, you can’t make a Hamlet without breaking legs.’ Hey, I couldn’t let him get away with that, could I? I came up with a better one.”
The Doc shuddered. “‘Better’? Hah! I remember it yet.” He turned to us. “He gives us a five-minute setup about this bizarre compulsion he’s been having, to build replicas of Assyrian stepped pyramids, and then burn ’em to the ground. And then he waits…until somebody’s just about to change the subject…and he says—”
Long-Drink finished it for him. “I gotta quit smokin’ ziggurats before it kills me.”
As one, we moaned.
“So of course I take a closer look at him,” the Doc said, “and I see he’s wearing this hand-painted polka-dot necktie—this is back when men wore neckties in a bar—and I say, ‘Nice tie, buddy. More in Seurat than in Ingres.’ And we were off and running. As I recall it, his next atrocity was something about a new method of erosion control for beaches—”
“You wait for a real hot day, so the winds’ll be violent,” Long-Drink interrupted again. “Then you just spread out fishing nets. This results in the formation of—”
The Doc, and Mike Callahan, chorused the punch line with him.
“—A BAKIN’ LATTICE AND TORNADO SAND RIDGE!”
“So naturally,” Callahan took up the tale, “I was gonna throw the both of ’em out in the street. But it was already too late. The infection was already spreading. Lonegan comes out with the news that he’s found a Buddhist hamburger stand, where they’ll make you one with everything—”
“Right,” Long-Drink said excitedly, “and Tom mentioned a junkies’ hotdog stand, where it comes with the works…and that actor guy, what was his name, talked about the critics’ burger joint, where it used to be part of a horse…and David Gerrold spoke of a Jewish fast-food place where they do it Jahweh, and a Catholic one staffed by fish friars and chip monks…and come to think of it, it was you, Mike, who came up with the next one, about the steaks at Lady Sally’s House, where it’s always well done.”
“All right, I confess,” Callahan said. “I’m not immune. But I was ashamed of myself, and I was going to stop, honest I was. But then I noticed that all my customers were drinking twice as much as usual, to blunt the pain. So I invented Punday. But the whole thing was Doc and Long-Drink’s fault.”
If you’re not familiar with the ritual, Punday Night is when we pick a topic, and pun round-robin on it until we run out of horrors. The last person standing gets his or her bar tab for the night erased. I’ve kept a running tally over the years since my own arrival, and the Punday Night Champion has been the Doc about fifty-five percent of the time, the Drink thirty percent, and assorted dark horses—including myself—fifteen percent.
But I digress.
“Jadies and lentilmen, we digress,” I said. “Drink, you were hanging around Callahan’s Place before the Doc got there. How did you come to find the place?”
Long-Drink did a reverse Cheshire Cat: he didn’t go anywhere, but the grin slowly faded away. I signaled to Tom Hauptman for a beer, and passed it to Long-Drink. He took it, turned it around in his hands, looked at it, sighed, took a…well, a long drink…and belched percussively. “Well, see, I killed this guy.”
Dead silence. You could hear the wood aging.
“Drink,” I said, “you better start at the beginning.”
Long-Drink McGonnigle’s Story
Okay.
When I was eleven, I decided I was a Martian—
God damn it, who’s telling this story?
Like I was saying, when I was eleven years old, it was revealed to me that I was a Martian. I’d been suspecting it for years, of course. Little things, ways in which I noticed I did not resemble any of my contemporaries. I didn’t hate my parents, for instance. I liked school. I laughed at stuff nobody else thought was funny. I was utterly disinterested in sports, or cussing, or pissing off grownups. The kind of stuff you learn to conceal from the other guys.
But of course I couldn’t conceal morphology. I haven’t always been this tall, but I’ve always been this skinny—I make Jake there look like the Doc—so naturally I got the shit beat out of me regularly. I had so many black eyes, most of the pictures of me as a kid I look like a damn raccoon. I’m not complaining. It taught me to fight with my mouth, and that was all to the good.
But one day when I was eleven, this kid named Joey Bunch was in a bad mood for some reason or other, and picked a fight with me at the bus stop. I tried to talk him out of it, but he had his mind made up, so we went to work. And about five minutes into the fight, I had this revelation. It was just like that: a religious flash. I was flailing and sobbing and swearing and bleeding like always, and all of a sudden it came to me like a clap of thunder: I think I can take this asshole.
The tide of battle turned, and soon I knew I was right. Let me tell you, I was overjoyed. I was going to win a fight, for once. I was finally going to get to experience the fun part. All those other guys had certainly seemed to enjoy beating the shit out of me, and I’d always wondered why. I couldn’t wait to find out. I waded in there and I whipped Joey Bunch’s ass, just beat him like a mule.
And it was horrible.
>
I couldn’t believe it. It was no fun at all. It felt worse than losing. I was sick to my stomach. My eyes burned. My hands hurt like a bastard. I was ashamed of myself. It took everything I had not to apologize to Joey Bunch. And in that moment I knew for certain I was a Martian. From that day on, if anybody tried to beat me up, I just covered up and waited for it to be over.
(Long-Drink drank more beer, put down his tankard, and stared up at the ceiling, unconsciously rubbing his right fist.)
Well, it explained a lot. And you can get used to anything—even being the only Martian in Smithtown, Long Island. Fortunately, a few years later I discovered that Martians are sexually attracted to human females, and that helped the acculturation process a lot. It was nice to have something in common with other guys.
Unfortunately—a word that seems to keep coming up whenever I talk about my life—human females weren’t sexually attracted to Martians. The girls didn’t like tall skinny boys any more than the boys did. And the boys were mostly too busy chasing them to beat me up, now. So it got lonely.
At sixteen I figured out how to ride the Long Island Railroad for free, all the way into the city. You usually had to pay for the return trip, the conductors were smarter coming back, but what the hell. It got to be a regular habit: every Saturday I’d catch the train at eight, change at Jamaica, and when I got out of Penn Station at nine I’d just pick a direction and start walking. No plan, no destination—just walk, and see what I saw. Make no more than two turns, if I could help it. Four hours later I’d turn around and retrace my steps, catch the five o’clock to Smithtown and be home in time for dinner. People go nuts trying to find their way around Manhattan, trying to puzzle out the subways and the bus routes. I solved the problem by ignoring it. I walked at random. Every damn time I saw something new and different and completely astonishing. To this day, I can’t reliably find anyplace in the city, and it hasn’t bothered me a bit.
Well, you all know the city. Adjoining blocks can be different planets. I made the classic tourist’s mistake. One Saturday I’m walking along, I’m eighteen now, I’m thinking deep thoughts about Life and Art and God and when is some girl gonna take pity on me, I’m not paying attention. And all of a sudden I look around and I realize I’ve walked about two blocks too far, and I’m hip-deep in used food. Burned-out cars over here. Passed-out junkies over there. The smell of piss and red wine spodiodi everywhere. I am a tall skinny white kid from Long Island strolling through a neighborhood where anybody who has to live here ought to be allowed to kill anybody who doesn’t, and I can smell my own fear even over the piss and wine. Which means so can anybody else, so I slap my forehead like I forgot something, and do an about-face, and there’s this Puerto Rican street gang. This is back when they let Puerto Ricans have gangs. They’re about fifteen feet away, and they know I’m meat, and they’re very happy about it. It’s a hot day; I’m a godsend. José Rivera—I don’t think he was the leader, I think he was just the most pissed-off one present at the moment—José displays a switchblade. He does this little routine with it, flicking it open and tossing it spinning into the air and catching it all in one smooth motion, quick as a cat, like a TV cowboy spinning his pistol. And he says something about my mom.
I open my mouth and I start talking real fast. But of course, I am talking White Boy, and they don’t speak that language well enough to be impressed by my eloquence. So I try to recall everything I’ve ever read about Puerto Rican kids in newspapers and books, and finally I come up with, “I always heard you PRs”—this was back when “PR” was a polite thing to call a Puerto Rican—“I always heard you guys were big on honor. That was just bullshit, huh?”
That got their attention. “What you mean?”
“Well hell,” I said, “how much honor is there in waving a knife at a guy who hasn’t got one?”
I was pretty pleased with that one. And then José held out his hand, and one of his friends put another knife in it, and he tossed his to me.
I stepped aside and let it go by. “Right,” I said. “Fifteen or twenty to one. That sounds fair. Brave guys.”
“Don’t you worry about it, maricon,” José says. “Just you and me, we dance, okay? Nobody else.” He looks around, and the biggest guy there says, “That’s right, man. We just watch.” Then he grins and says, “You kill him, we let you join the gang,” and everybody laughs and laughs. And while they’re laughing, José Rivera starts coming at me, holding it underhand with his thumb and two fingers.
Well, I turned around fast and picked up that knife, but I figured I was a dead man. I should have been. This kid knew knife-fighting. I’d never held a killing-knife in my hands before. But I had one advantage he didn’t know about.
My daddy could afford to buy me a TV set…
I’d probably seen more movies than José Rivera had ever dreamed of. So I knew all about what the good guy does when the bad guy comes at him with a knife. He quick slips off his denim jacket and he wraps it around his left arm and when the bad guy makes a pass at his giblets he catches the knife in the loose fabric of the jacket and he pushes forward and to his left and as the bad guy’s guard opens up he comes in low and fast and it worked like a fucking charm.
(The Drink finished his beer, and stared into the empty tankard for a few moments.)
You ever jam a butter knife into a stick of butter? That’s how easy it is to put a sharp knife into a human being. Clothes, hide, forget it, no real feeling of resistance at all. Until you’re in to the hilt, and then, Jack, you’re stuck fast. Meanwhile you’re thinking funny stuff. Jesus, now I’ve pissed him off; he’ll kill me slow now. Maybe that’s what would have happened. But José had his second piece of bad luck. He was so startled, he stumbled. Tried to go in two directions at once, I guess, and tripped over his feet. His torso dropped about a foot before he could recover, and I felt the knife being tugged out of my hand and panicked and resisted, pulled the other way without thinking. It had gone in a couple of inches below his belly button. By the time he got his feet under him again it was flush up against his sternum.
Like I said, it’s funny the things you think. The blood didn’t surprise me. Even the intestines didn’t surprise me too much, though I remember they were lighter colored than I would have expected, kind of like Italian sausage before you cook it. But for some reason the shit really surprised me. I mean, you know intellectually that the gut is where shit lives, but somehow you just don’t expect to see it come out the front door. They don’t mention that part in the movies. When I realized there was shit on my hand as well as blood, I let go of the knife and wiped the back of my hand off on his tee shirt. Two swipes. One on each shoulder. He looked down at them—not at his belly, at the two smears—and then he looked up at me and frowned and said, “Jesus Christ, man.” Like, nice manners. And then he died and then he fell down.
I’m not sure why they didn’t kill me. I didn’t have the knife anymore. I’d just killed their friend. I am sure it had nothing to do with that honor and fairness bullshit. My guess is they were just too astonished. I just walked past them. I thought about running, thought hard about it, but my legs wouldn’t work good enough. Maybe that saved my life too. I turned the first corner I came to, and the next, and the next, and I had to ask directions three times to find my way back to Penn Station. They kept looking at me funny and repeating the directions several times.
If you gotta ride the Long Island Railroad, it helps to be in shock. We were almost home, just pulling into Hicksville station I think, when I had my first coherent thought. I’d been staring at my sneakers since Jamaica, trying to decide why they weren’t quite the same color. Suddenly it dawned on me. The left one was a darker black because blood had soaked into it. The doors opened, and I got up and stepped out onto the platform and puked until my eyes watered, and then I went back in and sat down again. And now the world had color and sound and live people in it again.
I know it’s hard to believe nowadays, but it actually made the Daily N
ews the next day. Dog bites man. That’s how I learned José’s name. I was hoping it would say he wasn’t really dead, just wounded. I knew better, but I was hoping. No such luck. The luck part was it said the cops had no description of the assailant.
(He tried to drink from his empty tankard, blinked at it, and put it back down.)
Well, you know. You go over it and over it in your head. You have to, because there’s nobody to talk it over with. I hadn’t been to confession in two years, and now didn’t seem to be the time to start again. For two weeks easy I kept going over it and over it. José’s address was in the paper, too: five or six times I started a letter to his parents. I wasn’t planning to sign it or anything, but it felt like something I should do. But I was handicapped by the fact that I didn’t know their names, didn’t know if they could read English, didn’t know if he even had parents, and mostly didn’t have the slightest fucking idea what I wanted to say to them. I went for a lot of long walks. Around town; I’d had my fill of the Apple for a while.
Anyway, one day I’m walking along this deserted stretch of 25A, and I’ve got tears running down my face, and this old clunker turns off the highway into a driveway right in front of me. The driver just glances at me as he goes by, but then I hear brakes on gravel and a door slamming and he comes running back out the driveway after me. We look at each other, and I’m trying to think of an explanation for why I’m crying. And then he says, “Come in wit’ me, pal. Ya look like youse could use a drink.”
It was Fast Eddie.
The next thing I know I’m standing in front of Callahan’s fireplace, listening to the echo of my glass breaking, and I’m telling a roomful of strangers the whole story. And just like tonight, it comes out with Joey Bunch and José Rivera all mixed up together. Pretty soon I’m babbling about Martians being dangerous. It was the first time I ever drank anything stronger than ballpark beer.
Callahan's Legacy Page 14
