by Annie Proulx
“I’m ready, I’m ready, it’s good,” her voice harsh and high, the sound he loved, the sound of ecstasy and raw pain.
Polish honor
They took a cab to the Polonia Ballroom so the accordions wouldn’t be chilled in the sharp cold. The street was jammed with traffic, horns hooting, a mounted cop beckoning cars forward.
“Big crowd,” said Joey as they passed the ballroom, swung around the corner to the back entrance. He felt his mood lift. A good crowd was what they needed. Now he was solicitous of her well-being.
“You all right?” She didn’t answer. They walked through the big room, already packed with people shuffling along in front of the concession booths and tables displaying giddily painted eggs, embroidered vests with triangular lapels, carved wooden cups, loops of kielbasa, cakes, intricate paper cuts of the Tree of Life, roosters and hens, banners, subscriptions to the Amer-Pol Reporter, a kiosk raising money to help the family of the Reverend Józef Jurczyk in western Poland—killed while he said mass by a madman swinging an axe—travel information for vacation transatlantic crossings on the M.S. Batory, pride of the Gdynia-America Line, and at one booth a red banner reading HELP DEFEND POLISH HONOR!
“You go ahead,” he said to Sonia. “I want to see what this is.” It was the Polish-American Guardian Society collecting signatures and money to sue the Motion Picture Association of America for producing movies defaming and degrading the Polish people and naming Taras Bulba, with Tony Curtis and Yul Brynner, along with Let No Man Write My Epitaph and a string of other movies he’d never heard of, and a separate petition urging Hollywood producers to make films portraying Poles in a sympathetic and favorable light, films based on the military careers of Pułaski and Kosciuszko, for example.
There were a lot of hippies around the Polish Honor booth. He was half disgusted; Polish hippies, some weirdly dressed in high-collared old-country shirts and short pants, but most of them wearing embroidered vests, their long hair catching in the crusted shoulder stitches. There was also a Vietnam veteran contingent, muscled guys in t-shirts and cropped haircuts, each of them looking capable of swinging an axe, punching each other’s arms and eyeing the coolers along the back wall that would only be opened after the contest when the dancing began. The babble of voices rose above the clack of unfolding wooden chairs in the back as the crowd pressed in, looking for seats.
The dressing room was community style, partitions separating the sinks and the mirror space. Sonia had the rented accordions out of their cases and under the dressing table near the heater. She was drawing arched eyebrows on her orange face, the lipstick next, protruding redly, like a dog’s prick, she thought, from its gold case on the table in front of her. His costume hung on the hook. She looked at him, threw him a wink, nodding her head at the partition to her left. He opened his eyes at her and she pointed, nodded her head again, he should go take a look. He walked casually to the bathroom at the end of the room, glancing to see who was next to them—the Bartosik Brothers. Only Henry was there. On the way back he stopped, said, “hey, Henry, how y’doin? Where’s Cass? You guys all set?” There was only one accordion in sight, one makeup kit.
“Tied up in traffic; it’s a mess out there.” Shot Joey a look of hate from his ice-blue eyes, turned away and fiddled with a strap.
In his own cubicle Joey grinned at Sonia and began to slather on the ruddy makeup that made them look healthy and vigorous. If Cass was drinking somewhere and didn’t make it or if Cass was drunk and did make it, they had the contest sewed up, rented instruments and all.
Out front the contest had begun with the Kiddy Polka King and Queen contestants and they could hear the too fast riffle of “The Skater’s Polka” and the surge of applause and whistles. It dragged on before the Best Accordion Comix started. By then he had something to worry about. They were in the next-to-last spot, but the coveted last act for the duets went to the Bartosiks. Well, there was nothing they could do about it. He sidled into the wings to watch the comics a few minutes. The crowd was roaring, laughing at anything, even the joke about the woman skiing down a mountainside while playing the accordion.
The Polish Polka Bums, Stas and Stanky, had a rough but funny act. Stas wore a hula skirt made of rubber chickens, a gigantic pink bra with Christmas-light nipples that lit up cherry red when he pressed the button taped to his palm. His hairy legs ended in steelworker’s boots with big round toes. Those goofy breasts and their red lights were always getting squeezed in the accordion bellows and Stas would roar AH! AH! in mock pain as he sang “They’re Always in the Way.” Stanky, dressed in a small tight black suit, played bent backward, his arms thrust through his legs, his groin arched and the accordion swelling and barking between his black silk ankles. Then he shouted at the audience, “you heard this one? Why does it take four polacks to make popcorn? One to hold the pan and three to shake the stove! Hey, who was Alexander Graham Kowalski? The first telephone Pole! Hey, how can you tell a Polish airplane? It’s got hair under the wings! Hey …”
Górka then, tall, tall and thin, dressed in a jumble of women’s clothes, a red wig, a false nose, a chrome whistle around his neck—and he blew the whistle, pouring water into his ear that spurted out of his elbow and his shoe, lighting up a giant fake cigar that blew up in an explosion of green dust. He had a trick accordion mounted on a Stumpf fiddle, honking the taxi horn, ringing the bells and clacking the pie pans as he played “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby.” And Skippo danced out, his onyx cuff links dragging his shirtsleeves out of the jacket, an orange silk background woven with gold and green lozenges, set off by a brown velvet collar and a tie pleated up like a tiny accordion under his dark jowl.
The comics were followed by a couple of transitional acts, first the mother of Arkady Krim leading her son, the blind boy from Durango, Colorado, who at age ten had lost his sight and three fingers on his right hand fooling with a dynamite cap. Arkady was dressed in a blue suit with sequins on the lapels. He held the accordion upside down and played a religious number after announcing that music was the gift of God and that he regularly turned down lucrative offers to play in roadhouses, pledging his talent to a higher power. After two encores he was replaced by a middle-aged woman in a strapless gown who began “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” worked “Winchester Cathedral” and “The Tennessee Waltz” and ended with that good old Polish tune “Zorba the Greek.”
Back in the dressing room
Before they married, Joey was already doing the Polish festivals and contests, a living to be made that way, just driving around from state to state, wherever they had the ethnic festivals, dances, parish get-togethers, Polka Days in a dozen states, busloads of tourists pouring in, the California Golden Accordion Fest, the East Texas Czech Fiesta, Hub City Polka Days, Polkamotion Nites, the Houston Livestock and St. Patrick’s Polka Gala, up to Fairbanks for the Polkalaska, the Polkabration Weekend at the Holiday Inn at O’Hare International, jets roaring overhead. It took a year of work before she got out there on the stage with him, before she got over being frightened of the sweating crowd and the snaky cords running every whichaway over the dirty stage, the squealing feedback and the sensation that she was going to pass out in front of everybody. And her throat feeling from the liniment like it had been scraped with a broken branch. She could hardly talk, but all the strength in her leaped into the singing. Then it got good, especially when they won a contest, exciting when they screamed out Joey’s name—and hers!—and shouted and whistled.
This was the time when fancy accordions were popular, the beautiful instruments from Karpeks, every color, pearls and paste diamonds, rhinestones and script glitter letters, grilles in silver plate and even real gold, the black and white key colors reversed.
The organizers were always a heavyset couple whose lives were subsumed in polka and Polishness. They knew how to make things work, rented the halls a year in advance, planned the publicity, wrote the ads and announcements that appeared in Accordion World, Texas Polka News, Polish-American Po
lka Aficionados.
When the first festivals started up in the sixties—let the blacks see that Polish was beautiful—the more Polish the music, the better the organizers liked it, wanted performers to sing in the language or some regional dialect, preferred unusual music and difficult dances that took a long time to get going, music from some isolated Little Poland. It was all Polish people who came then. But the festivals boomed and swelled, turned into everybody-come, beer-drinking weekend good times; the organizers knew what the crowd wanted and it wasn’t cultural esoterica. Mrs. Grab got Joey on the phone, explaining.
“We don’t want nothing weird or extreme, you know? There’s rules now, the association’s made rules.” She was booking them for the August Missouri Hog Farmers Polka Kick-Down. “We got the Civic Center auditorium again.” Joey groaned. The acoustics were hellish, the P.A. system was a clapped-out old wreck that amplified music into a metallic din.
“What’s the matter, couldn’t you rent a jumbo-size culvert? Effect’d be the same.”
“Now Joey. Craft booths on the east, food booths on the west, also the tables for records and tapes, then at the back we put the sign-up table for the door prize. This year it’s gonna be a metallic metal-flake Aztec-blue Ford. Also at the back door the ticket takers. Now, musical performers for the contest—that’s you—get six minutes apiece, and for the dance the bands change every fifteen minutes. Give plenty of variety. Line dances only, puts the dancers face-to-face with the performers, get that crowd electricity going, see, it’s more satisfying, people have more fun than just watching some old-style fanatics dressed up in wreaths do a two-hour wedding dance. Line dances makes a nice display. Only one song in Polish. Most people don’t understand it, but one song gives a nice ethnic flavor. That’s what we want to stress, ethnic flavor. Let me tell you something, Joey. Ethnic music is not that old-time stuff anymore. These days everybody is ethnic, might as well make money on it. They come for the music and to have a good time. And the beer and kielbasa. They don’t want that mournful folk music sound no more or those complicated couple dances going into circles and weaving around and slapping their asses and crossing into the next lane. No more of that Kozacy na Stepie, Cossacks on the Steppe, stuff. Everything gets mixed up unless you got a Ph.D. in Polish clogging. It’s no fun. You know, I’m not Polish, I’m Czech. What’s Czech these days? It’s boiled down to kolác pastries and polka. So get out there and play loud, fill the place up with good fast happy polka. Fast and happy. Show them what it means to be ethnic. You’re guaranteed three hundred anyway, and if you win—audience response on the applause meter determines the winners—it’s what, fifteen hundred and the Missouri Hog Farm Polka King crown.”
That particular gig was sour. She was expecting Florry and she’d lost about ten pounds and felt lousy all the time. (Both Florry and Artie had been born on September fifteenth, though two years apart.) Joey had worked up a showy version of “Zły Chłopiec” which they called “Bad Bad Boy.” It didn’t go over too well but was better than Jerzy Wald’s numbers where only three couples came out on the dance floor, and the spare applause had hardly died down when a big guy jumped up, his thin long hair pasted to his sweating forehead, and began to shout at them.
“This is not Polish polka, not Polish music. I am a Pole from Poland and in Poland they would laugh at you as I do now—Ha! Ha!—for saying this garbage you play is Polish! That is not Polish food”—he gestured toward the lawn covered with ethnic food booths, each a ten-by-fifteen canvas tent with a steam table and a cooler and some folding card tables in back and a counter manned by ladies’ auxiliary types—“that is NOT Polish food, that crap you call kielbasa and kishka. I wouldn’t feed them to a starving man. And that American mess, potato salad with little two-tone olives and pieces of pineapple and sugar-flavored mayonnaise. Ha! Language? I laugh in your faces! Ha! Ha! Ruined words forced into hilarious phrases; broken grammar to make a real Pole hysterical, you think this is your ancestral language? Never! Pig Polish!” And so on. Later she saw him sitting alone under a tree eating the American potato salad with a spoon in each hand.
Winners
It was all right once they got out there. The rented Colombos worked, the timing was flawless and Sonia’s voice was like a blooded dagger—this was what it meant to be Polish: misery suppressed, injustices borne, strength in adversity, endurance—how that poignant, rusty voice could hold a note until the audience gasped and breathed for her. And then a terrific polka that got the hippies in the audience clapping in rhythm, and the rest of the audience took it up—a good sign; they were with them. They got the most applause of anyone so far, announcer Jan Reha pointing at the applause meter and shaking his head in mock amazement.
They ran into the dressing room, sweaty and high with elation that it was over and had gone well.
Henry Bartosik, ready to go on, trembling with rage, stood outside his cubicle looking at the stage back door and at Cass Bartosik who came through it tearing off his overcoat and fumbling with the hasps of the accordion case he carried.
“Where the fuck you been? We’re on right now. I been going crazy!”
“You can’t get through, the traffic’s a mess, I had to walk eight blocks to get here—Christ, I’m frozen, my fingers are numb. Stall ’em a minute.” He ran hot water in the sink. “Hold the accordion over the register, it’s ice cold—quick, quick, come on.”
“You tell me come on? Goddammit, I can smell the whiskey from here.”
“Fuck that, I was getting something to eat. I don’t feel so great, see? I had a drink, one drink, to settle my stomach. Now get off my back.” One of them worked the bellows trying to get warm air into it, pressing the cold keys. “Ah, Christ!” Cass let out a series of small belches. From the stage, as the applause for Joey and Sonia died away, the announcer called out, “weren’t they great? A terrific duo, husband-and-wife team Joey and Sonia Newcomer. And now, what all you young people have been waiting for, a duo covered with fresh notoriety from their Milwaukee triumph at the Polish Street Festival, those outstanding interpreters of Polish tunes in popular styles, the Bartosik Brothers, Henry and Cass BARTOSIK.” The two brothers clattered off toward the stage stairs, Henry cursing and Cass belching, hiccuping, stuttering “you can’t get blood out of a dead dog.”
“Tonight the Bartosik Brothers—by the way, folks, Cass Bartosik is the fastest typist in the U.S. of A.—are going to change things around a little bit, popular tunes in polka style, and will play a memorial-tribute medley of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin tunes—but they’re not gonna smash their accordions and set them on fire!—so get ready to rock! The Bartosik Brothers!”
They heard the applause, the expectant silence and then the two accordions pumping out “Me and Bobby McGee Polka.”
Joey laughed. “Listen, the instrument’s too cold—the bellows is slow. They’re in trouble.” He poured half an inch of whiskey in her paper cup and she threw it down for the quick heat and the loosening sensation, the sense of relief. Suddenly from the stage they heard the slower accordion stop, a pause, and an enormous howl of laughter from the audience that went on and on though above it now were the sounds of scuffling and muffled shouting coming closer. The contestants waiting in the dressing room to go on pressed around the door, saw Cass and Henry fighting at the top of the stairs to the stage. In the auditorium the voice of Jan Reha beat against the laughter, soothing, making jokes against the tide of shrieks and howls.
“What the hell happened?” said Joey, for it was apparent that Henry was pounding Cass furiously, while Cass bent over to escape his brother’s blows. Cass leaned forward abruptly from the waist and vomited on the steps.
Joey crowed. “Jesus, he threw up onstage. He must of. Oh dear blessed Jesus, oh Holy Mother, saints and martyrs, suppose we’d had to follow that? What is it today, they’re throwing up all around me.” But someone rang down the curtain and two women with mops and buckets rushed onstage. Henry lurched into the dressing room, leaving Cass retching
in the corridor, a security man guiding him toward the men’s room. Henry was beyond rage, filled with a great Polish froth of madness, about to do something irrevocable and frightful, Sonia thought, seeing his blazing cheeks and white eyes, but he only thrust his accordion into its case, put on his overcoat and went out into the night. The snow-speckled wind swept into the corridor. Onstage the voice of Jan Reha was calling their names, the winners, the winners, that husband-and-wife lovebird duo Joey and Sonia Newcomer! And the middle-aged lady who played between intermissions was pumping out “Climb Every Mountain” as they came up to take the check and shake Jan Reha’s scaly hand.
The present
“Honey, OK, what do you want to do, go out for dinner or get something, get a bottle and some fried chicken, take it back to the motel? Listen, honey, I know the place is a dump but suppose we hadn’t won—it was all we could afford if we didn’t win. Look at this sweet check, fifteen hundred smackers—we got beautiful, beautiful money again. You beautiful little doll, you want to change to a different motel, something ritzier? We’ll do anything you want, just say the word.”
She wondered what he would do if she said yes. “I don’t know. I don’t want to go out it’s so cold, I kind of thought we might stay for the rest of the program, eat here, some good Polish food, it smells great. They’ve got potato cakes with roast beef. And there’s dancing.” Joey liked to dance at the outdoor festivals, where it wasn’t so crowded.
“Yeah, OK. Jesus, did you see the look on Henry’s face? They’re washed up now, they’re through. He’ll have to play the chordovox at the Washington Senators games. This’ll travel like wildfire all over the circuit. Can you imagine him calling up Jerry and saying they want a spot on the Doylestown? And Jerry says in that sarcastic voice, ‘no, thanks, we don’t think throwing up onstage is a real great act.’ Tell you what, sweetheart, I got to get these accordions back to whence they came from before eleven. Why don’t I go back to the motel, check the kids, get the car, turn in the accordions and then I’ll come back here and we’ll have some fun. Go to mass in the morning, it’s a polka mass, right across the street, have the Polish breakfast and start back. Stop in that town, Morley, talk to the cops about our instruments. We’ll have a couple hours then tomorrow afternoon to sit down with the checkbook and get some bills paid. Like that, wouldn’t you?” She nodded.
