Callahan's Place 10 - Off The Wall At Callahan's (v5.0)

OFF THE WALL

AT

CALLAHAN'S

Spider Robinson

www.spiderrobinson.com

Copyright © 1981, 1989, 1994 by Spider Robinson

Cover by Passageway Pictures Inc.

Books by Spider Robinson

Callahan’s Place
books:

      
Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon

      
Time Travelers Strictly Cash

      
Callahan’s Secret

      
Off The Wall at Callahan’s

Lady Sally’s House
books:

      
Callahan’s Lady

      
Lady Slings the Booze

Mary’s Place
books:

      
The Callahan Touch

      
Callahan’s Legacy

      
Callahan’s Key

      
Callahan’s Con

Stardance
books:

      
Stardance (with Jeanne Robinson)

      
Starseed (with Jeanne Robinson)

      
Starmind (with Jeanne Robinson)

Deathkiller
books:

      
Time Pressure, Mindkiller (published together as Deathkiller)

Lifehouse

Very
books:

      
Very Bad Deaths

      
Very Hard Choices

Other
books:

      
Variable Star (Robert A. Heinlein and Spider Robinson)

      
God Is An Iron and Other Stories (collection)

      
The Free Lunch

      
By Any Other Name (collection)

      
User Friendly (collection)

      
Night of Power

      
Melancholy Elephants (collection)

      
The Best of All Possible Worlds (anthology)

      
Antinomy (collection)

      
Telempath

This one is for
 

my friend and agent

Eleanor Wood,

sine qua
honest work,

with love, and thanks

for the idea…

and for

Captain Lazarus Long,

who established the precedent…

and most of all, of course,

for Jeanne,

sine qua
nihil...

OFF THE WALL

AT

CALLAHAN'S

Spider Robinson

Foreword

-

Wall Flowers

A)
 
Begin reading here if you’re not familiar with Callahan’s Place [if you are, feel free to skip down to B)]:

Callahan’s Place, the now-vanished tavern in Suffolk County, New York owned and operated by Michael Callahan (a.k.a. Justin of Harmony), was an unusual establishment in many respects.

      
(Understatement of the millenium!)

      
Among the many peculiarities of that merriest of oases:

      
Aliens, cyborgs, transvestites, talking dogs, telekinetics, telepaths, clairvoyants, immortals, Intergalactic Traveling Salesmen, time travelers, vampires, victims of severe Tourette’s Syndrome, and even
editors
 
were all made welcome there, from time to time.

      
Patrons were
encouraged
 
to smash their glass in the big fireplace after drinking—so long as they were willing to propose a toast first, naming the reason they felt like smashing a glass.
 
Exercising this prerogative doubled the price of your drink…to a dollar.
 
(Mike got a bulk rate on glasses.)

      
Puns, and competition therein, were encouraged—nay, actively abetted—by Callahan, himself a hopeless and utterly shameless paronomasiac.
 

Privacy was defended
by force
: any patron heard to ask snoopy questions of another patron was customarily blackjacked by Fast Eddie the piano player and dumped in the alley.

      
But perhaps the most remarkable and most important thing about Callahan’s Place was the converse of the last paragraph: any customer who displayed any desire to discuss his or her troubles received the instant and undivided attention of—not merely the bartender—but everyone in the room.

      
Consequently, a plethora of interesting stories ended up getting told in Callahan’s.
 
All those presently known to me have been set down in the three volumes CALLAHAN'S CROSSTIME SALOON, TIME TRAVELERS STRICTLY CASH, and CALLAHAN'S SECRET (all currently in print in Ace paperback), and collected in the omnibus CALLAHAN AND COMPANY (Phantasia Press hardcover; contact Alex Berman, Phantasia Press, 5536 Crispin Way, West Bloomfield, Michigan 48033 for details).
 

      
Regrettably, the last of these stories, “The Mick of Time,” involved the utter and final destruction of Callahan’s Place, a few minutes before midnight on New Year’s Eve, 1984/5…

B) Begin reading here if you already know Callahan’s:

But although it is gone, gone for good, echoes of Callahan’s Place linger on.

      
For one thing, there is a related cycle of stories having to do with Mike Callahan’s wife, Lady Sally McGee, and the fabulous bordello she once operated in Brooklyn, Lady Sally’s House—a House of
healthy
repute, and like her husband’s tavern an equal-opportunity enjoyer.
 
(Also, sadly, gone now.)
 
Two books full of these stories currently exist: CALLAHAN'S LADY, and LADY SLINGS THE BOOZE (I did
 
warn you about the puns…)

      
For another, a yet-untitled book is presently in progress concerning Mary’s Place, the remarkable tavern opened elsewhere in Suffolk County by Jake Stonebender (folksinger, guitar-player, songwriter, and narrator of all the Callahan stories) after the obliteration of Callahan’s Place.

      
And of course, there is this book, which represents my own desperate attempt to feed the voracious maw of ongoing Callahan Mania.

      
You see, another oddity of Callahan’s saloon was that Mike Callahan kept no mirror behind his bar.
 
The wall above the gallery of bottles—known as “The Wall,” to distinguish it from the other three—was bare and featureless…save for decades of graffitti, inscribed there by Callahan himself.
 
Any time he heard something that struck him spoken in his bar, it was Mike’s custom to grab a Magic Marker and preserve it for posterity on The Wall.
 
Many a newcomer found him- or herself so fascinated by this distillation of over forty years of good conversation that they ended up sitting there all night, reading and drinking and reading and drinking.
 
(Most of Callahan’s customs had more than one purpose…but all of them seemed to end up putting money in his pockets.
 
Not a stupid man.)

      
And one day I remembered that Wall, and saw a way to get out from under a nagging problem…

      
Look: transcribing Jake Stonebender’s yarns about Callahan’s Place into polished and compelling prose has been putting bread on my table and music in my headphones for just short of twenty years, now.
 
Nobody
 
misses The Place more than me.
 
Ever since "The Mick of Time,” the last Callahan story, was published in
Analog Science Fact/Science Fiction Magazine
 
in 1985, I have been reduced to thinking up stories of my own, an onerous task.
 
Trust me: if I knew any more Callahan stories, I’d find time to set them down on paper.
 
If I could find a way to
get
more, I would; I have tapped every source, shaken every tree, pursued every avenue.

      
Yet not a week has gone by—in six years!—without at least a few plaintive letters from readers, asking when I’m going to publish some more Callahan’s Place stuff.
 
People keep sidling up to me at conventions, on the streets, in public washrooms, and imploring me to publish something else—anything else—with the word “Callahan” in the title…

      
I do not like to disappoint readers; they are in too good a position to redress perceived slights.
 
So I cudgeled my brains.
 
(I do this so often that I have had my cranium fitted with a removable screw-top, to facilitate cudgeling.)
 
Among other things, I relived in memory—over and over again—every moment I had ever personally spent in that caravanserai of compassion.
 
And finally one day as I was idly forward-scanning through all the mental videotape,
I happened to notice a flashbulb go off…

      
I knew that many photographs had been taken in Callahan’s Place—hell, two of my most treasured possessions are framed 8x10 glossies of
myself
at The Place (one jamming with Fast Eddie and Jake; the other standing at the bar with Mike Callahan’s arm around me; both autographed by the participants).
 
I knew at least half a dozen people likely to keep a scrapbook of such photos.
 
In many of those pix, I reasoned,
The Wall must be visible
…
   

      
So I made a lot of phone calls, and I paid a lot of postage, and I made a lot of expensive trips to the East Coast…

      
…and then I sealed myself in my office with about a googolplex of snapshots of Callahan’s Place, a magnifying glass, a Macintosh II typewriter, a stereo, a case of Old Bushmill’s, and two pounds of Celebes Kalossi coffee…

…and after only a million years of pain and eyestrain, I had painstakingly reconstructed something like 50% of the wit and wisdom recorded by Michael Callahan, and imprudently stored by him on a medium inadequate to withstand nuclear fireball.
 
You hold it in your hands.

      
A large and aromatic bouquet of Wall flowers: flowers plucked from off The Wall At Callahan’s Place…

True story: in 1973 I had the privilege and pleasure of meeting the late great Alfred Bester. Much could be written about that meeting, for Alfie in person was the original One-Man Chinese Firedrill–but what is relevant here is that at one point he asked me what I was working on, and I said I was putting together a collection of Callahan's bar stories but couldn't think of a good title. Eyes flashing, Alfie excused himself, went to the washroom and returned less than two minutes later with a neatly typed list of over two dozen terrific titles. Among them were CALLAHAN'S CROSSTIME SALOON, TIME TRAVELERS STRICTLY CASH, CALLAHAN'S SECRET… and yes, by God, OFF THE WALL AT CALLAHAN'S.

I am now a firm believer in time travel…

Thanks yet again, Alfie, wherever you are!

      
Yes, there was more written on The Wall than you’ll find in this book—but I don’t see what I can do about it unless and until more photographs surface.
 
(If you have any, contact me c/o the publisher.)
 

      
Yes, I admit that the epigrams, maxims, perorations and pithy thayingth contained herein
do
lose something from not being scrawled in Callahan’s inimitable (thank God!) handwriting—but not one of those photos was clear and crisp enough to reproduce well in book format.

      
Yes, some of these quotations, and all of the longer puns, have already appeared in variant form in diverse Callahan’s or Lady Sally stories.
 
For one thing—as in so many aspects of science fiction—there is precedent for this from Robert A. Heinlein: every word of his book THE NOTEBOOKS OF LAZARUS LONG appears in his previous novel TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE—yet both books perennially jockey for position together on Berkley Books’
 
list of All-Time Best-Selling Titles.
 
For another thing, in recent years people have been quoting some of these maxims and puns
to me
, unaware that I hold copyright, so it’s time to set the record straight.
 
(One reader informs me that she has been sending out Christmas cards containing the Yule Gibbons pun for years now—presumably in an effort to shorten her Christmas card list.)