The Clarinet Polka (12 page)

She wrote her paper on Polish-American music and got an A+ on it. Her professor said, “Thank you, Miss Koprowski. I didn't know anything at all about this music before,” and he said if she wanted to go on and get her Ph.D. in ethnomusicology, he'd be happy to recommend her. She thought about that. But her scholarship was for piano, and if she went on for another degree, she'd have to get some help from Old Bullet Head, and she had a hard time imagining herself explaining to him what ethnomusicology was and how it might be useful to her in later life. And then it dawned on her that she didn't really want to study Polish-American music anyway, she wanted to play it, so she said to Mary Jo, “Let's start a polka band.”

“You sound like you're in a Judy Garland movie,” Mary Jo said. “Sure. What are you going to play?”

Well, Linda had fallen in love with that bright brassy trumpet sound, and any good Polish polka band has got to have a trumpet or two in it, so she went to Kaltenbach's—you know, there at the end of the Suspension Bridge—and bought herself a trumpet on the installment plan.

“A lot of people wouldn't do that,” I said.

“What?”

“Just decide to pick up another instrument like that.”

“Oh. Well, practicing is something I understand. You practice a couple hours a day, eventually you can play anything.”

*   *   *

Okay, so here comes the Polka Lecture. Don't worry, I'm not going to give you the whole shooting match; this is more like the
Reader's Digest
condensed version. When I heard it, I was sitting on the end of Linda's bed sipping a little sour mash so I didn't even mind when she played me a few hours' worth of her million tapes and records.

She started out with a band straight from Poland in the old days. She said they had a different scale from us, but let me tell you, that's not the only thing that was different. They were all playing fiddles, and these were peasants, right? So they didn't go buy their fiddles at the music store, they made them out of trees, and they came in all sizes from tiny little ones to great big huge ones, and they get to sawing away on these damn things, and some guy's yelling his head off in Polish over the top of all that racket, and they might as well have recorded some godforsaken tribe in Borneo for all it sounds like music to me.

Now I should tell you something about me and the polka. Since then, I've been polkasized but good. I wouldn't claim to know as much as Linda does, but I know a hell of a lot. So let's say you put on an American polka, I could tell you in about two seconds flat if it's Czech-Texas or Southwest Tex-Mex or Midwest Dutchman or Slovenian out of Cleveland like Frankie Yankovic played—or if it's Polish. And if it's Polish, I could tell you if it's Eastern or Chicago style—that's easy; that takes only about half a second—and probably I could tell you who the band is, and maybe even the names of all the guys playing and, give or take a year, when it was recorded.

But back in those days, I was into the Grateful Dead and Country Joe and Gracie Slick and all that other doped-out California rock. I've always liked dancing, and to me, polka music was just something you danced to. You didn't take it seriously, you know what I mean? Polka music was just that dumb stuff my parents liked—and Linda liked for some crazy reason—and I couldn't imagine any music more straight and square and corny and stupid. If you've heard one polka, you've heard them all, right? They all go one, two.

But I'm humoring my sister because I can see how much all this means to her. She keeps slapping on the records, telling me to listen for this or that. So you've got weird peasant music from Poland, and it mixes up with American popular music and you start to get something brand-new, something that's not like anything they've got back in Poland—the Polish-American polka.

Chicago's one of the main crossroads where it all comes together. Jazz guys—you know, like Louis Armstrong—coming up from New Orleans, playing hot, blowing the doors off the clubs. Polish guys learning to play jazz—the most famous one's Gene Krupa—and they're just trying to make a buck, right? Some of them, like Auntie Jean, one weekend they're playing jazz, the next they're playing polkas. Okay, so you can't swing a polka—if you do, it stops being a polka and you won't be able to dance to it—but you can sure play it
hot
, and you can make up your parts right there on the spot just like in jazz, and that's the beginnings of that hot Chicago style.

I'm sitting there sipping my drink, going, “Oh, yeah? Uh-huh. Is that right? Oh, yeah, that's interesting,” and eventually Linda figures out that I'm not really getting it. “Okay, Jimmy,” she says, “listen to this,” and she puts on a tape.

It must have been recorded back when there were still dinosaurs. Heavy-duty hiss and crackle, and then, very faint, there's this dumb old tune I've known my whole life.

“It's the first Polish tune that Columbia ever recorded,” Linda said. “In the old days they called it
‘Dziadunio,'
but now we just call it ‘The Clarinet Polka.'”

Then she put on a record. It was that great Eddie B. version of the same tune with Lenny Gomulka on clarinet, but I sure didn't hear how great it was that first time. I was tired of listening to polkas, and I couldn't hear all those neat twists and turns and curlicues that Lenny was putting on the melody. All I could hear was “The Clarinet Polka” done by a modern band. Linda was looking at me, waiting for me to get it—whatever it was I was supposed to get. “Yeah, so?” I said.

“That was just recorded last year. Well, it's sixty-some years later, and that tune's still around, still being played.”

“Yeah?”

“It goes straight back to Poland.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“And people are still playing it, putting their own feelings into it, their own styling to it—don't you see what I mean? The music's alive, it matters, it's
the real thing
. It's great popular dance music. It's as good as early jazz. It's still going strong after all these years, changing, developing, absorbing other styles—”

“Yeah, so?”

She was so frustrated with me she was getting tears in her eyes. “Don't you see, Jimmy?
It's ours
.”

*   *   *

Yeah, Linda's always been big on being Polish. Hardly anybody else our age gave a shit, but she was years ahead of her time—into it long before anybody thought of making red-and-white T-shirts with “Kiss me, I'm Polish” on them. “The new ethnicity,” they're calling it now. You've got to have a name for everything, right? And by the time you get around to talking about the
new
ethnicity, you can be damn sure that the
old
ethnicity is just about dead as a post.

Like when you get down to the kids in the fourth generation—whether they want to be Polish or not is something they've got to decide for themselves. Except maybe for having a last name that nobody ever pronounces right. But if you're like Dorothy Pliszka's father-in-law and you'd rather be Green than Grondzki, you can always change your name. And most of the kids today think it's all just a matter of polkas and
pierogi
anyhow. “Pierogies” they'd say. Well, some of them know better.

So anyhow, when Linda and I were going to Saturday school, they were always telling us, “Be proud you're Polish,” and most of the kids would go, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” but Linda was always real serious, and she took it to heart. She used to follow me around and say, “Hey, Jimmy, did you know Stan Musial was Polish?”

“Yeah, I knew that.”

“How about Carl Yastrzemski?”

“Yeah, I knew that too.”

Oh. Well, how about Madame Curie, Gloria Swanson, Wanda Landowska, Stella Walsh?—and on and on and on, and she'd tell me about every two-bit movie star who was ever Polish, and every scientist or statesman or scholar who was ever Polish, and naturally we knew that Chopin was Polish because she played him on the piano day and night. Now she's really got the last laugh on everybody—you know what's coming, don't you?—the
Pope's
Polish.

And Linda's always been attached to the Polish language—and that's putting it mildly. When she was little, she just flat-out refused to learn English. Can you believe that? It went on for a long time after Babcia Koprowski died. If you said anything to Linda in English, she'd put her hands over her ears and run away. Usually it was the other way around—kids refusing to learn Polish—and nobody had ever seen anything like it. Mom and Dad were real worried about her, but we went on speaking Polish at home because if we didn't, Linda would just cry. And Old Bullet Head would say, “She'll get over it. She was real close to Mother, and when she gets over that, she'll learn English.”

Well, Linda didn't get over it. They let her finish the first grade, but she still didn't know hardly any English. She didn't have any friends to play with because the other kids just thought she was weird, and even the nuns couldn't do much with her, and they usually were fairly persuasive, if you know what I mean. So finally Mom got Father Stawecki to come over to the house.

Old Father Joe could be real brutal sometimes. He squatted down on the floor so his eyes were right level with Linda's, and he took her hands, and he talked to her in Polish. He said, “Listen to me, little Linda. We do not live in Poland. We live in the United States of America, and the people here speak English. If you don't learn to speak English, we'll have to send you back to Poland, and you won't like it over there because you'll miss your mom and dad and your brother, and the people over there are Communists and they don't believe in Jesus or in his Holy Mother. You got that?”

Then he stood up and said, “And while you're at it, why don't you get her eyes checked? The sisters tell me she's blind as a bat.”

So Linda got her first pair of glasses and went around just amazed at how sharp and clear the world looked, and when she decided to speak English, she was speaking it perfectly good in about a week.

*   *   *

Babcia Koprowski was the one who took care of us when we were kids. She lived with us. Guys my father's generation don't like their wives working, but Mom had worked all during the war when he'd been overseas, and they took over the house after Dziadzio Koprowski died, so Mom got a job up at Krogers to help pay off the mortgage, and we got left with Babcia Koprowski. She was, I guess you could say, your standard-issue old Polish peasant lady.

I remember in her bedroom she had a picture of the Holy Mother of Częstochowa with a candle in front of it, and she just loved plants, had potted plants all over the place. She even tried to grow things out on the edge of our little bit of yard, but she didn't have much luck, what with all the red dust coming down.

She did that old-time cooking that takes all day long, the kind that nobody does anymore, and believe me, there's nothing like it. She made all these wonderful soups with these little
uszka
, you know, dumplings, and she'd bake that dark bread that each loaf weighs about fifty pounds. She'd put a cabbage leaf under the bread so it wouldn't stick to the pan, and for years I thought that's what everybody did when they baked bread. There was always a big meat dish except on Fridays, but that didn't mean you didn't eat on Fridays. It's heart-attack city, that cooking—everything you saw had sour cream in it—but to this day I'd rather eat
kapuśniak
than steak.

I was older than Linda, so I'd go out and play with the kids in the neighborhood, and then of course I was going to school, but Linda just stuck to Babcia like a little burr. And I used to look forward to coming home after school because there'd always be a nice snack—Babcia had learned how to bake American-style cookies—and sometimes if the weather was lousy, I'd hang around because I liked the old lady too. And whether it was just Linda or the both of us, Babcia talked nonstop all day long. She'd never been to school—I don't think she could even read and write—but she had wonderful stories, I guess they must have been folk tales. I can't remember much of what they were about, but I can remember the feeling I had as a kid, you know, hanging on every word—and she didn't speak much English. Well, that doesn't quite get it. You'd say anything at all to her in English, she'd say, “Very good, thenk you,” and that was it. So we were a Polish-speaking household. I picked up English when I started in school, but like I told you, Linda didn't.

And Babcia taught us our prayers. Every night before we went to sleep we were supposed to say the Hail Mary, and the Our Father, and the Confession, and she made sure we did it. You know, it's funny. To this day, I can rattle off those prayers in Polish ten times before I could even start to remember how they go in English.

So anyhow the year I was nine and Linda was five, Babcia got a real bad case of the flu, and it turned into pneumonia, and they put her in the hospital and she died. It hit everybody hard, but it hit Linda especially hard because she was so little and I guess because Babcia had been the person she'd been closest to, and poor Linda wandered around like a little ghost for months after that and refused to learn English. And Mom had to quit her job to take care of us. And that's when Old Bullet Head got heavy into the sauce. It's a damn good thing he quit drinking when he did because he made our life miserable for about a year.

We'd get the distant early warning that something was up when he didn't come home for dinner. Mom would wait and wait for him, and then she'd just give up and feed us, and she'd get so steamed, she'd be talking to herself and banging pots around, and I'd see Linda start to shiver, and I'd pray to the Holy Mother, “Please send Dad home soon,” but some nights the Holy Mother wasn't much help, and he wouldn't come home till one or two in the morning. He'd be so loaded he could barely stand up, and Mom would start screaming at him, and it'd go on for hours.