The Clarinet Polka (14 page)

“We came to hear you,” Linda says.

“Oh, yeah,” Patty says and stares off into space and starts tapping on the tabletop. Linda and I order a couple more beers, and Patty orders two Cokes—no ice, huh?—and when they come, she downs them both in ten seconds flat.

Patty was one of the most downright peculiar-looking girls I ever saw in my life. You could start with the lizard tattooed on her shoulder, and that was years before girls were getting themselves tattooed. Washed-out, I guess you could call her, but that doesn't even come close. Her skin looked like she'd once been pink like a normal white person but then she'd had some kind of solvent dumped on her that got most of the color off and left just a few pink spots here and there. Dead straight hippie hair halfway down her back—that stupid kind of blond that's like no color at all—and just about the palest eyes you could imagine, not even dark enough so you could call them gray. But the thing that was really creepy about her is that she was sexy as all hell—if you like your girls skinny as drawn wire. She had to scrape six guys off her just to get to our table.

I'm feeling sorry for my sister. There she is in her powder blue pantsuit, and she's doing her best. “We're really enjoying your music.”

“Oh, yeah. Shit. Glad somebody's enjoying it.”

I see Linda get a hurt look on her face, so I jump in with, “Georgie Mondrowski says hi.”

“Oh, yeah. Georgie, huh. Tell him I'm glad he didn't get killed.”

Patty never once looks at you and she never once smiles. Now she starts gnawing on the ends of her fingers. She's really going at it. The ends of all her fingers are red and chewed. “Heard you were down in Nashville,” I say.

“Yeah. About a year.”

Long silence. “So what brings you back to the valley?” Linda says in a cheery little voice.

“Temporary insanity.”

Linda gives me a look that says she's ready to leave, and I give her a look back that says, let's stick with it a little bit longer, so Linda and I are both trying to think of more stupid things to say while Patty's sitting there twitching and staring into space and gnawing on her fingers and tapping on the tabletop. Then the bass player comes over and introduces herself, “Hi, I'm Bev Wright. You friends of Patty's? Mind if I sit down?”

Bev has no problem talking. In about a minute and a half we know everything there is to know about her. She's from Barnsville, Ohio. Her brother gave her that Fender bass she's playing; it's a honey. Her brother's on the Jamboree all the time, plays with the Mountain Men. Maybe we've heard him? Jumping Jack Wright? When she was a little kid she used to follow him around going, “I want to play, I want to play, I want to play,” so he taught her guitar out of self-defense. Too many rhythm guitar players in the world already, so she switched to bass.

Bev's cute as a button, a friendly freckle-faced country kid with a big mop of curly brown hair, and while she's talking our ears off, Patty out of nowhere says to me, “Georgie got any smoke?”

I go, “Huh?”

“Mondrowski. I heard he's got some pretty good smoke.”

“Could be,” I say.

“Smoke in this fucking town's shit,” Patty says. “Bummer. Might as well be tea leaves. He still in the same place?” I tell her that he is.

Their break's about over and we still haven't got down to business, so I say to Bev, “My sister's trying to get an all-girl polka band together.”

“Oh, wow,” Bev says, “that's really neat. I love playing with all girls. I love polkas. I used to listen to that show on Saturday mornings,” and she's going on about how much she loves polkas—real happy music, she says—so Linda starts telling her about how the music from the old country crashed into pop music and jazz and made the Polish-American polka and about Eastern and Western styles and so on, and Bev's going, “Hey, wow, is that ever neat,” and Patty staring into space says, “My parents were into all that polka shit.”

We stop to give her room to say something more, but there isn't anything more, so Linda starts telling Bev about how great it'd be to have a friendly little polka band in the valley playing old-time Polish music, and again Patty comes sailing in out of left field, “You know that tune that goes, ‘Hey—'?”

“Hey?” Linda says.

“My old man used to sing it to me when I was a little kid. It was his favorite tune. He'd sing it to me when I was going to bed. It goes, ‘Hey—'” and she kind of shrugs, and she hums a little bit of the melody. She makes a face like, oh, God, sorry, I can't sing for shit, and she tries it again. “It's that Polak hillbilly tune,” she says.

I see the light bulb go on in Linda's head. “Oh!” she says. My sister amazes me sometimes. As shy as she is, she starts singing in her choir-girl voice right there in that country-western bar. She doesn't seem the least bit embarrassed. She's singing:

“Hej, góral ja ci góral,

  
Hej, z pod samiuśkich Tater,

  
Hej, descyk mnie wykąpał,

  
Hej, wykołysał wiater—”

That means like— Well, it's kind of tricky to translate. The first “hey,” is like if you'd say, “Hey, I'm a mountain man.” The next “hey” says, “right from the honest-to-God Tatras,” like from where the mountains are the highest. The next two “heys” are easy. They say, “Hey, the rain has washed me. Hey, the wind has rocked me,” you know, like a baby in a cradle.

“That's it,” Patty says. “God, I haven't heard that tune in years.”

“Wow,” Bev goes, “what is that language? Is that Polish?”

“Martian,” Patty says.

“Oh, I wish I was anything but a dumb-ass WASP,” Bev says.

And all of a sudden—slam, bang, pow—Patty's playing the table. She's beating away on the top with both hands and she's kicking the leg with one of her cowgirl boots. “That's the polka,” she says like she's daring us to say it isn't, and, by God, it is. She's got that polka beat nailed. You could dance to it.

The break's over and the girls are getting ready to go back up on stage. Patty grabs a Sugar Shack matchbook and borrows a pencil from a waitress and writes her number on it. “You get a gig,” she says to Linda, “you call me.”

“Me too!” Bev yells.

*   *   *

So there was Linda's rhythm section if she wanted it, but she wasn't exactly what you'd call ecstatic about it. We talked it over, and we both concluded that “you get a gig, you call me” didn't translate into “sure, we'd be glad to rehearse with you once a week and then sit around afterward for a few hours and talk about the evolution of Polish music in America.” And cheery little Bev Wright wasn't even Polish. Did it matter? “I don't know,” Linda said. “I guess not. All she has to do is play root five on the beat.”

Linda told Mary Jo about Patty and Bev, and the first thing Mary Jo wants to know is not how they played but if they were cute. Well, cute was certainly the right word for Bev Wright, but Patty Pajaczkowski? Well, maybe if you took “cute” and stretched it around the block a few times. And Mary Jo just loved it to pieces that they were playing in an all-girl country band and she wanted to hear what they were wearing right down to the finest detail, and once she heard that, she knew the girls were perfect. “We'll call ourselves Mary Jo and the Polka Dolls.” You can imagine how much Linda liked the idea of being a Polka Doll.

“Mary Jo sees herself as Mom surrounded by all these pretty little chickies,” Linda told me. Like Mary Jo was going on about some Polish dance group she saw somewhere, how cute their costumes were, and so she figured she'd dress the girls something like that, only with bouncy little white skirts with red polka dots—
polka
dots, get it?—real short, you know, like majorette skirts, but they could have matching panties under them so they wouldn't look immodest, or maybe the panties could be red with white polka dots, and flower wreathes in their hair, probably get good quality artificial flowers because real ones you have to replace every time, and that's an expense, and white boots up to the knee, you know, like peasant girls. “Right,” Linda says, “I'll bet you could find thousands of peasant girls in Poland who wear white boots up to the knee on a daily basis.”

I thought all this was pretty funny, but Linda didn't. “If I ever get a real band together,” she said, “we'll outnumber her.”

“Okay,” I said, “but let's just say for the sake of argument that Bev and Patty worked out. Who else do you need?”

“Another trumpet or a clarinet.”

Girl trumpet players don't exactly grow on trees, but a clarinet player? Well, that turned out to be nowhere near as hard as it seemed. I pop into Czaplicki's to buy a pack of smokes, and Mrs. Czaplicki corners me so we've got to do the how's-your-family routine, and just for something to say, I go, “My sister's starting a polka band, and she's looking for a girl clarinet player. You wouldn't happen to know one, would you?”

Mrs. Czaplicki goes, “Yeah, as a matter of fact I do. You know the Dłuwieckis?”

Naturally I know the Dłuwieckis. Everybody does. They're, I guess you could say, notorious. And it turns out that Mrs. Czaplicki's niece Sandy is best friends with the Dłuwieckis' youngest kid—they play in the band together at Central—and the Dłuwieckis' kid plays the clarinet, and everybody says she's incredible, maybe a musical genius. “Mr. Webb—you know, the music teacher—says she's the best student he's ever had in his life,” Mrs. Czaplicki tells me.

Linda doesn't think it's too likely a high school kid is going to have the kind of chops she's looking for, but you never can tell, so there we are with the Czaplickis at the Central band recital.

We're sitting on those damn hard bleachers in the gym, and all I have to do is walk through the doors and smell that sorry place to remember how much I hated it, and the band sounds just the way you'd expect the Raysburg Central Catholic band to sound, and wouldn't you know it, the Dłuwieckis' kid's solo is the next to the last number in the whole program.

“The things I do for you, Linda,” I say. “I can't believe it sometimes.”

“Well, I've got to admit,” she says, “they're not exactly giving us fresh new insights into the masterworks of band literature.”

To amuse myself, I'm trying to guess which one of the girls playing the clarinet is Janice Dłuwiecki. Her father's a tall skinny guy with dark curly hair, so I pick a girl I think looks like him, but I'm wrong. When solo time comes, this little kid stands up. She's blond as butter, and she's wearing her hair in pigtails. She looks about twelve.

The number they did was some famous Dixieland tune—I forget which one—and, boy, did that little kid ever make the Central band sound crappy. It was like they were in one universe and she was in another. It was like, I don't know—well, imagine Benny Goodman sitting in with the Fairmont, West Virginia, Salvation Army Band. Notes were coming out of her clarinet about a million to the minute, and she made it sound easy. She played it so hot and fast, whenever the band came in with her, they were like a pile of mud. She got finished and made a little curtsy, and naturally the audience went nuts. It was the first real music we'd heard since we'd walked in there. I said, “Well, Linny, is she good enough for you?”

*   *   *

Yep, Janice Dłuwiecki was plenty good enough, so all Linda had to do was figure out a way to get her. The Dłuwieckis were straight from the old country, and everybody knew what snobs they were, and probably the last thing in the world they'd want was their darling daughter playing in a polka band. But Mr. Dłuwiecki had a soft spot for Linda, and she planned to run into him accidentally somewhere and approach the subject sideways. You see, Linda had been his best student in advanced Polish.

When the Felician Nuns started teaching in Raysburg—that's back when our parents were little—it'd been all Polish, but eventually it dawned on them that it wasn't the world's greatest idea to be sending kids to high school who'd been taught no English whatsoever, so they switched to half a day in Polish, half a day in English. Well, that would have been okay for me and Linda, but by the time we hit St. Stans, the majority of the kids didn't speak Polish at home anymore, and you don't want your kids after their first day of school telling you, “Hey, guess what? Up till lunchtime the nuns talked funny, and I couldn't understand a word they were saying.” So by the time I got into grade school, they'd switched to all English, and Polish was just one of the subjects they taught.

Then one of the organizations—Polish people love political organizations, and I never could keep track of them all—began to worry that the Polish language in America might be lost forever, so they started a school on Saturdays—you know, for the kids who'd left St. Stans and gone on to Central. So for a few years—up until it died from its own sheer stupidity—we had Polish school on Saturdays. Anybody who knew more Polish than the kids was fair game to teach in it, and so you'd go over there and you'd have to put up with somebody's mom.

If you survived long enough, eventually you were supposed to get to Mr. Dłuwiecki who taught
advanced
Polish. But what most of us tried to do—I'm talking me and Georgie and Bobby and Larry,
the boys
, right?—we tried to be such total and complete assholes that we wouldn't have to go back there ever again, and we succeeded very quickly. The girls, being girls, hung on longer, and then they started dropping off, and not too many kids made it all the way up to Mr. Dłuwiecki, but naturally Linda did. In fact, she got so far she was the only one left, and every Saturday it was just her and Mr. Dłuwiecki shooting the shit in Polish in one of the side rooms in the church, and naturally he'd always thought she was just about as nice as a South Raysburg girl can be.