The Clarinet Polka (24 page)

“Oh, yeah, the best. When Ray Pahucki and the boys started to play, you'd jump right to your feet. It's sad. A lot of the guys from that old orchestra must be dead by now—or in the old folks' home.”

Naturally Linda liked the leftover old guys; she especially liked the way Ray Pahucki played the fiddle. It was that authentic Polish folk style with no vibrato, she said. But she didn't care for the younger guys making up the rhythm section, and Mary Jo agreed with her. The kid on drums was kind of crude. The guitar and the accordion kept getting in each other's way. “We've got to be better than that if we want to get anywhere,” Linda says.

“We've got to get
those other two girls
if we want to get anywhere,” Mary Jo says with acid dripping off her voice.

Linda's been hearing this from Mary Jo for a while now, and she says what she always says, “They're professionals. They want to get paid.”

“Yeah? Don't we all.”

Do I hear the guitar getting in the way of the accordion? Do I hear the drummer being kind of crude? Oh, hell, no. They've kicked into an instrumental—“Money Money,” I think it was—and what I hear is a good hot polka, and that boilermaker's started knocking at the base of my skull. It's the Pączki Ball, isn't it? Well, you don't stand around and talk about the damn band. You dance. I grab Janice and yank her right out onto the dance floor.

She didn't see me coming, and she lets out a huge squeal. I'm leading her right smack down the floor in front of the band, and when I do the polka, I like to step right along. Once Janice gets over her shock, she's a pretty dancer, light and airy. A kid, you know, so she's got energy out her ears. White tights and her little shiny shoes, her short skirt flipping around, she looks all legs, and we go by the band, Ray Pahucki starts egging us on—
“Hop, hop, hop, hopla!”
—and Janice is laughing, her pigtails flying behind her.

We go sailing around the edge of the dance floor and Larry Dombrowczyk gives us a big cheer. He grabs Arlene Orlicki and comes chasing along behind us. He's got a goofy way of dancing, taking these great big stupid steps—like imagine Abe Lincoln doing the polka—and people are cracking up. We're coming back around to where we started, and I see that Gene Duda's managed to get his ancient ass out of a folding chair, and he and Mary Jo are doing that old one, two, three polka step we all learned as kids, staying in one spot and barely moving their feet. And Mondrowski's dancing with Linda. He's a smooth dancer, turns the polka into something like a jitterbug. Well, it's like my mom always said, “If you're having a good time, there's no wrong way to do the polka.”

We're galloping by the band again, and they just love us to pieces.
“Do tańca!”
that old fiddle player yells at us.

“To grajcie!”
Janice yells back at him, and he cracks up. It gives you a real kick to see somebody happy like she is, her eyes sparkling. A cowbell's clanging away somewhere—probably my Aunt Helen, she loves to do that—and I think, yeah, I'm going to have a good time, what the hell.

You don't want a polka to last too long; otherwise some of the older folks might start dropping dead on you. So this one's run out and we've slid to a halt, and I'm standing there gasping for breath, and Janice says, “Jimmy, you're a wonderful dancer,” which makes me feel good, like I can still crank it up, you know, even though I'm regretting every cigarette I've ever smoked in my life.

“You ain't no slouch yourself, kid,” I say. She's not even breathing hard.

The Pączki Ball brings out the whole parish. You've got the young moms passing their babies to each other, and the little bitty girls being whirled around by their daddies, and grade school kids from St. Stans running around all over the place, and the girls Janice's age dancing with each other because most of the boys haven't showed up yet. They'll turn up later, after ten, pretending to be drunker than they are, and if Father Obinski's anything like old Father Joe, he'll greet them at the door just so they'll remember where they are. And your parents and your relatives are there, and it used to be that everybody you went to school with would be there, but looking around that night it really hit me how bad our ranks had been thinned out—you know, what with the Sylvania plant shutting down and Raysburg Steel doing all those layoffs.

But the old ladies sure were still there, like Babcia Wojtkiewicz working in the kitchen to make sure there's always plenty of
pączki
and later on, after you've worked up a real appetite, some
pierogi
. The festivities stop dead at midnight because that's the start of Lent, and before it's all over, those old ladies are going to be out on the dance floor for a polka or an
oberek
, and if you don't watch out, it's you they're going to grab. The oldest person is Mrs. Polzin who's something like ninety-four, sitting there in her wheelchair sipping a little beer and smiling at everybody as they go by.

The band finally decides to do one in Polish, a tune everybody knows. The fiddle player sings,
“Jakie czasy już nastały, że się baby powściekały”
—in English that means something like, “What's happening these days when the old ladies are going bananas?”—and then he goes,
“Oj, dana dana, oj dana,”
and everybody in the hall gets to yell back at him,
“OJ, DA NA!”
You don't even have to know any Polish to be able to do that.

Mondrowski grabs Janice, and Larry grabs Linda, and I grab Arlene Orlicki, and away we go. Arlene was a majorette back in high school and she dances what I guess you could call a majorette-style polka—showing off her legs—and she gets a few whistles, which is exactly what she wants. That tune's got just about everybody up on their feet, and I see Mom and Old Bullet Head stepping along in fine form, and then, coming right behind them, Dorothy Pliszka and her husband—yeah, she really is Dorothy Green now—and I get the same damn miserable feeling I always get. Shit, I think, it's been seven years. This is ridiculous. I figure I better dance with her once before the night's over just to take the jinx off—if that makes any sense. Well, I never did get to dance with Dorothy.

After that last polka I'm sweating out of every pore, and what I need's a cold one. I walk over to where they're selling the beer. Boilermaker number one went down so nice I figure what's called for is number two, so I dig up my fifth and pour out a good jolt into a cup, and lo and behold there's Linda looking right at me. “Come on, Jimmy,” she says, “why don't you take it easy tonight?”

I'm super pissed off for some reason, thinking, hey, it's going to be a cold day in hell when my little sister starts telling me what to do, but I say, “Oh, yeah, sure,” and give her a little smile.

Then I go wandering off talking to people, and I wait till Linda's not looking at me, and I pour another good glug into my cup and down the whole works. Real mature, huh? And I buy two beers so I don't have to keep standing in line, and I'm looking around for somebody to dance with, and then—whoa back there, boys!—the world's starting to go a little bizarre on me so I figure I better eat a
pączek
. And just as quick as I'd got mad at my sister, I'm feeling bad about it, and I'm thinking, oh, hell, she didn't mean anything by it. She was just trying to keep me out of trouble—fat chance of that because I've already drunk maybe a quarter of a fifth of Jack Daniel's and four beers on an empty stomach in little over an hour.

I ate a couple
pączki
. The band kicked into a waltz, and you want to dance a waltz with your girlfriend if you've got one, but I didn't have one, so I went and propped up a wall.

A waltz gives you a break from all the polkas so you've got a chance to breathe, and it gives you a chance to talk to the person you're dancing with, and if you're inclined to say something heartfelt and soppy to her, it gives you a good excuse because the waltzes they play at Polish dances are really soppy. Whether they're in English or in Polish, they've always got sweet pretty tunes—haunting, I guess you could say—and they're about falling in love, or having a broken heart because the one you love doesn't love you, or loving somebody who's an asshole, or missing your wonderful old mother now that she's gone, or missing your kids because you had to leave them, or missing the beautiful mountains of Poland that you haven't laid eyes on for three generations, or saying how strange life is, over in a flash, and in a year, in a day, in a moment, we'll be together no more—anyhow, the whole point of a waltz is to take your heartstrings and give them a real good yank.

Little kids don't like waltzes for the simple reason that little kids aren't sentimental. No, they go, “Hiss, boo,” and go off and have a Coke or something. Everybody else wades in up to their eyeballs. There's not that many waltzes played in the course of an evening, but each one they play is soppier than the last one—or maybe it just seems that way because you're getting loaded—so by the time you get to the last waltz, everybody in the hall's practically drowning in soppiness. That's when the old folks are remembering what it was like when they first fell in love a million years ago, and the young marrieds are thinking, hey, all that shit—you know, the baby crying and working night shift and never having enough money—well, it's all worth it because we love each other, and the unmarried kids are saying things that will embarrass the hell out of them the next day. Like the last waltz at the Pączki Ball my junior year in high school when I said to Dorothy Pliszka, “Dorothy, I'll love you forever,” and she said to me in that pissy little voice she could get sometimes that always drove me right up the wall, “Don't say it, Jimmy, if you don't mean it.” She made me so mad at her, I promised myself I'd never say I love you to a girl unless I really meant it, and I never have.

So I'm standing there not waltzing with anybody. And it's not like there's no girls there, you know what I mean? There's lots of girls, and I've known every single one of them my whole life. There's Shirley Zembrzuski, there's Arlene Orlicki, there's Georgie's little sister and Bob Winnicki's little sister, there's those crazy Wierzcholek girls—well, you get the picture, right? I could have found somebody to waltz with, but why the hell bother? South Raysburg felt like it had shrunk down to the size of a pea, and all the time I'd been at Central I'd been telling myself, I've got to get out of this damn valley, so why am I still here? Why am I screwing somebody else's wife every Wednesday night regular as a cuckoo clock? Why am I drunk at the Pączki Ball? Why am I not in Austin, Texas?

Right in the middle of this excursion into the Land of Gloom, Janice Dłuwiecki comes over to me and says, “Ladies' choice.”

“Who says?” I ask her.

“Me,” she says, and who can argue with that?

So I'm waltzing with Janice, this weird little kid, and I don't know what to say to her, and she isn't saying a damn thing to me. Dancing with her reminds me of dancing with Linda when Linda was that age—you're holding this skinny sweaty little girl and she's easy to lead—but Linda was always heartbroken over some guy who wasn't paying any attention to her, so if he was a friend of mine, after the waltz I'd go say, “Hey, would you mind dancing with my sister?” Sometimes they wouldn't mind at all. Linda could have had a lot more active social life if she hadn't been so shy, or so conservative, or so something—but anyhow, I don't know what I'm thinking about, too damn drunk way too early, and if Janice Dłuwiecki is heartbroken over some jerk, she sure isn't telling me about it. She isn't telling me anything. Why did she ask me to dance in the first place?

We danced the whole waltz, and all she said to me the entire time was—we were right in front of the band, and she said, “I want to be up there playing so bad I can taste it,” and I said, “Well, I guess you will be one of these days.” We got to the end, and she said,
“Dziękuję,”
and gave me a cute little curtsy like she did after playing her solo with the Central band. And for some reason I gave her a little formal bow the way you see the old guys do sometimes, and—Well, if I tried ahead of time to say it, I never could have done it—and maybe because I was drunk, I don't know—but someplace deep in the back of my brain kicked in, and I heard myself saying,
“Cała przyjemność po mojej stronie.”
That's like what you'd say to a princess if she'd just thanked you for a dance.

She looked kind of startled, and then we both laughed, and that was that. Except I had that soppy waltz feeling hanging on to me—not to mention being plastered out of my mind and it wasn't even nine o'clock yet—feeling gloomy and sad and thinking, shit, forget about having a good time. No, I'm not going to dance with Dorothy. It'll just make me feel even worse to dance with Dorothy, and it was really crappy in high school, going around crazy dumb-ass in love with her like some stupid poisoned pup, but at least I was in love
with somebody
—aw, what the hell, the only thing to do is have another drink, and a polka kicked in, and it sounded like good music to be drinking to.

It wasn't as bad as the night Connie stood me up. I didn't lose every single damn memory. Nope, there were a bunch of them clear as little snapshots left in my head the next day to haunt me. But a lot of it was gone.

I don't remember telling old Mrs. Bognar how horrible it was on Guam—although Linda tells me I did—and why I should have picked Mrs. Bognar, I don't know. She's a nice old lady, and Linda says she kept smiling and nodding at me, but she doesn't speak hardly any English at all. I don't remember passing out in the men's can, and when Georgie and Larry picked me up and carried me into one of the Sunday school rooms, I don't remember that either.