The Clarinet Polka (25 page)

I remember waking up and thinking, shit, how did I get in here? And I go lurching back into the parish hall to find my fifth, and it's empty, and I'm going, goddamn, son of a bitch, who drank my whiskey? And of course it was me who drank my whiskey. And I remember buying six beers and lining them up and starting to drink them one after the other. And I remember laying on the floor between a couple folding chairs with my head propped up against the wall at a weird angle and the whole world was one big polka pounding in my ears and I couldn't quite get it together to move my head and Janice Dłuwiecki was looking down at me and laughing, saying, “Oh, Jimmy, you're soooo drunk. Just don't move. Just stay there till I get your sister.”

And, God help me, I remember throwing up on the sidewalk in front of the church. Yeah, you're supposed to have a good time at the Pączki Ball, but you're not supposed to get so drunk you're obnoxious, and you're not supposed to pass out cold as a mackerel in the men's can so your uncle, or your father, or your father's friends, or
maybe even the priest
has got to step over you to take a leak, and you're not supposed to fall down in the parish hall and then just lay there staring at everybody like a demented fool, and you're not supposed throw up on the sidewalk right smack in front of the church as people are driving by leaving, shining their headlights on you.

I don't remember Georgie and Larry dumping me into the back of my car. I do remember them getting me out of it and me going, “What the hell's happening? Come on, you guys, I need a drink,” and they're going, “Shut up, numbnuts, or we'll deck you.”

They hauled me in and dumped me on my bed. I'm going, “Hey. Shit. I need a drink. I really need a drink.”

They kept shoving me in bed and I kept jumping out again. I sort of remember that, but not real clear. And finally the only way to get me to stay in bed was to find the other fifth I had stashed away and give it to me.

Well, as you could probably guess, I did not have a delightful night's sleep. You could probably also guess that I did not make it in to work the next day. About noon I'm sitting in the laundromat watching my sheets and pillows and blanket go round because there was no way in hell I was going to take that disgusting stuff home to wash it. You know, if you want to make a man with a terminal hangover feel right on top of the world, there's nothing beats mopping puke out of a trailer.

So I got everything looking good again, and I curled up on my bed and fell sound asleep. The next thing I know, there's Mrs. Constance Bradshaw letting herself in. I'm so far down, it takes me a few seconds to figure out who she is and who I am and where the hell I am and what's going on. “God,” she says, “it positively reeks of Lysol in here. What's this, cleaning day?”

Well, my desire to drive up to the Night Owl was a little below zero, so I said, “Let's just stay in tonight, okay?” and I told her I'd got monumentally loaded the night before and was just beginning to scrape myself back together.

I could see she was disappointed, but she was doing her best to be sympathetic. “Do you want me to go and get us a pizza?” she said.

Oh, yeah, a pizza. That's all I need. “I've got some soup. You want some soup?”

She didn't want any soup. She took her clothes off and got in bed with me—both of us, you know, crammed into that narrow little space—and that was the first time ever that sex was, I guess you'd have to call it, lousy. She seemed shy just being there naked with me, and my body felt like it was something made out of old parts from Wolchak's junkyard. I wasn't turned on at all, but it seemed easier to go through with it than have to face all the bullshit talking we'd have to do if I didn't.

We're laying there afterward, and I'm trying to smoke a cigarette although it's making my head worse, and I don't know why I said it, but I said, “It's Ash Wednesday. You know, the first day of Lent.”

“Oh,” she says, “does that mean something to you?”

“I guess not. I didn't go to Mass.”

There's a long silence, and she was probably thinking, oh, God, what do I say now? So she comes out with a really stupid line. She says, “I've never known any Catholics.”

If I hadn't been feeling so shitty, I probably would have just laughed at her, but what I said was, “Oh, I bet you have. We don't all wear St. Christopher's medals around our necks, you know. So you can't always tell. Yeah, Connie, you're surrounded by secret Catholics on all sides.”

“Boy, are you in a rotten mood!” she says and hops out of bed in a huff and starts getting dressed.

I didn't have the energy to try to come up with something to save the situation, so I just lay there and watched her. She didn't say another word. She just went banging out, leaving the door to my trailer open. I could hear her across the road laying rubber with her goddamn Mustang. I don't know where she was going. It wasn't late enough for her to go home. The Italian Renaissance wasn't over yet.

When I'd been out, I'd bought some hangover food, so I made a can of mushroom soup on my little stove. I'd bought a fifth of vodka because it's, you know, pure and easier on your system than sour mash whiskey, so I mixed a couple shots with chocolate milk and downed it, and I was thinking, shit, Koprowski, a man would have to be a fool to live like this.

NINE

After my splendid performance at the Pączki Ball, everybody and their dog was telling me I was drinking too much. Naturally I got the good word from Old Bullet Head. “Let me tell you a little secret, birdbrain. You'll never be able to drink it faster than they make it.” And from Mom. “How could you do this to me, Jimmy? Everybody's talking.” You see, that was the worst thing that could possibly happen to her—all the other moms going yatta ta yatta ta yatta, oh, poor Mary Koprowski, what a jerk she has for a son. Yep, at that moment among the good folks of South Raysburg I was about as popular as head lice. Even Linda was giving me shit. “Oh, Jimmy, when are you ever going to grow up!”

Then Vick Dobranski, that son of a bitch, put me on by the hour. “You're a good worker when you show up,” he told me. “I got no quarrel with that. But there ain't no money tree growing in here, and I got no intention of paying you for not working.” Boy, did that piss me off. I'd just got out of the service, hadn't I? It'd only been—what? Nine or ten months since I'd got out of the service? So of course I deserved to get paid for not working.

Well, you want to know a simple truth of life? If damn near everybody in the world is telling you you're drinking too much, you probably are. Of course Connie wasn't telling me I was drinking too much. No, she was right in there with me up to her eyeballs and things were getting—

Well, I've told you how dark it was in that parking lot at the Night Owl—well, it was a damn good thing. One night we walked out to the car, and I opened the door, and Connie went down on me right on the spot. She got me cranked right up to the stratosphere and then she stopped and said, “That's just to keep you interested.”

I thought, okay, honey, so that's how you want to play it, huh? So the next time we're up there, when we're leaving, I push her over so she's laying across the hood of my car, and I come into her from behind. “Oh, God, no,” she says. That's what she always said. You know that campaign they had a few years back to stop date rape or something, and the slogan was “No means no.” Well, somebody should have told Connie that. For her, no meant she was so turned on she was about ready to die. When she really meant no, what she said was, “Stop it, Jim,” but she hardly ever said that.

So anyhow, there she is facedown on the hood with me pumping away, and a couple guys come out and head for their car. Connie's going, “Oh, God, no, no, no,” and I don't even slow down. The guys look over at us and then look away. They get in their car and drive off. I stand her up, pull her skirt down, and shove her into the passenger seat. I go, “That's just to keep you interested, honey.”

So we got into these games of— It was like, let's see how hard we can pull the tiger's tail before he turns around and claws us. All it requires is getting so loaded you don't give a shit. We did it in the Wharf parking lot. We did it in the Kroger's parking lot. We did it on somebody's lawn out the pike. I'm a fairly big guy, and screwing in cars has never been my strong suit, but if you've got a girl wearing a miniskirt and no underwear and you sit in the backseat and get her to sit on your lap with her back to you, and if you lift her up until she's folded across the seat into the front, you can ease on into her and you've almost got enough room. We did that parked in front of the main entrance to the Staubsville Mill. I knew we had a good hour before shift change, but Connie didn't.

*   *   *

Meanwhile, back at the polka band, Mary Jo was getting more and more antsy. The Pączki Ball had really got her going. The church shouldn't have to bring Ray Pahucki and his boys in from Mercersville, she kept saying. There should be a good hot polka band right here in St. Stans parish.

Right, Linda said, that was the whole idea. So what about those other two girls? Mary Jo said. What are we waiting for, Christmas? So Linda worked up her courage and called the number on the Sugar Shack matchbook that Patty Pajaczkowski had given her, and some guy on the other end goes, “Patty
who?
Oh, you mean Patty the drummer. No, she split. No, I couldn't really tell you.”

Mary Jo was not pleased. “We should have grabbed her while she was in town.”

“We'll find some other people,” Linda said.

“Yeah? Where?” It had been awhile since Mary Jo had been talking about polka-dot miniskirts, and Linda was hoping that maybe now Mary Jo would let go of the idea of the all-girl band and just let her round up some of the loose polka guys she knew about.

But one thing that kept them going on Tuesday nights was they discovered that Janice Dłuwiecki didn't just play the clarinet, she could sing too. Up till then, they'd been a little thin in the vocal department. Mary Jo could honk out the words to a polka when she had to, but she'd been smoking her vocal cords with Kool cigarettes for the last thirty years, and she had a deep, raspy voice—you know, the kind that whenever you hear it, you keep clearing your throat—and nobody in their right mind would ever take her for a singer. And Linda had her little-girl choir voice, and that was okay for a soppy waltz at the end of the evening, but not great for a polka. So at some point it occurred to them to ask Janice if she could sing.

“Sure,” Janice said. When she'd been little, her mom used to sing to her all the time, and she'd learned all her mom's songs and they used to sing them together, so she knew lots of old Polish songs—the real sad sentimental ones her mother liked. “But I don't have a very pretty voice,” she said.

No, it wasn't a pretty voice, Linda told me, but that's exactly what was great about it. “It's really close to Polish folk vocal production.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said, “so how do Polish folk produce their vocals?”

So of course I got to hear Linda's lecture on vocal production. When Janice was trying to sing pretty, she was using her head voice and she sounded real thin—kind of like an asthmatic chipmunk—but the minute you asked her to forget that crap and just sing naturally, she dropped down and used her chest voice, and then she had a lot of power and sounded like somebody had just found her milking a cow in Prokowo.

Linda and Mary Jo are egging her on—“Hey, that's terrific, that's wonderful!” and Janice is going, “Come on. You're kidding me. You want me to sing like
that?
” Yeah, they said, exactly like that—and while you're at it, you might even be a bit more like that, and Linda lent Janice some tapes of the old-time singers from the Tatra Mountains so she'd really get the idea.

Naturally, being perfect as she was, Janice got the hang of what they wanted lickety-split, and pretty soon she knew about twenty good hot polka tunes. “She's a real ham,” Linda said. I had trouble believing that. “Oh, you ought to hear her.”

“Sure,” I said, “how about next Tuesday?” I was, you know, getting real curious to hear what they sounded like.

Linda goes into a panic. “Oh, no, no, no. I didn't mean now. We're not ready yet!” Which gave me a pretty good idea how annoyed Mary Jo must have been getting with her.

*   *   *

Oh, and while we're on the subject of Janice Dłuwiecki, I should tell you about her sixteenth birthday party. They sent us an invitation to it, I mean an invitation like out of Emily Post. It was addressed to the Koprowski Family, and it was one of those “Mr. and Mrs. Czesław Dłuwiecki request the pleasure of your presence—” Mom really appreciated the bars through the
l
's.

“What's wrong with that?” Linda says. “That's the proper Polish spelling.”

Mom just rolls her eyes. “Where's he get off sending these things anyway? Who the hell does he think he is—Paderewski?”

“I think it's sweet,” Linda says.

“Yeah, you would,” my mother says. “Well, I think we're going to have a prior engagement.”

“Aw, come on, Mary,” Old Bullet Head says, “that kid's been here so much she's practically a part of the family. The least we can do is show up and give her some kind of present.”

So what kind of present? It can't be clothes, Mom says, that's too personal. So how about a book then? Well, no, a book's not personal enough. Okay, so she's musical, isn't she? How about a record? “No,” Mom says, “not just a record. That's not big enough. It's got to be one of those boxed sets. You know what she likes, Linda. You pick something.” So Linda comes back with a boxed set of Benny Goodman, and everybody's satisfied with that.

We figure with that kind of invitation, it's got to be a dress-up affair, and that means I've got to go into a barber shop for the first time in months and convince deaf old Adam Cieliczka that all I want's a little bit off the sides—“That's a haircut?” my father says—and my dad and I have got to wear ties, so we dig out our funeral suits, and Mom and Linda go over to Zarobski's House of Beauty, “appointments not always necessary,” and come back looking like two poodles. “Why are we doing this?” Mom says. “That arrogant bastard is going to talk Polish at us, and if we say anything back to him, he'll be looking down his big nose at us because we talk like peasants.” Well, turns out she didn't have to worry about that.