The Clarinet Polka (28 page)

“Connie—we ran it right to the edge and peered over. What more do you want?”

I'm sitting on the end of my bed listening to the funny little distant sounds on the telephone line. And I hear a car drive by wherever she is. And I've just had it with her, you know what I mean?

“I think you better shit or get off the pot,” I told her. “Either quit fucking around on that guy or leave him.” Then I heard the click when she hung up on me.

TEN

That spring I was sinking lower and lower into the pit. I kept trying to do something about my drinking, and it wasn't just that I couldn't get started, it was even worse than that. Every time I'd come up with some plan—like okay, today nothing but beer, or you don't drink till you get off work, or whatever it was—something about even
making
a plan would kick me off into oblivion. Hell, I was drinking more trying to cut back than I'd been when I hadn't even been thinking about it at all. And then eventually I'd crawl back to consciousness and I'd think, oh, you weak gutless son of a bitch, what's the matter with you?

I knew it'd been the right thing to tell Connie to get lost, but I had to admit I missed The Italian Renaissance. It'd been fairly entertaining while it lasted—or like Connie used to say, “not without a certain charm”—but now there was really nothing holding me to Raysburg, and I kept telling myself I had to get my ass to Austin. I could have left anytime I wanted to. It was only a three-day drive. I even had money in the bank. But I just couldn't do it—any more than I could cut back on my drinking. I was stuck good, and I couldn't figure out why.

The lowest I sunk—anyhow, the lowest I sunk that time around—got kicked off on Holy Thursday. That's the Thursday before Easter, and for me it's the biggest bummer in the liturgical calendar. That's just my own personal take on it, you know. Most people think Good Friday's heavier, but I don't. If I'd had half a brain in my head I never would have let myself be dragged to that depressing Mass.

Lent's been going on, right? Of course that doesn't mean a damn thing to me, but it does to Linda. She's been singing the Bitter Lamentations at church and doing the Stations of the Cross and all that other cheery stuff you're supposed to do for Lent. And she's got a real sweet tooth, so she's given up sugar and pastries and ice cream and like that. It'd never occur to her to give up something like playing her trumpet. And ever since I've come home, Linda in her own quiet way has been trying to save my immortal soul, so she keeps trying to get me to go to one Mass or another, and I keep going, “Come on, Linny, I'll make it for Easter, okay? Isn't that good enough?”

I'm back at the house for dinner on Thursday night, and Janice is there because she and Linda are going to Mass. In spite of the age difference between them, they'd got to be real tight, and one of the things they've got in common is they're both religious girls, and so they're double-teaming me, going, “Come on, Jimmy,” and finally I say, “Okay, okay, okay,” more just to shut them up than anything else. I figure it's a short Mass, I can put up with that.

Now I should tell you something about me and Catholicism. When I was a kid, I had my own crazy ideas which I didn't bother to check out with anybody for the simple reason that little boys don't go around discussing religion. Well, maybe if you're the kind of little boy who's going to grow up and be a priest you do, but I sure didn't. And when the nuns were talking to us, usually I'd dial them out—like, oh, yeah, right, I've heard it all before. So some things I had in my head were not exactly your standard-issue Catholic doctrine, you know what I mean? And for years I believed that after Christ died on the cross, he went to Hell and suffered right along with the damned down there.

Where could I have got something like that? It's easy. We said it every time we went to Mass. It's right there in the Creed. You know how it goes. “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, Our Lord.” And it goes on with what happened to Jesus until he was crucified, died, and was buried. And then you know what? We did not say it the way we're saying it today—“He descended to the dead.” Nope, that's sure not what we said when I was a kid. In the Mass we said it in Latin, which naturally I don't remember, but we learned to recite it in both English and Polish, and in English it says, “He descended into
Hell
.” In Polish it's— Well, it says, “
Zstąpił do piekieł
,” and that means something like “he stepped down into Hell,” so when I was a kid, I used to imagine Christ stepping off into space and just dropping straight down into Hell—you know, like somebody in a Bugs Bunny cartoon—but any way you cut it, Hell was the place where he was headed.

Okay, so Christ gets betrayed. And they flog him and mock him and put a crown of thorns on him. And then he's got to carry his own cross, and it's so heavy, he falls down three times. And he's got to see his mother watching it all and see how heartbroken she is. And then they crucify him, which is not a barrel of laughs, and then God the Father doesn't give him any help, so it's not just the physical pain he feels—anyhow, that's the way it's always seemed to me—and he cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Then he dies just like we all have to, and they take him down and lay him in the tomb. That's where his body is, right? But where's his spirit? Well, the Creed said it plain as anything. For three days, he's in Hell. And when I was a kid, that was just about the worst thing I could imagine.

On Holy Thursday we remember a number of things. It's when Christ gave us Holy Communion at the Last Supper, and it's when he said, “Thy will be done,” and gave himself up to suffering and death, and it's when that little community of his got scattered every which way and Peter denied him three times. But the reason why the Holy Thursday Mass has always seemed to me just about the heaviest, gloomiest, saddest Mass in the liturgical year is that's when we remember the anguish Christ suffered in the Garden of Gethsemane when he was begging God the Father to let him off the hook.

The first time anything religious really got to me—I mean, you grow up hearing all this stuff, and it kind of seeps in through your pores, but that doesn't necessarily mean it gets to you in any kind of a real way. So I'm just a kid, and I'm listening to Father Joe's homily, and it's about Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus falls down flat on his face on the ground and prays. He's feeling heavy as death, and the sweat rolls off him like big drops of blood. He prays, “Father, if it's possible, take this cup from me.” Because he knows what's coming—betrayal and suffering and death and having to go to Hell,
and he's completely alone
.

I've heard it all before, but that time I really
heard
it, and it gets to me. I'm about ten years old, right? I swear I felt a horrible chill, and I got tears in my eyes, and I thought, hey, he really didn't want to have to go through all that shit
all alone
.

Well, every time I go to a Holy Thursday Mass, I remember that, and then they go out of their way to make things just as gloomy for you as possible, because at the end there's this procession around the church, and they strip everything off the main altar and carry it over to the side altar, and then they drape all the statues with purple cloth. It's to symbolize what it's like in the world with Christ gone, so they don't leave you a thing.

I remember it being a chilly night with a little bit of rain and the sky burning bloodred down in Millwood from the blast furnace—just perfect for Holy Thursday—and the girls aren't saying much because they're already getting themselves in a nice miserable mood for Mass. Except for the old ladies, there's not a lot of people in the church, because most people, if their main purpose is to get themselves good and bummed out, they'll come on Good Friday.

Well, Father Obinski delivered some kind of homily, but I don't remember much about it except it was gloomy. And I took Holy Communion just the way I did at Christmas Eve, but I didn't feel good about it. Even if there is a confession in the Mass, I knew perfectly well what old Father Joe would say about that if he was around to say it, and I knew perfectly well I wasn't in a state of grace. So if the Church was real and Christ was real, I hadn't been forgiven for a damned thing. And if the Church was
not
real and Christ was
not
real, then what was I doing there? Any way you cut it, I felt like a hypocrite. And we do the procession around the church, and they strip the altar and cover everything up, and I'm thinking, thank God, it's over—I'm dying for a smoke—but I forgot all about the prayers afterward.

You see, after the Holy Thursday Mass, a few people stick around to keep vigil, and in the old days, there were always people praying in the church all night long because what you're remembering is when Christ said, “Watch and pray.” And then his disciples fell asleep on him and left him completely alone, and so
you
don't want to fall asleep on him, right? And of course Janice and Linda are going to want to stay there awhile and pray, and so what am I supposed to do? I can't really say, “Sorry, girls, I know we're supposed to stick with Christ in his hour of darkness, but I got to take a leak and get a smoke in, so if you'll please excuse me, I'm going to duck out to the PAC and get loaded.”

There's no candles burning, and they've dimmed the lights in the church down to this depressing brown murk, and a lot of people have gone home, but we haven't gone home. Oh, no. The three of us are kneeling there, and the girls have got their rosaries out, and they're praying away, and when you look up at the altar, everything's gone because Christ is gone. There's no crucifix and no statues because they're all covered up. They've even carried away the little angels. And the altar table's bare. There's no altar cloth, no hangings, no host, no chalice, no purificator, no paten, no chalice veil, no candlesticks—no nothing. And then some weird thing in my mind takes it one more step, and I think,
no people
.

The closest I ever got to Hell was on that flight to Goose Bay, Labrador. Kneeling there in the church, I kind of relived it. I always kept a carton of smokes and a fifth of Jack Daniel's in my flight bag for emergencies, and we're airborne, and I'm congratulating myself, like, good going, Koprowski. For once in your life you thought ahead. You talk about stupid, right? And we go through this kind of giddy few minutes where we're yelling, “Hey, hot shit, we made it,” and like that—you know, getting out ahead of the missiles. They announced that we had orders for Goose Bay, and then, bang, it sort of hits everybody at once. Shit, nuclear war. When we get to Goose Bay, will we be able to land or will it be nuked out? All of a sudden nobody's saying a word.

It had only been a few years before when the Kennedy brothers and Nikita Khrushchev had been going eyeball to eyeball over the missiles in Cuba, and that little peek into the nuclear abyss was still clear in everybody's heads, and the way that drill was going, there was nothing to give us a hint it wasn't real. Do you understand what I'm telling you here?

If I'd thought of doing it, I probably wouldn't have done it, but automatic, I cross myself. And I look up and Ron Jacobson's looking right at me. His eyes are just glued to mine. And for half a second I'm really pissed off at him because he's from Wisconsin and I can't think of anything out in Wisconsin the Russians would want to bomb, but then I realize what a piss-ass rotten thing that is to think. And we're all in the same boat anyhow. And I'm trying to remember where Linda is, if she's in Raysburg or back down at WVU, and then I think, oh, what the hell good would that do? It won't take long for the fallout to drift down to Morgantown. We're in SAC, you know, so we're not exactly uninformed about nuclear war—like what happens at the epicenter and so many miles from the epicenter, and the effects of radiation burns and radiation sickness, and, you know, the whole rotten works. And of course we all know about that good old
assured mutual destruction
.

If they launched the nukes, they're already coming down, and there's steel mills all up and down the river, so maybe already there's no people. My mom and dad and grandma and all the girls I went to school with and any of my buddies who're still in town and all the old folks in St. Stanislaus Parish and all the kids at Raysburg Central Catholic and just, you know, everybody. For a minute or two you're trying to think of everybody. And all the time I'm thinking this, I'm looking at Ron Jacobson, and he's looking at me, and I know he's thinking the same thing. And we're still alive, but for what? What's our lives going to look like? Who the hell wants to be alive?

Up until then I'd always had some kind of crazy little optimism about life, like—I don't know, like a little robin in spring that followed me around or some dumb thing like that, but by the time we got back from Goose Bay, it was gone, and I'd never had it again. So I'd got out of the service, and I'd decided not to think about any of this shit anymore. I mean, what good does it do you? But just because I wasn't thinking about it didn't mean it wasn't still going on. Right at that moment while I was kneeling there in the church, there were B-52s over my head carrying nuclear payloads, and there were missiles all over the world all aimed and ready to go, and the whole thing was just, you know, poised and hanging on a thread.

And Jacobson, the guy I went through all that shit with, he's gone through his own crucifixion and death, just the way we're all going to have to. But why'd he have to hang on so long, suffering like he did? Where is he now? If there's no life after death, then he's just gone. The nicest guy I ever knew in my life is just gone. And if there is life after death, where is he? Joined the Communion of Saints? In Purgatory? In Hell? The nuns told us that Protestants went to Hell. Did I believe that? No way I believed that. He told me, but I can't remember what kind of Protestant he was, but if he's in Hell, that's where I'm going too. And if there's nothing afterward, then we're all just like Connie said when she was so weirded out, nothing but a bunch of robots, and nothing means nothing means nothing.