The Clarinet Polka (36 page)

Speaking of big brothers, Bev Wright came back in plenty of time, and she brought her famous brother with her—introduced him to everybody and never once mentioned he played on the Jamboree. I guess we were all supposed to know it. And Georgie finally brought Linda back. I wouldn't say she was as calm as a still lake in August, but she was in a hell of a lot better shape than when she left. “I took her to the church,” he said, “and we sat there awhile and contemplated the eternal verities.”

Of course there were all Franky's regular customers too. He hadn't had so many people on a Saturday night for years, and he was grinning like Christmas had come early. Yeah, it was old-home week all right—frosted pitchers of beer arriving by the dozen and people walking around to each other's tables, doing the well-how-the-hell-are-you? number.

My father and Patty's dad are bitching about something or other at the mill, another one of those grievances that went nowhere. About how they have all these levels a grievance has to go through now, and it takes forever, and then when they finally decide on it, there's a guy from Pittsburgh representing the union, and he doesn't give a shit about the local problems, so he just makes another Judas deal with the company and the grievance goes zip down the old
dziura
. “Yeah, right, terrible,” they're saying. “In the old days the union meant something.”

A pair of scissors or a razor blade still haven't come nowhere near Georgie Mondrowski's head, and he's taken to wearing his hair in a ponytail—which got it out of the way—but there wasn't much he could do about his beard. Just a great big ball of blond fuzz starting below his nose. So he might as well be wearing a sign that says, “Hi, I'm your friendly neighborhood fucked-up Vietnam vet,” and everybody's going out of their way to be nice to him.

Old Bullet Head reaches out and shakes his hand. “How you keeping, Georgie?”

“No problem but the rent,” Georgie says, “and the rent's paid.”

My father doesn't find that funny. He's not checked out on GI talk so of course he's going to take it straight, and he's probably thinking, what the hell's the rent he's talking about? Georgie Mondrowski's still living at home the last I heard.

Right in the middle of all this cheery pandemonium, Bill Winnicki and his girlfriend come popping in to see what's going on, and they check out the band setup, and he yells at me, “Hey, Koprowski, who's playing in here tonight?”

I yell back, “My sister's polka band.”

Patty says, “That's it. That's our name.”

Linda's going, “What, what?”

“Our
name
,” Patty says. “When it's just handed to you like that, you gotta take it.
My Sister's Polka Band
.”

“Hey, neat,” Janice says. “Well, maybe,” Linda says. “It's better than nothing,” I say.

And naturally we're all checking out Janice's dad—kind of out of the corners of our eyes, you know—and he's sitting there at his table with a glass of beer he's not drinking, and he's staring at the full drum set and the mike and the monitor and the two big columns and the electric bass and the bass amp and the humungo bass speaker. Well, it doesn't take a musical genius to figure out that they aren't about to be playing any ancient Polish folk music, and Mr. Dłuwiecki clamps his mouth shut and gets this expression like he's just bit off something real nasty. Janice says, “Wow, Jimmy, look at my dad. Maybe I should have said something to him.”

“It's a little late now, kid.”

At the last possible minute the priest comes in. There's no tables left, and even the bar's packed, and Franky's been turning away people at the door, but it's Father Obinski, right, and he's got to sit somewhere, so we make a space for him at the band table, and all of a sudden a plate of
kiełbasa
and a pitcher of beer arrive in front of him, and he didn't order either one of them. “It's really nice of you to come, Father,” Linda says.

Father Obinski winks. It's like he's sharing a big secret with you. It's one of the first things people noticed about him—“Hey, you know the new priest? He's kind of weird. He winks a lot.” And he says, “I wouldn't miss it for the world. The whole parish is buzzing about it.”

Well, Mary Jo figured they should get a few polkas in before people got down to serious eating because it's kind of hard, you know, to dance the polka with your stomach crammed full of
pierogi
, and she's bugging Linda, so Linda's bugging me. “Jimmy, Jimmy, say something. Get it started.”

Why me? I don't know. Maybe because I'm the manager. So I jump up and run around behind the mike and turn it on, and I do my Barnum & Bailey voice, yelling out, “Okay, folks, this is the moment you've all been waiting for. Here they are, live and off color—My Sister's Polka Band.”

Then Mary Jo gets up and says, “Hi, folks. You all know me. I'm Mary Jo, the polka lady. Well, awhile back I got together this bunch of pretty girls, and—I don't think I need to introduce anybody, do I? Everybody knows everybody? Oh, that's Beverly Wright. She's a nice kid from Barnsville, Ohio, and she's so good on that electric bass we made her an honorary Polak.” And she's gassing on about how they've been practicing real hard, and they've got some real good old tunes from the old country, and like that. You give Mary Jo a microphone and you can't shut her up.

Janice is standing next to me, holding her clarinet, and we're both sneaking looks at her dad. The word “polka” has been spoken aloud a few times by now, and he is definitely not pleased. His mouth's all turned down, and he's sitting there still as a stone. “Linda was right,” Janice is whispering. “Oh, boy, is he ever going to kill me!”

I figured it wasn't the right time to say, “Well, you should have paid some attention to my sister when she brought up that topic—like a couple months ago.” What I told her was, “Listen, kid, you just play the hell out of that clarinet. That's the only thing that's going to get you out of this one.”

She gives me a look like, yeah, that's right. Mary Jo finally shuts up and sits down and picks up her accordion, and Janice and Linda walk up in front of the band. Janice has got this little sickly half smile. She takes a deep breath and looks over at Patty and Bev, giving them the tempo—you know, beating it out for them with her hand—and they come in bang together, Mary Jo squeezing out the melody.

You'd think it wouldn't be too hard to play a good polka beat, right? You're just laying it down in two, right? But it's a lot harder than you'd think. It's got to have a lot of energy to it, but it's also got to sound totally relaxed—a nice, easygoing, bouncy groove but still with plenty of zing to get people up and on their feet. And that's exactly what they're laying down. It's just about the sweetest little polka groove you ever heard, and you can feel this sort of ooooh from everybody—like, hey, they're all right.

They opened up with “The Clarinet Polka”—that's the one that Janice had started calling “
my
polka,” I guess because she was the clarinet player—and she always played it like she owned it, really showing off her chops. As worried as she was that night, you sure couldn't hear it. The notes were just pouring out of her clarinet like sunlight, and the minute people heard that sweet sound, you could see them start to relax, smiling at each other, because anybody who could play like that sure must have it all taken care of. And people were jumping up and starting to dance, because—well, that's the point of a polka band, right?

Czesław and his family—it's kind of funny. It's like he's the king in one of those historical movies, and his wife and boys are his flunkies, and they're staring at him waiting to get their cue so they'll know what to do. And the band's going through the tune again, and Janice is flipping it around upside down and backward, playing four million notes to the minute, and the thing that really gets to you is how much she loves playing—like you can hear the joy in it. And she's Czesław's darling daughter, right? And he'd have to have a heart of stone not to be getting off on it at least a little bit. So finally he does crack a smile, and he nods like, well, yes, she certainly can play, can't she? And his wife and kids all nod back at him and smile, like, yes, indeed, you're right on that one, Pops.

I'd been concentrating so hard on Janice, I hadn't been paying much attention to Linda, and then it dawns on me—hey, she's doing okay. I mean, the clarinet's the main thing happening in that tune, but there is a trumpet part, and she'd been holding her own. I was real pleased for her.

So they get to the end, and they get a big round of applause, and right away they kick into the next polka. Again it's Janice who counts them in, and she steps up to the mike, and we know she's going to sing, but nobody else does. Mary Jo lays out the melody once, and here it comes again, and this time Janice comes belting in with that old-country voice she's got—
“Zosia, Zosia, Zosia kuchnię zamiatała, i Ma— i Ma— i Macieja zawołała—”

I told you how the first time I heard Janice sing, it totally blew me away. Well, that's how it hit just about everybody. They can't believe it. Especially they can't believe that wild voice is coming out of a little kid in pigtails wearing red patent-leather shoes. So there's like a few seconds' delay while it's sinking in, and then people let out this kind of whoop, and damn near everybody in the place jumps up and onto the dance floor.

Naturally I'd been watching Czesław. Well, the minute Janice starts to sing, he looks like somebody ran across the room and drove a broom handle into his solar plexus. I'm not kidding you here. He lets out this kind of ooofff, and he bends forward, and his mouth's even hanging open. And Janice is soaring up into the high part of the tune—

“Zosia kuchnię

  
zamiatała

  
i Macieja

  
zawołała—”

It's one of the great old polkas. It's about this girl Zosia, and she's sweeping the kitchen. And she calls to Maciej. The song doesn't say what she calls to him, but it's probably along the lines of, “Hey, Maciej, get your ass in here.” And it's got a pause built into it, like when the singer goes,
“Zosia,”
you're supposed to yell back,
“ZOSIA!”

So Janice is into the second verse, and people are starting to yell back at her in the right places—

“Matka— MATKA!

  
matka— MATKA!

  
matka lampę zaświeciła,

  
i Ma— I MA!

  
i Ma— I MA!

  
i Macieja zobaczyła—”

That's Zosia's mom, and she lights the lamp and she's checking out Maciej, giving him the hairy eyeball, you know, to see what he's doing with Zosia there in the kitchen. And after that verse, the band kicks into the drive. Patty boots it real good, and Linda's playing the melody with Janice riding on top, and Mary Jo's doing the bellows shake to push it along, and the band's cooking like you wouldn't believe. Patty's yelling, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!”

Well, when you've got a polka band that hot, it's impossible to sit still, and the dance floor's jammed. I hadn't been planning on dancing—I'd thought I'd just give them a good careful listen, make sure their sound was balanced and like that—but I just can't help it. I grab Georgie's little sister, Darlene, and away we go.

As I go swinging by with Darlene, I take another look at Janice's dad, and he's just stunned. Sitting there with his wife and two boys, staring at his daughter.

Patty drops down, SWOOSH, leaving a nice space for Janice to come in on the last verse.
“Wy, Ma— Wy, Ma— Wy, Macieju, co robicie? Å»e tak, że tak, że tak Zosię całujecie?”

Linda had told me that Janice was a real clown, but I'd never seen it before. This is where Mom asks Maciej just what the hell he's doing. And the grammar's not right. It's what a peasant would say. And when she hits that part, for a couple seconds Janice turns right into that old peasant lady. Her eyes are popping out and she looks absolutely incensed, and she says, “
Co robicie?
What are you
doing
?” and her dad cracks completely up.

It's amazing, but Czesław's laughing his ass off, and he looks around at his wife and boys, so they start laughing too, and he slaps the tabletop, like, can you believe that? Yeah, she's something else, isn't she? But they're still not dancing.

Janice is singing, “
Wy, Macieju, co robicie? Że tak Zosię całujecie?
Hey, you, Maciej, what are you doing, to be kissing Zosia so hard?”

Well, after that, they can't go wrong. All the friends and loved ones there, of course they're going to like the band—they would've liked it even if they'd been playing cigar boxes with rubber bands on them—but everybody was amazed, saying, “Hey, you know, they're really
good
. They're damn near as good as the Andrzejewski brothers.”

Next they played about four instrumentals in a row, “Eddie Zima's Polka” and like that, and Janice got to show off some more on the clarinet, and Linda's playing was exactly how she described it to me later—perfectly respectable. And then Linda sang a waltz in her sweet little-girl choir voice—“The Linden Tree.” It has one of the prettiest melodies you'll ever hear, and she did a real good job with it. They ended with Janice singing,
“Pockaj, pockaj, powiem Mamie.”
Everybody knows that one. It's a cute polka, perfect for a girl to be singing, and I think that's why they picked it to end on. It's the one that says, “You tried to kiss me, you bad boy, and I'm going to tell Mommy on you!”