The Clarinet Polka (5 page)

You'd think this would be the perfect arrangement for a hot-blooded young guy twenty-five years old, right? You've got a fantastic-looking girl who loves doing everything you love doing, and you've got responsibility zero. You don't even have to talk to her. It's like the best jerk-off fantasy you could ever dream up, so what could possibly be wrong with this picture? Well, right from the start I knew there was something wrong with it, but I just didn't want to think about it.

I'll never forget when it all came together in my head. I'd got stoned with Georgie Mondrowski and we ran into Dorothy Pliszka right in front of Czaplicki's grocery store. You know how when you're stoned, your mind makes all these weird connections? So anyhow, Dorothy was the first girl— But wait a minute. I'm getting ahead of the story here.

You see, Georgie got out of the service that summer too—well, no, to be exact, he'd gotten out in the spring sometime, but he'd been in the VA hospital, and then, finally, he turned up in Raysburg—I guess it must have been sometime in July—and he'd already been home for a few days before I even knew about it, and I thought, hey, why didn't you call me, you son of a bitch?

Like me, Georgie has a little sister, and his little sister was talking to my little sister, and Georgie's family was worried sick about him. Except for going to the can, he hadn't set foot out of his bedroom since the day he'd come home. They had to bring his food to him in there, and he wouldn't even talk on the telephone. So Darlene asked Linda to ask me if I'd come over to see him, maybe cheer him up or something, and I felt really shitty because I should have
already
gone over to see him—like the minute I'd heard he was back. But the problem was, he hadn't been an up-in-the-air junior birdman like me, he'd been one of those sorry bastards down in the jungle, and I was afraid he'd hold it against me.

Of course it wasn't as clear in my mind as I've just made it sound. All I knew was I was really reluctant to go see him, and the longer it went on, the more reluctant I got. Until one night Old Bullet Head's yelling at me, “Jesus, Jimmy, this guy's been your best friend your whole damn life. Why don't you at least pretend you give a shit?”

Okay, so I just couldn't put it off any longer, and one Sunday afternoon I go over there. The way George's mom and dad were, you would have thought
I
was their long-lost son. “Oh, Jimmy, it's just wonderful to see you, just wonderful. Georgie is going to be
so
glad to see you.” And they keep glancing upstairs to where his room is like they think he can hear us through the floorboards. “I got to apologize about his room,” his mom tells me, kind of half whispering. “He won't let me touch anything. He won't even let me make the bed,” and I follow her upstairs, and she bangs on his door and sings out in a big cheery voice, “Hey, Georgie, honey, look who's here to see you.”

I'm not sure what I'm walking into. All the blinds are down so it's really dark and the room just reeks of cigarette smoke and dirty underwear. He's sitting in the corner with his back to the wall, wearing an old pair of gray sweatpants and a sweatshirt with a hood just like something left over from track practice in high school, and after my eyes adjust, I get a good look at him, and it's shocking how thin he's got. His cheekbones are like big knobs on his face, and he's all hollow around the eyes. He must not have had a shave or a haircut since the day he got out. “Hi, Gee-O,” I say.

“Hey, Jimmy.”

I'd been afraid he wouldn't be able to talk, but there's no problem with that—he's going a mile a minute. But something's happened to his voice—it's quiet and hoarse—and I've got to get practically on top of him to hear what he's saying. He's sitting right next to his stereo, and he's telling me about his record collection. What with us both being in the service, I haven't seen him for a couple years, but, yeah, that's how he starts the conversation. Do I like Janis Joplin? How about the Grateful Dead, Country Joe? Hey, isn't that Gracie Slick something else? Have I ever heard this group called Love? They're really far out.

So he cranks up the stereo full tilt. He must have listened to those records a million times because he's got the songs memorized. His lips are moving along with the words. He keeps trying to tell me about things in the music—anyhow, I think that's what he's trying to tell me, but I can't hear a damn thing he's saying, so I yell at him, “Hey, you dumb fuck, let's get out of here.”

I thought he was going to give me a big argument, but he says, “Okay, sure.” Then it takes him like an hour to figure out what to wear, and finally I've got to say, “Just put some jeans on, asshole.”

We go downstairs and everybody is totally blown away that George is going
out
, but they're all trying to pretend it's perfectly normal—“You boys have a good time now!”

“Wow, it's a nice day,” George says, like it's a great discovery. It is a nice day. The air's clear and it's not too hot.

“So how the hell you been?” I say, and he just smiles at me.

He's walking fast like he's in a hurry to get somewhere, but we're not going anywhere that I know about. “Central going to have any kind of team this year?” he says.

“I don't know. I haven't heard a damn thing about it.”

“I haven't seen a high school game in years.”

“Yeah, me neither.”

“How the hell you been?”
he says. “I should be able to answer a simple question like that, huh? I should be able to say, Oh, I've been shitty—or great—or so-so—or something, right?” and he laughs, so I laugh too. “Hey,” he says, “let's go to St. Stans.”

So we walk over to the church, and I follow him inside. Like automatic, we both genuflect and cross ourselves, and then he stands there staring down the aisle at the altar. I haven't been in St. Stans for a couple years, but nothing's changed. You've probably been in a Catholic church, right? There's that heavy quiet feeling you've always got—the smell of incense, candles burning, and a couple old ladies saying their rosaries. But it's more than that. This isn't just any Catholic church, it's
our
church.

I always loved the two angels standing on either side of the altar. They've got wings taller than they are, rising up behind their heads, and they're holding lamp stands—three bulbs with crystal shades coming out like petals of a flower—and I always thought of them as girl angels, although with angels, I guess, you never know for sure. Then there's the two sections off to the front where you light votive candles. On the right, Christ has his side—you know, the Sacred Heart—and the Blessed Virgin has her side on the left, with the Holy Mother of Częstochowa and her sad, mysterious eyes. When I was a kid, I was afraid to pray to her because she had to worry about all the Polish people in the world and I didn't want to bother her with my little problems. “You been to Mass lately?” George says.

“No.”

“Yeah, me neither.”

I don't know what he's thinking about, but left to my own devices I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have gone into St. Stans. It's making me sad, maybe because I grew up there and it's all so much a part of me—and maybe because I don't believe in much of it anymore. I think Georgie might want to pray or light a candle, but no, he turns and walks right back out onto the street. “We had some good times, didn't we?” he says. “Remember the atom pearls?”

Oh, yeah, sure I remember the atom pearls. You know what those things are, don't you? They're about the size and shape of BBs. You drop them on the floor and somebody steps on them, they go off, BANG. We scared the shit out of the nuns with those atom pearls—until they caught us, and then that was another story.

When people ask me what it was like going to school with the nuns, I always tell them this old joke. Stop me if you've heard it. There was this bad-ass kid, and he'd been bounced out of public school, bounced out of about a dozen private schools, and his parents were just about at their wits' end with him. They weren't Catholic, but they decided to send him to school with the nuns because they'd run through all their options and that was the last resort. So he goes there a week, and then two weeks, and then a month, and his parents keep waiting for the bomb to drop, but no, nothing. His old man's amazed, and he calls the kid in and says, “Hey, what's going on? Usually by now you would have been expelled. How come you're not in trouble yet?”

The kid says, “Well, Dad, I walked in the first day, and I looked up and saw how they had that guy up there hanging on a cross, and I thought, hey, these nuns are
serious
.”

That's absolutely true. The nuns were
serious
.

But not all of them were mean. “You remember Sister Regina?” I say.

“Oh, yeah,” he says, “she was something else.” Sister Regina was big on apparitions. Any time the Blessed Virgin ever appeared to anybody since the year zero, she knew all about it, and she made sure we knew all about it too. We thought apparitions happened to people all the time. “Yeah,” I say, “she had me believing that any day now I was going to be walking home from school and there'd be the Blessed Virgin waiting for me right in the middle of Pulaski Park.” I really wanted to see the Blessed Virgin waiting for me in Pulaski Park. Other people had seen her. Why shouldn't I?

Naturally, Georgie and I were choirboys. Our priest was old Father Joe Stawecki. He was a little guy with a face like a bulldog, and he used to brag that he could say Mass faster than any priest in the Ohio Valley, and he wasn't kidding—in and out of there in twenty minutes flat. He'd get cranked up, he'd be going faster than a hillbilly auctioneer, all in Latin—getting rid of the Latin was the dumbest thing the Church ever did, if you ask me—and if you slow him down, your ass is grass. You're supposed to have all that Latin memorized, right? And there were cards you could look at if you forgot. But you don't sweat the small stuff, so you're just mumbling along lickety-split. Like, “
Confiteor Deo
a mumble, a mumble a mumble,
sanctis et omnibus
, mumble a mumble,
pecavi
a mumble,
mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa,
mumble a mumble a mumble a mumble,
Dominum Dominum Dominum
.”

You go make your confession to him, same thing—in and out of there, bingo, five minutes tops. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned—I've, ah—you know, committed impure acts—”

“Oh, yeah? Who with? Somebody else or by yourself?”

“By myself, Father.”

“What's the matter with you, Jimmy? Can't you find a nice girl to go out with?” and I'm sitting there in the confession box, and I think, hey, what did he just say to me? I'm supposed to go find a nice girl to make it with instead of jacking off? And naturally he knows exactly what I'm thinking. “You find a nice girl, you got a reason to keep yourself pure. Okay, one Act of Contrition, three Hail Marys,” and that's it, I'm gone. He preached short and sweet too, all in Polish, and he'd get real personal sometimes. “Hey, I heard Stas Rzeszuski's been stepping out on his wife again. He better stop that.” No parish priest today could get away with that shit.

“Too bad about old Father Joe,” Georgie says.

“Yeah.” Father Joe always said he'd never die until the last of the first generation had died, and he almost made it.

“What's this new priest like?”

“I don't know. Linda likes him.”

I'm just following along wherever George wants to go, and now it looks like we're headed down to the river. “I saw some asshole at the VA,” he says, “and he says I've got a sleep disorder. It's not that unusual. You know, for combat veterans. It's supposed to go away on its own. You want to do a J?”

When it comes to grass, I'm a real juicehead. Doren and Jacobson did their best to turn me on, but they never succeeded. “Hey, Jimmy,” they'd say, “juice is just a dumb body high,” and I'd say, “Well, shit, I got a pretty dumb body, and Jack Daniel's is about as high as it wants to get.” Oh, I gave grass a good run a couple times, but all it ever did was make me gloomy and paranoid, so I got to the point where I just stayed away from it, but there's no way in hell I can say no to George, so we cross the tracks and walk on down to the riverbank, and he hasn't just got some dope and papers, he's got a pocket full of joints all rolled up and ready to go. He fires one up and hands it to me to take the first toke. “When'd you get out?” he says.

“June.”

“You were right, Jimmy. I should have gone in the air force with you.”

We'd talked about joining up together, and he had considered it, but he was working at Raysburg Steel back then and hoping he'd move up the ladder there, and he figured it'd keep him out of the service. Well, maybe it would have. Steel manufacturing is vital to the war effort, you know, even if all you're doing is sweeping cinders off railroad tracks. But then they did some heavy-duty layoffs and you've got your FIFO rule—first in, first out—so there he was unemployed. And before he could do anything about it—things were tight in the valley even then—he got the greetings from Uncle Sugar.

So we sat there watching the river go by, and we did the J, and I was thinking it was lousy dope, catnip maybe, because I wasn't feeling a thing, and I'm thinking, Okay, what do I say now?
How was Vietnam?
Yep, that's a good conversation opener, all right.

So I start telling him about being on Guam. “It was like you weren't really in the war, but you were. People getting killed every day, but chances are, you weren't going to be one of them. You're maintaining the aircraft, and the aircraft are dropping bombs, but you never see the bombs drop,” and everything I say, he just smiles at me—“Yeah, yeah. Right.”