The Clarinet Polka (58 page)

I didn't know what to say to that. She downed her drink and walked out into the kitchen. I followed her. She pulled a casserole out of the oven, and then she just stood there looking at it and started to cry. “Hey, I'm sorry,” I said. I didn't know exactly what I was supposed to be sorry for, but I figured I had to be sorry for something.

“Fuck you,” she said.

I just didn't get it. I'd been thinking that we'd pretty well run it out last summer. “Do you want me to leave?” I said.

“Yes,” she yelled at me, “get the fuck out of my apartment.”

So I started for the door, and I got about halfway there, and she said, “No, don't leave.”

I turned around and she was just mad as all hell—her eyes shooting daggers—and she said, “Why do you always take me so goddamn literally?”

“Beats me, Connie. How am I supposed to take you?”

She gave me a little smile. “How about the living room floor?”

She didn't take any of her clothes off. She didn't even close the drapes. She wasn't wearing any underwear, and we had one of those—well, I guess you could describe it as a super-intense quickie. And then the minute—no, the very
second
we get done, she pushes me away, stands up, jerks her skirt back down, and walks out into the kitchen and makes us each a drink. None of that beer or white wine I've-been-cutting-back bullshit, but a real drink. I'm still laying there on the rug with my pants off.

I pull myself back together, and then we're sitting on two chairs like two normal drunks, drinking our drinks, and she says, “It's probably the best thing for you. I've thought all along you should get out of the valley. You've been going nowhere fast here.”

I know I've probably given you the impression that I didn't like Connie much, and it's true—there were lots of times I didn't like her much. But there were also times when I liked her just fine, and that was one of them.

So what do you talk about if it's the last time you're ever going to see somebody? I asked about her kids, and she said what she always said—they were “making a good adjustment.” And I asked her how things were going with her husband—if she thought they'd ever get back together again. “I don't know,” she said. “It doesn't seem very likely—but who knows? If we're both willing to change.” She asked me what I was going to do in Austin, and I told her about that airline, Braniff, and—well, you know all that crap about how you're going to get your shit together and start a new life.

Two things we'd always enjoyed doing together, and we'd just done one of them and now we were doing the other. Yep, the booze was just flowing down our gullets like a river, and she started telling me lots of things she probably never would have told me if she hadn't thought it was the last time she'd ever see me.

Like about the night she hadn't attempted suicide. “I wish I could say I don't remember how it happened, but I do remember. I opened the pill bottle, and I was just going to take one, and you know what happens sometimes when you're trying to pour capsules out of a bottle? You don't just get one, you get a handful? Well, believe me, Jim, I didn't think, okay, now I am going to commit suicide. I thought, oh, I just don't give a damn. And however many pills there were in my hand, I took them. Is that a suicide attempt? I don't know. I don't think so. I think it was a cry for help.”

She told me she was seeing a lady psychologist up in Pittsburgh. She was driving up there a couple times a week, and it was helping her a lot. She was finally confronting her miserable childhood. “First I had to admit how bad it was,” she said. “That was a big hurdle. And now I've got to dredge up all these ghastly things—like lancing a wound.

“I told her about all the men I've slept with,” she said. “I lost my virginity when I was twelve—can you believe that? Then in my teens I was really promiscuous. I'd be embarrassed to tell you how many—I'm not even sure I could come up with an accurate count anyway. And you know what? A lot of times I would've had more fun blowing my nose.

“I told her all about us and she said it was a damn good thing I wasn't seeing you anymore—that she couldn't imagine two people more of a disaster together. She said I abuse sex the way I abuse alcohol. She said I should lay off both for a while, that a period of chastity in my life right now wouldn't kill me,” and we both got a good laugh over that one.

She said, “I'm glad you came out tonight, Jim. This feels good—a good way to say good-bye.”

We had dinner just at the right time—before we got so pissed we didn't give a shit. It was one of those pilaf things—with shrimp in it—and it was good. We were getting along just great, and she just kept saying nice things to me.

“I always trusted you,” she said, “except when I was really loaded and paranoid—and then I don't trust anybody. And you never gave me any of that ‘I love you, I love you' crap. I always appreciated that. And we had great sex, didn't we?”

“Yeah, honey,” I said, “we sure did.”

I sang her my sad song about driving west and grabbing a cheap motel, and she said just what I wanted to hear—“Oh, no, no, no. You're going to stay here and get a good night's sleep. Don't worry, I'll give you a good breakfast and shove you out the door bright and early.”

So that settled that, and I went out to my car and got a fifth of Jack Daniel's out of my trunk, and she cracked open another bottle of gin, and we settled down to have us a little nightcap, and the next thing I know it's sometime around dawn, and I'm laid out on her couch, and that good old painful consciousness is creeping up on me again. I go lurching off to the can, and I drink about a gallon of water, and then something tells me to check on Connie.

She's in bed, out cold as a catfish, and I manage to notice the pill bottles sitting on her bed table. It's amazing how sensitive you can get to pill bottles.

Guess what? It's her good old pills. The Valium she used to take—you know, for the terrible anxiety she suffered from—and the Seconal for catching a few Z's and not attempting to kill herself with. I read the labels, and it was the same damn Dr. Andrew R. Hamilton who gave them to her before, and I thought, my God, what a quack. They ought to yank that bastard's license.

The lid was tight on the Seconol bottle and there seemed to be lots of pills in it, but I didn't know for sure she didn't have a couple of those mother's little helpers in her along with God knows how much gin, but she didn't seem like she was in a coma. No, she just looked like your standard-issue passed out drunk—drooling on her pillow and snoring away like a band saw—and I thought what the hell and stumbled back into her living room and crashed.

Well, when the Jim and Connie Show opened again the next afternoon, neither one of us was looking too good. And we discussed the matter and concluded that a little hair of the dog might be just what the doctor ordered. That first binge we went on lasted only four or five days, the best I can remember.

*   *   *

I've told this story before, you know—not in the detail I'm telling it to you, but hitting the main points—and I've had people say to me, “Wait a minute, Jimmy, there's something I'm just not getting here. How could you be on your way to Texas in October and still be hanging around getting loaded with that doctor's wife in December?” The folks who've ever had a real intimate relationship with the stuff inside the bottle never ask me that.

There's a certain amount of repetition that sets in at this point, so I'm not going to bore you with a blow-by-blow account, but I do want to give you, like they say, the big picture. Pretty soon we've got our life down to a nice little routine. First you've got your sex. And then you've got your happy hour when it all seems worthwhile. Then you've got your one drunken asshole delivering long lectures to your other drunken asshole who ain't saying much of anything. Then eventually your other drunken asshole opens his big mouth, so you've got your fight.

If you're lucky, the fight goes right around in a circle back to where it started, and you get to catch a few Z's so you can do it all over again the next day. But if you're not lucky, the fight keeps right on going. You know what? If the booze holds out, you can run a fight all night long and on into the next day. What did we fight about? I couldn't tell you. It's not like the passage of the years has dimmed my memory. We couldn't even remember from one day to the next.

Now if it was my turn to wind things up, I'd say, “Screw you, Connie, I'm going to Texas,” and I'd go staggering out and jump in my car and drive away. And if it was her turn, she'd say, “Get the hell out of here. If you're going to Texas, just go, damn it,” and she'd push me out the door. And then other times she'd be sitting at the kitchen table with the shakes, wrapped up in a blanket, crying her eyes out, trying to pull herself back together with a coffee and a pill. “Oh, God, Jim, this is insane! I can't go on like this. I've got to drive up to Pittsburgh and see my therapist. I've got to see my kids! I thought you were going to Texas. For God's sake, why don't you leave me alone?”

When I stumbled out of Connie's, I couldn't just get in my car and drive to Texas—because usually I'd be in fairly rough shape. So where I went was the Florence Hotel in Blantons Ferry. That's on the Ohio side just a short drive from St. Stevens. I stayed on the Ohio side. The last thing in the world I wanted was to run into anybody I knew, and I had like a superstitious dread of crossing the river back into West Virginia. I was on my way to Texas, wasn't I? Well, at least Ohio was one state west of where I'd started.

The Florence was an old rat's-ass dump down by the railroad tracks with one of those signs that says, “Furnished Rooms by the Day, the Week, or the Month.” I'd driven by it a million times, and I'd always thought, Christ, that hole must be the absolute end of the line, so it seemed like the perfect choice. Two bucks a night, ten bucks a week, or thirty bucks a month, and what you got was a flop and a warm place to shit. “The Floss,” the regulars called it, and if you were a regular, you could sit in the lobby and watch that old TV all you wanted just so long as you didn't bother anybody. And believe me, if you're the kind of guy who's flopped at the Floss, bothering anybody is not real high on your list.

I'd left town maybe not feeling on top of the world but definitely all filled with hope and high purpose, so how did I end up at the Floss Hotel? I did consider that question from time to time. I felt like something in me had snapped—like I'd been making a real big effort, and it'd been getting me nowhere, and I just couldn't hack it anymore. Like I'd been trying to do the right thing, but now I felt like doing the wrong thing, and so what? Who was I hurting? Of course Connie and me don't count, right? I can remember drinking with a kind of fury—like maybe this time, goddamn it, if I didn't chicken out or just give up, I could drink my way right on through to the bottom of everything.

*   *   *

Connie always had plenty of money, and she kept shoving it at me, and I kept taking it. A lot of times that was her way of getting me out the door. But I was spending my own money too, and I gradually pissed away everything I had and then I started spending the five hundred bucks Linda had given me. I kept telling myself I could always pick up some day labor like I used to in high school, but it's kind of hard to motivate yourself to go unload boxcars, you know, when somebody's shoving money at you.

I was still driving around with all my shit in my car. A lot of my clothes kept dribbling into Connie's, and seeing as she was a cleanliness freak, they'd end up washed and ironed. But there were still cartons and suitcases in my trunk, and in the backseat, with stuff spilling out of them, and I just couldn't get around to dealing with it. I couldn't get around to dealing with anything. I was leaving for Austin any day now, right? So what was the point?

Well, pretty soon the snow's flying on a regular basis, and it's kind of lousy weather for driving to Texas. I'd been lucky and hadn't run into any fellow Polaks wandering around in the great state of Ohio yet, and somehow the thought managed to cross my scrambled brain that except for Mrs. Constance Bradshaw, nobody in the world had the faintest idea where I was. So it's early in the day—for me that means around two in the afternoon—and I'm not totally shitfaced yet, and I've got some change in my jeans, so I call Linda. At work, right? In that dentist's office.

She's so glad to hear from me she starts crying—which naturally makes me feel just terrific—and she's telling me how worried everybody's been and how great it is to hear my voice. I'm standing in the lobby of the Florence Hotel, and I could have driven over to that dentist's office in about eight minutes. But I just can't bring myself to tell her where I am—because then I'd have to tell her what I've been doing—and somehow I can't tell her I'm in Austin either, so without even thinking about it, I say, “Guess what? I'm in Nashville.”

“Nashville?” she says. “What on earth are you doing in Nashville?”

What am I doing in Nashville? Well, let's see— I stopped in to see an old service buddy—Yeah, Bill Johnson's his name. Nice fellow, just got married. Great to see him again. And I'm, ah, working in a gas station. It's not much of a job, but I don't figure on sticking around too much longer. Yeah, Nashville's okay. The country music's real good down here.

Poor Linda. It'd never cross her mind that I could lie to her. But she had to know I'd been drinking. Any fool could have figured that one out. She said she couldn't really talk, being at work and all, could I call home tonight? Did I have an address? Did I have a phone number? Was I ever going to write to Janice?

“Well, ah, I'm working the late shift. Four to midnight, you know. And I'm leaving in a couple days anyway. I'll call you from Austin. Tell everybody not to worry about me. I'm doing just fine— Yeah, Linny, I love you too.”