The Clarinet Polka (6 page)

“Nothing to do on Guam but drink.”

“Yeah,” he says.

“We're just bombing the hell out of Vietnam, probably killing civilians right, left, and center, but we're on Guam, and we don't give a shit, right? And you know what I feel really bad about? What I feel really bad about is I don't feel bad about it.” That one gets a laugh out of him.

“I just heard, like just last week,” I tell him, “three guys from my shop got killed in Da Nang. One of them I was real tight with.”

“Yeah,” he says.

I don't have a clue what he's thinking—is he thinking, what the hell's Jimmy talking about? Some guy getting killed? What's
he
know about guys getting killed?

“Yeah,” he says, “nothing worse. I been there, man. That's really the pits.”

I look right at him, and he's got the saddest, kindest expression in his eyes I've ever seen on a human being in my life, and then, WHAM, I finally get it—I'm whacked totally out of my skull. That dope was the strongest shit I've ever smoked, and I'm just
ruined
. I can't even talk. “Hey, Jimmy,” he says, “hey, hey, hey,” and he takes my arm and hauls me onto my feet and leads me back up to Main Street.

We get up to Czaplicki's, and wouldn't you know it, there's Dorothy Pliszka out for a walk with her little kid. I haven't seen her in years, and I'm so stoned all I can think about is what we must look like to her—these two weirdos standing there grinning at her who can't find a good word to say—and I'm seeing Georgie through her eyes. There's no stoned hairy freaks in Raysburg yet, so he's probably the first one she's ever seen, and I can see her looking at him, like, oh, my God, get me out of here! But she's got to stand there and make conversation with us because she's known us her whole life.

Of course she's not Dorothy Pliszka anymore, she's Dorothy Green, married to that asshole Jack Green—his grandfather's name was Grondzki, for Christ's sake—and Dorothy's saying, “Jimmy, I haven't seen you forever. How have you been?”

“Just great, Dorothy, just terrific, how about you?”

When we were little kids, Mom made sure we never missed our Mass obligation. It wasn't like today when all you worry about is getting your kids'
bodies
into church, never mind what they've got on them. Back then boys had to have at least a clean shirt and pressed pants and their hair combed, and little girls had to be super neat. If they had the kind of moms who went nuts over that stuff, you'd see little girls that were just too good to be true—you know, with hats and snow-white gloves and patent-leather shoes and snow-white socks—and I remember the high point of Mass for me was Dorothy. She was the perfect picture of what everybody's mom thought a little girl ought to look like at Mass, and I'd sit there and stare at her across the aisle like I was hypnotized. I just couldn't imagine anything in the world as cute as Dorothy Pliszka.

You know what they're teaching now, that little kids can't commit mortal sin? I think that's probably right—I just wish somebody had told us that when we were little kids—and I know I wasn't having any impure thoughts about Dorothy Pliszka, not at seven I wasn't.

Later on, yeah, I had an impure thought or two. She was the first girl I ever kissed—it must have been in the eighth grade—and in high school she broke my heart. I can remember being dead drunk, sixteen or seventeen, stumbling into St. Stans at one in the morning, praying to the Blessed Virgin, “Oh, please let me be worthy of Dorothy.”

So there I am, stuck on the street with Dorothy, stoned up to my eyeballs, and she's saying all these dumb polite things, and they all sound totally ridiculous—I can't believe she can't hear how ridiculous everything sounds—and it really hurts me to see her, and I'm thinking, my God, what is this? Have I still got a thing for her after all these years?

And then, straight out of left field, George goes, “I love little children. They're so clear.”

Dorothy stops what she's saying and turns and looks at him. Dorothy's little girl—she's about two—is hiding behind her mom's legs. “See, she's afraid of me,” he says, “and she doesn't have to pretend she isn't,” and if Dorothy's got any smarts at all, she's just got to know he means, I know
you're
afraid of me, Dorothy.

You know how it is with dope, how it makes everything feel like it's connected to everything else—yeah, and so what can it all
mean?
So why did I run into Dorothy
right then?
And why does it remind me of picking up Connie in the St. Stevens Mall? Oh, because they both had their kids with them. And what could
that
mean? And then it hits me. It's clear as a bell. Hey, Koprowski, you dumb shit, you shouldn't be screwing around with a married woman.

All of a sudden George squats down on the sidewalk in front of Dorothy and starts talking to the little girl hiding behind her mom's legs. “You don't have to be afraid of me, honey,” he says in that strange, quiet, hoarse voice he's brought back from Vietnam. “I'm your uncle Georgie. Yeah, that's right. That's exactly who I am. Your mommy and I went to school together. Yeah, we went to school down here at St. Stans with the nuns, and then we went up to Central with another bunch of nuns. Your mommy always got straight A's, but your uncle Georgie didn't. No, sir, he sure didn't.”

Dorothy's wearing shorts and George is hunkered down right smack in front of her crotch, but he isn't paying any attention to her crotch, he's talking to her little girl. He holds out his hand, offering the kid his index finger. Dorothy and I are staring at him, and then she looks at me, and her eyes are saying, help, Jimmy, what do I do now? and I'll be damned if I know.

George keeps on talking, and then, very slowly, the little girl comes out from behind her mother's legs, and very slowly she reaches out and takes ahold of Georgie's index finger with her little hand, and she and Georgie just look into each other's eyes, and they're smiling at each other, and all of a sudden I'm all choked up, and I know if I try to say a word, I'm going to start bawling like an idiot right there in front of Czaplicki's grocery store, and I think, oh, God, what's wrong with me?

George stands up and says to Dorothy, “What a little sweetie you've got there,” and then it's over—thank God—and we're walking away.

“You still like her, don't you?” he says.

Ordinarily I would have denied it, but I was so stoned I couldn't bother. “Yeah, sure.”

“She's a nice girl, but she's too straight for me. I always liked the crazy ones.”

I was so gloomy I couldn't find a thing to say. George kept walking me around the neighborhood, and I was thinking, never again. Grass is really a bummer. The pits. And I was having all those dark, hairy thoughts that come with grass—about Ron Jacobson, and about Foley and Hewitt—Doren hadn't told me how they'd bought it, and I wished he had—and about that horrible flight to Goose Bay, Labrador, with Ron Jacobson, and now he's dead, and about all the death George must have seen, and about how we're all going to die, so if we are, shouldn't we be trying to make something of our lives, do something that really matters? Yeah, but what really matters? Let's get specific here, Koprowski, but I'll be damned if I know what really matters. And I want to tell George what I'm thinking, but I can't get the words to come out.

“There's a lot of nice girls like Dorothy,” he says, and I'm thinking, yeah, I suppose there are. Then something else goes click in my head. It's like the next logical step. I might be having the greatest sex of my life, but there's one thing I don't have, and that's a girlfriend.

We walk around some more, and he says, “I wanted to stay in the VA hospital. I told them, ‘You guys can't send me home. I'm nuts.' And you know what that asshole doctor says to me? ‘Don't worry about it, son. It's normal. You're bound to encounter difficulties reintegrating yourself back into civilian life,'” and he laughs his ass off.

So I finally got home and all I wanted to do was lay down and go to sleep for a while, but I had to eat Mom's Sunday dinner, and the first bite I took, I realized I was so hungry I could've scarfed up everything on the table all by myself, so I'm sitting there silent as a stone just shoveling in the food, and Linda's already talked to George's sister, and she says, “That was really nice of you, Jimmy. Getting him out of the house. You really cheered him up.”

*   *   *

I found out later it was Thai-stick we'd been smoking, or some shit like that, anyhow about a hundred times stronger than your ordinary dope, and that's why I'd got so fucked up. I couldn't believe some of the things that'd been going through my head. Seeing Dorothy Pliszka had been like a rerun of high school, and I don't know what it was about Dorothy anyway. I'm not sure I even liked Dorothy. She was cute as a button but nothing special, just your ordinary standard-issue nice Polish girl.

I'll never forget how we started going together. It was the fall of my sophomore year, and I'd been out with the boys on Saturday night, and the next morning my mother hauled my ass out of bed and I'd just made it through Mass with a horrendous hangover, and all I could think about was drinking about a gallon of something cold and fizzy. I step out of the church and dip my fingers in the holy water and cross myself—to this day I can remember the feeling of that little drop of water on my forehead—and I look up and there's Dorothy looking straight into my eyes and she's got a smile like a sunrise. She must have thought she could see my halo shining or some damn thing, and that was probably the best I ever looked to her the whole time she went out with me.

I always thought it was mean of her to wait until after the senior prom to break up with me. I guess she wanted to be sure she had a date. “I'm sorry, Jimmy,” she said, “I'm just not ready to settle down.” What she meant was, she wasn't ready to settle down
with me
, and I can't say as I blame her. When a nice Polish girl is just dating, maybe it matters to her if you're a hot-shit football player or if your old man has a nice big blue Chrysler you can drive her around in or if you're lots of fun and everybody likes you, but when she's getting serious, all she wants to know is, will you straighten out and get a good job and marry her and give her babies? And any girl with half a brain could see that's not where Jimmy Koprowski was headed.

When I was growing up, we had two religions at my house—the Catholic Church and the USWA. Old Bullet Head worked his whole life for Raysburg Steel, and he always said to me, “Jimmy, make something out of yourself. Stay in school. Or learn a trade. Get some ambition. Because if you don't, you know what's going to happen to you? You're going to piss away your whole life in a steel mill
just like me
.”

Dziadzio Wojtkiewicz—my mom's dad—you'd give him a drink of vodka and he'd go into these rants, half in English, half in Polish. “You kids don't know nozzing,” he'd say to me. “You don't know how good you got it.”

“That's right,” my father would say, “you kids just take it all for granted—just like everything else you didn't have to work for.”

“Back in them days,” Dziadzio would say, “they meke Polaks work the hard dirty job, and they don't pay for shit.”

Polish guys never moved up. It didn't matter how many years they'd been working in the mill, they stayed unskilled labor forever. Any American guy could be there six months, and he'd be bossing the Polish guys around. Dziadzio worked twelve-hour days, six days a week, and he made just enough to support himself, forget about a family. When he got married, Babcia had to work in the bakery; later on she took in boarders. And every other week he's on the long turn, twenty-four hours straight. “Drag yourself like old dog,” he says, “like dead man.”

Gases from the furnaces could kill you in minutes. Sometimes you'd get a hang or some damn thing and the furnace blows—guys blinded, burned horribly. “Lotta Polaks killed in them days. Company say sorry, pay the widow fifty bucks funeral expense, go away don't bodder us. Hey, you know what I seen, Jimmy? The tap hole. They didn't pack her right. Steel come down in the pit, kill fourteen, fifteen guys. You know what they do? Melt 'em back in the steel.”

“That's no lie, Jimmy,” my father says. “That's what they did in the old days. Can you imagine that? Jesus. ‘I'm sorry, Mrs. So-and-so, your old man got killed last night. Yep, buried alive in molten steel. Too bad about him, but anyhow we got the steel. You want to pay your last respects, we'll show you which ingot he's in.'”

“Company don't give a damn, do what it want,” Dziadzio says. “No union to protect you.”

“That's right,” my father says. “You pay attention, Jimmy.”

They always say the same thing. I've heard it a million times. My grandpa always goes back to this terrible strike they had right after the First World War when the company totally creamed the union. They brought in the scabs and the Pinkertons—“nozzing but a bunch of tugs and murderers,” Dziadzio says. They beat up union organizers, ran them out of town, broke their arms, and threw them in the river. They made Dziadzio kiss the American flag—he's always stomping up and down and banging his fist on the table when he tells this one—“I good American. I love this country. I work hard. I don't meke trouble for nobody. ‘You kiss the flag, you goddamn Hunky,' they say.
Niech ich szlak trafi!
”

On and on they go, and eventually we get to the Great Depression. Dziadzio lost even the little bit he had, everything he'd worked for all those years. “‘You no work today,' foreman say. ‘You go home. Maybe work next week. Maybe work next munt.'” Not enough money to feed his kids. His boys had to go on the bum. His beautiful daughter, she had the voice of an angel. She had to go sing in the bars for the gangsters. Every cent she made, she brought home to keep the family together.