The Clarinet Polka (7 page)

“Then FDR, he meke a law. Thet law say we got the right to organize. John L. Lewis, good man. He talk to boss at U.S. Steel, and they got the union jist like thet”—Dziadzio snaps his fingers—“but Old Man Eberhardt, he say, ‘Screw your law. Screw U.S. Steel. No union here!'”

My father remembers this too. It's when he was growing up, and he was a red-hot union guy right off the bat, so now he's chiming in with all the shit he went through. Listening to them is like listening to the nuns tell the stories of the saints—how you've got to suffer to get anywhere, but no matter how horrible it gets, you know it's going to turn out all right because you've got God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, not to mention the Blessed Virgin and the whole Communion of Saints, waiting for you at the end of the line.

“You don't gotta teach Polaks union,” Dziadzio says. “Polaks stick togedder. We just keep going like this, one step and then anozzer step and then anozzer step”—Dziadzio takes his first two fingers and marches them across the table in these slow careful little steps—“and we beat the old man good. We got the union,
dzięki Bogu
. Everyting we got, we owe to the union, and thet's the trut.”

“You pay attention to your grandfather, Jimmy,” my father says. “He's giving it to you straight.”

When I was growing up, the mills were going twenty-four hours a day. All you had to do was look south toward Millwood where the old man worked and you'd see that fire in the sky. Yeah, and they still ran open hearths in those days, and all up and down the river there they'd be, looking exactly like hell—fire and sparks and smoke and little black figures moving around in the fire like the souls of the damned. My sister told me that when she was little, she thought it
was
hell. I remember being afraid I'd never be grown-up enough, or a man enough, to work inside that fire the way my dad did.

*   *   *

I don't know why Georgie and I were such fuckups. We were the third generation so what we were supposed to do was go out and make something of ourselves, and a lot of the guys, that's exactly what they did. Jack Green who married Dorothy Pliszka was one of them. Good grades, scholarship to Carnegie Tech. A few years older than us so getting married young and staying in school and having a kid meant he had no problem with the draft. Got into the engineering department at Raysburg Steel and did real well there. Long before Raysburg Steel went down the tube, he'd already got himself a better job out west somewhere, and it was good-bye Ohio Valley. You've probably known guys like that, right?

So what was it with George and me? I don't know, maybe it was the sixties. See, if you think long enough, you can always find something to blame it on. But anyhow, after we got out of Central, we went down to Morgantown where we lasted about a year and a half. I was going to study accounting and he was going to study engineering. Anyway, that's what we told everybody.

We tried out for football. Neither one of us was big enough or mean enough for college ball, and halfway though the tryout, we looked at each other and said, “Fuck this shit, man. You want to go get a beer?” We were roommates in the men's dorm along with a whole bunch of other animals, and there you are for the first time in your life with no parents around, and, naturally, it's, “Hey, party time!” and we made a point of distinguishing ourselves in that particular area.

The university is a land grant institution, so they've got to take any sorry son of a bitch from the state of West Virginia who's managed to graduate from high school, and that's a lot more students than they can handle, so they've got to flunk out as many as they can, and I don't know how it is these days but back then, believe me, they got right down to it. The freshmen had these gigantic required courses with like three hundred students crammed into a lecture hall, and there's some boring old fart droning on about a million miles away down in the front, and you've got a TA who doesn't give a shit, and you get pick-a-winner exams graded on the bell curve, and half your class is gone by Christmas, so it was a minor miracle we made it through the year. Naturally we ended up on probation.

I remember one night Georgie was over at our house, and Old Bullet Head went on at us for hours. “Stay in school,” he said. Every argument we came up with, he had a better one—the good old 2-S deferment for starters.

“Shit,” he said, “if you guys ever worked a day in your life, you'd know what I'm talking about.” We thought that was pretty unfair because we'd both of us worked—summers, after school, any chance we got.

“Worked?” he says. “Jesus, that's a laugh. Listen, I don't mean a frigging paper route or mowing lawns. I don't mean hauling trash out of somebody's garage. I don't mean helping Bob Pankiewicz paint houses. I don't mean unloading boxcars for a couple days so you can brag to the girls about how you busted your ass. I mean
working for a living
.” Yeah, yeah, yeah, we say. Big deal, we say. We can always get a job. “You guys just don't get it,” he says.

“Stay in school,” he says. We can't get away from him. He's pursuing us all around the goddamn house. It's the most worked up I've ever seen him in my life. “Stay in school!” he's yelling at us, “stay in school, stay in school, stay in school!”

Well, by the end of what should have been our sophomore year, Georgie's got himself some shit job up at the Staubsville Mill and I'm a pre-racker in the Sylvania plant. What the pre-racker does is, the light bulbs come along on an assembly line, and he puts a little doohickey on the light bulb so the racker can put the next little doohickey on over the top of the first little doohickey. Well, God did not design a human being to spend eight hours putting little doohickeys on light bulbs, and my back and neck would go into knots hard as concrete, and my brains would turn to mush, and every Friday night, Georgie and I would get together in some bar and bitch about our jobs, and we didn't give a rat's ass about anything except drinking ourselves shitfaced.

God knows why, but I stuck with Sylvania for over a year. And one day I'm working away putting little doohickeys on light bulbs and I found out it's true, you really can tell yourself a joke you've never heard before, and I'm laughing like a hyena, and the foreman comes by and says, “Are all Polacks nuts or is it only you?” The next day I enlisted in the air force.

It occurred to me later that maybe I should have asked Old Bullet Head about it. “What difference does it make?” he said. “You've already done it.”

“I just want to know your opinion,” I said.

If I'd thought about it, I could have predicted exactly what he'd say. My whole life I'd heard him telling me what his old man told him, and if you want that ancient peasant wisdom straight from Poland, I guess this is it—“You don't work just to live.” That means it isn't enough just to support yourself; you've always got to be a few bucks ahead, socking it away, improving your lot in life. So of course what my old man said to me was, “Okay, Jimmy, being in the service is like anything else. You can use it to get somewhere, or it can just be another four years of your life.”

It was just another four years of my life.

THREE

Near the end of the summer, the Jim and Connie Show entered Phase Two. “Why don't you pick me up at the mall?” she said. That didn't make any sense to me. If you live in St. Stevens, wouldn't you think that the St. Stevens mall would be the last place in the world where you'd want to get picked up? “We haven't made a lot of friends here,” she said, “and I never see anybody I know. Besides, I can be talking to a TV repairman, can't I? There's nothing wrong with that, is there?”

Okay, Connie, I thought, it's your ass, so I started picking her up at the mall—which may have saved
her
time but sure as hell didn't save me any, and it turned out that now she had plenty of time anyways because she'd hired a lady to come in every afternoon to look after her kids.

I got to be an expert on the secondary roads of eastern Ohio. “What is it you're supposed to be doing?” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“You know, going out in the afternoon. What does your husband think you're doing?”

“I'm not sure he even thinks about it. I told him I needed some time to myself.” Hey, I thought, a very understanding husband—a lot more understanding than I would have been under the same circumstances.

So I started filling up the picnic cooler with beer and bringing along some Jack Daniel's and some gin, and after we got our rocks off, we'd sit around and shoot the shit, and what used to take an hour was taking all afternoon. She was great at asking questions, and she got pretty much my whole life story, but trying to get anything out of her was like pulling nails out of a board. The things I found out about her, I got in bits and pieces.

She wasn't, like I'd thought, the same age as me; she was four years older than me. She was damn near thirty. She was scared to death of turning thirty. “I got married too young,” she said. “I wasn't ready.”

“I don't know about that,” I told her. “You know what everybody says? Have your kids young, get it over with.”

“But who says I had to have had kids?”

She had an honors degree in philosophy. She told me there's a kind of philosophy that's like mathematics, and that's what she'd been interested in. She'd liked it because it was hard and she had to work her ass off at it, and she'd thought for a while she was going to go on and get her Ph.D. and teach—which is what some of her girlfriends did—but she got married instead, and she kept thinking she'd made the wrong choice.

She always called her husband “he” or “him.” It was like he didn't have a name. “This doesn't have anything to do with
him
,” she'd say. “He's a perfectly fine man. I have no complaints about him at all. This has to do with
me
.”

And then other times she'd say, “Oh, God, he doesn't deserve this. I'm such a bitch.”

Before she'd got married she'd been wild—that's the word she used. “But I vowed I'd be good. And I have been. At least most of the time. Up until now.”

“Do you have any idea,” she said, “what it's like being cooped up with a six-year-old and a four-year-old in a big house in a quiet neighborhood in a town you hate where you don't know a soul and don't
want
to know a soul with a husband who works twelve to fourteen hours a day?” Nope, I said, I didn't have a clue.

One of her favorite things was complaining about the double standard and she couldn't see why women—and, by God, I should never call them
girls
—so why shouldn't women be as sexually active as men? And I'd say, “Gee, Connie, I don't know. Why the hell shouldn't they?” I wasn't exactly checked out on women's lib in those days, and all this stuff was news to me.

Then one night I'm crashed out in the living room watching TV with Old Bullet Head. He's reading the paper, and Mom and Linda are out in the kitchen cleaning up so they can't hear us. The old man's eyes have been perfectly fine his whole life, but practically overnight he needs reading glasses—it's funny, but the same damn thing's just happened to me—and so he gives me the icy blue stare over the top of his glasses, and he says, “Okay, so who's the woman?”

“What woman?”

“The married woman you been screwing in the back of Vick's truck.”

“Jesus, Dad, I don't know what the hell you're talking about.”

“Don't give me that shit. Somebody's been doing
something
in the back of that truck. She left her unmentionables—”

“Her
what?
”

“Her frigging underpants. Come on, Jimmy, don't play dumb with me or I'll bounce your ass right out of here. Who the hell you think you're fooling? You drive away for a single call at noon and you haven't made it back to the shop by closing time, what the hell you think Vick's going to think? He figured it was the girl in the miniskirt—you know, the one
with the wedding ring on her left hand
. You following any of this, or am I way over your head?”

“I'm following you.”

“Yeah, I thought you were. Okay, there's just two things I got to say about this. One is, what you do on your own time is nobody's business but yours, but Vick's just trying to make a living like the rest of us. Is what you're doing fair to him?”

“No.”

“Okay, and here's number two. I'll let you in on a little secret, bright boy. Getting involved with a married woman is just about the dumbest thing you'll ever do in your life.” And that's that. He picks up the paper and starts reading it like he hasn't said a word.

I was so steamed I walked out, went straight down to the PAC, had a couple shots to calm down, said to Bobby, “Hey, put the word out, will you? I'm looking for a place to live. Someplace cheap. A fixer-upper maybe.”

The next morning I said to Vick, “You know, sometimes when I'm off with the truck, I'm not working for you. It's kind of obvious, right? Okay, suppose when I do that, I put the time back later?”

A big grin spread across his face, and he said, “Okay, Jimmy, that's okay with me.”

All that was left was Connie. “Okay, Miss I've-got-a-degree-in-philosophy,” I said, “what are you doing leaving your panties in the back of Vick's truck?”

It was like I'd dumped cold water on her, and then, just for a second, she looked like a little kid when you catch her pulling the cat's tail. She couldn't meet my eyes. “Oh,” and she gives me this little hee, hee kind of phony laugh, “is that where they went?” And I'm feeling a buzz, like, hey, this doesn't add up. Looking back on it, I suppose I could say it was the distant early warning of better things to come.