THIS WAS IN THE DAYS WHEN NIGHTTIME used to mean something. At midnight, the television stations all played “The Star-Spangled Banner” and then went dark until time for the Farmers’ Weather Report at dawn. You couldn’t go to the grocery store after nine. All the other stores closed at eight. It might be hard to find an open gas station. Last call was taken seriously at all the local bars—people were known to get busted running red lights, trying to make it in time.
In Waterville, the only all-night restaurant of any kind was Clyde’s Chicken, a brightly lit fried-chicken joint that usually had only one thing on the menu—Chicken and Biscuits. Sometimes a handwritten sign taped up on the wall announced the temporary addition of Fried Livers and Gizzards. I never saw anyone eat them, although I have heard some, such as Stinky, claim to. He felt it gave him an air of distinction.
Some men woo women with wine or with roses or with dates to see movies in which the heroine, despite being movie-star beautiful, is saved from a loveless future only by falling into the last-chance arms of the sweet and quirky hero, who is inexplicably available despite also being movie-star beautiful.
These men show a lack of imagination.
Danny wooed me with a handful of early-spring violets and a 2 A.M. trip to Clyde’s Chicken.
“Are you going to eat the gizzards to impress me?” I asked.
“Lord, no,” he said, and shuddered.
The Cavern Tavern was underground. You entered the front (where the bar was) down a dingy flight of concrete stairs from the street above, breathing in an updraft of cigarette smoke, dampness, stale beer fumes, and subterranean cool. You entered the back (where the pool tables were) down a set of wooden steps jutting out of the wet alleyway asphalt next to the dumpsters. Over the back door was a sign that read, “Ballroom Entrance.”
The Cave should have been a sad place in the late afternoons when Rafi, the weary first-shift bartender, opened both doors to try to let some air in while he washed out last night’s dirty ashtrays in the tiny cold-water sink next to the toilets. It should have been happy—happiest—at night when the red-colored light bulbs strung across the ceiling were turned on and the place was packed tight with tipsy, laughing people who had come to hear the bands play. We passed the hat and, on a good night, the band made sixty dollars altogether, plus the right to stay around after closing and drink free beer.
But in the afternoons, before opening time, if Rafi liked you, you could sit at the bar and smoke cigarettes and read the newspaper or listen to the call-in shows on the radio or to the preachers who made me laugh out loud and made Rafi grin and shake his head in disbelief, which was the closest he ever got to laughing out loud himself. Sometimes, if you felt like it, you could help Rafi out by taking the green plastic covers off the pool tables and folding them and brushing the tables down with the pool-table brush and then, while Rafi had their coin boxes open and was busy raking out all the quarters and counting them and putting them into rolls to take to the bank, you could play a free game of pool. In the summer especially, it would stay light so long that sometimes the afternoon didn’t end until late at night.
I used to hang around with Rafi when I first came to Waterville, and I was on hand when the regular weeknight bartender, Roscoe, quit unexpectedly after passing the bar exam. It was his fourth stab at it, so everyone was caught off guard. The next we heard of him, he had been elected to Congress and moved to Washington.
The afternoon when Roscoe came in with the happy news, I was there.
“How about hiring Josie?” Rafi said.
I took the job because I didn’t have another one.
Danny said, “Why don’t you skip work and just stay home in bed with me?”
“ ’Cause I’ll get fired and I need the money, that’s why,” I said.
“What can money buy you that would be better than a long afternoon with just you and me together right here in this room?”
“Well, just for instance, maybe it could pay the rent to stay underneath this roof.”
“It’s mighty romantic to sleep under the stars,” Danny grinned.
“What about when it rains?”
“You just have an answer for everything, don’t you, sugar?”
“Maybe I do.”
“Well, that’s a relief. A smart woman like you can surely figure out a way to keep the rain off us.”
Then he rolled over and went back to sleep.
Imagine, Socrates begins, a race of human beings who have lived all their lives deep inside a cave, chained so they cannot move their arms or legs or even turn their heads, but are compelled to stare straight ahead at a blank stone wall in front of them. Imagine also that behind these prisoners blazes a bonfire. Between the place where the bonfire roars and the place where the people sit, there is a walkway across which other people walk carrying all manner of objects, statues, and figures of stone and wood, casting long shadows on to the wall in front of the prisoners.
Socrates imagines that the chained prisoners in the cave talk with each other, discussing the shadows they see on the wall in front of them. The shadows would seem to be real to the chained observers, Socrates argues. And the sounds made by the bearers of the objects, echoing off the walls of the cave, would be taken to be the voices of the shadows. The prisoners believe these shadows and echoes to be reality.
They can’t see each other in the gloom, but even in their chains, they feel one another’s presence and seek out the sounds of each other’s voices. They converse on all manner of topics, he says, suggested to them by the shadows of themselves and of the objects behind them and by the echoes of the voices of the bearers of those objects. Chained immobile in the flickering firelight, they reach each other with their voices, and together they construct a conception of their world and a philosophy of their own. It is built only on shadows, but I think that is beside the point. At least they have each other.
Vera, who owned the Cave, had a good heart but took no shit from anyone. She tended bar on Friday and Saturday nights, when boys from Waterville State College came downtown to drink obscure Scandinavian or Dutch beer and she needed two bartenders to handle them and make sure they threw up outside. Vera paid almost all the bartenders under the table with money from the cash register at the end of the night, plus the tips in the goldfish-bowl tip jar set prominently next to the cash register. Only Rafi and Vera herself were on the books—and then only as a strategy to avert the suspicions of the Internal Revenue Service. In addition to wages and tips, bartenders could help themselves to a pack of cigarettes from the rack behind the bar whenever they wanted and could drink free beer anytime, except supposedly not until after closing on nights when they were working. The cheapest beer was National Bohemian—called “Natty BoHo”—at seventy-five cents a can, but the bartenders, like royalty, drank two-dollar beer in bottles. People mostly tipped a quarter or thirty-five cents. Sometimes the bartenders would make change out of the tip jar just to get some folding money into it. When I got hired, Vera told me that if trouble—real trouble—ever broke out, the first thing I should do was grab the tip jar.
Despite Vera’s precautions, the undeniably suspicious minimalism of Rafi’s economic life did eventually draw the attention of the local IRS field office. After a series of written exchanges equally impenetrable on both sides, Rafi was invited to present himself to a man in a windowless office and explain how his claims of Thoreauian simplicity could possibly be true. He was instructed to bring receipts.
Rafi sat with a shoebox full of little scraps of paper on his lap while the IRS man, with the usual contempt of the barely middle class toward those they suspected of harboring bohemian tendencies, slowly and thoroughly established that Rafi, indeed, had no other income, no car, no mortgage, no savings account, no retirement account, no stocks or bonds, no life insurance, no real or personal property of any significant value at all.
“Don’t you own anything?” the IRS man yelled finally, halfway between despair and disgust.
“Well,” Rafi said after some thought, “I have a baseball glove that was signed by Mickey Mantle.”
This was true, but it made the IRS man so indignant that Rafi was audited every year for eight years in a row until finally one audit showed he had overpaid his taxes by almost forty dollars, which was eventually refunded to him by government check, and after that he never heard from them again.
If you went out the back door of the Cave, you could go either right or left along the alleyway past the closed back doors of the drugstore and the record store and a store that sold area rugs. Or if you went straight ahead, you could thread your way along a narrow passageway and come out on Thornapple Street and be standing next to a Mexican restaurant called Tia Tortilla’s that also had a bar. In those days, state laws were such that establishments could serve hard liquor only if at least 51 percent of their receipts were for food. It was always a near thing at Tia’s, where the pork dishes in particular were a little suspicious. To make the 51 percent quota, shots of tequila sometimes had to be rung up as French fries. Without 51 percent in food, bars could serve only beer and wine. The Cave served only beer, although years before I arrived someone had once brought back two single-serving screw-top bottles of airplane wine from a long vacation. They were kept in a special place behind the bar in case of emergency.
Because of the proximity, regulars went back and forth between the Cave and Tia’s many times during the course of the evening, so that the two bars almost felt like one. You couldn’t pay your tab from one in the other, but the bartenders in Tia’s would let you carry a water glass with two fingers of tequila in the bottom back to the Cave to buck up the bartender there if it looked like it was going to be a long night.
Some regulars—especially the older ones who were troubled by their aches and their livers and were, therefore, somewhat sour of disposition—moved only once in the evening, from the Cave to Tia’s when the bands started up at the Cave. They hated to have to do it because there was no seventy-five-cent beer at Tia’s. Every now and then, an especially stupid customer would complain about the noise to Vera. We never had one stupid enough to complain to Vera twice.
Hank and Stinky wanted to complain but didn’t have the nerve to do any more than grumble behind Vera’s back. “Vera,” they would snort to each other with lots of conviction and very little volume, “she has no idea how to run a bar.”
“If I ran this place,” they would say, puffing out their chests to each other, “it would sure be different.” Then they would deflate and glance around nervously.
Hank was a big man with a big belly that poured over his big silver belt buckle and a big walrus mustache almost long enough to meet his sideburns down low on a stubbly chin. Stinky was tallish and skinnyish and tightly wound, with a little toothbrush mustache and a little pointy goatee. Hank was losing his hair and opted for the traditional stringy comb-over, which he kept well plastered down. Stinky was losing his hair, too, but went instead for a three-quarter-inch buzz cut all around that made him look like a cue ball dressed up for Halloween as a hedgehog.
Stinky’s real name was Jefferson Davis Smithfield Jr. He tried to get everyone to call him “J. D.,” but instead we called him “Stinky” because we could come up with no other explanation for his perpetually pinched-up look. We had numerous theories of what had crawled into his mustache and died, but none of them could ever be proven.
Hank had an invisible wife who, Lord knows, did not mind at all how many hours he spent sitting in the Cave. Stinky was divorced and had gone twice now to Thailand, where he apparently enjoyed the company of a very young prostitute who said her name was Mary and who assured Stinky that although, of course, she occasionally knew other men, her relationship with him was different; he was the only one she truly loved.
Even Hank was skeptical.
Stinky would protest and bluster. It was different. She did love him. He was a real man, the only man. The best lover ever. She meant it. None of us pathetic losers could even begin to imagine the delights they tasted during the long, neon-lit, paid-by-the-hour tropical nights, the soft breezes, the palm trees rustling and the full moon glowing right outside the whorehouse door.
“I dunno, Stinky,” Rafi said once, wiping up a wet patch on the bar. “It seems like an awful long way to go just to get laid.”
“Shows what you know, my friend,” Stinky said. “I don’t know why I waste my time even trying to elucidate certain facts for personages such as yourself who clearly lack the mental insight to even conceive of what I’m talking about. I’m telling you that this girl is special. The problem with you is that you have no sophistication.”
“I dunno, Stinky,” Rafi said again, shaking his head. “Maybe so.”
Across Thornapple Street from Tia Tortilla’s was a little yellow house that was the Hammer and Sickle Bookstore, run by Commie Tom. After two separate home-repair do-it-yourselfers were sadly disappointed during his first week of business, Commie Tom hung a big poster of Che Guevara in the front window, complete with beret and inspirational quote (“Better to die standing than to live on your knees”), and that seemed to clear everything up. Despite the death quote, this was not in any way a gesture of hostility. Commie Tom was sincerely concerned about the inconvenience he inadvertently caused people who were trying to buy hammers. He hated for people to be disappointed. He did add a small selection of home improvement books next to the Critical Race Theory section, just in case.
It was a pity, in a way, that those people no longer stumbled into the store because Commie Tom dearly loved converting the masses, joyfully pouncing on the unredeemed. When I think of him now, I remember him laughing in delight while his cat, Emma Goldman, chased a yarn ball tied to her tail, spinning madly across the bookstore floor. Tom would put on a tape of whirling dervish music, get Emma Goldman going, and sit on the floor and roar.
Tom handled the inherent conflict between being a communist and being a business owner by mostly giving away the stock. In fact, it was tricky to get Tom to sell you a book, to get him to take your money for it.
“Tom,” you would start off, “I’ve been wondering about the oppression of diamond miners in South Africa,” or whatever.
“Oh, yes, yes!” Tom would say. “That is so fascinating! I’ve just been reading a really excellent book about that. Now where did I put that? I just saw it. It’s right here somewhere.” And off he would go, rummaging through half the store, ending up with fourteen different books you should read, piling them one by one in your arms. “Oh, you have to read this. And the companion volume—very trenchant analysis. An interesting twist on commodity fetishism—you’ll appreciate it. Take this one, too. Oh, and this!” Until finally the long-sought diamond-mining book appeared from where it had been mislaid in the Lesbian Poetry section. “Aha! I knew I had it here somewhere. Take this and let me know what you think about it. Oops—and this one, too. No, no, don’t pay—just bring them back when you’re done. No, if you want to keep them—if you’re really sure—you can pay me later. I just want to see what you think of them first. We’ll talk when you’ve read them, no hurry. Here, let’s put those in a box. Any interest at all in the ancient Greeks? I ended up with three dozen copies of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology—I’m sending the covers back to the publisher, but you take the book. I also have The Dialogues of Plato, but only volume two. Look, I’ll just pack it right in your box here on the side. Oof! This box is heavy! You can’t lift that—let me carry it to the car for you. No, no, no trouble at all!”
He was like that with everybody, even Republican evangelical Christians who went into the store just to try to get his goat. I saw it.
Twice Commie Tom almost lost the bookstore to the bank. He was a terrible capitalist. If some of the left-leaning professors at Waterville State College hadn’t bypassed the university bookstore and made their students buy copies of expensive textbooks they ordered only from Tom, I don’t know how he could have survived. The professors helped him because of a generous feeling toward little bookstores and a selfish feeling that if they ever wrote a book themselves, Tom would put it on display right on the front counter and would even try to sell some before he started giving them away.
Quite often, Tom came by the Cave in the early afternoon and drank coffee. We never charged him for it. Of course, we never charged anybody. This was because nobody but Tom and the bartenders ever drank the coffee, which was inexplicably greasy and tasted like bug spray for days after the exterminator made his regular, albeit futile, visits. The bartenders drank the coffee to steady their nerves first thing in the day. Tom walked past the entrances to two actual restaurants (Tia’s and a little café called the Fiddlehead Fern, which I hardly ever went into because it was only open during the daytime) to drink greasy, bug-repellent coffee with the Cave bartenders. He even had a coffeemaker in his own store. I have no idea what was wrong with him.
The best times were after last call, when the last of even the regulars were gone and the band was packing up and the bartender was restocking all the coolers with beer for the next day. We would carry the trash cans to the dumpsters out back and heave them up and tip them over the side so the empty glass bottles slithered out all at once in a riotous, shattering cascade that sounded like the clanging cacophony of cathedral bells. It was strangely beautiful music in the still night air.
The Cave was never really empty after closing. Besides whoever was tending bar and whoever was left from the band, Vera would be there to count up the money and make out the deposit slip to go into the bank bag. And the bartender from Tia’s was there because it was more friendly to have a nightcap with everyone at the Cave than to have it all alone over at Tia’s, where the big plate-glass front windows invited unwelcome surveillance from bored policemen.
There were some people who were always welcome to sit in the premises after closing and drink a free beer and smoke free cigarettes, even though they had no connection of any formal kind with the Cave. These were people who had struck Vera’s fancy, or Rafi’s, or who were generally known and acknowledged as being “good people” who wouldn’t cause trouble in any way or be jackasses. Or at least not very often.
Pancho the piano tuner was always welcome to stay after hours. It was hard to tell whether Pancho was an old man who seemed young or a young man who seemed old. He had played honky-tonk piano at bars and smoky concert halls all around the state ever since he was way too young to be in those kinds of places. He had discovered whiskey at ten, heroin at fifteen, and Jesus at twenty-one. Now his wild black hair was starting to have threads of gray and his eyes, which often seemed to be looking at something no one else saw, were crinkled with crow’s-feet. He had enough rough road behind him now not to be shocked or bothered by other people’s foibles, which led many of those same other people (if their particular foible was meanness) to assume that Pancho was stupid.
Every now and then, Pancho would come by in the afternoon and tune the battered upright piano that stood against the wall next to the dartboards in the little cleared space where the bands played. This was not an easy job (especially if people were playing darts) because players did terrible things to that piano, like putting metal thumbtacks into the hammers to make it sound more like they imagined Jelly Roll Morton’s must have sounded when he played ragtime in the Storyville whorehouses a hundred years ago. It took ages to undo. After he got all the tacks out, Pancho would tune the piano with his eyes closed. We would try to be quiet while this was going on but didn’t really need to be. Pancho could tune the piano even while the radio was on. He didn’t hear anything else.
During the periods when the piano had been recently tuned and was still in pretty good shape, Pancho would sometimes play it after hours. He never played honky-tonk then, even though he still did occasionally around town with bands that needed a fill-in. Instead, for us, he played Beethoven sonatas, things like that. I didn’t know what they were, but they made me think of nighttime or mourning doves or tangled primeval forests.
“What is that, Pancho?” I asked him once.
“Old men will have dreams, Josie,” he said, and smiled. And that is all I ever got out of him.