IN SYMPOSIUM, PLATO RECOUNTS Aristophanes’s theory of the origin of Love.
In the beginning, Aristophanes says, there were three types of humans. These beings had two faces (one on either side of their heads), four arms and four legs, four ears, and three complete sets of genitalia. One type was all male, one type was all female, and one type was both male and female. Whenever these first humans wanted to run, they could put down all their limbs and turn cartwheels in any direction like whirligigs. They were fast and powerful and caused no end of trouble to the gods. On one occasion, the humans even attempted an assault on Olympus itself. They were a race with ambition to conquer the heavens and perhaps the power to do it.
Disturbed by the developments on earth, Zeus called a council of the Olympians to come up with a way of controlling these troublesome upstarts. Together the gods devised a plan to ensure that humans would never again have the wherewithal to challenge the gods. One night, Zeus went to earth with his blinding lightning bolts and split each of the humans into halves, severing them apart, dooming us each forever to incompleteness. He hid the terrible wound that this left, but he did not heal it.
Ever since then, bereft halves have spent their lives roaming the earth, searching for that other half who will complete them. Loneliness is the punishment for ambition.
Aristophanes says that we wrap our arms and legs around each other, we make love with each other, futilely trying to join again the pieces Zeus split apart. We are always searching for that one—the single other wanderer who belongs to each of us and completes us—because he was part of us in the beginning of time.
By the time I managed to leave home, to get out of the Smoky Mountains where I was born and raised, I was pretty sure my other half wasn’t anywhere up there. There wasn’t anyone—anything—for me.
In the summer, with the windows open in the house where I grew up, it was easy to hear the conversations the adults were having. Lying in bed at night, the air hot and still with the grown-ups’ voices murmuring through the darkness, I could hear everything they said, even if they whispered.
“I’d be glad to have Belle stay all summer,” Mama was saying to her sister, my aunt Sis, about beautiful Belle, my cousin.
“Just ’til I get back on my feet,” Aunt Sis said. “I hope she won’t be too much trouble.”
They were talking in the kitchen, drinking cups of Nescafé. I could smell it in hot little bursts whenever they poured boiling water onto another spoonful of crystals.
“Oh, Belle is never any trouble,” Mama said. “I like having her here, to tell you the truth. It’s nice to have a girl around to do for. Do girl things for, I mean.”
Aunt Sis laughed. “Josie’s a girl,” she said.
Mama laughed, too. “Not hardly.”
I was named for Uncle Joe. He taught me how to shoot, practicing on beer cans balanced on the top rail of the fence out back of his house in the woods. The first shot knocked me backward off my feet, but Uncle Joe didn’t laugh at me, just helped me up and dusted me off some.
“You’ll do better next time,” he said.
So the next shot, I tried to be strong. I didn’t hit my target, but I stayed on my feet.
“That’s the ticket,” Uncle Joe smiled.
Later on, he looked worried and said to me, “Now you don’t need to tell your mama anything about all this out here. She’d burn my biscuits good if she knew what I was letting you do.”
“Mama says I ought to be more ladylike, stop running so wild,” I told him. “Do girl stuff.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know—whatever girls do, I guess.”
“Oh, not yet, Josie,” he said, still looking worried. “Not for a while yet.”
As I got older, I learned more. I learned to listen like I was interested when boys talked about cars and when girls talked about boys. I learned never to let on when I read a book. I learned you should never get into a car with a boy who was a member of the National Athletic Brotherhood unless you were prepared to fight your way out. I learned never to let a boy I liked know I was a better shot than he was. I learned to keep my plans of leaving to myself.
The cable TV channel out of Atlanta showed Atlanta Braves baseball games and colorized movies. Sometimes those two worlds collided and there were movie stars in the stands at the baseball games. The camera would show them sitting there in their Atlanta Braves baseball hats and T-shirts and their designer sunglasses, looking intense and cool.
I thought to myself that it must be really something to live in a city like Atlanta and go to baseball games with movie stars. Or go to any big city where there were things to do that I’d never done and people to meet who didn’t already know me. I could get a job there or maybe go to college someday. It would be better, anyway, than living at home with Mama and going nowhere and doing nothing. Somewhere outside those mountains was a world that was colorized.
When I was fourteen, I started waiting tables at the combination fish fry and gas station Uncle Joe ran out on the county line. I saved all my tip money, hidden in a coffee can in the shed. Every dollar was another step down the road to a bigger world.
The day after my twenty-first birthday, I arrived in Waterville on the bus with one suitcase filled with all my worldly goods, the contents of the coffee can, and a four-hundred-dollar loan from Uncle Joe. (“But it’s all your savings,” I said when he pressed the cash into my hand. “Maybe you’ll need it for college someday,” he said. “Wouldn’t that be something?” “I can’t take it,” I said. “Pay me back when you can,” he said.)
I went into the coffee shop of the Greyhound station and bought a Coke, more to give myself time to get my bearings than out of thirst. A man was sitting at the counter reading a newspaper while a little boy next to him alternately looked out the windows at the bus parked by the curb, took drinks from a tall glass with a straw, and spun his stool around and around.
“You came on the bus,” the little boy said to me.
“Yes,” I said.
“Did you sit behind the driver?”
“No, I sat kind of in the middle.”
“I’m going to drive the bus someday.”
“Are you?”
“Not today, though. Right?” He looked up at the man next to him for confirmation.
“Not today,” the man smiled down at him. “Today we’re just looking.”
“Just looking,” the little boy repeated while he spun his stool again. “Let’s go look outside now.”
“Okay,” the man said, and folded the newspaper. He left it on the counter when he got up.
“Do you mind if I look in your paper?” I asked the man. “I need to find a job and a place to stay.”
“All yours,” the man said.
The little boy had hold of his hand and was tugging him out the door. “Come on, Rassi,” he said.
“Good luck,” the man said somberly to me. “I’m sure you’ll find something.”
I spent the next hour circling ads and found a place to live that very day. It was three rooms down by the river, with weeds out front and mud out back. The rent was a hundred dollars a month. I figured I’d be able to get some waitress work pretty soon. But I didn’t find a job until after I ran into Rafi again, started hanging around with him, and went to work in the Cave.
There were maybe some possibilities for finding my other half in that town, I thought.
Rafi had no girlfriend to speak of then, which was odd because he had dark wavy hair and hands that were both strong and delicate looking. His hands would shake some, though, before he had his first drink of the day, and that may have had something to do with the unsettled nature of his love life. Every February, he gave up drinking for the month and was, as a result, especially melancholy. He said he did it because he wanted to know that he could, but he picked February because it is the shortest month. Leap years were always particularly tough.
There were only two people I think Rafi loved.
The little boy I first met him with was Jordan. He was four—Rafi’s sister’s son. Despite Rafi’s bartender’s hours, quite often when he arrived at work, he had spent the morning with Jordan.
“Pumpkin Head and I saw a new calf today,” Rafi would say, carefully avoiding my eye so I wouldn’t see the punch line coming. “ ‘Look, Jordan,’ I said, ‘it’s a new baby cow. It’s just been born today. Today is its birthday.’ ‘Oh, Rassi.’ ” Here Rafi would imitate Jordan’s droll, deep-voiced baby talk, wagging his head in baby resignation. About half of Jordan’s sentences started, “Oh, Rassi,” and were accompanied by a small, patient sigh. “ ‘Oh, Rassi. It cannot be that cow’s birthday. How can it have a birthday if it cannot open the packages and cannot play with the toys?’ ” Then Rafi would look sideways at me, and I would laugh for him.
“I saw Pumpkin Head today,” Rafi said, filling the cash register with change from the bank bag. “He had this little fire truck that was supposed to have lights and a siren, but it wouldn’t work.
“ ‘Let me see if I can fix that truck for you there, Jordan.’
“ ‘Oh, Rassi, you cannot fix that truck. A wire is broke.’
“ ‘Are you sure, Jordan? Maybe it just needs new batteries.’
“ ‘It is not batteries. It a wire, Rassi. It a wire.’
“ ‘Well, maybe not. How long has it been broken?’
“ ‘Oh, Rassi, the weeks go on and on.’ ”
Rafi didn’t drive, or at least he didn’t have a car. I’m not sure of any particular reason for this, but it was probably a good decision. So Rafi had to live no farther than walking distance from work. At one point, a patron gave him an old Stingray bicycle that he rode for a while, but then something untoward happened on his way home in the dark one night, he limped for about a week, and the bicycle was never seen again.
Rafi shared a tiny white frame house with a carpenter named Billy Joe, who was the best guitar player I ever heard in person. As a young man, Billy Joe had lived in Memphis and had once cut a demo tape in a studio there. By a long chain of good luck and kindness, one of Elvis Presley’s Memphis Mafia—the one named Landon—heard the tape and liked it and called Billy Joe on the telephone. “Son,” Landon said to Billy Joe, “we’re going to make you a star.” He invited Billy Joe to come to Graceland sometime soon. But the very next day, Elvis was found face down, dead on the bathroom floor, and Billy Joe never went to Graceland but instead came back home and played the Cave pretty regular.
The white frame house was set back from the road at the end of a dirt drive, dwarfed by giant oak trees and hidden by scrub. Amenities in the house were somewhat scarce, and there was enough furniture outside and enough mice inside to make the distinction between being outdoors and being indoors a pretty fine one. The door we all used led straight into a kitchen that had a table with three chairs and an old stove with an iron skillet full of smooth river stones sitting on the back left burner. Rafi and Billy Joe said they were waiting until the stones were done to move out of the house.
Early on, Danny took me to a place he knew of—a barbecue shack out on the old blacktop highway toward Millboro. It had weathered board walls and tobacco farmers sitting with their wives and kids at the little tables, drinking sweet tea. There was no menu, and no one needed one. Danny and I ate plates of barbecue with slaw and hush puppies and drank cold beer.
“This is extra-special barbecue, sugar,” Danny said. “This is the barbecue I grew up on.”
We sat close together, and I could feel the warmth coming off his arm close to mine. I could hardly eat for thinking about what it was like to kiss him—I had just been kissing him that afternoon. I lowered my voice to talk to him under the restaurant sounds, so he would have to lean nearer to me to hear what I said.
“Good Lord, Danny, this is nearly a whole pig I’ve got here—I’ll never in a million years finish it all.”
“Eat up, sugar. You never know when you might need your strength.”
“I’ll bust!”
“Let me help you out with some of those hush puppies, then.”
He put his arm across the back of my chair and ate off my plate. I held my icy beer bottle to my face, hoping it would cool me off. After he ate my hush puppies, Danny ate my barbecue and my slaw, too. I drank cold beer and watched him.
When he was finally done, he said, “Sugar, I’m stuffed. My belt’s so tight it’s cutting off all my important circulation. You’re gonna have to drive back.”
“Silly boy, you’ll make yourself sick.”
“I’m glad I brought you here,” he said.
“Because I let you eat my dinner?”
“Because it’s someplace I’ve never taken anybody else since I was a kid, and I knew you’d like it.”
“I haven’t said I like it.”
“But you do—I can tell you do.”
“Yes,” I said. “I do. I like being here with you.”
We paid the bill and bought two more bottles of beer to take home with us.
When state government officials set up the laws regulating the public sale of alcohol (concerned with the moral turpitude and degeneracy associated with alcohol consumption, but not averse to a short stiff one themselves, should the occasion arise), they decreed that all bars should close no later than 1 A.M. They decreed this in the winter. But as everyone knows, the workings of daylight saving time mean that 1 A.M. in the winter is 2 A.M. in the summer. So when the time changed in the spring, the bars all started staying open until 2 A.M. The bartenders from then on greeted Spring Forward, when the late shift got an hour longer, with mixed emotions. Summertime was better if you were doing the drinking, but not so much if you were doing the bartending.
Spring Forward always happens on a Saturday night, and Vera told me that every year the Friday night before that—the last night of early closing—was the night of the secret Bartenders’ Ball.
Being below ground and consequently windowless, the Cave provided the perfect location for activities that were not strictly in keeping with Alcoholic Beverage Control regulations. The routine was that you were not to park your vehicle anywhere near the Cave, so the police would not see a big herd of cars all together on the street and feel morally obliged to investigate. You walked to the Ballroom Entrance of the Cave and pounded on the door. Vera would yell, “We’re closed!” and then you would say who you were, and Rafi would let you in.
The night of that year’s Bartenders’ Ball, I got there first. That was because I was already there, having been sitting at the bar for hours keeping Rafi and Vera company and watching a band called Attention K-Mart Shoppers, made up of ironic English majors, play to an empty room and then disconsolately pack up and wander away. Vera and Rafi were busy restocking the coolers and locking up the money because although we loved our friends, we thought it best not to tempt them. Rafi’s kind, weary face was beautiful in the glow of the red light bulbs, leaning over the coolers, filling them with Natty BoHo.
It is always awkward to be the first at a party, and I tried to look busy and entertained by smoking a lot of cigarettes, but it was rough going, so I was glad when Pancho sidled in, sat down next to me, and told me he had bought a watermelon that afternoon, which was unusual for that time of year and which gave us a topic of conversation while we waited.
The party started slowly, the bartenders who were off that night slipping in and diffidently depositing a bottle of vodka or tequila onto the bar and then shuffling down toward the dartboards. Next came the wait staff from the restaurants downtown, then the busboys, then the cooks and dishwashers, smelling strongly of detergent and steam. When Billy Joe showed up, he was carrying his guitar and leaned the case against the wall by the piano, which seemed quite natural but also quietly exciting, in a promissory kind of way. The last to arrive were the bartenders coming off the late shift uptown, who had finally closed up. When Vera told them we were closed, everyone said their names except for Commie Tom, who shouted, “The workers control the means of production!” and was greeted with loud cheers upon entering.
Like most people, the best music I’ve ever heard has been played on front porches or in kitchens or late at night when I least expected it. (I remember sobbing like my heart would break at 3 A.M. on I-40 in the Texas Panhandle over a song that came on the radio that I had never heard before and have never heard since.) That night, the music at the Bartenders’ Ball was no different, unexpected and heartbreaking in the early-morning hours.
When Billy Joe finally started playing, it was just him and Pamela, a coolly beautiful and efficient waitress from a café uptown, sitting back to back on the piano bench, leaning together, Pamela singing the blues in a deep, slow way that made you stop what you were doing and wonder why you’d never heard her sing before. A whole crowd of busboys left off their pool games in the back room and came up front near the bar to listen. Eventually Pancho nudged Billy Joe up from the piano bench, and Billy Joe didn’t miss a note. Lanky Charlie Blue, the dishwasher from Tia’s who had never played in public, brought in a doghouse bass from his truck on Thornapple Street. A girl called Rosalita who worked part-time at the Hammer and Sickle sang harmony with Pamela with her eyes closed, and three waiters from the Fiddlehead Fern were slapping out the rhythm with their palms on the bar. Vera was dancing, a sight I thought I’d never see. Rafi grabbed me tight, and we spun down the whole length of the room.
Later on, things got out of hand—which was the point, after all—although no real damage was done, other than that one of the busboys from Tia’s finally lost his virginity and someone drank both bottles of screw-top airplane wine.
There are three things I especially remember about that particular Bartenders’ Ball. The first is that I ran into Commie Tom by the pool tables and said, “Hey, Tom, what’s up?”
“I’m getting drunk and making an ass out of myself,” he said.
“What’re you doing that for?”
“Ahhhh.” He opened his arms wide with an expansive smile like a saint. “It keeps you young! Nothing makes you feel fifteen years old again like waking up in the morning and realizing you’ve completely embarrassed yourself in front of all your friends.”
The second thing was that Stinky tried to get in and Vera wouldn’t let him, and we found out later that he’d gone home and gotten a dozen eggs and come all the way back and egged her car.
The third thing was that I met a man named Danny, whom I had never seen before, and when I woke up late the next day, he was asleep in my bed.