I started hanging out at Sweeney’s after work.
I went there at the end of the same day I received the fourth fiver from Trowbridge, although I no longer believed he was directing his cosmic messages at me, if cosmic they were. They sure sounded cosmic. When I was in college I attended an introductory seminar for Transcendental Meditation, so I knew a thing or two about cosmic consciousness. Well, maybe one thing. The Maharishi’s teachings said that if you meditated twice a day for ten years you would attain cosmic consciousness, although he didn’t say exactly what that was. But I decided against signing up for the training class. Ten years was too long to wait. Ironically, if I had taken the training I would have become cosmic twelve years ago. Bummer.
I was worried about Sweeney though, as I walked through the swinging doors that night. I didn’t trust Harold. He might have squealed. But I had to go to Sweeney’s because I wanted to run into Trowbridge “outside the cab,” as we hacks refer to the real world. I wanted to see if Trowbridge wrote sentences on money while he sat in bars. If he was “a drunkard” as Harold had said, I wanted to observe him in his natural habitat. I wanted to observe a man who woke up each day in a state of total despair without looking at my bathroom mirror.
The joint was crowded when I walked in. It wasn’t jumping though. Sweeney doesn’t allow that. He’s a big guy, Sweeney. Anybody who starts “jumping” in his bar had better be doing the River Dance.
Sweeney was busy tending bar when I slipped in, so he didn’t notice me. I wanted to keep it that way. I planted myself in a corner and watched the door in case Trowbridge entered with a pocket full of fivers and a fresh Bic aching to pass judgment on the world. Pretty soon Kelley came over to my table. Kelley was a waitress.
“What can I get for you, Murph?” she said with a saucy smile. She’s been around. She knows the difference between “get” and “do,” unfortunately.
“A draught,” I said.
I once passed through Seattle during my drifter years, and learned that people there say “schooner” when they order a mug of beer. I discovered it when I walked into a waterfront bar and asked for a “draught” and the bartender looked at me as if I had ordered a cow. As soon as I finished my schooner I got out of Seattle. While I was waiting at the bus depot I asked a man pushing a broom if he had been in town when they had filmed the Elvis Presley movie, It Happened at the World’s Fair. He gave me a disgusted look and walked away. I liked that.
I had been in Sweeney’s about an hour when Sweeney finally noticed me sitting alone at the table. I knew he would spot me sooner or later. I read his face fast. I didn’t see any disgust. Word of advice: don’t ever mention Elvis to Sweeney. ’Nuff said. But apparently Harold hadn’t squealed about me showing up for a beer before noon on Monday. Sweeney just gave me a nod from behind the bar but didn’t make a beeline for the phone. My Maw is on his speed-dial. So Harold had come through for me after all. Maybe he really would make a good bartender someday. Or maybe he had just forgotten. Or maybe—just maybe—I wasn’t on Harold’s list of top priorities. Take your pick.
Trowbridge didn’t show up that night. Nor the next night, nor the next. I began to get the feeling he was a day drinker. Anybody my age who stands outside a bar at nine in the morning probably fulfills his commitments by Happy Hour. I decided to change my tactic and start dropping in at Sweeney’s in the morning, even though this would entail having “conversations” with Harold.
The first morning that I showed up I ordered a cup of steaming joe and told Harold I was taking my nine o’clock taxi break, which of course wasn’t true—taxi driving itself is just one long endless break on the road to the boneyard. But he stuck his lower lip out and nodded wisely, then asked me how come they don’t have goalies in basketball like they do in hockey. It took all my willpower to show up the next morning, but I had to do it. I wanted to see Trowbridge in action.
The next morning Harold asked me if it was possible to make cheese out of a dog’s milk. I said yes. Then he asked if ants could hold their breath.
I finally gave up hope. I realized I was making an error that I had made many times in my life, which was pretending that I had any control over anything. Whether my luck was good or bad, I myself was not in the loop. Fate was my designated driver. For example, one night during my drifter years I was passing through Des Moines and happened on a school fair taking place in a parking lot adjacent to a Catholic church. I stopped to look at the strung lights and balloons, the kids and the cakewalks. It reminded me of Wichita. I had attended Blessed Virgin Catholic Grade School in Wichita, and they held a fair every spring. They set up booths where you could toss darts at balloons or softballs at metal milk bottles. Games like that. For one thin dime you could take a ride with Lady Luck, although that was a venial sin, but Monsignor O’Leary always gave the congregation absolution for the evening.
The Des Moines bash started to make me feel a bit homesick. But since I am averse to all forms of sentimentality that aren’t broadcast on television, I started to walk away. And then I saw it. A Bingo game. There were scores of people sitting at long tables that looked like they had been hauled out of a cafeteria. I’m third generation Irish-Catholic so I caved in and bought a card. It was only a quarter. I sat down at a long table across from an elderly couple who were working eight cards simultaneously. The man at the microphone started calling out letters and numbers, and five minutes later I found myself hollering “Bingo!” I had won. My take was eighteen dollars. Just enough for a bus ticket out of Des Moines.
But when I yelled “Bingo!” the couple across from me threw down their markers with disgust, got up, and stormed away. They obviously had been sitting there for hours trying to win. It seemed like every place I went I disgusted people. But I learned something significant that night. I learned that life is unfair to everybody except me. I liked that. It’s been my guiding light ever since.
On the night that I got home from Sweeney’s after giving up hope of seeing Trowbridge, I cooked my usual hamburger, ate it, and did the dish. I carried my beer into the living room and removed my copy of The Stranger from the bookshelf and opened it to the fifteen dollars that had come from the Trowbridge taxi fares. I took the money out and put the book back on the shelf, then I sat down in my easy chair and laid all the bills out in the order that I had received them, including the Harold fiver.
Each bill had an observation, or a direct order, or a saying, or I don’t know what, written on it. I read them concurrently, as if they were sentences in a paragraph:
“You must wake up each day in a state of total despair. You must harbor a secret in your past so dreadful and shameful that the mere thought of it sends you lurching violently to the nearest liquor store. You must be compelled by an inner force to read books, listen to music, and view films which serve only to send you spiraling deeper into the bottomless pit of frustration. You must be prepared at any given moment to relinquish all semblance of dignity.”
I pondered these words for a few moments, then I pulled out my billfold, removed a fiver, and in imitation of Trowbridge’s handwriting I wrote a caption of my own, the same one I had written on the receipt: “You must not hold a job that you like.”
I placed the five alongside the others to see whether it stacked up in both form and content. The printing itself looked good—Trowbridge himself might have written it. But I was unsure of the content. It seemed a bit thin in comparison with his own phraseology, yet I felt it captured the spirit of his mind-set. But what exactly was his mind-set? Why did he write things down on money? I realized that in spite of my jungle-explorer analogy, I hadn’t really learned anything new about the man the last time I had seen him. I hadn’t confronted him about his strange messages. I had merely jotted down a one-liner on a receipt as if I was playing a game and waiting for his reaction. But only now did I realize that by doing such a thing, I may have crossed the line!
At some point he might have read what I had written and decided that for some reason I was mocking him. I’ve had similar experiences in my life, usually when I was trying to be witty around strangers. I don’t mean cab fares, where you can usually get away with lame jokes, but at parties or bars where I’ve had too much to drink. This was often in bumbling conjunction with my eagerness to get to know a woman, but let’s move on.
I stowed the money back in The Stranger, including my own by-line. I decided to view the twenty-five dollars as a kind of surplus that I would save for the day when I was flat busted, which arrives every now and then. I doubted I would see Trowbridge again, doubted I would ever get a satisfactory solution to the mystery of the talking money.
I put the book away and shut it all out of my mind by turning on the TV and channel-surfing until I hit an episode of Gilligan’s Island, the most effective means I know to remove all rational thought from my mind. It also does a job on irrational thought, so by the time I kicked off my Keds and collapsed into bed, I had forgotten all about Trowbridge. Instead, I started thinking about the fact that I would have to drive again the next day because I was already twenty bucks down for the week, thanks to Trowbridge. So there he was, back in my thoughts. Crazy, huh?
The next day I hauled myself out of bed thinking that I needed to earn seventy-five bucks just to make up for my losses. I began to castigate myself. I told myself that this was my punishment for getting involved, even peripherally, in the life of a fare. I might end up having to work a full week when the rent wasn’t even due. This made me mad at myself. I don’t mind if other people get mad at me because I’m used to it, but I hate it when I get mad at myself because it’s impossible to turn on my heel and walk away in a huff and refuse to speak to me again. I’ve tried it plenty of times, believe me.
As I guided my heap to Rocky Cab, I kept a grim look on my face. This was to remind me that I had to earn an extra twenty-five bucks— half a day’s pay!—because I had forsaken the vow that I made to myself at least once a month, sometimes once a week, depending on the psychological makeup of my backseat. I told myself that I ought to recite my vow once a day, like saying the Pledge of Allegiance each morning in grade school, i.e., renew the pledge every twenty-four hours or suffer the moral and political consequences.