scene three

“the scene of celebration”

A spot lights two tables and a jukebox in a downtown bar. A funeral wreath surrounds a placard which says: In Memory of our Credit Man.

Jim is seated at one of the two round tables—with an enormous twenty-six ounce glass of beer.

Bertha sits at the other.

Jim is a heavy-set fellow of thirty who looks somewhat older. He has a strong face beginning to go slack from tedium and a deep unconscious despair.

Bertha is a girl of twenty-five, who demonstrates vacuum cleaners in a department store. When she goes out on a date she loses her head and talks too much and makes her palpitations too apparent if the man does not call up for a second engagement. She has a lot of girlfriends, who meet once a week for contract bridge and try to excel each other in the preparation of refreshments, so that now what was originally “a little snack” between rubbers has turned into something like a Roman banquet. The girls are all getting heavy.

Ben enters the bar, a little unsteadily.

jim [with a smile that gives a fleeting youth to his face]: Hello, Ben—you’re late.

[Ben sits down without speaking. Jim takes out a large watch.]

jim: You’re eighteen minutes late, Ben. Punctuality is the courtesy of kings.

ben: I’m not a king.

jim [wearily]: Every man is a king—of a private kingdom. You look tired, Ben.

[Ben nods slightly.]

Hot day, awful hot. You’re lucky you got that cooling system up at Continental. We don’t have a dog-gone thing but those old-fashioned ceiling fans. Park Commissioner says in the paper the drought has killed sixteen of the Japanese cherry trees.

bartender [approaching leisurely]: Beer?

jim: Two times twenty-six ounces!

ben: I don’t want beer. Bourbon and seltzer, Mike.

[The bartender exits.]

jim: Huh?

ben: I stopped and had one on the way. Two, in fact.

jim: I thought you had a buzz on, the way you came in.

ben: I did. [He looks up with a tired grin.] Eight years ago, Jim, you got me drunk in this place to celebrate our graduation from college.

jim: Uh-huh.

ben: What a gloomy celebration! In exchange for our flaming youth we received a piece of parchment, fancy-lettered, tied up in a piece of pale blue satin ribbon. Life is full of phony transactions like that. A young man’s dreams, ambitions, the fabulous golden cities of adolescence, sold down the river—for what? Eighteen-fifty a week!

jim: I get twenty-two fifty.

ben: Three cheers for the plutocrat! Remember the baccalaureate sermon? It was delivered by the Honorable J.T. Faraway Jones, President of the Board of Directors of Continental Shirtmakers. He told me the future was in my hands—Now I’M in his! [He tosses down the whiskey, then bangs table with his glass.] Suds! Suds! Suds! Another twenty-six ounces! Jim—we sat in this very same booth the night of that celebration. This mirror reflected our faces, the same piece of glass. It hasn’t changed a damned bit—But we have, though. You used to be good-looking!

jim [huffily]: Thank you. So did you—used to be.

ben: You used to be athletic, an excellent swimmer. Now in your present condition I bet you would drown in the municipal birdbath. Even your eyes have changed color. They used to be blue, energetic. Now they’re kind of shifty-looking gray.

jim [violently pushing back his chair]: You’ve got a nerve to make sarcastic remarks about my personal appearance!

ben: Don’t get hot under the collar.

jim: Who wouldn’t get hot under the collar? Every man of thirty sees himself double in the mirror! The way he looks now—the way he looked at twenty! Nobody has to rub Siberian salt in the wound! And as for you, Mr. Apollo, take a look at yourself. I can’t observe a great deal of physical progress.

ben: I’ve kept in shape.

jim: What kind of shape?

ben: Thrice weekly work-outs in the gym at the downtown Y have preserved my youthful figure. But what I’m driving at is the fact that flesh is not a very durable substance. It’s an awfully cheap package in view of what it contains.

jim: What?

ben: The wild, incredible fact of being alive!

jim: Whew!

ben: It must’ve been accidental—I mean conscious life. ’Cause surely if they’d planned on it from the start, they would have made a better kind of a box to put it in than this drab stuff we’re made of that cracks with the cold and oozes with heat and shows such inordinate lust for disintegration! What do you remember of the time before you were born?

jim: My recollection of that is kind of cloudy.

ben: It’s on the dark side of the moon. And after you’re dead—that’s also on the dark side of the moon. But here in the middle— [He sticks his finger in the center of the table.] —is one little instant of light—a pin-point of brilliance—right here in the very center of infinite—endless—dark! What are you doing with it? What wonderful use are you making of this one instant?

jim: I don’t like you when you’re like this.

ben: Like what?

jim: Morbidly profound—the Hamlet of Continental Shirtmakers.

ben: Yep. I’ve seen my father’s ghost. But he walked at noon and he told me that something was rotten in more than Denmark.

jim: What’s happened? A run-in with Gum?

ben: Yeah.

jim: For Chrissakes, Ben—he didn’t give you the sack?

ben: Well—he held it toward me. He gave me twenty-four hours—from noon today till noon tomorrow—while he considers my case and makes up his mind whether or not he’s going to rip me out of this cozy little cocoon of a job I’ve snuggled down in for the past eight years. [He rises and swallows his beer.] So—for just that little space of eternity, Jim, I’m a man that’s suspended in between two lives—with a job and without a job! What do you think of that?

jim: Look here, Ben you’re a man with responsibilities. Alma your wife—!

ben: Yes, Alma, my wife— Once a delectable female, now a fiend.

jim [rising]: Ben, you’re off your nut!

ben: Maybe I am, I’ve had a violent shock. Mentally I’m a submarine brought to the surface for the first time in eight years by the explosion of a terrible depth bomb. Something is going to happen to me tonight.

jim: What?

ben: I don’t know what. —So long! [He grins, salutes and rushes out of the bar.]

jim: Ben!

[Jim starts to follow—but Ben does not wait for him. Jim stops short—catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror. He advances to the tactless declaration of his image. He puts on his glasses, makes a gloomy inspection. “Hmmmm!” He turns this way and that way, trying to draw up his chest. Bertha steps blithely out of the ladies’ room and goes straight up to the disconsolate employee of the Olympic Light and Gas Company.]

bertha: Have you got change for a quarter? I want to play something.

jim [welcoming her like springtime]: You bet I have! What shall we hear?

bertha: Something about the moon and the South Sea Islands!

jim: Personally I prefer the Arctic Circle! [He inserts a nickel, releasing the tender sadness of steel guitars.] Right now my libido is concentrating on Eskimo girls—with icicle ornaments on them! A necklace of Frigidaire cubes—more dazzling than diamonds! Would you care to dance with a man who used to be handsome?

[They dance.]

blackout