Extreme Vinyl Café

by Stuart McLean

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “He’s grumpy because I didn’t let him have onions on his burger.”

  “I’VE EATEN ONIONS ALL MY LIFE,” said the man in the wheelchair. He poked at the burger on his plate with his long finger. As if it might be alive. As if it might move.

  “They’re hard on your stomach, Dad,” said the woman.

  Then she said, “I’m so sorry. I’m Kathy. This is my father. You must be Morley.”

  “Actually, I’m Dave,” said Dave.

  The man in the wheelchair said, “SOMETIMES, IN THE WAR, ALL WE HAD WAS ONIONS.”

  The sea started to roll that afternoon. Not too terribly much, not waves even, just a swell. But it was enough of a swell that you had to reach for the railing every now and then.

  Morley was lying by the pool. Dave was wandering around, looking for peanuts or something to munch on, and to see, as he had said to Morley, if he could “spot anyone remotely our age.” He had been gone for over an hour, when he came up behind her quietly, reached out and dropped a chocolate bar on her tummy and himself onto the chaise longue beside her.

  “It’s a lockdown,” he said.

  Morley pushed herself up on an elbow, picked up the chocolate bar and wrinkled her nose. “What are you talking about?” she said.

  She pitched the chocolate bar back to Dave. Dave caught it, smiled and began to unwrap it.

  “I met a couple from Alaska. They were coming back from the fitness centre. Deirdre has everything under lock and key. The rock wall is roped off. The hot tub is lukewarm. The treadmills are pre-set on stroll.”

  Morley said, “Who’s Deirdre?”

  Dave said, “That nice man who took our photo.”

  Morley said, “You mean Derek.”

  Dave said, “Silly me. The poker chips have all been put away. It is twenty-four-hour euchre.”

  The weather turned. They were in their cabin, lying on their bunks, out of the wind. It wasn’t exactly cold on deck—just grey and unpleasant.

  Morley said, “Kathy gave her father the cruise for his birthday. She is so patient with him. It makes me feel guilty. Like I should have brought my mother.”

  Dave said, “It’s time for supper. We should go.” Morley said, “I don’t really feel like eating.”

  There was no question the sea had turned. The dining room was only half full, but Kathy and her father were both at the table.

  “I’m not feeling so good,” said Morley. “I’m not doing so well either,” said Kathy. “THIS IS NOTHING,” said the old man, twisting around in his chair, beckoning to the waiter, pointing at his wineglass. Kathy shook her head when the waiter arrived with the wine. “Just one glass, Dad. It makes you confused.” “YOU’RE THE CONFUSED ONE. YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN WHAT WE DRANK IN THE WAR.”

  The weather took a turn for the worse. Neither Kathy nor Morley made it to lunch the next day. “NAME’S … BRUCE …” said the man in the wheelchair.

  “BRUCE … TOWLER.” Between every second word, Bruce paused to catch his breath, looking down at his plate and pushing at his food. He had three glasses of wine. Dave wasn’t about to say no. He was a dentist. “USED … TO BE … ANYWAY.”

  He dozed off between the main course and dessert, but he didn’t seem at all confused. He snapped awake when the waiter tried to take his dessert away.

  “HEY!” he said.

  When the meal was finished, a porter came to push Bruce back to his room.

  Dave said, “Do you want to go on deck instead?”

  Dave pushed Bruce Towler out to the forward deck and the two of them watched the rolling sea. There was no doubt it was getting rockier. Rockier and rockier.

  Dave said, “I should check on my wife.”

  “DOESN’T … BOTHER … ME … A … BIT,” yelled Bruce into the wind.

  Dave wasn’t sure if he meant the weather or the fact Dave was leaving him.

  Morley wasn’t doing well.

  “I threw up,” she said.

  Dave sat beside her and stroked her hair. After about an hour, the boat changed course. And when it did, it began a whole new and nastier motion. Pretty soon the ship was being tossed around like a toy boat in a bathtub. Dave felt as if he were inside a giant washing machine.

  Before long, the closet door in Dave and Morley’s tiny room was slapping open and shut. The drawers in their bureau were banging back and forth. When Morley got up to make a dash to the washroom, her mattress slid off the bunk. When she returned, she lay down on the floor groaning.

  “I am not moving,” she said.

  And that’s when Dave remembered Bruce Towler.

  “Ohmigod,” he said.

  It was so rocky Dave could barely walk down the corridor. At one point the ship lurched dramatically, and Dave was actually walking along the starboard wall. A moment later, it lurched to the other side, and he was walking along the port side.

  When he got to the lounge, there were people stretched out on the couches. Others were sitting grimly, with their heads between their knees, clutching little white bags to their faces.

  Dave peered out the far window at the deck where he had left his lunch partner. Nothing. Then the ship pitched to the port side and a wheelchair flew past the window. A moment later the chair flew by the other way. Bruce Towler was sitting in the wheelchair with his hands above his head, like a kid on a roller coaster. From port to starboard, from starboard to port. He was soaked when Dave fetched him, but he was beaming.

  “HAVEN’T … HAD … THAT MUCH FUN … SINCE MY WIFE’S WAKE!”

  That was the night Dave met Doris Schick. They literally bumped into each other in the corridor outside the dining room. Dave was heading back to his cabin.

  “I’m looking for a card game,” said Doris.

  You either get seasick or you don’t. And Doris, apparently, was missing the seasick gene.

  Dave looked in on Morley. She was still on the floor of their cabin. In the fetal position.

  “Don’t talk to me,” she moaned.

  And so Dave, who was feeling surprisingly well, and Doris, who had never felt better, retreated to the forward lounge.

  Bruce Towler was sitting in the corner. As soon as they sat down, Doris pulled a pewter flask out of her purse.

  “Macallan’s,” she said.

  Bruce smiled and held out his hand.

  Doris pulled out a deck of cards and began dealing. “Texas Hold’em?” she asked.

  And so while dishes crashed around them and most everyone was huddled over motion sickness bags, Dave, Doris, Bruce and an eighty-six-year-old millwright from Seattle sipped fifteen-year-old whisky and played poker until midnight.

  Doris, it turned out, used to live in a seniors’ residence in Fargo, North Dakota. When she turned eighty-three, she took a hard look at her finances and realized she couldn’t afford to stay there for as long as she planned to live. She had been cruising full-time ever since.

  “It’s cheaper,” she said, fanning her hand on the table in front of her. “Food’s better.” She pointed out at the angry grey sea. “Weather too, mostly.”

  At 12:30, Dave said, “My wife is below. I should check on her.”

  “Ahh,” said Doris. “Young love. I lost my husband.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Dave.

  “It was a long time ago,” said Doris.

  The skies cleared the next afternoon.

  “TOO BAD,” said Bruce Towler, waving his hands over his head weakly, “that was fun.”

  That was the afternoon Dave found a pile of brochures that had spilled out of a drawer in the bar during the worst of the storm: They were about bungee jumping, parasailing and scuba diving.

  When Dave asked, Derek rolled his eyes. “We can’t run those activities with a crowd like this. Can you imagine?”

  Some people say genius is the ability to concentrate with more intensity than the average person. Others say a genius is someone who has the ability to understand complex problems and to use his imagination
to solve them. There are those, however, who believe geniuses are people who look at the world with a sense of wonder, and who possess the ability to see things in a fresh, childlike way.

  “YOU’RE A BLOODY GENIUS,” said Bruce Towler to Dave two hours later.

  “DORIS,” he shouted, “ARE YOU COMING? WE’RE GOING OVER THE WALL.”

  Half an hour later Bruce was standing on the upper deck. Well, standing is an exaggeration. He was sort of standing. He was clutching his walker with one hand and the shoulder of a Filipino crew member with the other. A second crew member was strapping him into a nylon harness. Bruce Towler was beaming.

  “MAKE SURE YOU GET A GOOD ONE,” he said, pointing at Doris Schick. Doris was standing in front of him with her Polaroid camera.

  When you are eighty-seven years old, and you can’t stand up anymore without someone standing beside you, when all the movement you can manage is unsteady, when your body has quit on you, but your spirit hasn’t, bungee jumping might just be the perfect sport.

  The Filipino mate cinched the final strap on Bruce Towler’s harness.

  “There is nothing to be afraid of, sir,” he said.

  Bruce Towler squinted at him. “DAMN RIGHT,” said Bruce.

  The mate was about to say something else. But he was too late. Bruce Towler was already gone. Bruce took a lurching step and flew out over the edge of the ship. Face down and fractious, Bruce Towler was hurtling toward the blue ocean. For the first time in years, he felt as light as air.

  “WHOOPEE,” he bellowed as he felt the unfamiliar surge of adrenaline racing through him.

  It was only when Bruce got to the end of the line and began his bouncing ascent that Dave noticed that Bruce, in his tweed suit and tie, was still clutching his walker. As he yo-yoed by the crowd on the deck, he was waving it over his head.

  “WHOOPEE.”

  Derek, the activities director, arrived at the lifeboats just as Bruce headed over the rails. As Bruce bounced up and down, Derek stood there, his one hand resting on a ring buoy. He was clutching his heart with the other. He looked apoplectic.

  Morley resurfaced the next morning. She set herself up again, with her magazines and bag of supplies, by the aft-deck pool.

  Dave didn’t have time to read by the pool. Dave had cards with Doris at nine, coffee with Bruce at ten-thirty and a shuffleboard playdown at eleven.

  “I’ll meet you at lunch,” Dave told Morley.

  When Morley walked into the dining room, Dave was working on dessert.

  “I waited,” he said. “I thought you weren’t coming.”

  Morley glanced at her wrist. It was ten past twelve.

  She stood by the table awkwardly. There were no empty places. Doris Schick was sitting in Morley’s seat. Doris smiled up at Morley. She reached out and rested her hand on Dave’s arm. “This dear man has been telling me the most wonderful stories.” Then she ran her hand through Dave’s hair and added, “I lost my husband.”

  “That is so awful,” said Morley. “I am so sorry. When did he die?”

  Doris rolled her eyes. “I didn’t say he died, dear.”

  And so the days rolled by.

  The weather turned. For the rest of the trip, they were blessed with hot days and long warm nights. The cruise ship stopped at a different island each morning. The lineups to disembark began at least an hour before they arrived.

  They all missed the turtles at Cummana. Much the same at Aqua de Perico, where there wasn’t time for a side trip to the Aztec ruins.

  Many of them, however, did get to see the endangered Santa Madeira woodpecker. It cost five dollars American to enter the tent where it was kept, and an additional seventy-five cents for a cup of pellets if you wanted to feed it. Dave didn’t go himself, but Bruce Towler told him the bird was either asleep or stuffed—in any case, not remotely interested in the pellets.

  “THEY AREN’T BAD,” said Bruce, holding out a cupful and munching away.

  By the end of it, Derek, who had been upstaged during the storm, mortified during the bungee jumping and humbled on the shuffleboard court, gave up the ghost. He had lost the crowd, and he knew it. He cancelled the last night’s bingo and more or less vanished, his activities schedule in tatters.

  And so it was Dave who organized the party on the final night. Well, not exactly party. It was more … an event. It began on the final afternoon. Bruce Towler had been wheeling along the deck, looking for excitement, when he almost ran Dave over.

  “OUT OF MY WAY,” he bellowed, picking up momentum.

  “Hey,” said Dave, laughing. “What’s your top speed?”

  Just then, Robert James, a ninety-three-year-old retired real estate agent from Boca Raton wheeled into view from the other direction.

  “Robert,” shouted Dave, “can you go faster than this old codger?”

  And that’s all it took really. The race was set for 8:30. On the promenade deck. Doris was given the task of spreading the word—discreetly, only to sympathetic passengers.

  “Don’t let Derek catch wind,” said Dave.

  Four others signed up at dinner, so they had to run heats.

  By race time, there was a crowd of over one hundred waiting at the starting line, which was by the aft portside lifeboats.

  Dave had lookouts placed strategically at each door. And Doris posted by the pool, a deck above, where she could watch over most of the course.

  The first heat featured Bruce against a car dealer from Portland, Maine.

  Before they started, Dave inspected each wheelchair.

  The car dealer rubbed his arms with BENGAY and Bruce popped a digitalis. And they were off. Twice around the deck. As he crossed the finish line in first place, Bruce raised his hands over his head.

  “WHOOPEE!” he said.

  The final pitted Bruce Towler against Robert James, the real estate agent from Boca Raton.

  Before they got it started, Bruce’s daughter, Kathy, got wind of the race and came hustling up with Derek, the two of them determined to stop it. Doris spotted them, and they were intercepted and diverted into the dining room. They had to watch through the portside windows, Derek beet red, perspiring and pounding on the glass.

  It was like the chariot race in Ben Hur—the two wheelchairs smashing against each other as they looped out of sight around the first-class cabins.

  They were gone for less than a minute, but when they reappeared there was only one chair. Bruce Towler was nowhere to be seen.

  “THE BUGGER STUCK HIS CANE IN MY SPOKES,” said Bruce when he crossed the finish line a good two minutes later.

  It was ten o’clock when the Empress of Kumar pulled back into Port Everglades. Dave and Morley were both on the upper deck as the ship eased through the seawall. Morley was leaning against the rail, looking back to sea. She was wearing a knee-length cream-silk dress covered with big green and white calla lilies. She was holding a glass of champagne.

  “What are you thinking?” said Dave.

  “Same thing I always think at the end of a trip,” said Morley, turning to smile at him. “Glad to be home. Sad that it’s over.”

  The ship blew its horn. She jumped a little.

  “Scared me,” she said. They were spending the last night in port. They were scheduled to get off in the morning.

  On their way to their cabin, Dave and Morley passed Doris Schick and Bruce Towler. Doris was wearing a silver evening gown with a thousand silver sequins. Bruce Towler, sitting in his wheelchair, was clutching her silver sequined purse.

  The letter came six months later.

  It was from Bruce Towler’s daughter, Kathy. Handwritten.

  I am having a hard time with this.

  My father would tell me to get off the pot. I should do that.

  He died last week.

  That’s the first time I have written that. It is so odd to see it written down.

  Dave was reading the letter in his record store, leaning against the counter with the letter in front of him. He was alone,
except for a guy he didn’t know who was flipping through the blues section.

  Dave looked up at the guy, and then he picked up the letter and counted the pages. He stared at them without reading for a moment. He was thinking of Bruce Towler. The afternoon of his big jump. Bruce hadn’t even hesitated, not for a second.

  Dave glanced back at the letter.

  As these things go, it wasn’t horrible. He drifted off watching Extreme Wrestling. He never woke up.

  My father spoke of you often. He liked you a lot.

  I don’t know if you knew he was sick. I thought he was going to die on one of those cruises. He said you were the one who convinced him to move in with me.

  He was always afraid of losing his independence. I always thought he would only come when he couldn’t cope and he would feel defeated. He wasn’t defeated at all. In fact, since that cruise he was happier, more energetic and more, I don’t know, present, than he had been for years. He was a different person.

  One night he even came to the movies with us. That might sound strange. You would have had to know him.

  But of course you did.

  Dave was nodding.

  I was upset with you on the boat. I thought those things you did with him were—I feel so silly now—I thought they were dangerous.

  He was so grateful for having met you. He said he never would have had the courage to leap if you hadn’t been there that day. And I think he meant more than the jump.

  I hope you don’t mind me writing. I wanted you to know and I needed to thank you.

  Here is my address. If you were ever this way, I would love you to drop by.

  It was funny the things you set in motion without meaning to. It was like a big game of pool. You hit the balls and they start colliding and you never know where they are going to end up. All you do is take your best shot and stand back and watch them. And hope for the best.

  It was a week later, a Sunday afternoon, just as Morley was leaving to pick up her mother for dinner, when Dave said, “Have you ever thought of asking her to live here, with us? I would be okay with that, if you did.”

  Morley was about to make a smart remark. And then she stopped, and saw he was serious. She came over to him, looked at him carefully and said, “Thank you.”