by Pete Hamill
The bus arrived and we got on. Max and Sal sat together and I took the seat behind them. All the way into town I looked for the woman in the yellow T-shirt and baseball cap, pedaling a blue bicycle. I didn’t see her. But I was certain I would find her.
Chapter
17
Dixie Shafer was just inside the door of the Dirt Bar when we arrived. She wasn’t very tall, but great piles of silky red hair rose off her face and made her seem gigantic. Her mouth and nose were small, and her skin was creamy, but she must have weighed three hundred pounds. A lot of that weight was in her breasts, which were round, full, straining against a flowered off-the-shoulder gypsy blouse. A gold cross on a chain lay between the breasts, sometimes turning on its side and flattening between them when she moved. Her eyes were blue behind oversized red harlequin glasses. Gold hoops hung from her ears and every one of her fingers was adorned with rings. I’d never seen anyone like her in my life.
“New man!” Sal yelled. “Mike Devlin!”
“First one’s on me!” Dixie shouted, jamming those huge tits against me and hugging me. “After that, you pay!”
“She means it,” Sal said, raising his eyebrows at me as Dixie moved behind the bar. He explained that Dixie had built the bar a year before on this empty lot on O Street. Land was cheap and Dixie saw something; she grabbed the plot, bought some concrete blocks from a chief ordnance man who robbed them from Mainside, and had the roof up in a week. A moonlighting shipwright built the bar and she moved in the jukebox and the shuffleboard machine and then ran out of money. She didn’t have a dime left for the floor. The sailors started coming, and she realized that sailors could get along without a floor—understood that Sal and some of the others actually loved the dirt—and that sailors could get along without almost everything except a bar and a jukebox, cold beer and warm pussy. So Dixie saved the money that should have gone for the floor and used it to build an extension: a place in the back, where she lived. And she did her best to give all her young men what they needed most. Beer and pussy. Pussy and beer.
“If heaven ain’t like Dixie’s Dirt Bar,” Sal said, “I don’t want to go.”
Dixie shoved three Jax beers at us, and we pooled single dollars on the bar and I could see other faces from the base in the smoky room and heard Hank Williams from the juke. “Jambalaya and a crawfish pie / And a filé gumbo.…” There were four men in civvies playing a shuffleboard machine and the door opened and two more came in to join the dozen at the bar. “Son of a gun, we’ll have big fun, on the bayouuuu.” The beer was full of little slivers of ice and I watched Dixie’s breasts move as she hurried around behind the bar, jerking tops off bottles with a church key and making change from a tray beside the icebox. I wondered what it would feel like to push my face between those creamy breasts.
“Hank ain’t dead!” Sal suddenly yelled, shaking both fists in the air like a Holy Roller. “Oh lord, no, Hank ain’t dead!” The shuffleboard players paused. Dixie gave him a look. “Don’t be telling me Hank Williams done died!” He was talking like a preacher now, with a little bit of Senator Claghorn too. “Just listen, brothers an’ sisters! You hear him? Do you hear poor Hank, poor Luke the Driftuh hisself? He lives, brothers and sisters! Right there on that jukebox! An’ I tell you, he’s gonna be there the rest of our lives!”
“Amen, brother,” one of the shuffleboard players said solemnly. “Amen, amen …”
“The Lord put him among us an’ the Lord done took him away, but brothers and sisters, we will be with him again in Paradise! I tell you! An’ right here, tonight, in this place, among us poor sinners, he is with us, because there ain’t a man among us who can’t say it loud and clear: Hank lives! Just shout it out, brothers.”
Two sailors at the bar yelled, “Hank lives! Yeah. Hank lives!”
“No, you gotta shout it! You gotta shout so the Lord kin hear ya! Do you know what I’m saying?”
I couldn’t tell if Sal was serious or what, but in seconds he had all of us chanting, shouting, pounding the bar, yelling Hank lives! Hank lives! Hank lives! While Sal threw his head back, chug-a-lugged the beer and then clunked the bottle down hard. While the words came from the juke: “Another love before my time. Made your heart sad and blue …”
Max said, “Sal, we can’t keep up with you like this.”
“You have to, mah man, mah Hebrew brother, cuz Hank would’ve wanted it this way.”
We chug-a-lugged together, in a kind of ritual, Sal moving us with the almost religious fervor of his sarcasm; Max let out an enormous belch, while Dixie opened three fresh bottles and Hank Williams sang “Ramblin’ Man.” Three more sailors came in, all wearing civvies, and the place was packed and full of smoke, with the bubbling lights racing through the columns of the great Wurlitzer against the concrete wall. I didn’t chug-a-lug the second beer, but I did manage a fat gassy belch as a kind of punctuation. Sal slapped me on the back and yelled for Dixie, who brought three more bottles. Her breasts were beautiful. They weren’t actually breasts at all, I thought, full of distinctions; they were tits. Real-life beautiful tits. Everybody was talking at once, with Sal roaring over them all and the talk was all Hank Williams.
“Hank ain’t dead,” Sal said, and finished a beer. “Hank lives!”
He had set the refrain for the night. Hank would’ve wanted it this way. Sal was making fun, I guess; I don’t think he truly felt very bad about Hank Williams. But, in his loud wild way, he was consoling the others, and maybe pitying them a little, too. So the night became a series of fragments: beer and new faces and change on the bar and bottles being smashed in a garbage can and Dixie’s creamy bigness, all of it held together by a poor lonesome dead man. Hank would’ve wanted it that way.
At one point, Dixie came up beside me and said, “You’re a quiet one, ain’t you?” And moved away. While Hank Williams sang:
“Did you ever see a robin weep
When leaves begin to die?
That means he’s lost the will to live
I’m so lonesome I could cry.…”
In the blur I tried to sort out the members of what they all called The Gang. Brian Maher from Hartford. Pale Irish skin untouched by the Gulf sun. Slick hair as black as India ink. A yeoman so good Sal said he could take stenography like a pro. Brian drank his beer very fast and belched almost demurely, and talked to me in a soft secretive way about ice skating on the Merrimac River when he was a boy and how no other women in the whole world had such round firm eatable asses as the girls on that winter river. Beside him, Don Carter from Newark. His accent harder than any New Yorker’s. Long-nosed, gap-toothed, with big hands, a deep tan, working at Ellyson as a parachute rigger (and Sal yelling at him over the words of “Mind Your Own Business”: What are you going to do with PARACHUTE RIGGING on The Outside? Carter glancing at me, shrugging, pulling at his long nose, staring into the top of the Jax beer bottle: I don’t know, the rigging school was in Lakehurst, near home, and I just wanted to be near my girl. And Sal slammed the bar and shouted: And where in the FUCKING FUCK is the girl NOW, Carter? Carter whispered: Gone. Sal blinked, and said: Drink up, asshole. Hank would’ve wanted it that way.)
And here was Boswell arriving, bouncing off the shuffleboard, hearing “Jambalaya,” and bursting into tears. While Waleski turned to me, saying he liked the way New York looked in the movies and he liked New Yorkers, but Chicago was the real place, the great place, the best city. Hey, New York couldn’t have anything like Pulaski Boulevard on the Near West Side or a bridge named after Kosciusko (and I said, Hey, no, man, we got a Kosciusko Bridge too, and Waleski said, No shit?) and anyway, you couldn’t drive at night from New York to Calumet City, the way you could from Chicago, to see the guy named The Human Prick (“What’s that?” said Dixie), a guy they dressed up in a prick costume, who would then proceed to eat himself on the stage (“Did he look like Red Cannon?” I said) and in New York there wasn’t no place like Madison Street in Calumet, either. Five Bucks A Fuck. Black and White All Night (“Y
ou mean you fucked a colored girl?” I said, walking into it, and Waleski said, “I thought I fucked a colored girl until I saw a colored guy fuck a colored girl”) and slower now, staring at the beer, he told me how hard it was that year before he joined the Navy, getting up in the dark to drive to work at Inland Steel in Gary and his girl Sherry ragging his ass at night ’cause he could never get the black stuff out of his fingernails and so she would never let him play with her glory hole, and then I said: Where is this Sherry now? And Waleski said, as we all said, every last one of us: Gone.
We’d gone off first, of course. That was the worst thing. All of us knew it. We signed up for the messes we made of our lives. We went off to join the Navy because they needed us in Korea, or because we didn’t want to go in the infantry, or because our brothers were in the Navy in the last war, or because we heard Kate Smith sing “God Bless America” or we saw a movie called The Fighting Sullivans when we were kids, or They Were Expendable. Maybe we wanted a uniform. Maybe we just wanted to prove we were men. Whatever it was, we went, and the girls watched our backs, and they said to themselves, as we said later (watching their backs): Gone. There were going-away parties. There were feverish good-byes. Some of the guys got engaged to the girls. Some even got married, standing with the new wives while the photographers took their pictures in downtown studios, the guys in their rented tuxes, the girls in white gowns, the rented cars double-parked outside. They carried those pictures in their wallets and their sea bags, took them to boot camp, and to the training schools in Memphis and Jacksonville and Norman, Oklahoma, took them across oceans, looking at the pictures and trying to remember the feel of flesh, the sound of their woman’s laugh. And learned too late that all the girls were gone. They’d found other guys who were always around on a Saturday night, flesh-and-blood men of bone and cock, not addresses on envelopes; young men who could dance with them and drink with them and lie with them.
That’s what I heard in the smoke and noise and broken pieces of the night, in those murmured stories held together by the voice of a poor dead lonesome hillbilly singer. And I felt for the first time since leaving home that I was not alone. That I’d never been alone. That I too was part of this huge secret society of loss, and here in Dixie’s Dirt Bar I was attending a meeting of the Pensacola chapter.
Around ten, as they did every night, the whores arrived. “Look at em, God’s truest angels,” Sal said. Max shook his head and whispered about the clap, but Sal just laughed and grabbed a skinny girl and danced with her to “Cold, Cold Heart.” The other guys grabbed for female arms and waists and asses, and the girls were all weepy over Hank and buried their heads on Navy shoulders and some of them kicked off their shoes to feel the damp dirt of the Dirt Bar’s floor. “Go ahead, honey,” Dixie said, and I danced with a skinny gap-toothed girl from the bayous of what she called Luziana, washed up here in Pensacola four years before while trying to get to Miami. She called me “mate” and said she sure felt bad for Hank and asked me if I wanted to go out to the van and I said I was broke and she said it was only four dollars and I said maybe next time, and she said, Well, okay sailor, fair enough and when the tune ended, she went to Max and took him to the dance floor and after awhile they went outside.
Soon it was all sailors and whores, dancing on the hard-packed red dirt. There was a tattooed girl and a toothless girl and some rough girls with coarse skin and hillbilly accents. They called us “mate” or “sailor,” and I thought that must have been part of what they did. They couldn’t possibly remember the names of all the guys they fucked, so they called us mate or sailor or sport. Maybe they didn’t want to remember. I danced with some of them, but mostly I watched, trying to sort out the faces, thinking that I would like to draw them, that maybe I could make them more beautiful than they were and that would make them happy. For they were not happy, not one of them. And I realized then that I was at a wake. The corpse had been found in a Cadillac in West Virginia, but they were mourning other things: people forgotten and lost, lovers gone, broken promises, the past. Still, no matter what its object, it was a proper wake, like any other back home. And when the whores laughed when Sal yelled or grabbed their asses they were just doing that night what the Irish always did on other nights in Brooklyn. They’d even done it when my mother died. They started out weeping and mournful. Then got formal. And then drunk and singing the old songs. It was what the Irish had instead of the blues.
By midnight the place was a steady thumping roar, Hank Williams and beer and some white lightnin that Boswell brought in from outside, and then the door burst open and two jolly fat girls came waddling in, bellowing “yee-HAW” at the crowd. Sal yelled “Tons of Fun!” And went running at them, yelling “Hee-Fuckin-HAW!” And leaped, as the women, whose names were Betty and Freddie, made a cat’s cradle with their hands and caught him in the air, like a turn in a circus, like something they’d rehearsed. They began rubbing their breasts in Sal’s face, and Freddie grabbed his crotch and massaged it, while Sal screamed in mock panic: “Get me a priest! Get me a fuckin priest!”
I looked at Dixie and she shook her head at me. No. A sign. A message. No. Did they have the clap? No. And then Freddie and Betty let go of Sal and he fell to the dirt floor with his feet straight up in the air like the last panel in Mutt and Jeff and the whole bar cheered and more beers came slamming down on the bar and Sal grabbed my arm and said, “Come and meet my Fee-ahn-says …”
… And the girls were beside us at the bar, rubbing, pressing, Boswell sticking a tongue in Betty’s ear, Sal faking exhaustion, Maher paralyzed. And Freddie swore that she once sucked Hank’s dick and Betty said that was the truth and Freddie said that Hank had a tiny little dick and was built like a weed and Betty said, No lie, and Freddie said that when she heard the news she wished it had been her instead of Hank Williams and how bad he musta felt all his life about that itty-bitty pecker and how he never did get to use it all that much, what with the drinkin and everything. She poured some cold Jax down her throat without ever touching the bottle to her lips, which made Sal holler in delight. While Betty played with me. And Dixie Shafer shook her head again, No, saying with her look, Don’t dare, saying, Absolutely not. Saying No.
Until they all were gone, sailors and whores, Sal leaving with Betty and Freddie, shouting “Hank would want it this way!” And the others paired off or left alone, while the floor rolled under me like an ocean swell and the walls advanced and receded and the jukebox went silent at last. Dixie Shafer looked at me across the bar and then glanced at the corridor leading to the back room. There were no lights down there. She took off the harlequin glasses and slid them between her breasts, then reached across the bar and took my hand in hers.
“First one is on the house,” she said.
Chapter
18
What Dixie Told Me
I’m from Kentucky, originally. Breathitt County. Ever hear of hit? All mountains and forests and then the mines later on. My daddy was a Hardshell Baptist and in that little pineboard church of theirs, hit was real strict, I tell you. Women on one side the aisle, men on the other, and a lot of singin and tambourines but nothin you could call fun. There was a preacher came when I was eight year old, a Reverent Woodford, and he was somethin. That’s when they started the footwashin and the snake handlin. The footwashin warnt nothin, really, all of us there watchin, as theyd get down and wash each others feet.
But the snakehandlin, that was a different matter haltogether. They always did the snakes at night and I remember seeing everybody coming through the woods with lanterns and big shadows everywhere until we got to that little board church, just a sign in hit saying “Jesus is Comin” and a potbelly stove and kerosene lamps on the walls. The women almost all wore gingham in them days. And the men—by that time they uz miners—they hung their helmets on nails and got in the aisles and waited for the snakes.
The Reverent Woodford would start hit, holdin a rattler in his hands, and prayin to the Lord, and soon people started waili
n, beatin them tambourines, speakin in tongues, and the Reverent uz tellin them that if they uz without sin the Lord would protect them and if they warn’t then they uz in big trouble. Well, my daddy never would do hit and my momma said that uz proof he uz sinnin, he must have him some woman down the hollow, he must be drinkin liquor in the damn mines. But he said, No, he warnt gonna do hit, no snakes for him. And he stuck by his guns, until one night, I uz about twelve, we were there, and Momma uz pressin him, and the music got to playin louder and louder, and someone shouted, and I uz up shoutin, cause they called that The Shouts, hit just come right out of you. And then all of a suddint, Momma had a rattler in her hands, in front of all of them, and Daddy uz a bit shamed, and they were shoutin louder, and then Daddy uz up there too, I guess to get rid of his shame, or maybe to keep Momma, and the shoutin got to be real powerful, and I got real excited, and then pow! I tell you, boy, I know now what happen to me. I came. I just plumb came. Without no cock in me. Without no help at all. I just came, boy!
I uz something else, then, boy. Not what I am now. Boys thunk I uz a lovely girl. And I uz risin again and Daddy had that four-foot rattler in his hands and I felt hit comin again, felt the explosion comin up in me. And then the rattler bit Daddy. First rattled. Then bit him right in the neck. Rattled. Bit him again. And Daddy dropped the rattler and backed up and he had this look in his eyes like he jest seed the Devil and then he fell back and the chapel become quiet and Momma just stood up, she dint cry, she dint run to him. I did. I dint care where the rattler went, I went to my Daddy. I cried at him, Daddy. I cried Oh Daddy get up. Oh Daddy, I love ya Daddy. But hit dint do no good. We buried Daddy two days later with the wind howlin down the hollows and Reverent Woodford singin and all of them lookin at me, and I could tell they uz thinkin, Poor child, her Daddy uz a sinner.