"Broken hearts and dirty windows Make life difficult to see That's why last night and this morning Always look the same to me" John Prine It was a quarter till two, and Ernie the bartender was already showing signs that he was ready to close. Ernie, the owner and barkeep of a seedy little establishment in the San Fernando Valley, was a stocky little Armenian dude with a weird beard that was braided on both sides of his chin. His dark hair was curly and awkwardly lay on his head like a misplaced rug. Whenever he was ready to go home, he'd always turn off the radio and shut down some of the neon behind the bar then stand there and dry a glass that never seemed to get dry. "What's the matter, Ern, you in a hurry to get home?" "Naw, that ain't it, Errol. Ma's not feeling too good. She called about an hour ago and said her stomach was bothering her." "Hell, you shoulda said something. I'll swallow this one down then. Hey, you couldn't mix me one up for the walk home could ya?" "Well asides the fact that I legally can't do that, it goes against my better sense to pour scotch in a paper cup. What's the matter, you dry at home?" I nodded, "Payday's tomorrow." "Tell ya what I'll do then. I pour ya shot of Lamberts." "No scotch?" "Scotch is not for shots or paper cups. Scotch is a thinking man's drink. What you need for walking is whisky." I didn't argue and finished my drink and put the glass down on the bar, "I guess beggars can't be choosers." We both laughed and Ernie turned and went and got the Lamberts. I guess it would be wrong to call Ernie's Place an Armenian bar because even though there a boat load of Armenians living in the LA area, Ernie and his brother Leo were the only ones who seemed to ever come into the place. He explained it by saying it was because of a feud he had with some of his cousins. The regular clientele were middle class white dudes from the offices and car lots in the vicinity, a mess of blue collar Okies and Mexicans, a few Black guys from the airport, and some bored housewives. Some of the neighboring bars didn't let the ethnics in, but Ernie's wasn't like that. The whole theme of the place centered around the poker tables in the back room where how they judged character was solely based on how well you played cards. It was Sunday evening though, and Ernie shut the tables down on Sunday. It was a place where people either went to play poker or to drink away problems. Some, like myself, went there to talk to somebody other than the pictures on the walls. I'd come out to LA two years before from Tulsa, Oklahoma after my wife Elsie died from being hit by a hit and run driver. She was on her way to tell me that she was pregnant with our first child. She didn't die right away but lingered in a coma for over a week. My brother Pete, callously, picked that trying time to come tell me that he had decided to go out to California to seek his fame and fortune and wanted me to go with him. Mind you, my wife was lying comatose in the bed not six feet away from where we were talking. "Elsie's not going to want to go to California." He didn't say nothing, at least not out loud, the look he gave me though was pregnant with meaning and hung there in the air between us for several minutes. I broke the silence first, "What about Sissie? We the only family she's got out here now that Aunt Susie died and Walter and his family went west." Pete rubbed the stubble on his chin, "She's a big girl now, Errol. She don't want to keep living with her older brothers. Besides I think she's going to marry Oliver Jones if he ever works up the nerve to ask her." "Don't you think we at least ought to ask her?" "Well sure, but......., " he never finished his sentence because a nurse came in to check on Elsie. It turns out that we didn't have to ask our sister what she wanted because she died two days later. She had attended a barn dance in Pryor and on the way home, a drunken farmer had pushed the car she was in onto the path of an oncoming train mistakenly thinking his wife was in the car with another man. They brought her body into the morgue in the basement of the hospital while Peter and I were upstairs sitting with Elsie. Then my beautiful wife passed away not 10 minutes before Johnny Bowron, our neighbor's son, burst into the room to tell us about Sissy. I never did tell Peter one way or the other about going west. It was just assumed. I think that I was numb right up till the moment our truck, loaded with everything we owned, pulled out of the muddy, rutted, lane that ran up to our farmhouse. Pete had handled the whole shebang. Elsie was buried by the side of her Daddy up in Tulsa, but Pete and me buried Sissy on the hillside overlooking our farm, right by our mom and dad. I remember thinking that for the thirty-two years my family owned the place, there wasn't a single grave up on that hill. When we left, there were three. Ernie brought me a paper cup containing a double shot of Lamberts. I was reaching in my pockets to pay him when just waved me off and said it was on the house. "You looked like you needed that drink, Errol, and far be it for me to turn away a man who needs a drink." "Appreciate it, Ern, and you're right, I sure needed a drink tonight." "You ain't worried about that Giancarlo guy are you? If you want, I'll give you a ride home." "Naw, shit no. I ain't worried about that fool, him and his little gang of thugs. No, you go home check on your mom. I like walking at night. It clears my head." He finished locking up the door and walked over to where his car sat underneath the streetlight. He had to fight off a cloud of bugs to unlock it. He waved as he pulled out of the parking lot onto the blacktop road. I waved back and then turned and started walking the three quarters of a mile up hill climb to the one bedroom bungalow I shared with a parakeet named Edgar. That night Elsie came to visit me. I know it's probably wrong to phrase it that way, her being dead and all. But, the fact was, she still visited fairly regular. This time, she woke me out of a dead sleep. I was dreaming about a night at the county fair when we were on our first real date. We got in fight because she thought she caught me looking at another girl, got mad and took off through the crowd. It wasn't true. There was no way any fool could look at another girl when Elsie was around. I mean she was small town, church-going girl, and back then that meant she was clothed from her neck to her knees. My brother Pete used to use the word swaddled to describe the look when he was complaining about how the girls in our home town always dressed. He had picked up the word in Sunday school class, when our teacher, the aptly name Ms. Hogg said the infant Jesus was wrapped in swaddling clothes. Pete had spent a year traveling with some carnies and had no end of stories about how the girls dressed in the towns and cities more sophisticated than our own, which in his view, was pretty much every other town. He also used a lot of terms like hot to trot and out looking for it when he launched into one of his rants. I didn't care if Elsie wore a flour sack, which I'm sure most of our mothers had done at one point. Any guy in our neck of the woods would have snapped their damned head off trying to catch a glimpse of her walking by. Looking at her made me think about what life must have been like being a peasant boy in the Middle Ages, living in a hut with your animals, and then seeing the Lord's beautiful daughter come riding by. You couldn't help but think that the mere vision of. her wasn't heaven sent. I swear I was just looking away so I wouldn't give away what was going on inside my head by just staring at her all the time. Maybe, some other girl happened to randomly intersect the path of my vision when Elsie turned to tell me something, or maybe she just made the whole thing up to play games with my heart, I don't know. I was her first beau, and that was her first real time away from her mom and dad's protective vision. My dad had warned me about such things one night as he sat outside on the porch sipping on his nightly glass of squeezins as he called it. "You keep a young girl locked town tight as she begins her turning, she's going rebel one way or the other. The tighter the chain, the crazier the dog." I looked at him stupidly, not comprehending the analogy. Hell, I didn't even know what an analogy was then, "Elsie not a dog, Pa. She's the prettiest girl I ever seen. Maybe the prettiest girl in whole damn world." He just looked at me for a bit, took a sip and said, "Don't be stupid, Errol. I don't want to talk to stupid. I use up all my stupid talk when I'm trying to tell them pigs what to do. Most women have a great deal of crazy locked up inside them. Not judging, mind you. It comes with that monthly cycle thing they been given. They have to learn to live with things, we men, don't even know about. It's the child bearing and raising of youngins that uses most of the craziness up, and keeps'em from going full blowed crazy." "Mama?" "Your mama is one of the rare'uns, boy. Jeanne always so calm. There's two reasons she was so sane. Number one, she really believed in that Bible. Most of the people in that church say they do, but she really does. Secondly, her daddy was a lot crazier in her mama. Your mama had to learn how to be sane a lot earlier than most girls just to survive her raising and take care of her siblings." I guess, he just was trying me to tell to keep my guard up when it came to dealing with females. He tried to explain that Elsie was bound to play games with me regardless whether she wanted to or not. He said that she wouldn't even understand why she was doing things, and that I needed to stay smart and not get caught up in the craziness, and that my main job was to keep guiding her back to her true self." I was just talking to talk, and smugly answered that that sounded easy enough, and Pa suddenly spit out his drink, doubled over, and damned near choked himself to death laughing. When he finished, he had to take a big drink to stop the choking, and the strength of liquor caused him to choke even more. I damned near choked my pa to death out of mere stupidity that night. I think I learned more about human frailty that evening than anything that's happen to me since. After regaining some composure, he finally said in a voice made gravelly by all the choking, "Easy nuff? Son, when that little pecker of yours starts to gettin hard enough to scratch your name in that oak tree over yonder, you're going to learn a thing or two about crazy all right, and you're going to learn it, and still have to learn to act normal, build a house, dress a hog, and keep your own fool seff from being cheated by all the damn, two legged varmints round here. Easy has nuthin to do with it. Listen, you avoid easy like the plague, easy's got nuthin to do with real life." I never did learn if Elsie was playing with me or not. By the time I caught up with her and grabbed her by the shoulder, she turned around with the biggest smile, and I forgot the question. The night in the dream though, I was one shot away from winning her one of them big dolls, but I quickly put the rifle down and started chasing her through the crowd. Yet, every time I'd get close enough to start to reach out, someone or something would interfere, and she'd get even further away while I dealt with the problem. She made her way all the way out by the parking lot, where there was a beer stand where Pete and some of his friends were standing around talking. She finally stopped and let me catch up to her, and, this time, when she started to turn, she disappeared, completely vanished into the night and I realized I was with dreaming and woke with a cry that hurt me to the bone. After that, I couldn't go back to sleep. So, I got up and made myself a cup of coffee, went outside, and sat down on the single wooden chair I kept by the front door. And while I was pondering over what I need to do about a sleazy, little two-bit hood name Giancarlo Robbia, the morning sun peeked over a mountain top far away. |
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