When you’re nine years old, there’s not much to do on a Friday or Saturday between, say, 7:00 p.m. and 3:00 a.m. closing time except stand around, battling boredom, fatigue and rage, while waiting and watching your parents worship the god Utica Club at the profane alter of Hank Becker’s Bar & Grill. I mean, for how many hours of any one night, and for how many nights can a kid be expected to shove chrome pucks up and back on the shuffleboard table, or fling darts, mostly missing the pockmarked board? But at least doing those things kept one safe from the grizzled WW II vet who shoved swizzle sticks under your thumb nail to show how the Japs tortured G.I.s, or from their boozy, floozy wives who clutched you tight and smothered you between their pendulous, Cashmere Bouquet stinking breasts.
Back in 1958, I’d just turned nine when my prodigal sperm donor crawled out from whatever rock he’d been hiding under since my birth. In that time, my parents had been legally separated—not divorced. But when profligate papa showed up again, he and my maladjusted mom rushed headlong into what I still call their stupid fucking reconciliation. And for the next few years, until they’d both realized their stupidity, my experience of weekend family night got altered radically from having ice cream or popcorn while watching Gunsmoke and Have Gun Will Travel, or on Sundays The Ed Sullivan Show, stretched out on grandma’s living room carpet, to standing in a corner, a neglected living, breathing human white elephant, while watching raggedy-ass old folks drink beer, smoke cigarettes, and argue with or cheat on their wives or husbands.
However, I did find a single source of solace, a sacred object in that profane world that transported me from my dreary and desolate reality to an inner sanctum sanctorum of imagination and dreams. So, while hour after hour, Mommie muddlehead and Daddy dumbass clutched their beer bottles, I held on to the jukebox.
I worshipped at the Wurlitzer. Although located in the barroom, a definite danger zone where sharp sticks, suffocating bosoms, and sundry dragons dwelt, Wurlitzer became a hallowed object. I bowed to it, knelt before it, and paid homage to its silvery frame. I memorized the litany of song titles and the counted the jukebox buttons that set my favorite 45 RPM records spinning like they were holy beads.
Bedazzled by Wurlitzer’s beatific lights, and mesmerized by the spinning discs, I’d conjure visions of myself on stage at The Ed Sullivan Show, belting out joyful tunes about how I’d found my one true love, or crooning laments about how I’d lost that one true love while pretty, pony-tailed girls in the audience cheered and cried and swooned. As my grandma once told me, I ragazzi che sanno sognare possono volare. Or “Boys who can dream can fly.” And this boy wanted to fly like hell into another world, another life.
It was five songs for a quarter, and on slow nights, Hank Becker would toss me quarters from behind the bar, saying, “Kid—play something good,” and I’d play any songs I wanted. And he’d always say, “Good job.”
A darn good deal until one night when I could have played Everly Brothers or Chuck Berry, or Old Blue Eyes, Dino, or Nat King Cole—I played Robert Mitchum’s “Thunder Road” five-times in a row. Hank pulled the plug.
After I promised I’d never do that again, Hank Becker mussed up my hair a little, laughed and handed me two quarters, saying, “Have at it, kid.”
So, as I said, for a few years, until the old man crawled back under his rock, that’s how I existed: waiting and watching my parents worship the god Utica Club at the profane alter of Becker’s Bar & Grill. Hour upon hour, they clutched their beer bottles. I held tight to the jukebox.
By the time I turned twelve, my old man had found his new squeeze—a divorcee with six kids—divorced my mom and married the squeeze. Apparently, another guy’s six brats could love my old man in ways that I could not. I mean, I couldn’t even like the guy. I felt relieved to see him go. I guess he felt the same about me, as I didn’t get mentioned in his obituary. Yeah—a white elephant in human form—that’s me.
Mom—another story. Fell completely apart. Looked for love in all the wrong places, fell for all the wrong guys, and followed one to Ohio or bum-fuck Idaho or someplace when he ran from the cops.
I remember coming home from school to find a sloppily scribbled note telling me that she’d gone. I swore to myself that I would never—ever—no way, no how do the things my parents did. I would never drink, never hang out in bars, never argue with or cheat on my wife, and if I ever had a son, I would play catch with him, walk with him on summer evenings to the Tastee-Freeze, teach him to swim, ride a bike, drive a car, the whole nine yards.
Too bad I never kept those vows. As I once dreamed, I became a musician: a flesh and blood Wurlitzer. Never made The Ed Sullivan Show, just one lounge, barroom or dive after another. For the rest of my life, closing time never came. Until now when I hear the clock, tick, tick, tick.
Nick Di Carlo, an erstwhile poet, a former itinerant folk musician, and an inveterate short fiction writer has been careening about this earth for seven decades and a bit. Born in a small upstate New York town, he stumbled westward before face-planting in a dusty hamlet on the cusp of California’s desert. Novelist Eugene Mirabelli has written: “Di Carlo’s stories are severe and uncompromising. They aren’t pretty, but they are real. His scenes are gritty and hard edged, his characters are lost, marginal and indomitable.” These days Di Carlo views life through that rearview mirror that says, “Objects in Mirror are Larger than They Appear,” while listening to Anita O’Day’s “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” and Ella Fitzgerald’s “But Not for Me.” Recent publications include Muleskinner Journal, Flash Fiction Magazine, Guilty Crime Story Magazine, Friday Flash Fiction, The Yard: Crime Blog, Shotgun Honey.
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