Before They Were Giants (2 page)

Inside, several heresies.

First, the light is about as bright as you keep your living room. Callahan maintains that people who like to drink in caves are unstable.

Second, there’s a flat rate. Every drink in the house is half a buck, with the option. The option operates as follows:

You place a one-dollar bill on the bar. If all you have on you is a fin, you trot across the street to the all-night deli, get change, come back and put a one-dollar bill on the bar. (Callahan maintains that nobody in his right mind would counterfeit one-dollar bills; most of us figure he just likes to rub fistfuls of them across his face after closing.)

You are served your poison-of-choice. You inhale this, and confront the option. You may, as you leave, pick up two quarters from the always-full cigar box at the end of the bar and exit into the night. Or you may, upon finishing your drink, stride up to the chalk line in the middle of the room, announce a toast (this is mandatory) and hurl your glass into the huge, old fashioned fireplace which takes up most of the back wall. You then depart without visiting the cigar box. Or, pony up another buck and exercise your option again.

Callahan seldom has to replenish the cigar box. He orders glasses in such quantities that they cost him next to nothing, and he sweeps out the fireplace himself every morning.

Another heresy: no one watches you with accusing eyes to make sure you take no more quarters than you have coming to you. If Callahan ever happens to catch someone cheating him, he personally ejects them forever. Sometimes he doesn’t open the door first. The last time he had to eject someone was in 1947, a gentleman named Big Beef McCaffrey.

Not too surprisingly, it’s a damned interesting place to be. It’s the kind of place you hear about only if you need to - and if you are very lucky. Because if a patron, having proposed his toast and smithereened his glass, feels like talking about the nature of his troubles, he receives the instant, undivided attention of everyone in the room. (That’s why the toast is obligatory. Many a man with a hurt locked inside finds in the act of naming his hurt for the toast that he wants very much to talk about it. Callahan is one smart hombre.) On the other hand, even the most tantalizingly cryptic toast will bring no prying inquiries if the guy displays no desire to uncork. Anyone attempting to flout this custom is promptly blackjacked by Fast Eddie the piano player and dumped in the alley.

But somehow many do feel like spilling it in a place like Callahan’s; and you can get a deeper insight into human nature in a week there than in ten years anywhere else I know. You can also quite likely find solace for most any kind of trouble, from Callahan himself if no one else. It’s a rare hurt that can stand under the advice, help and sympathy generated by upwards of thirty people that care. Callahan loses a lot of his regulars. After they’ve been coming around long enough, they find they don’t need to drink any more.

It’s that kind of a bar.

~ * ~

I don’t want you to get a picture of Callahan’s Place as an agonized, Alcoholics Anonymous type of group encounter session, with Callahan as some sort of salty psychoanalyst-father-figure in the foreground. Hell, many’s the toast provokes roars of laughter, or a shouted chorus of agreement, or a unanimous blitz of glasses from all over the room when the night is particularly spirited. Callahan is tolerant of rannygazoo; he maintains that a bar should be “merry,” so long as no bones are broken unintentionally. I mind the time he helped Spud Flynn set fire to a seat cushion to settle a bet on which way the draft was coming. Callahan exudes, at all times, a kind of monolithic calm; and US40 is shorter than his temper.

This night I’m telling you about, for instance, was nothing if not merry. When I pulled in around ten o’clock, there was an unholy shambles of a square dance going on in the middle of the floor. I laid a dollar on the bar, collected a glass of Tullamore Dew and a hello-grin from Callahan, and settled back in a tall chair - Callahan abhors barstools - to observe the goings-on. That’s what I mean about Callahan’s Place: most bars, men only dance if there’re ladies around. Of one sex or another.

I picked some familiar faces out of the maelstrom of madmen weaving and lurching over honest-to-God sawdust, and waved a few greetings. There was Tom Flannery, who at that time had eight months to live, and knew it; he laughed a lot at Callahan’s Place. There was Slippery Joe Maser, who had two wives, and Marty Matthias, who didn’t gamble any more, and Noah Gonzalez, who worked on Suffolk County’s bomb squad. Calling for the square dance while performing a creditable Irish jig was Doc Webster, fat and jovial as the day he pumped the pills out of my stomach and ordered me to Callahan’s. See, I used to have a wife and daughter before I decided to install my own brakes. I saved thirty dollars, easy ...

The Doc left the square-dancers to their fate - their creative individuality making a caller superfluous - and drifted over like a pink zeppelin to say Hello. His stethoscope hung unnoticed from his ears, framing a smile like a sunlamp. The end of the ‘scope was in his drink.

“Howdy, Doc. Always wondered how you kept that damned thing so cold,” I greeted him.

He blinked like an owl with the staggers and looked down at the gently bubbling pickup beneath two fingers of scotch. Emitting a bellow of laughter at about force eight, he removed the gleaming thing and shook it experimentally.

“My secret’s out, Jake. Keep it under your hat, will you?” he boomed.

“Maybe you better keep it under yours,” I suggested. He appeared to consider this idea for a time, while I speculated on one of life’s greatest paradoxes: Sam Webster, M.D. The Doc is good for a couple of quarts of Peter Dawson a night, three or four nights a week. But you won’t find a better sawbones anywhere on Earth, and those sausage fingers of his can move like a tap-dancing centipede when they have to, with nary a tremor. Ask Shorty Steinitz to tell you about the time Doc Webster took out his appendix on top of Callahan’s bar ... while Callahan calmly kept the Scotch coming.

“At least then I could hear myself think,” the Doc finally replied, and several people seated within earshot groaned theatrically.

“Have a heart, Doc,” one called out.

“What a re-pulse-ive idea,” the Doc returned the serve.

“Well, I know when I’m beat,” said the challenger, and made as if to turn away.

“Why, you young whelp, aorta poke you one,” roared the Doc, and the bar exploded with laughter and cheers. Callahan picked up a beer bottle in his huge hand and pegged it across the bar at the Doc’s round skull. The beer bottle, being made of foam rubber, bounced gracefully into the air and landed in the piano, where Fast Eddie sat locked in mortal combat with the “C-Jam Blues.”

Fast Eddie emitted a sound like an outraged transmission and kept right on playing, though his upper register was shot. “Little beer never hoit a piano,” he sang out as he reached the bridge, and went over it like he figured to burn it behind him.

All in all it looked like a cheerful night, but then I saw the Janssen kid come in and I knew there was a trouble brewing.

This Janssen kid - look, I can’t knock long hair, I wore mine long when it wasn’t fashionable. And I can’t knock pot for the same reason. But nobody I know ever had a good thing to say for heroin. Certainly not Joe Hennessy, who did two weeks in the hospital last year after he surprised the Janssen kid scooping junk-money out of his safe at four in the morning. Old Man Janssen paid Hennessy back every dime and disowned the kid, and he’d been in and out of sight ever since. Word was he was still using the stuff, but the cops never seemed to catch him holding. They sure did try, though. I wondered what the hell he was doing in Callahan’s Place.

I should know better by now. He placed a tattered bill on the bar, took the shot of bourbon which Callahan handed him silently, and walked to the chalk line. He was quivering with repressed tension, and his boots squeaked on the sawdust. The place quieted down some, and his toast - “To smack!” - rang out clear and crisp. Then he downed the shot amid an expanding silence and flung his glass so hard you could hear his shoulder crack just before the glass shattered on unyielding brick.

Having created silence, he broke it. With a sob. Even as he let it out he glared around to see what our reactions were.

Callahan’s was immediate, an “Amen!” that sounded like an echo of the-smashing glass. The kid made a face like he was somehow satisfied in spite of himself, and looked at the rest of us. His gaze rested on Doc Webster, and the Doc drifted over and gently began rolling up the kid’s sleeves. The boy made no effort to help or hinder him. When they were both rolled to the shoulder - phosporescent purple I think they were - he silently held out his arms, palm-up.

They were absolutely unmarked. Skinny as hell and white as a piece of paper, but unmarked. The kid was clean.

Everyone waited in silence, giving the kid their respectful attention. It was a new feeling to him, and he didn’t quite know how to handle it. Finally he said, “I heard about this place,” just a little too truculently.

“Then you must of needed to,” Callahan told him quietly, and the kid nodded slowly.

“I hear you get some answers in, from time to time,” he half-asked.

“Now and again,” Callahan admitted. “Some o’ the damndest questions, too. What’s it like, for instance?”

“You mean smack?”

“I don’t mean bourbon.”

The kid’s eyes got a funny, far-away look, and he almost smiled. “It’s ...” He paused, considering. “It’s like ... being dead.”

“Whooee!” came a voice from across the room. “That’s a powerful good feeling indeed.” I looked and saw it was Chuck Samms talking, and watched to see how the kid would take it.

He thought Chuck was being sarcastic and snapped back, “Well, what the hell do you know about it anyway?” Chuck smiled. A lot of people ask him that question, in a different tone of voice.

“Me?” he said, enjoying himself hugely. “Why, I’ve been dead is all.”

“S’truth,” Callahan confirmed as the kid’s jaw dropped. “Chuck there was legally dead for five minutes before the Doc got his pacemaker going again. The crumb died owing me money, and I never had the heart to dun his widow.”

“Sure was a nice feeling, too,” Chuck said around a yawn. “More peaceful than nap-time in a monastery. If it wasn’t so pleasant I wouldn’t be near so damned scared of it.” There was an edge to his voice as he finished, but it disappeared as he added softly, “What the hell would you want to be dead for?”

The Janssen kid couldn’t meet his eyes, and when he spoke his voice cracked. “Like you said, pop, peace. A little peace of mind, a little quiet. Nobody yammering at you all the time. I mean, if you’re dead there’s always the chance somebody’ll mourn, right? Make friends with the worms, dig their side of it, maybe a little poltergeist action, who knows? I mean, what’s the sense of talking about it, anyway? Didn’t any of you guys ever just want to run away?”

“Sure thing,” said Callahan. “Sometimes I do it too. But I generally run someplace I can find my way back from.” It was said so gently that the kid couldn’t take offense, though he tried.

“Run away from what, son?” asked Slippery Joe.

The kid had been bottled up tight too long; he exploded. “From what?” he yelled. “Jesus, where do I start? There was this war they wanted me to go and fight, see? And there’s this place called college, I mean they want you to care, dig it, care about this education trip, and they don’t care enough themselves to make it as attractive as the crap game across the street. There’s this air I hear is unfit to breathe, and water that ain’t fit to drink, and food that wouldn’t nourish a vulture and a grand outlook for the future. You can’t get to a job without the car you couldn’t afford to run even if you were working, and if you found a job it’d pay five dollars less than the rent. The T.V. advertises karate classes for four-year-olds and up, the President’s New Clothes didn’t wear very well, the next depression’s around the corner and you ask me what in the name of God I’m running from?

“Man, I’ve been straight for seven months, what I mean, and in that seven god damned months I have been over this island like a fungus and there is nothing for me. No jobs, no friends, no place to live long enough to get the floor dirty, no money and nobody that doesn’t point and say “Junkie” when I go by for seven months and you ask me what am I running from? Man, everything is all, just everything.”