Callahan's Place 10 - Off The Wall At Callahan's (v5.0) (8 page)

      
Here, then, are as few words as I can get away with concerning all the wonderful people you’re about to hear:  [The descriptions in italics are quoted, and sometimes misquoted, from Chris McCubbin’s excellent text for the CALLAHAN'S CROSSTIME SALOON role-playing game, available from Steve Jackson Games, Inc. of Austin, Texas.)

Mike Callahan
:
He built his bar in Suffolk County, in the image of countless other roadside Irish taverns in the New York area…a serene and reassuring presence, he always kept his place merry.  He looked like a big dumb Irishman, but it was impossible to talk to Callahan for more than a few minutes without realizing that he was a man of unusual depth, wisdom and sensitivity…from Big Beef McCaffrey, who tried to shortchange him, to the Mafia flunky who tried to scare him into renting a jukebox, anybody who tried to put the muscle on Callahan got the same treatment—a free trip to the parking lot, and probably a broken bone to remember it by.  He smoked big cheap cigars that he lit with non-safety matches.  His reverence for human dignity, privacy and liberty verged on the religious.  He never mentioned his subjective age.  It is assumed that he’s about the same age as his wife, who is well into her third century. 
Mike was born centuries from now, in a place (possibly a planet) called Harmony.  Since it has taken me several books to even outline his mission in this ficton (a technical term for a space-time locus), I won’t attempt it here.  CALLAHAN'S SECRET has the best summary, I think.  Suffice it to say he is a good guy.

Lady Sally McGee
:
Lady Sally was Callahan’s spouse and counterpart in a battle across time.  She opened her famous brothel, Lady Sally’s House, in Brooklyn at the height of WWII, when such enterprises were tolerated…by the time the war was over, she had so many influential friends that there was no question of closing her place down.  A tiny, trim redhead who spoke in a patently phony British accent, Lady Sally was not an incredible beauty.  It was not her features, but her manner that accounted for her astonishing sexual appeal.  She considered sex an art, and studied it extensively.  Her employees were called “artists” (not prostitutes, and never “whores” or “hookers”).  Her artists were paid a regular salary plus room and board and allowed to keep any (optional) tips.  Her clients paid according to their means.  Her artists were of all seven sexes, and she catered to all sexual preferences except the dangerously violent.  Her Ladyship is much tougher than she looks, and has fewer scruples than her husband about killing evil people. 

Mary Callahan
(now Mary Callahan-Finn):
The only (known) child of Mike Callahan and Lady Sally, Mary was born and raised on Harmony.  When she reached adulthood, she began working for her mother, and despite what some would call a weight problem, soon established a reputation as one of the most professional and popular artists at Lady Sally’s House.  After a few years, she transferred to working literally behind the scenes, as her mother’s chief of security.  Where she got her training as a blacksmith is unknown.  She is a cheerful woman with a tremendous capacity for fun and no tolerance for evasions or self-delusions.
  I do
not
think Mary has a weight problem (I think very few women have a weight problem—although a lot of them have a big jerk problem), and neither does Jake Stonebender.  She had a (very) brief affair with him, once, but is now married to: 

Mickey Finn
:
Alien cyborg, 6’ 11 1/2”, 600 lbs; apparent age 40…
  Finn is the only survivor of a race exterminated centuries ago and far away by star-traveling monsters.  They filled him with enslaving machinery and made him a scout.  The very first Callahan story, “The Guy With The Eyes” (reprinted in CALLAHAN'S CROSSTIME SALOON) concerns the night he walked into Mike’s Place and announced that his job required him to sterilize Earth, and he felt just
terrible
about it.  The response of Callahan’s patrons was to sympathize: they got him drunk.  Which, happily, shorted out the machinery that made him a slave.  He spent the next decade or so learning how to be human (he spent some years as a farmer), but has since left Earth with his new bride, Mary. 

Jake Stonebender
: Narrator of the Callahan’s Place and Mary’s Place stories.  (And my financial arrangement with him is our business, okay?) 
A likable, lanky man with shoulder-length hair and a beard.  If he doesn’t watch himself, he can get a bit strident about his liberal politics.  A gifted folksinger, he loves his guitar Lady Macbeth like family.  While Jake doesn’t have the most brilliant mind at Callahan’s, he may well have the quickest.  He certainly saved everyone there, and likely the whole planet as well, through his quick actions on the Night of the Cockroach… 
Jake used to have a wife and daughter, once, until he decided he could fix his own brakes.  After their deaths, he tried suicide twice, and was fortunate enough to have his stomach pumped the second time by: 

Doc Webster
: who prescribed for Jake a trip to Callahan’s Place, and not incidentally spared me a life of honest work. 
In many ways Sam ‘Doc’ Webster is the leader of the gang, even more than Callahan himself.  While Mike is the unmoving center around which the bar orbits, Doc Webster is usually the one out there pushing the other patrons to do things, have fun and keep the Place merry.  An immense man, he is Callahan’s most profound drinker.  He’s also an excellent physician, who once removed Shorty Steinitz’s appendix on Callahan’s bar-top.  What most people remember about the Doc, though, is his immense, almost mythic joyousness.  He could break up the Sphinx with a one-liner that was old when it was built.
  He is the all-time Punday Night champion. 

Long-Drink McGonnigle
:
The toughest and least charismatic of Callahan’s regulars, Long-Drink (he’s “one long drink of water,” 6 foot seven) is an indolent and independent man with a razor-sharp tongue and no time for nonsense—unless it’s amusing nonsense.  In spite of his attitude problem, Long-Drink isn’t as shallow as he likes to pretend.  He genuinely cares about people who are hurting—and not just his friends, either.  He cried openly when Jake broke Lady Macbeth
.
  I would have to say that Long-Drink’s sense of humor is the most primitive in the group.  And I’m going to get him back some day… 

Fast Eddie Costigan
:
Callahan’s bouncer and piano player.  Born in Brooklyn, he met Callahan after the war, at Lady Sally’s, and accepted the piano chair in the bar Mike was just building out on Long Island.  He resembles a badly-shaven chimpanzee.  As a bouncer, his technique is subtle and effective.  He knows he’s not as clever as the other guys at the bar, and he’s comfortable with that.  Still, he often surprises his friends with an unexpected insight or brings down the house with a quietly hilarious pun or wisecrack.  It was he who found a way to make the broken Lady Macbeth well again
.
  Eddie is the best damn piano man I ever hoid…uh, heard. 

Les Glueham & Merry Moore
(A.K.A. The Cheerful Charlies):
In the early ’70s, Les Moore and Merry Glueham were not happy people.  As if their names weren’t bad enough, they were also each out of work.  With nothing to lose, each called a guy named Flannery who cheered people up for a living—satisfaction guaranteed or your money back.  It worked.  Tom Flannery not only cheered Les and Merry up, but when he introduced them, they fell in love. Then he gave them jobs as his assistants.  When they got married, Les and Merry swapped last names—it seemed to work better that way.  Tom died a few months later, as he’d been expecting to, and Les and Merry kept the business going.  Their business card reads, “Have Fun—Will Travel.”
 

Noah Gonzalez, Shorty Steinitz, Slippery Joe, Susie and Suzie Maser
: regular patrons of Callahan’s Place.  Noah used to work on the county bomb squad; Shorty is the worst driver alive; the Masers have been a triune marriage ever since Joe’s wives found out about each other.  (It seems to serve him right.) 

Jim/Paul MacDonald
: telepathic half-brothers with a fused identity, who appear first in CALLAHAN'S CROSSTIME SALOON, and last in CALLAHAN'S SECRET.  They sacrificed themselves to save the world from a cockroach. 

Arethusa Quigley
: surviving incarnation of a pair of telepathic
twins
.  In contrast to the MacDonald brothers, these identical blonde sisters, raised by religious fanatics who denied the concept of twinhood, grew up with only a single public identity, which they took turns investing.  The story of how they moved into a single skull together is told in lady slings the booze. 

Joe Quigley
: former private dick from New York; now gone public.  He’s married to Arethusa, and they worked together at Lady Sally’s House in its final year.  I’ve always thought he’s a dead ringer for Dan Rather, myself, but he says he can’t see it. 

Josie Bauer
: one of Callahan’s best-loved regulars.  A humor groupie, her unvarying custom was to offer to sleep with whoever won the Punday Night competition.  Few winners, male or female, ever turned her down, or reported regret afterwards.  Further deponent sayeth not. 

Rachel (last name unknown): 232 years old at the time she entered cryogenic suspension in 1973.  Fast Eddie visits her every week.  See CALLAHAN'S CROSSTIME SALOON for details. 

Maureen
: this is probably Maureen Hooker, former artist in the employ of Lady Sally McGee, currently free-lancing as a team with her husband Willard, a legendary confidence man now retired from the game.  They fell in love in callahan’s lady.

Priscilla
(last name unknown): Lady Sally’s bouncer; sort of a female version of the Terminator—the friendly one, from the second film.  Her heroic death is recounted in lady slings the booze; briefly, she died because she was bulletproof. 

Phillip
(last name unknown) and Tim (last name unknown): alumnae of Lady Sally’s House; see cl and lstb for details. 

Father Newman
: a Catholic priest who hung out…uh…religiously at Lady Sally’s House.  An organized and determined conspiracy of patrons, who attempted to nail down once and for all whether or not he ever actually availed himself of an artist’s services while there, disbanded with the question unresolved.  I know, but I won’t tell you. 

Woodrow W. Smith, Commodore Aaron Sheffield
and
Lazarus Long
: Yep.  That guy.  Very merry gent.  For an explanation of how a fictional character could walk into a bar in real life, see “THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST—” by Robert A. Heinlein. 

Stinky Kettering
: all anyone remembers about this guy is that he probably came in with Lazarus Long. 

Zebadiah J. Carter, Dr. Jacob Burroughs
: see above note regarding W.W. Smith.  It was believed at the time that these customers might be gay (despite the fact that their female companions were knockouts) since they were overheard using that word an inordinate number of times.  The Heinlein novel cited above later explained the matter. 

Tommy Robbins
: all I know is, the only surviving photo of him bears a remarkable resemblance to the guy who autographed my copy of even cowgirls get the blues.  Could be… 

Gentleman John Kilian
: his photo resembles the guy who autographed my copy of stand on zanzibar.   

Larry Van Cott
: strongly resembles the guy who autographed my copy of RINGWORLD, down to the detail that he apparently never drank anything but Irish coffee at Callahan’s.  The fact that said author writes a competing series of bar stories might account for the pseudonym… 

Chip Delany: looks very much like the guy who autographed my copy of babel-17. 

Edgar Pangborn
: If this is indeed the Pangborn who wrote davy and “Angel’s Egg,” I could kick myself for missing him at Callahan’s.  He’s not with us any more, more’s the pity.  Look him up in the library! 

John D. MacDonald
: again, if this was the author of the Travis McGee series and so many other fine books, I wish I’d bumped into him at Mike’s place; among other things, I always wanted to ask him what Meyer’s other name is, just to see how he’d answer … 

Ted Sturgeon
: no question, this is
that
Ted Sturgeon, one of the two best science fiction writers who ever lived.  I brought him to Callahan’s myself.  He was Punday Night champion for eight weeks running, a record exceeded only by Doc Webster himself—and gave seminars in Unlimited Inquiry (the symbol you’ll find with his quote was part of his autograph, and stood for “Ask the
Next
Question…”); Marriages Involving
Odd
Numbers of Spouses, and Advanced Hugging.  God bless you, Theodore, wherever you are. 

Robert A. Heinlein
: Ted’s only peer.  If you don’t know who he is, you should be reading one of his books instead of this one. 

Dick Buckley
: internal evidence—and mutual friend Ed McCurdy—suggest this may have been the late Lord Buckley (the Gasser! 1907-1960), the legendary American monologist who composed and declaimed free-verse tributes to his heros in Hipster, a dialect created by black jazz musicians and later adopted and adapted by white jazz musicians, beatniks, hippies and other undesirables.  C.P. Lee states that, like Louis Armstrong, His Lordship never performed without firing up a large pipe of marijuana first; unlike Pops, he did so onstage.  Lee also claims that Buckley and an entourage once crashed a Sinatra concert at the Waikiki Sheraton, stark naked.  (George Harrison’s song “Crackerbox Palace” was named for Lord Buckley’s home.)  Though his frame be long stashed, His Lordship’s surviving records are well worth the trouble of seeking out.