Callahan's Secret (13 page)

We have two or three regulars at Callahan’s who fit that nondescription: old and dear friends of ours who have -never set foot in the place. One of them, for instance, is a ghost, and I’ll tell you about him another time, when we’ve both had a couple more drinks. But the one I’d like to tell you about right now is a human being-and while I have seen him once, I don’t think I ever will again.

It was a Punday Night last year when the Cheerful Charlies showed up looking glum. This was quite unusual, enough so to engage my attention when I caught sight of them both-for the Cheerful Charlies have, quite literally, earned their name.

Doe Webster had already won the Punday competition-something he does with about the same consistency with which Mr. T wins arguments. The only way the Doe can possibly lose is if all possible puns on a given topic have been exhausted before it’s his turn-and far more often, when everyone else has come up empty, the Doc still has four or five up his sleeve. You might say that our chronic asteismus is iatrogenic… but of course you probably wouldn’t.

Like now, for instance: the evening’s topic had been one of those so broad as to seem inexhaustible-“animals”- and owl give ewe the gnus: most of us cats and chicks were falcon hoarse as we toad the lion and shrew our glasses into the fire in sheepish cabitchulation. But Dog Websteer was still game, cheerfoal as venison the springtime, a weaselly grin on his puss that got my goat.

“-always puzzled me,” he was saying, “that females of all species except the human seem, at best, utterly disinterested in mating. Most will actively resist it until tompelled by glandular pressure, and even then seem to derive little enjoyment from the business. Why,I wondered, should human females alone be blessed with the capacity to enjoy the inevitable?”

A good question. I’d always wondered that myself.

“The answer turns out to be simple. Man is a bald ape.”

“Oh, God,” Shorty Steinitz groaned. “Even for you, Doe, that’s an awfid pun.”

The Doe blinked and then grinned. “You misunderstand me, sir-for once the pun was unintentional. No, I mean that man is relatively hairless-whereas, through some sadistic quirk of nature, most other male animals are endowed with hairy penises. A cat’s penis, for instance, is covered with short, spiky hairs-whichface in the wrong direction.”

Murmurs of surprise and sympathy ran around the tavern; a few ladies winced.

“Small wonder, then,” the Doe went on, folding his hands across his expansive belly, “that a female cat doesn’t much feel like putting out-for any tom dickin’ hairy.” The horrified silence stretched out for nearly five seconds and then we awarded him the Supreme Accolade: as one we left our drinks where they stood, held our noses, and fled screaming into the night.

It was a nice night out there (not that that matters to any friend of Mickey Finn these days); I found that I was in no hurry to follow the rest of the gang back inside. My drink was perfectly safe where it was, and I wanted a few minutes alone with myself. I was feeling… well, “troubled” would be too strong a word, but I don’t know a word for the shading between there and “content.” Just one of those mild itches of the soul that a man doesn’t particularly feel like sharing with all his Mends, a passing impulse to toot for a few bars on the old self-pity horn.

It was, perhaps inevitably, just as I was finishing a contemplative cigarette and saying “Sometime again,” to the full moon that the Cheerful Charlies drove up in their ‘54 Thunderbird and wedged it into the confusion. (By honored custom, the parking lot at Callahan’s always looks as though a platoon of psychopaths had turned a game of Bumper Cars into an unresolvable snarl and wandered off. A half-dozen times a night we all have to pile outside to let somebody out, and it doesn’t inconvenience us in the least.) Just the sight of their splendid old heap cheered me up some.

Neither of them is named Charlie; that’s their professional designation and job description. They cheer people up for a living. You may have seen their ad in the paper:

DEPRESSED? Gamble a little time on The Cheerful

Charlies. $25 if we cheer you up, nothing at all if we don’t: you decide! 24-hr. emergency service available (rates double from 10 RM. to 8 A.M. Call CHE-ERUP for an appointment: What have you got to lose?

And, of course, their business card sums it up even more succinctly: HAVE FUN, WILL TRAVEL.

They did not found the business. That was done by Tom Flannery a few years back. Tom was one of the most infectiously cheerful men I ever met, and he had a certain natural advantage in cheering people up: at the time he founded his enterprise, Tom had about eight months to go on the nine-month sentence his doctors had given him (and did in fact eventually die on schedule almost to the day).

He didn’t talk about it much, but it made a terrific holecard for dealing with cases of intractable self-pity. How many people have the gall to be depressed around a smiling fellow who says he’ll be dead before your tax-return comes back? Tom hadn’t expected to make money at his job-but to his surprise he left a sizable estate.

The present Cheerful Charlies began as clients of Tom’s. Each was depressed by the same two things: both were chronically unemployed, and both bore names of the sort that parents ought to be prevented by law or by vigilante violence from giving to their children. The Moore fan~ily pronounced their name “More,” and saw fit to name their son Les; while the Gluehams, with a malignant case of the cutes, named their daughter Merry.

The coincidence of names was just too much for Tom Flannery to resist, I guess. He convinced them both that one of the best ways to cheer yourself up is to try and cheer other people up (it worked for him, after all), and took them both .on as apprentices, thus solving their unemployment problem. As he must have hoped., they fell in love-and when they marned, they solved the question of does-she-take-his-last-name by swapping even-steven. With irresistible appropriateness, she became Merry Moore and he became Les Glueham. They carried on Tom’s business after he died, and the story of their names itself is sometimes sufficient to get a client smiling.

Les and Merry have no set routine, but rather a whole spectrum of techniques which they tailor to fit the individual case. They are wise and warm people, with professionally tuned empathic faculties, and they seem to have made a remarkably comfortable marriage. One of their early cases, for instance, was a lonely old widower who had lost all his joy in living: after all their best efforts had failed, Merry and Les talked it over, decided that it might help and that in this specific case it probably couldn’t hurt-and then Merry took the old gentleman to bed. It did the trick, and since then they have (very infrequently) had occasions to use lovemaking as cheer-up therapy, singly or together. It has always worked so far, and they always refuse their fee in such cases. This is both to avoid breaking laws, and to motivate themselves to exhaust all other possibilities before resorting to Old Reliable-But-Risky; it inhibits the human tendency to rationalize oneself into the sack. But some cases of depression will yield to no other medicine.

And if even that doesn’t work, Merry and Les bring ‘em to Callahan’s Place.

But they didn’t appear to have a client with them tonight. They got out of the T-Bird, a little slowly I thought, and came my way. Merry was carrying something that looked like a big piece of stereo gear, and Les seemed to have a hardcover book with him. “Hey, Jake-what’s the matter?” Merry called to me.

“God’s teeth,” I said under my breath. Then aloud: “From twenty feet across a parking lot by moonlight you can tell I’ve got something on my mind. From what? The echo of an expression I was wearing before you pulled up? You people are incorrigibly good at what you do, you know that?”

“Ouch,” Les said softly.

They had almost reached me by now, and the third thing I saw was that Les’s hardcover was a boxed videotape, and the second thing I saw was that Merry’s stereo was a VCR, and the first thing I saw was that Les and Merry were-astonishingly, most uncharacteristically-miserably depressed. Their expressions, their stride, their body language, all said that they wei~e so far down that up was for astronomers; they had, to quote a song, of mine, the Industrial Strength Blues.

“Jesus Christ on a Moped, what’s the matter with you two?” An unpleasant thought began to form. “Oh hell, you didn’t lose one, did you?” That happened a year ago, a sleeping-pill job, and it took us all about a week to put the Cheerful Charlies back together again. It is the occupational risk, and a failure rate as low as one a year means that the Cheerfuls are supernaturally good at what they do.

(They have to be; there is no malpractice insurance for their racket.)

“No,” Merry inswered, “not yet anyway.”

“Well, tell me about it.”

“You tell us yours first.”

“Mine? Hey, on a scale of ten I’m a point two five and you guys are up in the eights-and-I think it’s a log scale, like the Richter.”

“Come on, give. If it’s a simple one, great: we could use the confidence right now.”

I shrugged. “Okay. I was just going a few rounds with envy.”

“Of whom?” Merry asked, setting the VCR down on the Datsun I was using for a bench.

“The Doc.”

“I like to make people laugh. So I troll for the best jokes I can find, make up the best ones I can devise, work on my timing, try to work the audience into it and use their feedback-and it works pretty well, most times they laugh, or groan, or whatever I was looking for. The Doe could recite his Social Security Number, deadpan, and lay ‘em on the floor. Damnut, I tell better jokes than he does, I even think I tell ‘em better-and he gets more laughs. With his incredibly tortuous set-ups and his corny voice and - his Paleozoic punchlines, we all fall down laughing. Even me! He’s just an intrinsically funny man-and I’m just a guy who tries to be funny.”

“And the worst of it,” Les said, “is that be’s such a totally nice guy, you can’t even dislike him for it.”

“Bullseye.”

Merry grinned, a ghost of her usual grin. “This is ironic.” She and Lea shared a glance.

I shook my head ruefully. “For you guys, no doubt. So okay: in the words of Mr. Ribadhee to the Hip Ghand, ‘Straighten me, ‘cause I’m ready.”

“Jake,” Les said, “a few years ago you lent us a novel called Lord of Light, by Roger Zelazny.. Remember it?”

“Sure. An SF novel about a world patterned after Hindu mythology.”

“Right-and then along came Buddha to kick over the applecart. Now, remember how the people who had become ‘gods’ were each able, at will, to take on an Aspect and raise up an Attribute?”

“Yama could become Death, and drink your life with his eyes, Mara’s Aspect was illusion, and his Attribute was to cloud your mind with a gesture. And so forth.”

“You’ve got it. Well, it’s like that with the Doc. His Aspect is Humor. In a figurative, but very real sense, Doe

Webster is Humor-at least when he chooses to take on his Aspect. And his Attribute is the ability to make you piss yourself laughing. Envying him is like envying a flower because it never needs deodorant.”

“Huh,” I said. “I think I get you. It’s silly to envy the gods.”

“Especially when you are one.”

“Jake,” Merry said, “when was the last. time someone interrupted you while you were singing?”

“Well…” I couldn’t bring such an instance to mind. People do tend to quiet down when I take my guitar out of her case.

Les did his uncanny Martin Mull imitation. “Remember the Great Folk Music Scare of the Fifties?” he quoted. “That shit almost caught on.’ Jake, haven’t you noticed that you’re about the only folksinger left on Long Island who can still fmd regular work? Don’t you know why you don’t need electronics and a thousand watts and a rhythm section to get gigs? Man, when you pick up Lady Macbeth and put her across your lap and open your mouth, you take on your Aspect-and when you wring her neck and coax sound out of her sounding-box and sing along with her, you’re raising up your Attribute. You take people out of themselves, for as long as you choose to go on singing. Doe Webster is Humor, Jake, and you are Music. Don’t you know that?”

I thought it over-and suddenly grinned. “How did you guys ever get the name Cheerful Charlies?”

“Maybe because we own the complete works of Walt Kelly,” Les hazarded. “Come on, let’s go inside.”

“Wait-what about your problem? Cheering-up ought to be like breastfeeding, you know, mutually satisfactory”

“Tit for tot?” Merry asked innocently.

Les mock-glared at her. “I think our problem should be taken inside,” he said. “We need a group head on this one.” So we went in and took chairs at the bar.

Mike Callahan came ambling over, wiping his big hands on his apron, smiling broadly when he saw the Cheerfuls. He took out one of the non-safety stick matches he imports from Canada, struck it on his stubbly chin, and put a fresh light on one of the stunted malodorous cigars he imports from Hell. “Well, if it ain’t the Beerful Barleys! What’ll it be, folks?”

I finished the beer I had left on the counter and answered for all three -of us. “Bless us father, for we have thirst.” Callahan nodded and made up three portions of God’s Blessing. It is called Irish Coffee by the vulgar, and I’m told there are actually places where they don’t sugar the rim of the glass before making it-but we who drink at Callahan’s Place have a proper respect for the finer things in life. “Here you go, folks.” I could tell from his expression that Mike had picked up on the Cheerfuls’ state of mind, and wanted to know what they were down about. But… look, I’ve been hanging out at Callahan’s for a good many years now. But if I walked in tomorrow night with a toilet bowl tattooed on my forehead, Mike Callahan would fail to notice it unless and until I brought the matter up. Mike likes that people should open up and talk about their troubles in his bar-and so he has given standing orders to Fast Eddie the piano player that anyone caught asking snoopy questions is to be discouraged with a blackjack.

Occasionally, though, he will allow himself to lead a witness. “So bow’s life been treating you?” he asked as he Blessed us.