Epitaph For A Dead Beat

CHAPTER 10

Behind the long dark bar in the Blue Soldier a bald Neanderthal type with a six-ply neck put down a wetly chewed cigar to take my order. It was a few minutes after nine. The man was about fifty-five. His shirt was white-on-white with a monogrammed Z over the pocket, his cufflinks were two more outsized Z’s, and his figured silk tie was as wide as the business end of a shovel where it disappeared into his white smock. There would be another initial on the belt buckle down under there. The man himself would have driven a booze truck during prohibition, would have taken some small independent chances in the petty rackets in the thirties, would have made his pile from black-market peddling during the war. Now he owned a chromed, gaudy tourist trap on lower Sixth Avenue, and within five minutes of the start of any conversation he would say something about being legitimate.

I could have been wrong. He was chewing the cigar again before he poured my bourbon. “No poetry reading tonight?” I asked him.

The man stopped pouring. He stared at me. I could not read his expression, but it was considerably like the one I might have gotten from certain good folk if I’d said something nasty about General MacArthur.

“Poets,” he said. “Beatniks. God almighty.”

He turned, started to walk away, stopped, snorted, came back. He put his elbows on the bar and leaned forward until his face was no more than three inches from my own. When he spoke again I had to strain my ears to hear him.

“In answer to your question, friend — no, there ain’t no goddam poetry reading.”

“You’re going to drop ashes in my drink,” I said just as quietly. “Forgive me. I’m sorry I brought it up.”

He backed away with a grimace. “I get something in your drink, you’ll get another drink. Drinks I got.”

“But no poetry readings.”

The man braced himself with both hands gripping the inner rim of the bar. “You really want to know? You’re not just making what you think would be friendly conversation?”

Td like to know.”

“You’ll stop me if I get violent? Sort of put your hand on my arm? I’ve got a touch of blood pressure.”

“Sure.”

He nodded gravely. He gestured toward my right with a stubby thumb. There were about twenty tables over that way, half of them occupied, and there was an empty bandstand.

“Nice little spot I got here, ain’t it? Brings in a good living, sends the kids to college — all strictly on the up and up, you know?”

I smiled pleasantly.

“No headaches at all. No high-priced entertainment — just a little dance music — steady clientele. So what happens? I get one of these uptown agents dropping in, hocking me, I should have these readings. Me, I donno from nothing — poetry’s out of my line — but be tells me out on the Coast they’re buying it like maybe it’s Equanil. Culture, he tells me.’ Three hundred bucks and I can own a poet for the weekend. A beard the guys got. Big son of a bitch, too, looks like he could wrestle Antonio Rocca better than writing poems. You follow me?”

“Peter J. Peters,” I said.

“Yeah.” He grunted. “So last Friday it goes on. I even bring my wife in, she goes for that sort of thing. First show at eleven, and by nine you can’t get a seat in the joint. Three, maybe four times as many customers as I ever had at one time before.”

“This is bad?”

He set the cigar down carefully on the edge of a glass tray. “Beer,” he said. “They wanted beer.”

I didn’t say anything.

“One,” he said. “One to a customer. Sometimes one to a table.” His nostrils quivered slightly. “This is the part where I tend to get upset. You’ll watch me, huh?”

I put my hand on his arm reassuringly.

“Six, maybe seven at a table usually holds four, see? So a waiter goes over. Maybe one guy orders. The other six don’t want nothing. Or maybe they say not yet. The waiter goes back, the six still don’t want. And the first guy doesn’t reorder, he’s still nursing the first one. You ever see a guy nurse one beer for three hours? Regular customers I got can’t get in, and six fully grown people are watching one guy nurse one beer for three hours. Characters talking all kinds of big words when what it adds up to, they can’t hold a job. Intellectuals. There’s even a table I got to replace, they carved things in. ‘Middle class morality is primeval.’ You want to tell me what the hell that means? A hundred and fifty people, and you know what I take in? I got more in the register since six o’clock tonight. Beatniks. The same slobs been hanging around the Village twenty years, this year they got a name. One more goddam poet or Beatnik son of a bitch sticks his nose in that door, I’m gonna—”

I squeezed his wrist. He stopped. “Yeah, yeah. Thanks.”

“You tell it with admirable restraint.”

“It’s a week, it gets easier. What’s your interest anyhow? You look like a man works for a living.”

“One of them owes me money.”

“The Russians should owe it to you, better. God almighty.”

I put some cash on the bar. He pushed it back toward me.

“You’ll remember it, you could come back,” he said. “A customer wears a tie, a customer’s got socks under his shoes — I’m just starting to see he’s worth being nice to.”

He was lost in thought when I went out of there. There was a cast of stolid, painful determination over his face. Like the look of a man learning to live with disgrace in the family.