Little Casino

The kisses of Dolores

HE SAYS, SO WHAT DO YOU THINK, RED? How’s the fuckin’ Marines treating you? He looks up, arrogantly, from the bar and the big Irish lunk swings on him and knocks him off his stool, right across the space between the bar and the booths along the wall, so that he lands on his back beneath a table, blood pouring from his broken nose and split-open lip. How I love the kisses of Dolores, he thinks, for no reason at all, and then he thinks, for the first time in years, of Dolores. When he was fifteen or sixteen, he kept her company one night when she baby-sat for a neighbor. There was a piano in the apartment, a little upright against the wall, under a pitifully inept fake oil of pinkish clouds over a white sailboat on a lake the weird blue of Aqua Velva. Dolores, frowning beautifully, began to play the piano in a dreadfully mechanical way. He smiled, since he was helplessly in love with her, and her impossibly bad performance was as nothing to her sweet, dark virginity. She banged a tinny chord and then told him that she was very sad and tired of being a good student and that she wanted to do something, something, that she wanted to do something. Her face was as calm and beautiful as the Virgin’s. He turned this confidence into something else, sexual and forbidden. Of course.

Noise and commotion possess the bar and he decides that he’d better just lie there and stay out of the general brawl that is growing in the sickeningly inevitable way that brawls do. Barroom brawls are high-spirited affairs, with laughs and thrills, only in the movies. Who’s that Norwegian jarhead, who’s that punk jarhead? lemme kick that son of a bitch’s ass! somebody shouts. Red’s Irish, he says, to the bottom of the table. He’s glad that Dolores, wherever she is, didn’t see him get knocked flat. Fat George looks underneath the table, smiling, and holds out a bottle of beer to him. You’re not gonna eat any white clam sauce with that mouth, sport, right? He sings to Fat George: How I love the kisses of Dolores, only my Dolores. Well, he’s still got all his teeth.

Another night among the many that these young men in Brooklyn had to call their own, something, ah yes, that nobody could take away from them. Some think that experiences such as these build character, but they don’t. But they don’t. I’m enthralled, he says to Fat George, enthralled and thankful and proud to be a small part of neighborhood lore, yet again, and so will Dolores be proud, or so I have decided to pretend. Come out from under there, Fat George says, you look like shit. Dolores! Jesus.

“Dolores” was a hit song in 1941. Words by Frank Loesser, music by Louis Alter.

Dolores, at the time of the “piano incident,” was, as you may know, a sophomore at Fontbonne Hall, an academically excellent and sociallygenteel high school for very smart Catholic girls. The girls wore navy-blue wool serge jumpers, white blouses, black ties, black knee socks or white anklets, and black shoes. Young men, seized, as they were, by Eros, often ground their teeth in hopeless desire when gazing upon the more comely of these girls. These amorous reactions were surely not intended by those who devised the puritanical uniforms. The flesh is unruly.

The various acts of violence noted here occurred in Henry’s, an actual bar; “Red,” however, exists only in fiction, from which, it appears, he has escaped. Or, being a Marine, from which he has apparently gone AWOL.

An AWOL bag was a soldier’s term for a soft overnight or gym bag. Perhaps it still is.

A Jodie suit was, traditionally, a badly cut civilian suit of O.D. wool, given to prisoners upon their release, with Bad Conduct Discharges, from the stockade. Out into the world they went in these condemnatory rags. To make a brand-new start.

Jodie was a legendary figure who always managed to avoid military service. He was loathed and envied by the dog soldier, for his reward for shirking his duty was the easy acquisition of good jobs, plenty of money, excellent clothes, the best food and booze, and all the women he wanted. There was a shining American-ness to his exploits, for he was the man who got what he did not deserve.

EXHIBIT:

Jodie says he feels all right,

‘Cause he fucked your wife last night,

Sound off! One, two,

Sound off! Three, four!

Cadence count!

One! Two! Three! Four!

One-two!

Three FOUR!