Exile on Kalamazoo Street (2 page)

“What song?” Bennie said, so far simply curious.

“ ‘Jim Dandy to the Rescue,' ” I said, purposely reciting the title rather than singing it and potentially digging a deeper hole.

“Oh, yeah,” Bennie said, but sounding like he was struggling to place it.

“Black Oak Arkansas,” I said, wishing I hadn't brought it up. I had needlessly diverted the opening diplomacy to unfamiliar territory for him.

“What?” Bennie said.

“That's the band,” I said. “Black Oak Arkansas. Turns out it's also an actual town in Arkansas. Imagine that.”

“Yeah,” he said, glancing down at his drink a moment. “Imagine that.”

“It's a simple song,” I said. “A dumb song. Mostly it just keeps repeating ‘Jim Dandy to the rescue.' I can't even recall what Jim Dandy was rescuing.”

“Maybe he was rescuing the song,” Bennie said.

“It needed it, for sure.”

“Okay—I think I know that one,” Bennie said, his tone neutral and signaling no real damage had been done. “That might be on the jukebox down at Up and Under.”

Music was a dangerous topic at the front end of meeting a new tribe. The music could be the wrong music. I'm a diehard Stones fan, for example. The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, too. Give me The Kinks and The Who anytime. Or Led Zeppelin. But Bennie could be country. Bennie might get boners for Hank Williams, or even Hank's dipshit Tea Party son. All that tears in my beers stuff. I think that's from a country song. The whole tribe at Louie's might circle jerk to Travis Tritt and Clint Black and all those other folks wearing silly-ass cowboy hats while maybe not knowing which end of a horse the oats go in.

I bought Bennie a Crown Royal to make sure I hadn't strayed too far and tainted my first tribal encounter.

“You from down there?” Bennie said. “Arkansas? Did you work down there?”

“Nope, never been that far south,” I lied. Drunks lie easily and even happily, and besides, I didn't want to open up more things to be explained at a first meeting. Lying is Jim Dandy to the Rescue.

“Me, neither,” he said. “I guess Cairo, Illinois, is as far south as I've gone. That's south enough for me. Got some family down there. Hillbilly relatives.”

When Bennie said Cairo, it came out as ‘Kay-row.' I'd always thought it was pronounced ‘Care-O,' at least that was how I'd first heard it. My family had driven through the town once when I was a little kid and we had stopped there for lunch, at a Dairy Queen. I pronounced it ‘Care-O' and Bennie either didn't notice or didn't care. I wondered briefly whether he would pronounce the Egyptian Cairo as ‘Kay-row' or ‘Ky-row.'

“I don't know Cairo,” I said, lying again. “I've been to Cincinnati. Is that south?”

“From here it is,” Bennie said, slapping his palm on the bar.

“Most places are south of here,” I added, not exactly sure what I meant by it.

“That's right,” he said. “Just us between Canada and the rest of the damn country.”

“Ever been to Canada, Bennie?”

“Fuck Canada.”

I took that as a no and decided not to pursue it. Instead I quickly gauged how I was dressed. I never wore suits or ties and usually wore khakis and a button-down shirt, sometimes a sweater vest, too. Or a crew neck sweater when it was cold. I had on khakis and a polo shirt on that day because it was warm outside. I know Bennie probably had me pegged for some sort of office job. Just not an office job too far up the food chain, which was good. My hair—brown and a full thick head of it—tended to creep past my ears a bit, but without appearing to be something I spent too much time on. Long hair would be okay with the tribe if it belonged to someone who worked up a sweat for a paycheck. Bennie had a dark crew cut, and because he was short and stocky it made his head seem even bigger. It was not a small head.

I ordered a Canadian Club on the rocks, smirking about the fact that it was
Canadian
whiskey, and we sipped our drinks silently for a few minutes, bringing to the forefront the sound of a good-looking, tall blonde with a great rack bullshitting several tribe members at the other end of the bar as she stretched her white blouse. Someone played the jukebox, but it was country and they all sound the same to me.

“So,” Bennie finally said, “been working hard, or hardly working?”

That was perhaps one of the oldest and corniest and most overused Midwestern expressions I knew, but pretty much standard fare for Bennie's tribe, I suspected, which was lubricated by booze, but bound by the notion that they worked for a living—worked with their hands.

“Hardly working, of course,” I said, adding “man” because man is a good way to address tribe members to be familiar, but not too familiar—to be down to earth and one of the fellows. A solid, working man. I raised my glass in salute because by then I had enough of the whiskey in me not to mind a mindless conversation.

He raised his glass, too. A moment later he said, “So, what sort of work have you been avoiding lately?”

I sipped my drink, which would always be understood by tribe members as a sort of private moment all were allowed as time to think before answering. It was what passed for contemplation within the tribe—fleeting introspection. Sort of like a quick time-out. I thought of movies about World War II, where an escaped Allied soldier tried to pass for German to board a train, but first had to get past the two burly Gestapo guys in gorgeous leather coats that checked his papers and listened carefully to his accent.

“Well,” I finally said. “You know … the usual. A little of this, a little of that.”

He smirked, but it was a good smirk, a friendly smirk, an accepting smirk. The official tribal smirk. The drunk tribe's version of the greeter at Walmart.

And I couldn't possibly tell him, in the first encounter with the tribe, that I taught English at one of the local colleges, and had even published several novels. Guys like Bennie didn't do much reading unless it was a sports magazine while they waited to have their cars serviced at Jiffy Lube. What I did for a living would take some time to get used to because tribe members were suspicious of work that didn't involve hands and sweat and elbow grease. It's not that I wouldn't have been welcome that day, but I would have been kept at a distance, like a foreigner wandering into the wrong place to ask directions.

An independent bookkeeper, for example, someone who did taxes, would be welcome into the tribe because that person often did the taxes for guys like Bennie. And an independent bookkeeper ran a small business, which was also a good attribute as far as the tribe was concerned. Bookkeepers weren't high up on any corporate food chains. A bookkeeper didn't have to have an MBA and tend to be an Armani-wearing jerk-off in a Porsche.

I guessed that at first I must have looked like a potential bookkeeper to Bennie and the tribe. Or an insurance agent, which again was not too bad as far as the tribe was concerned, as long as the agent showed up without a tie, or at least loosened his tie and kept his expensive jacket off and didn't look too corporate. If an insurance agent bought them drinks and told them raunchy jokes, they'd squeal with delight and slap him on the back and say, “That Jim Lonnergan. He's okay for a corporate fuck.”

“A toast to ‘hardly working,' ” I said when more drinks arrived. I saluted Bennie again, who returned it enthusiastically. For a tribe, saying “hardly working” was sort of like Nazis shouting,
Deutschland über alles
. Minus the Holocaust, swastikas, World War II etc.

“Bears or Lions,” Bennie said quickly—a crucial pop quiz. Sports were usually the cornerstone for the tribe.

“Bears,” I said quietly because I didn't yet know whether Louie's was a Bears bar or a Lions bar or a little of both. There were banners for both teams on the walls. In Kalamazoo it was often a mix, with some joints leaning toward Detroit instead of Chicago and vice versa.

“Good man,” Bennie said. “Da Bears.”

“Absolutely. Da Bears.”

“What's your take on Cutler?” Bennie said.

“A crybaby, but a great arm.”

“There's that,” Bennie said. “But he's still a pussy. Fuck Jay Cutler.”

I nodded. “As long as he beats the Lions, he's a good pussy. He's
our
pussy.”

That was nice and safe. No controversy. Bennie raised his glass in salute.

“Fuck the Lions,” he said, “and fuck the damn Packers, too.”

“I'm hearing you on the cheese heads, man,” I said.

“Fuck the cheese heads,” he said.

“Absolutely. Fuck them. Their cheese, too.”

“And fuck their women, too,” Bennie said.

“I'll help you all I can,” I said.

“And fuck the horses they rode in on,” he said, raising his glass again.

“Can't help you with that one,” I said.

He grinned. “You're okay, Bryce.”

“Bryce like in ice,” I said, again perplexed as to why I said it.

But I was clearly in like Flynn. I knew it was best not to get into an argument over a player or a team the first time with a new tribe. That can go south quickly and turn ugly. Then you're a marked man. An outcast. Just go with the flow at first. Be a jovial fellow. Plenty of time to bitch and moan about sports and women and politics once the tribe is used to seeing your face and hearing your voice. And after you have bought tribe members many more drinks. Drinks are as good as gold to the tribe.

On that day, my first day there at Louie's, my first powwow in the tribe's encampment, Bennie was sort of the tribe's point man, their scout. And as we got drunker, my allegiance to the Bears and hiding my job as a professor and novelist for a while helped me grease the wheels and gradually become accepted. Only after a number of visits to Louie's would I reveal what I actually did for a living, that I had an actual expensive education and knew the ten-cent words and could spell them, too. But by that time I had bought a great many Crown Royals for Bennie and others, and made a great many silly comments about women and football and baseball and politics. And so in the end, I became sort of the token education wing of the tribe.

That was three years ago.

I
nterminable night shape-shifted into reluctant morning as the pale, smooth bedroom ceiling stared back at me. Covers up to my chin, I contemplated for a time whether the ceiling was merely off-white or actually beige. Or a shade between the two I could not name. Soon a fly meandered along the ceiling until it stopped so long that staying in bed to watch it didn't sound like a plan. I sat up with all the grace of two dry and rusty gears attempting to mesh and I rubbed my eyes. I was well into exile in my house, on my street—Kalamazoo Street. Exile on Kalamazoo Street. That would make a good title for a book, I realized. Like the Rolling Stones, rock and roll exiles who holed up in Keith Richards' basement in the south of France to create something new, something raw and primal—
Exile on Main Street
—I was holed up in my house to create something and feeling a bit raw and primal, too. I resolved to listen to
Exile on Main Street
again, though so far I had avoided the electric universe of TV, DVD players, and the Internet in order to focus on the world right in front of me, through sober eyes.

After I was dressed, someone knocked loudly on the front door—the doorbell was broken and I had no plans to fix it. Through a crack in the yellowed curtain covering the door's small window, I saw a tall, thin man with close-cropped brown hair. His face was so narrow, so pinched, that I fleetingly recalled one of those aliens-posing-as-humans stories from a tabloid in a magazine rack at Walgreens. The man cleared his throat and looked down the street for a moment. He wore a handsome dark suit and blue tie and a very crisp-looking white shirt—a tan trench coat under one arm, despite the cold. I didn't recognize him at first. After a moment of indecision spicing a fear of the unknown, I realized it was Rev. Mortensen, the head Holy Roller at the church my sister Janis attended. I had gone there a few times with her the previous year when her marriage was on the rocks, and she needed someone to listen to her. But I couldn't imagine why he was at my door. I barely knew the man, had met him maybe twice with Janis at church—which was Presbyterian, I think. Even then the meetings had been brief and mercifully superficial. Behind me, Black Kitty sat on the stairs as Rev. Mortensen knocked again.

“He's a persistent cuss,” I said to the cat. “Do we let this salesman in, boy? He's a salesman, I can assure you. He sells the ultimate product.”

Black Kitty didn't seem impressed, and I waited to see if the reverend would knock a third time. He did, which was impressive as well as disappointing. I realized I had to answer because if I didn't, he might alert Janis about it, and she would worry for no reason. I had learned to save worrying for all the really good reasons. I opened the curtain, remembered to smile, and motioned toward the side door.

“Use the side door, Rev. Mortensen,” I said, realizing I had forgotten his first name. I was not especially enjoying the ominous Swedish sound of Rev. Mortensen.

I was slow to get to the side door—delaying my arrival because the good reverend was not just in the neighborhood. No coincidence, to be sure. And he likely was selling something I wasn't interested in buying. For Janis's sake, I knew I had to be polite. Or at least attempt politeness. I suspected the good reverend might be flummoxed by the news that I had exiled myself in my house for the winter in order to stop drinking.

Exile meant being an easy target. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. One lonely fish in a small barrel. And now people were discovering the barrel. Soon Jehovah's Witnesses and Buddhist monks would arrive, too. And a good old-fashioned Bible-thumping Baptist preacher, just for good measure. Maybe some nihilists. And why not some anarchists?