Punching on Maxie Smuts
“Here’s a grim story, kid,” Grandpa said. He said this:
“Used to always drink at this place. Behind the bar, Scott Mike would wring out his grimey rag and cough straight into a drunk’s face. It was a dim scene. This bar only had about, oh, six mugs, so if you were the seventh person in the bar you had to drink from a pint glass. No one wanted to drink out of the pint glasses because Marvin Chuckles pissed on all of them one summer while they sat in storage during the time the bar was shut down for A Mysterious Reason. The bar had an unassuming name. Some woman’s name, fuck. Geraldine’s Elbow Room. Maybe it was Mulligan’s Briar Patch, actually. Sorry kid, I can’t remember.
Men sat around on those barstools for miserable weeks in a row, lamenting the bitter passage of time. Time, that motherfucker. Scott Mike would pour out some low grade bourbon into chipped rocks glasses and slide them down the bar to the guys who needed them the most. He had ghoulish hands. In 1991, when you were little, Scott Mike strangled his old mother to death with those hands, right in the apartment behind your Aunt June’s house. But this before that. Before we knew what he could do.”
Grandpa paused and lit a Pall Mall. My brain shrieked wildly with a profane flood of death scenes. The jungle cat with the human smile comes traipsing down from the trees in the replica jungle scene, set up in the attic.
Grandpa kind of smiled and frowned at the same time, and said some more of this kind of shit:
“The jukebox used to always play ‘Lonestar State of Mind,’ and a motherfucker could just taste the words, like they were sitting on top of your beer. Like someone painted them onto your tongue while you were sleeping. The words tasted like the candy in your weirdest dreams, kid, full of poisonous flavors. God, I need a beer.”
And so on:
“Marvin Chuckles was throwing darts with Awful Andy by the back entrance, where all the little molly working girls used to have their pleasure corner. Out of nowhere two liquored up women started screaming and punching on Maxie Smuts until Scott Mike and Quigley the Heavy had to roll up their sleeves and drag them out of the bar. Three times in one day alone, I saw-”
The mind is a musical place when the smoke rises up from the sewer grates of memory. Grandpa had a lot to say about fucking nothing. But listen, so do I:
I love the honky tonk aw shucks ‘Lonestar State of Mind’ original, but have you ever heard Pat Guadagno play it? Go check him out at the Celtic Cottage about 15 years ago. “Corpus Christi seems so far away,” he sings, “and I ain’t talkin bout the miles.” Pat Guadagno gets a couple minor lyrics wrong when he dives deep into his catalogue of covers, but it’s okay. The sky is stained with the tears of longing, across time and tide and death like Cummings said. But shit, who cares. Here are some fine lyrics:
“Your phone call took me by surprise, gee it’s been a long, long time.”
*
Here’s something my grandfather said to me on Christmas Eve in 2004, right before Uncle Chollie’s house burned down and we started just going straight to Dooney’s to get hammered without any of the holiday bullshit. He was really old by then, and he said this:
“I loved that bar. It wasn’t called Mulligan’s, it was called Stuffy’s. I’ll tell you what, I sure do love toffee peanuts. Braddy Longlegs threw a near perfect game of darts one night at that bar and made about 35 enemies doing it. Single night competition with a prize of $1000 cash, stuffed into a big empty jar that used to have pickled eggs in it. Thirty-four of the 35 pissed off dart throwers would go home that evening and 34 would not kill Braddy Longlegs. It only takes one, though.
Kid, one day I had the strangest adventure with one of those assholes down at the bar. I guess you could say we were buddies, but really he just cut my hair for awhile when he was a barber and then I stopped having hair and just seen him at the bar. Oh wait, that’s old Tony Pace, the barber. I’m actually talking about Giacomo the mechanic. I get all the old faces mixed up nowadays. Anyways, listen, kid, I hope I’m not boring you, but just shut up and listen.”
Grandpa’s story continued on:
“We were down at the bar drinking morning beers on a Friday because no one was working that day for some reason. Buddy Ryan was coaching for us back then. No, it has nothing to do with my story, but just listen, willya?
But, ehh, I don’t know, ya know old Giacomo the mechanic, he said, ‘Hey Joe, what do ya say we go have lunch down at Marie Susan’s? Get outta this place and have a good lunch.’ So yea, I says yea to him, let’s get outta here. We finish our beers and we get into Giacomo’s old Buick, and yea, we head down to Marie Susan’s, and we have a whole lunch like a couple of big shots mafia dons or something. Giacomo orders us all these olives and cheeses, and Marie’s girl Angie pours us glasses of red wine out of the jugs with the straw on the bottom and all that shit. We had a full on little dago afternoon. It was fuckin’ great. And you know I never even cross Two Street, kid, except at Christmas when I pick up cannolis for your grandma.
Anyways, yea, it was nice, ya know? So, ah, on the way home, Giacomo says ‘Hey, Joe, I gotta make a stop before we head back to the bar.’ Ya know, I said ok, sure. We drove over the bridge and in like 30 minutes, we pull off the highway and end up in some farmland cemetery down in Hammonton, New Jersey.
I follow him around to the back of the graveyard, and when we get to this small little headstone, kinda set off by itself, he kneels on the ground in front of it. He’s silent for a long time, and I see tears coming down his face, so I walked off and had a few cigarettes to give him some privacy.
Those Winchester mini cigars. I can’t ‘em nowhere no mores, and they were my absolute favorite. Remember those? Me and your old boss Cliff down at the Mobil station are the only two guys I ever seen smoke Winchester minis. It was that red box, same as a normal cigarette pack, and they had the little plastic filter tips. I can’t smoke the Middleton cherries anymore. Your grandma won’t let me smoke them in the house, and it’s too cold in the garage. Ah, well.
But yea, I come back around to where Giacomo’s at, I say, ah, ‘Hey buddy, you ok?’ Just like that, ya know, I say ‘You ok?’, and he looked up at me with eyes like I never seen before. He looked holy like one of the guys in a Michaelangelo painting. I looked at the headstone and it said ‘Carmen DeFerrari, May 30 1967 - June 2 1967.’
Giacomo says to me, ah, ‘My son. My boy.’ He doesn’t say nothing else, and he walked past me, back to where we parked the Buick. Listen, kid, I knew Giacomo was married a long time before that, but I never knew anything about his family really, or, ah, anything like that. It just goes to show, so ya never know.
Your aunt tells me you’re still shooting up that dope. She says ‘Give up on him, Dad. He’s got a death wish.’ I don’t know, kid, I won’t give up on ya. Grandpa’ll never give up on ya.”