Old Songs in a New Cafe Page 5

  Finally, the surest way to lose romance forever is to do things just for money, even though your cells tell you this is not what you should be doing.

  Now, in no particular order, here are some suggestions for keeping romance around you (or getting her back if she has flown):

  Read some poetry every day. For starters, try a little Yeats, then some Kipling (along with some of his stories). I know Kipling must be terribly out of fashion nowadays, but romantics never concern themselves with fashion anyhow.

  Set a new schedule for yourself and do your reading then. Try this: Instead of flopping around in bed, get up early—maybe 4 A.M.—on a Sunday, in the winter, when a classic Iowa howler is blowing in from the Dako-tas. This works pretty well. Besides, you have the secret pleasure of being reasonably sure you are the only one in the Western Hemisphere reading Kipling at that very moment.

  Here’s another idea. Sometime in your life, build your own house or at least the most intimate parts of it. Design it, too, with lots of thought You will get endless pleasure and romance from walking through doorways and knowing you put the door there with your mind and your hands.

  Collect little things, like the old knife on your desk or the small box you had for keepsakes when you were a child. At a time in my life when I was just overcome with administrative burdens, and my face showed it, one of my faculty gave me a small wooden flute along with a note that said, “Don’t let your muse slip away.” I keep the flute where I can see it.

  Play a musical instrument. Something you can get out on those early mornings when reading is not the thing. Don’t tell me you are not musical and, for heaven’s sake, don’t tell me you are tone deaf. I simply, if you’ll pardon the expression, won’t hear of it. If all else fails, or even if it doesn’t, buy an Appalachian dulcimer. You can get warm, exotic sounds out of it right away without knowing anything formal about music at all. Try reading some ancient Chinese poetry while you strum the dulcimer. It works wonders.

  Travel is good for romance. But don’t just travel; travel. Here’s what you need: notebooks, a small compass, a pocket atlas of the world, and a spyglass for looking out of airplane windows or across the rooftops of Paris or far down the country lanes in England. A word of warning is needed here: If you are traveling with your boss and he or she is not a romantic, be careful. You may not want to be seen with your compass and a spyglass on an airplane. If you are a true romantic, however, it won’t matter much, because you will be good at what you do and your boss will just shake his or her head and mutter about what one has to put up with to get quality work these days.

  Keep good journals of your life and travels. This is vitally important. I delight in reading and re-reading my adventures in the old markets of Saudi Arabia, where I bargained for gold and silver to bring home, and my wild ride through the streets of Riyadh late at night with a Bedouin cab driver who played Arabic music on a tape deck and tried to give me a short course in his language, while the best I could do was teach him to say “Kleenex” by pointing to a box of it on his dashboard.

  I like knowing that I was in Richmond, Virginia, at 7:55 A.M. on June 7, 1981, or that I was in Paris in the snow in January 1982, or that I was once in Montego Bay, Jamaica, in the spring.

  One of the most haunting entries in my journals reads, “12:24 P.M. Back in Iowa Georgia and Rachael are sleeping (3:24 A.M.), and Fm over Egypt.” When I wrote that, I remember feeling very far away, in more ways than just miles, somehow.

  My secretary leaves me alone when I fall behind in an especially unappealing piece of work, and a cold, gray, November rain is splattering against the third-floor windows of Seerley Hall. She knows I’m traveling. I stand, put my hands in my pockets, stare out those windows, and I’m comforted by the knowledge that somewhere the big planes are turning for Bombay or Bangkok, for Brisbane or Barcelona, and romance is skipping along their wings.

  But romance is not just outward bound. She also rides your shoulder when you turn for home, with your notebooks full, your suitcase packed with dirty clothes, when it’s only a few days before Christmas and London’s Heathrow Airport is pandemonium, with all flights overbooked. But then you’re on, in your seat, London falls behind, Ireland is below; you get out the notebook again, and you write,’God, all I want now is to see Georgia, Rachael, the pups, Roadcat, and eat a giant plate of Georgia’s world-famous spaghetti.”

  Finally, you’ve got to work at remembering that romance is all around you. It’s not somewhere else. Here are two examples.

  I had to go to the Hawaiian island of Oahu a while back. Everyone told me, before I went, how crass and junky Oahu and, particularly, Honolulu have become. It certainly looks that way, at first glance. “But,” I said to myself, “romance must still be here somewhere.” At first I couldn’t see her. My vision was blocked by Don Ho standing around drinking a pina colada. But something caught my eye—and there was romance, right behind him, jumping up and down and waving to me. So, I got up before dawn, went down to the beach, rolled up my jeans, waded in, and stood there in the pre-dawn grayness, playing my flute with the water washing around me and thinking about what this must have looked like when Captain Cook first came around Diamond Head, his sails flapping in the trade winds. There were a few other people on the beach, but they paid me no mind; they were there for the same reasons. When I finished, I heard the sound of applause from a long way off. I turned; it was romance. I caught a glimpse of her, just as the first ray of morning sunlight struck the barrier reef while she danced along it. And, my notebook says, “Soft winds blow easy, here in the night time, as Oahu lies bathing in the sweet scent of orchids. This skyplane will ride the west wind to morning and land in L.A. just after dawn.”

  The second example has to do with Iowa. Iowa is a very romantic, mystical place. I can’t explain it, but it’s here. Anybody can see the Rocky Mountains—they’re obvious. It takes a little more perspective to see the beauty of Iowa or the romance in the long sweep of North Dakota prairie west of Larimore’ Once when I was working in the woods south of Wadena, in northeast Iowa, it started to snow late in the day. I worked on. As I did, I began to feel a presence. What was it? The woods were filling up with snow. What was there? It took me a moment, but then I knew: It was Iowa. Iowa, like romance, doesn’t come up and pirouette before you, saying, “Hey, look, Fm beautiful” She just lies there, on hot June days, like a woman in the sun, while romance splashes around where the Winnebago runs to kiss the Shell Rock, just two miles below the place of my growing,

  Well, that’s enough. You get the idea. All I have left for you is a test of sorts (you knew there would be a test, didn’t you?). How are you going to know if you have lived the romantic life? Here’s how. On your dying bed, after all the living and doing, you must run this poem by turn-of-the-century poet R. M. Rilke through your mind:

  I live my life in growing orbits,

  which move out over the things of this world.

  Perhaps I never can achieve the last,

  but that will be my attempt

  I am circling around God,

  around the ancient tower,

  and I have been circling for a thousand years.

  And I still do not know,

  if I am a Falcon,

  or a storm,

  or a great song.

  When you have done that, on your dying bed, if you can smile and nod quietly to yourself, you will have succeeded, and romance will ride your shoulder as you turn for home.

  Go well. Remember the flowers. Remember the wind. Thank you.

  A Rite of Passage

  in Three Cushions

  ______________________________________

  I’ve always liked personal-sized heroes. In the early 1950s, when other boys were fawning over Duke Snider or Rocky Marciano, I was deifying Sammy Patterson in an unpretentious room on the main street of Rockford, Iowa,

  I can still see him. Baggy shirt and pants. Flask protruding from his right hip pocket. He walked slowly and spoke quie
tly. But when he bent over the billiard table, his cue moved with the silent accuracy of an archer’s arrow. His stroke was smooth and sure, and the result was never harsh, just the soft click of ivory against ivory, as the balls moved in complex patterns over the green cloth. He must have been about sixty then.

  This was no fancy parlor where Sammy practiced his trade. No tuxedos, no leanings toward precious respectability with big prize money and women in evening gowns. Here, in Gerald Braga’s “The Sportsman,” pool was pool and billiards was billiards.

  In case you have led a life more sheltered than I care to imagine, pool tables have pockets, billiard tables do not. At least this was true in the world in which I grew up. Billiards is played with three balls. Two white, one red. One of the white balls has a small spot on it to differentiate it from the other. One player shoots the “clear” and the other commands the “spot.” The object is to make your cue ball hit each of the other two balls in one shot. A carom, in other words. Sound easy? It is not. Billiards is a game of physics, geometry, composition, skill, and treachery.

  And Sammy was good, very good, at it. He covered three angles on each shot. Make the carom. Set yourself up for the next shot. Leave nothing for your opponent in case you miss. He taught me just about everything he knew, including how to hold ordinary pool players in infinite disdain, as I followed him around the table, night after night, dragging a cue as tall as I was.

  I entered Sammy’s world through a rite of passage. All cultures have these, and mine was no different. One Sunday morning my parents and I drove over from Rockford to have dinner with my grandparents in Charles City. After we arrived and my mother had hurried off to the kitchen, my dad looked at me with a glint of wickedness in his eyes and said, “Let’s go up to the Elks Club”

  For an eleven-year-old boy, this was tantamount to being invited into manhood. It was the big leagues. Locked doors, a bar, silence on a Sunday morning, rumors of slot machines in the basement, and the smell of booze, smoke, and modest indiscretion left over from the previous night’s party. It was a man’s world. Women were invited for the parties sometimes; children were invited never, except for the annual Christmas bash, when the place, the language, and the behavior were sanitized.

  My dad walked past the bar, flipped on the light over a pool table without breaking stride, and stood before the long racks of cues. Like a scholar gently perusing books in a sacred library, he ran his fingers lightly over the cues, pausing now and then to turn one and look at the number engraved on it indicating its weight.

  He selected two, rolled them on the table to make sure they were straight, and casually slipped a few balls, including the cue ball, from the leather pockets. The training began. “Never, ever, shoot hard, except in special cases.” “Here, spread the last three fingers of your left hand on the table, crook your first finger over to meet your thumb, and control the cue by running it through the circle made by your finger and thumb. Only amateurs put all five fingers down and run the cue over the place between the finger and the thumb.” “Here’s how English works.” “Here are some tough shots and how to handle them.”

  It went on like that. For several weeks, each time we drove to Charles City on a Sunday morning, we shot pool. My dad was a fine player. I learned from watching him. Learned the language and the moves. Learned to take it seriously.

  After the training, I was turned loose at Braga’s place (we never called it “The Sportsman”). Braga and my dad were fishing buddies, so who knows what kind of pact was forged to assure my mother that, indeed, I would be all right there behind the steamed-over windows, lost in the thick smoke, and subject to the wild yelling and pointed oaths that came from the card room in the back, the room that had a sign saying “No Miners” tacked to its swinging-door entrance. (I remember pondering the fact that there was not a mine within 100 miles of Rockford.)

  It was a dime a cue, loser pay, and it nearly always was crowded. My pool and fishing crony, Dennis Parker, and I headed for there every afternoon when we escaped from school. And, of course, weekends were best. On Fridays we raced to Braga’s, put a nickel in the pinball machine, hoisted it up on our toes when Gerald wasn’t looking, and ran up 200 free games, enough to keep us going for hours. One of us shot pool, one played pinball, and then we traded off.

  I used to sit in school and dream of the beautiful patterns the pool balls made as they rolled, contemplating strategies for difficult shots. I kept shooting and got better. Pretty soon, I could spend all weekend in Braga’s for an outlay of maybe forty cents, not counting the mustard-smeared hot dogs I ate from the machine that went round and round by the cash register. Sometimes Gerald hired me to rack balls on Saturday nights. I picked up a dollar for the evening doing that and actually showed a profit for my day,

  I acquired my own cue for $5 from Kenny Govro. Kenny, it was said, had a bad heart and counted on his American Indian wife, Snow, to support him. He claimed he was giving up pool and billiards, in a fit of anger over losing one night, and sold me the cue.

  It was a thing of beauty. Seventeen ounces of light-colored gleaming wood, cork grip, trimmed in ivory. An arrow for the wars that consumed me. It rested quietly in a special, locked rack fastened to a wall inside the card room, until I gently removed it each day and began to shoot pool (“miners” were allowed in the card room to get their private cues).

  My mother was worried. Remember, this was only eighteen miles southeast of River City. She could spell trouble, she knew it started with t, and she knew what that fateful letter rhymed with. But she was overmatched. I shot pool out front, my dad was in the card room playing pinochle, and at least she knew where I was.

  The only real concession she demanded, and she stood absolutely firm on this, was that I undress on the back porch and leave my “awful, smelly clothes out there.” Those were her words. I thought I smelled just fine, anointed as I was with smoke, mustard stains, cue chalk, and the unmistakable musk of burgeoning skill.

  At some point, I don’t remember when, I was allowed to try the billiard table. This was another step in the rite of passage, as significant as learning to play pool. The billiard table was Gerald’s glory. He kept its smooth, unmarked surface and lively cushions covered with light canvas when it was not in use. The balls were stored safely out of reach in a box behind the front counter. You had to have Gerald’s permission to play on the billiard table. Perhaps twenty people held that permission at any time.

  There is a beauty about billiards that’s hard to explain if you never have played. It’s like watching a ballet, or listening to Bach. It contains within it pure form, an aesthetic of motion, point and counterpoint, fuguelike movement, and the sense of a small universe into which one can plunge forever.

  It was a different place from the cacophony of the pool tables only a few feet away. A place of silence, of concentration, of men who knew what they were doing. And Sammy Patterson ruled that world with a fearsome and undisputed grip.

  The showdown was, I suppose, inevitable. The teacher, the student, the game. There are vectors at work out there that we do not understand, that bring us together in particular settings at chosen times, with the outcomes known only to those curious gods of chance and logic.

  If there was a definable cause, though, it had to do with Kenny Govro. Kenny was regarded as the second-best billiards player in town, some distance behind Sammy. Shortly after his announced retirement from the game, he decided to renege on his promise and was casting around one night for someone to play. All he could find was the kid who had bought his cue. Oh well, a little practice to get the rust off. I slaughtered him. Sammy’s teaching and the constant practice were working.

  Kenny blamed it on the loss of his cue, re-entered retirement, and left Braga’s cursing about cues and smart-aleck kids and life in general. My shellacking of Kenny may have convinced Sammy that it was about time to see what the kid could do.

  It all came down on one of those hot, humid Iowa evenings in June, around 1953.I was in
the general vicinity of fourteen by this time. Sammy and I never had really played a serious game. Instead, he would set up shots, show me how to attack them (“medium left English, off the left side of the red ball, hit the side cushion, then the end cushion, then the other side, and it’ll head right for that old spot ball down in the corner”), and generally was trying to make a first-class billiards player out of the kid who followed him around.

  I can’t remember how the game got organized. There always was a certain mating dance that occurred when two good players were going to have at it. But, somehow, the little buttons on the wires overhead where the points were kept got shoved back, and the cues were chalked.

  Word had flashed around in that mysterious small-town way that Sammy and I were going to play. Ordinarily, this would not have meant much, but the same communication system had already disseminated the news about my easy victory over Kenny, and a fair amount of interest was generated.

  In fact, quite a lot of interest was generated. By the time Sammy and I squared off, some twenty or thirty spectators had gathered. For a fourteen-year-old boy up against the Master, it was the Coliseum at noon, the sun and the sand, a matter of virility and honor lined out in some distant chant about young men and old lions.

  We began. The match was to 500 points. I was on top of my game, running off strings of 20 or more points as my turn came. Sammy was not playing well. Perhaps it was the heat, perhaps it was because he had been conversing intently and at length with his flask while we warmed up. After a while, though, the magic welled up within him, and he began to make some long runs. It worried me. He was capable, I knew, of running off 75 points in one turn. I faltered, lost my confidence for a bit, recovered, and got back into it.