Quitman: An Unstarted Story

Quitman

  An Unstarted Story

  by Phil Houseal

  copyright 2000, 2013

  Years ago, I started writing a novel. Didn’t start, really... just sort of jumped into the middle of it. The experts tell you to “write what you know.” Apparently I don’t know much, because this is as far as I got. It is a fantasy set in the middle of reality. The bar, the characters, the memories are real; the narrative is fiction.

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 1

  From outside, the bar was just as I remembered it.

  Recessed black-edged wood door that was mostly glass. Thin curtains strung on a flimsy rod to keep curious eyes out. The cool flickering Hamm’s neon sign.

  I pushed open the door, and with a comforting creak I was in.

  “Hi, darlin’. Whatcha needin’?”

  A solid woman with determinedly dyed black hair and fiercely red lips caught me with her surprisingly pale eyes.

  “Shelda,” I said softly. “Shithouse Shelda.”

  “Fred Henderson,” she replied. “What are you doin’ here?”

  “I’m looking for my story,” I said. “I think it’s somewhere in this bar.”

  “Well, come on in and set yourself down,” she said. “We’ll help you if we can, and if we can’t, we’ll have fun tryin’.”

  I walked past the jukebox, and couldn’t resist a glance at the bandstand, which was on the left just inside the door. I remembered many nights perched on that stage, playing drums with the Swingmasters and peering out that curtained window onto the cold Main Street.

  Everything inside was reassuringly the same. Formica-topped tables, plastic and chrome mismatched chairs. And the smoke. The smoke was everywhere. Not just in the air, but soaked deep in the wood, the plastic, even the glass. The place had a smoky soul.

  I looked at Shelda, who hovered over me.

  “What year is this, anyway?” I asked.

  “’74,” she said. “1974. Why? Where have you been?”

  I told her. “I’ve seen the other side of 2000.”

  “Is that right?” she said without curiosity. “What brings you back here?”

  I was glad she understood. “I’m looking for something,” I said. “I think I left it here at Frank & Fran’s. At least, I know I found it here for the first time, and I’m hoping it might still be here.”

  How could I tell her the whole story? Maybe later. That’s what made Shelda such a good bartender. She listened. Everyone else I remember coming into Frank & Fran’s wanted to talk. Shelda would talk if you caught her in the afternoon. But once the evening crowd arrived, she listened. And served beer.

  “What will you have?” she asked as if it was the first time.

  “What’s on tap?”

  “Hamm’s. Twenty-five cents.”

  “I’ll have a Hamm’s.”

  Shelda got her nickname because someone once said she was built like a brick shithouse. That was an Iowa saying. I never did understand where it was derived, but I knew it meant the girl had a good figure. In Shelda’s case, she had the classic hourglass shape, but it was a rather wide hourglass. I always noticed her calves. They looked like a football player’s calves. And she had broad shoulders so she could have been a lineman. I never thought of her as sexy. Just solid.

  No one else was in the bar yet. It was early. That usually didn’t matter. The place opened at 7:30 in the morning, and Franny used to tell me there were always one or two customers waiting.

  I don’t know how I arrived here. But I knew it was the right place to be. In my real life, after I had left Frank & Fran’s and Quitman, Iowa, I ended up in Texas. There, I married, had kids, and was working as a school administrator.

  I passed 40 uneventfully. But as I approached 45, I began having a nagging feeling that something was out of place.

  Me.

  It was like an episode of Star Trek, where one officer senses that the Enterprise is in the wrong timeline. In that show the ship had hit an anomaly in the space-time continuum. I traced my anomaly back to Frank & Fran’s.

  “Here you go hon.” An hourglass-shaped beer frothed before me.

  “Is Frank coming in to play tonight?” I asked. I wanted to hear the Swingmasters again. I wanted to play with them. I wanted to be a Swingmaster again.

  “He’ll be in at 4:00. Floyd and Jack should be here later, too.”

  The beer tasted good. I started feeling better immediately. With the smoke soaking in from the outside, and the beer from the inside, I was becoming part of the bar again.

  “Why, if it isn’t one o’ them Hendersons.”

  I looked up. Lester Cantwell swayed before me.

  “No… no… don’t tell me… it’s Mark, right? No… he’s got all the hair. John. No, he’s down there in Argentina or somewhere.” He stopped swaying and fixed me with a long look. “Which the hell Henderson are you, Fred?” Then he smiled and grabbed my hand, using it to hold himself steady.

  “Sit down Lester. I’ll buy you a beer.”

  Still grinning, he pulled up a chair and fell into it. Lester was the most intelligent and wisest man I had ever known in Quitman. Through the stupor and haze of beer and cigarettes - I never saw him without either - he managed to dispense words of wisdom and insight so convoluted it was brilliant. He had a long, u-shaped scar from his nose down his cheek up to his temple. He grew up next to our farm, and one night he drove off the road to Spencer’s before they straightened it. He was lucky to have lived. But it didn’t change his drinking habits.

  “How the f… ‘scuse me… how the hell are you?” he asked.

  “I’m lost,” I said.

  He hunched his shoulders in mock surprise, looking around.

  “Shit… that means I must be lost too. Who lost you?”

  I like Lester.

  “Lester, I lost myself,” I said. “Somewhere between here and the future, I went sideways. I thought I’d come back and start over.”

  “”Didn’t you go to Brazil, or Portugal, or Sigourney, or somewhere down south?” he asked.

  “Peru,” I replied. “I spent a couple of years in Peru.”

  “Hell, I’d a been lost in Peru, too,” he said. “I need another beer. You want one?”

  “Sure, thanks.”

  Chapter 2

  “Good evening, ladies and germs. Welcome to Frank & Fran’s. I’m Frank. Franny’s serving the beer. And these are the Swingmasters. Hit it, boys.”

  We took off with Steel Guitar Rag. I was playing the drums. Wedged in a corner on the window stage, elbows scraping the wall with every beat on the snare.

  Playing the drums is really very simple. Imagine four beats 1 2 3 4. The bass drum (right foot) hits on 1 and 3. Snare drum is played with the left hand on 2 and 4. That pretty much applies to every song, at least every song played in a bar in Iowa. The difference comes with what you do with your right hand. That usually plays on a cymbal or hi-hat. A hi-hat is two cymbals smashed together on a stand, controlled by the left foot. Cymbal beats are 1234. For rock and roll, it’s a straight 1234. For country, the cymbal beats are syncopated.

  I’d never analyzed drum playing before.

  Steel Guitar Rag is a country classic in
strumental. The Swingmasters used it as a theme song. It was a fast swing 1234. The funniest thing is that nobody in the band or the bar thought it unusual that we didn’t even have a steel guitar in the band.

  Floyd handled most guitar duties. Floyd was a prodigy. Lean, black-haired, quick-tongued, Floyd was Frank’s brother. His hand could grab handfuls of chords Mel Bay only dreamed of. Self-taught as far as I could tell, Floyd had worked with Adolph Hofner, Bob Wills, and a host of other country western stars. Of course, Floyd was a pure liar. But I believed and wanted to believe his music stories. You couldn’t lie about playing so good when you were on stage with a guitar in your hand. Floyd was real.

  Frank played rhythm guitar. His style was about as different from Floyd’s as could be. Frank had the same black hair, greased and combed up in a bob (jet black hair seemed a prerequisite for country music and bars in Iowa), but from the neck down, things changed. Frank had a large and solid beer belly. I felt it once. It was hard and unyielding, more like a cyst than fat. It hung over his belt so much he had to have help removing his boots. I did that for him once, too. But on stage, with the black hair and the white shirt, black pants, and shiny belt buckle, Frank cut a dashing figure.

  Frank also only had three fingers on his left hand. I never heard how he lost them, but he still played good rhythm guitar. He tuned to an open E chord, so he could just bar straight across with his good finger.

  Jack, the bass player was no relative. First of all, he was balding. He had chubby cheeks, probably that way from a perpetual smile. Jack could have played with any band in southeast Iowa, but he drove the 60 miles from River Junction just to play with Frankie Lee and the Swingmasters. He loved the music. When the first song started, the smile came out, his eyes closed, and he entered a happy trance. I always believed it had something to do with escaping his real life. Six days a week, he slaughtered and cut up pigs at the packing plant. Each night, he came home to a wife that must have made the pigs look attractive. Her screeching voice, inane banter, and horrid looks had no effect on her self-image, though. On the occasions he brought her, she barreled through the bar and annoyed everyone.

  Add in four or five obnoxious kids, and Jack’s only escape was the bar and sweet Swingmaster music. He didn’t have to try to write a novel. He found his joy every Saturday night in Quitman.

  Playing drums. Maybe that is the metaphor for my life. Thinking back, the only times I truly felt one with the universe was when I felt four beats to the bar. From simple Hank Williams tunes to intricate Latin rock beats, there comes a moment when you forget yourself and meld with the music. Not every song, not every night. But like a cocaine high, the occasional buzz is enough to keep you beating the drums. In those rare moments, you crawl inside the song; you are the song. You just are. The smoke, the noise, the neon, the sweat, the dancers and drinkers become an ornate frame to the moment. Some way, beating time makes time stop. It is the only moment when I’ve ever beaten time.

  Chapter 3

  Pabst Blue Ribbon.

  Every night at Frank & Fran’s was the same. About 4 or 5 in the afternoon, the regulars started filtering in. They shuffled to their regular small groups around the Formica tables. Cards often came out; cigarettes always did. Stories were told.

  “Cornbread and beans” was the favorite story of Bum Baumgartner. Baumgartner was a lopsided dwarf of a man, who squinted so bad through one eye it might have been blind, or he might have been Popeye, except he was so skinny. He always held one shoulder higher than the other, and as he got drunker and more animated his one shoulder got higher, until it almost seemed to lift him off the ground. Some said that is the way I looked when I played drums.

  Baumgartner was a regular. He had drunk so much and lost his driver’s license so many times that he could never drive a car again. Since he lived about three blocks from the bar, which was way too far to walk, he had solved his transportation dilemma by driving his riding lawnmower to Frank & Fran's. Every night, he fired it up and drove the short distance, parking the John Deere behind the bar.

  Baumgartner’s favorite story was a convoluted tale whose punchline was “cornbread & beans.” We’d heard it a dozen times, never understood a word of it, yet laughed at the punchline every time. Bum had a speech impediment as well.

  I envy Bum Baumgartner. His world was well-defined. Mowing lawns every day. Riding the mower to the bar every night. Telling the same joke and getting drunk. A defining life. A defined existence.

  Chapter 4

  One thing I remember from my youth was that everyone had a nickname.

  The people in the bar all took on colorful monikers when they walked into Frank & Fran’s. Killer, Olaf, Shithouse… you don’t run into characters named Killer in the halls of Smiley Independent School District.

  My nickname was Pork Chop. Frank used to tell the crowd that I was so ugly as a kid that my mom had to tie a pork chop around my neck to get the dog to play with me. It was an old joke, but I’d never heard it, and the name stuck.

  The first time I filled in at Franks I was about 18. I earned $15 (come to think of it, Bill Niffenegger still owes me an extra $5 he promised if I’d fill in for him). When I was playing regular the pay was $25 a night and all the Pabst Blue Ribbon the windowsill could hold. The windowsill could hold a lot more beer than I could.

  That’s not to say I didn’t try. I would easily put away a beer a set, with a few thrown in after we were done. A six-pack of beer had its effect on a kid from the farm. I did some stupid things. Like driving home on pure ice roads in temperatures of 20 below zero Farenheit. Or trying to make out with Olaf’s girlfriend in the women’s restroom while Olaf was sitting at the bar.

  I got away with both unscathed. Didn’t deserve it, but didn’t deserve worse, either.

  Stretchy was another nickname. Like all the others, it made no sense and didn’t fit the person. Killer was a doughy, nice fellow, actually Lester’s older brother (Lester didn’t have a nickname - with a name like Lester he might have preferred one). Stretchy was a huge hulking burr-headed farmer who slurred words out of the side of his mouth like he’d had a stroke even when he was sober, which I only saw once in 20 years. That was at a county fair at 7:30 in the morning.

  My older brother John told me how Stretchy got his nickname, but I forget. It was something from back in the old country grade school by Cantwell’s, Thompson’s, and our place. Stretchy Spencer was from the work hard/play hard school, and used to brag how he worked. One evening I was telling him how I was working on painting the barn and outbuildings for my dad that summer. He said he’d come over with the power sprayer and front end loader and we’d paint the whole thing in an afternoon. That’s how he did his, standing in the dumper of the loader and spraying while his dad lifted him up and down with the tractor. I believed him. I didn’t accept his offer. I preferred to paint all summer.

  He worked hard, and he drank hard. He told stories every bit as funny and insightful as Lester, but I only understood about one word every three sentences. That was enough to piece together the jist of what he was saying, because he repeated every sentence at least 10 times during a conversation.

  Stretchy was a rare mixture of impulsiveness and planning. One time after I had left Quitman and was playing on the road, I mentioned that I would be playing in Dothan, Alabama. He said he might stop and see me. Sure, I thought.

  Weeks later, I was in the middle of a set at the officer’s club in Alabama, 1000 miles from Quitman, when in walked Stretchy and his buddies. Later in the hotel after the gig, this farmer from Quitman explained how he was returning from a trip to Costa Rica with his friends and remembered I’d said I’d be in Alabama. He tracked me down and figured out where I was playing and surprised me. He laughed and drank some more. I’m sure that story got repeated many times in Frank & Fran’s.

  Stretchy was also the one who gave me a stern lecture the night I left Franks and started my new music life on the road. He gravely sat me down and placed a huge paw on
my shoulder. Waves of beer and whiskey fumes engulfed me as he started in.

  “Now, Fred, I unnerstan yer goin’ out on the road to pl.. pl.. play music. Thas great. Jus remember, stay away from them drugs. Now beer and liquor are OK, and cigarettes. But don’t go messin’ with that marijuana and cocaine. Them are drugs, and they’re dangerous. Jus be careful out there, thas all I wanna say to you.”

  Then he shook his head and gave me a sheepish grin. “An have fun…”

  Chapter 5

  “So, we have all the characters assembled,” Shelda offered. “How are we going to put together a novel?”

  Shelda always could see through the smoke.

  She was right. We had a place, a small bar in a one-block-Main-street-town-in-Iowa. We had characters a plenty. Drunken wise man. Stolid bartender. Crazy tractor rider. A band. An endless assortment of colorful cast to be introduced as needed.

  And most of all, we had an innocent boy through whose eyes the story would unfold.

  “From what I know about books, first of all we need a plot,” said Shelda.

  What if things just happened, like they normally do in real life, I wondered aloud.

  “Then why would anyone read it?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure if that matters,” I said. “Who am I writing this for, anyway? Some nameless strangers waiting for an airplane, or for me?”

  “How about if you write it for one person?” she said. “Like me. Write a story for me. I’ll care about it then. If I care, maybe someone else will.”

  She was making sense again. I thought a bit.

  “Well, I do know of one possible plot line,” I said. “Didn’t you and Floyd carry on a bit?”

  She didn’t miss a beat. “Why don’t you ask our son. I’ll get him on the phone.”

  I smiled. “That could be an angle.”

  Shelda shook her head. “Nope, no angst, no untied ends, no tension,” she said. “Floyd and I were together, then he went on his way, like every no good musician passing through a small town. Planted his seed, then left me to weed the garden. And I still love to listen to him play.”

  We sat in silence, with only the snap of cards around the poker table.