By Andrew Barclay Newsham
Sam had a smile on his face as big as an upturned umbrella and it poked out into the bar and disturbed the locals. He was feeling good, damn good. So what if it was perhaps a little too good for the Lumber Mill Grill? There was no law against being happy. There was no law against smiling. To hell with them if they thought he was a nut.
He raised his glass of beer and saluted the small group of men who perched like vultures upon saggy leather stools at the end of the bar. They pretended not to notice him and glared stiffly at a small television that was tuned to a baseball game.
They are the nuts, thought Sam, for not smiling. How could they not? It was all too ridiculous. It was delicious. Absurd. Everything was as vivid as a peach.
As soon as he’d come in he’d gotten off on the wrong foot with the bartender. It was the smile but it was more than the smile. He’d ordered a German beer, the man had been friendly and pleasant. As he waited for his drink he’d read a framed piece of embroidery on the wall. The other wall decorations were antique black and white pictures of logging and lumber mills. The embroidered patch stood out, such frames normally referenced God or country wisdom but this did neither. ‘You can eat an elephant if you take small bites’, it said. He asked the bartender about it.
“I guess it means you can do anything if you set your mind to it,” said the bartender.
“Like eating elephants?”
“Yes,” said the man.
“Are you some kind of monster?” asked Sam. He was joking. It was clear it was a joke. How could anything accompanied by such a smile be considered otherwise?
But the bartender had frowned. That had been the beginning of the sour note that crept into their relationship.
“It’s just a saying,” he had said defensively.
“I know, I know,” said Sam hastily. “I’m only joking. It’s strange though, when you think about it, like, if you really set your mind to it you can really fuck something up.”
The bartender shrugged and retreated behind the shield of his profession. “Would you like any food?” he asked.
“Do you have any elephant? Maybe a deep fried ear with onion rings?”
“No, but I can recommend the ribs.” He gave Sam a menu and then walked away, down to the end of the bar and the little gathering of regulars staring at the television.
The television was old and small. Sam guessed it couldn’t have been more than thirty-six inches wide. Such a screen would be laughed out of all the bars he knew. Most bars in New York City, if they had televisions and were not cultivating an air of refinement, now went for giant screens that could be seen from the moon. But this wasn’t the city. He was a long way upstate. This was different world almost, like the Land of Oz. This was Podunk, New York. Population 2037.
Seeing these old men gathered around such a small screen was like something from the past. And who watched baseball anymore? Other than the World Series? Eight million games a season of virtually no importance. Grown men throwing and catching. Two or three big teams winning everything by virtue of buying up all the best players. The whole sham was deader than a legless turtle.
Sam imagined a legless turtle on the pitcher’s mound in Yankee Stadium. The place was packed, people knocked back weak beer, hotdogs and peanuts like mindless cows, as if it was all perfectly normal. A team of umpires yelled out the innings without a pitch being thrown or base being stolen, the only movement being the senile bobbing of the turtle’s head as it strove to comprehend its missing legs. During the seventh inning stretch everybody stood up and sang ‘take me out to the turtle…’
Sam began to laugh. The bartender and a couple of the old men shot him suspicious glances. He waved at them, as if he was on a boat. They looked away quickly.
Ten minutes later one of the men left the group and walked towards him. Sam swiveled in his seat to talk to him but he’d only come to get something from the bartender who had followed him up. The bartender got level with Sam and then bent down to open a padlocked box.
Sam decided to talk to the new guy anyway.
“Good game?” he asked.
The man shook his head and stared at the bartender’s back.
“Who’s playing?” persisted Sam cheerfully.
“Mets v Padres,” said the man. He spoke without looking at Sam. He wasn’t old. He was in his mid-thirties. He had a thick black moustache on his top lip like a coal brush.
“The Padres of San Diego?” asked Sam, continuing to probe for conversation.
The man looked at him. He had sad, clouded eyes. “Yeah,” he said.
“You know Padres are military chaplains who may carry weapons onto battlefields,” said Sam.
“No kidding,” said the man. He wasn’t interested, his eyes had already gone back to the bartender who had come up with a long cloth package in his hands.
“But obviously,” joked Sam, “I don’t think the baseball players are actual Padres. Just as the Cleveland Indians are not actual Indians or The Florida Marlins actual fish.”
“You never know,” said the man casually.
“No,” said Sam enthusiastically. “You never do know.”
The bartender handed the man the package. “Here you go Lloyd,” he said. The man took the package and laid it on the bar. It was tied at either end with two pieces of string. He undid the knots and rolled back the cloth to reveal a shotgun.
“Hey,” said Sam, “You’re not a Padre are you?”
“No,” said the man flatly.
“I mean, carrying the gun…”
The man had ignored him and studied the gun closely. What he was looking for Sam could not tell. After a few moments he seemed satisfied and tied it back up.
“Will you be in later?” asked the bartender.
“No…” said the man hesitantly, “um… I’ve got to polish my bowling trophies.”
The bartender nodded and the man walked outside.
After he had gone, the bartender sighed and knelt to relock the box under the bar. When he stood back up Sam asked him for another beer. As he set about pouring the drink Sam asked him what it was all about.
The bartender shrugged.
“But what does it mean?” asked Sam.
“What?” asked the bartender.
“Bowling Trophies. It’s a metaphor right?”
The bar tender shook his head. The man made him uncomfortable. He was glad for the business but he couldn’t work him out. They didn’t see too many tourists out this way and he didn’t fit easily into any box or category. His happiness was too loud. The smile was unsettling and his conversation veered towards the perverse. He wasn’t drunk, so that left other drugs or love or lunacy. There were other reasons of course but he knew those three things were the main suspects. People just didn’t get that happy. The bartender thought about religion and then realized he would count that under ‘lunacy’.
“OK,” said Sam. “That man takes a shotgun off you, studies it like a hawk and then walks off saying he’s going to go polish some bowling trophies…”
“He’s a good bowler,” said the bartender.
“So, you’re telling me everything was right there on the surface?”
“I don’t know what you mean.” The bartender grabbed a cloth and began to wipe the bar.
Sam knew he was making the man uncomfortable. His mood was veering towards the euphoric. He looked at the bar. It was perfectly clean and didn’t need wiping. It was a displacement activity, unless he was wiping away the stain of the shotgun. It had left no physical stain but maybe there was a psychic one.
“You gave him a shotgun,” he continued.
“It was his,” said the bartender.
“OK, but then you asked him if he was coming back. He said no, that he was going to polish his bowling trophies. Now you’re saying there was nothing hidden in that. That it was all there, right at the surface for me to see. That he is really going to go and polish some bowling trophies...”
The bartender shrugged. “He likes to keep them clean.”
“More than clean by the sounds of it. Shiny. Clean and shiny. Sparkling like Gabriel’s Trumpet. Like ornamental brass.”
“No harm in it.”
“You’re damn right there,” said Sam. “But who does that? And what about the gun?”
“Are you a cop?” asked the bartender.
“No,” Sam chuckled and shook his head. “I know it’s none of my business. I understand that. I’m just a harmless stranger passing time in your fine saloon.”
“OK then,” said the bartender and he walked away, back down to the locals.
Sam took a deep breath and laughed to himself. It was an odd town that was for sure and yet he also knew it was just like any place really. Any place in America where a man could drive home to spend a pleasant evening polishing up a collection of bowling trophies. It seemed ridiculous but then everything seemed ridiculous. And to question it, to point it out, to reach for your fellow man to try and weigh and sample the magic and mystery of the moment, why that could only bring forth fear and suspicion. No, he wasn’t a cop. But would that make it any more valid if he was? Did he need to be a cop to question the undeniable oddity of that moment? There was a gun. That was something. An ominous implement. One could dwell on the gun. But this was a rural place. It was possibly not so strange. What would signify crime in the city was nothing more than a farming or sporting tool out here. But there was also mention of bowling trophies. That was something else. This was no play. This was no staged moment. This was life in rural New York, way upstate. Podunk. Some kind of run down old logging town. Or maybe it wasn’t? The Lumber Mill Grill might never have been an actual lumber mill. It could be a fallacy, a construction. The old pictures on the walls of felled trees and grim squared jawed men in checked shirts merely reproductions. Or not even reproductions but complete fictions, photo-shopped images carefully selected by Chinese businessmen to create an atmosphere and inspire a warm nostalgic comfort. This kind of thing happening everywhere. The authentic was replaced by the fake. It had gone on so long now that the authentic had begun to imitate the fake. It made your head spin, or rather it would do, if you ever thought about it, if you ever scratched beneath the surface. What good were axe handles and mining helmets anyway, in this modern robotic age, other to adorn the walls of bars?
The bowling trophies existed. The bartender had said as much. Sam imagined them. Shiny. Golden. Kitsch. A source of pride for a lonely man with a shotgun. Had the man really been lonely? Yes, thought Sam. He’d been sitting with the locals down the far end of the bar but loneliness was more than simply being with people. Sam had known loneliness. He’d felt it vibrating off the man like black smoke.
He knew it was nothing but conjecture but he couldn’t help his mind spinning through the permutations like a ball bouncing round a roulette wheel. The man had entered competitions and he had knocked down a lot of pins and they’d given him big shiny metal objects which he displayed and polished. Symbols. Medals. Trophies. He had propelled his ball better than anyone else on the day. As he polished he remembered the wonderful moment in which he won them, the roar of the crowd, the deadly curve of the ball rolling on the shiny polished surface of the lane to smash down the pins. Maybe it was all there? Maybe it was all right at the surface? Maybe it only seemed strange to him, a man from the Big Bad City? He’d fallen into a dark pool of cynicism, a place where nobody would willingly spend time treasuring bowling trophies. Maybe they were right to look at him with suspicion. He had been flying on autopilot for too long and now he was taking notice of the world, really taking notice, he was behaving like an alien.
‘To hell with them,’ thought Sam. He raised his glass to his lips. It didn’t matter. Bowling trophies, that’s all it was. No big deal. He wasn’t the one going home to clean them. He was happy. That was all that mattered. The world was a wonderful place full of interest and intrigue. It was as vivid as a peach. And ridiculous. However way you looked at it. That was the truth. However way you cut it. Whatever your belief system, scientific or myth based. Or myth based and scientific. There was the beer you had. The beer you were yet to have. The sunny day. The cool bar. The comfortable chair. The old embroidered frames about eating elephants. The suspicion over a smiling stranger. The passing moment full of endless potential. The baseball game, two teams of men focusing intently on hitting and chasing a ball around like dogs. And all the pairs of eyes watching them, in the stadium and on television in rooms and offices and bars like this one. Sublime and ridiculous. And what was it all about? Could people really believe there was a God? With everything in his plan? For his pleasure or as a test? No no no. the sheer weight of everything was just plain ridiculous. Of course mankind had to come up with the idea of a God, with a human face, some kind of higher power and off-stage presence to make our every action seem worthwhile. It’s comforting, otherwise what have you got? Mindless pointless pain and hatred and animalistic drives and pig headed incompetence. The best thing mankind could do would be to waste time peacefully, harmlessly, without killing or hurting each other or the environment. Pray, polish the bowling trophies, drink a cool beer, watch baseball, play baseball, chase the ball as happily and as harmlessly as a dog. Keep it all on the surface. Least you could do is smile, laugh at the absurdity of life.
Sam took a deep breath and shook his head.
So what if he was feeling a little nutty? Was it so bad? He was generally a happy person but this was something else. It was unusual to feel so damn good. He told himself not to stress and analyze it. What good could come of that? No, better to keep it all at the surface. Take it all at face value. The smile was at the surface and yet didn’t it also reflect his mood? Yes it did, he was smiling all the way to his core. Maybe that was what people were finding do disturbing?
He’d driven up out of the city with his friend James. James had come to deliver a bunch of crap to his aunt who lived in this here Podunk, New York. For reasons Sam could not explain James had decided to deposit him in this bar and would pick him up later. He was out of the city for a day trip. It was nothing too big, nothing too grand. But he was feeling damn good. The feeling had grown within him as he’d left the city, following the Hudson River upstate into gorgeous greenery. Was it just a change of scenery? No, it was more than that. And possibly not even that.
At the end of the bar the bartender quietly told the regulars about his last interaction with the smiling stranger. The regulars now consisted of three men. Tom, John and Abe.
“He says he’s not a cop,” said the bartender.
“I can tell he’s not a cop,” said Abe knowingly.
The men agreed that Abe could probably tell if he was a cop because Abe had a brother who was a cop. In this silent and unspoken way he was considered worldly in terms of the law by the other men.
“Why’s he smiling like that?” asked John. It was the third time they’d asked the question amongst themselves.
“I think he might be religious,” said the bartender.
“He don’t seem religious,” said Tom. “He’s not trying tried to sell it to us yet.”
“Give him time,” said John.
“He’s just a fool.”
“He said Lloyd was polishing his trophies up to shine like Gabriel’s trumpet or some such,” said the bartender. “And he knows a lot about Padres, the clergy not the baseball team.”
Sam couldn’t hear what they were saying but he knew they were talking about him. It just made him smile all the more. The fact that they were wondering what he was smiling about when he didn’t really know what he was smiling about only added to his joy. He didn’t know why he was smiling. Other than he was happy, inexplicably happy. And that everything was ridiculous, silly to the very core if you thought about it.
He rolled off his seat and went to the jukebox in the corner. It was an old machine from the fifties, a beautiful dome and chrome relic, with yellow glass and mechanical flippers that flicked through albums of available songs.
There was Tony Bennett. There was Dolly Parton. There was Willy Nelson and Johnny Cash. There was a Woodstock album. There was Little Anthony and the Imperials. There was a lot of Frank Sinatra. There was Otis Reading and Marvin Gaye. The white crooners sang mostly from a position of reflection, from a lofty ivory tower of mastery over their feelings, ‘Regrets, I’ve had a few but then again, too few to mention’. The black soul singers sang mostly from the heat of battle, in the molten midst of emotion, ‘Please Please Please, Try a little tenderness’.
Sam put in a quarter and selected a song called Shimmy Shimmy Ko-Ko Bop by Little Anthony and the Imperials. The music began tumble out of the speakers. The Imperials sang the title over and over while Little Anthony provided a rhyming narrative about a woman dancing. A man was in a ‘native hut,’ when a woman arrived with a dance that put him in a ‘trance’. The lure of the female. The joy of sex. The simple surface pleasure of skin on skin. Sam laughed.
It was ludicrous. That this should be recorded. Practiced. Performed. Scratched into vinyl. Encased in an old rock and roll jukebox in Podunk New York. Released by a silver coin with a picture of an eagle on one side. ‘Shimmy Shimmy Ko-Ko Bop’ sang the Imperials. Sam began to dance. The old men stopped talking. Sam danced towards them.
“Little Anthony and the Imperials,” said Sam as he danced closer.
The old men stared at him, mouths agape. Sam danced now like a hula girl, he shimmied to the left and then shimmied to the right.
“I suppose you’re wondering why I’m smiling?” he asked, speaking loudly over the music.
The men looked at each other but did not speak.
As Sam turned in his dance he saw that his friend James had pulled up outside the bar in his station wagon. It was probably just as well. He didn’t know if he’d be able to sit back down after dancing. He didn’t know what he’d do. The men were scared of him, they really had no reason to be so but such feelings could easily congeal into open hostility. He bent low on his knees, rocking from side to side and danced around to face the men once more.
“I am only at liberty to tell you this,” he said. “Either there is a reason for it or there isn’t.”
He twisted away from them and danced out of the bar, timing his exit perfectly with the end of the song, a one man conga line lost in his own carnival.
The old men watched him go in stunned amazement. On the television the Mets turned a triple play and none of them saw it.
Later that night, the man called Lloyd finished polishing his bowling trophies and then put the shotgun into his mouth and blew his brains out. He was very careful not to get any blood on the bowling trophies.
The smiling stranger and the suicide of their friend became linked very strongly in the minds of the locals of the Lumber Mill Grill in Podunk New York although they really weren’t connected at all. Whenever they talked about it the conversation would always end with one of them intoning that Lloyd had always been likely to do it since his father had gone out exactly the same way.
On several occasions, over the next few years one of the old men would put the song on the jukebox and dance on his own, imitating Sam. They would all laugh and the bartender would give them free drinks. Then they would talk about Lloyd.
“If only he’d have stayed and seen the nut dance…” one of would say wistfully, as if that would have changed everything somehow.
On a shelf above the jukebox now sat a collection of bowling trophies. The bartender had put them there after they’d been brought over by Lloyd’s cousin a few days after the funeral. The bartender liked the look of them although he never polished them and they attracted a lot of dust.
He was the only one who knew that the trophies all had different names written on the plaques and Lloyd’s wasn’t on any of them.
