“Take it easy. I know a place where they won’t spit in your eye.”
He pulled himself together and made a joke of it. “This I have to see,” he said. “Near here?”
“A few blocks.”
We started walking. It was a nice night.
“I don’t know this city at all,” he said. “I’m from Covington, Kentucky. You do your drinking at home there. We don’t have places like this.” He meant the whole Skid Row area.
“It’s not so bad,” I said. “I spend* a lot of time here.”
“Is that a fact? I mean, down home a man your age would likely have a wife and children.”
“I do. The hell with them.”
He laughed like a real youngster and I figured he couldn’t even be twenty-five. He didn’t have any trouble with the broken curbstones in spite of his Scotch and waters. I asked him about it.
“Sense of balance,” he said. “You have to be tops for balance to be a spacer—you spend so much time outside in a suit. People don’t know how much. Punctures. And you aren’t worth a damn if you lose your point.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Oh. Well, it’s hard to describe. When you’re outside and you lose your point, it means you’re all mixed up, you don’t know which way the can—that’s the ship—which way the can is. It’s having all that room around you. But if you have a good balance, you feel a little tugging to the ship, or maybe you just know which way the ship is without feeling it. Then you have your point and you can get the work done.”
“There must be a lot that’s hard to describe.”
He thought that might be a crack and he dammed up on me.
“You call this Gandytown,” I said after a while. “It’s where the stove-up old railroad men hang out. This is the place.”
It was the second week of the month, before everybody’s pension check was all gone. Oswiak’s was jumping. The Grandsons of the Pioneers were on the juke singing the Man from Mars Yodel and old Paddy Shea was jigging in the middle of the floor. He had a full seidel of beer in his right hand and his empty left sleeve was flapping.
The kid balked at the screen door. “Too damn bright,” he said.
I shrugged and went on in and he followed. We sat down at a table. At Oswiak’s you can drink at the bar if you want to, but none of the regulars do.
Paddy jigged over and said: “Welcome home, Doc.” He’s a Liverpool Irishman; they talk like Scots, some say, but they sound like Brooklyn to me.
“Hello, Paddy. I brought somebody uglier than you. Now what do you say?”
Paddy jigged around the kid in a half-circle with his sleeve flapping and then flopped into a chair when the record stopped. He took a big drink from the seidel and said: “Can he do this?” Paddy stretched his face into an awful grin that showed his teeth. He has three of them. The kid laughed and asked me: “What the hell did you drag me into here for?”
“Paddy says he’ll buy drinks for the house the day anybody uglier than he is comes in.”
Oswiak’s wife waddled over for the order and the kid asked us what we’d have. I figured I could start drinking, so it was three double Scotches.
After the second round, Paddy started blowing about how they took his arm off without any anesthetics except a bottle of gin because the red-ball freight he was tangled up in couldn’t wait.
That brought some of the other old gimps over to the table with their stories.
Blackie Bauer had been sitting in a boxcar with his legs sticking through the door when the train started with a jerk. Wham, the door closed. Everybody laughed at Blackie for being that dumb in the first place, and he got mad.
Sam Fireman has palsy. This week he was claiming he used to be a watchmaker before he began to shake. The week before, he’d said he was a brain surgeon. A woman I didn’t know, a real old Boxcar