Sample Passage

As I started to say, so many pages ago, I turned twenty-one at the Deuce. Minny minny beers were consumed that night. I have a vague memory of standing in the upper bar area halfway through the evening holding yet another sweating glass of chilled beer while Tom, Joe, Dusty and Bill toasted me again. When I attempted to raise my glass to join them in the toast, only my by-then numb hand went up in the air. The slippery glass went crashing to the floor, beer soaking my shoes and socks. Ilse, by then having long forgiven me for my Cunningham-affair indiscretion, came tsk-tsk-ing out from behind the bar with a broom and dustpan and quickly swept up the glass fragments, while Joe got me another beer and thrust it into my offending hand, and even helped me to carefully wrap my fingers around the glass in that painstaking attentive way that drunks often affect.

By the end of the evening – or perhaps I should just say later in the evening – we were all gathered around the round table in the Pit, stalwart knights all. By this time I was nearly beyond remembering anything, slumped very tenuously in the seat of honor, unfeeling boneless fingers wrapped around yet another beer, eyes glassy. I think I remember at some point in the evening that we joined in one of those swaying group sing-alongs at the table. You guys that were there know what I’m talking about – that ritual where everyone at the table would throw his arms about the shoulders of the guys on either side and the whole group would sway drunkenly in rhythm (or not) and sing some classic drinking ditty together, like “Show Me the Way to Go Home” or “Roll Me Over in the Clover.” We would all bray discordantly at the tops of our lungs as we lunged back and forth, back and forth, spilling beer, belching and scattering cigarette ashes everywhere.

Singing, I should perhaps interject here (digression alert), was a time-honored and important part of our regular socialization at the Deuce. Whenever we would finish a set of days swings or mids, it was an unwritten rule that we would all meet that night at the Deuce for a “prayer meeting.” Now if I followed my usual pattern of yammering on about my being a “good Catholic boy” here, you would probably expect me to interject something like See? I didn’t totally abandon my religion. Sorry, but the truth of the matter is there were no prayers at our “prayer meetings.” It was just an expression, although we did always open the meeting with a “hymn” – sort of.

When we were still new to Rothwesten and the Deuce, these prayer meetings were usually convened and presided over by Jim “Jeeter” Lester, a truly accomplished drinker among drinkers. No matter how much alcohol he consumed – and he could put away prodigious quantities – Lester always kept his cool and maintained an amazing equanimity. I don’t know if he composed the opening hymn for these prayer meetings, or if he was only carrying on a tradition begun by an earlier group of ditty-bopper drunks. I think when Jeeter left though, that Mike Chesley, the Panics lead singer, took the torch from him and led the singing of the hymn. It was a simple heartfelt hymn, probably a reaction to six days of chafing under the regimen of rules that governed our work week. It was intoned solemnly in a deep, resonant, and drawn out manner, and went like this:

Himmm,
Himmm,
Fu-uck himmm.

And it was usually repeated several times, or as the spirits moved us.

I know. Nasty, disgusting, sacriligeous, and all that. But at the time it was all very cathartic, like taking a very deep cleansing breath, then letting it slowly out – AAAAHHH! All that built-up tension of the just-completed work week would hiss slowly away like a balloon deflating.

Hmmm. ... Prayer meetings, hymns, lifting our glasses, group sings at the round table. We may not have exactly been knights, but we were certainly “merry men” in those days of yore at the Deuce in downtown Kassel. (Heavy sigh here for days gone by.)

I’m sorry – lost in a reverie. Where the hell was I? ... Oh yes, my twenty-first birthday at the Deuce. The climax of the evening – or perhaps anti-climax – came when Ilse came down the steps into the Pit and presented me with a glass (not just a shot glass, but a small tumbler, perhaps five or six ounces) of a dark mysterious-looking liquid. Putting the drink down in front of me, she intoned gravely, “Today you are a man. You must trink this.”

I picked up the glass and sniffed the stuff suspiciously, wondering momentarily if this might perhaps be payback time for the Cunningham episode. But it had a kind of sweet scent, so I took a cautious sip. Mmmm, good! LI-cor-ish! Smacking my lips, I started to set the glass back down.

“No,” Ilse said, catching my hand with the glass, “You must trink it all. Then you will be a man!”

No prob-lem-o, I thought, and, raising the glass to my lips, I drank deeply – glug glug glug – and then, nothing. Darkness and oblivion. After a dozen or more beers, that small sweet glass of Jaegermeister did me in. According to later accounts from eyewitnesses, as I emptied the glass (and I did empty it, so, technically, I guess I was – am – a man), my eyes rolled back in my head, the glass dropped (someone caught it), my head lolled back toward my shoulders, and I slid slowly down my chair and under the table. (Have you ever heard the expression, “to drink someone under the table”? Well, it’s a valid turn of phrase. I know. Been there, done that, so to speak.)

The next morning I woke up in my bunk – a man. A miserably sick and hung-over man, but a man nonetheless. There you have it, kids. My twenty-first birthday memory. I know. I’m lucky I didn’t die on the spot of acute alcohol poisoning, something you read about now and then in the newspapers today, usually in a story about fraternity parties or initiation ceremonies. And I’m also lucky I had good friends who pulled my pitiful passed-out form from under the table, poured me into the car and took me back to the barracks and tucked me tenderly into bed. Thanks, guys. And thanks for being there to share in my special day too. (Like a Hallmark greeting card sentiment, no?)

Here’s one more Deuce memory I have to share. After last call at the bar, usually around one or two in the morning, I think, it was customary for all the hard-core drinkers who were still there to gather around the jukebox in the Pit for a final song. The old-timers knew how to crank up the noise to max by muscling the jukebox away from the wall and reaching behind it to turn the volume control all the way up. Then we would all stand swaying drunkenly, bellowing at the top of our lungs, along with J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers –

Oh where o where can my BAY-bee beee?
The Lord took ‘er a-WAYY from meee ...
and so on. That song, “The Last Kiss,” was a favorite closer at the Deuce that year, 1965.

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