Babooned

Jane was a baroque girl. She was exceedingly beautiful. She was brilliant and she had alluring eyes that were like fireworks in their most mesmeric moment. Right after they explode but before they begin to dissipate. That brilliant scintillating split-second haloed in a perfect veil of black smoke. 

Jane worked in an upscale café. Everything there cost more than it did down the street. This wasn't her fault. Not at all. Jane only worked there, she could say. Only she wouldn't ever say that. Jane would say something to the effect — you pay for quality. Or you pay for the experience. The ambience. The memories of dining in such an elegant place as Jane's café. And hopefully, a little extra for the great service. 

It isn't called Jane's café, however. It is called Knock Twice and Bark because it is set up like an old speakeasy. Outside it is elegant with an asundry of roaring twenties charms. A 1926 Ford is parked on the curb with the cafés logo on the side. There are gaslight lamps and neatly-manicured potted plants in art deco concrete planters. The building is painted black brick, there are no windows, and it looks like a closed business. The only way to get in is to go to the door and give the correct password. The password is, of course, to literally knock twice and bark. It is a beautiful building and formerly served as a Third Federal Bank that the infamous John Dillinger robbed. 

All throughout Knock Twice and Bark there are exposed brick walls decorated with framed newspaper clippings sensationalizing Dillinger and other notorious gangsters' infamous and not so infamous robberies. Framed mug shots, gruesome black-and-white morgue photos, old banknotes, Tommy guns, counterfeit money, and old shot-up car doors hang from the walls as well. There is also a lock of hair that the owner claims comes from the head of Bonnie, of Bonnie and Clyde, but that is horseshit. It is from the head of his ex-wife, Loretta, who resembled a blonde slutty manatee of sorts.   

This bar was entirely my idea, but I get no credit for it. I didn't just give it away, however. I was babooned, which is a word I entirely invented because that is my primary occupation. I am an inventor of words. Babooned is a verb. It means to be duped or fooled into losing one's sense of purpose through either literal or figurative theft. Long story short, a rich guy in town who made a fortune in port-a-johns literally stole my idea. He babooned me and I got a job playing the piano just to see how my babooning worked out for him, or at least, to be a part of it.

The male staff dress as though they work at the Third Federal Bank in 1930, I among them in a dark navy blue pin-striped suit and slicked over hair. My hair sometimes resists going back in time so I dollop it heavily with whatever gook I have on hand. The female staff are dressed as flappers. A lot of sequins and pearls. A lot of glitz and moxy. Probably a fair share of venereal diseases, to boot, but I don't gossip. To each their own. 

The place down the street is cruddy. There is nothing special about it. No original name. Terrible lighting. Absolutely no ambience at all. But it has cheaper food and beer and the bartenders have time to converse with patrons if they are in the mood. So most nights when I am done playing piano when Knock Twice and Bark is down to the droolers (noun: the last drunk people to reluctantly leave a bar), I walk down to Stew's with my wingtip shoes and sore fingers and drink my heart's desire. Sometimes I will sit there and create new words in my head and write them down on cocktail napkins and stuff them in my pocket for later revision and consideration into my own personal Oxford Dictionary. 

Stew's is a lonely goddamn place. They went for some Scottish theme but didn't get past the green-painted paneled walls and the framed photograph of the Loch Ness Monster, more intimately known as "Nessy," which hangs above the bar, and a sword which looks like one of those shitty dull ones you can buy at any renaissance festival or flea market. I suppose they ran out of ideas after that. Thank God the male staff doesn't wear kilts. 

Sometimes I think I wouldn't be here if I hadn't been babooned in the humiliating way that I was. I could have made a million dollars if that fagadash hadn't stolen my idea. If he could have just made me a partner, split it fifty-fifty, I'd be sitting pretty. I'd be living my happily ever after playing Cole Porter songs on a Steinway in my Hideaway Hills Shangri-la in front of a great glass window to perfect snowy pines by a rippling fireplace. Jerking off every night to a new thought as Bob Ross paints portraits on my TV. Sleeping til noon and not worrying how I'd pay the bills or buy groceries. Waking up to paint pictures that are as absurd as my thoughts. Buying the best toilet paper money could buy. I'd buy a cannon and I would shoot that sonofabitch every Fourth of July and I'd buy enough guns to qualify as an arsenal. I'd buy an old war Jeep with mounted machine guns. Maybe even a miniature tank. Then I'd buy an old sailboat and sail the HAH lake like Commodore Perry. I'd be puttin' on the ritz. Ritz as in The Ritz-Carlton. Luxury. 

But instead of all that, this shaloob is making a mockery of my idea and cashing in. This wicked glazed-face Chef Boyardee-looking galoop. Putting himself on billboards like Boss Hogg had he swallowed both Duke Boys. When you're putting on the ritz at Knock Twice and Bark you are garnishing your soup with an asparagus tip nestled in a small spoonful of lightly whipped cream.

I sit and stew at Stew's. For about two hours. That is the lapse between the time I get out of KTB, as the dweedles call it, to the times Stew's closes. The amount of time I have to sit in here and plot my revenge. I don't plot my revenge while I am playing piano at the café because I am in love with Jane who doesn't have a terrible thing to say about anyone or anything. Jane, the beautiful, who dances across that café, sometimes in gold sequins and sometimes in blue or red. I like her best in black, though. When she wears heavy eyeliner and the black-sequined dress and headband with the peacock feather. And all through the night as I tickle those old familiar keys, I look for that peacock feather rising above the humdrum heads of the crowd and sure enough, there she will be. Sometimes in the space between people I get to see her face. And every so often, when I'm lucky, I get to see her smile. 

It is all worth it, to have been so agregiously babooned, just for that split second. That one perfect second when she is there between two obnoxious hobnockers that resemble arrays of ham or pastrami sandwiches left over at a hotel luncheon and she looks at me and grins. And every single time she does, I catch that exact moment when those fireworks burst and I hold it just as I did when I was a little kid and everything in the world was still as good as cherry ice cream. My fingers, all the while, still tickling, striking the keys a little harder as my pulse races for that fleeting second I wish I could keep. 

But every night it inevitably ends. They cut the piano player (me) an hour before close because, as they say, it warns everyone that the bar will soon close without being too brusque about it. And here I sit in a piano-less bar where people watch sports games or they converse about who died, or what news story happened today, or how the game will turn out next Saturday. 

A lady smiles at me and she is looks happy. At least she plays the part as she eats peanuts from a dish and sips a rum and coke. She is in blue jeans and dingy tennis shoes. She is a nice lady. Very genuine, it feels. Not like most of the lintlickers who go up the street. They all look as though they could swindle you out of something, or they look like they would try to fuck your mother if you weren't watching. What matters to her is that game and the food she is eating and an occasional drink in this place. Happiness is not a complex recipe, I realize. It isn't a wishlist of things. My happiness was occasionally seeing Jane's beautiful face and knowing she exists. 

But the next day at work, Jane was gone. I had spoke to Jane only a few times, and she had requested the song, "The Entertainer," because she said it made her think of her dad. I suppose he was some sort of gambler, but the story was too intimate to share so I let it alone not wanting to be a neeslenaum. So I played it and played it and sometimes I even played it when she didn't even request it so I could see her smile. I never went out of my way to talk to her. I simply made it obvious how I felt, that I was interested physically and mentally, and left it to her. I thought the right moment hadn't yet occured. But life doesn't just sit on your face. And now Jane wasn't there at all and it was Friday, so I was depressed with the thought that my chance had passed. You snooze you lose, as my mother always told me. Maybe Jane was sick. Or perhaps she had moved on and those of us who hadn't the pleasure to know her well enough were out in the cold. 

So I sat there and played and played whatever I felt like playing. Some people made requests, but in between those requests, my melancholy poured from my fingers. I played what I wanted to play. Mostly sad Cole Porter songs. I played "My Heart Will Go On" from The Titanic —though it wouldn't — at least 8 times. Then the mananger, who reminded me of what I would imagine a frog's dick would look like if it was blown up and suddenly given limbs and googly eyes, told me to play something more upbeat for chrissakes. So I grinned and faked it. Grinned and faked it for the spectacled amphibian effeminate penis.  

Then after it became clear she wasn't coming back, I started getting very drunk with hopes that they would fire me because I was a terrible quitter. I asked around about what happened to her and everyone squibbed up on me and said they didn't know. I can take a firing all day long, but I wasn't going to quit. Quitting is not destiny. Being fired is destiny. So I kept playing sad songs, "As Time Goes By," over and over until the manager's warty eardrums began to bleed and it told me to pack my things on the charge of insolence. 

So I went to Stew's one last time on my nightly peregrination. Sad and dejected. Completely kerplunked. Fired by a hermaphrodite frog who was leaching on my idea. Perhaps I'd rip that sword down from the wall and eat it. Or stab someone who I think needed a good stabbing so I could wake up in jail tomorrow and read the headline, "Drunken piano player stabs beloved patron at local Scottish bar" because everyone is a saint when they die and everyone that gets arrested is a dirty motherfucker. 

"The lad soiled the reputation of me bar," the owner would be quoted as saying, though he wasn't Scottish at all, and though he'd reap the benefit of free publicity and I would be babooned yet again. 

It's all histrionics and coddlethwarping when someone dies. Everyone cares so goddamn much they hurt. For a few phony hours. It isn't even about the dead person, really, because they're dead and it's of no difference to them. But when you're living, they don't give a damn how you're really doing. Even though they ask you, everytime, how are you doing. But there isn't really a question mark at the end. It is just what people say to avoid awkward silence. It's all insincere frunkum. 

The above paragraph was the extent of my conversation with the man at the bar who owned a butchershop in town. Whose entire job entailed caring as little as humanly possible for other living things so to make a living off their dead and slaughtered corpses, yet I poured it all out there rather than grabbing that sword and making good use of it, as though he were Dr. Phil himself. He smiled and agreed and listened of how I was babooned by that bastard galoop. That slimy walrus-turd of a man. He bought us another round and told me of how he himself was once babooned. He didn't seem to have any qualms or nothing to confess over the lambs or calves he carved up, but someone stole his first wife from him, he confessed. 

I asked him who, as though I would know the guy, and maybe we would grab the sword together and go on a crusade to find him after a night of heavy-regret drinking and ram it up his asshole. But he looked at me and smiled in a way someone has never smiled at me before. Sort of the way a puppy looks after it shits on the carpet. He answered in a low and solemn voice with a big fat tear in his eye, "Jesus Christ. My Debbie left me for Jesus Christ."

It is a quiddity of mine, I reason, to carry on over things I ought to let go. To not move on like the rest of the bunch who seem to be able to do so at the drop of a hat. Like those who bedhop so they're never lonely, or so to get back at some former lover who couldn't care less. I dwell in the aftermath of someone for a while. I ruminate in moderate to severe heartbreak and let pain hurt because it should hurt. Because to feel is what makes us human or else we are all that butcher chopping up a life of lambs while the next one waits. Then I find myself and dwell there for a while longer. Alone. Reconnect to old memories so that my memories are distinct and not piled up like hundreds of cars in a horrible freeway accident. But I hold on to hope, even when things are at their worst that the best is still to come. Sometimes it comes with a simple resolution. Another possibility erases that which previously existed. A better and brighter light is lit and outshines that once hopeful one that burnt for so long like the gaslights outside of Knock Twice and Bark. I know all this. I've been through it. I've suffered heartbreak and loss before, but never over someone I barely knew. There wasn't a euphoric thought in the world that could cure me of the soreness in my soul of losing dear Jane and there wasn't a bright enough light cutting through this darkness to give me hope forward. So I mornfully resolved to be pilgrimpus (noun), or one who settles for less than that which he desires. 

Then came a bell, clear as the tustling of an angel's golden wing. Clear as the ring that cracked the Liberty Bell. And as I gazed at that murky picture of Nessy, and the sword of William Wallace of Lancaster, known as "Beetle" to his friends, the stool next to me turned with the squeal of bellyrubbed rabbit, and in the woeful emptiness of it, there she sat. There she sat next to me as a strange lovesong played on the bar radio. I saw her looking at me in the reflection of the mirror between bottles of whisky and tonics just as I had once between faces like ham and pastrami sandwiches. She took a deep breath and exhaled. Finally the right time sat on my face. 

I pretended not to be a space rocket in that moment with a fire in my ass and nerds in black ties and white short-sleeved shirts counting down my launch to spastic outerspace. I stuffed my pockets with my words that no one would ever accept in Scrabble and acted as though I nearly expected her, yet was still surprised by her sudden arrival. I may very well be a terrible actor. I was going for the occasion being pleasant, but not life-altering. We were simply launching a rocket into routine orbit, not one to Mars for fuck sake. But in truth, this rocket was headed straight for God, for Him to catch, play with, and toss back to earth full of new life and hope and His blessing. Nothing less could describe that feeling of being near to her. 

I had the good sense to buy her a drink and then the butcher realized the score and found solace in a plumber on the other side of him and they talked about inflation or midgets or Jesus and his wife or something I'd never know. And Jane and I talked about Jane because I wanted to hear about her. She said she missed my piano playing but had to quit because she felt tired and beat-up by life and it was time for a change. A new beginning. She was Tina Turner and life was Ike. She didn't give a notice because she didn't care that much and no one cared if she did. 

"Well, I would have appreciated a notice," I playfully retorted. 

"You and no one else," she grinned.

"Perhaps, me and the world. I cannot look at you and believe the whole world is not in love with you." 

She smiled and took a drink. 

"I've said too much."

"No. Not enough."

"Jane, I thought when you left I had been completely babooned."

"Babooned?" 

"Babooned is a verb. It means to be duped or fooled into losing one's sense of purpose through either literal or figurative theft. I'm sorry. I ought to explain. I create words that fill the void when there is no recognized or applicable word to satisfy the moment."

"I see."

"Well, anyway, I created that place. The idea, the location, it was all mine. He just had the money. I hadn't talked to him in a year or so and the next thing I know, the place is up. He offered me a job as the piano player. I think I was the only piano player he knew. So he babooned me. But then I saw you, and I knew that was why. I'd been babooned for a reason. If I was a partner, or owner, it wouldn't have been the same. Perhaps, we wouldn't have met at all. So I kept playing piano to catch glimpses of you between the boring faces of everyone else. Those few seconds I got to see you, I stuck in my pockets. They helped me get up the next morning with a spring in my step and to put on my pants and walk the dog. Indifferent to bad weather or bad news. Happy. Genuinely happy. Hopeful, which is more than happy. Luppo, I call it."

"You make me luppo, too." She kissed my neck and held her lips there for a while and just breathed, softly. Then she whispered that she had something to tell me, which she didn't want anyone else to hear. I feared the worst. Perhaps she was going to tell me that she was only a figment of my imagination. I couldn't bear it. 

"I've been babooned by guy after guy. It's a strange thing that you use that very word. Of all animals, you picked the exact one. My entire adult life, I meet a guy and he is a guy for awhile, but then suddenly he turns into a fucking baboon. I mean, an actual baboon. Of course, figuratively in reality, but to me, that is all that I can see. That stupid blue sea shell nose and a bright red ass. They've all tried to steal from me something rather than to wait for me to give it. Something deeper for which there is no word."

I nodded as though I understood. She might have been a little drunk, but there was more than a kwil of sincerity in her words and I knew very well what she meant. I understood it thoroughly. 

"Your soul."

She nodded. "That's the word. So how do I stop men from turning into baboons, Pete, the piano player?"

A witty comeback escaped me. I stalled by taking a drink. "We can discuss the matter over drinks and food at my place, if you'd like. Before I turn into a baboon."

She laughed and we said goodbye to the bartender, the butcher and the plumber and Nessy and Beetle Wallace's sword, as though we were all best friends. The usual soft drunken bar farewell no one ever remembers tomorrow. 

The whole ride home I kept thinking what painting I'd paint of Jane being babooned as she had described. Surely, the great Clarence Doore has already done one that I could buy and frame and give her as a gift on our first wedding anniversary, or whatever anniversay it is that is celebrated with paper. I might attach a card that would read, "I find you incredibly hot being attacked by the baboons you've successfully evaded. Forever in love and luppo. And never a bright red ass!"

I asked her that first night if she wanted to sit in the parlor where I would play piano for her. I even offered to play her favorite tune, "The Entertainer."

"No," she smiled drawing closer. "Save your fingers for me, darling." And so the piano sat undisturbed.