It was a chimerical wish — the impractical wish of a man who could no longer be of service to his company. And the reality of having lost his father to useless senility felt to Bob Grady Junior like a swift kick in the balls. Unfortunately, and to Bob’s disadvantage, Grady Enterprises had stopped making Tender Testicle Analgesic Cream a good five years ago.
1978 TRIPLE-TOASTED IN MISSOURI
The three St. Louis men had a number of things in common, some more important than others, and one the most important of all. Dennis, Jock, and Marvin were all well into their thirties. Each hated Saturday Night Fever and disco in general and the Bee Gees in particular. It was Dennis, oldest of the three, who took the initiative and barked at the bartender to “please can the disco music. This is a bar, not a discotheque.”
Kurt, the bartender, looked offended. “It’s four in the afternoon. Nobody’s here but me and the three of you, and Old Man Rivers, who doesn’t give a rat’s ass what music I play.”
“Well, the three of us do,” Dennis shot back. “And if you’re unwilling to kill ‘Stayin’ Alive’ sometime in the next, let’s say, thirty seconds, we’re gonna pick ourselves up and go drink our expensive Scotch whiskies in some other Carondelet bar. Capice?”
Kurt turned off the music.
Marvin was laughing. Marvin was drunk. He’d gotten an early jump on his companions. “Ironic, too,” he added.
“How’s that?” asked Jock. Then the answer came to him like a slap, and he nodded reflectively. “Kill. Alive. I get it.”
Besides an acquired fondness for Scotch, which put each of the three men on an even footing with their hard-drinking colleagues at the two law firms and one district attorney’s office where they worked, there was also a strong interest in the sport of tennis, both as players and fans, over which they had inevitably bonded.
Just the week before, Bjorn Borg had lost the U.S. Open Men’s Singles title to American Jimmy “Jimbo” Connors. Jimbo had won handily in straight sets. Marvin, who paid close attention to the minutia of the game, had opined moments before (while raising his voice to be heard over “How Deep is Your Love”), that Borg, who had earlier in the year captured singles titles at both the French Open and Wimbledon, was disadvantaged by his unfamiliarity with the new hard court surface, “DecoTurf,” that the recently opened tennis facility in Queens, New York, had laid in.
“He got to the finals, didn’t he?” retorted Dennis, who looked a little like Borg: blond and Nordic, a contrast to his booth companions. (One of the differences among the three men: none bore even the slightest resemblance to his two companions. Another was Dennis’s pedigree: he was the grandson of Pulitzer-prize winning novelist Dennis Bailey).
“The thing I read,” offered Marvin, who looked a lot like a young Arthur Miller — prominently spectacled and possessed of long vertical dimples that framed his voluble mouth like parentheses, “is that the new DecoTurf favors serve-and-volley players, not a baseliner like Bjorn.”
“Your theory’s bullshit, Marvin,” pronounced Jock, who, having his side of the booth to himself, had spread his right arm across the top of the back cushion as if waiting for an adoring female to slide in next to him. Jock was arguably the least good-looking of the three. He was beef and brawn and proprietor of a hairline that was dramatically receding (a product, he often bragged, of a natural overproduction of testosterone), and a face that perhaps formerly had some nuance of shape to it, but was now lithically hard-set and jut-jawed like a bulldog’s.
“Tell me why it’s bullshit,” said Marvin, enunciating each word carefully to keep from slurring.
“Because this kid coming up through the ranks, McEnroe — he’s all volley and serve. It’s like he’s allergic to ground strokes.”
“Or just a fucking hot dog,” observed Dennis, who waved his glass to get Kurt the bartender’s attention. Some of the remaining Dewars sloshed onto Marvin’s arm. “But yeah, yeah, I get your point — Connors cleaned his clock in the semi-finals.”
Kurt, detecting movement in the periphery of his vision, looked up from his present task of pillowing Old Man Rivers’ toppled head with a couple of folded bar towels, to see Dennis summoning his attention from the booth the three men occupied. “Thanks. I mean the music,” Dennis shouted.
“Pegged you three for either Billy Joel or Chuck Mangione,” Kurt called from behind the bar. Billy Joel was singing “Only the Good Die Young” over the bar’s speakers.
Marvin snickered. “Another irony. The room is awash with them this afternoon.”
“Almost creepy,” said Jock, sitting forward and setting both arms heavily upon the woody tabletop.
“I like ‘Brandy,’” admitted Marvin quietly and irrelevantly. “She’s a fine girl. What a good wife she would be.”
“It’s getting late, fellows,” said Jock. “I’ve got to go pick up Scottie at his school. If I’m not there stroke of five thirty, soon as football practice ends, word gets back to Jill, and bingo! It’s like the opposite of that Ozark Air Lines jingle.” Jock suddenly became tunefuclass="underline" “She doesn’t make things easy for me!”
The men laughed. “Are you saying it’s time for the toast?” asked Dennis. “Are you rushing the toast, Jocko?”
“I gotta rush the toast. Hey, we’ve been here over an hour. That ain’t bad.”
“These reunions get shorter every year,” Marvin reflected.
“That’s bullshit,” said Jock. “Christ, we were here well past the dinner hour last year. You should have heard the earful I got from Jill that night.”
“I need to be heading out, too,” said Dennis. “I don’t live under the thumb of my wife like Jocko here, but I’ve still got my domestic responsibilities.” Both Dennis and Jock turned to Marvin. Dennis spoke for the both of them: “Insert obligatory observation here about the advantages of bachelorhood.”
“Observation stipulated to,” said Marvin, his eyes now rheumy.
“You’re taking a cab,” said Dennis. And then to Kurt: “Make sure our friend Marvin gets a cab home. Oh, and we’re ready for our toast. Black Label, please. Only the best for Tracie.”
The bartender nodded and drew his bottle of twelve-year-old Johnnie Walker Black down from the back-bar shelf. The three men could hear the clink of the three ceremonial shot glasses as he plucked them up.
When he reached the booth, Kurt asked, “How long have you three ambulance chasers been doing this? All I know about is the last three years since I’m here.”
“This is our sixth gathering,” said Jock. “And you’re wrong about our friend Marvin here. He isn’t an ambulance chaser; he works for the people of the great state of Missouri.” Then to his companions: “Really sorry about rushing things, guys.”
“Perfectly understandable considering the circumstances,” said Dennis, taking up his shot glass.
“What a good wife she would buh-eeee,” sang Marvin. Then he corrected himself: “What a good wife she was.”
“That’s as good a toast as any,” said Dennis, raising his glass high. The other two men met his glass with their own over the middle of the table. “To Tracie, loving wife to us all. God bless and keep her in Heaven’s sweet embrace.”