“Irregardless isn't a word, Charlie,” meek Midas interjects.
“Who the fuck asked this guy, huh?” he says with a coy smile directed at me. “Irregardless,” he begins, making certain to emphasize each syllable, “Place looked like it'd been hit by a fuckin' hurricane. 'Sides the piss puddles and da' refer smell in the can, the whole ambiance was way outta' whack — was like a fuckin'…ya' know…uh, like a fuckin' frat house. Not as bad as fuckin' Paulmil, mind you, but fuckin' bad.” He shrugs again. “Look: I ain't saying 'at type a' shit's gonna happen in my bar. I know most da' people who come in and outta this place, and I ain't gotta worry much. But I ain't gonna stand by and let graffiti…ya’ know…uh, accumulate, until my bar looks like an old train car, you get me, kid?”
“I understand,” solemnly. “I guess the only question now is if you have any pictures from the bathroom before you painted over it. Maybe your wife took like a before and an after?”
“Hate to break it to ya', but I ain't the type a' guy who takes pictures a' people on the can. I leave that type a' shit to B.B. Fucking King,” before letting out a boisterous laugh. The guys hanging around the jukebox turn to him. “Yo', youse hear 'bout that?”
“Was in Saint Louis, right?” one of them asks.
“Nah, I heard it was the one in Times Square.”
“I thought it was in Kansas City,” Midas says hesitantly. “Probably just a rumor anyway.” He pauses. “You’re probably thinking about Chuck Berry, Charlie. He definitely did that shit.”
Charlie nods. “For once in your life, you’re fucking right, Midas. B.B. King’s a fucking saint. Still, dat’s some funny shit dough, huh?” Charlie asks/says. Regardless of the verb he utilizes, its usage manages to elicit a tepid response from the people in the bar, even the young couple playing pool, whom Charlie doesn't seem to know. “Tell ya' what kid, I got a box full of pictures somewhere in back. I can go an'get'm if you don't mind hangin' around a little.”
“I don't have anywhere to be,” I respond. “It's just that what I'm looking for appeared about a week ago,” I add.
He doesn't hear me. “Yo', youse don't need nothing, right?” he calls out to no one in particular. A few moments of silence produces no response, so he begins towards the door that reads employe's only.
“What's the story with the shoe?” I ask Midas as I take my first sip of beer for the day.
His features become pensive, furrowed into something that may have been a scowl for others, but has since become his default. He glares to the television without attention, the images having ceased to captivate so long ago that it seems the tube's only purpose now is to drown out the thought that too many years have been spent drinking in this dive straddling the lines of Red Hook and limbo. “Long story, kid,” he responds gruffly. I ask him if he knows anything about Coprolalia, and receive a derisive response. And yet in his eyes there is a faint glimmer, an attempt at recourse to something that the steady influx of beer probably makes him forget from time to time.
His friends call him Midas because everything he's ever touched has gone to shit. At least that's what I assume. It's an example of the sardonic humor that one is bound to encounter in these neighborhoods — a mild causticity that makes the incisive bite of a working a job that never pays all the bills, of living in a home that never keeps out all of the cold, of remembering a past that never fails to center upon the elusive “one big shot,” diffuse into a string of inconveniences and accidents and twists of fate that remove the central figure from any fault or blame — a comedy of errors that never ceases to provoke that poor-bastard shake of the head or, failing that, an encouraging remark about the sun rising the following morning. Luck, the most sacred shibboleth of the working class, never fails to make a cameo every couple of days to break a window, tamper with an alarm clock, or cajole a shoe loose while its owner tries to chase down a B61 driven by “a sadistic son of a bitch,” whose thoughts on empathy can best be summarized by his lead foot (practicing misanthropy, after all, is not just common behavior for MTA and city employees; it's one of their requisite duties). Luck forces the individual to make a split-second decision of “losing my job for looking like a fucking derelict or losing my job because I came in late two times last week” for reasons that are also subject to the whim of the malign poecilonym that keeps the gears of misfortune spinning.
“What would you do?” he asks.
“What do you mean?”
“If you lost your shoe running after the bus,” he responds quickly. “If you show up to work late, you're fired; if you show up wearing one shoe, you're fired — either way you're fucked. The boss will tell you that you should have left earlier. That way, you don't have to run to the bus. Hell, that way, you can even lose your shoe, walk back, pick it up, put it on, and still get to work on time by catching the next one. Problem solved, right?” he says with a snort and a cackle. The bottle almost reaches his mouth before he places it back down on the bar. He turns to me. “But what happens when you're kept up by your cunt of a wife? What happens when your kid won't stop crying all night? What happens when there ain't enough fucking hours in the night to deal escape from all the shit you have to deal with during the day?” He looks back to the bottle of beer in front of him and seems to become almost remorseful. “Fuck, guy, I don't mean to throw all of this on you. You're just looking for some prick who writes some stupid shit on the wall. I don't mean nothing by what I'm saying.” He looks to the beer in his hand with a tepid smile. “You're all right, you know that?”
We drink our beers in relative silence and stare to the televisions that broadcast sports that no one cares about. Midas offers sound bites of bar wisdom: “All a man really wants is five things. He's gotta have food and shelter; and he's gotta have a reason to wake up every morning and a reason to come home every night. Besides these, he's gotta believe that those four things are secure — philosophy ain't nothing more than a man attempting to legitimize that last one.” “This country was founded by hard work, and hard work's the only thing that's gonna save it.” “We were all born thanks to a woman, and we're all gonna die thanks to a woman.”
“I wanted to be a musician,” he says after a desultory harangue against unions, Republicans, Democrats; anyone, really — whether they are trying to impugn his liberty with regulations or whether they are getting rich due to the dearth of regulations. To him, it was pretty much all the same: the workingman gets screwed. “I was in a band for a long time called the Red Hook Sound Machine.” I ask what he played. “I was the drummer. I was on kit; we had another guy on percussion. Back in the day I was really something. People used to compare me to Harvey Mason, if you know who that is.” I begin to nod with diffidence. “You know Herbie's Headhunters album?” I smile. “That's him. One of the tightest, most innovative drummers of all time.” The jukebox, after a short hiatus, begins to spew out Big Joe Turner. In the purlieus of the bar, the Motown-Atlantic debate begins anew.
“Yeah, but I was never in it for the money. I mean, I wanted to make it — don't get me wrong — but I was also realistic. To me, just gigging with the guys every once in a while was enough. Extra money in my pocket was nice, but it's not like that was the only reason I was in it. We were good, too; and a lot of people really dug our sound. It's not like we were putting out gold records, but we had a pretty serious following around Brooklyn, and we were pulling in two hundred or so whenever we played.
“And then it got to be the nineties, and everything we did sounded outdated. Guys started quitting the band. Two of them got married: one to a woman, another to the JDL. Once we split up, I did some session work here and there, but that kinda fizzled out when Mikey, my connection with the studio, passed about a decade ago.” I don't ask; he just tells me: “AIDS.” He picks up his beer. “But I'm sure you don't wanna hear all this. As a poet once said, the wise don't worship dusty deeds.”