BAR PHONE FEES
$1 NOT HERE
$2 ON HIS WAY OUT
$3 JUST LEFT
$4 HAVEN’T SEEN HIM ALL DAY
$5 WHO??
A waitress approached our table and I prepared to reach for my wallet, but William put out his hand beneath the table to stop me and leaned across it. He raised his voice over the music and cacophony of other sounds. “Hey, Brenda.”
“Hey, William. Hey, Todd.”
“Hey,” Todd said.
The woman leaned in. “You meeting Monica?” she asked William.
William cupped his ear against the music and the din of the crowd. I had bad hearing also, my father’s hearing. I learned this when a bicycle tire I filled at a gas station on Broadway and El Camino exploded and my mother took me in to be tested. Brenda raised her voice and repeated her question.
“She’s working late,” William said. “We framed a job today and worked late also.”
I looked around, nonchalant, as if relaxing after a tough workday, and realized William had just set me up to get a drink.
“What can I get you?” Brenda flipped three coasters onto the table, each depicting a leprechaun in knickers. I was in.
“Jameson’s, rocks,” Todd said.
William ordered the same.
I didn’t know Jameson’s. My only criterion for hard alcohol was cheap. “I’ll have a Guinness,” I said and waited for the inevitable question. It didn’t come.
Minutes later, Brenda returned with our drinks and held out menus. “Are you eating?” she asked.
Todd shook his head. He had to meet his wife, but William nodded, so I did also. Brenda handed us menus and promised to return to take our food orders. We shot the shit and William kept on me for not asking out the New Yorker, but in a funny manner. Todd just smiled.
When Brenda returned, William ordered a club sandwich and a second Jameson’s. I ordered a hamburger and a second Guinness. Todd bugged out.
“Springsteen,” William shouted as the music changed songs. He rapped on the table edge like a drummer. “A good New Jersey boy.”
Mike had turned me on to Bruce Springsteen’s music. The prior Christmas he had bought me the eight-tracks Greetings from Asbury Park and The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle.
“We used to sneak into the bars on the Jersey Shore to hear Springsteen when he was a teenager with long hair and a shitty guitar,” William said. He smiled like he’d gone back to those carefree days.
I wasn’t a big music guy, I didn’t have money to spend on albums or eight-tracks, but I had installed an eight-track cartridge player in my Pinto; I’d even cut in the speakers in the back and run the wiring under the carpet. My tape selection was limited. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the two Springsteen eight-tracks from Mike. Mif and I also liked Elvis, though I didn’t have a tape and wouldn’t admit it out loud. Billy called Elvis “a fat has-been” and said Springsteen was a yodeler. “Uh-uh-uh-uh-oh.” It wasn’t flattering.
I worried William and I would not have much to say to one another; this wasn’t just sitting around after work with a beer. After Brenda returned with our food and drinks, I said, “You have bad hearing?”
William nodded.
“I do, too. I got my dad’s hearing.”
William grinned. “I have Vietnam hearing.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Blew out an eardrum during a shelling my first night in the bush.” He shrugged like it was not a big deal. “You know Vietnam?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “Not really.”
William grabbed his napkin and pulled out a pen from his pants pocket and drew what looked like the mirror image of a longer and thinner version of California.
“Saigon is here.” He put a star close to the bottom of the drawing. “I was up here near the Laos border at a firebase in the triple canopy jungle.”
I figured William wanted to discuss it. “What did you do?”
He shook his head. “Went out at night on recon missions and watched guys step on land mines and get blown to pieces. Then we’d get up the next night and do it all over again, like it never happened. Stupid.” He shook his head, so I did also.
William’s blue eyes looked to have turned a shade of gray. “You ever watch movies where the soldier is taking aim from behind a log and shooting the enemy? John Wayne shit?”
“Yeah.” I loved to watch movies with my dad. War movies had changed over the years. Movies like The Great Escape, The Dirty Dozen, and The Guns of Navarone, which emphasized American heroism and patriotism, had given way to movies like The Deer Hunter, which focused on the madness of the war in Vietnam.