Pete Hamill - Loving Women

Sal said, “Now these are the real goyim.” He saw the notice for the square dance. “I gotta take you there some Friday night …”

“Not me,” Max said. “I hear they commit ritual murder in there.”

“Absolutely true,” Sal said. “But only on Jews and spades. They take you in back, tie you up, and check to see if you’re, one, circumcised or, two, can balance a basketball on your dick. You can do either, that’s enough, a sign from God. Then they beat you to death with Bibles wrapped in argyle socks. Whatever’s left, they sell as bait out in the Gulf.… So we’d have to disguise you as an Irishman. Teach you the words to ‘Danny Boy.’ Get you a plastic foreskin …”

The bus arrived and we got on. Max and Sal sat together and I took the seat behind them. All the way into town I looked for the woman in the yellow T-shirt and baseball cap, pedaling a blue bicycle. I didn’t see her. But I was certain I would find her.

Dixie Shafer was just inside the door of the Dirt Bar when we arrived. She wasn’t very tall, but great piles of silky red hair rose off her face and made her seem gigantic. Her mouth and nose were small, and her skin was creamy, but she must have weighed three hundred pounds. A lot of that weight was in her breasts, which were round, full, straining against a flowered off-the-shoulder gypsy blouse. A gold cross on a chain lay between the breasts, sometimes turning on its side and flattening between them when she moved. Her eyes were blue behind oversized red harlequin glasses. Gold hoops hung from her ears and every one of her fingers was adorned with rings. I’d never seen anyone like her in my life.

“New man!” Sal yelled. “Mike Devlin!”

“First one’s on me!” Dixie shouted, jamming those huge tits against me and hugging me. “After that, you pay!”

“She means it,” Sal said, raising his eyebrows at me as Dixie moved behind the bar. He explained that Dixie had built the bar a year before on this empty lot on O Street. Land was cheap and Dixie saw something; she grabbed the plot, bought some concrete blocks from a chief ordnance man who robbed them from Mainside, and had the roof up in a week. A moonlighting shipwright built the bar and she moved in the jukebox and the shuffleboard machine and then ran out of money. She didn’t have a dime left for the floor. The sailors started coming, and she realized that sailors could get along without a floor — understood that Sal and some of the others actually loved the dirt — and that sailors could get along without almost everything except a bar and a jukebox, cold beer and warm pussy. So Dixie saved the money that should have gone for the floor and used it to build an extension: a place in the back, where she lived. And she did her best to give all her young men what they needed most. Beer and pussy. Pussy and beer.

“If heaven ain’t like Dixie’s Dirt Bar,” Sal said, “I don’t want to go.”

Dixie shoved three Jax beers at us, and we pooled single dollars on the bar and I could see other faces from the base in the smoky room and heard Hank Williams from the juke. “Jambalaya and a crawfish pie / And a filé gumbo.…” There were four men in civvies playing a shuffleboard machine and the door opened and two more came in to join the dozen at the bar. “Son of a gun, we’ll have big fun, on the bayouuuu.” The beer was full of little slivers of ice and I watched Dixie’s breasts move as she hurried around behind the bar, jerking tops off bottles with a church key and making change from a tray beside the icebox. I wondered what it would feel like to push my face between those creamy breasts.

“Hank ain’t dead!” Sal suddenly yelled, shaking both fists in the air like a Holy Roller. “Oh lord, no, Hank ain’t dead !” The shuffleboard players paused. Dixie gave him a look. “Don’t be telling me Hank Williams done died!” He was talking like a preacher now, with a little bit of Senator Claghorn too. “Just listen, brothers an’ sisters! You hear him? Do you hear poor Hank, poor Luke the Driftuh hisself? He lives, brothers and sisters! Right there on that jukebox! An’ I tell you, he’s gonna be there the rest of our lives !”

“Amen, brother,” one of the shuffleboard players said solemnly. “Amen, amen …”

“The Lord put him among us an’ the Lord done took him away, but brothers and sisters, we will be with him again in Paradise! I tell you! An’ right here, tonight, in this place, among us poor sinners, he is with us, because there ain’t a man among us who can’t say it loud and clear: Hank lives! Just shout it out , brothers.”

Two sailors at the bar yelled, “Hank lives! Yeah. Hank lives !”

“No, you gotta shout it! You gotta shout so the Lord kin hear ya! Do you know what I’m saying?”

I couldn’t tell if Sal was serious or what, but in seconds he had all of us chanting, shouting, pounding the bar, yelling Hank lives! Hank lives! Hank lives! While Sal threw his head back, chug-a-lugged the beer and then clunked the bottle down hard. While the words came from the juke: “Another love before my time. Made your heart sad and blue …”

Max said, “Sal, we can’t keep up with you like this.”

“You have to, mah man, mah Hebrew brother, cuz Hank would’ve wanted it this way.”

We chug-a-lugged together, in a kind of ritual, Sal moving us with the almost religious fervor of his sarcasm; Max let out an enormous belch, while Dixie opened three fresh bottles and Hank Williams sang “Ramblin’ Man.” Three more sailors came in, all wearing civvies, and the place was packed and full of smoke, with the bubbling lights racing through the columns of the great Wurlitzer against the concrete wall. I didn’t chug-a-lug the second beer, but I did manage a fat gassy belch as a kind of punctuation. Sal slapped me on the back and yelled for Dixie, who brought three more bottles. Her breasts were beautiful. They weren’t actually breasts at all, I thought, full of distinctions; they were tits . Real-life beautiful tits . Everybody was talking at once, with Sal roaring over them all and the talk was all Hank Williams.

“Hank ain’t dead,” Sal said, and finished a beer. “Hank lives !”

He had set the refrain for the night. Hank would’ve wanted it this way . Sal was making fun, I guess; I don’t think he truly felt very bad about Hank Williams. But, in his loud wild way, he was consoling the others, and maybe pitying them a little, too. So the night became a series of fragments: beer and new faces and change on the bar and bottles being smashed in a garbage can and Dixie’s creamy bigness, all of it held together by a poor lonesome dead man. Hank would’ve wanted it that way .

At one point, Dixie came up beside me and said, “You’re a quiet one, ain’t you?” And moved away. While Hank Williams sang:

In the blur I tried to sort out the members of what they all called The Gang. Brian Maher from Hartford. Pale Irish skin untouched by the Gulf sun. Slick hair as black as India ink. A yeoman so good Sal said he could take stenography like a pro. Brian drank his beer very fast and belched almost demurely, and talked to me in a soft secretive way about ice skating on the Merrimac River when he was a boy and how no other women in the whole world had such round firm eatable asses as the girls on that winter river. Beside him, Don Carter from Newark. His accent harder than any New Yorker’s. Long-nosed, gap-toothed, with big hands, a deep tan, working at Ellyson as a parachute rigger (and Sal yelling at him over the words of “Mind Your Own Business”: What are you going to do with PARACHUTE RIGGING on The Outside? Carter glancing at me, shrugging, pulling at his long nose, staring into the top of the Jax beer bottle: I don’t know, the rigging school was in Lakehurst, near home, and I just wanted to be near my girl . And Sal slammed the bar and shouted: And where in the FUCKING FUCK is the girl NOW, Carter? Carter whispered: Gone . Sal blinked, and said: Drink up, asshole. Hank would’ve wanted it that way.)