Stuart Dybek - Paper Lantern - Love Stories

A dreamer’s asleep, Rosie. A visionary’s so wide awake everyone else seems like zombies. It ain’t the place, Rosie, it’s the name of the place that’s a loser. Picture yourself some working stiff. All day in the foundry you been visualizing a cold brewski, its head of foam sliding down a frosty stein. Are you going to patronize some dump that sounds infested—Verman the German’s—rats giving the heil Hitler, the bar like a conveyor belt of cooties carrying off your beer, flies so thick you can’t see the Sox losing on the TV, and when, God help you, you go to take a leak, crabs in the crapper!

I don’t know about visionary, but Frank could be a hoot. Always had a way with words. Voluptuous . Who but Frank woulda called me voluptuous ? Sumnabitch wrote me poems when we first met. He’d scrawl them with my eyebrow pencil on two-dollar bills. I hid them from my mother. What Frank called a poem, she’d call a mortal sin. She’d of had to confess reading them and do penance. Even now, thinking about them, I feel the blood in my face. But I always was a blusher. It’s a weakness in a poker-faced world. I had naturally red hair, not like girls today dyeing it weird Technicolors. And the figure that went with it was natural, too. It ain’t like Frank that sumnabitch didn’t notice. Bosom Buddy—real subtle, huh? I saved the poems in a shoe box, three hundred and twelve bucks’ worth of two-dollar poems. Mementos, my royal keister! I was trying to figure how to cash them without getting arrested for passing pornographic money. You think those dirty bills are still good for spending or did Frank that sumnabitch ruin them, too?

How you liking that Polish beer?

Personally, I don’t think it’s worth the half buck extra. Czech beer, that’s different, and I hate to admit it cause I’m Polish. Frank that sumnabitch was a bohunk. They take their pivo seriously. Pivo ’s a breakfast food for them. The Polacks run on vodka, higher octane, but burns you out faster. You Mexican? You look like a bullfighter with that little ponytail, not that I ever been to a bullfight. I aced Spanish in high school. Cómo se llama ?

Rafael. That’s an angel’s name, ain’t it? You an angel? Don’t worry, you can take the Fifth on that. And I ain’t gonna card you neither cause angels never look their age. Here, Rafael, tak , try a sip of this. Put your money away, first one’s free, kid. You don’t mind if I join you. Tak . Don’t want you having to drink alone. Na zdrowie!

Like that, Rafael? Chopin vodka, made from spuds, not goddamn cornflakes. Prettiest bottle on the shelf. Not to say it ain’t a rip-off. It was Frank’s idea to carry imported pivo when all those Poles fled here before the Wall fell. We put up an old Solidarno poster and a picture of the Polish pope next to Mayor Daley. Frank figured immigrants want a little taste of the homeland, so we put in ywiec on tap, but DPs pledge their allegiance to whatever’s cheap. Frank that sumnabitch wasn’t visionary on that one.

But he was right about buying this bar, not that we coulda afforded it without luck. Buena suerte , right? When we first started going out, Frank that sumnabitch was working at the train yards as a railroad dick, which you can imagine made for some lousy jokes. His job was to keep people from stealing and vandalizing and the bums from riding the rails. Frank was the kinda dork who’d saved his toy trains. Loved railroads, but hated his job. He wasn’t the kind of sumnabitch cut out for regular hours or getting bossed. Complained it felt like the freights heading west were leaving him behind. He’d always wanted to be a cowboy. Instead a keeping the hobos off, he said he had the urge to join them.

So, Buffalo Frank Novak, what’s stopping you? I’d kid him.

He’d go, That was before I met my voluptuous Rosebud. You know, Rosie, it don’t hurt to have a fantasy that if things get desperate there’s always an escape route. But that Verman bar’s our real ticket out. All it needs is a coat of paint, a blue neon sign, and a new name. The right name can change everything.

Like magic, huh, Frank?

Presto change-o, Rosebud.

So, what would you call it? I ask him.

Well, if it was a ship, with red sails in the sunset, I’d name it after you, Rosebud, but a tavern—you don’t want your name plastered on no bar.

Actually, I wouldn’t have minded, you know, the Rose Room or something classy, with lighting to match. An electric rose glowing in a Chopin vodka bottle for a bar sign, maybe a piano playing, or at least Sinatra and the Stones instead of the “Too Fat Polka.” But I told him what he wanted to hear: No, Frank, don’t go naming some bar, even if it happens to be your dream in life, after me.

He goes, Notice its address? 2200 West 22nd. Four deuces. Could call it Deuces Wild, but that seems to invite bad behavior. But Four Deuces, that’s a deceptively lucky hand. A man with a hand like that lays in wait for the kill. Know the odds on a hand like that, Rosebud?

No idea, Frank.

Four hundred and twenty-six to one.

So, we get an asking price from Verman, and now that Frank’s fantasy has a name, the Four Deuces, it becomes his obsession. He was the kinda sumnabitch always needed an obsession. It’s what got him stealing from the railroad—he was a relatively honest sumnabitch up to then. Perfume, leather coats, rugs, booze, guns … He’d fence the goods on Jewtown and we’d play the funny money at Sportsman’s. Mr. Visionary would be up to all hours calculating the odds on that racing form. Einstein never figured harder. Frank had a theory there was a hidden pattern to luck, and if you could find it the odds would be on your side.

Don’t matter if it’s astrology or astrophysics, he’d say, they’re both about a pattern in the stars that allows you to predict. That Oriental rug you’re standing on is just a design to you and me, Rosebud, but if a swami saw it, he’d know there was a prayer woven in it.

Would the swami know you stole it off a boxcar?

Wouldn’t matter. That’s why in Aladdin the carpet could fly, cause he knew its secret power, Frank would say, and go back to his prognostications.

Mostly he’d get hosed.

One night on Memorial Day weekend, I tell him I wish we were at a movie or the beach or anywhere other than Sportsman’s, and he says, Hey, nobody’s twisting your arm to be here, and I joke I could do better with my eyes closed, then I close them and point to Devil May Care, a long shot. It pays thirty to one on my two-dollar bet.

Rosebud, try it again, Frank says.

I pick three winners that night, and stop only cause I get dizzy. We take home eight hundred and change for three hours’ play. Woulda taken Frank two weeks of dicking around to clear that. You can bet that sumnabitch wanted his lucky Rosebud along after that. You and me, Rosebud, he’d say, Romeo and Juliet, Bonnie and Clyde, Lucy and Ricky, and I was too goddamn dumb to tell the difference between love and superstition.

And Frank was one superstitious sumnabitch. He’d wear the same lucky track clothes and make sure I was dressed the same down to my lucky underwear. You can use your imagination as to what that might be. I knew what turned him on. We’d sit in the same lucky seats along the stretch …

Sure, you can buy us a round, Rafael. Vodka’s on you, brewski’s on the house. Fair? Chopin and ywiec—a Four Deuces boilermaker. Tak . No cheap-ass Beam and Millers for us. Na zdrowie!