Mark Dunn - American Decameron

“Hey, Pop,” said the son, “can I take you back home now?”

“Is it time already?” asked the father.

“I don’t know how much you got out of that meeting.”

The father turned to look at his son. “Enough to know that this ship is going down in a hurry. I don’t know why H-H wants the merger. Unless they’re planning to scrub everything and start from scratch. We have a fine plant. I wouldn’t blame them.” Pivoting back to the window: “Look at all the pigeon shit. Why do pigeons fly all the way up to the twenty-first story of this building just to shit on our ledges?”

When Bob Grady Junior saw his father’s face again, there were tears in the old man’s eyes. “I built this company from nothing. Just me and my dreams and that oversized rectal thermometer that took off like gangbusters in Greenwich Village and San Francisco, and, for some reason that I still can’t understand, Cheyenne, Wyoming. Now we’re floundering, Bobby. And I’m no help. I’m put out to pasture, son, like a half-dead horse.”

“We’re going to turn this company around, Dad. I’ll make it my mission to put Grady Enterprises back in the black. I’ll make you proud.”

Father and son stood at the window, the father’s thoughts drifting to memories of his glory days as a young entrepreneur in go-go Chi-town, the son’s thoughts wandering to how to improve the Bladder-Guard Antibacterial Urethra Shield. It wasn’t long before the father’s musings turned once again to pigeons. He thought he might like to be one himself so that he could fly away to a place where people still drank coffee and wanted to buy everything he had to sell, even though they would continue to do so with a blush.

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.

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 tuneful: “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.”