The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato (2 page)

Danny said, “Why don't you skip work and just stay home in bed with me?”

“ 'Cause I'll get fired and I need the money, that's why,” I said.

“What can money buy you that would be better than a long afternoon with just you and me together right here in this room?”

“Well, just for instance, maybe it could pay the rent to stay underneath this roof.”

“It's mighty romantic to sleep under the stars,” Danny grinned.

“What about when it rains?”

“You just have an answer for everything, don't you, sugar?”

“Maybe I do.”

“Well, that's a relief. A smart woman like you can surely figure out a way to keep the rain off us.”

Then he rolled over and went back to sleep.

Imagine, Socrates begins, a race of human beings who have lived all their lives deep inside a cave, chained so they cannot move their arms or legs or even turn their heads, but are compelled to stare straight ahead at a blank stone wall in front of them. Imagine also that behind these prisoners blazes a bonfire. Between the place where the bonfire roars and the place where the people sit, there is a walkway across which other people walk carrying all manner of objects, statues, and figures of stone and wood, casting long shadows on to the wall in front of the prisoners.

Socrates imagines that the chained prisoners in the cave talk with each other, discussing the shadows they see on the wall in front of them. The shadows would seem to be real to the chained observers, Socrates argues. And the sounds made by the bearers of the objects, echoing off the walls of the cave, would be taken to be the voices of the shadows. The prisoners believe these shadows and echoes to be reality.

They can't see each other in the gloom, but even in their chains, they feel one another's presence and seek out the sounds of each other's voices. They converse on all manner of topics,
he says, suggested to them by the shadows of themselves and of the objects behind them and by the echoes of the voices of the bearers of those objects. Chained immobile in the flickering firelight, they reach each other with their voices, and together they construct a conception of their world and a philosophy of their own. It is built only on shadows, but I think that is beside the point. At least they have each other.

Vera, who owned the Cave, had a good heart but took no shit from anyone. She tended bar on Friday and Saturday nights, when boys from Waterville State College came downtown to drink obscure Scandinavian or Dutch beer and she needed two bartenders to handle them and make sure they threw up
out
side. Vera paid almost all the bartenders under the table with money from the cash register at the end of the night, plus the tips in the goldfish-bowl tip jar set prominently next to the cash register. Only Rafi and Vera herself were on the books—and then only as a strategy to avert the suspicions of the Internal Revenue Service. In addition to wages and tips, bartenders could help themselves to a pack of cigarettes from the rack behind the bar whenever they wanted and could drink free beer anytime, except supposedly not until after closing on nights when they were working. The cheapest beer was National Bohemian—called “Natty BoHo”—at seventy-five cents a can, but the bartenders, like royalty, drank two-dollar beer in bottles. People mostly tipped a quarter or thirty-five cents. Sometimes the bartenders would make change out of the tip jar just to get some folding money into it. When I got hired, Vera told me that if trouble—real trouble—ever broke out, the first thing I should do was grab the tip jar.

Despite Vera's precautions, the undeniably suspicious minimalism of Rafi's economic life did eventually draw the attention of the local IRS field office. After a series of written exchanges equally impenetrable on both sides, Rafi was invited to present himself to a man in a windowless office and explain how his claims of Thoreauian simplicity could possibly be true. He was instructed to bring receipts.

Rafi sat with a shoebox full of little scraps of paper on his lap while the IRS man, with the usual contempt of the barely middle class toward those they suspected of harboring bohemian tendencies, slowly and thoroughly established that Rafi, indeed, had no other income, no car, no mortgage, no savings account, no retirement account, no stocks or bonds, no life insurance, no real or personal property of any significant value at all.

“Don't you own
anything?
” the IRS man yelled finally, halfway between despair and disgust.

“Well,” Rafi said after some thought, “I have a baseball glove that was signed by Mickey Mantle.”

This was true, but it made the IRS man so indignant that Rafi was audited every year for eight years in a row until finally one audit showed he had overpaid his taxes by almost forty dollars, which was eventually refunded to him by government check, and after that he never heard from them again.

If you went out the back door of the Cave, you could go either right or left along the alleyway past the closed back doors of the drugstore and the record store and a store that sold area rugs. Or if you went straight ahead, you could thread your way along a narrow passageway and come out on Thornapple Street and be standing next to a Mexican restaurant called Tia Tortilla's
that also had a bar. In those days, state laws were such that establishments could serve hard liquor only if at least 51 percent of their receipts were for food. It was always a near thing at Tia's, where the pork dishes in particular were a little suspicious. To make the 51 percent quota, shots of tequila sometimes had to be rung up as French fries. Without 51 percent in food, bars could serve only beer and wine. The Cave served only beer, although years before I arrived someone had once brought back two single-serving screw-top bottles of airplane wine from a long vacation. They were kept in a special place behind the bar in case of emergency.

Because of the proximity, regulars went back and forth between the Cave and Tia's many times during the course of the evening, so that the two bars almost felt like one. You couldn't pay your tab from one in the other, but the bartenders in Tia's would let you carry a water glass with two fingers of tequila in the bottom back to the Cave to buck up the bartender there if it looked like it was going to be a long night.

Some regulars—especially the older ones who were troubled by their aches and their livers and were, therefore, somewhat sour of disposition—moved only once in the evening, from the Cave to Tia's when the bands started up at the Cave. They hated to have to do it because there was no seventy-five-cent beer at Tia's. Every now and then, an especially stupid customer would complain about the noise to Vera. We never had one stupid enough to complain to Vera twice.

Hank and Stinky wanted to complain but didn't have the nerve to do any more than grumble behind Vera's back. “Vera,” they would snort to each other with lots of conviction and very little volume, “she has
no idea
how to run a bar.”

“If
I
ran this place,” they would say, puffing out their chests to each other, “it would sure be different.” Then they would deflate
and glance around nervously.

Hank was a big man with a big belly that poured over his big silver belt buckle and a big walrus mustache almost long enough to meet his sideburns down low on a stubbly chin. Stinky was tallish and skinnyish and tightly wound, with a little toothbrush mustache and a little pointy goatee. Hank was losing his hair and opted for the traditional stringy comb-over, which he kept well plastered down. Stinky was losing his hair, too, but went instead for a three-quarter-inch buzz cut all around that made him look like a cue ball dressed up for Halloween as a hedgehog.

Stinky's real name was Jefferson Davis Smithfield Jr. He tried to get everyone to call him “J. D.,” but instead we called him “Stinky” because we could come up with no other explanation for his perpetually pinched-up look. We had numerous theories of what had crawled into his mustache and died, but none of them could ever be proven.

Hank had an invisible wife who, Lord knows, did not mind at all how many hours he spent sitting in the Cave. Stinky was divorced and had gone twice now to Thailand, where he apparently enjoyed the company of a very young prostitute who said her name was Mary and who assured Stinky that although, of course, she occasionally knew other men, her relationship with him was different; he was the only one she truly loved.

Even Hank was skeptical.

Stinky would protest and bluster. It
was
different. She
did
love him.
He
was a real man, the only man. The best lover ever. She meant it. None of us pathetic losers could even begin to imagine the delights they tasted during the long, neon-lit, paid-by-the-hour tropical nights, the soft breezes, the palm trees rustling and the full moon glowing right outside the whorehouse door.

“I dunno, Stinky,” Rafi said once, wiping up a wet patch on
the bar. “It seems like an awful long way to go just to get laid.”

“Shows what you know, my friend,” Stinky said. “I don't know why I waste my time even
trying
to elucidate certain facts for personages such as yourself who clearly lack the mental insight to even conceive of what I'm talking about. I'm telling you that this girl is special. The problem with you is that you have no sophistication.”

“I dunno, Stinky,” Rafi said again, shaking his head. “Maybe so.”

Across Thornapple Street from Tia Tortilla's was a little yellow house that was the Hammer and Sickle Bookstore, run by Commie Tom. After two separate home-repair do-it-yourselfers were sadly disappointed during his first week of business, Commie Tom hung a big poster of Che Guevara in the front window, complete with beret and inspirational quote (“Better to die standing than to live on your knees”), and that seemed to clear everything up. Despite the death quote, this was not in any way a gesture of hostility. Commie Tom was sincerely concerned about the inconvenience he inadvertently caused people who were trying to buy hammers. He hated for people to be disappointed. He did add a small selection of home improvement books next to the Critical Race Theory section, just in case.