The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato (3 page)

It was a pity, in a way, that those people no longer stumbled into the store because Commie Tom dearly loved converting the masses, joyfully pouncing on the unredeemed. When I think of him now, I remember him laughing in delight while his cat, Emma Goldman, chased a yarn ball tied to her tail, spinning madly across the bookstore floor. Tom would put on a tape of whirling dervish music, get Emma Goldman going, and sit on the floor and roar.

Tom handled the inherent conflict between being a communist and being a business owner by mostly giving away the stock. In fact, it was tricky to get Tom to sell you a book, to get him to take your money for it.

“Tom,” you would start off, “I've been wondering about the oppression of diamond miners in South Africa,” or whatever.

“Oh, yes, yes!” Tom would say. “That is so fascinating! I've just been reading a really excellent book about that. Now where did I put that? I just saw it. It's right here somewhere.” And off he would go, rummaging through half the store, ending up with fourteen different books you should read, piling them one by one in your arms. “Oh, you
have
to read this. And the companion volume—very trenchant analysis. An interesting twist on commodity fetishism—you'll appreciate it. Take this one, too. Oh, and this!” Until finally the long-sought diamond-mining book appeared from where it had been mislaid in the Lesbian Poetry section. “Aha! I
knew
I had it here somewhere. Take this and let me know what you think about it. Oops—and this one, too. No, no, don't pay—just bring them back when you're done. No, if you want to keep them—if you're really sure—you can pay me later. I just want to see what you think of them first. We'll talk when you've read them, no hurry. Here, let's put those in a box. Any interest at all in the ancient Greeks? I ended up with three dozen copies of Edith Hamilton's
Mythology
—I'm sending the covers back to the publisher, but you take the book. I also have
The Dialogues of Plato,
but only volume two. Look, I'll just pack it right in your box here on the side.
Oof!
This box is heavy! You can't lift that—let me carry it to the car for you. No, no, no trouble at all!”

He was like that with everybody, even Republican evangelical Christians who went into the store just to try to get his goat. I saw it.

Twice Commie Tom almost lost the bookstore to the bank. He was a terrible capitalist. If some of the left-leaning professors at Waterville State College hadn't bypassed the university bookstore and made their students buy copies of expensive textbooks they ordered only from Tom, I don't know how he could have survived. The professors helped him because of a generous feeling toward little bookstores and a selfish feeling that if they ever wrote a book themselves, Tom would put it on display right on the front counter and would even try to sell some before he started giving them away.

Quite often, Tom came by the Cave in the early afternoon and drank coffee. We never charged him for it. Of course, we never charged anybody. This was because nobody but Tom and the bartenders ever drank the coffee, which was inexplicably greasy and tasted like bug spray for days after the exterminator made his regular, albeit futile, visits. The bartenders drank the coffee to steady their nerves first thing in the day. Tom walked past the entrances to two actual restaurants (Tia's and a little café called the Fiddlehead Fern, which I hardly ever went into because it was only open during the daytime) to drink greasy, bug-repellent coffee with the Cave bartenders. He even had a coffeemaker in his own store. I have no idea what was wrong with him.

The best times were after last call, when the last of even the regulars were gone and the band was packing up and the bartender was restocking all the coolers with beer for the next day. We would carry the trash cans to the dumpsters out back and heave them up and tip them over the side so the empty glass bottles slithered out all at once in a riotous, shattering cascade
that sounded like the clanging cacophony of cathedral bells. It was strangely beautiful music in the still night air.

The Cave was never really empty after closing. Besides whoever was tending bar and whoever was left from the band, Vera would be there to count up the money and make out the deposit slip to go into the bank bag. And the bartender from Tia's was there because it was more friendly to have a nightcap with everyone at the Cave than to have it all alone over at Tia's, where the big plate-glass front windows invited unwelcome surveillance from bored policemen.

There were some people who were always welcome to sit in the premises after closing and drink a free beer and smoke free cigarettes, even though they had no connection of any formal kind with the Cave. These were people who had struck Vera's fancy, or Rafi's, or who were generally known and acknowledged as being “good people” who wouldn't cause trouble in any way or be jackasses. Or at least not very often.

Pancho the piano tuner was always welcome to stay after hours. It was hard to tell whether Pancho was an old man who seemed young or a young man who seemed old. He had played honky-tonk piano at bars and smoky concert halls all around the state ever since he was way too young to be in those kinds of places. He had discovered whiskey at ten, heroin at fifteen, and Jesus at twenty-one. Now his wild black hair was starting to have threads of gray and his eyes, which often seemed to be looking at something no one else saw, were crinkled with crow's-feet. He had enough rough road behind him now not to be shocked or bothered by other people's foibles, which led many of those same other people (if their particular foible was meanness) to assume that Pancho was stupid.

Every now and then, Pancho would come by in the afternoon and tune the battered upright piano that stood against
the wall next to the dartboards in the little cleared space where the bands played. This was not an easy job (especially if people were playing darts) because players did terrible things to that piano, like putting metal thumbtacks into the hammers to make it sound more like they imagined Jelly Roll Morton's must have sounded when he played ragtime in the Storyville whorehouses a hundred years ago. It took ages to undo. After he got all the tacks out, Pancho would tune the piano with his eyes closed. We would try to be quiet while this was going on but didn't really need to be. Pancho could tune the piano even while the radio was on. He didn't hear anything else.

During the periods when the piano had been recently tuned and was still in pretty good shape, Pancho would sometimes play it after hours. He never played honky-tonk then, even though he still did occasionally around town with bands that needed a fill-in. Instead, for us, he played Beethoven sonatas, things like that. I didn't know what they were, but they made me think of nighttime or mourning doves or tangled primeval forests.

“What
is
that, Pancho?” I asked him once.

“Old men will have dreams, Josie,” he said, and smiled. And that is all I ever got out of him.

2

ORIGINS

IN
SYMPOSIUM,
PLATO RECOUNTS
Aristophanes's theory of the origin of Love.

In the beginning, Aristophanes says, there were three types of humans. These beings had two faces (one on either side of their heads), four arms and four legs, four ears, and three complete sets of genitalia. One type was all male, one type was all female, and one type was both male and female. Whenever these first humans wanted to run, they could put down all their limbs and turn cartwheels in any direction like whirligigs. They were fast and powerful and caused no end of trouble to the gods. On one occasion, the humans even attempted an assault on Olympus itself. They were a race with ambition to conquer the heavens and perhaps the power to do it.

Disturbed by the developments on earth, Zeus called a council of the Olympians to come up with a way of controlling these troublesome upstarts. Together the gods devised a plan to ensure that humans would never again have the wherewithal
to challenge the gods. One night, Zeus went to earth with his blinding lightning bolts and split each of the humans into halves, severing them apart, dooming us each forever to incompleteness. He hid the terrible wound that this left, but he did not heal it.

Ever since then, bereft halves have spent their lives roaming the earth, searching for that other half who will complete them. Loneliness is the punishment for ambition.

Aristophanes says that we wrap our arms and legs around each other, we make love with each other, futilely trying to join again the pieces Zeus split apart. We are always searching for that
one
—the single other wanderer who belongs to each of us and completes us—because he was part of us in the beginning of time.

By the time I managed to leave home, to get out of the Smoky Mountains where I was born and raised, I was pretty sure my other half wasn't anywhere up there. There wasn't anyone—anything—for me.

In the summer, with the windows open in the house where I grew up, it was easy to hear the conversations the adults were having. Lying in bed at night, the air hot and still with the grown-ups' voices murmuring through the darkness, I could hear everything they said, even if they whispered.

“I'd be glad to have Belle stay all summer,” Mama was saying to her sister, my aunt Sis, about beautiful Belle, my cousin.

“Just 'til I get back on my feet,” Aunt Sis said. “I hope she won't be too much trouble.”

They were talking in the kitchen, drinking cups of Nescafé. I could smell it in hot little bursts whenever they poured boiling
water onto another spoonful of crystals.

“Oh, Belle is never any trouble,” Mama said. “I like having her here, to tell you the truth. It's nice to have a girl around to do for. Do girl things for, I mean.”

Aunt Sis laughed. “Josie's a girl,” she said.

Mama laughed, too. “Not hardly.”

I was named for Uncle Joe. He taught me how to shoot, practicing on beer cans balanced on the top rail of the fence out back of his house in the woods. The first shot knocked me backward off my feet, but Uncle Joe didn't laugh at me, just helped me up and dusted me off some.