The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato (5 page)

“This is extra-special barbecue, sugar,” Danny said. “This is the barbecue I grew up on.”

We sat close together, and I could feel the warmth coming off his arm close to mine. I could hardly eat for thinking about what it was like to kiss him—I had just been kissing him that afternoon. I lowered my voice to talk to him under the restaurant sounds, so he would have to lean nearer to me to hear what I said.

“Good Lord, Danny, this is nearly a whole pig I've got here—I'll never in a million years finish it all.”

“Eat up, sugar. You never know when you might need your strength.”

“I'll bust!”

“Let me help you out with some of those hush puppies, then.”

He put his arm across the back of my chair and ate off my plate. I held my icy beer bottle to my face, hoping it would cool me off. After he ate my hush puppies, Danny ate my barbecue and my slaw, too. I drank cold beer and watched him.

When he was finally done, he said, “Sugar, I'm stuffed. My belt's so tight it's cutting off all my important circulation. You're gonna have to drive back.”

“Silly boy, you'll make yourself sick.”

“I'm glad I brought you here,” he said.

“Because I let you eat my dinner?”

“Because it's someplace I've never taken anybody else since I was a kid, and I knew you'd like it.”

“I haven't said I like it.”

“But you do—I can tell you do.”

“Yes,” I said. “I do. I like being here with you.”

We paid the bill and bought two more bottles of beer to take home with us.

When state government officials set up the laws regulating the public sale of alcohol (concerned with the moral turpitude and degeneracy associated with alcohol consumption, but not averse to a short stiff one themselves, should the occasion arise), they decreed that all bars should close no later than 1
A.M.
They decreed this in the winter. But as everyone knows, the workings of daylight saving time mean that 1
A.M.
in the winter is 2
A.M.
in the summer. So when the time changed in the spring, the
bars all started staying open until 2
A.M.
The bartenders from then on greeted Spring Forward, when the late shift got an hour longer, with mixed emotions. Summertime was better if you were doing the drinking, but not so much if you were doing the bartending.

Spring Forward always happens on a Saturday night, and Vera told me that every year the Friday night before that—the last night of early closing—was the night of the secret Bartenders' Ball.

Being below ground and consequently windowless, the Cave provided the perfect location for activities that were not strictly in keeping with Alcoholic Beverage Control regulations. The routine was that you were not to park your vehicle anywhere near the Cave, so the police would not see a big herd of cars all together on the street and feel morally obliged to investigate. You walked to the Ballroom Entrance of the Cave and pounded on the door. Vera would yell, “We're closed!” and then you would say who you were, and Rafi would let you in.

The night of that year's Bartenders' Ball, I got there first. That was because I was already there, having been sitting at the bar for hours keeping Rafi and Vera company and watching a band called Attention K-Mart Shoppers, made up of ironic English majors, play to an empty room and then disconsolately pack up and wander away. Vera and Rafi were busy restocking the coolers and locking up the money because although we loved our friends, we thought it best not to tempt them. Rafi's kind, weary face was beautiful in the glow of the red light bulbs, leaning over the coolers, filling them with Natty BoHo.

It is always awkward to be the first at a party, and I tried to look busy and entertained by smoking a lot of cigarettes, but it was rough going, so I was glad when Pancho sidled in, sat down next to me, and told me he had bought a watermelon that
afternoon, which was unusual for that time of year and which gave us a topic of conversation while we waited.

The party started slowly, the bartenders who were off that night slipping in and diffidently depositing a bottle of vodka or tequila onto the bar and then shuffling down toward the dartboards. Next came the wait staff from the restaurants downtown, then the busboys, then the cooks and dishwashers, smelling strongly of detergent and steam. When Billy Joe showed up, he was carrying his guitar and leaned the case against the wall by the piano, which seemed quite natural but also quietly exciting, in a promissory kind of way. The last to arrive were the bartenders coming off the late shift uptown, who had finally closed up. When Vera told them we were closed, everyone said their names except for Commie Tom, who shouted, “The workers control the means of production!” and was greeted with loud cheers upon entering.

Like most people, the best music I've ever heard has been played on front porches or in kitchens or late at night when I least expected it. (I remember sobbing like my heart would break at 3
A.M.
on I-40 in the Texas Panhandle over a song that came on the radio that I had never heard before and have never heard since.) That night, the music at the Bartenders' Ball was no different, unexpected and heartbreaking in the early-morning hours.

When Billy Joe finally started playing, it was just him and Pamela, a coolly beautiful and efficient waitress from a café uptown, sitting back to back on the piano bench, leaning together, Pamela singing the blues in a deep, slow way that made you stop what you were doing and wonder why you'd never heard her sing before. A whole crowd of busboys left off their pool games in the back room and came up front near the bar to listen. Eventually Pancho nudged Billy Joe up from the piano bench, and
Billy Joe didn't miss a note. Lanky Charlie Blue, the dishwasher from Tia's who had never played in public, brought in a doghouse bass from his truck on Thornapple Street. A girl called Rosalita who worked part-time at the Hammer and Sickle sang harmony with Pamela with her eyes closed, and three waiters from the Fiddlehead Fern were slapping out the rhythm with their palms on the bar. Vera was dancing, a sight I thought I'd never see. Rafi grabbed me tight, and we spun down the whole length of the room.

Later on, things got out of hand—which was the point, after all—although no real damage was done, other than that one of the busboys from Tia's finally lost his virginity and someone drank both bottles of screw-top airplane wine.

There are three things I especially remember about that particular Bartenders' Ball. The first is that I ran into Commie Tom by the pool tables and said, “Hey, Tom, what's up?”

“I'm getting drunk and making an ass out of myself,” he said.

“What're you doing that for?”

“Ahhhh.”
He opened his arms wide with an expansive smile like a saint. “It keeps you young! Nothing makes you feel fifteen years old again like waking up in the morning and realizing you've completely embarrassed yourself in front of all your friends.”

The second thing was that Stinky tried to get in and Vera wouldn't let him, and we found out later that he'd gone home and gotten a dozen eggs and come all the way back and egged her car.

The third thing was that I met a man named Danny, whom I had never seen before, and when I woke up late the next day, he was asleep in my bed.

3

DANNY

PLATO TELLS US THERE ARE OTHER PEOPLE
in the cave, walking between the prisoners and the fire behind them. He doesn't say who these people are or where they come from—only that they pass back and forth behind the prisoners carrying objects that cast shadows on the walls in front of the prisoners. They talk to each other, and the sounds they make echo through the cave. They never communicate with the prisoners or try to help them or seem to notice them at all.

Plato doesn't say it directly, but these people must be the gods of the cave world. They are inexplicable and aloof, but they know a reality that the prisoners do not. The prisoners believe that the shadows they see are solid and that the echoes they hear have meaning. Only the “gods” know that the shadows are an illusion. They alone know it is their own voices that are the source of the echoes.

But although the gods have knowledge, they do not have control. For the prisoners are, in a way, free. The prisoners can
spin a whole world out of shadows and echoes—a world they make among themselves, a world they conjure from their own imaginings, a world without limits, if only they can think it. Here the prisoners are free to invent infinite dreams and glorious theories. Anything is possible.

Meanwhile the gods tread back and forth on their walkway, bearing their burdens in the gloom. It is difficult to tell sometimes who is really a prisoner.

The first time I saw Danny, at the Bartenders' Ball, he was fighting with Vera—not physically fighting, because Danny always said it was beneath him to hit a drunk, but arguing loud and long enough that there was a little cleared space around the two of them and the people nearest to them were eyeing each other and looking skittish.

“Do you think we should do something?” I asked Rafi.

Rafi was sitting on the bar, where he could help himself to beers without having to get up.

“Do something?” he asked, like I was crazy. “
Do
something?”

“Do you think Vera needs help?” I asked, a little chagrined.

Rafi almost laughed. “Vera can take care of herself.”

Around dawn, people started to leave in ones and twos, stepping outside into the fresh morning air and breathing deep to clear their heads before going to bed. The sky, glimpsed through the opening ballroom door, was indigo, then gray, then suddenly rose pink. Billy Joe was among the last to leave, taking Rafi and also a pretty blond girl with him in his car back to their house. I bolted the front door closed behind them before I started to restock the coolers.

Vera was shooting pool in the back room, and even though
I shouldn't have been, I was surprised when I went back there to find her laughing with the same boy she'd been fighting with earlier. Vera was always partial to people who gave as good as they got. They were playing nine-ball, and she was whipping his ass.

I should say right now, so you get the sense of him, that Danny was like whiskey held up to the light—warm and glinting. Even though we hadn't been introduced, he knew me already because Danny never met a stranger.

“Come shoot some pool with me, Josie,” he said, all delighted to see me, like I was an old friend. “I'm losing bad, and there's five dollars on the line.”

He was from deep in the country—born in Dogwood and raised in Millboro, an even littler town—and the way he drew out the word
five
was irresistible. I was half in love with him before he was halfway through. By the time he finally got to
dollars,
I was a goner.

“Come on, Jake,” Vera said. “You and me against Danny and Josie—I could sure use the money.” Vera was talking to a dark-haired man stretched out on a bench in the corner. We were the only four left in the bar.