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How The Music of 1945 Changed the Music of 1951

Jenean McBrearty

    The Wolf was at the door. Freddy Wolf who never really knocked. He rapped lightly, but persistently. So that, like a bug bite you’ve vowed not to scratch because to scratch meant you had no self-control and that violates the Boy Brotherhood, you eventually give in.
    “Come in already!” Jack said as he yanked open the back door and ambled back to the living room to find his pants.
    Freddy followed him. “You’re not hung over again are you, Jack? And while we’re on the subject of you, why do you call yourself Jack when you’re name is Mike?”
    “I’m Canadian.” He held up a pair of wrinkled jeans and waved them over his head like a lasso. “And I’m not hung over. Hangovers are for alkies. I do drugs. I’m crashin’, man. Or trying to.” He wiggled into his jeans .
    “Mavis wants you to come for a bar-b-cue this week-end and you fought with the U.S. Army.”
    “I was working in a Deli in Queens when Pearl Harbor got bombed. I went insane.We’re not talking about you now, but how is it you married my sister for a year and don’t know she’s Canadian?” He gave up the hunt for a t-shirt and flopped into his chair. Freddy knew he had a third nipple.
    “You’ve heard of mixed marriages. Weren’t you married to a Jewish refugee for a few weeks?”
    “Yeah. It kept her in the states and alive.”
    “There you go. Mavis could be Canadian and you could have been born in Iowa.”
    Jack found the Zippo lighter his father gave him—the one embossed with a B-52 bomber—and fired up a roach. “Do I look like a dumb ass from Dubuque to you?”
    Freddy scraped a stack of New Yorker magazines off a fat ugly green chair and sat down. “I know your gate swings both ways, but you ought to get married just to have somebody clean this place up. Must be crawlin’ with germs. I fear for your health.”
    Jack was calmer now, a placid smile replacing his ubiquitous sober scowl. “So, what say you be my sex slave and wash the floors? Start with the bathroom.”
    “I told Mavis you’re a hopeless deadbeat. Try to make it to the bar-b-cue. Your parents are coming.” Jack saw him fade out the back door, the word hopeless hanging in the air like beer farts.
    Oh, yeah. The parent thing was definitely a deal maker. Like they wanted to their son getting himself clean with the help of people like Gillis. He was a dead beat. That meant he was dead but his heart kept beating saying freedom, freedom, freedom with every pulse spurt. What confounded him was how Freddy returned from Europe seemingly unscathed by the inhumanity and carnage they saw in the death camps. He wrote a note to himself on a Man Whole napkin: Ask Freddy why he’s a pussy-whipped square.

****

    “So me and Kerouac were talking at the bar and he asks me if I’ve started my novel. I tell him no, because my head is swirling in an eddy and my thigh is aching from the half dollar-sized hole in it.” The napkin he used to clean the needle had something written on it, but it must not have been important if Gillis used it too.
    “You show your bullet hole to Kerouac?”
    “I don’t show it to nobody.”
    “You show it to me.” Gillis moved away from him and rooted around for a cigarette on the nightstand.
    “I don’t show it to you. You look at it. That’s different.”
    “It’s hard to miss when I’m down there takin’ care of business. I mean it’s right there.”
    Jack pushed the bedding onto the floor. “God, this place stinks. Smells like a whore-house I visited in Rome once.”
    “Once?”
    “I was eightteen.”
    “You were horny. Who isn’t at eight-teen?”
    “You ever hear a Panzer tank blow something up?”
    “I was too young and way too smart to fight.”
    “Lucky you. The boom makes you deaf. I held my helmet on and prayed. Guess God didn’t hear.“
    “If He was there, the Panzer probably made Him deaf too. War’s made an old man out of you, my friend.”
    Old? He and Freddy were the same age. Twenty-eight. Invaded Anzio together in ‘43, the 3rd Infantry Division slogging its way to Rome, collapsing Kesselring’s Gustav Line and making sure the Krauts in Italy never made it to Normandy. How come men like Thomas Merton became monks and men like him shacked up with guys like Gillis from Jersey, and smoked, swallowed and shot up chemicals, and men like Freddy went to college, got jobs with 3M, and got married to people named Mavis? “They’re buying a house and Mavis isn’t even pregnant. Why?”
    “He’s a shallow bastard,” Gillis said when Jack dumped the question on him.
    “No. No, I don’t think that’s it. He coaches Little League. Get that sheet for me, will ya’? I’m freezing.”
    If Gillis hadn’t been there, he’d stuff the head of his Johnson into his bullet wound. It was a comforting habit. Like thumb-sucking. A way to fill up his empty self.

****

    Mavis acted like the emaciated, shaggy-haired man at the front door was still the strapping uniformed guy whose picture was on her living room piano. At least he’d showered. She recognized the scent of Ivory Soap. “You really ought to call though, Mike. The bar-b-cue’s tomorrow. You’re lucky you caught us home,” she said, leading him to the patio.
    “So, Freddy here?”
    “Puttering in the garage with the jig-saw he got for Christmas. He’s decided he can make everything cheaper than we can buy it.”
    “You in dire need of a birdhouse?”
    Mavis’ smile was angelic. “He’s making an Amish cradle.” She patted her tummy. “Uncle Mike.”
    Speedballs he could tolerate, but sugar made him want to puke. So Mavis was pregnant after all. “You look happy.”
    “I’ll get Freddy.”
    And he appeared, aproned and safety-goggled. He removed the carpentry get-up, and got them each a beer from an ice chest on the pick-nick table. “Good to see you, Jack. What’s it been, three days?”
    “Yeah. Tempest fugit. Congrats on the kid to be.”
    “We’re thrilled. What’cha need? I take it you won’t be coming to the bar-b-cue.”
    What did he need? Money, job, a shrink. Maybe a future. “Nothing much. Just the answers to the age-old questions. What’s the meaning of life? What happens after death? Who’ll win the World Series?”
    Freddy laughed. He was on his home turf. Familiar and safe. “Must be more important than that. You cleaned up.”
    Jack smoothed his freshly-brushed hair. “Sort of. Did you know Mavis thought about being a nun? The Order of St. Jane de Chantilly Lace or something. They were all about the universal cleanliness Godliness nexus.”
    “I’m lucky she changed her mind.”
    “You believe in that whole all you need is a good woman thing?”
    “I believe in that whole all you need are good people thing.”
    “You don’t find many of them in war.”
    “Oh, I don’t know. Remember the priest who said mass for our unit in that bombed-out church? The medics who carried your wounded ass two miles to an aid station. The Italian women who gave us dried apricots when we were all hungry...and then there was the choir.”
    “What choir?” He’d begun to sweat, a reminder that he was strung out again and needed a fix to stop the cramps that would soon overtake him.
    “The Red Army Choir that came to the hospital in Berlin. But, that’s right, you were already home then. Yeah, those guys were something else. Went to Stalingrad and sang the praises of their comrades who fucked up Von Paulus. We had it bad, Jack, but nothin’ like those Ruskies at Stalingrad. Got the crap kicked out of them by Stalin and Hitler both. I didn’t understand the words but I sure understood these sons-of-bitches weren’t beat. Burned cities, raped women, slaughtered families...and they had to start their fuckin’ country over from scratch. But they weren’t beat.”
    Jack felt his gut begin to twist. He was gonna toss his hops and malt...or curds and whey or whatever he’d put in his stomach since last night’s poetry reading of Ginzburg at The Underground. Cold pizza a la rat poison. Maybe dried apricots. The worst part was the way Freddy looked at him. He’d dug into his back pocket and brought out his wallet, and took out a wad of bills with the claw at the end of his prosthetic arm. He’d folded the money and stuffed it into his t-shirt pocket, and he left without the answers to the crucial unasked question: why was Freddy so kind to him? Maybe Freddy was trying to give him some hope, but it felt like fuckin’ charity. If he hadn’t need the money so badly, he might have been grateful.

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