On the Rocks

 My wife and my brother and I enjoyed a nice round of cocktails at Manny's the other day.  Michelle looked out the window and noticed some large, painted letters on the side of a building.  "What's 'Bagro'?" she asked.

"A wine distributor on 39th," I told her.

Pat drained the rest of his scotch.  "It's underneath the Missouri."

"Underneath the Missouri?"  we asked in unison.

"Uh huh," he said, "pretty much all of 39th is under that Battleship...the USS Missouri.  You remember, Dad used to talk about it. They have it hanging up there.  Kinda' like a museum."

"I thought the Missouri was in Hawaii or somewhere," asked Michelle, "what's it doing here?"

"Well, like I said, it's some kind of museum.  They have the whole thing hoisted in the air with mammoth cranes and hanging over the city.  I'm surprised you missed it on your way over.  You wanna' go see it?"

This was too good to be true, so Michelle and I naturally took Pat up on his offer.  We paid for our drinks, headed outside and made our way to the escalator that ascended heavenward on 39th.  Tickets were a little unreasonable, but my brother is an architect in the city and knows the right folks. He pulled a couple of strings and we were headed up to the Missouri - with free drink coupons in our fists, no less.

On deck, almost 890 feet in the air (3 feet higher than the Mighty Mo is long), we were treated to a wonderful sight. Her beautiful 16-inch guns were decorated with red and white stripes, giving them the appearance of candy canes.

"All I want to do is wrap my arms around those guns," I cried, overcome by the moment.  Tears filled my eyes.

"Well, I think your wish might come true," said Pat, motioning toward the nearest gun turret and a sign that read "Line up here to wrap your arms around a gun barrel."

We were headed over in a rush of adrenalin when the music began.  Accordion-playing USO veterans came out of the gun turret's hatch and cordoned off the area with a swaying chorus line.  Elderly women in over-sized Uncle Sam costumes began a slow, shuffling dance and sang in one raspy voice,

"All I ever wanted to do
was watch old women dance
and wrap their arms around
the mighty, mighty guns
of the Mighty, Mighty Mo."

We could not break through their tight, accordionated defensive line in a frontal assault, nor could we find a way of flanking this group of octegenarians.  Michelle suggested distracting them with the bourbon in my hip flask, but I knew I would need it later and decided against such an option.  Dejected, we turned away and headed back down the escalator.  We did not even have the desire to redeem our free drink coupons.  It was proving to be a long, silent trip back down to the street, until Pat's face lit up and he turned to us.

"Hey, I've got an idea - they have the USS Iowa hanging up over some park just east of here...whaddya' say? Drinks are on me!"

The Old "Two Finger Shuffle"

Dr. Schiffinger, the albino proctologist with an increasingly-vigorous hand tremor, had hid his tourettes' syndrome for years, but now as he entered the twilight of his career, it was becoming more and more difficult to conceal the symptoms and pass them off as mere eccentricity. There was that time he had been in the middle of administering a digital exam to the congressman's wife. Just as he intended to ask the nurse for more lubricant, he instead cried out “Oaschloch! Oaschloch!” and began pumping his fist quite violently in a most untoward manner. The nurse blanched, shook her head and asked the poor Dr. Schiffinger for clarification. The good doctor shook his own head, came to his senses and mumbled something about horticulture and reached for the lubricant himself. The congressman's wife was never quite the same.

Proctology is nothing to sneeze at – let us be honest about that, shall we? It is the most serious of medical disciplines and the highly-esteemed Dr. Schiffinger knew it. Otto Wilhelm Schiffinger III, M.D., had studied proctology at Vienna's famed Heinprodder Proctological Institute and had immigrated to Putnam County during the war. There being no call for proctologists at the time, the good doctor made his way in the world by serving as a bismarck-filler at the local doughnut emporium. In time, Dr. Schiffinger returned to his craft, and Putnam County was given the services of the finest Viennese proctologist ever to lift a finger, as it were.

The whole of Dr. Schiffinger's world came crashing to the ground one fine spring day, however. It was the day Colonel Murphee, the planter, came in for his semi-annual high colonic. Colonel Murphee, resplendent in his white suit and black string tie, faced each high colonic with great poise and dignity. Each spring and each autumn the Colonel would return to the Heinprodder graduate and keep a stiff upper lip while Dr. Schiffinger plied his craft, but this one fateful day was different than those in seasons past.

Colonel Murphee had been prepped by Dr. Schiffinger's nurse, Miss Penelope, and was waiting patiently in “the position” when Dr. Schiffinger entered the procedure room after having spent a good number of minutes chopping pieces of ice for use in his after-hours cocktail. A full quart of ice chips he had prepared in his office, and the prospect of a frosty libation weighed heavily on his mind - even more heavily than the prospect of the day's last high colonic. Contrary to his usual practice, he still carried his pearl-handled ice pick – a gift from the Countess de Mont-Palatine for “services rendered.” This treasured possession he still twirled absentmindedly as he prepared for the procedure.

The remaining events of that afternoon are the stuff of legend. With the beginning of the flow of water and the sound of a cool, cool trickle, the good doctor felt strangely led out of his body. The Colonel inquired as to the prospects for a dry planting season, and something was triggered deep in the albino proctologist's mind.

“Oaschloch! Oaschloch!”

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Squeak, Memory

My friend the composer, whom I shall call Daniel (as it is his name – what else would I want to call him?), tipped me off to a wonderful addition to the King of Cocktails. Daniel puts orange zest into his Manhattans. I just tried it this evening. My, my...it is like a little dash of sunshine in the middle of this midwestern winter.

I got to looking through a biographical list of Lost Generation authors just two nights ago, and then I came across a reference to Vladimir Nabokov just today (it was actually just my mind recycling the lyrics to “Don't Stand So Close to Me,” by the Police, if you must know), and I realized that chronologically Nabokov would have fit in neatly with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Papa Hemingway and the other Losts, had he not been a royal pain in the ass and perhaps taken himself a bit less seriously. His 1972 assessment,

“As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early 'forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.”

Ridiculous. Anyhow, I think a true test of artistry would show either Fitzgerald or Hemingway as the hands-down winner: who can mix the meanest round of cocktails and pen the notes to his next novel while at the same time being hit on by a room full of Spanish nurses and/or dancing the Charleston? Nabokov would be face down in his samovar. 23-skiddoo, fella.

Hand me my cocktail shaker and pen...and crank up that craa-azy Victrola.

Is it Live, or is it Imitrex?

Kip. His real name. Kip had some kind of racket going on. He just wasn't on the level – there were those who maintained that he sold drugs or got his income in some other sort of illicit manner. Just what that might have been, I have no idea. Kip was firmly planted in the 1990's, but when I met him he looked like he had just rolled out of Lake Tahoe in 1960. “Badda-bing.” Only the second person I ever met who really used that phrase, as I have mentioned before. “Badda-bing,” Kip would reply whenever he needed a moment to think or whenever he wanted to respond in the affirmative. “Badda-bing,” and he would drain the last few drops of his cocktail, glance around whatever room he was in, and smile.

Badda-bing. That sly rascal Kip was always smiling at me from behind those horned-rim and silver frames, those bold print short-sleeve shirts on a hundred different summer evenings, downing gin and tonic after gin and tonic. Brylcreem when Brylcreem was definitely not hip; Brylcreem almost 20 years before I started using it myself. Brylcreem taken intravenously, perhaps, to give that swagger, that groove, that badda-bing to the man who sported such a stylish stingy fedora when the weather turned cool.

Yeah, the Kipster was a man out of time. He rolled into our lives on a wash of Sinatra and rolled out in a filthy, drunken haze of Smashing Pumpkins and Mudhoney. The last time I saw the aging hipster he was hunched over on a barstool – it may have become part of the anatomy of his nether region by that time, in fact – and he was once again draining the last few drops of his cocktail. An ashtray filled to overflowing with butts of Camel Lights showed that he had been in the same position for more than just a short while.

I got no badda-bing out of Kip, just a stare through deadened eyes. His stubbly chin was supported by a hand that had grown a permanent cigarette between the index and middle fingers – a yellowed pair of fingers that seemed to show just a hint of a tremor. Kip had forgotten who I was, I am sure, the “Hey, guy,” greeting giving that away.

I can't remember if I bought Kip a drink that evening. I think I probably did not. I think I probably saw in him what I could have become, and what a lot of my friends could have become. The 1990's were not kind to Kip, but then, Kip was not kind to himself in the 1990's. For Kip, though, it would forever be 1993 or sometime, I suppose, and the next evening would always bring the chance for a new beginning – a new beginning that never actually arrived; a new beginning that would whisper of prosperity of the sort his parents had wanted for him a long time ago, the sort of prosperity that his oldest brother had found, but the sort of prosperity that got tossed out the window to the pavement below while Kip and his classmates and barmates and bandmates drained the last few drops of a gin and tonic and a west-coast microbrew while laughing to the penetrating feedback of angry guitars from Seattle and L.A. and wherever else they needed anesthesia in that wasted, wasted time.

Here we are now, entertain us.