Learning Wit from the Local Masters and a Great Comedian

 

            Wit is a survival mechanism for a restaurant server.

Bartenders, waiters and waitress in New Hope and Lambertville develop it over time, since there are so many witty people around to learn from. Serving as a job demands you cater to raunchy strangers and ethereal friends alike, and the power dynamic is almost always on the side of the customer. That’s as it should be.

Still, it doesn’t prevent some patrons and even friends from acting like jerks or idiots when you’re such an easy target behind the bar or on the floor.

Wit is a way to strike back. It is like a whip you can snap at your unruly customers. It does harm only to inflated egos. It allows servers to get on an even footing with customers and permits them to go on doing what they’re doing and blow off steam at their low status.

As I found out, wit is not an easy thing to learn and is sometimes misused.

Once while working at John and Peter’s a drunk flicked a lit cigarette butt at me. It bounced off my chest and onto the floor, doing no harm but pissing me off. I picked up the butt and flicked it back at him, hitting him on the arm. He scowled at me and I scowled at him and he walked away. He didn’t want a piece of this nasty server.

It wasn’t much of a response on my part, and I knew I couldn’t survive as a server by dishing out what I go. I wish I had been able to come up with something witty to say, but I was new on the job, so anger tongue-tied me. That would change as I learned from some of the best in town.

A couple of drunks once accosted my beautiful, humorous and artsy friend Ruth Christopher. They inflicted on her a putrid request as she came to wait on them. Raven-haired and doe-eyed, Ruth was fun-loving and sweet, just so gorgeous, that guys often hit on her. They couldn’t help it.

She knew how to respond to jerks.

“I’ll give you a hundred bucks for a blow job,” that charming slob said, flashing a C-note while nearly falling off his seat.

Ruth didn’t blink.

“Oh, no thanks,” she said sweetly, in a childish sing-song voice. “I don’t need a blow job.”

And she walked away to applause.

The response became a time-honored response to many such jerks from many of the local waitresses. I heard it more than once.

Ruth passed away from an asthma attack nearly twenty years ago. I hope she’s using the riposte in heaven, should she encounter any drunken, horny angels with similar bad manners.

Of course, New Hope is a gay town with many gay servers. Their gayness sometimes makes them targets. The wit of gay men is well-known and an effective way to survive when confronted by the rude or idiotic, I was to learn.

Bobby was a gay legend in town who often worked as a server. He produced a couple of classics incidents worth relating, wisecracks I heard he had come up when dealing with some confused patrons.

“Hello, my name is Bobby. I’ll be your server today. Can I start you out with a drink?”

His customers were two elderly blue-haired ladies out for lunch at the Canal House.

One ordered immediately

“I’ll have a whiskey sour on the rocks.”

“And for you, madam?”

“Hmm, I think I’ll have a gin and tonic.”

“Certainly, a gin and tonic.”

“No, wait. Maybe I’ll have a whisky sour, too.”

“All right. Two whiskey sours for the ladies.”

The lady bit her lip.

“No, now wait. Maybe I will have a gin and tonic.”

“All right, a gin and tonic.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I should have a whiskey sour.”

“Would you like me to come back when you decide?”

“No, make it a gin and tonic.”

“All right. Is that final?”

“Yes, a gin and tonic.”

Bobby high-tailed it out of there before listening to another neurotic response. He put in the drink order and carried the drinks back to the table and set them down in their proper places.

“Oh, I know I said I wanted a gin and tonic, but could you make that into a whiskey sour?”

After all that, Bobby had the perfect response.

“Madam, I’m a fairy, not a magician.”

Shock and awe.

The somewhat decisive-phobic customer said she’d accept her hard-won gin and tonic.

Two gentlemen came out to lunch at the Canal House on another occasion and presented no such neurotic hesitations to Bobby as they ordered.

“I’ll take a shrimp cocktail and a Heineken.”

“I’ll have the same.”

Simple. Direct.

The kitchen made a mistake with the order.

Bobby carried the two shrimp cocktails and two Heinekens to the table and set them down.

Simple. Direct.

He was about to walk away and had turned his back.

“Eh, excuse me.”

He turned around.

“Yes, sir?”

“My shrimp cocktail has five shrimp and his has six. Why is that?”

Bobby picked up shrimp number six and tossed it into the canal.

“There. Now you both have five.”

Wit is good for use as a weapon, but when served up in a restaurant it can be acid-flavored or honeyed in taste and can either make the meal or flavor it with crow. Constant usage, as required behind the bar or on the floor, sharpens it and informs the user when to deploy it as sugar or a bitter poke. You never want it to be too crass.

I practiced and practiced, and thought I had mastered the rules of the game.

On a Saturday day shift at the Lambertville House, the hostess, a middle-aged local woman of heft and a kind heart, came back to my bar looking as though she had seen a ghost.

“A famous customer is coming back next to have a drink with you,” she said with wide eyes.

What was this announcement? And why is it needed?

“Does he have an appointment?”

That nonplussed her. It was cruel to confuse her. I relented from my jerky bartender witty act and softened my attitude.

“Who is it?”

“Danny Kaye. Be very nice to him. I love him. I love him so much.”

I loved Danny Kaye, too, as did most of America. He was a song-and-dance man, as well as a kind and clever comedian, in the movies of the 1930s and 1940s. He lit up the television, too, with his slapstick dance and mugging. He often managed to tug on the heart strings. He was and actor, novelty singer, dancer, quick wit and all-around beloved performer with whom no one had issues.

He died in 1987, just short of a decade after I met him.

Here’s Danny!

He was older when he made his appearance at the Lambertville House, in his early sixties, I think, but he still had that unmistakable joy and kindness etched over his being. He had blond wavy hair and was not a big man. Although he was moving in a somewhat tentative way, not at all like the humorous comedic whirlwind he had been in the movies, he still had his dancer’s grace.

And with him was one of the most beautiful young women I have ever seen.

With fine blond hair and large blue eyes, she had a shyness and charm that was unintentional, like a fawn. She seemed not to know how gorgeous she was. I looked at Danny Kaye in his sixties and her in her early twenties and I longed with all my heart to be a Hollywood movie star. My god, what a beauty she was, unassuming and not at all arrogant, and I immediately pegged her as an up-and-coming starlet.

“May we sit?” Danny Kaye asked as I gawked. He waved his hand at the barstools.

“Oh, course, Mr. Kaye. It’s a pleasure. What can I get you?”

I stared again at the young beauty, as out-of-control as an adolescent. I could not help it. I hoped she was his daughter or a friend, although I still don’t know what their relationship was to this day. Danny Kaye was married and she was as light as air and at least forty years younger than he was.

He kindly pulled out the barstool for her, and her delicate exquisiteness settled onto the seat like an angel into a painting. Mr. Kaye sat beside her with some difficulty.

“What would you like, dear?” he asked her.

“Oh, I don’t know. Just a chardonnay.”

It was almost as though she was apologizing for asking. So she was sweet, too. She blinked at me as though I might hurt her for asking for the white wine, so I turned to the wonderful comedian.

“And you, Mr. Kaye?”

“I will have a Bloody Mary, but make it very, very mild. Just very, very mild, with almost no spice. Just very mild. I would like it very, very mild, you see? Can you do that for me? I have such a very, very sensitive stomach. Please, very, very mild.”

“Yes, sir. A Bloody Mary, sir, very mild, and a chardonnay for the young lady.”

I almost bite my tongue for using the word “young,” in case he was sensitive to the age difference.

I stole a sidelong glance at her before moving off to make the drinks, again playing the idiot schoolboy. My heart was palpitating from the adrenaline she inspired in me.

Per Danny Kaye’s instructions, I made his Bloody Mary very, very mild, using only tomato juice and vodka and garnished it with a celery stick. I didn’t even squeeze a lemon in it. It was very, very mild. I poured her cold chardonnay, thinking I was pouring the wine for a woman who would one day be a screen goddess, unless she fell madly in love with me and decided to stay in New Hope.

I gave them their drinks and stepped back while Danny Kaye hesitated before trying my very, very, very mild Bloody Mary.

“Did you make it very, very mild? I have a very sensitive stomach, you see. I need it to be very, very mild.”

Why was he treating me like an idiot? I had made the damn drink very, very, very mild. He made me feel dumb, which I deserved, I suppose. I was still a little too sensitive to my low station in life, though, somewhat insecure and an emotional bumbler.

“Yes, sir. It’s very, very mild.”

Finally trusting me, he sipped on it through the straw and sighed and smiled.

“A-aah, perfect. Wonderful. You have the hands of a surgeon, sir.”

Still a little miffed at being treated like an idiot, which I was, I made the worst joke I have ever made, to Danny Kaye no less, a great comedian. I would like to nominate it now as the world’s worst joke ever.

“Well, that’s funny,” I said. “That’s the job I had before this one.”

To my surprise, he took me seriously. A grave look of concern passed over him. He was impressed and troubled that I had once been a surgeon and had lost my position. How had this foul change of fortunes come about? He wanted to know.

“My goodness, what happened?”

“Well, I forgot to sharpen the axe for a patient and he complained.”

Danny Kaye understood immediately what a lunkhead I was being. His look of concern changed to one of droll indifference.

“You see, everybody wants to be a comedian,” he said, turning to the beauty beside him and rolling his eyes.

I understood my faux pas. I was embarrassed that I had attempted such a despicable trick on one of the most popular and beloved comedians of all time: I hadn’t learned my lessons in wit well. I winced and turned away. I liked and respected the man and I had played that goofy joke on him.

“I’ll let you enjoy your drinks.”

Danny Kaye was keen to my distress. He saw how repentant and sorry I was. I was blushing with embarrassment at my idiotic attempt to be witty.

“No, no, stay a moment and talk to us. Stay. What is your name?”

I was not used to such kindness behind the bar, and often felt more like a target. We chit-chatted for a while, with me much relieved at his forgiveness. Danny Kaye was as kind and funny as always as we talked, including me in the badinage. I don’t recall what we spoke about, but it was just small talk and nothing of importance. I didn’t dare try to display my “wit” again. I could see he was having trouble relating to the young beauty beside him and perhaps needed me to make the situation more comfortable, which is something a good bartender will do. I obliged him with volumes of non-toxic small talk about the towns of Lambertville and New Hope and what he might want to see and do while here.

He and his lovely date departed and the Saturday rush began.

So that was the day Danny Kaye acted as a straight man and foil and teacher for me to sharpen and refine my wit.

I’m just sorry I had to be such a jackass while learning the lesson.

 

A Story about Someone I Never Knew

  

The first rule of writing is you must know your subject.

If you don’t, you might as well stare at a blank page for all eternity. Even then  inspiration won’t strike. Words just won’t march across that empty flat white surface, stop and come to attention and live if you don’t know what you’re writing about.

I never really knew Rocky.

That’s not going to stop me from marshalling up in words the young man I knew, whoever he was. If someone or something forced me to pursue the oddly absurd task of writing about a person I never really knew, it would have to be Rocky.

Rocky was a shadow, an invention, an oddly flamboyant character created by someone unknown. He was some hidden human being I never met who constructed an interesting new persona in New Hope almost fifty years ago.

Forgive me if I don’t have any other name to call him, a real first name and surname. He was just Rocky, and that fabricated personality was a good friend, mostly because he was such a justifiable phony, preferred to party and seemed to need friends. He also liked a good laugh, which always helps when you are so broken you desperately require a new identity.

Rocky was a combat veteran of the most-hated war in American history, the Vietnam War. I’m sure he used his real name in the military, but when he lived in New Hope he switched to his make-believe moniker in everyday life. He affected a kind of Hispanic accent that was transparently false. He consciously and consistently stuck to it, year after year, speaking in Pidgin English meant to resound with a Spanish tone. He deliberately talked in broken English so that his words sounded like foreign round stones coming off his tongue, but I could always understand him and I didn’t care.

I figured he didn’t want to be the person he had been in Vietnam, and that was good enough for me. I’d accept the humorous and tragic fabricated man he presented day after day without questions.

If I had been through what he had, I wouldn’t want to be him, either.

Once he was telling me a story about a man he knew, and his accent broke.

“This guy went …”

He stopped in mid-sentence, realizing his mistake of speaking in good English.

“I mean, he go,” he corrected himself.

I had to laugh. I didn’t care about the mistake of good English.

If you were young and lived in that era, you would remember his affectation as “freaking out.” You freaked out over the myriad horrors of the time, from the jungle war in Southeast Asia to the murders of liberal politicians like the Kennedys and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X to the race riots. It seemed murder and death and hate and vitriol were everywhere, like today. If you freaked out, it was a sign you had turned from hate to love as a way of life.

You re-invented yourself from the middle-class killing drone you were taught to be into a flower child.

Rocky looked every bit the hippie. His daily uniform consisted of jeans and a jean jacket embroidered with colorful designs redolent of weed. He sported two long, thick braids of dirty blond hair far down his back, a baseball cap and an untrimmed beard that never seemed unkempt. His shoulders were slightly slumped forward, as though he had marched many miles with a rifle, and his eyes were bright blue.

Somehow, he got the idea that I was French, so he rarely called me by my first name. Instead, he greeted me with the name he made up for me, consistent with the way he had freaked out.

“Hey, Frenchman, how you doin’?”

It always made me laugh. I was always “The Frenchman” to him.

“Hey, there go The Frenchman.”

New Hope is a gay town, but Rocky was far from it, although his appearance once got him into a fight with some young fools who came to town looking to beat up a gay. To their everlasting regret, they attacked Rocky by Fran’s Pub, mocking him and misidentifying him as gay because of his colorful appearance. He promptly beat the living daylights out of all three of them.

He once convinced me and several others to come to his karate class for a lesson, so aside from his combat training he had martial arts training. I barely got through the hour-long class. I guess as Rocky he still needed to be able to defend himself, while I avoided that.

It always seemed that Rocky was afraid. That’s understandable, given the memories he had to live with, but it gave him a dangerous aura rather than a peaceful one. People feared him, but I didn’t. Fear can make you seem something you’re not and make you do awful things. A woman once punched him in the face for talking to her girlfriend. He promptly decked her. Panic, unlike those three young fools who attacked him, does not discriminate when provoked. Punching a woman I think was the result of an instant reflex that fear had ingrained in him during the war: he reacted to her punch in the only way his fear would allow: self-preservation. There was no thinking before punching her: panic made him do it.

Another time, he and I were walking back to John and Peter’s after a Sunday softball game. We were taking a shortcut along the railroad tracks to return the softball equipment to the bar, where it was stored during the week. I was carrying the bats and he was carrying the bases and other equipment.

“Give me a bat,” he said, stopping on the tracks.

“That’s okay, Rock. I got them.”

“No, give me a bat. I need to have a bat. I don’t go without no bat.”

I understood why immediately. We were walking through a deserted part of the tracks, and he did not want to walk unarmed while I carried all the weapons. That made him sweat inside. I gave him a bat and he settled down.

I guess he didn’t even trust The Frenchman.

Our mutual friend, Jim Woolsey, told me a story about the time Rocky was in his house and a Special Forces vet came to visit. In Vietnam, the Special Forces had a particularly violent, ruthless reputation. Who knows what Rocky saw when that apparition intruded?

“Rocky just shut down as soon as he saw him,” Woolsey told me. “He looked down and wouldn’t say a word, nothing. He froze.”

The last time I saw Rocky was in the grocery store. He was walking with a cane and limping badly.

“Hey, Frenchman, how you doin’?”

“What the hell happened to you, Rocky?”

“Ah, I get in a fight. I was beat up this guy, so he shot me in the leg.”

Toughness only goes so far. Bullets don’t care how hard you are. Rocky had a limp.

I learned some years ago on Facebook that Rocky had died of cancer. He had moved to Upper Bucks County, but was alone when the cancer struck. As he lay dying his “friends” came into his apartment and stole his belongings. The man who posted that said what a travesty it was, treating a veteran that way, and thought it should be stopped. Rocky was too weak to prevent his “friends” from taking everything he owned, and he simply had to endure their thievery in his death-agony.

In the end, the person he had been could not escape himself. None of us can, but while he lived happily in New Hope under his new identity, his escape was a roaring success.

He will forever be Rocky, just because he did not wish to be the suffering vulnerable vet he was coerced into being.

A monochrome tiger lily.

 What sense does it make to take black-and-white photographs, especially when summer comes and the world is filled with color?

When I ask myself that question, I tell myself to stop trying to make sense.

A photograph has its own agenda, and the photographer must stick to it.

Lifesaving vests waiting to save lives.

Lifesaving vests have to wait until needed, but when they are needed, the necessity becomes apparent.

Take the plunge, rent the canoe, try finding a photograph that tells you it must be shot in black-and-white.

Your ride to experience awaits you.

Seeing things clearly sometimes involves recording them in simple terms.

The Beauty of Photographic Watercolor Flowers

 Photographic Watercolors of Flowers

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A Gallery of Summertime Photographs

 A Bright Summer Scene

Summer finally arrives in sunshine for a field of wheat, the sky and clouds.

Colorful Canoes Ready to Go for a Swim

Colorful Canoes are ready for work in the water.

Working upside-down

A honeybee defies gravity to find the nectar he needs on a milkweed flower.

A Peach of a Flower

This begonia beauty if more than ready for her closeup.

A Clear Statement of the Season

Summer leaves no doubt it's arrived.

Four World War II Veterans at Home Again

  

My uncle John came home from World War II a damaged man.

Physically, he was intact, but mentally and emotionally he was not. His unit of green troops had been over-run by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes Forest.

When Germans over-run you there is very little left. The Bosch scoffed at American soldiers, saying they played at war.

Today, we call what Uncle John had post traumatic stress disorder. In his time, it was known as battle fatigue, the thousand-mile stare. It manifests itself in various ways and at various times over a life.

It never really goes away.

And it lasts longer than a lifetime, because the madness is passed it on from generation to generation.

It ruins marriages, families and friendships.

When I was five years old in 1953 Uncle John visited our house visibly upset. He came to talk to his older sister, my mother, about a delusion he believed was real.

Sweating, shaking, red in the face and with his knees nearly buckling he began describing what he had witnessed between a man and a boy in the woods.

“Kids, go to your rooms,” my mother instructed us.

We scurried up the stairs without hesitation. We loved our Uncle John and looked forward to his visits. He he made us laugh and brought us chocolates, so we really did not want to go.

We compromised between our need for obedience to our mother and our desire to stay close to Uncle John by flopping down on the hardwood floor at the top of the stairs.

We could not be seen there but could hear him talk.

“There was a man in the woods with a boy over his knee. He had the boy’s pants down and was spanking him with a heavy leather belt and cutting him with a knife. He just went on and on hitting him with the belt and cutting him with the knife while the boy screamed and begged him to stop.”

“John, no. You know that was not real.”

“It was. I saw him doing it.”

“It was just in you mind. Can’t you understand that? Or maybe you dreamed it.”

“I wasn’t asleep. I can take you there into the woods and show you. There is this man cutting and spanking a boy with a knife and a belt.”

Why my mother didn’t ask the obvious, that is, why Uncle John didn’t stop him, I don’t know.

Perhaps she was too upset by what she was seeing and hearing from her brother.

My mother eventually called the cops. I don’t remember much of what happened after that, but the police were very understanding of the situation, most likely knowing what they were dealing with.

They had Uncle John take them into the woods, where they found nothing.

There is an old joke that says I’m not crazy but I’m a carrier. My uncle was both crazy at times and a carrier.

I don’t know if my big sister listened to the conversation or not, but I did.

It was enough to implant his awful image in my mind.

As a boy, I thought it was as real as the sun rising in the morning or my father’s smile.

At that age, and often into our later years, we take what adults say as gospel.

I had nightmares about that man beating and carving up that boy’s bottom. In my nightmare that boy was me, just as in his hallucination my uncle must have thought he was back in the Ardennes being butchered by Germans.

In a way, both my uncle and me were victims, all courtesy of the Battle of the Bulge. Thank you, Adolph Hitler.

As the years pressed on, I understood my nightmares for what they were. They were what my mother understood them to be when she first heard Uncle John’s feverish tale: they were all in my head.

It was a feverish fantasy brought on by the immense trauma of war, butchery, dread and death, brought back home from the Ardennes Forest.

*

The Battle of the Bulge had been a tragedy that my uncle had participated in and suffered terribly from. It was logical that that reality would be seared into his consciousness and color the contents of his mind, then mine.

Horror was real to him, it had to be for him to survive. His mind was trained to see destruction and death and avoid them, but his mind also wished to eject them.

He could do that only when his memories were transformed and talked about, given the devilish pathways that had been established in his brain by war.

Uncle John recovered enough to live a normal life. My father, who was a contractor, hired him. Hard work was good for him physically and mentally and emotionally.

Education helped. He graduated from Villanova University with a degree in accounting.

Fiddling with dry numbers was a clean and honorable way to think and demanded discipline. He married and had children, embarking on a normal life, but his demons remained in certain ways.

It almost sounds comic to say it but in reality it was very sad: he ate a gallon of vanilla ice cream every night before bed, always one gallon and always vanilla. He weighed over three hundred pounds.

Maybe the ice cream cooled the hot night terrors and kept away the demons of memory.

*

Veterans of World War II were everywhere in my youth.

So many had fought and been sickened in the mind by the experience. Whenever I encountered one, I thought of what my Uncle John had gone through and how it affected him. I looked at them with the insights my uncle’s visit had conferred on me.

Some were in worse condition than he was, others were much better.

It made me a pacifist for life.

I hated the Vietnam War, partly because I knew its distant horrors and futilities would last in us forever, that crazed veterans would come home and years later relate stories to their sisters that would drive their children half-mad with fear.

My boyish nightmares had stopped.

Growing up crumbles all fantasies. I saw how my uncle had recovered. I tried to see the good in other old soldiers who had endured such things.

My very minor case of PTSD, caught like a head cold and brought on by my uncle’s tale when I was five years old was vanquished by growing up.

I saw the good I saw in him in his later years, but I remembered his story and what it meant for others.

*

Irv, Charlie and Bob were three World War II veterans I served when I tended bar at The Lambertville House.

In a way, I knew them before I met them.

 “Give me a drink, Carl.”

“The usual?”

“The usual.”

They were disinclined to talk about the war.

I knew better from my upbringing than to ask.

I did not have the ghoulish delight in hearing tales of horror that some who had not been to war relish.

But I couldn’t help but observe their lives as growing twisted out of the war, as works of recovery in progress, for I knew living a good life and forgetfulness were balms if not cures and were necessary.

Each of these men took the chance to move on toward normality, living the kind of life they would have had they never gone to war.

We’re going to the movies of the mind now.

The Lambertville House, with its dark wooden bar and smoke-filled old-time ambience, was a perfect oasis for my three friends.

It was like something out of Casablanca, the World War II flick starring Humphrey Bogart and Igmar Bergman, but playing out years after the war, when Irv, Charlie and Bob came around.

Each visited me to drink, see each other, make jokes and forget.

I tried to be a good bartender and help them along with these things, the drinking and joking and music. Each had the survivor’s delight in the ability to simply be. They reveled in it.

I knew when I saw them light up in the presence of each other that their companionship, their bonds, had been forged in a lifetime of mutual relief. For them, the war was over when they saw each other in the Lambertville House.

Their survival proved it.

“Give my friend here a drink, Joe.”

“Yes, sir, Mister Rick.”

Bob was a leader of the group. He led by music, like Sam the piano man in the movie.

He was a fine musician who worked playing swing-jazz piano in the bar at night, recreating the good times of their wartime youth, which helped to erase the bad.

A man of average size, slightly hunched over, Bob had the biggest smile I have ever seen and a voice made gruff and deep by cigarettes and scotch that he put to good use singing the romantic melodies soldiers listened to during World War II.

His playing and voice revived the visions of pin-up girls and home, the sweetness of civilian life that going to war had taken from them.

“You must remember this …”

Bob socialized with everyone, whether he knew them or not, or had been in the war or not, when he took breaks from playing.

He always had that huge smile and a cigarette and a scotch as played and socialized.

For some reason, perhaps because I was in awe of him, I was a little tongue-tied around him. He would have hated to know that, for he was very comfortable with himself. He liked what he had become, and so did everybody else.

*

Irv was quieter, thinner and taller than most, the pleasant wounded vet who sat alone and seemed very kind.

He perched on the same end stool at the bar whenever he could, and had a dramatic shock of black hair that gave him the looks of an old movie star. He listened to Bob’s music, smiling at the memories, and got misty-eyed and sad.

He had trouble speaking at times. I found out why when he opened up to me one night.

Somehow the subject of how he had been wounded came up.

“I caught a fifty-millimeter shell in the chest from a Messerschmitt flying over to strafe us as we marching along a road,” he said. “Those are big shells and it should have killed me, but I was holding my rifle in front of me as we marched and it hit the wooden stock of my rifle and knocked me over. It sent fragments of wood and metal into my lungs and chest, but holding my rifle that way saved me. It took me years to recover. I still have some trouble breathing.”

He was bony almost to the point of ill health, and mostly he sat there with a drink and a smile, his ears attuned to Bob playing those old songs he loved.

“… a kiss is just a kiss …”

*

Charlie was not quite so happy.

He was the brooding Humphrey Bogart character of the bar, the man almost unable to forget loss.

When he saw Bob and Irv he lit up with a smile as they did with him, but there was a darkness in him that I believed the war had clawed into him and left permanent scars.

To my eyes, he seemed to have every reason to recover, but he had difficulty in doing so.

He married a beautiful woman, Mary, who as a yoga instructor was as fit, caring, healthy and spiritual as a woman could be.

Married to a vet with PTSD she would have to be all those things.

I did not know what Charlie did for a living, but he always wore a suit and tie and seemed to make a good living. He had the same movie-star shock of black hair that Irv did, but he seemed to squirm with discomfort at times just sitting there at the bar in Lambertville’s Casablanca.

He, too, opened up to me, but just once.

“I don’t know what it is. I can’t seem to be happy.”

As a bartender who gave advice when asked, I made a thoughtless, foolish mistake.

I loved traveling to Europe.

To me, it was one great continent of new experiences, pleasures and escape from the insanity of America in the 1970s. I thought it might be for Charlie, too. He had opened up the subject, but I was certainly not one qualified to advise him.

I did not realize that.

“Travel a little,” I said. “Have a good time. Go to Europe.”

He looked at me like I was crazy. He waved me off.

“I’ve done all that already,” he said. “I don’t enjoy those things anymore.”

If I had been more insightful I would have realized his Europe of exploding shells and whizzing bullets was wrong as a suggested travel destination.

His experiences there as a young man were completely the opposite from mine.

He turned to the side on his barstool, away from looking at me. I went on making drinks.

*

I don’t know what became of Irv, Charlie and Bob.

Those days working as a bartender at the Lambertville House were forty years ago.

I think they must have lived out their lives well, as they seemed to when I served drinks to them and I imagined their fears and pains and joys.

I remember hearing that Bob had died, and felt very sorry for it. I feel the same for Charlie and Irv.

Let me buy you a virtual drink, boys.

They say the real pacifists are those who have seen combat.

In a way, I became one of them by learning from my Uncle John.