An Empty Mug
It was late when I slowed down and turned off the dusty road. At the far end of the gravel parking lot, my headlights lit the murky insides of an empty, burnt-out building. Tumbleweeds from the desert plains collected under the rotting canopy over the front door. A faded sign with peeling green paint hung from one side of the canopy, the other side broken and buried in a pothole. Washed-out white letters spelled, “The Empty Mug.”
I sat for a few minutes staring into the skeleton of posts and beams, through the jagged holes and broken panes. The Empty Mug was once a grimy little bar on the other side of the tracks where people gathered on Saturday nights. They shared stories of the week, drank some, and danced to the sounds of a piano that sat in the far corner of the back room. Sometimes it was me they came to listen to…I was the piano man.
“Is this the place?” Sheila’s question startled me. It had been thirty years since that night…the haunting memory forever etched in my mind. “Are you going in?”
“I suppose so,” I said. I opened the door of the Jeep, stepped out, and walked toward the building. After a couple of minutes, I pulled on the front door; its rusted hinges groaned and creaked, but gave way. Inside was dusty and dank, dark and quiet. A lizard scurried away under a pile of debris in a far corner. The headlights sent bats through a gaping hole in the rotted roof. I felt as if I had stepped back in time, to a place I tried to forget.
************
It was thirty some years ago, in the mid-seventies. I was four months home from a bloody tour in Vietnam, met a girl, and got married. Six months later, she was gone, so was the money. She ran off with an old boyfriend. I tried to bury her with liquor, drugs, fast cars, and faster women. I never did. I lived in flop-houses and hotels, shacked up in one room apartments over filthy bars, other times I lived on the streets. All I had was tonight, nothing else mattered. But I loved my music.
The piano kept me alive, kept me going, anchored to something, something tangible and real. When I sat down in front of a keyboard, the pain would fall away. Each hammer falling on a string would ease another ache, cover another scar. Every day back then felt like another needle in my arm. At night, the moment I opened the wooden cover over a line of white and black keys, I felt alive. So I played gigs whenever I could get them…mostly in honk-tonk bars and dives where people were too drunk to notice whether the music was good or bad, or were too stoned to care.
The Empty Mug soon became a regular spot for me. It got so I played almost every Saturday night there. Ralph didn’t pay well and I lived on mostly tips anyway; a drunken couple, arm in arm, sweaty and smiling, would toss a couple of quarters or a dollar into a thick glass mug sitting on the stains and dust covering the top of the old Grand Piano. I got to know the regulars there. I would sing and play and drink until the place closed. I’d fill my pockets with the loose change from the mug, leave a few dollars for Jim, the bartender, maybe I’d take the new waitress home, maybe just leave her some change instead. Most nights I just passed out in the empty parking lot. In the morning, the Western Flyer would thunder past. Its shrill horn pieced holes through the morning light, and right through my ears. The clickity-clack of the boxcars sounded like lonely tires humming into the night.
It was 9 o’clock on a Saturday, a hot summer night in ’79, when I turned into the parking lot of the hotel. Dewy the Drunk was passed out in the alley. Puke ran down his knotted beard onto his chest. Jack the Rat rummaged through the garbage can next to Dewy. Lulu stood on the corner under the street light waving at Cadillac’s and Beamers. Her black spiked heels did the walking. A worn-out mini-skirt did her talking. As usual, I was broke, hungry, hung-over, and sick of that place. I piled a garbage bag full of dirty clothes into the cab of the truck along with the few belongs I owned, washed down a couple of green-specks with a bottle of Wild Turkey, tossed the rest of the bottle to Jack, and headed for the highway. On the way out of town, I stopped at The Empty Mug to play one last time, collect some tips, and make promises I would never keep. I really didn’t give a rat’s ass about those people, any people for that matter. But they paid me to play, and I took their money.
I pushed open the back door to the bar and stepped inside. A murky cloud stinking of cigarettes hung in the stale air. Ralph waved and pointed to the rack of dusty whiskey bottles on the back wall in front of the mirror. There is always a mirror; bars have to have a mirror. Ads for cheap beer and specials of the week from last year cover the nicotine and grime. The mirror makes everything look bigger. The crowd looks bigger, the rack of bottles look bigger, the stinking little room looks bigger, the little people huddled over the bar look bigger. I look bigger in front of the mirror…if I care to look. Usually I don’t look…or can’t.
I nodded back at Ralph with a smile and a wave. Big Bob waved his ten-gallon hat at me. He sat on the nearest corner. Steve sat next to him. Both their wives were at a table on the other side of the bar; Jean was portly and loud…bad tempered too. Sandy was Steve’s wife. She was lean and lewd with an hourglass figure. She looked good that night; gave me a sideways wink on the sly. I tipped my glass to her and made a mental note to pay more attention to her later on, after Steve passed out. JD and Ann huddled in the corner table like no one could see them cheating. Really, no one cared. Bruce usually sat in the center of the bar. Big Bob said he died last Sunday night. We all die. We struggle until we die, until we become unchained from a hell of pain and misery; our innocent dreams of life shattered by living. Yet, for some, for these people, they spend one night a week laughing, sharing, and listening to music. They dance and sing. They touch, and talk, and become more than pawns, pieces of shit that society has tossed into a garbage pile of rotting flesh.
I picked up my drink, said hey to the regulars, and walked into the dark back room. A haggard old man hunched in a dark corner booth called to me. “Excuse me. Could I have a word with you?” His hollow voice trembled and shook. I strolled past the piano, to the booth where he started to get up.
“Please, sir, don’t get up,” I said. He placed his cold and boney hand in mine and squeezed the best he could. His leathery skin was hard and grey, his cloudy eyes were sunk into his skull like empty sockets. A clammy chill shot through me when I took his hand…his two small fingers were missing. “What can I do for you, sir? My name is Will, William really. Please call me Will.”
“Glad to meet you Will. My name is Joe, Joe Moynihan. If’n you could sit for a minute and listen, maybe you could do something for me.”
“Sure, Joe. I'd be glad to.” I set my drink on the table between the scratches and the stains and slid into the booth.
“Well, Will. You drew back at my hand. I'm used to that. I lost them fingers in the First World War. We was captured in Germany. I wasn’t nothin' but a kid, a private. I didn’t know nothin', no secrets nor nothin'. Them guards got bored and took to torturing us for fun. They called themselves ‘interrogating us.’ Well, they cut these here fingers off. Took them better than a month. They would take a saw and hack away at a knuckle a week. Some lost toes, hands, or arms…one joint at a time. They did other things too, Will, unspeakable things. Them who made it out...well, none of us could never have no kids—you know what I mean, Will?” He sat quietly for a minute rubbing his hand as if to erase the ghastly memory.
“Well, we was rescued a year later and shipped us home. I met a girl before I left for the war; Sara was her name. She waited for me, Sara did, and stayed true too. She was all that kept me going, kept me wanting to live. We all need something to live for, Will. Sara said she knew I'd come home and she wanted to be there when I did. She said she didn’t care nothin' about having no kids; it was the only thing she ever fibbed about. But she gave me her love, gave me her life…and I gave her mine. Sara would always say, ‘Something ain’t nothing Joe, until you give it away.’
“We got married right away after I got back. That was 60 years ago…60 years. We made every one of ‘em together. We went through so much all them years; the Depression was the worst of it. We was young and had nothin'. We went to living in a tent. We ate crumbs and stuff the rats left us. But we made a good life of it, me and Sara…made us strong, kept us living.
“She always said she wanted to make to 60 years together. Well sir, Sara took sick two months ago. I took care of her, just like she took care of me all those years—she passed on last month. She looked so beautiful laying there with all those ruffles and silk. She had her blue anniversary dress on and her silvery hair done up just so. I sat with her, alone and quiet for the longest time. After a spell, I stood up, leaned in, and one last time I kissed her on her cheek, told her how much I loved her. Then I closed the wooden cover. When we got to the cemetery, they lowered her into the ground and I watched them toss dirt over my Sara. God, I miss her so.” Joe reached in his back pocket for a folded and stained hankie.
“Well, today would have been number 60 for Sara and me. It’s our anniversary day and it looks like we ain’t gonna make it--with her over there in The After, and me back here. We had this song we played once a year. It was an old ‘78’ of Louis Armstrong when he sung ‘What a Wonderful World.’ I'd crank up the Victorla and set the old scratchy needle down on the record. Oh my, how we could dance. She'd wrap her arms around my shoulders, lay her head on my chest. She'd kiss my cheek and close her eyes like everything was ok, and she'd say real soft, ‘I love you, Joe Moynihan, always did, always will.’ Fifty nine times we done that, danced like everything was ok…and it was ok. It was always ok with my Sara.
“I laid that ‘78’ in with Sara so she could keep it until I get there. I ain’t gonna be here much longer, I won’t make it ‘till next year. But, if’n you know that song Will, could you play it for me tonight? For Sara and me? Maybe she'd hear it and know how much loved her all these years, how much I miss her. Could you play our anniversary song, Will?”
Joe’s story sent me to my last end. All this time, I played the piano for me, for my selfish sanity. I played for money, money to drink, money for drugs, women, and anything else that fed me. Sitting across the table was a decrepit and dying old man who dedicated his life to someone…and in return, she gave him life. I fought the mist trying to overtake me…I fought emotion. It seemed like I was always fighting something those days.
“Sure, Joe. I'd be proud to. I’ll play the song. I’ll do the best I can. It might not be good, but I’ll sure try.” Joe thanked me with a warm handshake. His tired and sunken eyes were swollen and wet.
I walked to the back corner where the piano sat. I turned on the old amplifier and the tinny speaker crackled to life. I sat my drink down on the dusty piano and stared down at the wooden keyboard cover. I slowly lifted it open expecting the underside to be lined with frills and silk. As I began, I couldn’t make two notes run together. The sounds were just noise, disjointed, out of tune, no rhythm. Nothing fit.
But it didn’t matter to the couples who made their way to the dance floor. They laughed and they smiled and they whirled around each other as I played. I watched Joe sitting alone, waiting. After a few songs, I began to get comfortable. The notes ran together and became music. My fingers started to melt into the keys. I began to play for them, with them, the people out there, who dance together and give each other life. One song ran into another. When it was time for Joe, I kept the rhythm going.
“We have a request tonight, an anniversary request. Sixty years ago today, Joe and Sara were married. Sara couldn’t be here tonight, so Joe asked me to play their song, the same one they danced to all those years. Could you all get up? Could you dance for Joe…and dance for Sara?”
I settled in to the song. My voice was alien, raspy and soft. The notes, the music came from a part of me I didn’t understand, a place I buried years ago. I played from inside. I sang from inside. The scene seemed foggy and foreign. They danced in the haze, all those people danced for Joe, and for Sara, and for me, and for each other. And I played, and I sang. When one couple sat down, another got up, and still I played. Right there, at that moment, I began to understand, that this was a wonderful world. And I played on and on, tireless without stopping. When I watched Joe turn ashen and slump in the booth, I played. When the shadows in the crowd opened up to form a circle, I played. I played for Joe. I played for Sara. I played for the blurred young couple who danced in the iridescent light in the middle of the floor…her arms around his shoulders, her head laid on his green uniform, her eyes shut like everything was ok…and still, I played…I played for them, all of them.
That night, thirty years ago, was the last time I ever touched a piano, that night in The Empty Mug. Long after the last couple left, confused and dazed I stuffed a wad of dollar bills into my jeans and walked out the back door. I sat in the truck until the sun shined through morning dew on the windshield and the Western Flyer thundered through my head. Eyes swollen and head spinning, staring straight ahead, I switched on the key, and headed the Chevy east…toward home .
************
“Hon?” Sheila’s tender touch and soothing voice broke through the past. “We better think about getting along, Hon. The kids will be waiting.”
She stepped around me, wrapped her arms around my shoulders, laid her head on my chest, and she closed her eyes like everything was ok, and it was.
“I love you, William. Always have, always will.”
“I never thought I'd be happy, Sheila...not until you came along. It sure doesn’t seem like twenty-five years, does it.” I looked at the dusty keys, and closed the wooden cover back over them.
We turned and walked away from The Empty Mug, Sheila and me, and never looked back. “Do you think we'll make it to sixty years?”
“Sure we can, Hon. Happy Anniversary.” Let’s go home.”
