After I lost my driver’s license, I started hanging out nights at the Pit & Paddock. The Pit was a 3.2 joint on Snelling Avenue in St. Paul. It was deep and narrow with a black door, black walls, black ceiling, fluorescent lights hanging on chains, lenses yellow with cigarette smoke, a worn and grimy checkerboard floor that was at one time maybe white and red, pinball machines on the left as you came in and further down the bar with red vinyl stools tucked under. On the right, a foosball table just inside the door, then, across from the bar, half-a-dozen red vinyl booths with strips of duct tape holding the vinyl together, and the juke box pounding out Joe Walsh, Doobies, Skynard, Airplane, Cream, Steppenwolf, Buffalo Springfield, Janis and the rest, all stuffed into a flashing glass and chrome box, the arm shuffling through the vinyl 45s between songs fun to watch.
In the back there was a seven-foot pool table with beer-stained cloth that cost a quarter and a nickel and past that a couple of bathrooms where drug deals and blow jobs transacted and occasionally somebody would take a leak. The guy who owned the Pit, Ethan, was from England and raced and wrecked Mini Coopers as a way to spend the money he made selling beer. Pictures of the car, dark green with white stripes on the hood and roof, numbers on the doors, big chrome driving lights, dust and gravel spraying from the front tires on some dirt rally course hung on the walls. Ethan’s face, framed by his helmet, eyes open and intense and focused on something beyond the camera, was recognizable through the windshield. Ethan’s girlfriend, Iggy, was the bartender. Ethan wasn’t around much.
The Pit was a biker bar. In the summer, Harley shovels, pans and even some knuckles, along with the odd Norton or Triumph, would line the curb in front; in the winter, it was pickups and vans, a lot of vans, Fords, Chevys, Dodges. This was 1972 and even then “biker” was not a big paycheck occupation so the pickups and vans tended to wrinkled sheet metal and rust. Iggy ran a tight ship, she didn’t have a bouncer and didn’t hesitate to ask for help putting a lousy drunk on the sidewalk or breaking up a fight, and the guys at the pool table would more or less oblige depending on the customer and the colors flying on their vest and who was doing the fighting. The cussing and shoving was mostly back by the pool table. I tended to stay up by the foosball table close to the door playing for beers and mostly winning and was left alone, pretty much. As for Iggy, I never saw anybody mess with her.
A friend of mine, Swede, would drive us down to the Pit in his Plymouth Fury, four doors, 383 V8, auto, rust coming through the floors and fenders, and we’d play foosball and drink beer. One night, Swede gets up to take a leak and bumps a guy taking a shot at the pool table. The guys were playing for money and Tiny, the guy taking the shot, had been losing for a while and when he missed his shot because of Swede, he stood up and swung his fist around and hit Swede in the side of his head and knocked him down and while he was on the floor kicked him hard in the ribs, he was wearing the beat up Corcoran jump boots he’d worn in the Army, called him “little motherfucker” while he was doing it. Swede, skinny and sixteen, same age as me, got up, took his leak and came back and played foosball the rest of the night and didn’t say a word about it. Tiny was big and muscly and drunk and standing there with his sideburns, they looked like brown squirrel tails glued to his cheeks, and his biker vest and his wallet on a chain and swinging his pool cue around like ‘I’m here if you want some’. Swede for sure didn’t want any of that.
A week or two later, Swede’s looking for a place to park his Fury, it’s a cold spring night, still piles of snow here and there, and he points to a pickup and says, “That’s his fucking Dodge.” He finds a spot, grabs a magazine or catalog or something out of the back seat, I can see him under the street light, he looks around, unbuckles, squats and shits on the sidewalk next to Tiny’s truck. And then he takes the magazine, picks up his shit and smears it on both the door handles and the windshield. Then we went in the bar, played foosball, won some beers, and when we left, Tiny was still there playing pool, his girlfriend sitting at the bar chatting with Iggy, her pretty fingers laced around a Hamm’s beer glass.
Hanging out at the Pit, you saw a lot of stories. Hot summer night, close to bar time, a woman staggered in blown out drunk, she was heavy set, short black hair, crooked teeth, short black dress, bra strap slipping off her shoulder. She was buying beer; some guy driving a white VW bug had dropped her in front and was going around the block waiting for her to come out with the Schlitz. Leroy, good-looking guy, dark hair to his collar, droopy mustache, tattoo on his forearm in blue ink of a helicopter, the words “Viet Nam ’68 – ’70” inscribed in an arc above the Huey, “1/1 Cavalry Squadron” in an arc below, he started chatting her up at the bar. While Iggy was getting her beer, Leroy put his arm around her and in a couple of minutes he was whispering in her ear and she was leaning on him and whispering back and then he called over to the guys standing by the pool table watching the game and holding beers, “Hey, Roach, get your van.”
The front door was open and Leroy leaned against the jamb watching for her guy to drive past. When he did, when he slowed down and she didn’t come out, he accelerated around the corner for another lap. Once the bug turned the corner, Leroy stepped out and waved and Roach pulled up in his van and Leroy and the drunk woman staggered across the sidewalk. As they were going by me, Leroy shoved the bag of beer into my arms and I followed behind, stepping sideways between a chopped Triumph Bonneville and an ratty Sportster trying not to trip on a kickstand or knock one over, then ducking in the side door of the van. Iggy was counting cash at the register.
Roach’s van was an orange, mid-sixties Chevy, the rust holes in the rockers sprayed over with flat-red rattle-can primer. There was a Tet ‘68 sticker on the rear bumper. Roach was part-owner of a muffler shop and by the dome light, I could see the back of the van was stacked with mufflers in boxes; lengths of exhaust pipe clanked back and forth under our feet. I climbed into the passenger front seat and Leroy and the woman got cuddly on the bench seat in back. The van had a six-cylinder engine that needed exhaust work, a three-on-the-column transmission, and a Realistic 8-track deck cut into the steel dash where the radio used to be, Willy and the Poor Boys poking out of the front. We hadn’t pulled away from the bikes at the curb before the woman’s face and fist were in Leroy’s lap, her head bobbing up and down, while Fogerty, with his flat scream and twangy guitar, let go with Fortunate Son, and Roach drove us past dark St. Paul houses on the 1:00 am streets.
Roach drove us to a park on the river. The sign said the park closed at sundown and there were no cars in the parking lot. We sat at a picnic table by the water and I put the two six-packs in the middle of the table. There was no moon but the night was bright with light from the stars and we could see each other as we drank her beer. The river was glassy smooth so that it reflected the individual stars, the terrible force of its currents hidden beneath its mirror surface.
After some minutes and some beer, the woman got up from the table, put her hand on Leroy’s neck and led him to the water. And in the light of the stars, we listened to their groans and curses and watched them fuck on the sand. When Leroy was done, he got up and buttoned his fly while she lay on her back staring at the sky with her feet pulled up to her naked butt. Roach fucked her then, he didn’t last long, and then it was my turn. I walked to where she lay on her back on the beach looking at the sky, she was covered with sand, her dress bunched between her waist and her breasts, her bra and underwear somewhere lost. She stank of sweat, semen, vomit and beer.
I sat next to her and she lay beside me not moving and still staring at the night sky. Leroy and Roach were sitting at the table sucking beer cans and smoking Roach’s Camel Straights and sharing a joint back and forth and telling war stories and ignoring us. After a while she said, “What was your branch?”
When I didn’t answer she said, “Army, Navy, Marine Corps?”
“I’m in high school,” I said, “eleventh grade this year.”
She was silent for some moments then she said, “You look like Eddie when he went in, tall, skinny, pretty face, long pretty hair.” She reached up and ran her hands through my hair, then along my face and jaw, her touch soft so that I could only just feel it. Her fingertips left sand on my lips; fifty years later, I can still feel the grit. “He only had to shave once a week.”
It was late and I was tired and the beer was making my thinking soggy, “Who’s Eddie?”
“My boyfriend.”
“The guy driving the bug.”
“That was my brother. He’s trying to save me.” She snorted, “There’s no saving me.”
She was quiet then she said, “Eddie was KIA. The army sent his stuff home,” she said it matter-of-factly like it was something she’d read in the Pioneer Press or heard on the radio, like it was somebody else’s news.
Her voice dropped into a snarl, “I want him, I want him back, I want him so I can’t sleep, so I can’t eat. All I can do is drink and fuck and try to make it stop. And it won’t stop. No matter how much I fuck. No matter how much I drink.”
Her snarl became a moan, a resonant hurt that went on and on. The raw force of it twisted her face into a clown mask, mouth and red lips open wide against her pale skin, teeth bared, eyes huge and black reflecting the night sky, a river of tears flowing down her cheek into the sand. I took her hand and held it because I didn’t know what else to do and we sat there until she stopped moaning.
And when she did, she stood up and shoved her dress past her hips and it fell to the ground around her ankles and she stepped out of it and she was naked except for the dog tags hanging from a chain around her neck. She took my hand and led me to the water’s edge, the glistening stream in its tree-furred canal disappearing into the stars in both directions. When I stopped because I didn’t want to get my boots wet, she tugged my hand and I let her pull me in until the river was past my waist. The water was body temperature and had a faint, late-summer pee smell to it. I felt the tug of the current on my legs and stopped again. I wasn’t a good swimmer and my jeans and boots were getting heavy. She let go of my hand and backed away from me into the water until it reached her chest and she lay back and let the current take her, only her head and white breasts visible on the dark, star-specked river. As the current of the center channel took her, she accelerated away from me until her face and breasts were just tiny points of light, until she became one with the stars.
