Let's Go to the Slide! Aimlessness

When was it? Forty-two years ago? Or 44. Before I went to the Peace Corps. It must have been afterwards. Bud would put it to me: "Let's go to the Slide!" It must have been in the summer of 1965, after I got back from Ibadan and D.C. and Indianapolis and Tucson and El Paso and Ciudad Juarez* and Las Cruces and wherever in hell else I meandered that aimless year.

That's about all I remember from those trips to the Hillside Hotel cocktail lounge. Warm, sweaty nights with crickets and things. I recall one night when we were there a guy passed out and put his head on a table. John David Lucht, the owner of the bar and the bartender, with a white short-sleeved shirt and black necktie there night after night (Bud and I were there night after night and we knew how faithful John David was to that job), needed the table and he leaned the passed-out drunk on his chair up against a wall and took the table for some more genteel clients and they didn't mind and John David didn't mind and the drunk didn't mind and it was funny. Reminded me of the corpse in "The Real Inspector Hound" or Bernie in "Weekend at Bernie's." We laughed quietly and politely and went on with our merriment. The guy slept it off the entire evening we were there. He might still be there. Bud knew how to pick what my mother referred to as "saloons." We'd sit in the lounge and look out the window at night and it was a nice view, kind of like San Francisco -- I've sat in bars in Frisco and looked out at the night lights too. That's about it. Just a reminiscence.

We'd plummet down that little hill after a beery night (for me: Bud drank manhattans) and drive home in the still darkness hours in little old Madison (we both slept at our parents' house that summer) and sleep it off and the next day would come, and we were young and all of us were alive -- both parents and I had no idea that the old man had a bad heart (actually not a bad heart but blood vessels like mine, clogged up with plaque, and there was no Plavix then and no CABG) -- not thinking about croaking, you know, and life was damned good.

I'd have bacon and eggs next morning as soon as I could tolerate them and those were the days I'd do two drunks a day: I liked to take off shortly after noon to a bar in Chelsea, a "wide place in the road" en route to Louisville, beyond Hanover, in the early afternoon, where I would drink three or four beers, and then come home and sleep it off. I recall driving back from the "3-N-1" one afternoon and encountering some joker who was driving on the left side of the road. Just for the hell of it, I reckon. I got off the road and let him go by. Crazy somebitch.

Then there'd be the evening of drinking with Bud at the "Slide." He wouldn't go to the redneck places like the Crown Room. I would go there and because of my big stupid mouth would come close to getting the shit kicked out of me. Them t'backer farmers/factry workers liked to fight. Don't know why I went to that shit-kicking place. The sweetheart of the jukebox was Brenda Lee. I did/do despise her singing. No Anita O'Day, it goes without saying. Or Roberta Peters singing the "Queen of the Night" aria from Die Zauberfloete. Finally I got a job as a biochemistry lab tech at Muscatatuck and my wild-assed drinking continued in Miller's Tavern in North Vernon and in a dorm on the campus there. The to-be superintendent and I enjoyed getting fucked up in that saloon. It is my recollection that he was removed in disgrace later on. I believe the same principle applied to this chap as to me: One should not attempt to manage other people when one cannot manage oneself.

More reminiscences to come. Gentlemen: Goodnight.

* In that city across the Rio Grande from El Paso I met an incredibly beautiful Mexican woman. I'd marry her in a Madison minute if I had the perspective then that I have now. Now, I know which women are the keepers. I was too young and callow to marry anybody then and, to my credit, I knew it. I hope this lovely muchacha got out of that hellhole she was in. I hope she is alive and well and now a great-grandmother and prosperous and all her family is prosperous. She was a righteous lady. Vaya con dios, amigos y amigas.




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