The Blue Moon Review - Fiction

Side Step is Mainstream

by Thomas Allbaugh

"Now like I've said many times before, we're not one extreme or another, so religious puritan types never bother us. Occasionally you over-hear a relative in drinking soda with one of the regulars, trying to get him churched, but that's always just sort of fun, gives us something to talk about after the relatives go home. But this time, it was, well, I think the word is incongruous."

Technically, it began with the bet.

But that's technically. To my mind -- and I think I ought to know -- it all really started with the preacher. On a hot, cloudless night last summer, when Mike had the air on and everyone's thoughts were on the fine things in life, the door opened and this short, thin fella walked in with a tennis racket and a raincoat. Now like I've said many times before, we're not one extreme or another, so religious puritan types never bother us. Occasionally you over-hear a relative in drinking soda with one of the regulars, trying to get him churched, but that's always just sort of fun, gives us something to talk about after the relatives go home. But this time, it was, well, I think the word is incongruous.

First thing, he walked up to my girlfriend Marilyn, who was working behind the bar. When she saw the black raincoat -- too hot for a night like this one, not to mention there wasn't no rain, not even in the forecast -- she smiled and said in that mocking tone she can use so well, "What's your pleasure, Noah?"

Well he stood there, all five feet of him, oblivious to insult, looked into her eyes, and said, "Marilyn."

Her mocking look melted because he said her name, and I mean her mind just kind of got carried away from the bar there and out into the streets and beyond until she was remembering being a girl in high school before her parents had to sell their house in the suburbs. I'd never seen that look in her eyes before. She looked at him again and said, in this gentle voice, "Do I know you?"

"God does."

Now, let me tell you, for years Side Step has been my place of refuge. It's in just the right place, far enough away from the gay strip in front of the State Capitol, so we don't get bothered by reformers, but still far enough away from the east side of town and the University, so we don't have to put up with droves of first-time drunks puking up Tom Collins. In a word, Side Step is mainstream. Mike, the owner, has helped so many people that I've stopped counting, and they all come in and share a cold one and a game of pool and tell you so. I'm not saying it's heaven. But he took in old Cheney after his own bar went bust. Cheney had sipped himself via martinis into invalid status, when Mike goes and takes him in, lets him retire in the apartment over Side Step, which really makes me mad when I think about it. Helmut, too. He came after he got out of prison, and Side Step gave him a real good place to mend and get back into things. Mike let him work a little, but really watched him, and it really gets me when I think about what happened on account of what I think you could call a religious extremist.

So he says that to Marilyn about God, and I thought, here we go with the latest. You always see it on those televangelist shows with the ugly settings and the phone number you can call to give money. Well, for Marilyn, a strange new distraction came into her face. Before he left, this short fellow gave her a card and talked with her. I'll tell you I was bothered all night because of that, because of how it seemed miraculous the way he said her name. But there's always an explanation.

And it came on the following Wednesday night when I was in, sharing a few with Phil and Dean. Marilyn came up and Dean said, "You seen your friend in yet tonight?"

"Friend?"

"Recreation Man. Came in yesterday with a volleyball."

Marilyn said, "Why should he be my friend?"

"He gave you his card," said Dean.

"He's a friend to all," said Phil.

"What's he doing here?" Dean asked.

"What are you doing here?" Marilyn asked.

"Solving the world's problems," said Phil.

"So is he," said Marilyn.

"Oh, take a joke," said Phil.

Just as Phil said this, the door opened to the brightness outside, throwing into dark silhouette the pool players inside, and in walked Rec man with his tennis racket again -- minus the raincoat.

Marilyn watched him while we all sort of frowned and studied our drinks. Then she stepped to the bar, which was only a few feet from the booth we always occupied, and asked, "What do you need?"

"Just here to see Frank," he said. Then he sat down with Frank there at the bar.

Cheney, on his bar stool next to Frank, said, "He your tennis partner?"

"He's a friend." So here was my answer. Not only about why this guy was here in the first place, that is, to see Frank Spilli, who had been on the mend for a while in one of this guy's church programs. Apparently, Recreation Man had come looking for him again. But that also explained how it was that Rec Man knew Marilyn's name -- Frank had told him.

"Hey, its Rec Man," came a shout from Helmut at the pool table. Helmut lifts weights and always wears sleeveless shirts in summer. He's a little younger than the rest of us. He's got one of those silly, thin blonde mustaches. Well, I thought he stared at Rec Man a little too long, and I felt trouble, because, as I said already, Helmut had done time.

But Dean, from our booth, said, "Do you represent some new type of recreation club?"

"It's funny you put it that way," Rec Man said. "Recreation is such an interesting word. It means literally to create again. It also means a kind of restful activity in our leisure hours. It is rest and, yet, re-creation. How is that possible -- I mean resting and re-creating?"

Dean stared his blankest stare.

"Re-creation happens in the saving work of Christ," Rec Man said. "He loves to bring people into his eternal re-creation."

Dean wrinkled his nose like he really disagreed, but Phil raised his glass up into Rec Man's face and said, "Name your poison."

"A damn Sunday school lesson," Cheney growled, "a damn Sunday school lesson," then coughed and stood up, wavering, his thin frame stopped there on the floor. It's one of the seven wonders of the modern world that he can even stand up. Anyway, "Who didn't pay their tithes?" he shouted. "Who brought the preacher looking in here?"

Then he stumbled somehow toward the facilities.

"What are you bothering old bums for?" Dean said.

"Cheney is not an old bum," Marilyn said, and I smelled danger. I mean, she had studied social work in the eighties before dropping out and giving up on the thing, so I could understand that she had compassion. But here she was, defending Rec Man, who next said, "Jesus loves you. All of us." The thing is, you see, that he didn't really shout it. He said it in this quiet way, almost as though he weren't really saying it. But he was.

"Get him out of here," Cheney growled from the bathroom doorway. "I pay my tab."

"No you don't," Marilyn said. Then, to Rec Man, she said, "Tell me, I understand your wanting to help...." but didn't finish.

Rec Man had picked up his racket, placed his card and some phone change in front of Frank. "Call me any time, day or night." Then he walked out.

Then the rain began.

Cheney, back at the bar doing Jack Daniels, said to Marilyn, sort of in the way Dean asked, "Your friend coming in anymore tonight?"

I'm sure that the rain reminded him of Rec man, coming down on the sidewalk outside, where we heard it, through the open door, slapping the sidewalk, the wet reflecting the neon lights. To be honest, the rain, the way it came, just unsettled me.

I was still sitting with Dean and Phil, and we were on a pitcher. "I used to be a Christian," I admitted.

"Every red blooded American is a Christian," Helmut said.

"No they aren't," I said.

"Oh, not this again," Cheney said.

Marilyn sat down next to me. There was a light in her eyes. In a tone of voice that betrayed compassion, she said, "Everyone is so stuck all the time."

"I'm not stuck," Dean objected.

"I wish that God called my name," I said.

From over at the dart board, Bill Eschavaria, who works at Chrysler, said in the most exaggerated way, sounding like Billy Graham, "And that, brethren, is faith." He threw a dart and missed the board completely. Then he came up to the bar. "I want to let you in on what happened to me last summer," he said, looking from Marilyn to Cheney at the bar. "Something profound that I've never been able to explain rationally."

"If you can explain it," I said, "aren't you using rationality?"

"No, no, no. Now. I was just discussing the boulder on the corner of City High School. It's been there a long time, hasn't it?" He looked at Cheney.

"Not as square as it once was, but it's always been there," Cheney said.

"Well, I say I saw rocks like that in Wyoming last summer. No, listen. I saw them changed in an instant into grown men." I couldn't believe how stupid it was. I haven't thought well of Eschavaria since.

Cheney just started to cough.

Bill raised his hand. "I saw it happen."

"When did you go to Wyoming?" Helmut asked.

"This is stupid," I said. "Maybe it's time to call it a night."

"I'll place five hundred on it," said Eschavaria.

I mumbled, but then began to say clearly, "People only believe what they see. An unbelieving generation demands a sign. But no sign shall be given it except the sign of Jonah."

"Noah," said Helmut.

"No, it's Jonah," I said. "I know. It wouldn't make any sense if it were Noah."

Helmut shrugged. "I don't see the difference."

"Yes," Bill said, "We all know bits of the Bible here. But I saw it. And I'm willing to wager that rock at the corner of City School is one of them."

"I'll tell you about unbelieving generations," Cheney said. "1939, Nazi Germany building up troops to invade Poland. Couldn't accept that Hitler meant to do it. So 1941 men like me walking over Europe. Only us and the English stopped him."

"You tell him, Cheney," Helmut yelled.

"Then you don't believe," said Bill.

Cheney moved his jaw to speak but could only hack and cough.

"Then you will place a bet with Marilyn here, that the city school rock will not change into a man come tomorrow morning?"

"Not on your life."

"You must really believe me then. Just as I thought. You are hiding."

"Oh, I'll wager five thousand," Cheney said, his throat finally clear. "I'll enjoy the money too. Maybe reopen my business."

Bill shook his hand. "It is a bet." And then he walked out. I don't know what he was thinking -- maybe that Cheney was too drunk to remember shaking.

Helmut came around to where Cheney was smoking a camel. "I'll bet Eschavaria is going to take that rock off school property and try to say that it turned into a man, unless we can get there first.

Cheney scowled.

"I could come around with my brother's pick up. He lets me use it if I give him a good enough reason."

"Good enough reason, Helmut, come on," said Marilyn.

"Five thousand greenbacks is a good reason. I could get some help too."

"Another chance to show off the training, Helmut?" Marilyn asked. "Eschavaria hasn't got Five thousand dollars."

"I don't need to prove nothin'."

"Besides," I said, "Aren't you still on probation?"

He drank his Milwaukee's finest.

"Look," said Marilyn, "if you tried to remove it, Eschavaria would say it really did change or some such nonsense."

Helmut seemed not to hear or understand her.

"Martin," Cheney said, "You used to be in the service."

"My name's not Martin," I said. "It's Martyr."

"What?" Cheney said.

"Martyr. Martyr Alexander."

"Your mother hate you or something?"

"Moment of inspiration."

Now usually Marilyn would say at this point, "Whyn't you go by Alex?" This was one of our subjects. But on this night she didn't, I noticed, as I saw that Helmut had finished his beer and was walking out the door.

"Coulda been worse," I said to fill the gap. "I could've been Caesar Martyr."

No one laughed.

Anyway, after the Side Step closed that night we ate breakfast at our usual restaurant. On this night a cop was sitting down the counter from us, and the waitress had just brought our eggs when we heard on his beeper something about vandals at City High School.

After the cop left, we went over in Marilyn's 1979 Lincoln. It was still raining, but we drove around City School, keeping away from the two cop cars that threw their disturbing blues and reds over the trees and the houses across the street. Finally we inched toward the spot, the wipers going full blast, and sure enough, the rock that had stood at the corner for generations, but had been leaning a little of late and wasn't as square as it used to be, was gone.

In the morning I went over to have coffee at the Side Step. Mike was at the bar and said, "What's your take on what happened here last night?"

I told him.

Mike said, "So you think it's Helmut?"

"Helmut? What's he done?"

"Come with me upstairs." We walked through the back parking lot to the wooden steps leading up to the apartment, and those steps were muddied and some of them chewed up freshly at the edges. We went upstairs into the apartment and there was the huge, jagged shape of the City High School rock muddying the floor next to the bed where Cheney slept. Somehow sensing our movement, Cheney sat up in his alcoholic haze, turned, looked squarely at the rock, as though to make sure that it had not been transformed into a man, and then rolled back over to sleep. There were also ropes tied tightly around the City High School rock and then wrapped around his covered, thin body.

Back in the bar, I said to Mike, "Well, in so many words I've told you what I really think. Helmut was just an accomplice."

Mike stared out the window and the police radio he had dragged in was on behind the bar, and I felt real bad for him, because as I've said already, this is the trash you always get for helping people out.

"You gonna press charges against him?" I asked.

"I'll tell you what we're lookin' at. Closing the bar down..."

"No."

"Or covering up. I'll tell you Marty, I've had enough trouble with the public because of the people I've helped."

"I guess you know," I said.

"Helmut has no idea of the trouble he's caused me. No idea."

Mike was taking it real personal-like. "He's a pawn," I said. "Just a pawn."

Well, Mike had the boys come over and start to pulverize the boulder. It took more than that night, though, and let me tell you it sent the fear of God into all of us sitting down below there in that bar while we knew the chiseling was going on upstairs.

Anyway, the next night, who should innocently show up but Rec Man, in the rain coat again with his racket. Well, we had had enough tension in two nights to last one week, or at least I had, and I was certain that he was the reason that Mike might be closing down, and I wasn't going to stand for it. This was when I realized that Marilyn didn't feel the same way.

In he came, sat down and asked for Frank again. None of us had seen him or Eschavaria -- or Helmut.

"Look," Marilyn began, "I respect what you're about, trying to help people and set a good example and all. But I'm not sure that you understand the people who come in places like this enough to help them. You may just push them over the edge."

"In fact you have pushed them over the edge," I said, coming over now beside him from Dean and Phil's table.

"Marty," said Marilyn.

But Rec Man was calm. "In places like this my faith began." And he looked in my eyes with his brokeness.

I had balled up my fist and stared him in those eyes, waiting for them to go bloodshot with fear and then look away, and then I was going to pound him into the bar.

"Your faith began in a bar?" Marilyn asked. Then she turned to me. "It won't do any good, Marty."

"Yes it will," I said, understating like Clint Eastwood, letting my eyes do the talking.

But he looked like he was just a pair of eyes staring through a head in a body that was dead and gone and had no more use for pain or pleasure. I hadn't seen that look for at least fifteen years, and I had forgotten that it existed, that there really were people in the world broken and healed by Jesus. And he seemed enveloped in something. I've never told Marilyn that, never admitted it. But it was as though he were protected.

Marilyn said, "Marty, you will get the cops in here." She glanced upstairs. "That's not something I think you want to do tonight."

Oblivious to everything, Rec Man said, "It was in a place like this I used to spend my paycheck. Talking to the other drunks, I was always surprised at how many customers had religion relics in their background, an experience of heaven, a relationship with God, but thrown away for the pursuit of some other thing." He said this looking at me, not at Marilyn. "It's almost as though every action of theirs was settled into the direction of trying to prove that He doesn't exist. Or, that there are many other possibilities, because if you can prove that, then the gospel accounts were somehow wrong, and you could go your own way. Just so long as there isn't just one way, like the gospels says."

Dean had come up on his other side, and he pointed at him and said, "Virtue does not exist. It is only the authorities scaring citizens into compliance."

"Yes," Rec Man said. "Except that you've really only demonstrated original sin and humanity's need for God's grace."

That's the problem, I thought. That's really the problem. And you never quite get away from it.

One week later, the rock had finally been sent out in bits, when I could swear a whole fleet of cop cars came and blocked off the parking lot. They apprehended Helmut for going out of state and breaking his probation. I couldn't believe it. All for a stupid rock, one that had been falling over on the school grounds and no one had even bothered to straighten. But they never found anything, no evidence. Mike handled the cops' questions with his usual aplomb, I believe the word is, never blinking, always ready to help the young officers. And then it blew over.

Now Eschavaria, if he's drunk and Mike isn't in, will go on and on about proving his religion. Meanwhile, Cheney refutes him everytime. "Tain't true," he says. It's just so stupid. People really listen to whatever goop that settles in their ears, whatever sounds good and isn't too hard to think about. They want to have, no, they really need to have some belief to cling to, and they'll fasten onto anything that sounds good. And in spite of how calm Mike was that night when the cops came in, he tells me that he dreams some nights that some young detective has come into the bar with a chip of the rock and asks to look upstairs. Mike dreams that the detective'll see parts of the wooden stairs that are chewed up, and will pretend like Columbo to believe that the marks on the wooden stairs really did come from the new refrigerator Mike put in for Cheney to cover for the rock being moved up there. In a way, the rock still haunts Side Step.

No, I'll tell you, Side Step is mainstream. But people are always going off one end or another. And some people really are covered and protected, and they move things in their path without even trying.