UNCLE MERL'S BAR & GRILL
A Mystical Exploration of the Supernatural
(or Cheap Gratuitous Sex, I’m not sure which!)
By
Peter "Lou" D'Alessio
Copyright 2010
Don’t ever let him know I said this, but all things considered, I’ve always thought Jonsey was a good cop. He did all the things cops are supposed to do and he did them all right. More than that, he had a big heart. But with the type of work Jonsey did, good cops rarely got a chance to get out of the gutters that situations forced them to work in. I had heard he had played semi-pro ball for one of the Newark teams that were part of somebody’s farm system. Some of the old timers had thought he might become the new Roy Campanella. Then one day he put his catcher’s mitt away, sailed off to Viet Nam via the Marine Corps, and after that joined the police force. Nobody was quite certain why. As I see it though, events in the universe don’t happen randomly, and for whatever reason, Baseball’s loss was Law Enforcement’s gain.
Things were concrete in Jonsey’s world. If it was a murder, there was a motive, and ergo a murder weapon! The world that Doc worked in was cloud and shadow, so murder didn’t require motive and a murder weapon was purely optional. There is a thin bridge that joins one world to the other. But neither Jonsey nor Doc could see each other at the opposite end of the bridge they were walking on, doing the same work. They were so much alike at times they’d lose sight of a situation in professional competitiveness. I kind of slap ’em both around until they focus on the problem again. Or at least that’s what Doc tells me. Not in so many words, but…
I had met Doc Boreese in an Ancient Civilizations course he was teaching when I was in college. I needed a cheap ‘C’. Two years later, I was chasing witches, werewolves and warlocks all over New Jersey with him. The Good Doctor always tended to ‘upset’ folk who had never been exposed to the Spirit World. I think it was mainly the dark purple colored, stripped bell-bottoms with the fur cuffs that did it. The thin, pointy face with the Spanish Inquisition model beard and dark beady eyes was purely secondary. The gothic flowing overcoat, reminiscent of a 1930’s horror movie, that he wore from fall to spring didn’t help his image much either—but hell! The guy knew when to go for the cheap laugh. Obviously, tonight wasn’t “WHEN”.
The early July night was unusually cold. Or maybe it just seemed that way. We had walked about half the distance to Uncle Merl’s joint with Doc fidgeting all the way. He kept clutching the Holy Water Flask and scratching his nuts. I don’t know if it was doing anything for our vampire problem, but it was starting to make me crazy!
“Jesus, Doc! Will you stop that?” I finally had to moan. “You look like the third base coach for the Boston Red Sox!”
“Huh? Oh! Well, you’ve seen one curse you’ve seen ’em all. By the way, don’t bother looking around, but we’ve been followed ever since we left the cop station. Right now, the only thing keeping you and me alive is this little bottle.” He had the atomizer in his hand spraying it over his shoulder, the way a superstitious person might pinch salt they had spilled and toss it over a shoulder. And there was that ring in his voice again.
“Doc, tell me it’s Jonsey behind us!”
“Okay, it’s Jonsey behind us. You happy? Now shut up and keep walking.”
If Doc hadn’t said anything, I’d have been fine! The uninitiated don’t understand. It isn’t death people fear; it’s the act of dying. I’ve seen enough of it to know the truth in that. And deep down inside everybody knows and believes that too. One of the first things Doc had shown me from his personal collection of Wit & Wisdom from the Ancients’ was a slab of rock that had been chiseled out of some forgotten cave. The strange markings on it, he explained, were the oldest extant examples of graffiti. And you know it said? “When the fat lady sings, strike three is strike three! And dead means dead!” In other words, once the game is over, your life will speak for itself and you’ll be judged by what you chose to live by. If you’re a Christian, you’ll meet a Christian God. A Muslim meets Allah, a Buddhist meets Buddha, and a Cubs fan… actually; I haven’t figured that one out yet.
But nobody wants to pay the toll to cross over! There’s no factual documentation that the Great Beyond is actually so great. So every once in a while, some fool who’s just too damned stupid to lay down and die will decide crossing over ain’t for him. They can’t get back and they won’t proceed. They become shadows, things that only exist in the dim light of a street lamp’s reflection in the night. If they mix with a little free-floating evil, you’ll get all kinds of problems.
Take your average, run of the mill werewolf for instance. The technical name for the physical condition is Lycanthropy, and it is an actual mental disorder: the assumption of wolf-like or animal characteristics. But Lycanthropy is a mortal disease. It isn’t necessarily being a werewolf! That’s a conscious choice on the part of the individual, and it is an immortal disease. You can spend eight to twelve hours a day for eternity looking like a Barbasol advertisement. You don’t catch it from a bite! If you ever saw anyone who’s been mauled by a werewolf, YOU KNOW they ain’t coming back from anything-ever-again! Death included! It’s a conscious choice made by a spirit that refuses to leave the dance floor after his jig is up. (By the way, you don’t need a silver bullet to kill a werewolf. That lie got started with an old Lon Chaney Jr. movie. The hottest radio program that year was The Lone Ranger, sooo... ) Now, the problem is that in many instances a killed werewolf can transmute to a vampiric form, and silver bullets do work quite well on them. But! They have to be pure silver and blest by a priest. It gets to be expensive and it can really screw up your Sunday!
Now! The vampire is dead! He’s a shadow, 100%! To maintain his existence in the concrete world, he’s got to pump blood into the shadow so there’s something solid to trap the light. It becomes a progressive insanity and it can sustain itself for centuries on illusions and lies.
Doc and I have nailed a few vampires in our time and it had always damned near scared me out of ten years growth. But the old Coot has stood there hammering stakes through their hearts like he was Hank Aaron on a good day! He wouldn’t have so much as blinked and I’d go home with yellow underwear. Hey—when you pump six .44 Magnum silver-tipped hot-loaded rounds that the friggin’ Lone Ranger’d be proud to have square into the chest of some dude who’s looking at you like a TV dinner, and it doesn’t even slow him down… trust me, you’ve got more than good cause to worry! And Doc wouldn’t even break a sweat! He’d have his little spray bottle of Holy Water in one hand and his trusty old Black & Decker multi-directional Impact Tool with Wooden Stake Adapter attached in this other hand, and be swinging away like Reggie Jackson in October!
Just for the record, they don’t burst into flames, sizzle like they’ve been splashed with acid, snap-crackle-pop… Hell, they don’t even go out fighting. None of that Hollywood junk! It usually takes one good shot to break into the chest cavity and a second shot to finish the job. After the first shot, they usually freeze in whatever position they’re in and say something nasty, like, “Your mother blows Pollacks up on the roof!” To which, Doc would usually responds with, “Yeah! But at least she gets paid for it, and that’s more than you can say about your mother, now go to hell!” And then he’d go for the in-the-park home run.
So the fact that Doc was showing signs of panic had my stomach doing back-flips. He didn’t scare easily—you can’t in this line of work. As long as I’ve known him, and that’s…that’s…let’s see… I was in Princeton’s class of ’83... Hmmm, 1783 to 1999? That’s… what? 216—no, 217 years! Anyway, you get to know somebody pretty well after that much time. Doc’s the best Apparition Tracker in the business—he ain’t supposed to scare—at all!
I started hearing the high pitched clicking sound of a woman’s high-heeled shoe in the street behind us—and the sign for Uncle Merl’s Bar & Grill was still at least a block and a half away. Neither one of us said anything, but the pace picked up…and so did her’s. It was too late at night to be a hooker, and Lady Cops wore gum-soled shoes—that left one other possibility. Every time we’d pass a street lamp Boreese would spritz the atomizer over his shoulder. As we crossed on to Liberty Street he even started chanting—sort of:
“From Ghoulies and Ghosties and Long-Legged Beasties and thinks that go ‘bump in the night, oh Lord protect us!”
“Hey, Doc, you sure that’s the right incantation?”
“Damned if I know, it’s the only one I can think of! Now, rrrruuuuunnn!!!”
We must have looked like a Greyhound race, only with the rabbit chasing the dogs. With twenty yards to go Doc had the lead, but I was hanging in there and pushing to pass! I couldn’t bring myself to look over my shoulder but I could hear the clicking of those three-inch spike heels getting faster, louder and closer. When Doc lowered his head and broke into his final sprint I knew what the game plan was. And sure enough, Doc was still “at speed” when he pivoted a perfect right face into Uncle Merl’s. I was a good two yards away when I jackknifed through the opening in perfect Olympic form.
Don’t buy Jane Fonda’s bullshit! There’s a lot to be said for a few extra pounds of body mass. When I became airborne I gained a full second on the old guy. I skated, belly first, across the very same table that Doc was colliding into the bar with. In fact, I dare say we smacked wall ‘dead heat’ and tumbled into the corner in solidarity!
Our pursuer tried to stop too; I guess it just ain’t as easy to stop in high-heels as it is in sneakers. I could hear that while her feet had stopped moving her heels hadn’t. I guess she slid about five to ten yards before her shoes went out from under her. Then,, judging by the perfect ‘Doppler Effect’ to the sailor-like cussing disappearing down Liberty Street, probably another five to ten yards on her butt.
“We made it!” Doc panted, sucking for air. “We’re safe! Vampires can’t… huh, huh… can’t enter… hehuh, uhuh… any place they’re not invited into! So far… huh, huh… so gah, good!”
“Oh, yeah! I can tell! We really got her on the run now!”
“Hey, we’re alive! You want better n’ that? Now! If we can just stay alive till daybreak we can go back to the Book and figure out what to do next!”
“Y’all wanna know what you’re gonna do nex’?” The voice came from over the top of the table. We peered up to see Uncle Merl bending over us. “You’re gonna git the hell out from under my table and sit like two normal peoples or you gonna git the hell out! Four minutes to las’ call! You gonna do anythin’ ‘bout it, or j’you jus’ stop by to say ‘hullo!’”
The idea of going back outside didn’t really thrill us all the much. We ordered a dozen or so shots of Jack Daniel’s and four or five pitchers of Uncle Merl’s homebrew. According to state law, even though the bar was closed we were entitled to sit there as long as there were paid-for drinks in front of us. Since Uncle Merl usually never shut the bar down anyway, he usually didn’t mind the company. Uncle Merl’s Bar & Grill, besides being the last chance for decent live Jazz this side of the Hudson and the last known whereabouts of actual living Brooklyn Dodgers fans, was a catchall for every whacko and weirdo in Newark, as Jonsey had put it—not that that was such a bad thing!
They might be whacked and they might be a little weird at points, but most of Merl’s patrons were harmless. They were folk that, well, maybe made a wrong turn or three in life or might just have no place to go. Like Phil Thomas sitting over there by the TV set watchin’ an ESPN rebroadcast of a Yankee/Red Sox game with a couple of old timers that seemed to live in the place. Phil had worked in the old Ballentine Beer brewery down in the Oranges. They say he almost drowned in a beer vat. The only thing that saved him was crawling out to find a bowl of pretzels! Or Crazy Al. Al wasn’t really ‘crazy’ crazy. He was one of Tim Leary’s first LSD experiments gone wrong. He had started serious tripping back in ’63 or ’64 and hadn’t landed yet! Rumor had it that he had ingested so much acid his blood system had learned to manufacture its own! If a person ever needed to know the exact count of all the dust particles dancing in a ray of sunlight coming through Uncle Merl’s window, Al was the guy to ask!
“How stupid could I be?” Doc grumbled into his beer. “She was feeding off the fear still in the grooves in the wall. I was staring right into her eyes, uh, in a spiritual way of course.”
“Oh, of course! I’ll ask one more time, then I ain’t askin’ no more—what the hell happened?”
“Spiritual feedback—a continuous loop. The ‘Infinity Effect.’ Our eyes met at the wall and it was like having two TV cameras facing into each other! That’s a strong willed witch, and a serious vampire. I’m not sure we can stop this one without serious help. This one goes straight for the mind.”
That wasn’t what I wanted to hear. There is a strong misconception regarding vampires. Laughingly, we call it the ‘Bella’ Syndrome—BS for short. The true terror of the phenomenon, at least as far as the living go, is the loss of “Self.” Losing more and more of yourself with each of the first two bites and knowing there is no way to stop the fatal third. That’s why Doc knew our friend in the alley was dead dead. When he saw that rigor mortis had set in, he knew she had fried him in two bites or less. But as I was saying, it’s being uncontrollably controlled to whatever evil end that wierds most victims out. Did you ever notice that this is the part in the vampire movie where they throw the gratuitous sex scene? Why? You need confirmation that the vampire still has a physical form! Same in real life! That’s the only fact Hollywood got right—but for all the wrong reasons.
‘God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confuse the wise’. I think that’s from the Bible—or maybe Jeopardy, I forget. That’s how Doc explained it to me. Once we shed these mortal bonds, the wisest thing to do is lay-the-hell down and die! Mentally punch the ticket, lower the flag and head for the locker room. I say mentally because once you’ve pulled up to the tollbooth, the body is dead, gone and beginning to smell funky. That’s why vampires are referred to as ‘shadows’ or ‘reflections.’ Their temporal bodies are gone, for the most part—just a psychic imprint is left. That’s a little known, secondary concept of Body and Soul… I always liked the Colman Hawkins rendition better. Anyway, seeing that imprint, primitive man had figured out that death was only a door. The material ‘being’ stopped but the essence carried onto another level or plane.
Now, Hollywood would have you think that when a vampire bites, blood is removed. Well, they’re half right. The great rule of God’s Great Universe is simple: Everything must balance in the end. If you take something out, you’ve got to put something back in! Those two large canine teeth you see when a vampire goes to bite? One’s an ‘insy,’ but the other one’s an ‘outsey!’ It pumps this ethereal fluid in and the vampire starts broadcasting directly to the brain of the victim. Usually it takes a couple of bites to introduce enough of the fluid into the system of the average victim to get good conductivity. That’s why, in the movies anyway, you always see the vampire standoffish about chowing down on the strong willed Professor. Hell, it could take five or six infusions before the vampire can start to exert any real kind of mental influence—power of suggestion, that’s the key! The average person takes one hell of a jolt and by the third bite they die as much from circuitry burnout as blood loss! Now! Give a guess what part of the brain is most susceptible to suggestive stimulation? Aha, you say! Vampirism is a highly contagious sexual disease transmitted through the blood system directly to the portion of the brain controlling sex drive! Gee, aren’t you smart! A victim who starts getting off on being stimulated can choose—and I say choose—to become the living dead! Too much stimulus can ruin you—but that’s another problem for another generation.
When Doc had said that this vampire went straight for the mind, what he was saying was that his ‘ace-in-the-hole,’ his strong will, wasn’t going to help us this time. This one was coming after us with no concern about strong wills. For reasons unknown to us, our lady friend was bypassing the initial circuits and going directly to the main relay!
Human beings are a funny lot. They produce more creative thoughts than any beings anywhere! Millions upon millions upon millions, and it’s all done one thought at a time. Have you ever noticed you can’t think two thoughts simultaneously? Can you imagine what it’d be like if the only thought in your head is a hyper-libidoed lightening bolt sent in to stimulate the most irrational and overwhelming portion of your skull? WHAM! You’re instantly transformed into a super turbo-charged American sixteen-year-old, all hormones armed and at the ready, and not a sign of acne anywhere! Is it worth trading your soul for?
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