UNCLE MERL'S BAR & GRILL

UNCLE MERL'S BAR & GRILL

Chapter IX

One Celestial Rumba to Go, Please

(A ring-a-ding-ding)

Peter "Lou" D'Alessio

Newark, on a day that, for no natural reason, threatened rain, sleet and/or snow in an undetermined order or amount, added a certain degree of dark, dank and dreary to an otherwise normally depressing day—God, it reminded me of home. We were gumshoein’ it down Broad Street movin’ towards Merl’s joint. There was something bugging Doc and he wasn’t in a sharing mood, so I just let him be. Considering we hadn’t slept in the last thirty-six hours and had absolutely no idea where in the hell we were going, we were making pretty good time! Doc had just shrugged off my meteorological observations. I didn’t realize it then but what he was looking for was Divine Intervention.

Actually, in our line of work, you’ll take whatever anyone’ll give you. So if God wants to throw the first pitch, you catch it! Lo and behold, we had sought and had found. Right off of Bell Avenue, rummaging through the trunk of what had once been a ’63 Chevy Impala was our man, Al! God must have been working overtime for us because no sooner had we spotted Crazy Al then Jonsey came blasting around the corner in an unmarked cop car—you can always tell the unmarked cars in Newark, they all sport tires that look like they were made by Shickhaus—the screams of the tires on the high speed turns could be heard farther away than a set of sirens. It saved a lot of time on minor and near meaningless paperwork. And Jonsey’s tires were particularly bald. Even Crazy Al heard him coming and looked up.

“Eeehheyy, Jonsey! Great wheels! How’s the fuzz biz these days, buddy?” he screamed, head tilting out of the trunk.

Jonsey screeched to a halt about half a block away. “Yo, Al! Long time no see! Was’hap’nin’ baby? Stayin’ out of trouble?”

Al grinned that grin! “Heyyy! Jonsey! I got a pound a’ Jamaican in my trunk AND I’M HIGH!!! It’s great stuff! Want some?? There’s plen’ny! My old lady sprang for it!”

The expression on Jonsey’s face went from mildly amused to stunned—then back to amused. Who the hell in their right mind would tell an on-duty cop he had a…hey! “Right mind”, that was the key. Jonsey remembered whom he was dealing with, shouted “save me a dime, bro” and roared away (so much for talking with Jonsey) grinning, as if he’d just made the joke of the century as we walked up from behind Al. Al was bending over a kitchen pail sized plastic bag, shifting his fingers through a finely ground, pungent smelling vegetation and mumbling, “Okay, cop wants a dime, cop gets a dime! Wow! I didn’t even know Jonsey even smoked!”

As we drew within a foot or two of Al, Doc pointed to three small punctures about four inches below his left ear. These were not your conventional hickeys—they were clustered around the other ear. No, it was vampirism. The fact that Crazy Al was humming alternate lines from “I Got a Woman” and “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” sort of confirmed the rest of Doc’s hypothesis.

Things were starting to develop defined edges at last. In fact, the only thing still confusing the issue was Al’s energetic rolling of six-ounce joints in pages he was ripping out of an old Gideon’s Bible, and tying them together with pretty pink bows. But when I saw Doc struggling to put a sentence together to greet and/or question him, I knew things were starting to get out of hand again. Doc’s jaws kept flapping but nothing was coming up but grunts and stutters. I figured I’d better bail him out. Even though we were right on top of him, Al was totally unaware of our presence and Doc was making absolutely no headway in establishing unilateral bi-partisan communication. I felt the initiative was mine to take!

“Yo! Al, baby! What’s shakin’?” Al never looked up but Doc shot me a nasty look leading me to believe that things were serious enough to keep my friggin’ mouth shut and just listen and watch.

“He’s in Commune. He won’t hear a thing we have to say!”

“Damn, Doc! He heard Jonsey well enough and…”

“No! He heard Jonsey’s high pitched, squealing tires… like a silent dog whistle. The prospect of corrupting a good cop with drugs was more than our lady friend could resist! She spoke through Crazy Al! It’s an old witch’s trick! We’ve got to find a way to reach through the mesmerizations and reach Al. But he’s so…so…”

“Bizarre?”

“Bizarre! That I can’t even imagine where to start!”

The good Doctor paused in bewilderment. He looked at me as if to say “forget the shut up and listen look, if you’ve got any ideas…” I did! It seemed simple. If you had a pound of high electric weed in a garbage bag and a hand full of six-ounce joints, what would be the first thing you’d be looking for?

“Need a light?” I said, flicking my Bic several times in Crazy Al’s direction. The fricative noise of cheap steel grating over a cheap chip of flint got his attention fast enough. Black magic not withstanding, I think it was all conditioned reflexes on Al’s part. His body swung around and started moving at us long before his head did. When his head did turn, he quickly crouched over and covered his eyes as if blinded by the sun. “Oh, wow!” he gasped. “Anybody got any Foster-Grant’s they ain’t usin’? This sun is blinding!”

Blinding? There was no sign of the sun anywhere in the sky! I looked over at Doc who was standing there pensively stroking his beard. I was about to say “bad sign” when a spine chilling hiss licked at my flank. The expression on Doc’s face was one of totally false bravado, and reminded me never to play poker with this guy. A little voice inside alerted me to the fact that things had just fallen from really bad to hopelessly beyond control.

“Take me…ow…out…to the…ballllllgame… You and your little dog too!”

It wasn’t Al’s voice—well it was, but it wasn’t! I wheeled back around and nearly knocked the good Doctor over. Al was red-eyed and foaming at the mouth. He was hunching over like a little kid doing the pee-pee dance. It was the position werewolves go into before they attack and helps explain why I never wanted children.

“Holy Shit, Doc!” I choked out, “this is gonna be it!” I braced for the onslaught, my eyes racing along the gutters for a brick!

“I’ll end you both! In my time! In my way…my way! I…I DID IT…Myyyy way! And now, the end… has come…”

The chilling voice was now doing Sinatra impersonations—I would have preferred an attacking werewolf! It wasn’t a real good impersonation. Al was wailing away on My Way, oblivious to either Boreese or me! I’ll give him credit, though; he had the hand motions down! Between the second and third verse and right before the chorus, he extended one of the joints and motioned for a light. I was more than happy to oblige. And THAT was pretty damned strange too! Every time he’d take a drag off the bone, the smoke went in but didn’t come out!

“Jeeesus, Doc! He’s gonna blow up like a balloon and float away!”

“Nah, he’s pipe-lining. He’s inhaling but his shadow—Al’s blood sucking girl friend—is doing the exhaling. Somewhere in Newark is one very stoned vampire! With any luck she’ll get the munchies and try and go out for a pizza! One ray of sun light and ‘POOF”, our problem is solved!”

“Have we got that kind of luck?”

“Not lately! Let’s get out of here. It sounds like he’s going to break into It Was Very Good Year!”

* * *

“Desperate times, boy! I can see them coming now!” Doc was hammering the oak floorboards in his study with the palm of his hand. I knew better than to ask what he was doing. Usually, the weirder Doc acted, the more I was about to learn. “Hell, it can’t be more than a century or two since I… Eureka!” I figured either he’d found what he was looking for, or he’d decided to vacuum the apartment. “Charley, give me a hand!”

I had been sitting in Doc’s chair and peering over the desk. I could only see the back of his head (which sort of reminded me of a statue I had seen of Saint Frances of Assisi) disappearing into the floor.

“Whoa, Doc! Where’re you going?”

The head pivoted around. At first, the face facing me was angry, and then it softened. “Sorry, Charley. I forgot you’ve never been down here. C’mon, we’re going down into the basement.”

“Jesus, Doc, we’re on the thirteenth floor!”

“It’s a psychic basement, ah, we’re going to regress back into our own archetypal recess, our Ids so to speak…”

“Recess? I can do that! Stow the rest, how do I…”

“Just crawl in this general direction and you’ll sort of fall into it.”

We fell into it, all right! About four stories if my stomach is any judge of distance. And damned if he wasn’t right! We were in a basement! A dark, damp, moldy, stinkin’…

“Now! For the big guns! Charley, pay attention! This is a ritual that hasn’t been seen in eleven centuries and…”

Basement! This is where Doc always started losing me. The guy has solid brass nuts, and big ones too! He’d stick his face in a burning building if it meant snuffing out a lump of evil apparition, but man, his ritual left something to be desired. He was living proof that those who could do—should do, and not teach! He was feverishly digging around in an old sea chest, which was dimensionally engineered. It had to be, no normal chest could have held all that junk! He suddenly stopped and exclaimed, “AHA! Here Charley, hold this!” Without withdrawing his head from the chest, a glass ball came flying out and straight at me! Needless to say, I didn’t catch it and it shattered into several million pieces. Doc looked up from the chest. “Thank God for safety glass,” was all he said, and he pushed back into the sea chest.

As I stood in a sea of tiny glass droplets, I was suddenly aware of a gentle rumbling of the ground below me. “I’ve got it!” Doc exclaimed triumphantly, totally ignoring the minor quake. He extended his hands over his head, showing a neatly folded gown of moldy brown cheesecloth.

“We’re going to save the world with one of Gloria Swanson’s old dresses?”

Doc’s head shot up between his still outstretched arms and he pivoted almost 180 degrees. “This!” he directed at me with an incredulous look in his eyes, “is the robe of Moses! It is the greatest source of communicative psychic power and spiritual ascendancy extant!”

“We’re gonna talk to God? Doc, I’m not even shaved!”

“No, Charley. Nobody talks directly to God about this stuff anymore. We’re expected to handle all the little problems ourselves. We’re going to use the power in this robe to reach out and touch the greatest Apparition Tracker of them all!”

“Nefri of Cairo???”

“Himself!” Boreese spat defiantly out as he crawled around inside the robe! The first thing I learned was that Moses could have played forward for the Boston Celtics! Obviously a man of greater stature than Doc, the robe fell about three feet in all directions around where Doc stood. “There!” he exclaimed. “How do I look?”

“Like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia,” I dutifully reported.

“I don’t remind you of Merlin the Great?”

“You mean the old guy that runs the bar and grill on…”

“Charley…just…never mind. Now let’s see. You successfully modified my crystal ball’s concept of the universe, what the hell can we use for a medium? You got anything to light a fire with?

Doc began loading up an empty ten-gallon paint can (you seen one basement, you seen ’em all) with old newspapers and assorted burnable junk littering the corners, while I groped through my pockets for my Bic.

“Charles, my boy, this indeed shall be interesting. We’re going to attempt to talk to spirits using ancient Hebrew symbols and artifacts, northern European chants from the middle dark ages, a Druid ritual fire…”

“And a ten-gallon Dutch Boy paint can for an altar!”

“Hey, you can’t have everything! Roll up your sleeves, time to boogie!”

I’ll give the old coot credit! Doc started shuffling around like Chubby Checker at his peak. The old bugger conjured up Harry Houdini, Geronimo (a mean witch man and a hell of a second baseman in his own right), and a dozen or so magicians and white witches I’d never heard of, Rembrandt (our Dutch Boy influence, no doubt) and even a set of the Sacred Vestals of Rome. But try as he might, Doc couldn’t seem to push the psychic envelope past the year zero. Face after face appeared like holograms in the pitiful blue conflagration, but not the face we needed. I even tried my hand at the Celestial Rumba, but no go! The best I could do was a fleeting glance of Babe Ruth in a Boston Red Sox uniform from the turn of the twentieth century. Doc finally gave up and melted into a sweaty pile on the floor.

“That’s it, Charley. We’re beat.” Doc was panting pretty hard now. “I’m getting too old for this! I got no idea on what we’re going to do. It’s gotta be getting close to dark. What time is it?”

I looked at my watch. It told me that it was later than we thought.

“Holy Moses! Doc, it’s…”

“What d’hell are you two schmucks doin’? You been makin’ me mashuga for the last two hours! Ya found me, so who d’hell are ya and wada ya want wid Nefri? He’s a busy man!”

Doc and I jumped nearly halfway across the room. We turned towards the fire to see—nothing!

“Nefri!” cried Doc. “We can hear you but we can’t see you, you are not in the flames!”

“Not in the flames? You guys are boinin’ garbage in a paint bucket, you want a protoplasmic identification too? Don’t push it boys! If you weren’t giving me a headache I wouldn’t be here at all!”

“Oh, great Nefri,” Boreese chanted, “we have sought thee with wind and rain and…”

“What is it? Amateur night in the future? And let me explain something, you ain’t got Nefri, you got me, his agent, Moses! Remember? Ya asked for “Holy Moses”. The call went through, ya got’im! Now say the secret woid and the duck comes down! Wada ya want?”

“T-H-E Moses?” I queried.

“If you mean the guy Charlton Heston looks like, no! If you mean the little fat Jewish guy who’s makin’ a fortune off this Nefri scam, yes!”

“Scam?” I said rather uneasily.

“Well, let’s just say Nefri gets the credit. I ghost write the book, do the exorcise programs, the whole ball a’ wax. Ya gotta remember, these are ancient times, an’ the home team ain’t been doin’ so well lately. That Ramses, wad a ball player! Anyway! Either I do this or Nefri’ll have me building a bunch a’ pointy buildings with no doors or windows, out in 100 degree heat!”

There was a strange queasy silence in the room. Our effort wasn’t getting us where we wanted to be. Neither Doc nor I knew what to say. If this wasn’t Nefri, or worse—if Nefri was a scam—there was no place left to turn too for help. It would be getting dark soon and we hadn’t come up with squat yet.

“Well?” vocalized our apparition. “Okay, let me take a stab at this or we’ll be here all night. You! The tall, skinny guy with the beard, wearing one a’ Gloria Swanson’s old dresses! If you can’t get the woids out, just nod, yes or no. You can’t see me, but I can see you! I’m gonna assume you guys are apparition trackers, yes?”

We nodded, somewhat sheepishly.

“Fine! That’s a start. Are you guys livin’ after the fifteenth but before the twenny-thoid century?”

“Yeah!” we choired.

“Okay! I’m gonna take a wild stab! You got a vampiress who seems to have a magic wand. You tried everything you know and you’re getting absolutely nowhere. She’s got some simple-minded schmuck to do her bidding who, by the way, is a friend a’ yours and you’re down to the infamous las’ bite. Is that the drift a’ things? Am I close?”

We were stupefied! Speak about simple-minded? Doc and I were making strange choking noises, sort of like a couple of cats in a burlap bag being tossed suddenly into a lake.

“S’okay! I do dat to a lotta people! That’s why I get paid the big drachmas! I assume from your response, I hit the nail on the head?”

“Uh…”

“Okay! Here’s the deal. You got yourself a Lamia-Vampirus-Manifestasis. How’s that for a name, especially since Latin won’t be invented for another five hundred years! Oi! A grand slam hitter of hexes!”

“Mmmmm,” mumbled Doc, pensively stroking his beard. “We see, we see…”

“You two butt-heads don’t see shit!” the faceless voice snapped backed. “You boys are in a world a’ hurt and you don’t even know it! And there’s no doubt in my mind that you two yutzes have already tipped you hand! Am I right or what?”

“Uh…”

“Of course, right! You got yourselves a high-bred, top of the battin’ order, the Babe Ruth a’ Bad, the Ty Cobb a’ terror, the…”

“Doc, check the fire, I think we just drifted into the Wide World of…”

“That’s right, Chubby, make jokes! On the one hand, you got the latest model of vampires—no big cape, no cheap tux, no blood shot eyes! One hundred and six pounds of plasma sucking hell on earth! On the other hand, you got a premier Bruja of the first Dark Order! You twits are supposed to know how it’s supposed to woik, right? You don’t wanna cross the bridge, so you can choose to become an apparition—witch, vampire, werewolf, umpire, IRS agent. This is NO apparition, schmucks! This is somebody BIG’S daughter! You drive a stake through her heart to kill the vampire and she becomes a werewolf. You shoot the werewolf and she becomes a witch. You try boinin’ the witch, she becomes an IRS agent… and THEY never go away!!! You getting’ the picture?”

“So what do we do now?”

“How long have you boys been doin’ this? A week? Two? Who are we, what are we, where are we going? These are the great philosophical questions of humanity. Everybody asks them! Then, when you’ve tol ‘em the answers, they ask, “So what do we do now?” I haven’t heard a question from either a’ you two birds even vaguely in that category, so I’m gonna figure it like this. You boys are at least three questions behind the rest of humanity as a whole! Either a’ you two jerks wanna try and go to the head of the class by answering an intelligent question? What do you think is your top priority? You! The funny lookin’ guy in drag! Wad do you think?”

“Uh, killing the apparition?”

“EEEHHH! Wrong!”

“Saving Crazy Al?” I blurted out.

“And why?”

“Because he’s too dumb to save himself?”

“Say it! Don’t ask it! Myself, I would have phrased it differently, but right! ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me!’ Some guy’ll say that in about 2000 years, so if I use it now I ain’t gotta pay royalties! Jus’ keep one thing in mind! All you guys are doing is playing proxy for the forces of good. Remember that! It’s the best weapon you got! Now, you want another answer, give me the right question.”

“If we figure out where she came from, can we send her back?”

“Hey, good question! How the hell should I know? But! There are two ways to fight a fire. First, you can fight it with more fire! Or you can try praying for a rainout—you know, throw water on it! In this case, Holy Water…”

“That’s been tried, and with some success!”

“Don’t interrupt, I’m on a roll. And if I couldn’t do that, I’d get a ringer and look to the bull pen!”

“A what?”

“Don‘t make me repeat myself. You know what this call is costing? I gotta go, there’s someone on ‘call waiting’. Good luck, let me know how it comes out!”

“HEY! WAIT A MIN—“

“Don’t worry. So long as the Red Sox keep playin’ lousy baseball, ya got nuttin’ to worry about! If they start lookin’ like winners, OI! Kill yourselves!”

“The Red Sox? She got Boston playing like world beaters!”

“Then you’ve really got a problem. Could be the end of the world! But what the hell do I care? I died almost four thousand years ago. Remember what I tol’ ya! Fight fire with fire and get a ringer!”

The voice faded back into the flames. I looked at my watch. It was mid-afternoon again. This was our first break of the day. We had caught a flux in time and drifted backwards, like two guys fishing in a rowboat with no anchor. We’d drifted towards the shore with the tide.

We stood there for a long moment. Doc looked kind of stunned. There was an air of puzzlement about him that I just plain wasn’t used to. He grasped at his throat area feeling for the ties to loosen the old gown he was wearing. Finally, it fell to the floor. The dust cloud that rose from it was rather impressive, or at least I felt it was.

“A ringer? Charley, where the hell are we gonna get a ringer? What kind of ringer? Fire with fire?” Doc wailed. I thought the old guy was going to unglue, but much to my relief he composed himself.

I’ve always been amazed at how fast the human mind—or in Doc’s case, the Quasi-human mind—can change gears and flop a 180. From out of the depths of despair, a firm resolve spread across his countenance! Either that or he had gas, but I think it was resolve. A sudden animation crept into his frame as if a great demon spirit possessed him. “Chas,” he bayed as a bloodhound in hot pursuit of his quarry, “Chas, I’ve got it! Ringer! A phone has a ringer! Moses wasn’t busting our bangers; he was showing us the way! There’s no “Call Waiting” in Infinity, it’s all direct dial! We were being spied on! And by Jove, I’ve got it. I know what he was telling us to do!” Doc went asses and elbows, bursting through the dimensional portal—all locked, ready to rock, and half-cocked! He knew what to do!

Me? I wasn’t so sure.

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