UNCLE MERL'S BAR & GRILL

UNCLE MERL'S BAR & GRILL

Chapter X

The Devil, You Say!

Peter "Lou" D'Alessio

We blew down the main drag at about 40 miles an hour—for an old geezer, Doc could run like hell when he wanted to. He kept mumbling something about “fire with fire” and something about Joan of Arc, which I couldn’t quite catch…and he showed no signs of slowing down or stopping till we reached Uncle Merl’s joint. When we got there, he crumbled on the hood of an old LeBaron waiting on a tow truck. And there, standing like he was waiting for a pat-down from a cop, he huffed and puffed for a full minute waiting for his wind to return.

All this excitement and we were stopping off for a beer? As the tow truck began to pull away from the curb, Doc pulled his hands back and straightened up. He was still gasping for air as he motioned to me to open the door. I did and we entered into the cool darkness. The old place reeked of Chinese food and was deserted except for the three or four old timers that seem to live there, and some strange looking guy writing in a notebook. On the TV screen, the Yankees were pounding the Red Sox, down by six runs with two outs in the bottom of the ninth. The old guy in the Dodger’s cap was pointing at the screen and laughing. But the next Boston batter wiped the smile right off his face!

Doc and I stood there in horror. With two gone in the bottom of the ninth, a middling at best Red Sox team was staging a very dramatic comeback against the mighty Yanks. A double, a single, a homer, another homer. Boston loaded up the bases and a .209 batting, reserve third baseman took the first pitch thrown and sent it out somewhere over the Atlantic.

Doc staggered towards the table, turning green at the gills. “Where’s Merl?” he demanded. The old guy in the Brooklyn cap, stunned himself by the sudden disassembly of the Yanks, looked up with a shocked expression and just shrugged a negative response. The guy with the notebook, seeing that Doc was in a state of near-panic, jumped up and helped me get the old boy seated. Doc thanked him then froze, staring mistrustfully at this unknown benefactor. The old African guy said something then that I didn’t understand. He looked at Boreese and whispered, “Don’t worry, he’s one of us!”

One of…us? Us who? Us what? He wasn’t from the same place I was from! He had that Jersey-boy look, a regular nosy bastard.

Doc huddled the small team up and started from the top. I leaned on the bar, having ‘been there’ and ‘done that’ in real time. I started availing myself of Uncle Merl’s homebrew. I don’t know what the old boy put in it, but you could drink and drink and drink and never even stagger, but wow! Does time pass fast while you’re downing it! I hadn’t realized it, but the afternoon had begun to melt into evening and daylight was fading away. One by one, the evening regulars began drifting in, but still no Merl. Around 7:00 o’clock, old nine-fingers came in and opened the bar up officially.

At 7:30, two impossible things happened. The game for the evening was supposed to be the Braves at NY Mets. It turned out to be the Yankees at Boston! It was tomorrow night’s game! A hush fell over the group as the realization that Boston was not only getting ‘outside’ help, but the help was accelerating the process to push the Sox into the driver’s seat for first place in the American league!

The second impossible thing to happen was the entrance of Crazy Al and his new/old lady. They walked in arm-in-arm, looking more like Meathead and Gloria Bunker than a vampire and her victim. Al was wearing a tie-dyed Boston Red Sox T-shirt and his neck was fully exposed. Doc let out a shriek when he saw all the marks on his neck.

“My God!” he gasped, fumbling for his bottle of Holy Water and making a rather bad show of it. “She’s using him as munchies! Human pop corn!”

“Doc, calm down. Those aren’t teeth marks!”

Boreese looked over at the couple again. Sure enough, both Al and his old lady seemed to have a rash of wicked looking marks over both their necks.

“What is that?”

“Those are hickeys, boss. I got a feelin’ Al and his old lady have been doin’ the nasty thing in the old coffin. Holy shit! Look at that! She’s givin’ the waitress advice on how much in tips to declare on her taxes! This is getting to weird even for us!”

And it got weirder! They sat there rooting for Boston, who was all but nuking the Yanks. Three nights earlier, if you’d asked Crazy Al what a baseball was, he’d probably have told you it was a party at a naval yard. Now there he was, calling stats and offering advice to the TV set that his girlfriend saw to being taken!

It was about 10:30 when Merl reappeared. Doc flew out of his seat and nearly knocked one of the old guys down. Merl was already up to speed, having picked up the game on the drive back to the bar. For some reason, he thought it might have something to do with the old guys. But after a quick conference with the group, he and Doc strode boldly towards Al’s table, prepared to do battle. Surprisingly, Al hit with the first strike.

“Hey, man, oh wow! Merl! Doc! Am I really glad to see you guys! I really need your help, like…”

“Don’t worry, Al!” Doc exclaimed with all the determination of a Templar Knight. “We’ll save you!”

“HUH? Oh! No! Like, like… me and the liddle lady here, we’re gonna get hitched, or actually we are hitched! I wanna rent the joint for a reception! But! Like I’m skinned, busted, broke…no cash till the first of the month!”

You would have thought Al had busted Doc right in the kisser with a club—and Uncle Merl wasn’t far behind him!

“Yeah, like, we already been to see a pritcher, so we was… Oh, wow!” The Budweiser clock had gripped Al’s focus of attention. His bride, who had been fumbling with a match trying to re-light a candle that had blown out, looked up at her new hubby in a very weird but strangely touching way. Then the two lovebirds, oblivious to everybody else in the bar, snuggled up together and proceeded to contemplate the route of a neon racecar infinitely circling a can of Budweiser.

“I don’t believe this!” Merl turned to Doc. “She could set the entire buildin’ on fire with the bat of an eye…”

“She’s got that kind of power?”

“The woman’s ‘bout to end the Curse a’ Ruth, bring a World Series to the Red Sox, and the end of the world for the human race—and you’re askin’ me if she’s got that kind a’ power?”

“Merl! Look at her! She’s turning into the same bubble-headed pin-brain as Al!”

“You mean…she’s just as stoned as he is! Looks ta me like they been out lickin’ the same 60s vintage postage stamps!” The two old masters turned to where the voice came from. There, holding a beer in one hand and a half-eaten skunky-burger in the other was Jonsey in his best off-duty cop attitude, guarding a sack of “Castle-rats” on the bar, and suspiciously studying the love-doves. “Yeah! I would have to say they’re both higher than the Empire State building. They’re trippin’ their asses off!”

Here was a whole new experience that wasn’t in Nefri’s book! Personally, I thought it was hysterical, and much to Doc and Uncle Merl’s displeasure, proceeded to laugh my ass off. She must have munched down on Al and dosed herself pretty damned good! She was a victim of modern chemistry! All this worry over nothing! Oh, there was that ‘Red Sox thing’, but in her present state even I could have talked her out of any more tampering with nature. Al would marry the Princess of Pain, the two of them would go merrily tripping through life counting the fuzz strands in dust bunnies through long, blissful winter nights and Doc and I were off the hook for letting the world come to an end! Too bad for Boston, they’d have to wait out the curse, but our troubles were over!

NOT!

While our attention had been focused on the drama at the Budweiser clock, Doc had been busily trying to summon up the spirit of Joan of Arc (whom he had equated with ‘Ringer’ and ‘fire with fire’) using his handy-dandy portable Sorcerer’s Stone. It’s small and powerful and chocked full of ethereal fluid—and using it is like opening a gigantic ‘party line’ to the Great Beyond. He hadn’t quite succeeded in reaching the Maid of Orleans, but had succeeded in alerting the other 99.999% of the spirit world that something of an extreme nature was taking place! Before Uncle Merl could even ask the happy couple if they preferred live music with the hors d’oeuvres, an explosion of the fifth magnitude type rocked the bar. It sent tables, chairs and customers flying in all directions. An eerie smell of brimstone filled the tavern.

From the midst of a dense cloud of greenish smoke that seemed to rise along a wall, a huge form, dark in countenance and snarling angrily, was materializing. It stood a good seven feet tall and wanted to know one thing:

“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO MY DAUGHTER!” It bellowed and roared and paced back and forth. This wasn’t good!

Now, Jonsey had been blown neatly clean across the bar and he’d bounced over a table. It took him three tries to locate where the bar room floor was located around the twisted lump of flesh that he had metamorphosized into. Assuming a ‘cop in charge’ stance, Jonsey staggered to the creature and, looking him square in the face, flashed his badge, flipped open his note pad stammered out, “Okay. Bub! What’s your name and where the hell are you from!”

I think that kind of pissed off the shade because he started turning purple from the top of his horned head to his pointed tail and sparks started flying out his ears. I think he was getting ready to squash Jonsey like a bug when Merl stepped between the groggy cop and the demon.

“Ahhh, Officer Johnson, I’d like you to meet Lucifer, the Overlord of Hell!

* * *

Jonah Johnson had been ‘Jonsey’ since he walked off the bus at the Marine Training Depot at Parris Island, South Carolina. It was 2 AM, raining like hell’s fury, and September of 1963. Some Marine Sergeant in a Smokey Bear hat had jumped on the bus and started screaming at the top of his lungs and scared him half out of his wits. When the command MOVE was given, the terrified seventeen-year-old from the streets of Newark had vaulted two guys from Georgia, jumped off the bus and slid sneaker heels first over the cobblestone-like bricks and smack between the legs and under the poncho of another Marine in one those strange Stetsons. He had been standing there, motionless in the South Carolina downpour as if the sun had been shining brighter than a new dime.

He lay there on the rain soaked brick, cold, wet and terrified. The Marine—who to this point had not so much as even blinked—lowered his face almost straight down till all the frightened youth could see were two cold brown eyes under the stiff round Stetson brim staring down at him. Instead of backing away, the Marine took two steps forward. The first step knocked the youth off his elbows and flat on his back. The second had him standing on the youth’s chest.

“I’ll be damned!” growled the voice under the hat’s brim and various locations in the Carolinas and Eastern Asia. “A natch’al born Marine! Can’t wait till you git to the Island, can you! What’s your name, piss ant?”

“Cha, Jo, Jona…” He was so shaken, he couldn’t stammer out his name.

“Well, listen here…Jonsey. I am Drill Instructor Sergeant Thomas! And since you seem to be hell-bent on becoming my best friend, I will be you Personal Guide through HELL. When I’m finished with your dumb ass, Jonsey, you won’t even be a’ feared of hell or the devil!”

D.I. Thomas was a man of his word!

And he became ‘Jonsey.’ Jonsey, the kid from Newark, running from a place he wasn’t sure had a place for him—but that changed when D.I. Thomas hammered, cajoled and tormented him into becoming one of the “Few and the Proud.” So he became Jersey Jonsey, the ‘Nam Marine ‘Jerseyfied’ to separate him from the dozen or so other Jonseys per Vietnamese rice paddy—but that changed too when he became Jonsey with the Congressional Medal of Honor, having saved the lives of almost a dozen Marines. So they sent him home in January of ’67 after barely beginning his second tour of duty to become Jonsey, the Newark Patrolman with two or three inches of metal having gone through his body, making throwing to second impossible, but otherwise okay. But even that changed in the summer of ’69 when all he had known since childhood burned to the ground before his eyes and almost consumed him with it. Newark rewarded his pain by exhuming his remains from a patrol car and moving it to the Detective Bureau. And there his body rested, content that at last he had found his place in the world.

Jonsey had seen his share of death and come to see it not so much as an enemy, the taker of life, but as the great reliever of sorrows, the final release from these mortal bonds. This perspective had given him a rare insight into life. He saw little difference between the jungles of ‘Nam or the streets of Newark, which he routinely patrolled.

He had developed a keen sense of good and evil. It wasn’t the spiritual kind that Boreese dealt with, but the down-to-earth, cops-and-robbers kind that filled everyday life. But it was still good and evil, and it was his bond with Doc. They drove each other crazy, Doc refusing to believe Jonsey couldn’t accept the manifestations of evil right under his nose, and Jonsey refusing to believe that a grown man would spend a lifetime chasing ghouls, ghosts and goblins around Newark. It became a year round rivalry with only a single day when they found common ground to stand on—Opening Day at Shea Stadium! But the rest of the year, they both took great pains to protect each other from the prying eyes of the world at large.

Crazy Al was a doper, but he wasn’t Evil. As far as Jonsey was concerned, Al was just a guy who had never left the ‘60s. He wasn’t a burglar, a pusher, a mugger or a pimp. And being heir to the fortune of the largest Used Car chain on the east coast almost negated the possibility of Al ever changing course—first of the month, some banker somewhere sent him a check larger than Jonsey’s salary for six months, most of which Al spent foolishly on his friends, buying food, clothing and places to sleep—and enough weed to keep the party going. The greatest statement of Al’s character, if such a term could even be applied to Al at all, was that he was part of Uncle Merl’s adopted family group—and that was good enough for Jonsey. Besides, he liked Al. He wasn’t so nuts about his in-laws, but shit, he didn’t like his own in-laws either!

Jonsey was all jammed up. The idea of standing nose to nose with Lucifer didn’t really bother him. Jonsey didn’t believe in the devil—or God, for that matter. Even with the haze still in his head from the blast, he still believed in Life, which he had sworn to protect from Death. He’d stopped fearing that long ago.

As a boy, he had seen himself walking in the shoes of his heroes, Roy Campanella and Yogi Berra. But a land mine going off changed all that. Having weighed what the alternative might well have been, he was now quite satisfied walking in his own shoes! A ball game was a ball game, and watching could be as good as playing. Baseball made you feel alive, and life was important! His life, anybody’s life!

So if the kid wanted to marry Satan’s daughter…well, it was his life!!!

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