Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls(28)

“So are you just going to stand here smoking all night?” he asked.

Normally I waited until nine o’clock to start drinking, but “What the heck,” I said. “I’ll have a beer. Why not?” When a couple of seats opened up, Johnny and I took them. Across the narrow carriage a black man with a bushy mustache pounded on his Formica tabletop. “So a nun goes into town,” he said, “and sees a sign reading, ‘Quickies—twenty-five dollars.’ Not sure what it means, she walks back to the convent and pulls aside the mother superior. ‘Excuse me,’ she asks, ‘but what’s a quickie?’

“And the old lady goes, ‘Twenty-five dollars. Just like in town.’”

As the room filled with laughter, Johnny lit a fresh cigarette. “Some comedian,” he said. I don’t know how we got onto the subject of gambling—perhaps I asked if he had a hobby.

“I’ll bet on sporting events, on horses and greyhounds—hell, put two fleas on the table and I’ll bet over which one can jump the highest. How about you?”

Gambling to me is what a telephone pole might be to a groundhog. He sees that it’s there but doesn’t for the life of him understand why. Friends have tried to explain the appeal, but still I don’t get it. Why take chances with money?

Johnny had gone to Gamblers Anonymous, but the whining got on his nerves and he quit after his third meeting. Now he was on his way to Atlantic City, where he hoped to clean up at the craps table.

“All right,” called the black man on the other side of the carriage. “I’ve got another one: What do you have if you have nuts on a wall?” He lit a cigarette and blew out the match. “Walnuts!”

A red-nosed woman in a decorative sweatshirt started talking, but the black fellow told her that he wasn’t done yet. “What do you have if you have nuts on your chest?” He waited a beat. “Chestnuts! What do you have when you have nuts on your chin?” He looked from face to face. “A dick in your mouth!”

“Now that’s good,” Johnny said. “I’ll have to remember that.”

“I’ll have to remind you,” I told him, trembling a little at my forwardness. “I mean…I’m pretty good at holding on to jokes.”

As the black man settled down, I asked Johnny about his family. It didn’t surprise me that his mother and father were divorced. Each of them was fifty-four years old, and each was currently living with someone much younger. “My dad’s girlfriend—fiancée, I guess I should call her—is no older than me,” Johnny said. “Before losing my job I had my own place, but now I’m living with them. Just, you know, until I get back on my feet.”

I nodded.

“My mom, meanwhile, is a total mess,” he said. “Total pothead, total motormouth, total perfect match for her * thirty-year-old boyfriend.”

Nothing in this guy’s life sounded normal to me. Take food: He could recall his mother rolling joints on the kitchen counter, but he couldn’t remember her cooking a single meal, not even on holidays. For dinner they’d eat take-out hamburgers or pizzas, sometimes a sandwich slapped together over the sink. Johnny didn’t cook either. Neither did his father or future stepmother. I asked what was in their refrigerator, and he said, “Ketchup, beer, mixers—what else?” He had no problem referring to himself as an alcoholic. “It’s just a fact,” he said. “I have blue eyes and black hair too. Big deal.”

“Here’s a clean one,” the black man said. “A fried-egg sandwich walks into a bar and orders a drink. The bartender looks him up and down, then goes, ‘Sorry, we don’t serve food here.’”

“Oh, that’s old,” one of his fellow drunks said. “Not only that, but it’s supposed to be a hamburger, not a fried-egg sandwich.”

“It’s supposed to be food, is what it’s supposed to be,” the black man told him. “As to what that food is, I’ll make it whatever the hell I want to.”

“Amen,” Johnny said, and the black man gave him a thumbs-up.

His next joke went over much better. “What did the leper say to the prostitute? ‘Keep the tip.’”

I pictured what looked like a mushroom cap resting in the palm of an outstretched hand. Then I covered my mouth and laughed so hard that beer trickled out of my nose. I was just mopping it up when the last call was announced, and everyone raced to the counter to stock up. Some of the drinkers would be at it until morning when the bar reopened, while others would find their assigned seats and sleep for a while before returning.

As for Johnny, he had a fifth of Smirnoff in his suitcase. I had two Valiums in mine, and, because of my ugly past history with sedatives, the decision to share them came easily. An hour later, it was agreed that we needed to smoke some pot. Each of us was holding, so the only question was where to smoke it—and how to get there from the bar. Since taking the Valium, drinking six beers, and following them with straight vodka, walking had become a problem for me. I don’t know what it took to bring down Johnny, but he wasn’t even close yet. That’s what comes with years of socking it away—you should be unconscious, but instead you’re up, and full of bright ideas. “I think I’ve got a place we can go to,” he said.