Post 754

ost 754 of the Veterans of Foreign Wars is in Amherst.  It's a long, white building next to the train tracks on Main Street, downhill from the Emily Dickinson House.  Its only mark of identification is VFW Post 754, and its only invitation to a stranger is a sign that says, lunch served until two. 

            Most people come in through the back.  I went in the front, through two closed doors. I heard voices coming from the basement, so I went down the stairs. The girl behind the bar glanced at me; the men in front did, too.  I stood like someone trying to get out of the rain— then turned and went back up .I could have walked out-- but I turned around again and went back down. .

           I'm not twenty-one, so I asked for a Coke.  I sat in a short-backed bar-chair, leaning my elbows on the bar, trying to look like there was some reason why I belonged here.  I got up and wandered around the room.  Behind the bar are several tables.  On the wall behind the tables are posters commemorating great moments in the history of the US Army.  The other half of the basement has more tables, more posters, and a pool table. 

I sat back down.  The man next to me looked to be World War Two-age.  He also looked like he was too drowsy to stay awake.  The gin-and-sodas were making him drowsier.  I watched him sideways for a while, waiting for eye contact to start a conversation.  Instead, he paid after his third drink, got up and hobbled out, moving like his body might come apart at the spine.

            I looked at who was left: three other men and a woman. The woman looked like she might have spent her life in bars with men.  They were all watching Married WithChildren.  The girl who tended the bar tried to anticipate the jokes that the men would find funny.  She wasn’t bothered that they were the crudest ones.

Another guy ambled in and sat down; she asked if he wanted something to drink. He said, “Well what else are you offering?” 

            “Topless bar-tending,” she said. The other guys liked that. They told her they had as much hair on their asses as she on her head; they said her breasts looked like cheese in the middle of marshmallows. She didn't seem to mind.

             I got up and wandered around the room, again. They started to talk to talk about New Orleans.  I looked over a map of Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm and listened.  “I know some places that don’t even open till three.  You go in there, order a drink and you got a girl with her twat in your face.  Then you go bang ‘er in a dark corner.”

            “New Orleans is no place to take your wife.”

            “Place to take some other guy’s wife.”  They laughed.  The bar-tender laughed too.  As I knocked pool balls together, the bartender began talking about college boys who can’t do it after four hours of drinking.

            “They’re boys…not men,” said the woman at the bar.

              When I went back a second time, I guessed the guy sitting next to me was a veteran.  He looked to be Vietnam-age, and there was a mark on his face.  I guess it could have come from anything: birth defect, accident; or it could have come from shrapnel.  I managed to chat with him about the Club’s raffle and the news; I could barely understand a word he was saying.  He eventually got up and left.

            The next time I pulled into the parking lot of the VFW, I saw him pulling out in a pick-up truck.   He nodded to me and I nodded back.  I would’ve preferred talking to him, listening to his story. If he had a story. Maybe I just preferred the nod.

            I was sitting at the bar another day, now accustomed to waiting, listening, coke-drinking, clock-watching.  One guy came in with a racing hat on and the blue, name-tagged shirt of whatever his job was.  He sat at the end of the bar and flirted with the bar-tender.  She walked to his end of the bar, threw her head down and then back up to collect her hair in a pony tail.  She told him about how wasted she was when she came in there on Sunday morning, “So we finished the handle of cheap vodka, and then we started on the thirty-rack, and then we got another fifth …”

He told her about car races in Europe where the spectators stand at the edge of the road.  Not in this country, he complained, too many lawyers.  She told him about her various men.  About the one that’s married— he warned her not to think the guy’ll leave his wife for her.  She knew.  She told him about the Canadian body-builder who wants her; he’s big, like this big.  The guy measured two inches with his pointer and thumb and warned her about the 'roids.  “He doesn’t use the roids,” she said. 

“They all do,” he said.

            An Asian man came in.  The bar-tender and the other guy greeted him with, “What the sheet!” which he echoed.  He sat down and started telling a long, aggravated story in a barely intelligible accent.  He was drinking a beer as fast as he could, smoking a cigarette, cursing for no reason with profound, triumphant disgruntlement.  “Fuckeen Aye.”  He was drinking a Heineken; the other guy was drinking a Bud.  He was wearing khakis and a tucked-in polo shirt.  The other guy had on jeans.  When the Asian man left, the other guy and the bar-tender made fun of him.  The guy asked her, “Remember when he owned that store?  Every time somebody’d buy a lotto ticket he’d rub it on his balls and say, “Goo luuck.”  The guy repeated it again, letting his face go dumb as he said it: “Goo luuck.”  The bar-tender told a story about how, one time, someone was buying the Asian man drinks, and he shut up after two.  “Two drinks?” said the guy. 

            Later, another guy came in.  He was tall with a saggy face and a profoundly bored look in his eyes. He asked for “a friggin drink”, but he didn't sound very convincing  A third guy, who had been there the whole time, sat between Mr. Car Races and the new guy.   He'd been unable to get anybody to respond to the things he said.  He spoke tentatively; sometimes he repeated himself.  It took him a long time to finish his beer; he looked triumphant when the bartender came to take it away.  He looked defeated when she slammed another one down in its place.  Finally, he was able to start a conversation about why you see soldiers in Iraq on TV carrying their rifles with the butt on their shoulder and the handle in their hand.  The tall guy agreed that it was strange.  The racing guy explained that it was so they can swing the weapon into firing position easier: extend the arm, catch the barrel in the support hand and let fly.  If you’re carrying an M-16 by the handle on top, it takes longer to get into firing position.  It’s a sign of soldiers expecting the shit to hit the fan at any moment.  The bar-tender came over, asked if they were talking about guns.  The racing guy told her, “Guns are something you play with as a kid.  Weapons are something you kill people with.”

            Eventually, the tall guy and I were the only ones left in the bar.  He blew smoke through his nose and looked very bored.  The bar-tender tried to make conversation with him.  He looked ahead as if she hadn’t spoken.  She said it again.  He looked ahead still, then looked at her, and said with annoyance, “I can’t hear a thing.”  She repeated it again.  “So?” he said.

            “Is it mostly veterans who come in here,” I asked her.

            “It's about half and half, veterans and local guys.”

            “I’m actually looking to talk to some veterans. I was hoping to write about them. Their stories--what they've been through.  That’s why I’m always hangin’ around here.”

“Ahhhh.”

“When are the most people here?”

            “Friday after three,” she told me.

            So I came on Friday after three.  The bar was full.  Everyone seemed to know one another; they talked to the people they knew, turned in, towards each other, backs out.  I drank my Coke.

            I noticed a young guy come in the back door and put quarters in the pool table.  I left my seat at the bar, walked to the pool table, and asked him if he was looking for a game.

            “Actually, he’s playing”— the cook had come out of the kitchen with a pool cue in hand—“but you can have next game.”

            I played the cook, then the kid, then the cook, then the kid beat me.  By then I was easy with both of them.

            The kid seemed a little older than me.  He was reserved in the first game, but smiling and talking by the second.  A scratchy voice from the bar, obscured behind a corner of wall, was muttering about, “…that kid that’s supposed to be doin’ community service cookin’ but he’s always over there playin’ pool.”

            “They talk so much shit,” said the kid.  “I’m like, kiss my ass.”

            The cook was a small-framed black man who looked to be in his fifties.  Spry around the table, he seemed more interested in me winning than in him winning.  “Niiice roll,” he’d say.  “Good cut, man.”  “Whew!”  When I won he slapped my hand.  As men walked out the back door behind the table, he said, "See ya later", or "Have a good one". He spoke to all of them, and they all responded.  His outgoingness seemed very genuine, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t learned, I thought, adapted.  His graying hair was straightened and subdued. 

            The black cook and the white kid sat at a table together—the table farthest from the bar—and talked, too low for anyone to hear.

            The voice that had been talking shit about the kid belonged to a burly man with a mustache. He began talking about the Club.  About how it wasn’t getting enough support from its members.  “I could have all the guys come over to my house for drinks.  Then the drinks’d be free.  But that wouldn’t support the Club.”  He looked around as he spoke, offering anyone within earshot a piece of  the conversation. Now and then, he excused himself to any would-be critic: “It’s just my opinion, and I’m just an idiot, but….” 

            The next time I came back was on a Sunday afternoon, out of the rain.  I was  sick of coming there, of being an outsider.

            The place was dark.  The bar was row of hunched backs.  A few heads turned to look at me, faces not smiling.  There was no girl behind the counter, but a thick man wearing flannel with a buzz-cut and regretful-looking eyes.  He looked at me like he was waiting to have to card me; he was slightly relieved when I asked for a Coke.

            There wasn’t much talking.  Everyone watched a Steven Sagal movie on TV.  Sagal did his thing: brusquely convinced the woman to trust him, went in alone, shoot all the goons, took a bullet, saved the worst guy for last, took the room apart with him, then put a cork-screw in his head.  The movie was a hit with the people at the bar.  I thought for a moment about a bunch of veterans, sitting in a dark bar, on a Sunday afternoon.  No one but them would chuckle at what Sagal  did.

            But that wasn’t it.  The bar-tender, who I'd figured for a veteran, started talking to a guy at the bar.  They talked about the girl I’d seen tend the bar on other days.  About how she’d always have a couple of shots before she went home.  “She’ll have a few in an hour’s time,” said the bar-tender.  He started a story.

            “So there was this one guy in here, been drinkin all night, and I been tryin to get him to leave.  Finally, I’m like buddy, you gotta get out.  He’s like, one more shot.  Do a shot with me.  I’m like, if I do a shot with you will you leave?  He’s like yeah.  So he picks one of these (he shows a glass that holds half a beer) and fills it with ice and Jack Daniels to the top.  Then he drinks it down like this.  So I drink mine down.  Now, I’m like, alright, get out.  I went right home and puked all night.  I just can’t drink that stuff.  It’s nasty.”

            “You want another soda,” he asked me.

            “No, I’m all set,” I said, getting up to go.

            I went back, one last time.  One half of the bar was filled with regulars.  I sat alone at the other half.

            “Hey,” said the girl bar-tender.  “Coke?”

            “Yup.”

              Married With Children was on, followed by Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

            A guy sat down next to me, said something to the bar-tender about catching coins on her breasts.  She said they would bounce off.  He said that was just as good and looked around for agreement.  I smiled.  He didn’t seem satisfied, and a few minutes later moved to the other side of the bar when a seat emptied.  I heard him muttering about boys and men.

            I heard a snippet of conversation and the word—Vietnamese.  But they were talking about race.

            “My mother always said there’s good and bad in people of all nationalities.”  This was the woman who seemed like she'd spent her life in bars with men.

            “I don’t care what color ya are, if ya act right I got no problem with ya.”  This was her husband, the guy with the scratchy voice who'd  talked shit about the kid.

            Another guy piped up from the end of the bar.  “But you’re forgetting the philosophy of Blazing Saddles, Bill.  'We don’t mind Chinks, we don’t mind Niggers, but no Irish.' ”

            They all laughed.

            “You want another Coke?”  The bartender smiled; she'd grown used to me.

            “No, thanks, I’m good.”  I got up and walked slowly out.