The Likely Lads

Mr. Smith and the Tug Boat Captain, late of the Bela Marie, retire for the afternoon to a local waterfront tavern.

TBC: Mr. Smith, within the feeble confines of your brain, has it ever occurred to you, notwithstanding the fact that I am your employer, but perhaps out of gratitude or a desire to acknowledge our long association—which I dare to call friendship—or even indeed, to submit to the world proof of your own humanity and basic understanding of the social contracts we are bound to, have you, Smith, ever considered buying us a round?

Smith: Yes, sir. And no, sir.

TBC: That’s a mystifying answer, I must say. Thankfully, while you were off attending to your person, I have ordered us two more, and here they arrive. So therefore we need not test the limits of your purse this afternoon.

Smith: Thanks kindly, sir.

TBC: Here’s another puzzle for you, my dear Smith.

Smith: I await the riddle with open ears, sir.

TBC: And a sharp mind, I trust, for it is a poser. How is it, that despite my long and happy relationship with popular music, one filled with an affection and a depth of feeling I rarely elicit even to close relations—despite crates of records stored away in various rooming houses, and volumes of exegetical Greil Marcus books consumed, and a powerful case of tinnitus that I shall live with for the rest of my days, caused by hours of my youth spent in rock clubs, I still to this day do not quite have a grasp on what 3/4 time is. I am in the dark, blankly ignorant of its machinations.

Smith: One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four…

TBC: I know it’s the basis for all western popular music, and it makes me bob my head, and I think of the apprentices of the Mersey Beat, and of the three-chord heroes of my youth, but I still don’t get it. It’s been explained to me, by kind and patient and sage practitioners, but, like a dream upon waking, it fades from my working memory.

Smith: It is what it is, I’d say.

The Six Woeful Bachelors

As documented in The Demons and Ghouls of the Upper Midwest (Eli Westman, Medford & Ochs, 1978), The Six Woeful Bachelors have haunted the front room of the Cookie Jar Restaurant in Medicine Flats, South Dakota since at least the late 1930’s. The ghosts are described by regular patrons as “harmless,” and “almost funny if you think about them long enough.” The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist James Argyle, who spent much of his boyhood in Medicine Flats, made note of the Bachelors in his memoir, Witness to War (Watermark, 1984).

"Sunday mornings, I’d have to pull my dad out of the Cookie Jar to bring him to church. It was one of those unspoken understandings I had with my mother. We never discussed his whereabouts and I never talked about how difficult it was to drag him the hell out of there. She’d say “Go get your father, will you dear? We don’t want to be late.” I think she was just content that he wasn’t at the whorehouse. I still don’t know if that’s heartbreaking or if that’s just life.

The Cookie Jar was a haunted tavern. Six ghosts of long dead, sad-sack bachelors moped about the place. Nobody was frightened by them, they didn’t raise a ruckus and break dishes or rattle the chandeliers. They just kind of moaned and lamented. The living sad sacks gathered about the bar accepted them as part of the scenery, just some ectoplasmic ambiance to make them feel more comfortable with their afternoon drinking. If you sat in the bar long enough you’d hear the Bachelors. They’d grumble and sigh, say things like:

“What the hell?”
“Jesus, this is a lonesome goddamned town.”
“Woman tells me to get a job, I say I got a job, she says get a better one.”
“She went a married O’Toole. Can you believe it? O-fucking-Toole of all the people in this miserable town to shack up with.”
“I can’t shake it. I’m trying, lord.”
“She gave me a dose, all right. I reckon I like the wild ones too much.”
“So what, I say. So what. Don’t matter anyway.”

The Bachelors rarely materialized, mostly you just heard them. I did see one of them once, just for a second. A slim gentleman with a handlebar mustache and a stiff collar, sitting at the bar, looking a locket. They teach a good lesson, the Bachelors. Bitch and moan in life, you’ll probably bitch and moan in death.”