***
Simon's Bowl and Tap was just that, a narrow bowling alley of just eight lanes with an old and formerly glorious bar lining the front wall. It must have been glorious back in the fifties when the place was built and the area was still flush with cash, and farmers in town to deliver crops or pick up provisions would stop at the bar, spending generously and enjoying elusive male camaraderie before retreating again to the family solitude of the farm.
Those good times were clearly past. I could see that the farm crisis of the early eighties had taken its toll; the most recent improvement to the room was a Centipede arcade game, which was probably once popular with farm kids who tagged along with their dads but was now shoved forgotten into a dusty corner. Everything in the room seem to date from that Centipede machine and earlier; you could almost pinpoint the exact year—maybe 1981 or '82—when incomes and fortunes first began to dry up, then withered away like drought-stricken stalks of sweet corn.
We pushed through the screen door—spanned by a metal Dr. Pepper sign hung at waist height, like a tackily-colored cummerbund—and walked inside, where it was pitch-dark compared to the late June glare outside. But soon my eyes adjusted and I could take in my surroundings. The long walnut bar, its top inlaid with narrow wood strips, the tarnished beer tap stand—Bud, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Hamm's and Stag, the local swill I drank in town whenever I was broke—and the deer portrait hanging over the back bar's mirror, green-glowing lighted columns at each end of the mirror, half-filled sheets of bowling league standings tacked to the side wall, snapshots of family picnics and Christmas dinners and Ozarks vacations taped on every spare surface.
"So, why Tillsburg?" I had to ask. It was one of many questions that had nagged at me during the past few weeks.
"Why not Tillsburg?" he replied, a bit too loudly, while glancing at the bartender with a knowing, almost conspiratorial look. As if to say to him, "This kid isn't one of us, Sam," or Hank or whatever the bartender's name was. No introductions had been made, nor even hinted at. But Wheatyard's look was ignored by the bartender; if Sam or Hank felt that he and Wheatyard were of the same people, he certainly wasn't showing it. They exchanged no words—not when we entered the room, nor when we sat down at the first barstools, nor when Wheatyard called out for two PBRs. He tossed down three singles, from which the bartender silently withdrew two bills before retreating to the far end of the bar where the older man leaned, craning his neck to stare at the overhead TV and the tabloid news show that was airing.
Considering that we were the only patrons there, in the middle of a Thursday afternoon, I thought we'd get friendlier service, especially in what was supposedly Wheatyard's stomping grounds, at his watering hole in what I assumed was his hometown.
"Tillsburg's friendly," he said, despite all evidence to the contrary, "and cheap, and easy to get around in." He voice was very matter-of-fact, as if his claims had been rehearsed or repeated frequently, either to others or himself. "And the house is paid for, which wouldn't be the case up in the city."
I almost laughed at Wheatyard calling Champaign a city. For me, and especially for my grad school friends, Champaign was no more than a town, a two-year layover in our careers. To us, the nearest city was Chicago, two long interstate hours to the north. Though I appreciated Champaign—much more so than my friends, who couldn't wait to leave—calling it a city seemed overly generous.
And if Champaign was merely a town, then a place like Tillsburg was even less—a moribund, dying village barely left over from another era. Though I once thought I could live in Tillsburg, that really would have only been for affordability, a cheap place to sleep while my real life—school, stores, the bars—took place twenty miles away in Champaign. I had to admit that my opinion of farm towns, while not as dismissive as that of my friends, was still condescending.
But on that hot afternoon at Simon's, I wasn't interested in Tillsburg. I was there to find out about Elmer Glaciers Wheatyard, that puzzle whom I barely knew, that cipher who beckoned me with an old postcard from Mammoth Cave. Asking about the town was merely an opening.
"So, about your book," I started.
"Which one?" he replied. "There are so many of them."
"The one you gave me," I said. "Longing Dissolute Midnight."
I had only made it through a few hundred pages of the book before finally giving up after a week, my mind overwhelmed by the densely-packed narrative. The little I read was a riotous, glorious mess. Great Crusaders mingled with Hollywood starlets and little green men from Mars and fatally small-minded bureaucrats from dying New England mill towns as Wheatyard explored a bewildering number of barely overlapping themes, from evolutionary theory to immigration to the ethics of the death penalty to socialist economic systems. And in those two hundred single-spaced pages there was even room for adolescent romance, slapstick humor and later on—to my pleasant surprise—for raw sex, courtesy of the little green men from Mars and unemployed New England mill girls. Where it went after that, for the next six or seven hundred pages, I couldn't imagine. Wheatyard's imagination in conjuring up this human—and alien—menagerie was nothing less than dizzying.
None of it should have worked, but somehow it did. Or I thought it did. Had I tried, I couldn't have explained much of what I had read. My mind felt too simple, too primitive, to comprehend all of its connections, its implications.
"Wh-where did it all this come from?" I stammered, not even knowing what questions to ask. I just hoped he would elaborate, expand, illuminate, completely unprompted by me.
"Here," he replied, pointing at his temple. "And here"—he nodded at the beer bottle—"plus a few things I grow in my backyard."
Clearly he was being disingenuous. His writing had to come from more than alcohol and homegrown hallucinogens. I once read some William S. Burroughs, a writer supposedly under similar influences, and none of his writing made any sense at all. But Longing Dissolute Midnight did register with me, a little. It had to be more than just some drug-crazed rant.
"I jot down every impression that comes to mind," he said, beginning what I hoped was the expansiveness I was seeking. "My house is full of scraps of paper, every one with just a few words on it. Names, places, abstract theories, arcane factoids, none of them having any obvious connection to any of the others."
He paused, shifting his hips on the stool so he could remove his wallet from the back pocket of his jeans. Flipping the wallet open, he peered inside as a chagrined look came to his face. I could see the wallet was empty, as was the beer bottle in front of him. I assumed he would hit me up for some cash. Though he had invited me all the way out there, I had already seen that his hospitality was sadly lacking. But I only had a few bucks on me, and I needed to fill up the gas tank in a day or two, so I decided to just go through the fake formality. I'd look in my wallet, say "Sorry but I'm tapped out," and let it go at that.
I had just begun to reach for my wallet when he spoke, not to me but to the bartender, who was still standing at the far end of the bar and looking up at the TV, which was running a story about Sharon Stone's latest romantic dalliance.
"Tom," Wheatyard called out, cocking his chin up slightly in a show of familiarity once the bartender turned to look at him. Wheatyard smiled as he approached, a smile which was not returned, and entreated the man with his smoothest used car salesman patter.
"Tom, my friend and I would like to stick around here a while. Trouble is, I'm all tapped out."
"Trouble for you, not me. It figures you're broke." Tom turned to me. "So, what about you?"
"Me, too." Wheatyard hadn't even asked me, but I didn't know if he guessed I was light on cash or if he just didn't care. He may have been more interested in seeing what he could wheedle out of the bartender, winning another round or two for free, than the beers themselves.
"I was hoping you might set us up with a few." He nodded at the lone dollar that remained on the bar, as if that signified he was a big spender who deserved the occasional comp. Nothing ab
out him—his clothes, the old pickup, the run-down house—indicated he had the means to be a big spender, nor even a midsized one. But he was trying that pitch anyway.
"On the house?" Tom replied, his tone mildly incredulous.
"On the house, sure. Or run a tab, or whatever."
"You were a month late on your last tab. I'm not getting into that again."
"My next check comes in the end of this week," Wheatyard said, running his index finger across the bottom of his nose, rubbing an itch and making a sharp inward sniff. "Same as always."
The mention of a check, of some source of income, drew my attention toward Wheatyard.
"Man, I don't know," Tom said, rubbing his eyes. He looked tired, although clearly not from an overabundance of business at the bar.
"C'mon, Tom, you know me." To me that didn’t seem like a smart angle to take. Though Tom knew Wheatyard, he hadn't given any indication that he particularly liked him. "I'm in here a couple times a week, give you some business, pay my tabs on time."
"Or pay them eventually, after I nag you for weeks."
"Hey, that one tab was the only one I've been really late on. And only because my carburetor went out. I told you that."
"Yeah, well, you tell me a lot of things. Things I don't want to hear, a lot of things I don't believe."
"God's honest truth, Tom. It was the carb. Damn thing went out that morning right before I had to drive to Peoria, I was in a big rush, and that bastard Wally Long—yeah, I said bastard, and you can tell him I said so—he gouged me for a new one. Said he was holding it for another customer who ordered it special, but he'd sell it to me for ten dollars over list. Special order, my ass. Who around here needs a carb for a '74 Chevy? There’s only a few of those left around here, so what are the odds that someone else had a carb go out the same time as mine? What a crock. So I had to pay for the carb, and fortunately I could install it myself and didn't have to pay Wally thirty bucks an hour to do it, and because of that I didn't have the cash to pay my tab right away. I had to get to Peoria that day—very important appointment—and Wally knew it and took advantage of me. I really couldn't help it."
Tom listened to Wheatyard's diatribe against Wally Long and price-gouging and the fickle nature of 1974 Chevy carburetors with obvious disinterest. The bartender must have heard the story before, probably every time he asked Wheatyard to pay his latest overdue tab. He seemed unmoved by Wheatyard's earlier plight, and now Wheatyard was asking to drink for free, and not only himself, but also this young stranger—me—who the bartender probably thought was just some middle-class college student slumming out in the boonies.
"Look, Elmer," Tom interrupted, his emphasis and choice of given name clearly meant to put the freeloader in his place, "I'm tired of hearing you talk. First off, Wally's a friend of mine. I've had enough of you badmouthing him. He helped you out that day, and charged you a little extra for his trouble. And it's always something different that you're complaining about, blaming everybody and everything for your problems—everybody but yourself. I'm tired of hearing it, all of it. I'll set you and your friend up with one more round. Won't bother putting it on a tab, since I don't want to bother trying to collect it from you and hear a new bunch of excuses. Putting it on a tab isn't too different from giving it to you on the house anyhow—either way I won't get paid."
He paused, sliding open the door of the cooler below the bar and withdrawing two Stags. We weren't even getting the mediocre PBR.
"So these are on the house. And after you're finished, I want you out of here. Understand?"
"Understand perfectly," Wheatyard affirmed.
Tom turned away, back to the TV, and Wheatyard smiled a sheepish grin. I hoped he would resume his narrative on how he came to write Longing Dissolute Midnight, the discourse that was interrupted by his quest for a free round, or just for the haggling.
"Why not Tillsburg?" he repeated from much earlier, all thoughts of the book apparently forgotten. "Great place. Wouldn't live anywhere else."