Whistle & Fish Werewolf Tales

Dead Writers’ Bar

Posted by Harry Haller |  

Emily Dickinson sits in the far corner, where darkness insulates her shy demeanor, and she nurses a single sweet vermouth all night long and writes frenetic verse with a felt-tipped pen on stiff bar napkins. Occasionally a randy newcomer, reeking of formaldehyde, will make a pass at her, but she brushes them off as casually and efficiently as one brushes cracker crumbs from a shirt. The regulars know better. They give her wide berth.

Not so for old Walt. He swaggers in, still dragging a leg from his final stroke, reciting verse at the top of his lungs in a voice that could drop birds from trees at a thousand paces. Yes, he’s the Good Gray Poet, and he still gets democracy better than anyone in the place — including the Greeks who invented it — but if his bellowing “Song of Myself” breaks one more champagne glass, I’ll throw him out on his good gray ear. I don’t know. Maybe it’s the mincing walk. Or the colored scarf at his throat. Or maybe I’m homophobic. But he and Oscar Wilde creep me out. And when they get together. Cripes.

Then there’s Ernest Hemingway. He’s a likable enough sort. Tells a good story once he’s knocked back a tumbler or two. But have you ever tried carrying on a conversation with someone when half his skull — including one eyeball — is gone? You focus on that one remaining eye, acting like it’s the most natural thing in the world, but all the time you both feel antsy about it. I told him once, “Papa. For God’s sake. Get a hat. A bandage. Something.” But of course he didn’t listen. You can’t tell him anything. And he always hangs out with that fey hypochondriac Scott Fitzgerald and his shrew wife Zelda. Scott isn’t so bad. Give him a bottle of gin and after a while he curls up like a kid and sleeps. But that Zelda! What a harpy! She and Hemingway get into it and pretty soon his brains have sloshed everywhere. Takes me an hour to clean it up, I tell you.

I got stories from all of them. Victor Hugo, Tom Aquinas, Yukio Mishima, Guy de Maupassant — even Mike Cervantes. Dante frequents the place with John Milton on his arm. They sit over there near the jukebox and argue about hell. Then Cummings comes in and rags on them with this whole lower case dialectic thing. Hearing the three of them talk is like listening to be-bop jazz. So, naturally, when they’re around the beat writers come in and start all their crap. You’d think every word that dropped out of their mouths was gold or something. But when Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky come in for vodka, everyone gets real quiet. They’re like the kings of the written word around here. Will Shakespeare and Herman Melville are the only ones welcome at their table. Well, sometimes they let Joe Conrad simper around like a puppy.

Really, it isn’t too bad. When these folks get sotted and tell you a story, you know for sure it will be a damned good one. And those Brontë sisters are all lookers. Jane Austin isn’t half bad either. I’d do her on a bet.

I could be working down the street at the Royals’ Bar. I heard one night Anne Boleyn came in carrying her head under her arm and drank a pint of pure grain alcohol in a single sitting. She stuck a funnel in her gullet and had the bartender pour it straight down.

That would have creeped me out, let me tell you. Give me Papa any day of the week, sloshing brains or not, but keep me away from those decapitated queens.

Hey. I gotta go. I think Mark Twain is going to break up the place. Have one on me. Whatever you want. Dammit, Mark, what have I told you about bringing frogs in here? I don’t care where they came from. Calaveras County don’t mean nothing to me.