In God we trust_ all others pay cash - Jean Shepherd [58]
“Not exactly. Do you have any olives?”
“Olives! I got plenty a olives.”
“I will need four. Two for your drink and two for mine.”
“Why two?”
“It is important that you use only two per drink. No more, no less.”
I poured a jigger of vodka into each glass, filling them with the ice-cold tomato juice, a dash of Worcestershire in each, a pinch of salt; then very precisely I dropped two olives into each drink. A few quick swirls of a red plastic swizzle stick, and then:
“Cheers, Flick. Enjoy. Here are two classical Bloody Charlies.”
“They look like Bloody Marys to me.” I sipped mine appreciatively, smacking my lips loudly, ostentatiously.
“No, Flick, there is a crucial difference. These are Bloody Marys with balls. I have invented it. I call it a Bloody Charlie.”
Flick sipped his for a moment and said:
“You always did have a dirty mind.”
I set my drink down precisely on the bar, saying as I did so:
“No, that is not exactly true. In fact, I well remember when I could not even understand the simplest, most basic obscenity. My innocence led me into considerable difficulty.”
XVIII UNCLE BEN AND THE SIDE-SPLITTING KNEE-SLAPPER, or SOME WORDS ARE LOADED
Every family has a Joke Teller, and he is usually bad news. That’s right, bad news. But the kind of bad news that sneaks up on you and gets you before you know what’s happened.
Joke Tellers are not to be confused with Storytellers. The difference is not only a matter of technqiue, but of degree of desperation.
Uncle Ben was our family Joke Teller, and he was so far out on the fringes of the family solar system that nobody ever mentioned him, even in passing. Uncle Ben would show up at about every third or fourth family affair. He would arrive about one-third Bagged, as is the case with most Joke Tellers. He was not the Drinking Uncle, because he didn’t really drink. He just absorbed the stuff. He didn’t really knock it down, like Uncle Carl, who would fall down and holler and try to climb up the coal chute and all that kind of stuff. Uncle Ben just quietly drank. He just had a red nose, and sat, and he always looked like … well, have you ever seen a brass lamp? Uncle Ben had a kind of Brass-Lamp look. He’d just sit there and glow, and like most Joke Tellers was indecisively fat. And all he would do at any party was tell jokes. Not funny stories—Jokes. And I mean the worst kind. I mean the kind of jokes that should be fumigated before they are allowed in the house.
Joke Tellers rarely have even a barely perceptible sense of humor. Uncle Ben was no exception. It is very hard to know how to listen to a Joke Teller. What kind of look do you put on your face when he is telling a joke, and hitting you on the arm at the same time? Do you smile in preparation for the punch line? Or do you look sad, which is the way you feel? Or just uncomfortable?
Joke Tellers can be dangerous. I’m about seven years old, and I’m in the sun parlor of Aunt Glenn’s apartment. Uncle Ben is over, and one wing of the family is having an Afternoon.
Uncle Ben was the kind who would always sit in another room. When all of the family’s having a big thing, he would sit out in another room, drinking beer, coming out only to draw another stein and tell a joke. And then, finally, when the pinochle game was organized, he would play. Badly. In true Joke Teller fashion, everything he did seemed to have some comic or violent overtones. Whenever he played pinochle he would slam his hand down on the table with:
“That’s it!”
BANG!
“Seven spades! That’s it!”
POW!
He also was a great one for trick shuffles.
On the day in question, Uncle Ben and the men are playing double-deck pinochle. My kid brother and I are out in the sun parlor, knee-deep in ferns. Uncle Ben starts telling jokes, in his Joke Teller’s voice. One of the men says:
“Hey, you know the kids are here.”
And Uncle Ben says:
“Ah, they’re old enough to hear this. And if they’re not old enough to hear it, it won’t make any difference anyway. Hahaha.”
And he plows ahead:
“And so the bartender says to the guy.…”
Of course, my ears are like