Jackie Martling - The Joke Man, 1: Bow to Stern

A POST HILL PRESS BOOK

The Joke Man:
Bow to Stern

2017 by Jackie Martling

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 978-1-68261-389-4

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-68261-390-0

Cover Photo by Peter M. Budraitis, PMBPhoto.com

Interior Design and Composition by Greg Johnson/Textbook Perfect

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Post Hill Press

New York Nashville

posthillpress.com

Published in the United States of America

1968

Claims Bad Knee

What a tale this is. Summer 1968 my longtime pal Michael Iacovelli and I had been playing in the same bar band, the Secrets (our secret was that our drummer, though he was six foot five, was only sixteen, and shouldnt have been playing in the boozy dives we worked at), but we had broken up because we had relentlessly tortured my best friend, our guitar player Chris Bates, about his girlfriend and he had angrily quit.

So Mike and our nut job pal Red McCreedy and I were cruising down the Long Island Expressway in Mikes white 1964 Chevy Impala en route to a party in the city being thrown by Reds wealthy girlfriend, Cynthias friend Joyce.

(To this day, Red is the only person I know who actually saw the Beatles at Shea Stadium, due to Cynthias rich fathers connections.)

(Update 2017: Im up to knowing three people who saw them.)

Suddenly, there in the middle of the right lane was a full-size beer keg.

I yelled, Iacovelli, pull over.

I figured itd make a great table for my room in my parents cellar, where I was living while I was home from Michigan State University for the summer. Plus, it would be the Good Samaritan Thing to Do, because the thing was certainly going to cause an accident sooner rather than later.

It wasnt until a ways up, of course, but Ikey was finally able to pull off onto the shoulder and we ran back. I went out onto the highway to the keg and it was ice cold and full!

I figured there was no way a keg would ever fall out of a beer truck, so it must have been in a caterers van, tipped over, rolled, and smashed out through the rear doors, or something to that effect. I immediately pictured a stoned delivery boy, still zipping along, totally oblivious.

The keg couldnt have been out there long, because it was still ice cold and it was a broiling August day.

No small task, we rolled it to the car and put it in the trunk.

We were (still are, I guess) assholes, so it never dawned on us that beer is homogenized, like milk, and that leaving it in the trunk of the car all night wasnt a great idea if you planned on eventually drinking it. Not that we could have done anything about it, short of heading home, which would have been out of the question.

Our little party that night was one for the books. We had a bottle of gin and no mixers and no money. So we drank gin and water. Did you ever try to drink gin and water? Its damn near impossible to get down, unless youre college kids determined to get drunk. Luckily, we filled that bill, so we also filled our glasses with gin and water.

Joyce had a nice apartmentshe was wealthy, tooand I very clearly remember (this is important to the story) that she had a cloth seat cover on her toilet seat. And she had stereo speakers standing up on the floor to either side of her turntable, and each had some kind of decorative material on top of them.

One of the living room sofas pulled out to become Joyces bed. We must have been way too loaded to even consider driving home, so we stayed over. Plus, I think I was trying to get with Joyce. Actually, its a safe assumption. As I remember, she was a lot olderonly in her mid-twenties, but I was just twenty, and at that age a few years was a big gap.

When I began to come to in the morning, lying on the rooms other couch, which was ninety degrees to where she lay, my head was pounding as badly as I can ever remember (gin and water? My God...).

And into my mind came this very foggy memory of a dream I had that I had been sitting on one of the speakersit was cloth, so maybe I had made the connection that it was the cloth of the toilet seat... Im trying to extrapolate and fill in the blanks of a very drunk guy who had to take a leak in an unfamiliar dark apartment in the middle of the night... I had been sitting on a speaker, and had awakened when Joyce screamed, What the hell are you doing?

My hazy memory started to recall that in my dream when she screamed I had snapped to a bit and realized that I was sitting on the speaker with my pants down to my ankles, relaxed and pissing like a racehorse on the living room rug.

And as this all was slowly coming into focus in my gin-soaked mind, as I opened my eyes and glanced over toward where the closest speaker was... in front of the speaker was a huge wet spot, about three feet in diameter. It hadnt been a dream. I had pissed her rug.

When I got up and around, she was needless to say way beyond mad (even I couldnt type pissed). Plus, though she wasnt especially attractive or sexy, she thought she was superior to us due to her age and her financial status, thought she was attractive and sexy, and accused me of sitting on the speaker and jerking off as I watched her sleep. What a fucking idiot. But what a great story. We roared all the way home.

We get back to Oyster Bay and put the keg in the downstairs cooler where the kegs were stored at Idas Folly, the bar-restaurant by the old Oyster Bay train station owned by Michaels parents, Eddie and Ida Iacovelli. Ida said we could keep our keg down there until we were ready to drink it.

One night, Mike and I walked into the bar and the customers were talking about the rotten beer theyd been served. Our good friend Charlie Brezinski, a long-time conductor on the Long Island Railroad and the chief cook and bottle washer at Idas between shifts, had been drunk when he went down to tap a new keg and accidentally tapped ours. And it was nasty. The official bar term is skunked. It had gone bad, very bad, sitting in the hot car trunk for a full day.

It was pretty funny when we put it all together. And we told Ida it was only fair that we get a keg to replace it. How the fuck that was fair Ill never understand, but she said okay.

Believe it or not, this story is the chronicling of my military career.

A week or so later, my dear friends the DeGuzman family were having a big Sunday afternoon party at their home on Main Street in Oyster Bay, with the familys many kids and friends, their relatives the Biggarts many kids and friends, and of course all the local hippies, who wound up at every party any of us had back in those great, great days that were the late sixties. It was the perfect party for our windfall, the rescued keg of beer, so we decided to donate it. We dragged one up from Idas cellar and brought it to the party.

We of course got smashed as hell, and it had rained a bit, so the outdoor party was a sloppy mess.

While my brother Bobby and Peter DeGuzman and I were wrestling in the mud, one of them smashed against my left leg from the side, it bent the way it wasnt supposed to, and something ripped. Man, did that hurt. Wow. But I was drunk, and eventually the pain subsided. A week or so later, I turned on my left leg a bit too quickly or something, and I got hit with the same pain. My knee killed me for about an hour and then again it subsided.

What I didnt know was when I got hit from the side, the cartilage in my left knee had partially torn, and the second time I had torn it a bit more.

I went back to college, and in January I was walking up the stairs of my rented house, caught the heel of my left boot on a stair, and it was like someone shot me in the knee. The cartilage had finally totally ripped and the pain was triple what it had been the other two times. My God. I started guzzling beer much faster than usual, somehow hobbled over to my pal Jan Beers apartment across the street, and got naked with her.