Stoney’s

"I first ran into Stoney / in a bar downtown..."

Stoney’s is on Main Street in Crawfordsville, Indiana, its gray paint faded and windows covered with black plywood. I walk in because I have an old favorite song entitled, 'Stoney.'

"...said c'mon get your bag boy / come with me sun's up time to roll / know there ain't no better time than early in the morning / to be out walking the road...."

Inside, Stoney’s looks like it surrendered in 1947. The last improvements were poorly performed and made prior to the outside being painted. I think it's wallpaper on the walls: a 1920s-looking fade, countryside scenes spotted with evergreens. The ceiling is checkered with Donald Duck and Goofy images and stenciled notes about veterans. The chairs are dying, bleeding, cut, hanging threads of former upholstery. Round oaken tables and a bar crowded with ten men and three women, ponytails, tattoos, battered hot-buttered rum refugees from the drug wars, and worse.

I see faces not just weathered but glaciated, low-end frowns, terminal marriages of awkward, faltered life. Angry, assassin eyes telling a silent story, and telling it poorly. One alone in a cold corner, wordlessly weaving worries and wounds, embracing the dignity of silence. The bartender is short, wiry, with slicked back 50s hair and glassy blue eyes. A shorter, less handsome, Paul Newman. I approach an empty space at the bar.

"Budweiser," I say.

"Beer!" the man shouts, placing hands on the bar. "Beer! We have beer!"

"Budweiser," I say clearly, eliminating any New England accent, as if that's the problem.

"Beer! We have beer!" the man shouts. I glance left, notice a grin. The bartender retrieves a bottle from an ancient, reach-in cooler behind, calling as he does, "You wanna glass widdat?"

"Yes."

"That'll be four dollars," he says. There's not a joint within a hundred miles that charges more than a couple bucks for a Bud, and this place should give it away. With no reaction he plays to his audience. "It'd be less widdout the glass," he says with a wink. He pops my beer and glass on the bar and when I toss a buck tip he calls out, "A dollar! A dollar! Sit right here, this chair's yours!"

I move instead to an oaken table next to the juke box. Paul Newman comes over, plays Hank Williams. I do not engage him in conversation. I peruse the music after he's gone. No one alive is on the jukebox. As the old joke goes, they have both kinds of music—country AND western. No one alive, that is, unless they've been born again.

"...gettin’ a hold of another day beginning / instead of rushing on by / it would be like some Mr. Independence, son / taking our own sweet time… time as we know it...."

I think of Jerry Jeff's song, of sentiment conveyed of a time of freedom, time before marriage and family and worries and work.

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Time long ago and far away, trudging Nauset Beach toward one of the old, weathered shacks dotting the sand dune road. A three-mile November jaunt late one evening, several of us skirting the tide, keeping to wetted sand. Framed by brilliant night sky above, rhythmic water washing shoreline to our left, dunes to our right, and sparkling phosphorescence sand below. One was a friend who had spent several years in a leg cast, recently removed. He was valiantly plodding ahead, trying his best, but I could see he was struggling. We had all night, we were young, we hadn't a care in the world. There were no mortgages, or utility bills. There were no children, no life insurance, no equity loans. There was no keeping up with the Joneses, because all our Joneses had nothing. We were youths on sparkling sand yearning for all that life promised, all that lie ahead. I stopped my friend.

"What's the matter?" I asked him.

"I'm trying to keep up," he replied.

"Hey, we have all the time in the world," I said, "all the time in the world." We paused and laughed at the stars, pulled a rucksack bottle and tilted it north. We continued toward the shack and the warmth torn up snow-fencing in the cracked brick fireplace promised. We were far behind, but we didn't care. It didn't matter. Just two friends making our way through a starry, starry night, with time as we knew it.

"...but we were that free then / just walking down the road / never really caring where that highway goes… where that highway goes…."

Long ago and far away. And the highway had led me here where I sat, a stranger in a strange land’s broken bar. At one point I caught myself gesticulating with my hand, wordlessly weaving worries and wounds, embracing a silent dignity. Jerry Jeff Walker dedicated the song “to Harry Stoneback, wherever he may be.” I raised my glass to my old friend, wherever he may be, and began singing under my breath: "I first ran into Stoney, in a bar downtown..."