Off The Wall At Callahan's Read online

  Books by Spider Robinson

  TELEMPATH

  CALLAHAN’S CROSSTIME SALOON*

  STARDANCE (collaboration with Jeanne Robinson)

  ANTINOMY

  THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS

  TIME TRAVELERS STRICTLY CASH*

  MINDKILLER

  MELANCHOLY ELEPHANTS

  NIGHT OF POWER

  CALLAHAN’S SECRET*

  CALLAHAN AND COMPANY (omnibus)

  TIME PRESSURE

  CALLAHAN’S LADY

  COPYRIGHT VIOLATION

  TRUE MINDS

  STARSEED (collaboration with Jeanne Robinson)

  KILL THE EDITOR

  LADY SLINGS THE BOOZE

  THE CALLAHAN TOUCH

  *FORTHCOMING FROM TOR BOOKS

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  OFF THE WALL AT CALLAHAN’S

  Copyright © 1981, 1989, 1994 by Spider Robinson

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, N.Y. 10010

  Tor ® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  Design by Lynn Newmark

  Interior illustrations by Phil Foglio

  Edited by James Frenkel

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Robinson, Spider.

  Off the wall at Callahan’s / Spider Robinson.

  p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates Book.”

  ISBN 0-312-85661-X

  1. Bars (Drinking establishments)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3568.03156038 1994

  813'.54—dc20

  93-43229

  CIP

  First edition: March 1994

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This one is for

  my friend and agent

  Eleanor Wood,

  sine qua honest work,

  with love, and thanks

  for the idea…

  and for

  Captain Lazarus Long,

  who established the precedent…

  and most of all, of course,

  for Jeanne,

  sine qua nihil…

  Contents

  Foreword

  Graffiti

  Puns (I)

  Puns (II)

  Songs

  Dramatis Personae

  Foreword

  Wall Flowers

  A) Begin reading here if you’re not familiar with Callahan’s Place [if you are, feel free to skip down to B)]:

  Callahan’s Place, the now-vanished tavern in Suffolk County, New York, owned and operated by Michael Callahan (a.k.a. Justin of Harmony), was an unusual establishment in many respects.

  (Understatement of the millennium!)

  Among the many peculiarities of that merriest of oases:

  Aliens, cyborgs, transvestites, talking dogs, telekinetics, telepaths, clairvoyants, immortals, Intergalactic Traveling Salesmen, time travelers, vampires, victims of severe Tourette’s syndrome, and even editors, were all made welcome there, from time to time.

  Patrons were encouraged to smash their glass in the big fireplace after drinking—so long as they were willing to propose a toast first, naming the reason they felt like smashing a glass. Exercising this prerogative doubled the price of your drink…to a dollar. (Mike got a bulk rate on glasses.)

  Punning, and competition therein, were encouraged—nay, actively abetted—by Callahan, himself a hopeless and utterly shameless paronomasiac.

  Privacy was defended by force: any patron heard to ask snoopy questions of another patron was customarily blackjacked by Fast Eddie the piano player and dumped in the alley.

  But perhaps the most remarkable and most important thing about Callahan’s Place was the converse of the last paragraph: any customer who displayed any desire to discuss his or her troubles received the instant and undivided attention of not merely the bartender but everyone in the room.

  Consequently, a plethora of interesting stories ended up getting told in Callahan’s. All those presently known to me have been set down in the three volumes CALLAHAN’S CROSSTIME SALOON, TIME TRAVELERS STRICTLY CASH, and CALLAHAN’S SECRET (all currently in print in Ace paperback), and collected in the omnibus CALLAHAN AND COMPANY (Phantasia Press hardcover; contact Alex Berman, Phantasia Press, 5536 Crispin Way, West Bloomfield, Michigan 48033, for details).

  Regrettably, the last of these stories, “The Mick of Time,” involved the utter and final destruction of Callahan’s Place, a few minutes before midnight on New Year’s Eve, 1984/5…

  B) Begin reading here if you already know Callahan’s:

  But although it is gone, gone for good, echoes of Callahan’s Place linger on.

  For one thing, there is a related cycle of stories having to do with Mike Callahan’s wife, Lady Sally McGee, and the fabulous bordello she once operated in Brooklyn, Lady Sally’s House—a House of healthy repute, and like her husband’s tavern, an equal-opportunity enjoyer. (Also, sadly, gone now.) Two bookfuls of these stories currently exist: CALLAHAN’S LADY, and LADY SLINGS THE BOOZE (I did warn you about the puns…)

  For another, a book is now available called THE CALLAHAN TOUCH, concerning Mary’s Place, the remarkable tavern opened elsewhere in Suffolk County by Jake Stonebender (folksinger, guitar-player, songwriter, and narrator of all the Callahan stories) after the obliteration of Callahan’s Place.

  And of course, there is this book, which represents my own desperate attempt to feed the voracious maw of ongoing Callahan Mania.

  You see, another oddity of Callahan’s saloon was that Mike Callahan kept no mirror behind his bar. The wall above the gallery of bottles—known as “The Wall,” to distinguish it from the other three—was bare and featureless…save for decades of graffiti, inscribed there by Callahan himself. Any time he heard something that struck him spoken in his bar, it was Mike’s custom to grab a Magic Marker and preserve it for posterity on The Wall. Many a newcomer found him- or herself so fascinated by this distillation of over forty years of good conversation that they ended up sitting there all night, reading and drinking and reading and drinking. (Most of Callahan’s customs had more than one purpose…but all of them seemed to end up putting money in his pockets. Not a stupid man.)

  And one day I remembered that Wall, and saw a way to get out from under a nagging problem…

  Look: transcribing Jake Stonebender’s yarns about Callahan’s Place into polished and compelling prose has been putting bread on my table and music in my headphones for just short of twenty years now. Nobody misses The Place more than me. Ever since “The Mick of Time,” the last Callahan story, was published in Analog Science Fact/Science Fiction Magazine in 1985, I have been reduced to thinking up stories of my own, an onerous task. Trust me: if I knew any more Callahan stories, I’d find time to set them down on paper. If I could find a way to get more, I would; I have tapped every source, shaken every tree, pursued every avenue.

  Yet not a week has gone by—in six years!—without at least a few plaintive letters from readers asking when I’m going to publish some more Callahan’s Place stuff. People keep sidling up to me at conventions, on the streets, in public washrooms…imploring me to publish something else—anything else—with the word “Callahan” in the title.

  I do not like to disappoint readers; they are in too good a position to redres
s perceived slights. So I cudgeled my brains. (I do this so often that I have had my cranium fitted with a removable screw-top, to facilitate cudgeling.) Among other things, I relived in memory—over and over again—every moment I had ever personally spent in that caravanserai of compassion. And finally one day as I was idly forward-scanning through all the mental videotape, I happened to notice a flashbulb go off…

  I knew that many photographs had been taken in Callahan’s Place—hell, two of my most treasured possessions are framed 8×10 glossies of myself at The Place (one jamming with Fast Eddie and Jake; the other standing at the bar with Mike Callahan’s arm around me; both photos autographed by the participants). I knew at least half a dozen people likely to keep a scrapbook of such photos. In many of those pix, I reasoned, The Wall must be visible…

  So I made a lot of phone calls, and I paid a lot of postage, and I made a lot of expensive trips to the East Coast…

  …and then I sealed myself in my office with about a googolplex of snapshots of Callahan’s Place, a magnifying glass, a Macintosh II typewriter, a stereo, a case of Old Bushmill’s and two pounds of Celebes Kalossi coffee…

  …and after only a million years of pain and eyestrain, I had painstakingly reconstructed something like 50 percent of the wit and wisdom recorded by Michael Callahan and imprudently stored by him on a medium inadequate to withstand a nuclear fireball. You hold it in your hands.

  A large and aromatic bouquet of Wall flowers: flowers plucked from off The Wall at Callahan’s Place…*

  Yes, there was more written on The Wall than you’ll find in this book—but I don’t see what I can do about it unless and until more photographs surface. (If you have any, contact me c/o the publisher.)

  Yes, I admit that the epigrams, maxims, perorations and pithy thayingth contained herein do lose something from not being scrawled in Callahan’s inimitable (thank God!) handwriting—but not one of those photos was clear and crisp enough to reproduce well in book format.

  Yes, some of these quotations, and all of the longer puns, have already appeared in variant form in diverse Callahan’s or Lady Sally stories. For one thing—as in so many aspects of science fiction—there is precedent for this from Robert A. Heinlein: every word of his book THE NOTEBOOKS OF LAZARUS LONG appears in his previous novel TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE, yet both books perennially jockey for position on Berkley Books’ list of All-Time Best-Selling Titles. For another thing, in recent years people have been quoting some of these maxims and puns to me, unaware that I hold copyright, so it’s time to set the record straight. (One reader informs me that she has been sending out Christmas cards containing the Yule Gibbons pun for years now—presumably in an effort to shorten her Christmas-card list.)

  Besides, a great many of these quotes, and all the shorter atrocities, appear here for the first time.

  And I have included lagniappe. Along with sayings from The Wall, I have included the lyrics to several of the songs that Jake and Fast Eddie used to play on Fireside Fillmore Nights, the ones that got the most requests during my tenure there. While only one or two of these songs actually appeared on The Wall, all of them frequently echoed from it, and from the other three walls. Several of these are recorded here for the first time; I’ve transcribed most of them from tapes in my possession, and can certify the accuracy of the lyrics.

  And as if that weren’t enough, I have taken special trouble to isolate the most potentially lethal quotes from off The Wall—the puns!—in a separate, labeled section of their own, for your sanitary protection.

  Wisdom, laughter, and song—here you have Callahan’s Place in a nutshell…

  I know: it’s not the same as having more Callahan stories. But it’s something, and the best I can presently offer you. Half of why one went to Callahan’s Place was for the companionship, the camaraderie, the merriment and melancholy, and the stories that got told, and I wish I had more of that for you, I do.

  But the other half of why I used to go there was the consistently good conversation. Interesting things got said there a lot, because Callahan’s custom of requiring a toast put his customers into the habit of distilling their (very!) varied experiences and insights into crystallized form. As the late, immortal Theodore Sturgeon used to say, “If it’s really basic, it’s simple.” And you can’t have too much of that kind of stuff.

  It is my fond hope that in consideration of all this, readers will take pity on me, cut me some slack, and not write me any more letters asking for more Callahan’s Place stuff for a while.

  I promise, anything I hear, you’ll hear. Okay?

  —

  Spider Robinson

  Vancouver, British Columbia

  29 November 1991

  C) Begin reading here if you’re the kind of reader who always skips the Foreword.

  *True story: in 1973 I had the privilege and pleasure of meeting the late great Alfred Bester. Much could be written about that meeting, for Alfie in person was the original One-Man Chinese Firedrill—but what is relevant here is that at one point he asked me what I was working on, and I said I was putting together a collection of Callahan’s bar stories but couldn’t think of a good title. Eyes flashing, Alfie excused himself, went to the washroom and returned less than two minutes later with a neatly typed list of over two dozen terrific titles. Among them were CALLAHAN’S CROSSTIME SALOON, TIME TRAVELERS STRICTLY CASH, CALLAHAN’S SECRET…and yes, by God, OFF THE WALL AT CALLAHAN’S.

  I am now a firm believer in time travel…

  Thanks yet again, Alfie, wherever you are!

  Graffiti

  Off The Wall

  at Callahan’s Place

  Callahan’s Law: Shared pain is lessened; shared joy is increased.

  Lady Sally’s Law: Shared despair is squared; shared hope is cubed (or better: Raised to the power of infinity?).

  Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of. But do it in private, and wash your hands afterward.

  —Woodrow W. Smith

  A person should live forever, or die trying.

  —Mike Callahan

  Most joints, the barkeep listens to your troubles…but we happen to love this one so much that we all share his load.

  —Jake Stonebender

  We raise hopes, here…until they’re old enough to fend for themselves.

  —Mike

  The church is near

  But the road is icy.

  The tavern is far

  But I will walk carefully.

  —Ukrainian proverb,

  quoted by Charlie Daniels

  Funny men are better lovers.

  They know about pain.

  —Josie Bauer

  The average human in the best of circumstances spends a hell of a lot of attention and energy on monitoring the body’s thousand and one aches and pains and twinges and other sudden, small alarms. At least as much energy and time goes into constantly combing the environment for immediate dangers or enemies. And as much again is spent on worry about impending or chronic problems, the struggle to stay afloat, the need to be loved, and the underlying awareness of mortality.

  No wonder we’re all so grumpy so much of the time…

  —Joe Quigley

  One man’s meat is another man’s person.

  —Lady Sally McGee

  If you can’t have fun here, it’s your own damn fault.

  —Mike

  There’s nothing in the human heart or mind, no place no matter how twisted or secret, that can’t be endured—if you have someone to share it with.

  —Jake

  “This game’s over, man! You gotta move your Boss or Rocky’s gonna lay a subpoenie on him; then his Torpedo is gonna smoke your Old Lady, and all your Heavies’ll be doin’ time—except for maybe your Mouthpiece, but Rocky’s Sheriff got him put in the corner—you got nothin’ left but Punks and Junkies: you’re through, Jimmy.”

  —Angel Martin to Jim Rockford,

  commenting on a chess game, in the Rockford Files episode “Ch
icken Little is a Little Chicken” by Stephen J. Cannell.

  For a predator, a wrong guess can be preferable to a slow one.

  —Jake

  Context is everything.

  Breast-feeding is beneficial for nearly all infants—but for an elderly cardiac patient, it can be fatal…

  —Samuel Webster, M.D.

  All-purpose toast:

  “To all the ones who weren’t as lucky.”

  —Mike

  “Rupture” occurs when you think you are in the middle of a conversation with someone…and suddenly discover that you’ve merely been making noises at each other, that there is a previously unsuspected chasm between you.

  —Chip Delany

  Never wake up a cop by dropping a .45 on the pavement next to him.

  —Joe

  If you’ve got a hurt and I’ve got a hurt and we share them, some crazy how-or-other, we each end up with less than half a hurt apiece.

  —Jake

  Everybody’s got roots in the past—but they’s all got roots in the future, too.

  —Fast Eddie Costigan

  Joy always equals pain in the long run.

  —Mike

  Joy is the product of the pain that has gone before it, and vice versa.

  —Rachel

  Femaleness and maleness are halves of a spectrum, a curve on which you can graph humanity and get a hell of a lot of overlap in the middle. Some disparage these so-called in-betweeners, but the true freaks are the ones stuck way out on either end of the curve, their sexuality unalloyed by any of its complementary ingredient. These poor perverts often carve wide paths through the world, driven as they are by untempered engines, inspiring the awe due mighty forces out of control.