MOST ADMIRED MAN IN ROUNKE'S BAR

MOST ADMIRED MAN IN ROUNKE’S BAR

(From Daily Rhapsody)

By

Larry Eugene Meredith

“There’s nothing in my life I haven’t controlled. I have made everything conform to my will, “ was Keith’s motto.

It was true.

We sat to drink and talk in a far corner of Rounke’s Bar, a regular after work hangout.

 Keith was not tall. He was average looking, although women called him cute. He had a clean and rugged face, like something you would find carved beneath a waterfall. His hair was blond and receding. Yet every man would watch him walk away and one would say, “Man, that Keith!” Every man wants to control his own life, but how few do?

There was a lot of envying of Keith.

None of us certainly. We had gone through the motions of education taking our cues from our elders.  We worked in the institutional gray of corporate offices where our skin turned paper-white. We were married to hometown sweethearts of whom our parents approved. Women who never fretted over fashion and whose hemlines hadn’t risen higher than their first prom dress. When we made love it was not with passion, but desperation, strictly done by the book and quick. “Men lead lives of quiet desperation,”¹ said some wise man in some other bar in some other time.

But not Keith, he wasn’t going to the grave with any song unsung. He was a man of action, not of brooding over the insignificant consequences of an act if it prevented his controlling the situation. Keith was a doer, our hero. Self-pity did not cripple him as it did us.

While we sniveled excuses to some petty high school teacher, Keith was arguing his own point of view with the principal and when the principal would not acquiesce; Keith walked out of his office and never went back to school.

“It was a matter of principle,” he said with a laugh. His laugh was loud and free of all care.

There was a girl he fell in love with, but her parents disapproved. He was not good enough for their daughter, this high school dropout, the free man. He was not a Catholic, which to them was the worse sin of all. He was taboo, verboten, forbidden, and he married her.

It wasn’t easy. He had to sneak her away from watchful eyes. There was a bus trip across several states and seclusion in a strange land, while police searched for the missing girl. And later there was the tribunal, the challenge to the legality of the license and the attempt at annulment. But he won her in the end, going from town to town, state to state, job to job, day to day and hand to mouth until the comingling of sperm and egg resulted in conception. The child ended the harassment and brought only the silence of family banishment.

What a man of determination. The excommunication of his wife condemning her to the lips of Hell and damnation could not frighten him into subjugation, as it would us. But he would have none of it when his wife demanded they raise their child Catholic. Despite her tears, screams and pleads he would not relinquish to her desires.

He left her. He left her three states behind with their child. He left her still barred from returning to her parental home. He never went back. He never wrote. He was a man of amazing self-control and strength. He laughed without regret when we would have lost sleep over such a slight to a wife or child.

We admired his stand against the boss. He stood to full height and called the boss a bastard to his face and marched out to the unheard applause of our hearts.

Man, that Keith!

“We gather in this far corner of Rounke’s bar to lift a glass to Keith”, one of us said.

Keith died in a brutal car accident. He crashed his small foreign sports car into a bridge abutment. It took firemen four hours to cut him from the wreck, and when those hours ended he had no laugh left inside.

We meet at Rounke’s Bar in a wake since that loss  “The good die young,”² said some wise man in some bar in some other time, I think it was Billy Joel. We enslaved men, captured by convention and care, continue, but the free man died.

One of us witnessed the crash. He came to our wake, but brooded in the back.  “Funny,” he said after a few rounds had passed “the road was straight and dry. The day was clear and traffic was light.”

He stood and raised a glass. “Gentlemen,” he said, I give you the most admired man in Rounke’s Bar. There was nothing in his life he didn’t control.”

We turned away and left our glasses sit.

-30-

FOOTNOTES:

1. Henry David Thoreau

2. Attributed to:

 Herodotus (c. 445 BC), “Whom the gods love dies young; best go first.”

William Wordsworth in “The Excursion”, “The good die first/And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust burn.”

John Barrymore, “The good die young – because they see it’s no use living if you’ve got to be good”

Many others, all before Billy Joel