Songs of Memory: A Jukebox Story Read online

  The Songs of Memory

  A Jukebox Story

  Dean Wesley Smith

  The Songs of Memory

  Copyright © 2012 Dean Wesley Smith

  Published by WMG Publishing

  Cover design copyright © 2012 WMG Publishing

  Cover Illustration by

  Jorge Enrique Villalobos Espinos/Dreamstime.com

  Smashwords Edition

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved.

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

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  The Songs of Memory

  I locked the front door of the Garden Lounge with a loud click and turned up the lights slightly so that it didn’t feel like nighttime. Then I turned back to the six friends sitting on the bar stools, drinking and laughing, with their backs to me.

  This was going to be very, very hard to tell them.

  Outside, the July sun was beating down on the afternoon streets, sending the temperatures to almost a hundred. But inside the Garden, I kept the temperature at a cool seventy-two. But even with that, I was sweating and worried about what I was going to say.

  The old jukebox that had changed so many things for all of us sat in the corner, dark as always, sort of tucked away behind a planter full of natural-looking fake plants. I seldom plugged the jukebox in and turned it on for anything but the special Christmas Eve gathering. The background music in the bar came from an old stereo system tucked under one end of the bar.

  That old jukebox could take a person back through time to the memory associated with a song, and the last thing I wanted was to have customers playing songs that took them to memories that they changed and then not come back to be customers. I didn’t have enough customers as it was.

  But today I needed to turn it on one more time, just for me.

  So as I walked toward the bar, I moved around the planter and plugged in the jukebox.

  All six regulars turned as one, all stunned.

  “Stout?” Big Carl said, frowning. “What are you doing?”

  Carl was a giant of a man and as gentle as they come. He worked as a contractor and had skin as tanned and leathery as shoe leather. Of all my friends, he also worried the most about me.

  Dave, my best friend, sat next to Carl on Carl’s left. He was still in his airline pilot’s uniform and he looked suddenly very worried. He had managed to get here by changing flight assignments this afternoon. It was the only time I had ever asked him to do something like that, so he already had a hint about how serious this was.

  Sandy, his daughter, sat to the left of him. She was a private eye, one of the best in the city. Beside her, Fred stared at me as well, watching me like I was about to rip off the hotel for older men he ran down on the south side.

  Next to Fred on that end was Billy, a rough-looking man with even a rougher past. Billy had moved into Fred’s hotel about six months ago, and the two had become like a couple, always seen together and bickering half the time.

  Closest to me and the jukebox on Big Carl’s right was Richard Cone, a manager of a local factory and the only one of the group besides me who didn’t drink. Richard also ran the bar when I couldn’t make it or was out of town for some reason. He was the only help I had, and he only worked when I wasn’t around.

  My six closest friends.

  All very different people.

  And all but Richard had experienced the effects of the jukebox. Richard just kept declining to go back to a memory, stating his life had turned out just fine and he was happy with where he was. But he loved to watch others disappear back into their memories from a song and then come back with stories.

  “So what’s happening, Stout?” Richard asked, as I moved around behind the bar.

  “Just a little announcement is all,” I said. “But before I do it, I need to take a little ride back in time.”

  “Not to change anything I hope,” Sandy said, clearly almost panicked.

  I laughed. Sandy existed because Dave had gone back through the jukebox and saved his wife. Without the jukebox, Sandy would have never been born, and no way was I going to take a chance on changing that.

  “Nope,” I said. “Not changing a thing. I just need to go have a look at someone one more time. Then I’ll tell you all what this is all about.”

  “Jenny?” Dave asked.

  I nodded, took a quarter from the cash register, then passed out earplugs as I moved over to the very special Wurlitzer jukebox and dropped in the quarter.

  “Stay focused on the bar while I’m gone,” I said. “I don’t want any of you jumping by accident.”

  They all nodded. They all knew the drill.

  I didn’t dare let myself hesitate. It had been ten years since I had taken this ride, ten years since I discovered the jukebox, and I didn’t dare hesitate now or I would never do it. But I had to know for sure if my feelings for Jenny were still there before I made my final decision. And the only way to discover that was go be with her for a few minutes.

  The length of the song.

  I punched A-1, the place on the jukebox where the special song had sat since I found the jukebox.

  “Have a good visit,” Richard said.

  All my friends looked very worried. The next two minutes were going to be a very long time for them, of that I had no doubt. I had done my share of waiting the length of a song while someone was gone, wondering if they would return.

  Those two or two-plus minutes could be an eternity.

  Behind me the jukebox clicked the 45 record into place. The first note of The Mindbenders song “A Groovy Kind of Love” started and the worried faces of my friends and the Garden Lounge vanished and I was facing Jenny across the hard, polished-Formica top of the table at the university student union.

  Jenny had been the one true love of my life. She had long, brown hair, very straight, as was the normal fashion of the late 1960s. She wore jeans and a white blouse tucked in with a cloth belt.

  We were sitting at our favorite table in the old university student union. She had just told me she was transferring to a university in Southern California and would have to leave in three weeks to get to a promised job and get settled before the semester started. It was the best school for her music degree, and was a great opportunity for her.

  Now for the “us” that existed, the couple we had become and been for the last few years, not so good, and we both knew that.

  The Mindbenders’ song played softly over the student union sound system, which was why the jukebox brought me to this moment.

  She had just looked at me and asked me what I wanted to do. And what I wanted her to do.

  I had just stared at her and not said a word, and eventually in a day or so we decided she should go and take the job and get the degree and I would visit as often as I could from Eugene, Oregon. I just didn’t want to leave the job I had at the moment. She had married someone else six months later.

  Now I sat there in that student union once again, staring at her, my stomach twisting just as it had all those years before. My young-self and my old-self memories were all locked into the same brain.

  When I was young, I hadn’t been willing to give up a job to go with her, and I had lost her. Would I be able to give up the Garden Lounge and all my friends in Portland this time around?

  That was the reason I had taken the trip through the jukebox, to try to get an answer for that question.

  My young self loved Jenny more than anything. And it seemed my older self
did as well. But not just the young girl sitting there, but the woman Jenny had become over all the years.

  As I had done when I was young, I just sat there silently and stared at her. Then the short song ended and I was back, standing in front of the jukebox and the worried looks of my friends.

  “You all right, Stout?” Dave asked.

  I nodded, then unplugged the jukebox and went around behind the bar.

  “Not really, huh?” big Carl said.

  “Not really,” I said as I refreshed everyone’s drinks, then leaned back against the back bar with the orange juice on the rocks that I sipped during the summer.

  The Garden was as silent as a tomb, so I moved over and turned the stereo back on for background noise. Music was so much of a person’s life, it didn’t feel right to not have some music playing while I talked with my friends.

  I couldn’t think of how to start into this, so as I moved back to my position leaning against the back bar facing my friends, I just decided to start from the beginning.

  “You know computers can be dangerous things.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” Dave said. As an airline pilot, he had told us more horror stories about computers than I wanted to remember. Especially the next time I had to fly.

  “About six months ago, I decided to see how Jenny was doing,” I said. “So I looked her up on that Google-thing that Sandy showed me how to use when she installed that computer in my office.”

  Sandy laughed. “That computer was for bookkeeping, not surfing the web.”

  Billy just shook his head. “Stout surfing. Now I’ve seen it all.”

  “Hey,” I said, laughing. “I used to surf when I was down in Florida for those jobs.”

  Billy snorted. “Yeah, thirty years and fifty pounds ago.”

  “Twenty-seven years and forty-three pounds,” I said, laughing even harder. Amazing how good friends could make you feel better even when you were trying to tell them bad news.

  Billy raised his glass in defeat.

  “So you found Jenny,” Sandy said, getting me back on my story. “What was she doing?”

  “I actually didn’t find her at first,” I said, my stomach twisting. “I actually found an obituary for her husband. He died of cancer two years ago. She was mentioned as surviving him.”

  “Oh,” was all Sandy said.

  “I searched some more, and discovered she had an account on something called Facebook, so I joined up.”

  “The world has ended,” Billy said.

  “My hero is lost,” Big Carl said.

  Fred just shook his head, saying nothing, while Sandy looked proudly at me and Richard and Dave looked worried.

  “So I contacted her and we’ve been in touch for six months now.”

  “No wonder you’ve been in such a good mood,” Richard said.

  I let them chatter about my mood for a second until Dave said, “Let him finish his story.”

  “Jenny has two grown kids and a couple of young grandkids. She’s living just south of San Francisco and doing fine. Retired from teaching at the university there.”

  “Is she going to come up and visit?” Fred asked. “I could clean a room in the Golden Dream if she needs a place to stay.”

  Billy just smacked him on the side of the arm and everyone laughed.

  “Thanks,” I said. “She actually will be in tonight, and I’ve got her a room at the Comfort Suites down the street from here.”

  Now smiles lit up on everyone, and they all started talking at once about how they were looking forward to meeting her.

  Finally, after the conversation eased, Dave looked at me and asked, “So, Stout, how come the trip through the jukebox?”

  “I wanted to see if the feelings were still there just from the old memories, or if these new memories were building new feelings.”

  “Getting serious it seems,” Richard said.

  “Skype will do that for you,” I said, smiling.

  “The world really has ended,” Fred said, shaking his head. “Our Stout is doing the nasty with a woman on the computer.”

  I just laughed. “Only talking. Honest.”

  Everyone but Richard laughed. “So what’s the upshot of this, Stout?”

  I took a deep breath and looked at Richard. “Remember when I had you run the bar for a week two months ago? I was down seeing Jenny and getting to know her family. And that went well, which is why she’s coming up here this time. To see my life and meet all of you.”

  “And if this goes well?” Richard asked.

  I smiled. Richard really, really knew me. He was one of the sharpest people I knew. And since he never took a drink, he often caught stuff others missed.

  “We might get married,” I said, smiling. “We’ve talked about it, but nothing firm yet. Waiting to see how this trip goes.”

  Everyone cheered and I quickly hushed them. “Jenny is looking forward to meeting you all, but not a word of that marriage stuff, all right? Promise?”

  Six hands went up as one, promising.

  “And if you decide to get hitched,” Richard said, “you’ll need to move down there with her. Right? She’s the one with the grandkids and family.”

  Suddenly even the background music didn’t help the dead feeling of the Garden. I made a note to hear the Beatles song playing on the radio to anchor this moment.

  “Actually, we’re planning on living both places,” I said. “And doing some traveling. But it will be tough to own a bar and not be here six months of the year.”

  I glanced at all six of the sad faces on my friends. The Garden was as much of a home to them as it was to me. Just like I couldn’t imagine shutting this bar down, they couldn’t imagine being without it and all the friendships. And that’s what they were all thinking at that moment.

  No one said a word, so I went on with my plan.

  I moved down in front of Richard. “Mr Richard Cone, sir,” I said, acting very formal. “I know you have a great job managing that plant, but I also know you have always wanted to own your own bar.”

  Richard’s head snapped up and he looked me square in the eyes.

  A Beach Boys song called “Good Vibrations” was now playing.

  “If this works out between me and Jenny, which I have a hunch it’s going to, would you be interested in buying the Garden Lounge and running it in any manner you see fit?”

  I watched him swallow hard, his eyes slightly misty.

  Except for the background song, the bar was dead silent.

  Dave leaned over and touched Richard on the shoulder. “I’ll back you if you need the help.”

  “Yeah, me too,” Sandy said.

  “Count me in,” Carl said. “I got some extra if you need it.”

  “Me too,” Fred said.

  “Not me,” Billy said. “I barely got enough to drink and eat and pay my rent to Fred here. But I’ll buy drinks if you’ll serve me.”

  Everyone laughed then, including Richard. Then Richard turned to them. “Thanks. But with my job and low expenses, I’ve been saving for something like this for a very, very long time.”

  He turned back to me and extended his hand. “Mr. Radley Stout, if things work out with your new girl, you’ve got a buyer – as long as that damned jukebox stays with the bar. We can’t be changing traditions now, can we?”

  We shook hands as everyone cheered, and it felt as if a huge weight had just lifted off my shoulders.

  * * *

  Jenny fit in perfectly with the regulars at the Garden. She and Dave and Richard hit it off perfectly, and after just a few evenings, she told me she felt like she had always been sitting at the bar joking with everyone.

  And at one point or another every one of my friends told me in private that if I lost this woman, I was dumber than a post.

  I had to agree with them, even though Jenny sure didn’t look much like the thin, long-haired girl I had fallen in love with all those decades ago. Just as I had done, she had filled out, and now her once-brown ha
ir was short and silver. And she tended to wear dresses more than jeans. And she wore glasses, those thin kind that professors wore.

  She actually had been a professor for over twenty-five years, teaching music theory and history before she retired to care for her husband in his last year.

  Her husband had been a building contractor, so she and Big Carl seemed to sometimes talk another language that most of us just didn’t understand.

  After four days, it was clear she and I were going to be together for a lot longer if I could just get past one more hurdle.

  Dave reminded me that I needed to tell her about the jukebox.

  I had to agree with him. It was important that a future partner would know that I owned – and was about to sell – a time machine.

  So once again I passed the word to my closest friends to come in early in the afternoon to help me out in case I needed it. And I asked Jenny to come with me to open the bar. I said I had something I needed to show her.

  “This sounds serious,” she said, looking at me with those wonderful brown eyes of hers. Those eyes hadn’t changed at all, and her ability to really see me hadn’t changed either.

  “It is,” I said. “And I hope nothing serious. Just something you need to know about.”

  The night before we had talked about me selling the bar to Richard and how happy I was about that.

  And sad at the same time.

  She double- and triple-checked that I was telling her the truth. After the last few days, she could see just how special the Garden Lounge was to me, and how hard it was going to be for me to let it go.

  I told her I didn’t plan on leaving the Garden forever. We would be regulars when we were in town. And I told her that every Christmas Eve we had to be there, no matter what. We could fly back to her kids for Christmas Day, since Oregon and California were only a few-hour flight apart.

  I told her she would understand why after I showed her what I had to show her at the bar.

  Christmas Eve at the Garden Lounge was a special time for all the regulars. It was the only time I ever turned on the jukebox and let customers go back to their memories. Richard had told me that even though he had never gone through the jukebox, he planned on honoring that tradition, and hoped I would be back every year to run the party.