Vineyard Deceit by Philip Craig

Author:Philip Craig
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

15

Oak Bluffs’ main street is Circuit Avenue. There’s a honky-tonk quality about it that contrasts sharply with the prim propriety of Edgartown’s streets. It’s lined with shops catering to day-trippers who come in off the boats from Hyannis and Falmouth and then get on the tour buses driven by highly imaginative drivers whose ignorance of the Vineyard in no way prevents them from spinning entertaining explanations about what their passengers are looking at. Back in Oak Bluffs once again after their tour of the island in their driver’s mind, these tourists roam Circuit Avenue buying fast foods and souvenirs of their day on the island—brass trinkets, tee shirts, wood carvings of sea gulls on pilings, and other such New Englandish stuff, imported largely from Asia. Then they take the boat back to the mainland and tell their friends all about the Vineyard.

Mixed with these shops are bars that are largely filled in the summertime by young working people and college types. If there’s ever a fight on Martha’s Vineyard, it usually starts behind one of these bars and consists of drunken young men making loud combative noises while they swing at one another or roll around on the ground until the local cops come and PC them for the night. The Fireside is one of these bars. I found a parking place just up the street and went inside to find Bonzo.

Sometime before I met him, Bonzo was, I’ve been told, a promising young man. The only son of a widowed schoolteacher, he was the apple of her eye. Then, as occasionally happens to young men these days, he scrambled his brain with an illegal chemical additive, reputedly bad acid. He now earns a few dollars a day by performing menial tasks at the Fireside. He gazes out upon the world through sweet, empty eyes, and when not working, collects bird songs on his expensive recording devices and, now and then, goes fishing with me. He takes his work seriously and harbors no grudges against man or God. His mother lives in one of the gingerbread cottages near the Tabernacle and still labors in the academic halls of Martha’s Vineyard High School. She loves innocent, blank-brained Bonzo without hope or self-pity. I take her fish from time to time, as Vineyard fishermen do to folks who cannot catch their own.

Bonzo and his mop and bucket were cleaning a spill back in the far corner of the barroom. The place was crowded with noisy people, mostly ten or fifteen years younger than I was, and the music was blaring in that mind-splitting mode that seems so popular with today’s half-deaf youth. “American Bandstand” and I were born and raised together, so I am familiar with many a wretched, once-popular song and singer, but compared to the current awfulness, even Elvis, once a controversial figure, now seems sedate and bland. My advanced age did not seem to offend anyone, so I went to the bar, found a stool, and ordered a Sam Adams.

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