When I wrote about my godfather, Bob Caplinger, last year (“The West Virginia Hillbilly”), I had a feeling there was something more. There was something else my parents had saved and I just had to find it.

There it was, in amongst our family archives.

In 1991, Bob wrote an autobiographical short story, dedicated it to my parents and younger brother, and dropped it in the mail to them.

SATURDAY NIGHT IN CAPITALS

A short story by Bob Caplinger

Written expressly for Joan, Hal, and Bill Vayo
who got caught up in the circumstances
without even trying or knowing the web was there

“Why does most of the stuff that happens to me seem like Saturday night in CAPITOL LETTERS instead of just plain ol’ Tuesday afternoon in the cool of a shade tree?” Bob wondered.

“Take that crazy business of the experimental workshop play that was produced last month in New York,” he thought.

Thirty-five years ago, Bob had worked with Hal at a small GE plant in a small town on the New York Barge Canal in upstate New York. For both of them, it was their first permanent job after graduating from college and finishing the rotating GE training program. There were just the two of them and a couple of clerical types working for joltin’ Joe, the dynamic, bombastic, and type-A Manager of Employees and Community Relations for the plant.

While Hal and Bob worked together at the plant, Hal and Joan, his wife, had a baby. Since both they and Bob were Catholics, they asked Bob if he would be the Godfather for the little girl baby, Paula.

Bob was delighted.

Shortly after that, Bob got transferred by the huge GE complex to another plant. And within a short time, Hal and Joan also got transferred. They never worked together in the same GE location again. Years later Bob had been laid off from GE for a temporary time, and he found a job working in New York City. Hal was working at GE headquarters at that time, and they took time to have lunch a few times, but it was not like working together for the same company.

Hal and Joan had two other boy children before Paula and one boy child, Billy, after Paula. For Bob, everything in the children category of Joan and Hal was measured before and after Paula – BP or AP.

“Paula is getting married this summer in a small town in Indiana,” Hal told Bob in a phone call sometime around the middle of the ’80s.

“I’ll be there,” Bob said, matter of fact-like.

And he was. He flew to Louisville from Houston, where he now lived. He rented a car and drove the 125 miles or so over to the small town and attend the wedding. The best that Ferdinand could muster and the best damn wedding reception that the auxiliary at the American Legion Hall could put together. The maximum they would charge Joan and Hal for the whole affair, including the sitdown dinner, was six dollars and a quarter.

Ferdinand was so small that Bob and, for that matter, many of the other members of Joan and Hal’s family stayed at a motel in a small town seven miles down the road. That was where Bob met Bill. He was a teenager at the time. Wild. Confident. Muddled. Full of energy or what Bob’s daddy used to say, “piss and vinegar.”

Bill grew up. Or at least he got older.

Bob also grew older.

He had never even thought about growing up for a long time. Every time he did, something happened that proved he couldn’t – or didn’t want to. Bill graduated from high school in 1982 and after batting around college for a year or so, he enlisted in the Marine Corps.

He spent time stateside and then a good hitch in Hawaii – until the Desert Storm in the Middle East broke out. He was in Saudi Arabia quickly. No training necessary for Sergeant Bill. He was up to speed. That was why the Marines had invested nearly six years of training in him. Although he had probably not thought of what was happening to him during that period in exactly those words.

It didn’t look like Bill was going to be in the thick of the fighting, but who could tell? After all he was not a grunt – he didn’t have a grunt MOS. He was a sergeant in the military police. But who could tell?

Joan told Bob that Bill was going to Saudi.

Bob told himself that he was going to write to Bill every day that he was over there, and he started doing that as soon as he found out what Bill’s address was.

Bob told Bill that he knew that he was very busy and didn’t expect him to write back to him. Bob told Bill that much of the time he could find to write to him was while he was at work as a clerk typist in Galveston. Just before he left Saudi, Bill recorded a whole C-90 audio tape for Bob and sent it to him. In it, Bill talked like he was talking to himself about his life, his loves, what he was planning to do when he got home, about school. Really profound. But life is generally not profound. It is more like small-case tuesday afternoon at two-thirty. Most of the time.

Except for Bob.

The tape sounded like Bill wanted more of Saturday night in his life when he got home. But doesn’t seem like that has happened yet. He is at home, going to a semi-local college (not Yale, which is a crying assed shame) and coping with the two girls who were fighting for his bod mainly while he was safely several thousand miles away.

“I’m treating you to a play in New York City this coming Saturday night,” Bill told Hal and Joan. “Bethlyn, a friend of mine, has the lead, and she asked me to come.”

“Sure, we’d like to come, son,” Hal said. “Beats hell out of Saturday night tv, even if the tickets are a blood offering for your keeping your room so crapped up during the past month.”

When Joan and Hal got to the theater, The Theater Ten Ten at 1010 Park Avenue at 85th Street in the City, sat down and opened the Playbill, they were shocked after reading casually for a couple of minutes.

Rattlesnake was the name of the play. Running time one and three-quarters hours. Produced by Diane DiMemmo. Nothing remarkable there. Written by Fred Pezzulli. Not familiar. Jessie played by Bethlyn Weidler, Bill’s friend. Nothing unusual there, that was why and how they got here in the first place.

“For Christ’s sake, look here,” Hal buzzed to Joan. He was reading the synopsis of the play. “That is where CAPITAL LETTERS SATURDAY NIGHT BOB comes from.”

God knows that over a 35-year period, Bob had alternately bored and entertained Joan and Hal with stories about Elkins, West Virginia – a town of about 8,000 souls and a few cows – in the middle of West Virginia, near nowhere.

The Playbill read,

During the second World War, the U.S. Army moved into many small towns across the country to train troops for the invasion of Europe and the assault on the Pacific Islands.

One such town was Elkins, West Virginia. The surrounding countryside with its rough terrain, mountains, back-country roads, wooden bridges, hollows, creeks, and rivers was a perfect place for army maneuvers.

The war turned this small West Virginia town into a training camp overnight. It turned young boys into hustlers and young girls into prostitutes.

Rattlesnake is the story of one such boy and the girl he worked for. It is also the story of others who came in contact with them and the consequences of those encounters.

The play is set in June 1944 and is about events happening in about four days.

When Hal and Joan got home, Joan wrote a letter to Bob and told him about the small-world phenomena, the play, how they got there, and they sent him a copy of the Playbill.

“It sure is a small world,” Bob thought as he read the Playbill.

“I was one of the hustlers. I never ran a stable of whores but I sure made a bunch of money for a kid 16 years old in 1944. I sold newspapers that cost three cents and the GIs seldom paid me less than a nickel for them. Sometimes a dime. I hustled px watches. I sold them little comic dirty books that I got from Louie’s newsstand. I sold them food. And sometimes got beer and booze for them when they couldn’t go into town to find some.

“My parents moved me out of my private bedroom and back in with my brother, Jimmy, temporarily. They rented my room to a Catholic chaplain. Father Jack used to take me with him in his Jeep to be an altar boy when he said Mass for the troops. He had beaucoup altar wine which I sampled liberally. And his personal 1941 Pontiac, which he loaned me a lot, was the scene of some heavy necking and sometimes a little bit more with Jan and Christie and a couple of others,” he reveried.

“The only Pezzulli family I know of lived a couple of blocks from our house, next to Archie Bodenheimer,” Bob thought. “Mr. Pezzulli tore the living and dining rooms out of the house and put in plate-glass windows and made a mom and pop neighborhood grocery store out of their home. It was unique because it was one of the first stores of that kind in Elkins, where you could buy a six-pack to take out. And believe me, us high-school kids found people old enough to get it for us when Mr. Pezzulli might think that we weren’t old enough – or sales were good enough that he knew that we weren’t.”

Well, now. Bob was curious.

He wanted to find out if this was the same Pezzulli family. How? The only factual information he had was the Playbill. And he was sitting in Galveston, Texas, and Rattlesnake had played October 1-5 in New York City. It was October 15. He called the theater. The box office gave him the number of Diane DiMemmo, producer of the show. After getting her in person and not her answering machine, and after overcoming her suspicions that he was going to do something dire and menacing with the information, he got the work number of Fred Pezzulli.

“Radiology Department, Lennox Hill Hospital,” the individual answered the phone.

“Fred Pezzulli, please,” Bob asked.

“Just one moment, and I’ll page him,” the operator answered.

After a couple of minutes on hold, she came back on and said, “He doesn’t answer his page.”

“Let me try back later,” Bob said. “Thanks.”

A couple of hours later, after an identical attempt, the same results occurred. Bob decided to try again on Monday since it was quite late on Friday afternoon.

On Monday morning, Bob made another call and the operator paged “Dr. Pezzulli” and after a couple of minutes he came on the line.

Bob introduced himself and:

“Sure, I remember you, Bob,” Fred said. “I am a radiologist here at Lennox Hill. I went to Elkins High School with your brother, Jim, and your cousin Johnny. I thought for a long time I was in love with your cousin Martha Lou.

“I still own the house on Davis Street,” he said. “And I rent it. My ‘agent’ in Elkins is John Sainat, who bought the house that your mother and father owned on Center Street, just around the corner. I go back to Elkins at least once a year and usually stay at a motel, but the last time, John and Eleanor were in Florida and so I used their house, maybe even slept in the same bedroom where you and that Army Chaplain slept back there in the ’40s.”

“I haven’t published Rattlesnake,” he said. “But as soon as I get a rewrite done on it, after the performances in October and the advice of critics and others, and when it is typed, I’ll send you a copy,” he told Bob.

Fred said he had a couple of sisters who married local guys and live around Elkins. His brother, Tony, is a foot doctor in San Antonio and has been for a long time. Fred has written two other plays with settings in and around Elkins, West Virginia. They are The Iron Horse Café and Ginny. They have both been produced by the New Voice Theater Company in Vermont.

Bob and Fred agreed they would try to keep up with one another. Fred is 58 and Bob is 63. Maybe they will. Maybe Fred will mail Rattlesnake. Maybe.

“Small friggin’ world,” Bob mused, “particularly when you are blessed, or cursed, with CAPITAL LETTERS, SATURDAY NIGHT.”

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“SATURDAY NIGHT IN CAPITALS” © 1991 Robert M. Caplinger. All rights reserved.

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