I Sailed with Magellan

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Once I was a great singer. Caruso Junior they called me, and Little der Bingle. Crooners like Bing Crosby and Sinatra were still big in those days. My repertoire included “Clang, Clang, Clang Went the Trolley,” the song behind my ambition to become a streetcar conductor. I knew the nameless tune my mother sang when we waited for the El: “Down by the station early in the morning, see the little puffer-billies all in a row”; and my uncle Lefty had taught me a version of “Popeye the Sailor Man” that went, “I’m Popeye the Sailor Man, I live in a garbage can, I eat all the junk and smell like a skunk, I’m Popeye the Sailor Man, I am.”

But none of those was the song for which I was famous, the song requested over and over. They’d hoist me onto the bar, where I’d carefully plant my feet among the beer bottles, steins, and shot glasses, and, taking a breath of whiskey air, belt out “Old Man River.” I’d learned the song by listening to my father’s mournful baritone while he shaved for work. It wasn’t a popular song of the time, not one you’d find on the mob-owned jukeboxes in those taverns where “That’s Amore” or the “Too Fat Polka” were as likely to be thumping from the speakers as “Hound Dog.” But the men drinking there had all toted that barge and lifted that bale and got a little drunk and landed in jail, too, and had the scars to prove it. The noisy bar would quiet, small talk deferring to lyrics.

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