Free Callahan's Place 10 - Off The Wall At Callahan's (v5.0) by Spider Robinson Page A

distillation of over forty years of good conversation that they ended up sitting there all night, reading and drinking and reading and drinking.   (Most of Callahan’s customs had more than one purpose…but all of them seemed to end up putting money in his pockets.   Not a stupid man.)
           And one day I remembered that Wall, and saw a way to get out from under a nagging problem…
           Look: transcribing Jake Stonebender’s yarns about Callahan’s Place into polished and compelling prose has been putting bread on my table and music in my headphones for just short of twenty years, now.   Nobody   misses The Place more than me.   Ever since "The Mick of Time,” the last Callahan story, was published in Analog Science Fact/Science Fiction Magazine   in 1985, I have been reduced to thinking up stories of my own, an onerous task.   Trust me: if I knew any more Callahan stories, I’d find time to set them down on paper.   If I could find a way to get more, I would; I have tapped every source, shaken every tree, pursued every avenue.
           Yet not a week has gone by—in six years!—without at least a few plaintive letters from readers, asking when I’m going to publish some more Callahan’s Place stuff.   People keep sidling up to me at conventions, on the streets, in public washrooms, and imploring me to publish something else—anything else—with the word “Callahan” in the title…
           I do not like to disappoint readers; they are in too good a position to redress perceived slights.   So I cudgeled my brains.   (I do this so often that I have had my cranium fitted with a removable screw-top, to facilitate cudgeling.)   Among other things, I relived in memory—over and over again—every moment I had ever personally spent in that caravanserai of compassion.   And finally one day as I was idly forward-scanning through all the mental videotape, I happened to notice a flashbulb go off…
           I knew that many photographs had been taken in Callahan’s Place—hell, two of my most treasured possessions are framed 8x10 glossies of myself at The Place (one jamming with Fast Eddie and Jake; the other standing at the bar with Mike Callahan’s arm around me; both autographed by the participants).   I knew at least half a dozen people likely to keep a scrapbook of such photos.   In many of those pix, I reasoned, The Wall must be visible …    
           So I made a lot of phone calls, and I paid a lot of postage, and I made a lot of expensive trips to the East Coast…
           …and then I sealed myself in my office with about a googolplex of snapshots of Callahan’s Place, a magnifying glass, a Macintosh II typewriter, a stereo, a case of Old Bushmill’s, and two pounds of Celebes Kalossi coffee…
    …and after only a million years of pain and eyestrain, I had painstakingly reconstructed something like 50% of the wit and wisdom recorded by Michael Callahan, and imprudently stored by him on a medium inadequate to withstand nuclear fireball.   You hold it in your hands.
           A large and aromatic bouquet of Wall flowers: flowers plucked from off The Wall At Callahan’s Place…
     
    True story: in 1973 I had the privilege and pleasure of meeting the late great Alfred Bester. Much could be written about that meeting, for Alfie in person was the original One-Man Chinese Firedrill–but what is relevant here is that at one point he asked me what I was working on, and I said I was putting together a collection of Callahan's bar stories but couldn't think of a good title. Eyes flashing, Alfie excused himself, went to the washroom and returned less than two minutes later with a neatly typed list of over two dozen terrific titles. Among them were CALLAHAN'S CROSSTIME SALOON, TIME TRAVELERS STRICTLY CASH, CALLAHAN'S SECRET… and yes, by God, OFF THE WALL AT CALLAHAN'S.
    I am now a firm believer in time travel…
    Thanks yet again, Alfie, wherever