His eyes were blue behind the thick horn-rims, and his hair was black. His nose was skewed off in the direction of Pittsburgh, and he wore a sport shirt open at the neck under his jacket. His hands seemed almost like those of a newborn baby’s, soft and pink. That was Billy Wald, and it didn’t matter what he looked like. Once he started playing.
The evening was no longer than most, no shorter than others. They played their set, and took their breaks, and no one in the combo again mentioned the change of style. No one bugged Billy. He sat on the stand steps, his arms holding the cornet down between his legs; he was thinking.
The final set. One-thirty, and the place was jammed and dimmed and the spots focused on the combo rattling out their noisy Dixie melodies. They swung off on “Royal Garden Blues,” doubled back through “Chains, Chains, Chains,” and took a whack at one of Billy’s strangely titled originals. It was a solid old-style Memphis blues number, which Billy had titled (in progressive tone) “Through Melancholia, with Drum and Camera.” They were halfway through the number, Solly running his snaking fingers up and down the bass, slapping it with a palm, twanging it like sixty, when an old man staggered into the joint. What were the odds. Yeah, right.
How he got in, even the owner, Tony Hadley, on the door, couldn’t say. But somehow he slipped in when no one was watching. One moment the cleared dancing space on the floor was empty, and the next minute this funky old man was in the middle of it.
The spots on the combo washed the floor a bit, and there he was…clear as a bad dream. He was tall, but he looked like they’d decided to just stretch a little skin over the bones—not bother with fleshing him out. His hair was dirty gray, and spilling down his shoulders like an untalented amateur’s scarecrow. His eyes were so black, and so deepset, he looked like a mugger had thumbed out the eyesockets, leaving only shadows.
His mouth worked at gumming a sentence, lips dry and thin; and he almost got a word out.
Billy Wald stopped blowing. It was, of course, because there are no good playwrights left in the world, Joe Privalorio. Fresh in from out of nowhere.
“Through Melancholia” died away as though it was ashamed to have been in the way while Billy yelled. And the sidemen stared at the old man. He was standing in the middle of the floor, weaving, tottering, almost ready to fall. Stinking drunk. What are the odds.
“Think ya smart up there, doncha?”
Nobody in the joint snagged a breath. Dinner dishes and forks stopped clattering. The music went far away, because it knew what was coming. But no one else knew.
“Think ya smart, doncha, ya little bastard…”
The bouncers came out of the kitchen, and started to muscle him down. Billy stepped quickly to the front of the platform, motioned them off. The old man staggered full into the spotlight, and Billy could see he was only halfway to dead. It was more than drink, much more. Truly going to die extremely soon. He had the old vegetable soup smell of death on him.
“Wald ya calls yaself! Billy Wald, ya gutterlittlebastard! Laid ya ole lady in the back room of the Mission Street Bar…Bar ’n’ Grill n’ you gotta be a li’l bastard with a name come on like Billy Wald!”
There was never anything like that in the whole world. Billy’s hand turned white and trembly on the Three-Star, and when the stinking old rumpot started calling his Maw those names, he wanted to tear the old man’s liver out and make him choke on it. But he stayed put, because he knew what was happening. And he felt good watching the old cocksucker dying, right there in the middle of the dance floor.
“Think ya can blow a horn, d’ya? Here, lemme show ya…I was the greatest horn man ever blew outta N’Walins. Gimme!”
He staggered to the podium, grabbed the Three-Star from Billy’s shaking hand, pulled loose the mouthpiece, blew out the spit, and stood there. Just stood, half gone away in another world, with his legs apart, and his old back arched, and the pop of the mouthpiece slipped back in, and then the horn to his lips, and Billy didn’t make a sound.
Billy didn’t make a move.
Billy just stared, watching the old man die. Fuck’im! Croak, you old bastard sonofabitch!
No one thought the old man could do it. They waited to be embarrassed. But he pursed his gray, gray lips; and out it came.
Speaking many languages. Out it came. The first three notes were so goddamned familiar, Cappy had to look around, to make certain someone wasn’t playing a record, or slipped Billy a new horn…
…because that was Billy blowing! All the way from the gut, that was Billy Wald.
Then they knew where Billy had gotten the talent, left there by some old rumdum. If this was Billy’s old man—and they guessed it was, then there was no secret any more, where Billy had picked it up.
He was his old man’s student. Whether he’d ever taken a lesson or not.
The old man played three choruses of “Beale St. Blues” as no one has ever heard it before or since, and even got Solly running his hand across the bass, till Cappy tossed him a look that said Knock it off, shithead!
Then he came to a stop, right in the middle of a bridge, and there was drool out of the corner of his mouth. His eyes were rheumy, and he stared at Billy from Hell.
“That’s the end! That’s all I’ll ever play, Mr. Billy Wald!” he said. “Just this!” And took the sweet Three-Star and cracked it hard across the edge of the platform, denting the bell out of shape, caving the shank, pulling the mouthpiece loose and sending it off under a table.
Then he threw the thing at Billy’s feet, staggered back a step or two with a bad laugh, coughed blood all over a guy and a woman at a ringside table, and dropped right on down dead in front of the bandstand, his hand and all its blue veins across Billy’s shined brown cordovan shoes.
Billy fainted off the platform, and the bouncers carried both of them out back together. There was something poetic about it. Everybody said so.
In the dressing room he regained consciousness. He sat up, and an instant later he was crying. They all left the room because no one wanted to see that kinda shit happening. No one saw him rise and smash his hand against the metal door of the locker, beat his hands against his head. No one saw him writhe and suffer, and finally come to rest gasping. No one wanted to see that kinda shit.
It was not the work of a minute, nor the work of an hour; it took three hours. Three hours later, when he opened the door, the combo knew something had changed deep inside Billy Wald. As he left the darkness of the back room, he seemed to be a man stepping from an old familiar prison, into a fresh, clean, clear day. Something like that. He looked okay. Maybe…well, refreshed.
The Casino was dim, the crowds gone, the chairs ass-end up on the table. The three sidemen rose slowly, watching their leader come toward them.
He stopped at one table and stared at the broken metal that had been the Three-Star, the cornet that was exactly like his father’s. He stared at it a moment, ran his hand across the ripped instrument, and smiled.
He came toward them, and the streaks of dirt and tears down his cheeks told them what he had gone through.
He stopped before them, and they watched carefully.
“It’s all over now,” he said.
Cappy Carpenter made a move to take his arm, but Billy shook him away. “It’s all through; it’s okay. I’m cool, honest. I’m free now. I guess I didn’t even know I was tied up inside, but now I’m out of it. I cut it loose.”
They smiled at him, and he jerked a thumb at the wreck of the Three-Star.
“Monday, we’ll go out and pick me up a new weapon. I’m going to have to get in practice…
“…as long as we’re switchin’ from Dixie to Progressive.”
He smiled back at them, and the ghost drifted up, and up, and up, through the roof of the building, and left the Earth forever. Ugly, drunk, useless and mean, but at least, simply, the fuck gone.
The passport had been revoked. Further travel was forbidden.
—New Orleans, 1956
I CURS
E THE LESSON AND BLESS THE KNOWLEDGE
Okay, if you’ll for chrissakes stop leaning over my shoulder, I’ll start it again. How the hell do you expect me to write this with you…supervising the damned thing? Listen, nuisance, one of the reasons I became a writer was because I swore I’d never work under someone’s beady, watchful eyes ever again.
And here you are, telling me I haven’t got it right, that it didn’t happen that way at all. This is fiction, dammit, not real life. Fiction turns the mirror of reality; slightly, so things are seen in a new way.
That’s unfair. I’m not lecturing, I’m merely explaining the way I write so you won’t get all bent out of shape if I alter the facts. This isn’t supposed to be one-for-one. It’s supposed to be a story, and that means things will be changed.
Now I’ll start it again, and you just shut up and stop nuhdzing me. And okay, okay, I won’t call you Patti. (But I still think that’s a super name for the young woman in the story.) Now. For the third time. I begin.
The first thing Katie ever said to me was, “How much is the school paying you to come here to speak today?”
I said, “Eight hundred dollars.”
She looked shocked and awe-stricken for a moment and then said, “That’s indecent. Nobody should make eight hundred dollars just for amusing a bunch of imbeciles for an hour and a half.”
“I usually get fifteen hundred,” I said.
“You’re kidding. Just for standing up here and reading a couple of stories you wrote?”
“I’ve been told I read very well.”
“So what? Dylan Thomas read better than you and he died broke.”
“And an alcoholic to boot,” I said. “Thank God I don’t drink.”
She started to turn away. The rest of the mob of students pressing in for autographs jammed into the space she’d vacated. I watched her as she walked away. “Hey!” I yelled. She stopped and turned around. She knew I meant her.
“Are you going with, engaged to, pregnant by, or hung up on?”
She thought about it for a moment. The mob ping-ponged their eyes between us, history in the making, before their very faces. “No,” she said. “Why?”
“How’d you like to have a cup of coffee with me?”
The guy who had strolled up beside her looked as if he were about to get an enema with a thermite bomb. He started to take her arm, but she smiled and said, “Okay,” and his hand never finished the grab.
She sat down in the first row of the empty auditorium and had a heated conversation with the guy who hadn’t finished the grab. I tried to catch what they were saying, but the fans were babbling in my face and I’ve never been able to listen to two things at once. I signed their books as fast as I could—I was afraid she’d disappear—and as the last straggler moved away, fangs finally removed from my throat, charisma leaking out of my body with a soft hiss, I stepped off the stage and walked over to her.
Yes, I know I’ve made you sound cooler and hipper than you were that day. Yes, I know you went fumfuh fumfuh a lot. But this makes it sound better. So what if you’ve never read Dylan Thomas, what does that matter? Will you just sit back and let me get into this bloody thing!
They both stood up. The grabless guy didn’t like me a lot; negative vibes hammered at me like the assault of noise made by one of those superpimp blacks in mile-hi platform wedgies who carry Radio Shack transistors with hundred and eighty decibel speakers, who boogie up and down Hollywood Boulevard blasting Kiwanis schmucks from Kankakee out of their white socks with the gain up full.
“Mr. Kane,” Katie said, indicating the source of the negative emanations, “this is Joey. Joey, this is—”
He knew who I was. He’d sat through my lecture and my readings and had applauded. Until I’d hustled his girl, he’d been a faithful reader of my wonderful prose. I lose more fans that way. He didn’t wait for the introduction, just thrust his hand forward and said, “Howdyado.”
We shook. Solemnly. On such dumbass grounds as this did Menelaus and Paris get into one hell of a lousy relationship.
Nothing happened for a few seconds. Everyone waited for the Earth to stop jiggling on its axis. As usual, I was the one to move the action. “Well, listen, uh, Joey, it was nice meeting you.” I turned to Katie. “Are you ready to go?” She almost gave Joey a look: the muscles in her neck moved slightly: but then she just nodded and said, “Okay.” I smiled at Joey, very friendly, very magnanimous, and we walked away from him. I am very grateful blowguns and poisoned darts have never been marketed in this country by Wham-O.
The nameless nuisance in the background tells me I’m lying, and making Joey look like a jerk. That is true. Even though her affair with Joey was at an end at the time we met, she was still fucking him occasionally, and though I like to believe I’m very sophisticated about such things, I was born in 1934, which makes me forty-one, and I spent the greater part of my life as a sexist, not knowing I was doing anything wrong, and though I’ve had the error of my ways pointed out to me by a number of voluble women infinitely smarter and better-adjusted than myself, I cannot deny that the oink of the beast can occasionally be heard in the velvet tones I now affect. (Like an ex-drunk proselytizing for Alcoholics Anonymous, or a reformed head who’s found Jesus, there are few things in this life as dichotomous, neither fish nor fowl, as an apostate male feminist. I try, but it’s Fool’s Gold, and I despise myself for the hypocrisy.)
Nonetheless, the truth of the matter is that Joey was a very good guy, and he urged her to have the cup of coffee with me. But I still hated him. He’d had his hands on her for two years, and I was jealous. And it’s my story, dammit!
So we went to Yellowfingers where I ordered with all the aplomb of Gael Greene and Alexis Bespaloff melded into one unisexual gourmet.
“We’ll have the spinach and mushroom salad for two, a sausage, cheese and ratatouille crêpe for the lady, and I’d like the fried baby and a cup of warm hair,” I said, dimpling prettily. Katie broke up, the waitress stared at me with a charming mixture of nausea and loathing. “Make that a Croque Hawaiian and an iced tea,” I said hurriedly.
“And what would you like to drink?”
“A Coke.”
At that instant I saw the future, “the evening spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table.” Gray and chill and inevitable. This moment during which I sit here writing it, as it hurtles down on me; I saw it then.
In a few minutes I would discover that Katie was eighteen, and I would discover that I was forty, nearly forty-one, she nearly nineteen, and she didn’t even have to tell me how it was going to end. Damn you, Nabokov!
“Bring the lady a Coca-Cola,” I said, and knocked my silverware into my lap trying to pull loose the napkin.
(It was too like that! Shut up and leave me alone; I feel like shit. Let me write, woman!)
The lunch went well. I snowed her like crazy. I was by turns serious, clever, amusing, controversial, urbane and Huck Finn. Her eyes were mostly green. Sometimes blue. Her hair fell over one side of her forehead in a soft sweep that paralyzed me.
I told her I was putting the make on her. She said, “You are?” She wasn’t being coy, she simply didn’t know that was what was happening. Lesson one for the old man trying to play grabass with (what the nuisance bitchily calls) “young stuff” (when she’s trying to bug me): they don’t do it that way these days. They are free—they assure me they’re free. They just seem to raise invisible antennae and the libidinous message pulses off them. And in some marvelous, thaumaturgic progression of events without time or measure, like a fast wipe in a Chabrol film, pow! there they are in bed together, free and libidinous, everybody orgasming just the way Alex Comfort would have it, no effort, no hangups, no groping and no seduction. In the sweet and amoral world of the children there is no stalking, no hunting, no hustling; just the act, final and total and contained, as Merwin puts it, “one tone both pure and entire floating in the silence of the egg, at the same pitch as the silence.”
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I have no idea what I was thinking. It had been just another pain-in-the-ass speaking engagement; Price Junior College, an agro school that got confused and wound up with a bedroom-community commuter day-care babysitting population of twenty-five thousand acne-festooned urchins taking dingbat classes in Science Fiction, Artificial Flowers I, Bowling, Inert Gas Welding and Current Events in the Arts (which, so help me, Amen-Ra, turns out to be a course in how to be a good audience). Because it is essentially a free-tuition college for state residents—$6.50 per semester for students carrying 6 units or more, $2.50 for shmucks handling under 6 units—it is a refuge for post-puberty illiterates who would better serve the commonweal if they were out planting Ponderosa Pines in an effort to stem the floodtide of concrete threatening to pave over the entire state.
If, from these utterly objective and well-mannered remarks you get the impression that I have very little use for young girls, I am content in the knowledge that I absorbed Lord Alfred Korzybski’s theories of General Semantics. I have but nothing to say to young girls. They’re fine to look at, in the way I would look at a case filled with Shang dynasty glazes, but expecting to carry on a conversation with the average teenaged young lady is akin to reading Voltaire to a cage filled with chimpanzees. I’m certain they would feel the same alienation for me. I can live with that knowledge.
For instance…
Yes, I realize I’m digressing, nuisance! This is what is called back ground color. It lends depth to a story; it establishes character, motivation. Please! Do you mind?
As I was saying. For instance, one night I had a date with a certifiably mind-blowing, color-coded, lathe-turned, rhodium-plated gorgeous. I picked her up and she was wearing an evening dress that, had Lee Harvey Oswald turned around from his position crouched in front of that window in the Texas Schoolbook Depository, 1940 vintage Italian-made Mannlicher-Carcano in his mitt, and seen it, with her in it, would have burned out the clown’s eyeballs and we’d be living in a much better country today. What I’m saying here, if you catch my drift, is that this female was a positive paralyzer.