Crime Plus Music

by Jim Fusilli

  “You know what I think?” Something at the corner of her smile cut him more than it should have.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think you’re a lying motherfucker, Frankie Lymon.”

  He stuck his chin out. “Yeah, why is that?”

  “You never could have written that song on your own.”

  “Why not?”

  He looked around at the other patrons to see if they were listening. But they were all deep in their own bags, either lost in each other or listening to Sam Cooke’s smooth insinuations with half-closed eyes.

  “Because I wrote those words,” she said. “And you took them.”

  “How could I do that? I never even met you before.”

  “The letters,” she said, reaching for her purse on the counter.

  “What letters?”

  “You know the damn letters I’m talking about.” She put the purse on her lap. “Before you made it big? When your friends were practicing in the hallway of that building on 165th and Edgecombe? Singing ‘Goodnight Sweetheart’ and ‘Why Don’t You Write Me?’ over and over? Who do you think was upstairs?”

  “Who?”

  “The answer is me.” One of her lashes stuck together. “That’s where I was living. When I was in love with a man across the hall. Mr. Kenny Tyrone. Who made me feel things that no woman has ever felt before. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  He drained half his drink. “I don’t know why I’d care.”

  “Because I taught poetry to little punk-ass students like you and I knew how to put my feelings into words. And I put those words into letters. And I gave those letters to Mr. Kenny Tyrone. And he gave those letters to your friends because he didn’t want his wife to find them and because he got sick of hearing you all sing the same damn words over and over. And then you put them in your song.”

  “This is a lie.” Frankie shook his head, refusing to look at her.

  “It’s not a lie.” She used her fingers to peel off the misbehaving lash. “Because at dawn every day, Kenny’s wife would go to work early at Presbyterian Hospital. Then I’d go across the hall. Because I had an hour and a half before the first class I had to teach at Stitt Junior High. And I lived for those mornings, because my life was so lonely the rest of the time. I’d sit by that window looking out over 165th Street, waiting for the sun to rise over Highbridge so she would go and I could live again. And I’d listen and I’d ask myself, ‘Why do lovers await the break of day?’”

  “That’s just one line.” Frankie finished his drink.

  “That’s the whole damn song, Frankie. It’s all about waiting for the break of day. It’s not about being in love. It’s about falling in love. Dumb as you are, even you understand that. Otherwise you couldn’t have sung it the way you did.”

  He looked away from her with a sinking feeling. Of course, it was true. He was reminded of it every time he heard the song. It wasn’t about the thing when it happened. It was about imagining what it would be like just before it happened. Like when he was standing backstage at the Apollo, listening to all the girls scream, like they were promising all the love in the world. Before he realized it would never be enough.

  “You taught at Stitt?”

  “For ten years.”

  “I ever have you?”

  “Only as a substitute. And you were a fresh-mouth lying little motherfucker even then.”

  He stared at her until the fog of years parted and she became faintly recognizable as Miss Brooks, the seventh-grade English teacher. Hiding behind her glasses with her hair up in a bun and her pigeon-toed walk with her flat shoes and long skirt that made a seething sound when she walked.

  She looked completely different now. The glasses were gone, along with one of her eyelashes. The sunken eye looking back at him had seen to the bottom of too many things. Of too many high-ball glasses, of too many lies, of too many men who couldn’t live up to their own promise. She didn’t believe in homework or steady diligence or poems or love songs that could change your life anymore. She was just looking for something to take her away for a while. And the thing that bothered Frankie the most was that it was like looking straight in the mirror.

  “What happened to you?” he said.

  “You’re not the only one who’s had a hard time, Frankie.”

  “You’re not teaching anymore?”

  “I got depressed. Especially after Kenny gave you all those letters and then moved away. He betrayed me. And I had to think about that every time that song came on the radio. And that’s why I cursed you.”

  “You cursed me?”

  “Let me tell you something, Frankie.” She slid to the edge of her stool, so he could smell the rancidness of her breath mixing with lavender. “I went to City College, and I studied romantic poetry. I wrote my thesis on Keats. But some of my people were from the islands. And they know all about Voodoo and Yoruba. I lit a candle to try to get Kenny to come back to me. And when that didn’t work, I lit a candle to put a curse on all of you.”

  “I don’t believe in any of that.” Frankie took the little red straw out of his drink and put it in an ashtray.

  “Ask yourself. Doesn’t it seem like everyone who touched that song got cursed?”

  He smirked and raised the drink to his mouth, even as his mind started revolving. Morris’s brother stabbed to death at Birdland. George Goldner broke and on his last legs with gambling debts. Alan Freed disgraced, forgotten, and dead with cirrhosis at twenty-three. And Frankie himself an addict since fifteen, in and out of rehabilitation ever since, living his life like the Furies were after him.

  “You may have cursed everyone else but it doesn’t look like you’re not doing too well yourself.”

  “That’s how it goes with some curses.” She looked down at the purse. “You call forth the darkness, it overtakes you too. I got so down about what happened with Kenny and that song that I stopped being able to get out of bed in the morning to go to work. So they fired me. And then the same curse I put on you got put on me.”

  He saw now that her hands were swollen and her arms were unnaturally skinny in her puffy sleeves. If he rolled them up, he knew she’d have almost as many track marks as he did.

  “That’s not a curse,” he said. “That’s drugs.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  “Look.” He spun away from her on his stool. “I’m broke too. If you know anything about me, you know it’s true. If you want a piece of my song, go talk to the lawyers. Because I haven’t seen a dime off it in years. And most of what I had I put in my arm, like you did.”

  The Sam Cooke song had ended and the next song started. And there was Sherman doing the deep bass intro. “Ehh-de-doom-wopa-de-doom-wop-de-doom wop duh-duh . . .” Before Frankie came in with the other fellows, his high voice all velvet and brass, with streetwise choirboy sass. “Ooo-wah. Ooo-wah . . .”

  She started rummaging through her bag. All at once, he realized there were no accidents. Curses were real. She hadn’t just seen him randomly in the bar. And he hadn’t just randomly picked Sam Cooke on the jukebox. The purse bulged as she put her hand in it and he thought he discerned the shape of a gun.

  “You owe me something, Frankie. And you know it.”

  Ever since Sam Cooke died, he’d had a premonition that he’d go the same way. But he thought that it would be one of his wives who pulled the trigger.

  “I’m sorry.” He put his hands up, his voice cracking in the wrong way. “But I don’t have anything left to give you. It’s all been took or given away.”

  In the background, his young voice seemed to mock him. Young Frankie wailing, “Tell me why, tell me whyyyyy” before giving way to the bodacious blare of Mr. Wright’s dirty hot sax solo, which promised decidedly adult pleasures just down the pike.

  She pulled a crumpled Kleenex from the purse. “I want you to acknowledge me.”

  “Okay, you’re acknowledged.” He dropped his hands. “Now let me be.”

  �
�That’s not enough. I know Morris Levy must have put a few dollars in your pocket when he brought you back up here.”

  “Barely enough to put a song on the jukebox.”

  She bunched up the tissue in her hand. “I know a spot around the corner where they say Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday used to score.”

  “Uh, Miss Brooks, I’m supposed to be trying to stay clean, case you hadn’t heard.”

  And God knew, it wouldn’t take much to get him chipping again. His doctor at Manhattan Psych said he never saw an addict more determined to get a hypo in his arm.

  “Come on, Frankie. I’m just trying to get what I need, same as you.”

  “And what is it you think I need?”

  She sighed. “We both know that if you had another verse, it wouldn’t be about fools in love, or rain from above, but ‘why’s someone in pain put a stick in his vein?’ Some things just got to be.”

  He watched her blow her nose and in the dim light of the bar, he almost reached out to touch her tracks. She was right. They were the same. Chasing that feeling they once had. She’d gotten it when she was sitting by the window waiting for Kenny Tyrone’s wife to leave so she could go across the hall. He’d gotten it when he was waiting to hit that seraphim-clear high note that would make girls scream. And less and less these days, when he was waiting for the powder to stir up his blood and bring on the rush.

  As the sax break finished and his old voice came back in with Herman, Jimmy, Joe, and Sherman, he saw a couple of the other patrons look at him, bop their heads nonchalantly and smile. And he had the strangest sensation that he was here but already gone. The people were taking the song and making it their own, like the guy who sang it wasn’t standing among them like a ghost. It was part of their stories now. His presence was irrelevant. He was just a vague memory to them, not significant for who he was, but for how he reminded them of how it used to be in their own lives.

  For a half second, he thought about what it would have been like if he’d never gotten his hands on her letters. Then there never would have been that song and they wouldn’t have gotten past the audition. He would’ve stayed in this neighborhood, working as a delivery boy at the grocery down the block and occasionally picking up two dollars for steering white men to the whores across the street. He would’ve limped through high school and maybe caught on with some crappy little civil service job or wound up driving a truck. There would’ve been no “Fools Fall In Love,” no Alan Freed Tour, no rock and roll. He would’ve been just like these other people in the bar, drinking his wages and trying to forget his troubles. Or, just as likely, shivering through withdrawal for the umpteenth time and awaiting trial in a Rikers Island cell.

  What was the difference? It was over now. “Sea Breeze” would never chart, and he knew it. He’d never play the Palladium or the Apollo again. He would just keep trying to hit that high note until he wound up face down on damp tiles, a fallen junkie-angel crashed out on a bathroom floor.

  Maybe it wouldn’t happen tonight, but it would be another night and soon. He’d hang up the jacket Sam had bought for him and roll up the sleeve his grandmother had ironed, and he’d let this woman—or someone else—stick a needle in and that would be that. And then the legend wouldn’t just be That Song anymore but The Bag of Heroin that Killed Frankie Lymon.

  Meanwhile, the young Frankie was still on the record, and would always be, full of light and hope, singing his heart out in a voice full of promise, taking a breath to make that one last daredevil acrobatic leap into the upper register as the other guys’ vocals gathered to cushion him in case he slipped off the note, but he held it and held it until the engineer started to fade him too soon and the band hustled to get the triumphant last beat in under the wire.

  “Don’t look so sad, Frankie.” Miss Brooks closed her bag and stood. “We got up there once, didn’t we?”

  “I know that.” He nodded, somehow relieved that it was over. “It’s just everybody else I feel sorry for.”

  THE BLACKBIRD

  BY PETER ROBINSON

  IT ENDED WITH A HEAD floating down the river. Or is that where it began? You never could be certain with The Blackbird. I should know. I’ve known him for years, and I was with him until the end. Well, almost.

  His real name was Tony Foster, and once, quite early in our relationship, I asked him how he had acquired his nickname. Tony drew on his cigarette in that way of his, cupping it in his palm like a soldier in the trenches, as if he believed it would be bad luck to let anyone see the glow. He turned his blue eyes towards me, a hint of a smile lighting them for a moment, then he looked away and told me it came about when he was a teenager growing up on a rundown council estate in the mid sixties.

  Tony and his parents lived at the far end of the estate, and there was a ratty old tree a bit further on, by the main road. It had hardly any leaves, even in summer, and the ones it did boast were a sickly sort of yellow. Somehow, though, like Tony, the tree survived.

  One spring morning he was woken early by the most beautiful birdsong. He thought it was coming from the tree. All he could do was lie there transfixed and feel himself tingle all over, the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end. He had no idea what kind of bird it was. Being a city boy, he only recognized the sparrows that fought over crumbs on the pavement and the pigeons that made a hell of a racket across the street.

  Mr. and Mrs. Fox lived next door in a house that smelled of pipe smoke and boiled cabbage. Tony used to drop by sometimes to see if they were okay and if they needed anything from the shops. Mr. Fox never said much. Tony’s dad told him it was because the old man had fought in Burma, where he got captured by the Japanese and sent to a prison camp. Mrs. Fox had shown Tony some medals and photos of men in uniforms smiling in a jungle clearing, but Mr. Fox wouldn’t talk about what they did to him there. He just clamped his mouth down on his pipe and stared at a fixed spot on the opposite wall, his jaw muscles so tense they quivered. But Tony had seen The Bridge on the River Kwai, and he didn’t lack imagination.

  The Foxes seemed to know a lot about most things, Tony had discovered, so after he had been listening to the strange bird singing for a few days, he asked them what it was. Mrs. Fox told him it was a blackbird and went on to tell him that it had made its nest in the old tree. She could see it from her bedroom window. The nest was rather messy, she added, and the tree itself was hardly the most suitable environment for a blackbird, which surely must be choking on all the exhaust fumes. And as if all that wasn’t bad enough, the poor creature had a damaged wing, too. He flew slightly off-kilter and was very wobbly on his landings. He looked lopsided, too, she said, when he was perching on a branch—the wing not folded up quite right. But for all that, Mrs. Fox concluded, he did have a beautiful song.

  Then Mrs. Fox asked him if he knew why the blackbird was singing. Tony admitted that he didn’t. It was then that Mrs. Fox said what he thought was a very strange thing. She told Tony it was because the blackbird was looking for a true love to share his nest. It was because he was trying to attract a mate.

  TONY TOLD ME THAT HE was enthralled to hear about this blackbird with the gimpy wing sitting in its messy nest and singing a beautiful song. Somehow, it struck a chord deep inside him. He had lived a very sheltered life, dominated by illness, and the only kind of mate he knew about was the kind you had at school—friends, pals—though he didn’t have any friends, himself. Even so, the more he listened to the blackbird, the more he identified with it. They had so much in common, except the singing. Tony said he began to believe that if only he could sing like that, then maybe he would have pals and mates, too. Maybe they would overlook his limp and his sick room pallor.

  From then on, Tony thought of himself privately as “The Blackbird.” Not very long after, he began to feel all sorts of confusing emotions about girls that he had never felt before, and when he learned what a true love and a mate really were, he set about learning with a vengeance and a passion. Despite his game leg, he got a part
-time job at a mushroom farm as well as morning and evening newspaper rounds, and with the money he made, he bought a beat-up acoustic guitar from a pawnshop and paid for singing and music lessons. His voice had a touch of Tim Buckley with a hint of the more bluesy Van Morrison thrown in for good measure, and though the guitar was hard for him at first, he worked at it and developed a fine, individual style.

  Tony was wise enough to realize even so early that a human singer needs more than just a fine voice and a pretty melody; he needs good words, too, so he started to write his own songs. Luckily, he had hardly been to school, so teachers hadn’t had a chance to knock the love of poetry out of him. He had spent many of his days in his sickbed reading Tennyson and Kipling and Wordsworth, even as a child. He loved the magic and the music of words, so in many ways he was a natural. He started out with the simple boy-meets-girl pop songs of the times, though he had never been out with a girl, let alone kissed one, and as time went on his songwriting developed into that more complex mix of myth, social comment, angst, and mysticism that became the hallmark of his later years. He loved the old sixties guys best—Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon. These were his heroes, his models. These were the poets he imitated when he hit his stride in his late teens.

  I only heard him later, after the lessons, but I guessed that he must have had natural potential from the start. After all, you can’t improve on what’s not there in the first place, can you?

  THE FIRST TIME I SAW Tony perform was in 1969 at a folk club held in the upstairs room of a pub. He was about eighteen or nineteen, and it seemed to me that he already had an enthusiastic audience. One of the young female folk singers on that night’s bill told me that he was a regular, and he performed there most weeks. People just couldn’t seem to get enough of him, she said. I also noticed an odd kind of wistful yearning in her eyes when she looked at him.