Long, Last, Happy

by Barry Hannah

  Most of these nights he was secretly drunk. Edgar, still abhorring Parton’s habit, was becoming alcoholic, having never touched drink before age twenty-four. There was no great reason for it. The band was chaster and soberer by a long shot than any of their contemporaries. Some of them, get this, Rolling Stone noted, played dominoes and Scrabble at the hotels, enormous bars flowing around them, themselves oblivious, like a bunch of Mormons in the lobby.

  Only Edgar and another man, a middle-aged survivor from the last band, a relative of Lambert, hid out in a dark rear booth, drinking, playing nothing but boozy arias back and forth, in prep for the gig. The older man was a veteran. Only vodka would do, maybe a dex on a tired trip, then Listerine and a quick Visine to the eyes before stage time. (Lambert would throw you out.) Woodrow, the saxman, assured him that liquor, when controlled, was a friend of music. It was no mystery then that Edgar was playing better. Woodrow argued that he should know, he himself wasn’t worth shit, never had been, and had plenty of time to listen, since Lambert rarely used him unless in a loud ensemble. But he knew music and Edgar, you cooking infant, you are away, man. You make other grown trombonists cry. Edgar rejected Woodrow’s claim: you’re the wise one, the dad, he said. You’re the tradition, the years, the true center. Holy smoke, man, you’re football, or a church.

  Rolling Stone, concentrating on Parton, Snooky, the maniacal drummer Smith, Edgar and Lambert, had them in a big article called “Revenge of Big Jazz.” Life did about the same in huge pictures. Parton Peavey had never heard of either magazine. What a gas. He led both features, quoted in his wonderful innocence, drug-thin and solemn in nothing but boxer shorts backstage with a bottle of Geritol in his hand. The following spring their new record, Quiet Pages from Little Lives— the loudest thing they’d ever done—went gold. What jazz had done that lately?

  Edgar let out an unusual, drunken obscenity of approval as they looked at the articles. Snooky was shocked. She accused the house sitter of pushing drinks on Edgar and maybe the black cigarillos, too, cutting into his breath, his life, and so on. The house sitter began crying. Though Edgar denied it, the upshot was that Snooky told the girl to leave. Nasty, but her man. This was the final signal. They soon married in her city, Jackson, with Parton and Lambert in attendance. Afterward, Edgar and Snooky began to make love clumsily. They had a long honeymoon in the apartment with only the heavenly gigs to interrupt it. Edgar would look up at the cold black Chicago sky and say, “Thank you.” Snooky loved this. She did not notice his drinking. He was such a perfect, gentle, vigorous husband. Nothing could be wrong. On the plane they were treated like two people “going steady” on a high school bus trip. He could swallow nearly a half pint of vodka at once in the jet’s restroom.

  Lambert got cancer, but he could live with it. For a while the band’s celebrity increased because this fact was known. He never missed a show, even during chemotherapy. His piano playing became quieter, more wistful, more classical, his contemporaries noticed, adoring him further, if that were possible.

  Then, pop, America forgot them almost wholesale, down to bargain basement at the stores. The band held a two-year discussion about this fact, but nobody could find a reason. Did Life kill people? They hated, in all their musicianship, and with saintly Lambert’s genius, to have been some vagrant novelty. The jet trips stopped instantly and the hotel rooms were poorer. They ganged up in rooms to make the budget. They traveled in a bus. None of them except Woodrow had saved much. Their foot had been in the door, they were about to step in as permanent guests, then . . . But they had youth and were extremely loyal to each other and to the music. Edgar, who could barely read music, if truth be known, began trying to write for the band with a computer, but he wasn’t any good.

  Two more records, then studio time became too expensive to make them—that kind of sales. So it was all over America, slowly and much more than anybody wanted. Lambert would fly ahead. Sick and more irritable lately, he’d greet them cheerfully, but his heart was down. All the kids were down. The halls became very thin, half deserted, echoing. Cocaine, more cigarettes, even cough syrup for its codeine became usual. Edgar stayed with the vodka. He’d tried Parton’s heroin once, over his protests, but it made him very sick. Snooky and most of them still took nothing.

  One night out of Oklahoma City, Edgar had a sort of fit, insanely unlike him. He shouted another withering obscenity, grabbed the steering wheel away from the driver, and raced them off from the rest stop, screaming “I’ll take us somewhere! I’ll take us somewhere!” He turned the bus over on a curve, laying it down very fast in a long ditch. Everybody was shaken badly. Some had cracked ribs and terrible bruises. But there were no serious injuries except to Parton Peavey. His left hand would never be the same even after three surgeries. Also, something was wrong with the bus insurance—not a dime, and they didn’t have enough to get the bus fixed. The band canceled and laid up a month, leaking money.

  The third week Lambert called for a band meeting in his small hot room in the motel. He began calmly. Then he insisted Edgar come up front. The general feeling was that Lambert would forgive him. Lambert was that kind of man. But then he saw Edgar was drunk. Edgar and the band had never heard that kind of profanity and hollering from him. Lambert kicked Edgar out and screamed at those, like Smith and Parton, who stood up for him. It was a bitterly sad thing. The worst, thought Edgar. But he was wrong.

  Snooky left him. The pets, who’d been disturbed by his behavior, went with her—weasel Ralph and dachshund Funderbird. The house sitter came back. Edgar slept with her mournfully.

  Parton, who’d left the band—several others had too—and gone on to solo celebrity (loved by the knowing for his crippled left hand; he was a real vet at twenty-nine now, a dues payer) came by for a last visit. He didn’t blame Edgar at all. Further, he was tearful about Edgar’s breakup with Snooky, who remained with the little-attended Big Thunder Hounds. He had no solutions, no black Beaumont wisdom, except, “Up to now, Edguh, we been lucky. Don’t rush it.”

  Edgar looked at him through fuzz: a child. He felt much older than Parton. He didn’t think he could live at peace like that. He was often breathless and felt dirty around the neck, sweaty, where his tattoo was. An old Dylan thing chased around in his head: “boiled seaweed and a dirty hot dog.” Most of the time, he could not even eat that down, but it was what he deserved.

  He’d made a lot of friends, however, gigging around Chicago, and for a long time he was known as a classy drinking man, an aristocrat of the ’bone, my man. Then he became a student at Northwestern where they had a fine-music program and worshiped pros. He’d heard Snooky was there, studying double bass, but he saw her only twice. Edgar was an uncommon freshman. He’d thought college was the thing to keep him straight, but it wasn’t. He felt elderly in the classroom, the reverse of his band experience. He did not know what the rest of them did. Against the odds, he played the clubs till five in the morning, around Rush and out in the burbs where jazz was a discreet rage with the young rich. His appearance in class—blasted, orange, looking thirty—was a miracle. But he pushed on through classes where he was not valued, making poor grades, keeping his mouth shut, and memorizing desperately. He fell down more than once, smashing his head on a desk. A mere pint a day was a masterpiece when he wanted the bar. The house sitter left. There went any order at home. He developed separate dumps of classwork. His refrigerator became green inside with uneaten food as the money got low. By the time he graduated at twenty-seven, thin and trembling, with a sociology major, he was a bum. He had no more time to fool around.

  He crashed his old Harley into a pier post after a graduation party he gave himself and the fellow bums on the South Side, where he now lived with his few remaining possessions, a small dusty transistor radio and shower shoes. A lot of his clothes he simply lost. He was thinking an old thought about Snooky when he hit the post, his motorcycle flying out into the water of Lake Michigan. The yachtsmen were highly irritated. When the ambulance came, he still kn
ew nothing. But he remembered what one paramedic said when they were lifting him in, looking at his tattoo: “Look at this piece of shit’s throat. Drive slow. He comes out of the booze, he’ll scream when to hurry.”

  His sternum was cracked. For a month afterward he did not drink. The Dilaudid was pretty good, though. When they wouldn’t give him any more he had three especially lonely, agonized days. He wrote—why not?—an old aunt who was rich, and lied to her that he was in graduate school and poor. From La Grange came a note and money almost by return mail. What a mystic boon. He drank a great deal on it.

  He would retell the story of how he’d had all the clubs going for a while with his “new” sound, but he was a sick drunk by then, the spitty and flat noise duplicating him. Even the avant-garde had found out he was merely drunk, and given him the door. But now his chest hurt too much to play. Plus, both instruments needed fixing.

  He liked to travel light anyway, he told the fellows on the corner. Those cases were heavy, guys. One of them took him at his word and stole both horns. He knew who’d done it, but he was in such a world now that he just stared with his mouth open at the man and asked him, please, for a slug of port. The man refused. Edgar, forgetting the trombones, said he’d remember this. He wrote his aunt about his graduate studies and here came another money order from La Grange. Guilty, he began making notes on the bums. He used the back of his classwork pages. Some of the bums were long and vibrant narrators. Two of them spoke to Edgar in Russian. He kept scrawling on the page. As payment for their stories he would buy them drinks (sometimes the fellows cleaned up enough to get in a bar, hair combed in a bathroom). They thought he was very classy. The trombone stealer died. One of the narrators kindly took him to the pawnshop and he got his horns back.

  He was thirty-four when he finally got treatment and afterwards, why not, he headed back down to Georgia on an Amtrak which went through Jackson, where he looked stupidly around for any sign of Snooky. He kept clothes and toiletries in his horn cases. He wanted, he thought, never to play the horns again. He could smell alcohol in them and they made him sick. But he wanted them near to remember.

  Edgar’s sobriety did curious things to him. For one thing, he had not realized he was tall. His posture was still poor, though, having been curved over in search of the pavement all those years. He had blood and air in him again, and was still a bit high on withdrawal. His face was plumper, unblotched, his hearing and eyesight better. However, he had the impression he looked suddenly older, thrown forward into his forties at thirty-four. He had intimations that he would die soon, and must hurry. He also felt exceedingly and cheerfully dumb, as a saint or child might feel. He greatly enjoyed not knowing vast lots of things. He could remember nothing from his college “education.” Going back to school now under the patronage of his aunt (under the lie that Chicago, foul and windy, made his studies there impossible), he found he could barely write, and did it with his tongue out, counting the letters and misspelling like a fresh rube trying to explain Mars to somebody back home. Women, though his desire was wild from lack, frightened him. He withdrew from music. It hurt him even in restaurants. He discovered himself asleep, eyes wide open, for long periods of time. He guessed he’d nightmared himself haggard with liquor and his body was still catching up, sly fox. He became agoraphobic and would often walk straight out of a room with more than three people in it. Attending class was hard. Then there was one last thing: he was certain that he would do something large, significant and permanent. Yet his imagination was gone, and he supposed it would be a deeply ordinary thing he’d do, after all.

  At the little college in La Grange where he pursued his master’s degree, depression hit him and he could barely stutter his name. One day he stopped in the hallway of his department in flowing traffic and for several minutes had no real idea where he was. The voices and moving legs around him were suddenly the most poisonous nonsense, but there was nowhere else to go. He was older than everybody again. Later he remembered that with seventeen years in Georgia and seventeen in Chicago he was torn between languages, even whole modes. He hadn’t heard Southern spoken by a large group in ages, and it sounded dead wrong, just as the crepe myrtle and warm sun seemed dead wrong. Somebody passed with a Walkman on. He awoke, sickened by the tiny overflow from the earphones. A winsome girl was shaking him by the arm. They were classmates. She, astoundingly, seemed concerned, though she made him afraid.

  Next was the matter of his aunt, whose patronage he had never quite understood. He was into her for many thousands already and did not dare count it up until he was a well man. Neither could he face his parents, who had lost him during the years he was a bum. Athens was not far, but it was a century away. They were old people now. The sight of him might kill them.

  Long, long ago, his father, who rarely drank, had got loaded on beer to level with the famous hipster his son had become. Edgar was touched. His father, who wrote innocuous historical features for the local paper, seemed bound to drill at the truth about his wealthy older sister, Hadley.

  Hadley was rat-faced. She resembled other animals, too, depending on her anger. It was a shame she was so homely and bellicose. A low, crook-backed and turtled thing, her typical expression was the scowl, her typical comment, derision. She scratched the air with snorts and protests. Edgar got it after he’d moved in: “You keep your room like a doghouse!” Edgar thinking it near clinical in classified piles. Nobody could remember her being pleasant to anybody for very long. When she was young she had considerable breasts. Two husbands comforted themselves briefly with them. The husbands may have become husbands mainly for such comfort. But the harshness of her face reasserted itself and the mean gruesomeness of her voice knocked out, in a few months, her breastly charms, and the long rut of acrimony got its habit, driving the last husband pure deaf and happy of it. The old lady had retired from formal religion long ago, blaming the perfume and powder of her contemporaries, widows like her, who gave her “a snarling snootful.” Now she listened to the pastor on the radio, but only to keep up a mutter of assault against him. He was too meek and liberal for her. Hadley was a loner first, but not finally. Curiously, she’d had three handsome daughters. She wanted an ear, she demanded an audience, but something that nodded and remained fairly mute. She had worn out her daughters years ago. Her iron-jawed homeliness depressed them. They avoided her except at Christmas and Mother’s Day, which she always ruined. They wondered why there was such a long mystery of dispute with her as she was wealthy, safe, air-conditioned, pampered by a forgiving black maid, and hardly threatened by the music, newspapers, widespread fools and widow-harmers she so reviled. Paying for anything especially disgusted her and there was always a furor about some bill. The habits, hairdos, and clothing of her daughters’ husbands moved her tongue to little acidic lashes, as if they weren’t there, only their shells. The old woman, though, was smart and not just an ignorant blowhard. It seemed she had educated herself to the point of contempt for close to everything; further knowledge was frivolous. She dusted it off with a snarl.

  Edgar numbed himself early on. His own rages and countermeasures had cost him soul and ground in the past. He was still a wreck easing himself slowly back into the waters of hope, and with caution he might repair some of the mournful holes. He was dutifully hacking away in sociology in exchange for his roof, the use of her car, even money for postage. Edgar, on the advice of his counselor, was writing letters of amends to Snooky, Parton, Lambert—still alive!—and delaying the long one to his parents. The old woman knew he’d been a drunk. Said she could smell it in his letters. Hadley relished it, she had him. Edgar would rally up a blank nod and she could scratch away at will. He hid his smoking from her. The day she smelled smoke in her Chrysler would be a loud, nasty one, he reckoned. His elegant garret in the Tudor mansion hid cartons of Larks and ephedrine bottles. The horn cases, necessary, made him sad.

  Auntie Hadley had no bad habits. Her enormous love for chocolate was controlled. The single Manhattan she pou
red herself at six-thirty, correctly just preceding dinner, was all she ever had. He wondered why she bothered. He could have had twelve to establish his thirst. She looked in his eyes for the suspected thirst. He stared down at her legs and was shocked to see them smooth, pretty enough to flirt by themselves. Here she was seventy or more. Her back was slightly humped, her chest low and heavy. The young legs were an anomaly, tight in their hose.

  She dressed well. Much better than he, though he did not care. She’d put him in designer dungarees. He had several too expensive turtlenecks from Atlanta because of his tattoo. He wore a better coat than he’d ever had at the height of his money. Maybe clothes were her bad habit. She dressed way above the town, her blouses in warm hues like the breasts of birds. Her pumps were girlishly simple. The girl who’d held his arm in the hall saw Hadley in the Chrysler once and said she looked stamped by Vassar or Smith. But Edgar knew she’d had only three years at a women’s college as undistinguished as the one he now attended—private, small, arrogant, and mediocre. From Northwestern to here was a damned other free fall of its own. Still, three years of college for a woman in the Depression wasn’t bad. His aunt had a certain sneering polish to her. As for himself, he had flogged into the “program” with minimal credits and letters of recommendation from three drug/alcohol counselors who almost had to approve of him. The big letter, though, he’d touched from a senile prof who had been a high horse in urban ethnic studies. The quality of his dementia was that he cheered thunderously everybody he came in contact with. A hoary, religiously approving idiot in atonement for all the years he’d sternly drawn the line, perhaps. Edgar sucked up to the emeritus, who favored the phrase “my poor children!” He’d never even taught Edgar. But he had a letter from the famous old man and could have had his clothes and car. The faculty here were impressed to the point of envy.