Dirty Beat

by Venero Armanno

  Then, just as I was thinking of packing my bags and disappearing forever, things changed.

  It was a Friday afternoon and I came home from school to find the front yard full of building equipment. Emma and Conny were standing there looking at it. They were shoulder to shoulder and whispering together; it might have been the most intimate moment I ever saw between them. Their storm was over. I stopped. They hadn’t heard me come through the gate and it was the first time I thought I saw something real between them, some shared complicity. In the way their shoulders touched, in those quiet words I couldn’t hear, there existed the key to the mystery of how two people so utterly different could be together, could be married, and could forgive whatever transgressions drove them crazy. The answer was that they needed one another, but more than that, each knew he or she needed the other. The rest didn’t mean much at all – and that was their contract.

  I looked away, embarrassed to be observing something so private, so tender between them. Instead I stared, baffled, at what was in the yard. There was a petrol-operated mixer, bags of concrete, piles of sand, loam and gravel, and pallets of bricks and blocks. A lot of them. There were tools as well: two long-handled shovels with round lips, two short-handled shovels with square lips, a pair of picks and mattocks, and other things that I understood had to do with the business of mixing cement, applying concrete and making something. Someone was going to be constructing, and it was going to be substantial.

  Emma turned to me with a sort of kindness in her eyes and some small sense of pride. Not for herself, but for her man.

  ‘Your stepfather hired all this stuff, Max.’

  Concetto San Filippo, my nemesis for three weeks now, turned to me. This was just about the first thing he’d said to me in all that time: ‘Make sure you go bed at good hour. Tomorrow you are up with the sparrows.’

  Well, things might have turned sweet for them, but the hell I was going to do something like that. Instead, I went out to a party that ended in a half-hearted, half-drunken beach fight somewhere down the south coast. By the time someone dropped me back home we’d covered several hundred kilometres and it was three in the morning. I had a split lip and a throbbing arm from being throttled by some surfer twice my age.

  Sure enough, despite injuries and wretchedness, I was to be up with the sparrows. Conny shook me awake in the gloom before dawn. Through half-closed lids I saw him flinch from the rotten stench of me.

  ‘Come on, Muxx, is best time to start.’

  Five a.m. Saturday. Bleary-eyed, cloudy-headed and still half-asleep, I found myself under the house with him. Conny got straight to work, starting to take mysterious measurements here, there and everywhere. He had me hold the tape for him while he committed some figures to paper, but most others to memory. He staked out the area with twine. That was about as easy as the day got. It turned out we had foundations to dig; then we had to fill them with steel-mesh and concrete for strength and support; of course, Conny explained, after that we had walls to build, starting with twelve-metre high walls here where the house stood tallest on its stilts and overlooked our large jungle of trees. My aunt’s house was on level ground at the front but the land it was on fell away at an almost perfect forty-five degree angle so that it was held up at the back by tall steel struts.

  So it came to me: this mad bastard Conny had decided to brick-in the underneath of the house. For the time being I had no idea why he’d gotten it into his head to do this. Maybe it had something to do with appeasing my aunt. Whatever the reason, we simply started the process of labouring hard; or should I say, he laboured and I followed. Stripped to the waist, he had the physique of someone half his age. He was a sapling, but was firm and toned. Whenever I thought he was busy with something else I looked for tell-tale signs of marks near his veins. There were none. It was ridiculous. He didn’t look like a drug-taker and he certainly had a far younger man’s energy, much more than I did. It didn’t even seem so extraordinary to me that he knew exactly what he was doing, could figure things out so quickly, and could work so swiftly and with such assurance – even with such happiness. You could call it joy. This work of ours gave him, if anything, even more pleasure than his drumming.

  It took all of the weekend simply to dig the foundations for the walls. By Sunday night my hands were blistered and my body ached. I slept like the dead. Monday morning I was due to go to school. I set my alarm early, but I still missed him; by the time I was into my stinking work clothes and had fixed myself a bite to eat, it was five-thirty. I went downstairs and Conny was preparing to get the mixer going.

  ‘What you do? Get dressed. You have school today.’

  Picking up the shovel that was now mine, I said, ‘What do you want me to dig?’

  I didn’t go to school, not for another month. Emma called the principal, a crotchety old fool with a violent streak by the name of Brother Langford, and explained I had chicken pox, a really terrible case. Brother Langford said he was happy not to see me till I was recovered and then some. I worked with Conny. That’s what I wanted without knowing why I wanted to do it. Labouring by his side and under his tutelage gave me a feeling I couldn’t remember experiencing before. I felt safe; I felt needed. It was good to actually make something. We painstakingly built in the underside of that wooden, colonial-style house, gave it no windows, simply bricked it all up like some terrible mausoleum and had a high time doing it.

  We finished our handiwork on a Wednesday. The hire company came and cleared away all of its things as the afternoon fell into a gathering gloom.

  The next Saturday morning, just when I thought everything in Conny’s scheming of things was over and done, I woke to see the man sitting in the chair by my bed. The expression in his face said there was something new to add to the mystery of his plan.

  ‘Awake?’ he asked.

  I nodded. He took me into the kitchen and fried bacon for me, scrambled some eggs with horseradish and salmon, and gave me buttered wholemeal toast. When I was finished, he sent me to get out of my pyjamas. He washed up. Aunt Emma was still asleep.

  When I emerged he said, ‘Okay, you come downstairs.’

  We went outside, walked around and down the side of the house, opened the new door into the cavernous gloom of the walled-in area beneath our home, and there a new drum-kit stood beside his much older set. Its chrome was shining and smelled of fresh polish. The labels said it was a Rogers.

  ‘Is no one hundred percent soundproof down here yet, I have more to do, but I think will be okay.’ He went and touched the shiny kit with a love that was palpable. ‘Look here, Muxx, the fittings. Really do look at them. See what holds this into this? This piece here, how it fits with this one there? This is quality.’ I walked around this thing, barely believing what had been planned in this man’s head. He’d been insanely angry at me for touching and playing his own drum kit, now here he was saying, ‘Take driver’s seat.’

  I sat in the stool. He handed me a pair of drumsticks. He didn’t beam with pleasure at the enormity of his surprise. Instead, he was very serious.

  ‘Okay. You have to say. You, Muxx. Now you decide how it must be. Is you choice, because is choice for life.’ He looked at me, posing his question as carefully as he knew how: ‘You want to be boy who go boom-boom-boom – or you want to be musician the finest?’

  I swallowed hard. ‘I want to play really good.’

  ‘Yes?’ he said, then took my hands, folding the drumsticks into them. ‘Hold like this. Don’t be scare. Feels wrong but I tell you, is right way. Is called the traditional grip, proper way to play all jazz-styles. Then if you want you learn to flick you fingers around like this and you change the way you hold sticks so you can play meat-head rock. This now is called the match grip. But is for later. For now we start with one way only, the traditional. From today into the future you do things the right way. You shoot straight or you do no shoot at all, this is the rule. Okay?’

  I nodded.

  He moved to his own kit and I thoug
ht he was going to start showing me what and how to play. Instead, I hadn’t noticed that beside it there was an old, wind-up style metronome. He picked it up and turned the key as far as it would go, then set it down by my side.

  ‘This is the click. This click must go in here.’ Conny gently tapped my skull. ‘Once this click it is in here, it will never go out. Nearly every musician you will play with will start at wrong tempo, lose beat somewhere, but not you. You will always bring everyone back to the click.’ His hand on my head became a caress of my hair. His fingers lingered in the waves and curls. He smiled and flicked the switch on the metronome. I’d soon come to recognise the insistent click of a basic four-four beat, and yes it would go into my skull and never disappear. Conny said, ‘Figlio mio, now is start.’

  XVI

  Despite all the new love that was being heaped on her, Aunt Emma began to wither before Conny’s eyes. He knew what was going on long before a teenager like me did, what with the band I was playing in and all my other extracurricular activities. Even so, her decline was so quick that neither we men of the house had all that much time to absorb the fact she was actually dying.

  The diagnosis was colon cancer, which had spread through the abdomen. Then, when headaches became unbearable, tests revealed tumours inside her skull. The surgeons performed a craniotomy, the tumour resection cutting out most of a beast the size of a small orange or mandarin. They hoped to treat the rest of it with radiotherapy. Head shaved, eyesight all but gone, Emma came home after a surprisingly short stay in hospital, but she was frail as a moth and her heart gave out a day later. Maybe weak hearts have been a familial thing, but bad living can be a familial trait too. Even at the start the consulting surgeon had told Conny and me, ‘It’s going to be difficult to be too optimistic. It appears that her liver’s not in very good shape either.’

  Conny had her buried in her best Sunday church dress. He purchased an expensive gold crucifix and chain to thread through her fingers and hands, but he also had wit enough to place her favourite beer stein in the coffin beside her. With his glasses on, he sewed black cloth stripes to every one of his shirts, at the bicep of the right arm. He was in mourning and he took it seriously. At the funeral he wept without reservation and seeing him like that made tears run down my face too. I didn’t quite know how to feel or think; I’d been in this position when my mother passed away, but this time I was thinking, So what’s it gonna be like, just me and this man Conny from now on?

  With time, the quiet of the house seemed very little changed from when Aunt Emma was alive. Sometimes it was as if she’d never been there in the first place. How many days and nights had she spent in her dressing robe, smelling like a cat, drinking beer and watching every piece of junk that turned up on the television? Now she was like a shadow that had passed through the house and left no residue.

  I was playing in my first band, effortlessly switching from the match grip for their tumbling style of surf music to the traditional grip for Conny’s jazz-influenced tuition. The click in a vast array of forms had gone into my head all right, so what he taught me now was more technique and refinement. These were the heady days of Concetto San Filippo and Maree Kilmister, my dynamic duo of tutors. From him I learned that playing drums should be an endless process of finding and acquiring new ways, and from my little hippie-chick I learned just about the same thing, only applied to her.

  As time wore on Conny became less interested in his official mourning – which involved offering thanks to Emma before the evening meal as if she’d cooked it herself, and praying for her soul before sleep each night even though he never darkened the door of a church on Sundays or any other days, and modulating the sound of the television and stereo as if not to disturb a slumbering spirit. He started to come home with more and more esoteric jazz-fusion style records. From week to week he played them a little more loudly and frequently. He wanted to hear new things, then he would trek downstairs to try them out for himself, me following if I wasn’t occupied with Maree. The work of artists such as Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman and even the Art Ensemble of Chicago soon filled our minds, and whenever those tricky, spaced-out rhythms started to drive us a little crazy we always went back to the touchstones of swing music and the jazz of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. From time to time Conny could even take something as left of his field as the first three or four Carlos Santana albums, but I knew he never really listened to the guitars or voices, but was instead decoding the pulse inside those Latin-infected beats. The time for tranquillity and sombre reflection was passing. Our practice room became an endless cacophony of experimentation, but with those brick and block walls at least no neighbours or slumbering spirits needed suffer.

  However, despite all of this, the truth is that Concetto San Filippo found himself sharing a house with a teenage boy who had plenty of outside interests, and while I was always a willing pupil for his drum lessons, loneliness started to eat at him. After the anniversary of Emma’s death came and went he seemed to decide his official mourning was over. No more dinner thanks and no more evening prayer. Conny unpicked the black stripes from his shirts and joined a quintet of aging musicians. These men played mostly weddings and had been after him for years. Now at a loose end and freer than he’d been, he gave in.

  They wore tuxedos wherever they played and called themselves I Pinguini – Italian for ‘The Penguins’. The band would practise in our big room downstairs and often I sat in to watch and maybe learn a few tricks. Sometimes I helped them set up in the small places they played. It was the usual stuff. They did traditional wedding music numbers: slow waltzes, a bit of old-time rock-and-roll, and well-known ethnic songs like ‘Volare’ and ‘O Sole Mio’ just for fun. Of course, they always had to end with Tom Jones’ ‘Delilah’ and Johnny Preston’s ‘Running Bear’, these were what people expected and paid for. There was no jazz or experimentation in the least. The old guys were all Italian and one of them had a decent voice, but their sound was crowd-pleasing and cheesy. It didn’t seem to bother Conny but it did me, seeing someone with his skill slumming it with lesser musicians in these types of venues. Well, it didn’t matter. He was finally enjoying himself and for the last years of his life he had a good reason to get out of bed.

  The real problem was that all the good times and new friendships had an unforeseen effect: he drank more and took up smoking again, having given up, he told me, on the ninth day of August 1945. That was when ‘Fat Man’ was dropped on Nagasaki, three days after ‘Little Boy’ destroyed Hiroshima, and ‘The human race, Muxx, he loses his heart.’ The nights he didn’t have a job to play he sat alone in front of the television after cooking some lovely Italian meal. He would light a cigarette and drink wine or Cynar and stay there, often falling asleep on the couch, so that if I came in late I’d have to get him up and put him to bed, cleaning up his ash and butts, putting away a half-empty bottle.

  Funny what ends up killing a person.

  For you, Conny, it was those stupid cigarettes. Early 1975 and you were driving your EJ home from the wedding of some ethnic princess to the heir of a local hairdressing chain. It was a big night, a happy one. Your quintet played its heart out and for the entire final hour its repertoire was at their request nothing but Thirties’ and Forties’ swing. The new husband and wife had met while taking ballroom dancing lessons, hadn’t they, and so you led the band through a set-list of as many Count Basie, Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman standards as they could find it in their fusty old memories to remember. You even threw in some lesser-known numbers, including some that Gene Krupa made his own, just so you could show off a little in that flamboyant Krupa style.

  Did you keep to shooting straight or did you let yourself go a little wild? For this, your last performance ever, I hope it was the latter. Just a bit. I remember one day you demonstrated to me how Krupa had influenced rock drummers such as Ian Paice, Keith Moon and John Bonham, and I’d been staggered that you knew the names of rock musicians like them and could even ape their styles.


  Driving home from the wedding you lit a cigarette and smoked in contentment. The window was open. You had your hat on and the AM radio station was playing an old Dean Martin tune. You flicked out the butt. Five minutes from home the hunger for tobacco, that craving that never really goes away, was still gnawing at your lungs. You thought you could have another smoke before getting in. You plugged in the car’s dashboard lighter, waiting for it to pop while Martin sang something dreamy about a lazy ocean hugging the shore. You remembered how your old band leader Jimmy Jones used to croon tunes just like that, and with almost as much verve as men like Martin, Al Martino or Tony Bennett.

  The lighter clicked. You put a cigarette into the corner of your mouth, a practised move you learned from the movies years ago. You pulled the lighter out and held the glowing grill to the tip of the cigarette. The paper and tobacco started to send up tendrils of smoke. The car turned a corner and a strong breeze off a bend of our river blew diagonally into your window, sending an ember of the cigarette’s glowing tip into your left eye. It hurt like a needle-jab, didn’t it? You dropped the lighter, which fell into your lap, where it burned through the soft cotton of your trousers. In sudden, ridiculous agony, and momentarily blinded, you swerved off the road into a giant fig tree. Your neck snapped.

  You heard Dino ask his love to thrill him as only she knew how, to make his longing body sway right now, then it was goodbye.