Of course, time-lapse photography would prove you wrong, for Little Red’s collection, filed and unfiled, is in constant motion. Occasionally, as in the case of the Japanese Gentleman, or during one of Little Red’s visits to the record fair, albums are sold, leaving gaps on the shelves. These gaps are soon filled with the new old records from the accordions, which have already been alphabetized, and from the boxes, which have not. The customary progress of an album is from box to accordion, then finally to the shelf, after a consultation of the discographical record has pinned down its chronological moment. (Those discographies are in constant use, and their contents heavily annotated, underlined, and highlighted in a variety of cheerful colors.)
The quantity of rearrangement necessitated by the box-accordion-shelf progression would be daunting, exhausting, unbearable to anyone but Little Red. The insertion onto the proper shelf of four recently-acquired Roy Eldridge LPs could easily involve redistributing two or three hundred records over four long shelves, so that a three-inch gap at the beginning of the Monk section might be transferred laterally and up to the midst of the Roys. The transferal of this gap requires twenty minutes of shifting and moving, not counting the time previously spent in chronologicizing the new acquisitions with the aid of the (sometimes warring) discographies. It’s surprisingly dirty work, too. After ten or twelve hours of unbroken filing, Little Red resembles a coal miner at shift’s end, grubby from head to foot, with grime concentrated on his face and hands, bleary-eyed, his hair in wisps and tangles.
At the end of your conversation, Little Red will say, “You can come over tonight, if you feel like it. It doesn’t matter how late it is. I’ll be up.”
None of Little Red’s friends, followers, or acquaintances has ever seen him in the act of filing his records. He files only when alone.
Miracles Attributed to Little Red
1. The Miracle of the Japanese Gentleman
The Japanese people include a surprising number of record collectors, a good half of whom specialize in jazz. Japanese collectors are famous for the purity of their standards, also for their willingness to expend great sums in pursuit of the prizes they desire. One of these gentlemen, a Kyoto businessman named Mr. Yoshi, learned of Little Red’s collection from John Elder, with whom he had done business for many years. By this time, Mr. Yoshi’s collection nearly equaled John Elder’s in size, though only in the numbers of LP, EP, and 78 records it contained. In memorabilia, Mr. Yoshi lagged far behind his friend: when it comes to items like plaster or ceramic effigies of Louis Armstrong, signed photos of Louis Armstrong, and oversized white handkerchiefs once unfurled onstage by Louis Armstrong, John Elder is and always will be in a class by himself.
Little Red knew that the Japanese Gentleman had a particular interest in Blue Note and Riverside recordings from the 1950s, especially those by Sonny Clark and Kenny Dorham. Mr. Yoshi would accept only records in or near mint condition and in their original state—original cover art and record label, as if they had been issued yesterday and were essentially unplayed.
Little Red’s monthly rent payment of $980 was coming due, and his bank balance stood at a dismal $205.65. The sale of two mint-condition records to Mr. Yoshi could yield the amount needed, but Little Red faced the insurmountable problem of not owning any mint-condition Sonny Clark or Kenny Dorham records on the Blue Note or Riverside labels. He had, it is true, a dim memory of once seeing The Sonny Clark Trio, the pianist’s first recording as a leader for Blue Note and an object greatly coveted by Japanese collectors, pass through his hands, but that was the entire content of the memory: the record’s shiny sleeve passing into and then out of his hands. He had not been conscious of its value on the collector’s market; Sonny Clark had never been one of his favorites. However, he knew that he had once purchased a nice copy of Kenny Dorham’s Una Mas, maybe not in mint condition but Excellent, at least Very Good anyhow, A to A-, worth perhaps $150 to $200 to a fanatical Japanese collector who did not already own one.
Little Red scanned the spines of his Kenny Dorham records without finding a single original 1963 copy of Una Mas. He had a Japanese reissue, but imagine offering a Japanese reissue to a Japanese collector!
Yet if he had neither of the most desired records, he did have a good number of consolation prizes, Blue Notes and Riversides maybe not exactly unplayed but certainly eminently playable and with sleeves in Fine to Very Fine condition. These twenty records he coaxed from the shelves and stacked on a folding chair for immediate viewing. With luck, he imagined, they could go for $30 to $40 apiece—he had seen them listed at that price in the catalogs. If he sold them all, he would make about $700, leaving him only a few dollars short of his rent.
Mr. Yoshi appeared at precisely the designated hour and wasted no time before examining the records set aside for him. Five-seven, with a severe face and iron-gray hair, he wore a beautiful dark blue pin-striped suit and gleaming black loafers. His English was rudimentary, but his tact was sublime. He had to pick his way around Swamp Thing to reach the folding chair, but the Japanese Gentleman acknowledged its monstrous presence by not as much as a raised eyebrow. For him, Swamp Thing did not exist. All that existed, all that deserved notice, was the stack of records passed to him, two at a time, by Little Red.
“No good,” he said. “Not for me.”
“That’s a shame,” said his host, hiding his disappointment. “I hope your trip hasn’t been wasted.”
Mr. Yoshi ignored this remark and turned to face the crowded shelves. “Many records,” he said. “Many, many.” Little Red understood it was a show of politeness, and he appreciated the gesture.
“For sale?”
“Some, I guess,” said Little Red. “Take a look.”
The Japanese Gentleman cautiously made his way around the accordions and through the boxes on Swamp Thing’s perimeter. When he stood before the shelves, he clasped his hands behind his back. “You have Blue Note?”
“Sure,” said Little Red. “All through there. Riverside, too.”
“You have Sonny Clark, Kenny Dorham?”
“Some Kenny, yeah,” said Little Red, pointing to a shelf. “Right there.”
“Aha,” said Mr. Yoshi, moving closer. “I have funny feeling….”
Little Red clasped his own hands behind his back, and the Japanese Gentleman began to brush the tip of his index finger against the spines of the Dorham records. “Here is reason for funny feeling,” he said, and extracted a single record. “Una Mas. Blue Note, 1963. Excellent condition.”
“Yeah, well,” said Little Red.
But the record in Mr. Yoshhi’s right hand was not the Japanese reissue. The Japanese Gentleman was holding, in a state akin to reverence, exactly what he had said it was, the original Blue Note issue from 1963, in immaculate condition.
“Huh!” said Little Red.
“Must look,” said Mr. Yoshi, and slid the record from its sleeve. No less than his shoes, the grooved black vinyl shone.
“You try to keep this one for yourself,” Mr. Yoshi teased. “Suppose I give you $500, would you sell?”
“Uh, sure,” said Little Red.
“What else you hiding here?” asked Mr. Yoshi, more to the intoxicating shelves than to Little Red. He picked his way along, flicking his fingers on the spines. “Uh huh. Uh huh. Not bad. Uh oh, very bad. Poor, poor condition. Should throw out, no good any more to listen.”
Little Red said he would think about it.
“I have funny feeling again.” Mr. Yoshi stiffened his spine and glared at the spines of the records. “Oh yes, very funny feeling.”
Little Red came closer.
“Something here.”
The Japanese Gentleman leaned forward and pushed two B- Kenny Clarke Trio records on Savoy as far apart as they would go, about a quarter of an inch. A collector’s instincts are not those of an ordinary man. He twitched out the Kenny Clarke Trio records and passed them to Little Red without turning his head. His hand slid into the widened gap, his head moved n
earer. “Aha.”
Very gently, Mr. Yoshi pulled out his arm from between the records. A fine layer of dust darkened his white, elegant cuff. When his hand cleared the shelf, it brought into view two LPs which had been shoved into an opening once occupied by John Elder’s long-departed reel-to-reel tape recorder. On the albums’ identical covers, staggered red, blue, green, and yellow bars formed keyboard patterns. The Sonny Clark Trio, Blue Note, 1957, still in their plastic wrappers.
“You hide, I find,” said the Japanese Gentleman. “This the Sonny Clark mother lode!”
“Sure looks like it,” said dumbfounded Little Red.
“All three records, I give $2,000. Right now. In cash.”
“Talked me into it,” said Little Red, and the Japanese Gentleman counted out two months’ rent in new, sequentially numbered hundred-dollar bills and pressed them into his host’s waiting hand. Little Red threw in a plastic LP carrier that looked a bit like a briefcase, and Dr. Yoshi left beaming.
After the departure of the Japanese Gentleman, Little Red remembered the wad of bills remaining in his guest’s wallet after the removal of twenty hundreds and realized that he could have asked for and received another ten.
Don’t be greedy, he told himself. Be grateful.
2. The Miracle of the Weeping Child
Late on a winter night, Little Red emerged from stuporous slumber and observed that he was fully dressed and seated at his command post in the freezing semi-darkness. Across the room, the twinkling screen displayed in black and white a fly-like Louis Jordain scaling down the façade of a hideous castle. (He had thought to enjoy the BBC’s 70s Dracula as a reward for long hours of filing.) By the dim lamplight he saw that the time was 3:25. He had been asleep for about an hour and a half. His arms ached from the evening’s labor; the emptiness in his stomach reminded him that he had failed to eat anything during the course of the busy day. Little Red’s hands and feet were painfully cold. He reached down for the plaid blanket strewn at the left-hand side of his recliner. Even in his state of mild befuddlement, Little Red wondered what had pulled him so urgently into wakefulness.
How many days had passed without the refreshment of sleep? Two? Three? When deprived so long of sleep, the rebelling body and mind yield to phantoms. Elements of the invisible world take on untrustworthy form and weight, and their shapes speak in profoundly ambiguous voices. Little Red had been in this condition many times before; now he wished only to return to the realm from which he had been torn.
A push on the lever tilted the back of the chair to an angle conducive to slumber. Little Red draped the blanket over his legs and drew its upper portion high upon his chest.
Faintly but clearly, from somewhere in his apartment came the sound of a child weeping in either pain or despair. As soon as Little Red heard the sound, he knew that this was what had awakened him: a dream had rippled and broken beneath its pressure. He had been pulled upward, drawn up into the cold.
It came again, this time it seemed from the kitchen: a hiccup of tears, a muffled sob.
“Anybody there?” asked Little Red in a blurry voice. Wearily, he turned his head toward the kitchen and peered at the nothing he had expected to see. Of course no distraught child sat weeping in his kitchen. Little Red supposed that it had been two or three years since he had even seen a child.
He dropped his head back into the pillowy comfort of the recliner and heard it again—the cry of a child in misery. This time it seemed not to come from the kitchen but from the opposite end of his apartment, either the bathroom or the front room that served as storage-shed and bedroom. Although Little Red understood that the sound was an hallucination and the child did not exist, that the sound should seem to emanate from the bedroom disturbed him greatly. He kept his bedroom to himself. Only in extreme cases had he allowed a visitor entrance to this most private of his chambers.
He closed his eyes, but the sound continued. False, false perception! He refused to be persuaded. There was no child; the misery was his own, and it derived from exhaustion. Little Red nearly arose from his command post to unplug his telephone, but his body declined to cooperate.
The child fell silent. Relieved, Little Red again closed his eyes and folded his hands beneath the rough warmth of the woolen blanket. A delightful rubbery sensation overtook the length of his body, and his mind lurched toward a dream. A series of sharp cries burst like tracers within his skull, startling him back into wakefulness.
Little Red cursed and raised his head. He heard another flaring outcry, then another, and the sound subsided back into pathetic weeping. “Go to sleep!” he yelled, and at that moment realized what had happened: a woman, not a child was standing distressed on the sidewalk outside his big front window, crying loudly enough to be audible deep within. A woman sobbing on West 55th Street at 3:30 in the morning, no remedy existed for a situation like that. He could do nothing but wait for her to leave. An offer of assistance or support would earn only rebuff, vituperation, insults, and the threat of criminal charges. Nothing could be done, Little Red advised himself. Leave well enough alone, stay out. He shut his eyes and waited for quiet. At least he had identified the problem, and sooner or later the problem would take care of itself. Tired as he was, he thought he might fall asleep before the poor creature moved on. He might, yes, for he felt the gravity of approaching unconsciousness slip into his body’s empty spaces despite the piteous noises floating through his window.
Then he opened his eyes again and swung his legs from beneath the blanket’s embrace and out of the chair, for he was Little Red and could not do otherwise. The woman’s misery was intolerable, how could he pretend not to hear it? Thinking to peek around the side of the front window’s shade, Little Red pushed himself out of the command center and marched stiff-legged into the toilet.
As if the woman had heard his footsteps, the noise cut off. He paused, took a slow step forward. Just let me get a look at you, he thought. If you don’t look completely crazy, I’ll give you whatever help you can accept. In a moment he had passed through the bathroom and was opening the door to his bedroom, the only section of the apartment we have not as yet seen.
The weeping settled into a low, steady, fearful wail. The woman must have heard him, he thought, but was too frightened to leave the window. “Can’t be as bad as that,” he said, making his slow way down the side of the bed toward the far wall, where an upright piano covered half of the big window. Now the wailing seemed very close at hand. Little Red imagined the woman huddled against his building, her head bent to his window. Her mechanical cries pierced his heart. He almost felt like going outside immediately.
Little Red reached the right edge of the window and touched the stiff, dark material of the shade. Unraised for nearly forty years, it smelled like a sick animal. A pulse of high-pitched keening filled his ears, and a dark shape that huddled beside the piano moved nearer the wall. Little Red dropped his hand from the shade and stepped back, fearing that he had come upon a monstrous rat. His heart pounded, and his breath caught in his throat. Even the most ambitious rat could not grow so large; Little Red quieted his impulse to run from the room and looked down at the being crouching beside the piano.
A small dark head bent over upraised knees tucked under a white stretched-out T-shirt. Two small feet shone pale in the darkness. Little Red stared at the creature before him, which appeared to tighten down into itself, as if trying to disappear. A choked sound of combined misery and terror came from the little being. It was a child after all: he had been right the first time.
“How did you get in here?” Little Red asked.
The child hugged its knees and buried its face. The sound it made went up in pitch and became a fast, repeated ih ih ih.
Little Red lowered himself to the floor beside the child. “You don’t have to be so afraid,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
A single eye peeked at him, then dropped back to the T-shirt and the bent knees. The boy was about five or six, with short brown
hair and thin arms and legs. He shivered from the cold. Little Red patted him lightly on the back and was surprised by the relief aroused in him by the solidity of what he touched.
“Do you have a name?”
The boy shook his head.
“No?”
“No.” It was the smallest whisper.
“That’s too bad. I bet you have a name, really.”
No response, except that the shivering child had stopped whimpering ih ih ih.
“Can you tell me what you’re doing here?”
“I’m cold,” the boy whispered.
“Well, sure you are,” said Little Red. “Here we are in the middle of winter, and all you have on is a T-shirt. Hold on, I’m going to get you a blanket.”
Little Red pushed himself to his feet and went quickly to the sitting room, fearing that the child might vanish before his return. But why do I want him to stay? he asked himself, and had no answer.
When he came back, the child was still huddled alongside the piano. Little Red draped the blanket over his shoulders and once again sat beside him.
“Better?”
“A little.” His teeth made tiny clicking noises.
Little Red rubbed a hand on the boy’s blanket-covered arms and back.
“I want to lie down,” the child said.
“Will you tell me your name now?”
“I don’t have a name.”
“Do you know where you are?”
“Where I am? I’m here.”
“Where do you live? What’s your address? Or how about your phone number? You’re old enough to know your phone number.”
“I want to lie down,” the boy said. “Put me on the bed. Please.” He nodded at Little Red’s bed, in the darkness seemingly buried beneath the rounded bodies of many sleeping animals. These were the mounds of T-shirts, underpants, socks, sweatshirts and jeans Little Red had taken, the previous night, to the 24-hour Laundromat on the corner of 55th Street and 9th Avenue. He had filled five washers, then five dryers with his semi-annual wash, taken the refreshed clothing home in black garbage bags, and sorted it all on his bed, where it was likely to remain for the entirety of the coming month, if not longer.
Mister October - Volume Two Page 4
