Desert Blues

by Bill Albert

  Over the years she had had a few affairs while he was in St. Louis, but she always ended them before he came back. It wasn’t just the money, she never found anyone she liked to be with as much as Archie. She had settled for that. Now everything was up in the air.

  Would he stop her money? Throw her out? How much did he love her? It would have to be a great deal if Harold was put on the scales. And all she had was about $700 in her bank account. The house was rented, even the car belonged to Archie’s company. Enid felt very vulnerable. It wasn’t the first time.

  When it all started with Archie she hadn’t worried too much about being kept. It seemed romantic, exciting, something out of a steamy Southern novel. Anyway, if Archie got fed up and tossed her out she wouldn’t have been any worse off than before. Within a few months, however, complete dependence and lack of security started to nag at her. Also there wasn’t much for her to do in Palm Springs. She didn’t really know anyone except Charlene. She started going to the public library on Palm Canyon Drive. The books didn’t help. Enid was not a reader.

  In the same block as the library was the Plaza, a Spanish colonial-style arcade of shops put up just before the war. She found a part-time job there in a small gift shop. The pay wasn’t great, but it was all hers, it got her out of the house and it filled in some of the spaces. Archie hadn’t liked it.

  “Hey, babe, if I’m not giving you enough money, just say the word. It’s no problem.”

  “It’s not that, Archie.”

  “What then?”

  She hedged, not wanting him to guess the real reason.

  “I just need a little something of my own is all. Something to do.”

  Her allowance was increased. She quit her job and he persuaded her to take up golf.

  “After all, babe,” he laughed, “that’s what got us together in the first place.”

  He paid for lessons and tried to join Tamarisk, a new golf club and the only one in the area which accepted Jews. They never got past the membership committee. The sister of the wife of someone on the committee lived in St. Louis and knew the Blatts and someone else knew about Enid. Tamarisk Country Club was a very straight set-up. Archie got a polite letter: “We are sorry, but under the circumstances . . .”

  “What a place!” he exclaimed, throwing the letter on the couch, “Even the goddamn Jews don’t want us!”

  They were forced to play at O’Donnell, the public course. Archie made the best of it.

  “Listen,” he said. “Maybe they did us a favor, babe. O’Donnell is a nice course and it’s right here in town, not like Tamarisk or Thunderbird way to hell and gone out there in the desert. Sure, you could walk there if you wanted. And we don’t have to worry about those stuck-up bastards and all that country club stuff. Yeah. They did us a big-time favor.”

  To her surprise, especially after her performance at the driving range, Enid discovered that she was a natural golfer. Within a few months she was going around the course in the mid-80s. Archie was delighted. She made new friends and spent a lot of time at the O’Donnell clubhouse. She met people there who invited her and Archie to the Racquet Club. The Racquet Club catered to movie people, and as long as he could pay the membership fee no one was concerned about exactly who Archie’s wife was. They joined and Enid took up tennis. Her days filled with activity, and it became easy not to think too much about the future. It would take care of itself.

  She wasn’t so sure about that anymore.

  But Archie wasn’t due back until the end of September, more than two months. Maybe it would all work out. He was a nice guy. He might surprise her and even like Harold. She pushed her arms slowly through the water, letting that idea settle. It didn’t. Who was she kidding? Even for a person who loved kids Harold would be hard work. After all, what was to like, really like, about her nephew? In the first place he was well over six feet, more than six inches taller than Archie. That wasn’t a great start. Added to that, and even leaving out the death of his parents, Harold seemed to be having a particularly rocky adolescence. He was awkward, morose, overweight, and could shower more often then he did. A teenage nightmare. And the music he played! Archie was strictly an Eddie Fisher–Frank Sinatra–Broadway Show Tunes person. She turned over and began to swim a vigorous crawl.

  Harold stood by the sliding glass door in the living room watching his aunt. He had a painful erection. It was the first time he had actually seen a completely naked woman in the flesh. Sure, there was Playboy and there were those pictures in nudist magazines that got passed around at school, the pages wrinkled and greasy, the photos always frustratingly just out of focus, vaginas and penises airbrushed out, as if they didn’t exist. Harold knew better. He spent a good deal of time wondering about vaginas.

  Outside

  Enid was increasingly concerned about her nephew. He had never been a talkative child, but now he had withdrawn almost completely. All day he stayed in the house playing his records or watching television. It was a week since the funeral and he hadn’t mentioned his parents. In fact, he rarely said anything and showed no sign of wanting to get out of the house.

  “Harold darling, it isn’t normal for a big boy like you to sit inside all day. You should go out. See the town, maybe meet some kids or something. There’s a nice boy about your age who lives just up the road here. I’ve seen him go by on his bike. You should go over and introduce yourself. It’s another month or so before school starts again. You want to make some friends, don’t you, darling?”

  Enid was by the kitchen sink washing the breakfast dishes. She was wearing very short white shorts and a low-cut halter top. Every few seconds she glanced over her shoulder to make sure Harold was paying attention. He was, to the way her bottom moved as she scrubbed whatever it was she was holding, to her breasts, exposed almost to the nipples when she bent over. He tried not to stare, but couldn’t help himself.

  Her body was endlessly fascinating. At one moment he was swamped with sexual desire, not for his aunt, of course not, but for the separate parts of her body. In the next moment he was drained by his revulsion. After all, she was his aunt, she was almost twenty years older than him, and he didn’t actually want to touch her. He didn’t even like her very much.

  He had never seen his mother naked. Both his parents were meticulously circumspect about not exposing their bodies. Bedroom and bathroom doors were always firmly locked.

  “Harold! How many times do I have to tell you to close the bathroom door when you urinate?”

  “Are you listening to me, Harold?”

  He quickly shifted his eyes downward as his aunt turned her head.

  “Yeah, Aunt Enid.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Yeah, Aunt Enid’? Come on!”

  He shuffled his feet back and forth under the table. He could feel his face reddening.

  “It’s just that you can’t just go up to someone like that, you know. It’s . . .”

  “What are you waiting for, a formal invitation?”

  “You don’t understand. You know . . .”

  “I don’t know, darling. I really don’t. Maybe I should come out there and introduce you?”

  He looked up in genuine alarm.

  “No, Jesus, Aunt Enid!”

  At this point his mother would have shouted at him. Aunt Enid laughed.

  “OK, OK, darling. Don’t worry, I won’t embarrass you. You do what you want.”

  She dried her hands on the sides of her shorts, crossed the room, bent down and hugged him. There was no escape.

  Aunt Enid’s house was in the north end of Palm Springs. It was only a few blocks from the center of town, but in the early August heat the walk seemed much longer. There were no sidewalks and Harold had to trudge through the soft sand by the side of the road. After a hundred yards his legs hurt. By the time he got to Palm Canyon Drive he was gasping. The sweat dripped down his sides and pooled in the cr
eases of his stomach. His aunt had insisted he wear one of her straw hats. The straw was long and carefully frayed all around the brim. It made him look like a beachcomber. He felt stupid. He wanted to turn back, but knew he probably wouldn’t make it. He needed a cold Coke. It was better to keep moving.

  He had decided to venture out to search for a record store. The chances of finding a place with the music he liked were slim, but buying records was Harold’s major passion, and after more than a week away from the racks of new 45s in their crisp paper wrappers he was getting restless.

  Harold had been initiated into music by Alvin Harper. When Harold was thirteen, Alvin and his mother had moved into the downstairs apartment. He was about twenty-five years old and had been disfigured and blinded in Korea. He stayed in all day with the drapes closed playing music. Harold hadn’t been able to figure out any of the words, only the thump of the bass came through the floor. It drove his mother crazy. She forced her husband to go and tell whoever it was to turn down the noise or they would complain to the landlord. It was then they found out about Alvin.

  “Hey, boy! I hear y’all stepping by that door now. Y’all come over here. I ain’t gonna harm you, little peckerwood that you is. No need to be afeared of ol’ Alvin.”

  There was every need in the world. Raised scars sliced across Alvin’s face. One scar was partially hidden behind dark glasses, the other had taken a lump out of his chin and curled up a corner of his mouth, giving him a perpetual sneer. Alvin was built like a scarecrow, his clothes hanging loosely from bony shoulders and thin arms. His mutilated face and his stiff-legged blind-man’s walk terrified Harold.

  It wasn’t until years later that Harold would think how strange it was that a white Southerner should be so caught up with Negro music. At the time he had no experience with either Southerners or Negroes or music and he took it all as it came.

  How it came was hard, raw and mainly from the Delta, for Alvin Harper was a purist. For him John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Muddy Waters were latecomers. He tolerated them, but Robert Johnson was his god. Harold spent hours in Alvin’s apartment being schooled in the finer points of the blues, listening to scratchy 78 rpm recordings of Tampa Red, Kokomo Arnold, Lonnie Johnson, Black Boy Shine, Pinetop Burks, and others—Blind This, Big Mouth That, Three-Fingers Someone Else.

  His mother didn’t approve of him hanging out with Alvin. To begin with he was far too old for Harold. Also, Alvin was virtually an illiterate, and that could be nothing but a bad influence on her impressionable son, who was already having enough problems at school. And, of course, there was the music. Sylvia Abelstein violently detested the music that leaked noisily into their lives from the apartment below.

  “Jungle noise, Harold. Nothing but uncivilized jungle noise. Thump, thump, thump! Shout, shout, shout! Music? Give me a break, please.”

  At first he hadn’t really cared for it much either, but sandwiched between Alvin’s insistent proselytizing and his mother’s persistent hostility he soon acquired a taste for the blues, although he had little more than a hazy understanding of what broken hearts or bad women or babies being gone or mojo hands or getting up soon in the morning were all about. When he asked, Alvin either told him stuff that was even more incomprehensible or laughed wildly and shook his head, sending thick strings of spit flying in all directions. Harold soon stopped asking such questions.

  Alvin bought his records at dingy hole-in-the-wall shops off Hollywood Boulevard. They all seemed to be called Moe’s or Jim’s or Sam’s. Harold went with him and discovered a whole new world. But, it wasn’t Alvin’s world of treasured 78s, of obscure Mississippi Delta blues men. It was the new 45s of B.B. King, the Ravens, Bo Diddley, the Penguins, Lloyd Price, LaVern Baker, Muddy Waters—stuff he had never heard on the radio, that is until he found KRKD, LA’s only Negro station. The rolling stomp of Fats Domino’s piano on The Fat Man, the joyous shriek from Little Richard, the Wolf’s growl, the echoed whine of Elmore James’s guitar all hit him in places where he hadn’t known he had places. He figured that was all the understanding he needed.

  “You just ain’t a gonna get the same sound on these little biddy things. Shit, child, they ain’t never replace the good ol’ 78.”

  He also didn’t approve of Harold’s choice of music. According to Alvin that wouldn’t last either.

  Harold crossed to the west side of the street to get into the shade. It helped a little. He walked down toward the center of town looking for somewhere to get a drink. He passed a place called Desert Dates, a men’s clothing store, a barbershop, a children’s shoe store. All of them had sun-bloated brown paper covering the inside of their windows.

  SORRY, CLOSED FOR THE SUMMER.

  He could see why. The street was virtually empty. A few cars, fewer people. As he passed a wooden bench, an old guy with a long white beard, wearing torn and faded shorts and leather sandals, raised his walking stick in greeting. Harold was too surprised to respond. He noticed that the old man had on a straw hat with a fringe. He walked on a little faster.

  Finally he found a drug store that was open. There were a few people sitting in the red plastic booths. He went inside, sat down at the counter and ordered a Coke. The jukebox played “Tutti Frutti” by Pat Boone. It summed up Palm Springs for Harold. One of the greatest songs ever written, he thought. Maybe the greatest song ever written. Pat Fucking Boone! A wave of despair swept over him. He took off his hat, rested his soft arms on the Formica counter and let cool air blow over him. It was a very, very long way from LA.

  “A real hot one today,” said the waitress, as she put the glass down in front of him.

  She was bleached blond, sixteen, maybe seventeen, with a mouth full of orthodontal steel.

  “Yeah . . . thanks,” Harold replied uneasily, looking down at the floor.

  Girls his own age made him nervous, even more nervous than Aunt Enid did. He sipped the Coke, letting the crushed ice melt slowly on his tongue.

  “You down on vacation or what?” she asked, leaning forward and squinting nearsightedly at Harold.

  There was a slight gap between the top buttons of her white uniform. He could see the edge of her bra and imagined the roundness of a breast. He disengaged his eyes and concentrated on the silver and green malted milk machine behind her. He knew he was blushing. There was nothing he could do about it.

  “Um, Uh . . . No. Just moved here.”

  “Neat, ain’t he?”

  “Who, I . . .”

  “Pat Boone, silly. You know, the singer.”

  She pointed at the juke box selector on the counter.

  Wop Ba Ba Lo Ba and a . . .

  The voice was smooth, white, cozy, everything the song shouldn’t be. Harold felt sick. The long walk, the heat and now Pat Boone. It was too much.

  “Are you OK or what?”

  He nodded, put two dimes on the counter and pushed himself up from the stool. He felt his weight like never before. With some effort he moved toward the door.

  “Hey,” the girl called after him, “you forgot your hat.”

  Two men sitting in a booth by the door turned to look at him. One of them was wearing a battered cowboy hat. His small eyes were very close together, his skin like overlapping slabs of sun-dried meat. He gave Harold a lipless smirk. Harold saw a thin forked tongue flick out darkly between the man’s lips. Over by the counter the girl had the straw hat in her hand and was waving it in the air. The hat was gigantic. Bloated. Surely he couldn’t wear it.

  Got a gal named Daisy, she almost drives me crazy.

  Harold turned and stumbled out into the street.

  She sat on her bed and looked across at her reflection in the full-length mirror on the closet door. Not bad for a woman pushing thirty-five, she thought. She felt her thighs. The muscle tone was still there. Her chin was firm, her neck taut. Maybe it was marriage that did it to the others, having kids. So many of
the women she met at the club seemed to have let go. Not that they didn’t take care of themselves. In fact, most of them seemed to do little else. They dieted, spent hours at the beauty parlor, bought expensive clothes. It was just that they didn’t have the vitality any more, the fine edge. Enid prided herself on being able to maintain a fine edge.

  She rubbed the white cream into her hands, added a little more and spread it on her arms and her legs. She loved being tan, but in the last few years she had noticed how the sun dried out her skin. But nothing was for nothing, she supposed and there was no way she was not going to sit in the sun. Being brown all over was too much part of her. It made her feel healthy She also thought it made her look younger. Younger was becoming increasingly important for Enid.

  For reasons she didn’t understand, having Harold around the house had made her more conscious not only of her age but of her life. By doing that, he had accomplished in a week what her sister had been unable to do in more than seven years of constant nagging.

  Sylvia had always disapproved of her younger sister, even when they were kids. She thought Enid was irresponsible and frivolous and immoral.

  “How can you take the man’s money like that?”

  “You take Norman’s money, don’t you?”

  “But he’s my husband, Enid. My husband. This Arnold guy.”

  “Archie. His name is Archie.”

  “Archie then. This guy, he’s married for Christ sake!”

  “So’s Norman,” laughed Enid.

  Sylvia didn’t think that was funny.

  Now they were both dead. Buried beside the Hollywood Freeway. Poor Sylvia. All those years being so careful to do the right thing. Enid wept for her dead sister.