“Agnes Cassady,” Oliver says to no one, almost whispering it to his glass. “Poor, poor Agnes Cassady.” He covers her hand with his again so she can feel the rough palm against her knuckles. He presses down, flattening it to the table firmly, yet gently, and stops the trembling.
A tear rolls down her cheek as the main lights in the club come on, exposing them in a harsh glare and signaling it’s time to go.
(INTERLUDE NO. 3)
NEW YORK CITY, 1938
a conversation between Oliver Pleasant and Winky
Central Park
New York, New York
“I ever tell you about my first night in New York? Winky? Where you at?”
“I’m here, Licoricehead. You never told me about it. When was that? Were there dinosaurs?”
“You got a mouth on you, boy. It was a cold night, colder than this here. January 16, 1938. I was seventeen years old.”
“You’re the dinosaur,” Winky said, laughing at his own joke, wittiness becoming a new taste in his mouth.
“We came in on the train and, first thing I know, my man Hamlet’s tuggin me out of Penn Station into a cab and up to Harlem. We go round to the Savoy and there must be ten thousand people outside that place. Looked like a revival, or a riot, except everybody’s dancin and drinkin and foolin on each other. Hamlet, he pulls me round back through an alley and knows the brother at the stage door who lets us in. And in we go, to church. You listenin? Winky?”
“You said ‘church.’ What church was it?”
“The Church of Jazz, the Church of the Music of the Day and a Lifetime. Our Lady of Perpetual Hep. Come over here now; I’m talkin about the Church of Swing of New York City, boy.”
Winky rolled his eyes and threw down the stick he’d been using to try to break the frozen crust of Central Park. His breath showed white and heavy in the frosty air, and he shoved his hands into the pockets of his thin coat and slumped down once again beside Oliver.
“Now, that night was a historic night. Me and Hamlet, we stood just offstage and watched Chick Webb and his orchestra and Count Basie and his in a cuttin contest like I ain’t never seen. It was a heavyweight bout, a title match.”
“Cuttin?”
“Cuttin, boy. Cuttin, to see who’s best, who could hold title to the King of Swing. Basie, he’d just been down at Carnegie Hall—that’s another church down in Midtown—playin with Benny Goodman and some other cats, but he’d hightailed it up to Harlem and was givin them people, all of us, a show. Givin Chick a show, too, son. They was cuttin each other with knives like you ain’t never seen.”
Oliver was getting excited and his breath came out in short, quick blasts of exhaust. He wrung his hands together, both for warmth and from excitement, and it looked to Winky like he’d left the park. It was like Oliver just lifted up and floated right out of there on clouds of exhale and memory. Oliver’s eyes bugged out and glazed over at the same time, and his foot tapped as though he had a beat in his head and in his heart.
“Who won?” Winky, too, was excited, as though he were watching a boxing match on television. “Who got cut the worst?”
“Well, that’s arguable, still talked about and debated to this day. Some say Chick, others say Count. I guess, I suppose maybe it was Chick—it was his house after all. Any tie gonna go to him. Hell, maybe it was the people won, those of us watchin, ’cause we witnessed history that night. We saw some of the best swing ever, some of the best musicianers in the world—then and now—playin that night. And it was my introduction to New York City. It was my first hint at what this could be, where the music could take us as a people—not just blacks, but all of us. Them people in the audience in the Savoy, and, hell, out in the street, them that couldn’t get in, it was like they was lifted up all at once. They danced and they laughed and they was sweatin like I ain’t seen since my time as a boy playin for the colored who came to my mama and daddy’s to dance and drink or around Longstreet’s piano down there in New Orleans. As a boy, I didn’t know if it was the music or the drink did that to them. That night at the Savoy, though, I knew. It was the music, the music has a power, son. It’s a power you can only find in the darkest saloon or the most holy church.
“After that show, Hamlet hustled me and a couple girls he picked up I don’t know where into the back of a cab and told the driver, ‘To the Village!’ That driver didn’t look so happy about havin a couple Negroes with white women in the back of his cab, but he drove on anyway. I didn’t know what village Hamlet was talkin about. Didn’t know how Hamlet knew to go to Harlem and the Savoy or how to catch a cab and where to go next, but he must have learned it somewhere between Vicksburg, Mississippi, and New York City.
“Manhattan opened up to me like an amusement park on that drive. The driver took us all the way down Broadway and the lights and people were like nothin I’d seen before. It was like they was all celebratin somethin and I asked the driver what it was was goin on and he just looked at me in the rearview like I was out of my mind. And maybe I was, because them lights was out of this world, son. It was all tinsel and gold and you could just feel the possibilities comin at us through the windshield.
“Anyway, them girls wasn’t white so much as they was Puerto Rican, even talked with the rolling Rs and had big brown eyes and soft hair. We was all wedged into that cab half on top of each other and, God forgive me, but the smell of them big girls, their perfume, I guess, put me in mind of my mama’s church on Sunday morning. It might not have been the same musk, but it was close and hot as hell and stirred something inside me, that’s for damn sure.”
“They swear a lot? You swear a lot.”
“They was Puerto Rican, so yeah. All Puerto Rican girls cuss.”
“There’s a girl in my class at school, Rosie, she’s Puerto Rican but she don’t cuss.”
“She will, you wait.
“So we get down to Greenwich Village and find us a jazz club but there ain’t nobody down there. They’s all up in Harlem at the Savoy, so we get a good table, the four of us, and we have some drinks and everything’s feelin good. And then this cat gets up onstage and starts playin the drums. Real soft, too, with brushes, and the other folks in the club, what few there were, was just lookin around waitin for more. After a while, after quarter hour of this, a cat comes in wearin a suit and shades and he’s talkin to the bartender about what he just seen up in Harlem—the very same show we was at. And this cat gets onstage and takes a bass out of the case he was carryin and starts playin along with the drummer. They don’t even speak, just fall in together on some tune or other. Little bit more and another cat comes in, this one with a fat cigar in his mouth, and makes a beeline for the piano, where he sits to play. Then, later, some horns come in. The whole band filled in like that, all tricklin down from Harlem. I guess maybe that’s how jazz got to the Village—it trickled down from the top of the island like an hourglass, only with black sand.
“Time was another thing that got me that night. It was like it stopped, like the nighttime might just go on forever. There was no windows, of course, and the club was dark as hell and I spent most of that night with my face in one of them girls’ hair, I guess, and listenin to music, but the night was eternal. Forever, boy. Nobody asked what time it was, nobody seemed to have to be nowhere. Hell, maybe no place else existed outside that club.
“When that music finally did stop and we stepped onto the sidewalk, swayin this way and that from the drummer’s time and good liquor, it was still dark out. Hamlet found us another cab and we headed back uptown to Spanish Harlem; neighborhood was barely a couple blocks in them days and just a few streets up from here. Took them to their building, where we figured we’d invite ourselves on in—you know what I’m talkin about?”
“No.”
Winky wandered away as though he didn’t care to know. Oliver didn’t notice his audience had gone.
“You will, just wait.
“But here’s the thing. On the stoop of that building was a man, and that man said them were his girls. ‘Both of ’em?’ I said, and he just grunted. ‘How you gonna have two women?’ Hamlet asked, gettin up in that man’s face. Man stood up then, tall son of a bitch, and said that them girls worked for him and, near as he could tell, we owed him about twenty dollars each. ‘Twenty dollars?’ Hamlet shouted. ‘Where the hell I’m a get twenty dollars?’ And then Hamlet and I looked at each other and we just seemed to know, to understand—we was like brothers that way—and Hamlet gave that tall motherfucker a shove and he went backward onto them steps and we ran like hell.” Oliver doubled over in laughter at this. “But not before he gave one of them Puerto Rican girls a grab on her big ol’ ass. And that pimp chased us back to lower Manhattan. Don’t know how we lost him; he must’ve grown tired. Or maybe we sank back into the eternal dark.
“We wandered, ended up in Battery Park when the sun finally did show up. We watched the light come up there, over the water and shine off the lady out there in it, and you know what it was like, Winky?”
“Guess I’ll find out.” The boy had grown weary of so much talking, which became more difficult to hear over the rumbling of his empty stomach.
“It was like church, like the whole city was church.”
Oliver looked up into the light coming through the trees in the early morning, disbelieving it could be the same sun that had shone on him and his good friend. He couldn’t believe his friend wasn’t there with him as his life prepared to change once again.
“That was my first night in New York. It was holy and it was sinful. It was a blessed time in a searing pool of brimstone. I didn’t know it then, though I was startin to feel, that it was everything I wanted. Sure do hate to leave it all. Sure do.”
Winky, who had been alternately digging in the dirt, chasing squirrels, and only halfway listening to what Oliver said, climbed up on the bench next to that big, round man and stared, too, at the new light.
NIGHT FOUR
1.
Frank is pulled from sleep as though from under water. Breaking the surface, he gulps air and then, realizing where he is, feels foolish, feels the other side of the bed, but finds he’s alone. This is nearly as surprising and disorienting to him as the sense of breathlessness he’d felt only moments before. He and Karen have spent only a handful of nights apart since they were married seventeen years ago. It makes this trip all the more difficult and, Frank has thought the past couple of days, necessary.
The first night they spent apart after the eve of their wedding day came within the first year of marriage. Frank was a young reporter then and his work hours erratic as he paid his dues at the beck and call of police scanners, murderers, victims, and their inconsistent states of consciousness, and editors’ even more inconsistent nerves and bowel movements. He’d worked a week and a half straight of late nights, staying in the newsroom until just after the presses ran in case there were last-second corrections to be made. He was young and eager to please, eager to show his worth. Many of those nights he’d ended at the P & H Café just down the road from the paper in a smoke cloud where the copydesk, designers, and reporters too locked into routine to not work that last shift met for beer and commiseration.
Karen was lonely, Frank sees that now. He rolls over and counts the skyscrapers visible across Manhattan from his bed and thinks that Karen didn’t have as many friends then as rooftop spires he counts. She was working just as hard as he was, but it was “regular work,” as he called it—nine-to-five, grab-a-lunch-at-noon-with-the-girls kind of work. And that one guy. His name was Chad and he worked in Karen’s firm. Chad. The fuck kind of name is Chad? he thinks even now. She’d gone out that Friday night with everyone from the office because she knew Frank would be working late, and because she didn’t care if he was working late or not by then, she was going out. She’d sat at home for eleven nights counting and wasn’t about to have another dinner alone, did not intend to watch Law & Order and then drift off to sleep with Jane Austen instead of her husband again.
So she went out. And it was early the next morning when she came home. She said the girls had all ended up at Amanda’s house and that was probably true. He knew back then that it was probably true and as he looks at his fleshy, lined, forty-year-old face in the bathroom mirror of an inexpensive New York hotel now, he still knows it’s probably true. But he didn’t care then; he had just wanted to hurt her and had accused Karen of spending the night with another man. Chad. They’d argued and she’d told him to call Amanda if he didn’t believe her and then flew into a rage when he picked up the phone. He wasn’t going to call her; he was bluffing. They didn’t speak that day and slept apart that night, though under the same roof. They were in their small apartment then and he’d fallen asleep in a chair in the living room where she left him. Eventually they made up, but the scar was there. It became a raised white line of suspicion that, over time, they may not notice, but every once in a while a fingertip grazes it or its ugliness is caught in the reflection of a mirror.
But it’s not all cold, the scar has faded, and Frank and Karen do love each other. They wanted to have that baby together and to fill up their house with children. A family would help to erase the scar even more, they both know, and so they’ve tried and tried and tried until they’ve both grown so very tired of trying, and yet they still do.
He lies back down on the bed, dripping water from the shower. He just wants to crawl back under the covers, sleep for a day and a night, but he’s got a breakfast date and knows he shouldn’t skip it. His notebook is peeking out from the back pocket of his jeans, which are lying balled up on the floor. He reaches for it and sees written in a handwriting that resembles his own, but not quite: “Internat.”
“Internat?” He says to the notebook. “What the hell is an ‘Internat’?”
He’d gone out with Davis McComber after Oliver’s show the previous night. Frank had wanted to sit and talk with Oliver some more, but he had company, a young woman who was pretty but so very pale and thin. Davis took Frank to all the haunts of lower Manhattan, rushing past some to tell him who’d played there—Van Morrison, Morrissey, Elvis Costello, Blondie, Miles Davis, Nirvana, and Mos Def—and into other clubs where he was greeted at the door by name and never charged a cover, and he seemed to know everyone everywhere. Those in the crowds, young and old, said hello, holding up beer bottles with apathetic acknowledgment, as if they knew he was only passing through. Catching and holding Davis in conversation last night would’ve been like catching water in your bare hands. He read handbills posted on doors and strained to look over heads to see who was onstage before turning around to dart out the door again with Frank following. Davis kept apologizing and cursing the fact that they were sticking to the Village and SoHo while completely disregarding Harlem. “Harlem’s got some good shit going on. Good shit. Not like the old days, of course, no house parties and all-night cutting contests, but some decent clubs with old-timers and new guys. It’s making a comeback. But what the fuck am I talking about, you’re from Memphis, you know from good music. Clubs on every corner there, every half corner, I bet. Soul, rock, funk, R and B, alt country. Home of Ardent down there—Big Star, ’Mats, Jim Dickinson. I got to get down there.”
Davis seems to think any city, any area of a city, with a musical heritage oozes with chords and a backbeat, that simply by having a front door and an address, whether a dry cleaner, grocery store, diner, or bar, they are obligated to host live music shows. He expects it. The world, he believes, expects it, and it is, by God, that city’s duty to accommodate.
And it is Davis McComber’s duty to report it all. Frank watched as Davis scribbled notes and asked questions. There was a story everywhere, in every dive, on every stage, and in every note. “Is this how it is? Is this the life of a freelancer?” Frank had asked, his head swimming from alcohol and environmental stimuli.
“Nah. Wel
l, yeah, for me,” Davis said. “All this could be written from my apartment using Google. I know the fuckers who do it that way, but I’ve got to get out. I need to put my feet on the street and get my ears onstage with the players. That’s where you find the details.”
Details. Frank’s mind flew back to journalism school and Professor Jordan, who must’ve seen all this coming—Frank’s career, his being laid off due to a decrease in ad revenue and proliferation of online news sources. Had he also seen Frank’s malignant contentment and his laziness adding up to little more than a still-empty sheet of typing paper in an unused home office? Davis is excited, and excitable. He sees the details in the stories and the stories in the details the way that Frank used to on those late nights in the newsroom and nicotine cave after work.
“Why?” It was all Frank wanted to know. “Why do this when people can just Google and fill their cloudy heads with the crap that ad executives are telling us to consume these days?”
Davis shrugged. “I figure it’s the least I can do for them.”
“Them? Who?”
“Readers.” He shrugged again. “Music fans. Little dudes sitting in Iowa or some other fucking place who don’t have clubs or live music, places that aren’t the beginning of anything. Except maybe corn or something. This shit goes out everywhere.” He wiped his open hand across the sky for Frank. “Every-fucking-where. Don’t need a subscription for this, just electricity. Figure they have electricity even in Des Moines.”
The electricity of Davis McComber shocked Frank. It was like time travel back to his own first years as a reporter when the story was the thing. He’d forgotten what it was like to give people a story just for the story’s sake, just because they might not be able to experience whatever it was he’d just experienced. Maybe all his colleagues had forgotten that as well. Getting it back might not make up for lost ad revenue or increase circulation, but Frank was done with all that anyway. Maybe, though, that electricity could jump-start his own heart, kick-start his own writing. He pulled his notebook from his pocket and, in a boozy, bleary-eyed hand, wrote: “Internat.”
Five Night Stand: A Novel Page 17
