by Edgardo Vega
The following weekend she reciprocated and brought her own albums and Wyndell pored over them, asking her questions about Puerto Ricans and their different shades of colors, and he said that his family was quite similar in that skin tone varied and he had cousins who were as light as she was and could pass as whites if they wanted; white Cherokee, anyway, he said, and that Puerto Ricans were similar in that regard. She said he was right and then he said jokingly that maybe she had African blood. “Yeah,” she said, innocently, liking the idea; thinking that if that were the case she would now feel closer to Kunta Kinte, Kizzy, Chicken George, and the rest of the people in Roots.
Upon her return to Tarrytown at the end of the Christmas holidays, spurred by Wyndell’s idea that she might have a connection to Africa, she broached the subject of black relatives with her mother. Elsa went bananas on her, going on about how the whole thing of race was an irrelevancy since weren’t we, after all, she and her stepfather Barry López-Ferrer and Vidamía, first and foremost Puerto Rican and didn’t concern ourselves with color.
But Vidamía wasn’t having it and said, “That’s all well and good, but could you please tell me if we have black relatives, because you have somewhat curly hair, and sometimes I look at myself in the mirror and, even though my skin is white and I have freckles and green eyes and my father is Irish and has blond hair, I can see a little bit of my friend Charisse Robinson, maybe around the eyes or the lips, so I’m wondering if I have black relatives.”
“Sometimes you are impossible,” Elsa said. “What difference would it make?”
“None,” Vidamía said. “I just want to know. But if you’re ashamed that we have black relatives, then forget it.”
Elsa had raised her hand but hadn’t slapped her. Vidamía hadn’t even flinched, knowing more than ever that her mother was no longer a force in her life. For some reason, which she quickly identified as rebellion, she recalled the first time she and Wyndell had made love. She now looked at her mother and smiled, relishing the fact that her mother couldn’t know what she was presently thinking. The feeling of power was enormous.
Needing to find out about herself, she took the “big train” into Grand Central Station and then took the “little train,” the subway, the Number 6, to be exact, getting off as always at Astor Place rather than on Bleecker, which was closer to the Farrell loft, but needing to immerse herself each time in the rhythm of the neighborhood; walking down St. Mark’s and into the East Village, which was now her turf, homegirl; needing to walk the fifteen or so blocks to measure herself against the harshness of the neighborhood; bopping like she was attitudinally bad when she walked the street cause then nobody messed with her; people thinking there goes one crazy-ass Puerto Rican girl, with her baggy jeans and brogans and her leather jacket and blunt haircut and dark lipstick on some kind of mission so don’t mess with her or she’ll get her posse after you and whatnot; watching the tough white girls emulating us, as she now liked to think of herself belonging to the P.R.s, this urban tribe of incomprehensible cultural savages.
So visceral was her need that she’d gone and visited her grandmother, Ursula Santiago, threatening never to go back to her mother’s house in Tarrytown unless her grandma, her abuela, told her what was going on with everybody about los negros. Her grandmother had gotten all emotional and said don’t say negros but gente de color, which literally meant people of color, which to Vidamía sounded horrible. Her grandmother sat down in the kitchen and said that her grandfather, Tino Santiago, was dark-skinned, not black mind you, not really.
“You know, trigueño,” she said. “Justino, but they called him Tino.”
“Where’s he live, güela?” Vidamía asked.
“In the Bronx, mamita,” Ursula said. “I don’t know. I lost touch with him a long time ago, six or seven years after your mami was born. That was almost thirty years ago, baby.”
“Does mami know him?”
“No, he was never home. Always playing somewhere with the other musicians.”
“He was a musician?” Vidamía said, unbelieving.
“Yeah, un conguero.”
“Conguero,” said Vidamía nodding her head happily, allowing the Spanish to take over, wondering where all these musicians in her life were coming from, and she with not a musical bone in her body, except for slapping that “funny-ass” tub bass with her family’s band.
“They used to call him Tumba.”
“Tuba, güela? I thought you said his name was Tino? Tuba, like oom-pa-pa?” Vidamía said, making like she was holding a big ole sousaphone, puffing up her cheeks and rocking from side to side, so that her grandmother slapped her arm playfully.
“Not tuba, boba,” she said, calling her silly. “Tumba.”
“Like a tomb?” Vidamía said, earnestly. “Where they bury people?”
“Not like that and not like the Tombs, where they send the junkies and thieves to jail,” replied her grandmother. “Tumba, tumbadora, like the big conga drum. That’s what it’s called, the bass one—tumbadora.”
“Oh,” Vidamía said, “a drum. And they called Grandpa that?”
“That’s right. Tumba Santiago. That was his name.”
She had gone back up to Tarrytown armed with enough ammunition to blow anything her mother said about not having black relatives totally out of the water. Right after the Christmas holidays, which she spent in New York with the Farrells while her mother and Barry went off to Puerto Rico with friends, everything exploded like never before. The blowup was brought on by Ursula telling Elsa innocently that Vidamía had been asking about her grandfather.
“What did you tell her?” Elsa asked.
“I said he left us a long time ago,” her mother said. “That’s all. That he was a musician.”
“Anything else?”
“No, nothing else,” Ursula Santiago said and felt bad for lying. It didn’t make sense to tell Elsa that Vidamía had been asking whether any of her relatives were black. And since Elsa hadn’t asked, she wasn’t going to provide any extra information.
“Did she seem like she wanted to go and find him?”
“I don’t think so,” Ursula said.
Elsa forgot about the issue until one evening after supper Vidamía brought up the subject of her grandfather, stating that she was going to begin looking for him. Elsa sighed patiently.
“Why?” Elsa said. “He’s probably remarried and doesn’t want to be bothered.”
“I’m not going to bother him,” Vidamía said. “I just want to meet him.”
“Why? Are you still on this Roots kick?” she asked, knowing that she’d slipped up in bringing up the issue of color, which Vidamía immediately picked up on.
“Mom, for God’s sake, you sound like such a racist.”
“I’m not a racist. You have no right to make such accusations.”
“I didn’t say you were. I said you sounded like one.”
“I was only talking about your wanting to know about your relatives. That’s what I meant about that book. That’s what it’s about. That has nothing to do with race.”
“Fine, but you sounded so paranoid.”
“That’s enough, young lady. You know very little about psychology, and labeling people because of their concerns is extremely dangerous.”
“Forget it, okay? I’m just curious. It’s not like I have all kinds of grandfathers, you know. As a matter of fact, I only have one. My other was a cop and got killed. Did you know that?”
“Yes, I’m aware of that.”
“And your father might as well be dead, too.”
“Right, and I forbid you to spend any time trying to find him.”
“You have to be joking, okay?”
“I mean it.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Never you mind,” Elsa said and got up from the table.
Vidamía looked at Barry, who shrugged his shoulders. For Vidamía the matter was a moot point since she didn’t have enough time to begin lookin
g for her grandfather in the middle of the school year. For Elsa, however, the issue took on a completely different meaning.
While there are always a few detective shows on television, some new ones and others in rerun, and there are at least a dozen films a year dealing with detectives, in actuality there are many more private investigators than one would imagine. Few of them are as glamorous as Magnum or Mike Hammer, or as interesting as Columbo, but all you need to do is open the Manhattan Yellow Pages and look under “Investigators” and you’ll find over four pages of ads. Are your phones bugged? Matrimonial. A Team of Former Federal & Local Law Professionals. Confidential Private Investigators. Problems Discreetly Handled. Full Service Security Professionals. Difficult and Unusual Cases. Know the Truth for Peace of Mind.
So, at the beginning of April 1990, when she knew her daughter would be spending her Easter break on the Lower East Side, Elsa, sitting in her office after finishing with her last patient that morning, dialed the number of the agency she had settled on and asked for an appointment. At three that afternoon she went in, and, impressed by the professional way in which she was treated by ex—New York City police detective Richard Flanagan and his partner, Walter Pavese, himself a retiree from the Connecticut State Police, she explained her situation.
“It’s just a matter of safety,” she explained to Flanagan. “I’m worried about my daughter.”
“Do you think she’s involved with drugs?”
“It’s always a concern these days,” Elsa said. “It would just ease my mind if I knew where she was spending her time. She comes into the city almost every weekend. Her father lives down in the East Village, and she spends quite a bit of time there. I’d like to know if she’s hanging around undesirable people. She has threatened to make contact with her grandfather.”
“What’s wrong with her grandfather?”
Elsa had put her head down and looked pained.
“It’s pretty difficult for me to talk about him.”
“He’s your father?” Flanagan had asked.
Elsa nodded and dabbed at the corners of her eyes, pretending to be troubled.
“Yes, but I don’t want you to turn him over to the police,” she said, feigning panic.
“That’s not our job. But we have to know the extent of the criminal activity, if there’s any.”
“I think he’s involved up in the Bronx,” she lied, relishing casting her father in that light and being purposefully vague.
“I see,” said Flanagan, nodding. “Do you have a photograph of your daughter?”
From her briefcase Elsa produced several pictures. Flanagan said that they could create a surveillance routine for a period of a month and write up a report if she was able to provide approximate times when her daughter came in the city. Flanagan quoted his fee, which seemed quite reasonable to Elsa, who would have agreed to twice the amount. Flanagan then explained that for a slightly higher fee they could provide a photographic record. Elsa said she didn’t think it would be necessary, and then thought another instant and changed her mind.
“Yes, maybe that would be the best thing,” she said, nodding.
“If anything were to happen after we were off the case, at least you’d have the photographs. By the way, you can count on us to testify in any court proceedings.”
She wrote out a check, shook hands with Flanagan, and left, her mind going in a dozen different directions. The photos were a good idea. Although she had no desire to ever be in the company of her father again, she would welcome seeing how age had ravished him, wanted to see how poverty had subverted his spirit and defeated him, the black bastard. Ultimately, she needed to see proof of Vidamía’s disobedience, even if it meant having to deal with the issue of blackness.
40. The Music
The first time in twenty years that Billy Farrell played Thelonious Sphere Monk’s tune “Straight No Chaser” all the way through on the piano, he was alone in a practice room at New York University around one in the afternoon a week after Thanksgiving in 1988. The previous night he had lain in bed, restless and unable to sleep, thinking again about Joey Santiago’s death and imagining things like being a Marine again and sitting in a barracks in Beirut and suddenly flying through the air in a confusion of sound, blinding light and flying debris, watching, in slow motion, limbs and heads flying by him, until, as if a dawn were breaking on a new day, he saw “Straight No Chaser” clearly, and, on its tail, other tunes like “Friday the Thirteenth,” “Little Rootie Tootie,” and “Epistrophy.” He had previously avoided those compositions, fearing that he wouldn’t be able to play them without his two fingers.
All he thought about the entire morning as he walked the twenty or so blocks to New York University was Monk’s austerity. Was this what he was doing? Isolating himself in order to emulate the great pianist? He entered the Main Building hoping to see Pop Butterworth, but his elevator had just gone up. When he arrived at the practice room that day he went in, closed the door of the soundproofed room, and sat down hesitantly at the piano. At first he had watched his hand, playing an improvisational sequence against the chord structure of a blues, noting that the speed at which he was able to play had increased dramatically. It was exactly as Lurleen had explained learning curves. For a while there appeared to be little progress, then suddenly there was a huge leap forward. All at once he realized that he was playing in a totally different way than he had ever known. His left hand was as strong as ever, its capacity to span three keys over an octave and still sound coherent pleased him and he watched now, independent of his playing, what his right hand was doing.
What he observed pleased him even more, and he saw that when he attempted to play a tune like “My Funny Valentine,” the melody line was merely insinuated, as if his conscious mind were attempting to play the tune but the missing middle and pinkie fingers couldn’t hit the required notes so that his left hand was now compensating for the lack, producing contrapuntal chords that, when played up-tempo, sounded new and unlike anything he had ever heard. He also found that this method sounded better on the lower part of the piano. The melodies he was creating reminded him of Monk’s chording—except in his case the missing notes were created by his attempts to play the melodies.
He chuckled once when he held back his left hand and played the melody with the three fingers of his right hand and it sounded like M—Fun—va—tine—eet com—val—ine, or something like that. He hummed the melody, suppressing his right hand and playing the chords, and, indeed, where the spaces were in the melody, he had employed a perfect complimentary chord, so that as a ballad the tune sounded odd, but quite pleasing. He tried it with “Autumn in New York” and then “April in Paris.” In each instance the result was the same. For some reason the tunes sounded as if Monk were playing them sideways. The notion made him smile and talk to himself and say things like “Go ahead, man. Play it. Work” or “That’s some deep shit, man. That’s some nasty mothafuckin’ stuff. Where you been hidin’ all that music?”
And he’d answer himself, mumbling: “Oh, man, get outta my face. You just trying to figure out what I’m doing so you can get over and not have to think for yourself.” Holding dialogues with himself like he was talking again to Mr. McQuinlan, the black leprechaun of his youth. It was then that he tried playing “Straight No Chaser,” carefully at first, and then with increasing confidence, opening up the tune to a variety of interpretations, first going in one direction and then exploring another, the trails filled with a landscape of ideas, each one branching off into other tunes that, unlike some of the bop exponents, he wouldn’t play but leave open, so that while playing an improvisational chorus he would get to a certain place where he could’ve easily played “How Are Things in Glockamora” as a little joke but instead left the tune implied and under it played its chord structure.
After that day he spent three days a week from November 1988 till well into August of 1989 playing melodies and their chord structures, going up and down the keyboard doing scales, e
xploring the changes of a tune, trying out riffs and improvisational variations, but always plumbing the depths and the wealth of material of Thelonious Monk, the pianist he most admired, and the hundreds of tunes by other musicians and composers which formed part of his large repertoire.
Students as well as faculty came by and stood spellbound outside the closed door, listening to him play variations on tunes, the virtuosity obvious, the intensity apparent, his up-tempo runs reminiscent of the most accomplished bop pianists, particularly the breathless abandon of Bud Powell and Lennie Tristano, needing to fly, to give himself totally to the music and on its wings to soar beyond any level he’d ever known, each time pushing the boundaries of his capacity, daring himself, as he imagined instinctively every great artist must, to go beyond the commonplace and stand courageously, to face the storm and relish its fury. At this point he didn’t know yet that it was the shrinking from this stand, this daring of destiny, that had brought him to the life he now led.
There were times when he played on beyond his allotted time, but no one ever bothered him, and eventually someone would get word to Pop Butterworth, who people in the Jazz and Contemporary Music Program at the school knew was responsible for getting Billy the practice time. Butterworth would come upstairs to the practice rooms when he got off work at five, listen to him for a few minutes, and then open the door, go over and put his hand on Billy’s shoulder, and tell him it was time to go.
“You sound real good, son,” he’d say.
“Thank you, Pop,” Billy would say. “I played some more Monk today.”
“That’s great. You gonna be ready to get back into it soon.”
