The French Revolution

by Matt Stewart

  NAPOLEON

  He had no scruples and he had no manners. He was ill-bred, as was shown in his relations with women, of whom he had a low opinion. His language, whether Italian or French, lacked distinction, finish, correctness, but never lacked saliency or interest. The Graces had not presided over his birth, but the Fates had. He had a magnificent talent as stage manager and actor . . . He could cajole in the silkiest tones, could threaten in the iciest, could shed tears or burst into violence, smashing furniture and bric-a-brac when he felt such actions would produce the effect desired.

  —CHARLES HAZEN,

  The French Revolution and Napoleon

  I found the crown of France lying on the ground, and I picked it up with my sword.

  —NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

  She say she love me, say she want me around

  I put up my dukes

  But that woman done break me down

  Werewolf became famous in the months after Katrina, lying on a flooded-out Buick in St. Bernard Parish and singing to the sky. For months he was ignored, hollered to, shot at, and busted while he sang hymns and love songs, doo-wopped and bluesed. His voice was reedy and soft with depression, a man with everything already lost but pushing on anyhow, not really sure why.

  He appeared with a bottle of vodka when the moon lifted over the horizon at night. He wore pink plastic sunglasses, a red fez, a checked tie that barely reached his third rib, crusty overalls, an eggshell-blue velour jacket with yellow zebra stripes, cheap flip-flops. Spun out and wiry, he groped down a gravel driveway and eased onto the hood of an abandoned ’96 Skylark. He waited until he felt the moonlight break on his brow, a slash of warmth across his forehead that unzipped his mouth and delivered his lyrics, holding notes for eons, music without breathing, the only slight breaks in sound coming on the quarter hour when he twisted sideways for a slug of vodka. By the time the moon went down he was wasted with tears, his voice strong and terrible. He always finished with “Amazing Grace,” then rolled off the hood and passed out in the backseat.

  He became an attraction when Tiny Jake Haddox started playing with him. Air-conditioning unit salesman by day and jazz drummer by night, Tiny Jake lost his house in the hurricane, then his job, then his band said they were moving to Houston and he wasn’t invited. He started drinking all day and all night, until his wife took off for Canada and he moved on to drugs. A month later he was driving through the abandoned blocks of St. Bernard Parish, shooting out windows and smoking PCP-dipped cigs two at a time when he heard the lonesome call come to him from a driveway, the saddest, scrawniest thing he’d ever heard, bloated with grief, a dirge to bury them all.

  He pulled over, sipped the froth off the man’s vodka, and set up his drums.

  When the people trickled back they didn’t ask questions. Ragtag bopop a boom ba husss filled the driveway once the bulldozers quit for the day. Poppoppoppaloppalop yah they tore out dry rot, hauled scrap, painted, and upholstered. Spewy de leelee shambam babababam they drove home from night jobs working security and fast food, cat burglary, fucking. Occasional potshots whizzed over the Buick’s bow, intending to miss and accomplishing it as the man in the blue jacket was thin as a twig and near impossible to hit keeled on his back. His voice hung by a stitch, dry and trebly and a little flat on the high notes, but his words came true like bombs and bridges, the despair caught in his tremolo, and people understood how it helped carve out their home. After a few weeks they stopped messing with him altogether; the music was part of the city’s fabric, a train rolling through the night.

  It ain’t the rain ’pon my shoulders

  Or the world hangin’ round my head

  But when she pushed me

  Out that window

  Ain’t a thing she coulda said

  On the first anniversary of Katrina, a reporter found them assembled in the driveway under a waxing crescent, the singer splayed out and cornhole drunk, Tiny Jake using brushes on one of their slower numbers, a melancholy tune that usually came on late in the night when the man on the Buick was two-thirds out and falling.

  Hiss hiss

  That’s what I get for a kiss?

  Why not slap my face?

  Why not split my lip?

  If you won’t have me

  Stab me

  Because I ain’t here no more

  Warbling and scattered, the words came like a sacred spell. Then he launched into “Amazing Grace,” slithered into the backseat, and punched down the locks. The reporter caught Tiny Jake while he was packing up his cymbals, a doobie stuck in his lips.

  “Excuse me,” the reporter said. “What was that?”

  Tiny Jake glared at her. It was the first time anyone had spoken to him at the driveway.

  “Can you tell me about the music? How long have you been playing here? And why?”

  He loaded the rest of his drum set into the trunk as she repeated her questions. The presence of her voice felt profane. He climbed into his truck and started the engine, but she stood in his way with both hands up like a traffic cop, a pushy, bitchy move that kind of turned him on. He rolled down his window.

  “It’s jus’ our thing. Ain’t nothin to say. Come, play. Tha’s it.”

  “How did you two start up?” she asked.

  “Ask him,” he said, nodding to the decrepit Skylark’s backseat, the stench in the sealed chamber palpable a few yards away. “Werewolf here come out with the moon and sing to his woman. I jus’ play drums.”

  When Tiny Jake came by the next night, he had to lay on the horn to part the crowd. The street was stopped up, the sidewalks overrun with folding chairs and blankets. People chugged cans of beer, tossed footballs, smoked cigarettes, laughed on cellphones, scratched dogs, threw garbage in the bushes, tickled kids. Combating subwoofers birthed wet, heavy bass lines. The aroma of fried chicken mingled with the night’s mildewed heat. Some kind of fucking picnic, he thought, some kind of disrespect.

  The driveway was lit up like a car dealership, stuffed with people and hot. Reporters encircled him as he stepped onto the street, capturing exclusive shots of his raised middle finger. “Shithogs,” he whispered, then pulled his snare out of the truck bed and set it up on the driveway.

  He started back to the truck, but the rest of his drums were already floating toward him, portaged by a band of twelve-year-old boys. Somebody handed him a Corona. He heard Teddy Pendergrass on the sound system, watched an acrobatic one-handed football reception. The journalists receded. He cracked open the beer and watched a Chinese girl in a tank top blow him a kiss.

  Suddenly it was the best day he’d had in years.

  A fat slit of moonlight washed in from the east, creeping over portable Dumpsters and decimated homes, water-sunk land. The crowd hushed. Ten minutes slugged by. Tiny Jake tightened his skins and finished his beer and wondered what his wife was doing. He’d last seen her three months ago from under a bar-stool, high heels kicking aside beer cans and stomping toward the exit, prattling on about Vancouver. He couldn’t really remember, it might have been Montreal, he’d been in a bind then, eight sheets to the wind and then some, drowned in Jack Daniels, his rhythm off for weeks. He looked over at his truck, technically half of it still hers, insurance past due and a leaky transmission but there when you needed it worst. Kinda like Werewolf, he thought, sticking around.

  The crowd murmured. Network engineers repositioned satellite uplinks. A girl ran up to the Skylark and tapped her finger on the windshield. Then a crash in the back, a woman’s oof, Werewolf’s fez bobbing over a field of craned heads.

  “I smell Carnegie Hall tonight!” Werewolf called. “Where you kitty-cats been all my life?” He lurched down a rapidly opening corridor toward the car, postured like a crunched telephone pole and groping. When he got to the Skylark he pulled a bottle of Uncle Joe’s vodka from his pants, uncapped it, and chugged. Then he sneezed into his hand and parked his caboose on the hood. “So many of you came out, shit. Feel like I should ask if you got any requests.”

>   Utter silence. Responding felt wrong; they didn’t know his repertoire, his range, how serious he was. The quiet held for a minute, until a sloshed insurance adjustor suggested “When the Levee Breaks,” Led Zeppelin, in C minor.

  “Gotta be an asshole to ask for that one,” Werewolf said. “But a nice tune, used to hear it on the radio all the time out in San Fran. We’ll lose the power chords. Maestro?”

  Tiny Jake put drumstick to head in the approximate pace of the one Led Zeppelin song he knew from his wife playing it all the time, “Going to California,” until he realized the song didn’t have much if anything for a drumbeat and was too slow for Werewolf’s vibe. He threw it all out and went free flow like usual, the line coming out cresting and punchy, with long gaps for improvisation. He worked the cymbals over easy, toe-tapped the kick, closed his eyes, and felt Werewolf sipping his vodka and unloading melody. The whole street cottoned to it, he realized later when he saw the video and the crowd sobbing to Werewolf’s undone lyrics, the cameras flashing like a swarm of lightning bugs, the music holding over everything but a growling dog somewhere. Wolf hummed through the parts he didn’t know, and the lyrics he remembered he didn’t go buck nasty on, didn’t push it down to empty. The song came together stark and broken, mucked up like a pigpen, fitting the souls of New Orleans snug as new socks.

  Five months later they were the opening act at the Comeback Mardi Gras, crowds packed in like stock cattle and crying arduously when their encore ended. Over brunch the next morning they inked an eye-popping record contract, celebrating with Sazeracs and mimosas and a spontaneous jam session, beating forks and spoons on the table, the diners at Commander’s Palace supplying lyrics Werewolf wouldn’t sing during daytime. Videos of their driveway duets went viral, streamed across the planet, played as slow songs at proms and formals and later remixed into club dance numbers. Fan websites materialized; Led Zeppelin’s lawyers sent menacing letters demanding royalties. Tiny Jake went whole days without thinking about his wife.

  They didn’t talk to each other, Werewolf and Tiny Jake. They made joint decisions on song selection, financial planning, tour dates, cover art, distribution strategies—but too much was caught in their deadeye feel, knowing the holes in each cadence, rim shots tied to huffed breaths, the serene emptiness that filled their music. It couldn’t be wrecked with words. So Werewolf kept away from Jake’s scent and Jake steered clear of the ratty fez, and it was only on stage that they came together, distant strangers partnered on a macadam driveway, their agents fighting over points in day-long meetings downtown.

  On the Buick went platinum before the first week was out, in a year when industry analysts posited that there was no point to recording music anymore with all the piracy; artists should play live venues only, with jacked-up ticket prices and the full complement of overpriced band merchandise. The blind man and his sheep flew off record shop racks and into computers, the lowlight cover photo of them knocking out a tune on the abandoned city’s driveway jacking into hearts, pity, wallets. The moon broke the sky like an eyelid, the vodka bottle digitally removed.

  Word spread that Werewolf had made the entire album from the hood of the Skylark, he’d towed the vehicle to the Music Shed on Euterpe Street and recorded his vocals in the garage. He only sang when the moon was out, he could hold a note for ten minutes. He ate bats and pissed puss and drank vodka like water. He said he was blind but didn’t carry a cane, didn’t have a seeing-eye dog, walked straight down the street like the sun showed the way. The rumors crawled across radio shows and gossip columns, festered in internet chat rooms, selling magic and albums by the crate.

  Werewolf moved out of the Buick and into Marriott hotels, top floor corner pocket, two adjoining rooms, the most space to himself he’d had in his life. Pay-per-view porn played all day while he slept, his dusk wakeup call consisting of fake orgasms and ass slaps. A stack of room service sandwiches passed for dinner, accompanied by the entire contents of the minibar taken straight, no ice. He wore the same wretched outfit, never washed, the desperate getup pilfered from a St. Vincent de Paul store after Katrina and still the only clothes to his name. Every few weeks he called a disconnected phone number and pulled on his earlobes, then fell onto one of his four beds like dirty laundry.

  They toured for a year. Tiny Jake’s agent wanted arenas but Werewolf’s agent said clubs, so they settled on stages and charged ludicrously. They dubbed the tour Moonrise, with a great jelly orb of a satellite and a padded Buick for Werewolf to lie on and cases of cheap vodka, dump truckloads of gravel, as close as could be gotten to St. Bernard Parish without all the unprofitable downside. The tour was noted for Werewolf’s mephitic smell, his extreme tardiness, the variability of the start time, the nights cancelled without explanation, building a reputation as the least reliable ticket in town. Because when Werewolf’s agent had insisted that the shows correspond with the lunar calendar there had been big pushback, stage policies and union contracts and blue laws to consider, and he’d had to settle for a floating start time but the show ending by 2 AM no matter what. Tiny Jake could only riff a solo for so long before the crowd rumbled angry, streamed for the ticket booth, called for refunds, and booked.

  Tiny Jake knew it wasn’t star bullshit, a wacked-out trip or too few flowers in his trailer, his name not in big enough lights. Part of Werewolf was wrong, everyone knew that, but Jake guessed it was viler than they thought, something about a woman that gnawed tears from him and made him worship the moon like some alley cat or fucked-up Aztec. Bullets from his past ridged under those sunglasses, crooked his walk. That vanquished voice: the man was older than he let on, Tiny knew, at least sixty-five and not much more to it if he didn’t cut out the liquor and start hitting the salad bar. But Tiny wasn’t gonna rebuke him or lay down the law—no need to prime that bomb so long as the royalty checks kept rolling in. Wolf’d sing when he was ready, and that was it.

  Tiny delivered his observations to his agent, who huddled with Werewolf’s man and moved for Vegas. They set up at the Wynn for a trial stint in the fall of 2010, show start times ranging from 6:30 PM to 4:00 AM, drifting thirty-one, thirty-nine, forty-two minutes later each day, until the sun came up with the moon still out and the show went dark until the lunar calendar cycled through a couple weeks later.

  “A floating craps game,” Werewolf said after he crawled out of the Buick’s backseat on their first night in the Full Moon Theatre. “Nice job, you caught us. Let’s play.” He reached into the car and took out two martini glasses and a pair of dice. Opening the vodka bottle with his teeth, he filled both glasses and handed one to Tiny Jake. They looked at each other for a quick second, eyes shining loss and torched women, then drank it all down in one toss. Werewolf rolled the dice on the snare and Tiny Jake made them hop and shimmer until the drumroll peaked, the crowd was shouting, the ricochets filling the theater with the rap of cold rain. He batted the cubes into the lights with his drumsticks as Wolf fell back on the Buick and belted out “Luck Be a Lady” to a crush of lurid whoops. No schmaltzy Nathan Detroit greased handshake, this was the shook-down version, unwired. Straight like the morning mirror through a hangover, so true it bled.

  The audience of celebrities and high rollers yawped and hooted. “Y’all happy?” Werewolf asked, his smile a drooping hot dog bun. “Hafta know pain to know what happy is. So let’s ride.” He sang “Black” by Pearl Jam, tearing through notes like loose flagstones; he sang Muddy Waters like the dead; he sang the Beach Boys and Al Green with love snatched from his chest; he sang his own blue, tortured concoctions while Tiny Jake whisked over cymbals. Laid back on the Buick’s hood, his fez lodged between windshield wipers and his feet walling in the hood ornament; his sooty, stained outfit masking his features save the inside of his nostrils, his Adam’s apple, the underside of his lips, occasionally a quick glimpse of his ears. A boom microphone draped over his face caught his heated lamentations, his delivery channeled by vodka and turning frustrated and vexing as the night moved on. There was no
sign of him stopping and the crowd ate it up, so they let him go past the scheduled close and into the night, Tiny Jake aching but toughing it out, throwing in some Latin fusion he’d been working on to get people dancing, plumbing out Werewolf’s pipes all over the contour map until daybreak hit like a slap shot and “Amazing Grace” lay in. The curtain crashed down, and the audience hobbled back to their rooms, their intestines laced with hemlock, their souls forever changed.

  Two months later, the lifetime contract was signed and stamped home. Tiny Jake filed for divorce soon after, trying to cut out all the nights lost watching the audience for the peanut butter eyes he’d known his whole life, his wife lost to liquor and acts of God, floating free across the Great White North.

  Who was this man?

  No interviews, never sighted outside the casino, quickly becoming one of Vegas’s richest and most reclusive residents. His televisions were always on, now playing news as well as porn, war footage, death lists, martyrs, elderly women strapping bombs under their abayas and blowing up food trucks, weather, motorsports. Small-cap funds and cellular implants. The first crop of cloned soldiers in accelerated development. Fun snacks to make with leftover party cheese. He paid the most attention to the crowd scenes, feeling out the dead space in the correspondents’ reports, probing the chumming masses for some sound, some thing, someone.

  He began to gamble large sums of money. He favored the slots, playing alone at a thousand dollars a shake, his fortunes announced by a roll of bleeps. It passed the time. He hired investigators to provide him with in-depth briefings, hi-res videos with interpolated audio, phone numbers, photographs, report cards, copies of deeds and tax returns, birth certificates and death certificates, all of which he kept in his room safe and never discussed with anyone else. Liquor filtrated through his mind.