Full Spectrum 3 - [Anthology]

by Ed By Lou Aronica et. el.

  Harris was back in Panama, dancing and raising a loa. The Harris in Panama could not see into the future, but even if he could, it was already too late. Raising a loa had not been his real mistake. By the time the loa came, everything here had already occurred. Harris had made his real mistake when he took the toad. Up until that moment, Harris had always played by the rules. Harris had been seduced by a toad, and in yielding to that seduction he created a whole new world for himself, a world without rules, just exactly the sort of world in which Harris himself was unlikely to be comfortable.

  “Come on,” his wife said. “What do you really think?” She was so excited. He had never seen her so animated.

  She was going to be old someday. Harris could see it lurking in her. Harris would still love her, but what kind of a love would that be? How male? How sufficient? These things Harris was unsure of. For these things he had to look into himself, and the cartoon looking glass didn’t go that way.

  He held the cartoon panels between himself and his wife and looked into her instead. He had never understood why Carry Nation appealed to her so. His wife was not religious. His wife enjoyed a bit of wine in the evening and thought what people did in the privacy of their own homes was pretty much their own business. Now he saw that what she really admired about Carry Nation was her audacity. Men despised Carry Nation, and Harris’s wife admired her for that. She admired the way Carry didn’t care. She admired the way Carry carried on. “I always look a fool,” Carry wrote. “God had need of me and the price He exacts is that I look a fool. Of course, I mind. Anyone would mind. But He suffered on the cross for me. It is little enough to ask in return. I do it gladly.”

  “I know it’s not literature,” Harris’s wife said, a bit embarrassed. “We’re trying to have an impact on the American psyche. Literature may not be the best way to do that anymore.”

  Harris’s wife wanted to encourage other women not to care whether men approved of them or not, and she wanted and expected Harris to say he approved of this project.

  He tried to focus again on the surface of the glass, on the cartoon panels. What nice colors.

  “Kapow!” Harris said. “Kaboom!”

  We come from the cemetery,

  We went to get our mother,

  Hello mother the Virgin,

  We are your children,

  We come to ask your help,

  You should give us your courage.

  —VOUDON SONG

  <>

  * * * *

  Chango Chingamadre, Dutchman, & Me

  R.V. BRANHAM

  ¡

  Así!”

  Dutchman and me heard it, drawing closer.

  “¡De a Pepe timbales!” Dutchman served one of her regulars—a patent attorney—his espresso. “¡Asi!” She made change. “¡Mira el H.P.!”

  Dutchman hawked into the sink behind the bar, cleared her throat and covered her mouth before sneezing. She then turned to me: “Hey, M.E., make yourself useful and turn the friggin’ record over.”

  M.E., that’s me. Mervyn Eichmann. Now you know why I use the M.E. “¡De a Pepe cojones!”

  I put the other side on, and gently slipped the needle onto the edge of that divine platter. Louis Armstrong to you, Sir. Call him Satchmo and you’ll be on your ass. “Potato Head Blues.” (This was the D.B.A. Dutchman had used when she sailed into the rotten apple and decided to get a business shingle and take over this dump—er, ah, bistro—serenaded by her flying phonograph and her flying 78’s, inherited from her uncle, who’d drawn succor from them while stationed on the Maginot Line in the mid-thirties.)

  “¡DE A PEPE SANTOS COJONES!”

  Who else, none-other-than El C.C., Chango Chingamadre, former Great Black Hope of Bebop, Newyorican Contingent, with a box, a big heavy box. He was a spidermonkey on the needle. A monkey with another monkey on his back. “On The Road,” Chango Chingamadre declared.

  “Cool it, babe,” Dutchman told him. “Mistah Armstrong, he’s swinging.”

  “Sorry, Dutch.” Chango set the box on the bar. Dutchman examined the side.

  “Viking, eh?”

  “Fell off the back of the truck,” I offered by way of suggesting how it had come into our acquaintance’s hands. Dutchman unfolded the flaps. It was On The Road.

  “B.F.D., babe. The long-awaited Kerouac debut—”

  “You can give me twenty for it, eh? C’mon, Dutch.”

  “Hey, this is yesterday’s papers. Everybody in the Village has been reading the galleys for donkey’s years.”

  “Look.” Chango was sweating. He needed a fix. In a rather bad way. “Gimmie ten now and ten when you sell ‘em all.”

  I’d walked over to examine the books. Fifty. Hardcover. I opened one. First edition. And a slip, “Review Copy.”

  Dutchman saw the slip: “Why didn’t you say so? Hell they’re worth something.” She took out a couple of ten-dollar bills. “Sorry, I’m a bit short now. Come back tonight and I’ll give you the rest.”

  Chango smiled. “… ‘S cool.”

  “But Don’t Spend This All On Junk; Get Some Food In You. And get a jacket, ‘s cold evenings.”

  “I go to the Queen of Night,” Chango replied, “…’s warm there.”

  I poked Chango’s shoulder to get his attention, and he turned to face me. “You ought to stay away from that scene.”

  “But I get to sit in with the house band, M.E. I get to jam… we play the secret music. That house band is—”

  “House band, my butt,” Dutchman told us while furiously scouring at some other or thing behind the bar counter. “A bunch of hasbeen-neverwas-nevergonnabe no-account junkys—”

  I glared at Dutchman. Chango mumbled some Spanish crap and started to leave, but turned, and grabbed a book; he gave it to me. “Keep it for me, till I go home to the old lady.”

  Word on the street was that he’d met his old lady at the Queen of Night’s salon. (I’d even heard from one gone case that she was the Queen of Night’s kid sister.) Well, they’d been together, gotten a cold-water boxcar flat with a Harlem air shaft view. Chango insisted that one night he’d found her naked with someone (I think; it’s hard to tell, Chango’d been incoherent on that point, raving on about blood candles and a bowl filled with wax and a goat’s severed platter on a large head) and they’d had an uncool fight. And she’d kicked him out.

  “It’ll be good, tu miras, we make up; she take me back home.”

  Dutchman exchanged glances with me; we all knew she’d never take him back home. Not now. Now home for her was a six-by-six-by-six plot of land in potter’s field.

  Chango was out the door before you could say shit or Shinola. Dutchman frowned, shook her head.

  “You really laid into him, Dutch.”

  The patent attorney spoke up: “Could I buy a couple of those from you. They’re for a nephew, his bar mitzvah’s next week.”

  “Ten percent above cover.” Dutchman was unpacking the books.

  “But—”the patent attorney wanted to haggle—”you’ve already got a good markup at cover price.”

  I turned away, to let Dutchman hustle a good price from the customer. In the back, by the rest rooms, I saw a woman rush past… actually, I just saw a flash of her flashy dress. It was funny. I hadn’t noticed anyone else besides Chango come in.

  “Fifteen percent. I hear you’re a good lawyer. You can afford it.” She put the books on the small bookcase by her dusty bar minor, along with the City Lights Howl and Other Poems.

  After a moment the attorney agreed. He became peeved when he asked for a sack and Dutchman said she didn’t have any.

  “Closet Beat,” I said, after the lawyer had left.

  Dutchman laughed, her dyke laugh.

  Dutchman is a dyke; I’ve never seen her with a woman or heard of such Sapphic episodes, but I came on to her once and she wouldn’t hop into bed with me. The only fifteen other women who wouldn’t ride the banana boat with me were, not to put too fine a point on it, lesbians.
They’d even told me so, when declining my favors… One time, after a jam session, I’d brought it up with Chango Chingamadre, and he had said, “Who caaares?”

  Well, I don’t Dutch…

  … She’s family. She is a friend.

  “I worry about Chango…” Dutch said.

  “What?” I’d been thinking of the gig tonight, about maybe going home and taking a nap, maybe taking the old upright and practicing. East Saint Louis Toodle-oo. Maybe something by Bird. I never played more than one or two songs before a gig. I might jam for hours afterwards. But not before the gig.

  “I don’t know.” I gave her that don’t-despair smile (it’s what she calls it). “Maybe we should get him into Bellevue.”

  Dutch shuddered. “Cold Turkey. I dunno.”

  “I do.” I had been there. I’m no Ishmael, but I’m no Ahab, either, not anymore. People quit when they are ready to quit. Not before. But there is the first step, and Cold Turkey is one first step, one Nanfuckingtucket sleigh ride.

  “M.E.,” Dutchman said. “I’ve heard a lot about the Queen of Night. And it doesn’t sound like a good scene.”

  “Yeah, well.” I laughed. “A whorehouse that does double duty as a shooting gallery isn’t my idea of a good scene.”

  “I’ve heard they’re mercenary bastards—won’t even feed the girls; keep em locked up, doped, and half-starved. Not even a fridge on the premises.”

  “But they got a house band, Dutch.”

  “They’re too tight to even have a decent cathouse band. From what I’ve been told, you hear ‘em, and even if you’re stoned out of your cranium, you just want to do your business and split. I call that cold-blooded mercenary.”

  Her outburst made me curious. “How do you know so much about whores?”

  “My great-grandmother ran a very popular bordello in Rotterdam.”

  “You never told me—”

  “You never asked. Anyway, she kept a buffet, heaping plates and bowls of erwtensoep, spinach tarts, sateh, plover’s eggs, smoked salmon, duck sausages, waffles, all laid out on lace tablecloths… lunch and dinner. And full bar. The Queen of Night doesn’t even have ice for booze, let alone food.”

  “But you don’t even serve food, Dutch.”

  “I at least serve pretzels,” she yelled.

  “So now you’re an authority on the Queen of Night?”

  “I have my sources.”

  “Rasputin.” I hooted.

  “I have my sources.”

  I remembered something, about Rasputin. His tour bus, with his “See The Village! An Epiphany & A Meal, Such A Deal!” banners all over it. He always brought them into the Potato Head for espresso and the Beat poetry books Dutchman kept in stock. His name was Rasmussin, but we all called him Rasputin, because of his Svengalish ways with the ladies. Dutchman even had the hots for him. Which I resented. I resented him for trying to convert her. It wasn’t her fault—Rasputin had those pheromones, sex hormones. He was clearly oversexed.

  This arrangement, between Dutchman and Rasputin, was quite good in a business sense. But goddammit, if my friend wanted to be a dyke, then who was Rasputin to lay a bourgeois patriarchal routine on her—? And using sex—?!

  He would come in with his chiropractors’ wives from Chicago, dermatologists’ divorcees from Des Moines, and Rotarian widows from Richmond, and, while they were ordering espresso or cognac, while they were buying Beat books, he would stand there and irradiate her with his pheromones.

  I had seen this. Time and again. So I had to make a moral decision. Either tell her, in which case she’d run upstairs and get all dolled up… or not tell her, in which case he might be too distracted with the seduction of one of his touristas to work on Dutchman.

  “Rasputin, he’s coming today—” Dutchman’s a big girl, big enough to make her own mistakes.

  “I thought it was tomorrow.”

  “Remember, last week; he said he was changing the schedule.”

  Dutchman was lifting the wooden grids she kept on the floor, behind the bar. “I’d better hurry and hose these off. They’re filthy.”

  “Need any help?”

  “You’ve gotta go home, nap, and practice—remember?”

  Later, on Bleeker Street, I ran into Raj’neej, an East Indian Welshman of sorts. He always sounded like Dylan Thomas when he talked. Not the Welsh, but the drunk, bit.

  “M.E.” We slapped hands. “Have you by any chance seen Chango—”

  “No.” I lied.

  “I heard he’s hanging out at the Queen of Night’s, jamming with the house band.”

  “Yeah.” I remembered something Chango’d said. “Secret Music he calls it.”

  “… ‘S secret all right; I go there about a year ago with my drummer, and I hear the house band, hear isn’t the word for it. They stand in a corner, with their eyes closed, fingering their axes like worry beads, and sway. But no sound. A lot of the cats in the room sway too, their eyes closed too. I see my drummer close his eyes, and sway. So I say to myself, when in Rome, shut my lids too. And faintly, ever so faintly, I hear a buzz, a sort of minor chord. There’s an odor, too, a vague smell of cheap perfume. But the more I focus on either the music, or on the aroma, the more they fade. And I start to get a headache, like my cranium says fuck that scene, so I open the eyes. But everyone still sways, eyes still closed, waiting for a wake-up call. It’s a drain, M.E., a real energy suck… I think of the Vetala and Rakshasa of India—”

  “Vetala? Rakshasa?” I’d never heard the terms before.

  “India’s vampires, who first play tricks, suck your will, then hypnotize you into doing their will. Then they dine on your horse, or on you—I don’t really believe it. I don’t disbelieve it, either; so I leave everyone to their individual karmic dances. I go in a room and find agitated gents at the walls, peeping in on some tantric exchanges. So I go to another room, and there’s a very weird poker game going on, played with tarot cards, and before they put their money in the pot they fold it into frogs or cranes, flowers or whales, paper airplanes. In the next room is the oldest guy—I recognize him, old Gutbucket Slim, from Ma Rainey’s band (he’s like antediluvian). The Gutbucket’s on the nod, in front of a television showing the Dorsey brothers. So I walk over to say hello and observe the hype in his arm; it’s filled with blood. Then blood dribbles from his mouth and down from his nostrils. I turn to call for help, and I hear a lady. She says:

  it’s being taken care of,

  and through the glass beads of the doorway I see the skirt of a woman, kilometers of ruffles, very Carmen Miranda. I then decide it’s time to depart (like, I don’t want to be there when they fold twenty-dollar-bill origami cranes for Mistah Police); so I return to the main room, and everyone’s still swaying. I drag my drummer out of there; he says it is the most beautiful music he’d ever heard. Month later his playing went to shit in a rickshaw, and I had to fire his ass. Been through two other drummers since.”

  I looked at Raj’neej in amazement; I had no idea what occult scene he was getting at, but it made me anxious. I remembered the skirt I had glimpsed at Potato Head.

  “I’d like to give Chango a break; he’s too good to waste.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve got a gig for tonight; we need skins.” Raj’neej was the coolest pianist I’d heard in a long time; he could’ve blown Brubeck away. Hell, Dutchman snoring could’ve blown Brubeck away. But Raj’neej was good… not Monk, mind you, but good.

  “Too bad.” I almost wished I hadn’t lied. But… “He lost his cabaret card, y’know.”

  “I could get him a bogus one. Everyone else is clean—if we have a junky sitting in for one or two gigs, there won’t be any hassles. He could use the bread, he might get straight.”

  “Go to Potato Head Blues. Tell Dutchman I sent you.”

  “I know Dutchman.” Raj’neej paused, and blushed. “I’ve heard—is it true she’s a dyke?”

  “Ask her and see.”

  * * * *

  I was
in the middle of the dream of dreams when the phone of phones rang its ring of rings. I picked it up. “M.E., ‘s Dutch; Chango Chingamadre, he’s…”—she fought back sobs—”turning gray!”