White Tears

by Hari Kunzru

  I kept meaning to cancel my magazine subscriptions, but the issues kept coming. I couldn’t bring myself to throw out the pile of unread Down Beats and Jazz Reviews without at least looking at them, so one day, instead of throwing them into the trash chute, I found myself crouching down in the hallway outside my apartment, flipping pages, skimming headlines and reader’s polls. In one I found a small ad.

  WANTED:

  BL. ON K&G

  ANY WITH S.J.H. MASTER #’S

  K&G. Key & Gate. The advertiser was searching for blues on Key & Gate, any record made in a particular session. The address at the bottom was Chester’s. On that label, the letter prefixes usually told you where something was recorded, but I couldn’t think of a town or city with the initials S.J.H. The magazine was only a couple of months old. I looked through others. The same ad had appeared in every issue of every major collecting magazine for at least five years. Long before I drove Chester to Mississippi, he’d known that Charlie Shaw did a session for Key & Gate. Even now, it sounded as if he wasn’t sure that any more material was out there. He quoted no titles, no catalog numbers, just the master number of the session. Chester had no proof anything had been released, or even recorded, except the two sides he had. But he was hungry. If something was out there, he was determined to have it in his hands.

  I threw out the magazines, every one. The stink of Chester’s record-lust rose up off the pages and I could not get far enough away from its taint.

  Time passed and slowly my unease began to ebb. I did normal things, ate and drank and went to movies, ignoring the faint air of unreality that had settled over the world around me. One cold and rainy fall day, I was heading down MacDougal. I had my head down and my collar up, my hands jammed into my pockets as I hurried from the bookstore to the diner where I usually ate my lunch. When Chester stepped into my path, my mind was on the blue plate special and for a moment I didn’t recognize him. He looked haggard, drained. He was wearing a filthy gray suit, the legs of the pants spattered with mud. His long wet hair was plastered down over his face.

  —Damn it, he said. You stole it and by God I will have it back! His chest was quivering under his grubby shirt. He wasn’t wearing shoes, and his feet were black with city grime.

  —Chester. You look like hell.

  —Enough with the soft soap. As if you care about me or anyone else but your own damn self!

  I realized that he must have been waiting for me, standing there shoeless in the weather. I wondered why he hadn’t come into the shop. He kept pulling a sordid handkerchief from his pocket and dabbing foppishly at his face. I raised my hands. I wanted to placate him. He looked agitated, capable of violence.

  —I don’t understand. Chester. Has something happened to you?

  —Don’t play the innocent. You had the gall, the goddamn effrontery to chastise me for my—well, my act of preservation, because that’s what it was. And now, I don’t even know what to say. How the hell did you do it? That’s certainly one question.

  —I still don’t know what you’re talking about.

  —I invested in some heavy-duty door furniture, top of the line. Never trusted that super further than I could throw the wop bastard.

  —Chester, are you OK?

  —Chains. A dead bolt. You are a goddamn snake, you know that? A polecat. I don’t have a clue how you got into my room but it’s gone. And you do know what I’m talking about, mister high and mighty. Your hypocrisy stinks to heaven. So what if the old woman didn’t give it to me? She was too dumb to know what she had, surely you see that. Unless I took matters into my own hands, Charlie Shaw’s legacy would have been dust in the wind. That makes me the rightful keeper of that record. I am acting on behalf of posterity.

  —I don’t have it, Chester. I didn’t take any record.

  —It’s mine. I want you to give it back. They’re like children to me, every one.

  —I said I don’t have it.

  —You’re a liar. A goddamn dirty liar.

  His handkerchief bunched in one hand, he began rooting around in a pocket with the other. I thought he might pull a knife.

  —No need for this, Chester.

  —My collection has an integrity, you little bastard. It is a single document, a unified design. What you have done is an act of vandalism. Did you pick my lock? Is that how you did it? At least have the grace to tell me.

  —I didn’t pick your lock.

  —Well, did you break in? Just tell me, for the love of God.

  —I didn’t break in.

  There was no knife, just another handkerchief, which he bunched up with the first. By this time, the rain was coming down hard. I was shivering. I could feel water seeping under my collar. Chester looked pathetic, disordered. I didn’t have his record. All I wanted was to get away.

  —I have to go.

  —You goddamn thief!

  As I took a pace backwards, he grabbed the sleeve of my coat and began shouting for a policeman.

  —Get off me!

  I pulled away and began to walk off down the street. He came after me, still shouting police stop thief. No one wanted to know, passers-by rushing to get under cover, unwilling even to look at us. I turned back, water streaming off the brim of my hat, and saw him limping far behind, unable to put his weight down on one foot. I left him standing on the curb, supporting himself against a street sign, impotently shaking his fist.

  I spent weeks looking over my shoulder as I went to and from the bookstore, always expecting Chester to be lurking in a doorway, ready to wreak his revenge. But he never appeared. I saw in the New Year at a party of laughing West Village bohemians who danced to the Modern Jazz Quartet and threw confetti at people down on Bleecker Street. As I looked out of the window at the happy roiling crowd of drunks below, I believed—once again—that I was done with Chester and Charlie Shaw and the whole rotten apparatus of the past.

  Then a letter arrived. It was a sort of mimeographed circular that must have gone out to all Chester’s wide circle of collectors. Though it was not a personal message, it made me almost physically sick. The flyer announced that he intended to sell his record collection. I thought I’d misread, it seemed so unlikely. His entire collection. He wanted to sell as a single lot and would entertain offers in the region of ten thousand dollars. I crumpled it up and threw it away, pretending to myself that I wasn’t scared. The price was ridiculous, no collector had that kind of money. But what could have brought him to sell? Anyone else, perhaps. People do fall on hard times, but Chester Bly would have plucked out a kidney or an eye before he broke up his collection, let alone got rid of the whole thing. What in the world did he have but those disks? I thought about my own records, possibly already unplayable, deliquescing behind the batik cloth like a guilty conscience.

  One evening Tom Grady came bursting into the shop. I was furtively reading a science-fiction novel under the counter and dreaming of Los Angeles, a city where I would not have to trudge through slush and horizontal sleet to get home. Tom, the youngest and most socially integrated of Chester’s disciples, was a bulky Irishman with a fund of surplus energy that should have been directed into digging canals or writing stream-of-consciousness novels instead of working in a photographic lab or whatever low-commitment day job it was he held. He was wrapped in a heavy woolen coat that seemed to exhale steam as he entered the shop, throwing off moisture like a large dog. Since my exit from the collecting scene I’d nodded to him a couple of times in the White Horse, but we’d never spoken beyond a few pleasantries. I’d let him know that I was no longer interested in old records, and since there was little else he cared about, we had no reason to detain each other further.

  —Did you hear about Chester, he said at once. No preamble, straight up to the counter, quick enough to startle me.

  —No.

  —Dead. Burned to death. He had some kind of accident with a space heater.

  —You’re kidding.

  —No I am very much not kidding.

 
—How did you hear?

  —Pinkus called me. He went by the building. He’s over there most days. He thinks Chester is going to give him his collection.

  —Sell it to him?

  —No, give. Pinkus says Chester had some kind of change of heart about being a collector. He just wants it—wanted it—off his hands. Pinkus doesn’t think he’s sold them already, though apparently Chester was very unclear. Pinkus thinks they were probably in there with him. All of them.

  —The records.

  —Keep up man. Yes, the records. He can’t be sure, though. He says he can’t be a hundred percent. But I expect it’s all burned to hell.

  —Why can’t he be sure? Either the records were in the room or they weren’t.

  —Chester never even lets the poor bastard in. He makes him talk through the closed door.

  —Seriously?

  —Chester’s kind of let himself go.

  —But the room was gutted by the fire? Everything’s gone?

  —I don’t know.

  I had to serve a woman, who bought Schopenhauer and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I wrote the names down in the ledger alongside the prices and stamped a receipt. Grady paced about behind her, pretending to look at a dictionary. As soon as she left, we took up our conversation.

  —I saw him a while back in the Village. He didn’t look good. Have you been going to his parties?

  —Jesus, no. That pretty much ended when you left. My God, that night. What happened? You slammed the door and Chester ranted on and on about your ingratitude and then kicked us out. All over a Mississippi Sheiks side.

  —It wasn’t the Sheiks.

  —So what was it? He played a Patton that evening, didn’t he? One I hadn’t heard. And he finally told me the name on that fingerpicking record.

  —Bayless Rose. Anyway, you stopped going.

  —Well, I never got another invite. Maybe Pinkus did. I don’t think so. It sounded like Chester stopped having anyone over at all. The last time I saw him he turned up at that bar on Sullivan yelling about how you’d stolen a record from him.

  —He told you about that?

  —About what? It wasn’t anything. Pinkus says he found it again a week or two later.

  —He found it?

  —Then he decided he’d lost it again. Told Pinkus he couldn’t stop it slipping away. Odd thing is, he wouldn’t say what it was. I mean, how are you supposed to talk about a stolen record with a fellow who won’t even tell you its name?

  I realized I was sweating. I felt as if I might be running a fever. Grady lit his pipe and shrugged.

  —Crazy as hell, Chester. He always had that in him, you know? I thought so, at least. But those records. Jesus, just that Bayless Rose record on its own! To think that’s all gone!

  —You didn’t want to buy his collection?

  —Sure, I wanted to.

  He rubbed fingers and thumb together.

  —There’s a lot of things I want.

  There was a great unspoken urgency to him. The thing he could not talk about because it was indecent, because proper form would be to dwell further on the personal qualities of the deceased.

  —Look, you don’t have to approve, but it’s an important collection. There are things that will be lost forever.

  —If it’s a fire, they’re already gone. Just the heat in the room.

  —But if they’re not.

  —Well, what’s stopping you? Why don’t you go and check?

  —Christ, you have to make me say it. I don’t want to go on my own, OK? Pinkus says they found his feet. Just his feet, nothing else, in those awful old leather slippers he wore. The rest of him was completely incinerated. That’s a terrible thing to happen to anyone.

  —You want me to go out to Brooklyn on a night like this?

  —Come on. I’m begging. You’re the nearest thing to a sane person in the whole gang. I didn’t know who else to ask.

  —You understand I’m not collecting anymore. I told you that. I’m not involved.

  —You sold your records?

  —No.

  —So you still have your records.

  —I don’t listen to them.

  —If you still have your records, you’re still in.

  Train going express. Both hunched in our coats on the El platform, hands crammed in pockets. The wind slicing at us like a mugger, inverting Grady’s puny umbrella.

  —Chester went to see Pinkus at the bank.

  —Pinkus works in a bank?

  —Some savings and loan in midtown. Chester turned up there, stinking all to hell, Pinkus said it smelled like he shit his pants, pardon my French. Told Pinkus he needed to come over to his room right away and take all the records. Pinkus was worried about the customers. He could have lost his job, someone in a state like that running around in the office. He just wanted him gone, but Chester wouldn’t leave until he promised that he’d come and take the records, as soon as possible, that very night. Pinkus didn’t think he was serious.

  —Did he go?

  —Of course he went. Pinkus can’t stand Chester, you know that. He puts up with him because he’s obsessed by the music. But he went all the way out to Williamsburg and Chester wouldn’t let him in, just talked to him through the door.

  —Well of course. He’d never just give them away.

  —Here’s the weird part. He told Pinkus he couldn’t give him the records because it was too dangerous. He couldn’t have it on his conscience. That’s what he said. Word for word. Pinkus tried to persuade him, but nothing doing. He’s been going back every day hoping Chester will change his mind.

  —Did you tell Pinkus you were planning to do this?

  —No. I thought—put it this way. If we find anything, he’ll be on to us soon enough.

  He gave me a straight look.

  —Fifty-fifty, OK? Split right down the middle.

  —Grady.

  —Just say it.

  I could have replied, I don’t want anything. I could have told him I was just there out of curiosity, or any number of other things. But I didn’t. I shook on the deal.

  —Fifty-fifty.

  I was still in.

  Chester’s building looked doubly sinister in the darkness and rain, a great brick slab set on a corner, with a soot-blackened stone porch and an empty lot on either side. Five bucks to the super got us into Chester’s room. I could smell the stink of smoke as we climbed the stairs. The guy unlocked the door for us but didn’t want to go in. Some kind of accident while cooking, he said. Hell of a mess.

  As soon as I stepped inside, my eyes began to water. The room was soot-blackened, but weirdly undisturbed except for a rough circle, about three feet in diameter, scorched into the floor. One of Chester’s two chairs was intact. The metal skeleton of the other lay on its side in the scorched patch. There was no space heater, or anything else I could see that might have set him on fire like that. The mattress was gone from the bed frame, and there was nothing stored underneath it. No boxes. No records. Grady looked stricken.

  —Poor bastard. What a way to go. I mean, Jesus, the feet. Imagine his two feet, just sitting there.

  He flashed another five at the super, who was standing in the doorway, a handkerchief over his mouth.

  —Were there any records here?

  The super looked wistfully at the money and shook his head. He hadn’t carried out any records. Some books, a few cups and plates. I flashed on Chester sitting in that chair. Sitting and listening, or just sitting and waiting in the silence. Was that how it was? Chester, rigid in his chair, knowing he couldn’t escape, waiting for the heat to erupt in his core. Suddenly it was all I could do not to run for the door. I fought it for a few seconds, then gave in. The records weren’t there. Nothing could keep me in that room a second longer.

  I could hear the sound of boots, clattering on the stairs. My own boots. Chester had gotten rid of his collection, but it hadn’t been enough to save him. I still had mine. I was still in. Panic completely overtook me
and I fled along the street. I didn’t know where I was going. It was a primitive urge, fight or flight, unmodulated by civilization or decency. Grady caught up with me as I reached the El. I was shouting, hyperventilating. Somehow he managed to calm me down. He said the best thing would be to go to a bar and get drunk. All the way back into Manhattan, he babbled on at me. A couple of drinks. Steady the nerves. How he wished Bly had answered the letter he wrote. Grady had his hopes set on the success of a certain little scheme. He thought maybe Chester would consider selling his Broonzys separately or perhaps even the Robert Johnsons. He thought, with a little notice, he could have raised enough money to take a few, at least. But it wasn’t to be. We ought to look on the bright side. They weren’t in the room so they weren’t damaged. That meant he got rid of them before it happened. So they were still out there. All we had to do was find who had them. Someone would know. We just had to keep an ear to the ground…

  I left him on a street corner, still talking. In my apartment I bolted the door and lay down on the bed, knowing that I would not sleep that night. The next morning I sold my records to a guy at the Washington Square fountain. I just walked them down there in a crate and sat for an hour or so with a cardboard sign saying Blues until a buyer turned up. He was a rich kid who wanted to start collecting. I told him a few of them might be warped but he didn’t mind. He knew nothing, less than nothing. Though he handed me enough money to pay a couple months rent, he didn’t really understand what he’d bought, the burden he’d taken on. I didn’t try to explain.

  THE OPEN DOOR TO OUR MOTEL ROOM. The ambulance pulling into a parking bay as I am thrown in the back of a patrol car. The hand on the top of my head, pushing me down through the door. Me yelling, smacking my forehead against the window and the partition that separates me from the front seat. Screaming her name again and again until both rear doors fly open and fat deputies pile into the space on either side of me, leading with batons and elbows and fists. They drag me out onto the concrete. You’re resisting, they shout, for the benefit of some dash or chest cam. I am not resisting. I am just screaming. I am screaming out my grief and loss in the blackness framed by the doorway. I am screaming at the crowd of jostling cops.