by Larry Karp
“And this is all outa the goodness of his heart? Nothing’s in it for him.”
For the first time, Bess looked uncomfortable. “He says he’ll take ten percent for his trouble. Five hundred dollars, that seems fair, doesn’t it? Considering the risk he’s taking?”
“And you, Miss Vinson? How about you?”
She shook her head. “I’d just like to see my father get the recognition he deserves…well, and I’d also love to give that Rudi Blesh a good screwing-over.”
“I sure ain’t about to argue with that. But I’m sorry, Miss Vinson, one thing does bother me. How do I know you’re really who you say you are?”
“I thought you might ask.” Again, Bess opened her purse, pulled out a folded piece of paper and gave it to Brun, who unfolded it. It was a worn document, crisp and yellowed, corners long gone. The barber moved his glasses into reading position. “Certificate of Birth,” he mumbled. “State of Missoura. Louise Bess Joplin. Mother, Belle Jones. Father, Scott Joplin. Date of Birth, December 14, 1902. Hmmm.” He refolded the paper, passed it to Bess; she slid it back into her pocketbook. “How come you never wrote anything about your father, or talked to people about him?”
“What could I say about a father I never knew? And why should I tarnish the reputations of the good man and woman who brought me up. Besides, the person who helped my mother and father get me adopted is still alive. She could go to jail.”
Brun coughed. “You make a fair point. But I still don’t even start to know how I’m ever gonna find five thousand dollars.”
“I’ve got to leave that to you,” said Bess. “But I do hope you can. We’ve got somewhere between one and two weeks.” She pulled out a little pad and a pen from her pocketbook, scribbled on a page, then tore it out. “Here.” She pressed the paper into Brun’s hand. “My phone number. Well, actually, it’s the drug store downstairs. I can’t afford a phone, but they’ll take a message for me. Why don’t you give me your number?”
“Can’t give you something I ain’t got,” said Brun. “I’ll have to call you when I have something to say.”
Bess smiled. “I’m so pleased to meet you, after all I’ve read about you. I do hope you’ll be able to publish my father’s journals.”
Brun sighed. “Can’t do more than try.”
***
Midway through dinner that evening, Brun worked up his nerve, then cleared his throat. May set down her fork and knife. When her husband broke a silence by hawking, he usually had something to say that he knew she wouldn’t appreciate. “Something funny happened at the shop today,” the barber said.
“Oh, really?” May tried to keep her voice level.
“Yes indeed. I had me an interesting visitor. The colored lady who came by here, looking for me.”
While he told the story of Bess and her proposition, May drummed a finger on the table top. Then she said, “Well, I guess that is pretty funny, isn’t it? Asking you for five thousand dollars? She might as well ask for the moon.”
And for what she’s got, I’d give her the moon, Brun thought. “May, listen. This ain’t no lark. A whole journal written in Scott Joplin’s own hand? I been thinking, it’s nice they’re going to put a plaque in the high school for him, but that ain’t near good enough. If I had that journal, I bet when I could go out there for the ceremony, I could talk to the mayor and some of the big businessmen—”
“Brun Campbell, what ever are you saying? If I thought you were serious, I’d be calling Dr. Gervais.”
Brun reached to his pocket, then stopped. No point even showing her the page copied from the journal. “Come on, now, May,” a plea. “You got it all wrong. I just want to get Mr. Joplin the reputation he deserves to have. This Rudi Blesh is a johnny-come-lately, but now, all of a sudden he’s the world’s biggest expert on ragtime. He’d take Mr. Joplin’s journal and mess it all up with his big-shot ‘commentary.’”
“Oh, Brun, you try my patience! Playing that awful music in bars at night, writing articles for silly little newsletters, planning schemes, every one of them more foolish than the last. Scott Joplin, Scott Joplin, Scott Joplin. And what’s ever come of it? Only that you’ve got people convinced you’re soft in the head. How do you even know this Bess woman really is who she said she was?”
“She showed me her birth certificate. ‘Louise Bess Joplin’.”
“People can get phony birth certificates these days.”
“Well, it sure looked real to me. Old. And it had Scott Joplin down as father, and Belle Jones, that was his wife’s name before she married him, as mother.”
May sighed extravagantly. “Brun, I’ve given up trying to make you see the light and use a little common sense. If you want to spend the rest of your days hollering ‘Scott Joplin’ at deaf people, I guess you’ll just have to go right ahead. But don’t you even think of doing something like mortgaging our house to pay for this craziness.”
How did she always know what was in his mind? “May, I’d never—”
“Yes, you would. And you’d better forget about it. I’m not going to ask you for a promise, because I know what your promises are worth. But if you put us in debt over this, I will walk out the door and never come back, and you’ll have to figure your own way out of your mess. That’s my final word on the subject.”
“May, come on, you know I wouldn’t do it. I owe a big debt to Mr. Joplin, but I wouldn’t mortgage the house.”
May sighed. He looked like a little boy, caught reaching for the cookie jar up on a high shelf. She pointed at his plate. “Eat your supper, Brun. Cold spaghetti’s pretty bad.”
***
After dinner, Brun told May he was going for a walk. Once outside, he tapped a cigarette from its box, lit up, then walked to Venice Boulevard and into the Rexall drug store. He got the soda jerk to change a fin, took the coins into the phone booth at the front of the store, closed the door, pulled a little notebook from his shirt pocket, and began to dial.
When he came out of the booth, he had thirty-five cents in his pocket and a glum look on his face. After fourteen calls, the kindest reaction he’d gotten was, “I’d like to help, Brun, but I’m hurting right now, myself.”
The old barber trudged out of the pharmacy into the warm spring evening, started to drag his feet homeward, but then stopped. “Yes!” he muttered, pumped a fist into the air, and took off at a codger’s stiff-legged trot, up Amoroso Court to Cal’s tiny cottage, where he banged on the door and called, “Hey, Cal, open on up. I got to talk to you.”
***
They sat on opposite sides of the tiny living room, each with a partially-drunk bottle of beer. For what seemed to Brun like forever, Cal just stared at him, didn’t say a word. Finally, the young man gestured with his bottle. “Let me get this straight. A woman walks into your barber shop, tells you she’s Scott Joplin’s long-lost daughter, and offers you the opportunity of your life. For a mere five thousand dollars, you can own Scott Joplin’s personal journal.”
“You got it,” Brun said. “And I need the dough in about a week.”
“Okay. Now, the first question is, why the hell are you talking to me? You don’t really think I’ve got five grand burning a hole in my pocket.”
“No, ‘course not. But I got to start someplace. Maybe you…” His voice wound down as he saw the look on Cal’s face.
“I couldn’t give you even one thousand, never mind five,” Cal said. “And not to hurt your feelings, but if I did have anything like that kind of money, just about the last thing I’d do with it is give it to you to publish Scott Joplin’s memoirs. If they really are Scott Joplin’s memoirs. Jesus, Brun—”
Brun pulled the page from his pocket. “Here, wise guy. Take a look at this.”
As the young man read, a twisted smile crept across his face. “Okay, now I get it. ‘The Reminiscences of Scott Joplin…brought your way by the one…the only…ta-da! Brun Campbell.’”
“Jeez-all-Pete, kid. If yo
u didn’t talk so pretty, you could really piss me off.” Brun snatched the paper from Cal’s hand, slipped it back into his pocket. “So, what’s wrong with that? A man lives for as long as I have, he gets to askin’ himself, well, what did I do? Scott Joplin was a thing that comes along maybe once in a hundred years, and he put a ton of hope on me. And then I pissed my life away, cutting peoples’ hair when I shoulda been talking up Mr. Joplin’s music every place I could. Now, looky here, I ain’t bughouse. I never thought you could bankroll me. Why I came over was to see if maybe you know some book publisher who’d want to publish Mr. Joplin’s journal, and then the five K would be a…what do you call it again?”
Cal’s face was smeared with doubt. “An advance?”
“Yeah, that’s it. But it looks like you don’t think too much of the idea.”
“Brun, it’s crazy. No, I don’t know a publisher who’d do that. Mine sure wouldn’t. And you say you’ve got only a week or two to beat out Blesh. Any way you cut it, a deal like that would take months. No publisher in his right mind is going to hand you a contract and five thousand dollars without seeing the journal and reading a sample from your book. I’m sorry, Brun, I really am. But there’s no way that’s going to work.”
The barber got to his feet and stretched. “Okay, then. Thanks for listening. And thanks for the beer.” He walked halfway to the door, then looked over his shoulder. “See you at Roscoe’s funeral?”
“Sure,” Cal said. “Friday, ten o’clock, right?”
Brun nodded. “First Baptist Church.”
Chapter Six
Fri, April 6
Early afternoon
There was barely room in the little barber shop for the five men. Brun sat in one barber’s chair, like a king on his throne, while Cal perched between two colored men on the piano bench. A third colored man lounged against the piano. “I say it’s a cryin’ shame,” Brun growled. “A good man like Roscoe dies, and nobody shows up to see him off.”
The man at the side of the piano, a round Negro with no visible neck, spoke in a high voice incongruous with his build. “Hey, Brun, I don’t exactly think I’m nobody.”
“Come on, Charley, you know what I mean,” the barber said. “If Roscoe’d died forty years ago in St. Lou, there’d be more people than the church coulda held. But with everybody out here he did stuff for, all them old ladies, nobody except for the five of us could bother to show up.”
“Most of them old ladies was white,” Charley said. “They ain’t gonna come down and sit in a colored church.”
“Well, why the hell not?” Brun barked. “Sorry, it still don’t seem right to me. Just like how he died don’t seem right.”
“You gonna go on about thinking he was killed?” That from the Negro to Cal’s right on the piano bench. “Man takes a little too much to drink, slips and falls down the stairs onto a cee-ment floor, it sure sounds like an accident to me.”
“I ain’t never seen Roscoe fried,” Brun said. “Sure, he’d have himself a shot or two, but that was it.”
“Just because you ain’t seen it don’t mean it didn’t happen,” the dark man replied.
“Fred, now you cut that out,” Charley piped. “You ain’t supposed to talk bad about the dead.”
“Hey, Charley,” Brun shouted. “Don’t get yourself all worked up, and bust your fat ass through my piano.” The barber turned his attention to the trio on the bench. “Monday afternoon, when Roscoe come in here and said he had to talk to me, he didn’t look like he just wanted to pass a little time. I wish to God I’d took a few minutes to hear him out right then and there.”
“You didn’t have any way to know,” Cal murmured.
The day’s mail slid through the slot in the door below the CLOSED FOR FUNERAL sign, and spread across the floor. Brun walked over, bent laboriously, picked up the envelopes. “Fraternal Order of Eagles, crap.” He tossed the envelope onto the little counter next to the cash register. “Bill for light and power.” That quickly joined the F.O.E. on the counter. The third white envelope sported a red, white, and blue border; the barber waved it at his friends. “Air-mail, from New Jersey. To ‘Brun Recording Company.’”
Cal spoke. “Maybe you’re getting famous, Brun. Could be a big record company wants to give you a contract.”
The colored men snickered.
“Wiseass,” Brun muttered, then took up his barber scissors, slit the top of the envelope, pulled out the letter, unfolded it. He read slowly, moving his lips and following a finger down the page. When he finished, he thrust the sheet of paper into Cal’s hand. “What do you think of this, huh? From a kid all the way ‘cross the country. He musta got my address offa one of my records. Says he heard about me on a New York radio station, and he wants me to tell him how to play ragtime right.”
Cal looked up from the letter. “It’s fan mail, Brun, nice. I get it, too. I write back and say thank you, I’m really glad you liked my book, and that’s that. It’s no big deal.”
The colored man to Cal’s right hauled himself off the piano bench. “I better be gettin’ to work. Mr. Parsons gave me time off for the funeral, but I stay here a lot longer, I ain’t gonna have a job to go back to. He started for the door; the others followed. “See you, Brun,” a chorus.
The shop seemed unnaturally quiet. Brun glanced at the letter in his hand, then walked to the barber chair, sat, read the letter again. “Even if my mother does hate it…” he mouthed. “…They All Played Ragtime…Rudi Blesh…except for Scott Joplin, no one ever played ragtime as well as you…anything you can tell me, I will really appreciate.”
Brun looked toward the door, as if his companions were still in sight. “‘No big deal,’ huh? Just a kid writing a fan letter? Canal water!” The old man jumped to his feet, dashed to the counter, took a lined paper pad and a pencil from a drawer, then went back to the barber chair and began to write:
Friend Alan Chandler:
I’m very glad to recieve your letter and find out that kids like you are interested in ragtime and want to know how to play it. Well, you come to the right place. It would suprise you to see the letters I get from all over the world, that is inquiries about the Old Rag Numbers. The reason why those tunes you asked about don’t sound like ragtime is because they are not ragtime. When the mugs in Tin Pan Alley saw how popular Scott Joplin’s music got to be, they all tried to copy him. Yes! But they didn’t have the knowhow. They call their music ragtime, but I can see you have got the right kind of ear so you know better. Forget about all that Tin Pan Alley stuff because it is a waste of your time and money. You should look for music by Mr. Joplin and James Scott and Joseph F. Lamb, who lives in Brooklyn which is near by New Jersey, and Charles L. Johnson, and Tom Turpin (who wrote HARLEM RAG and also BOWERY BUCK and other fine compositions). You should practize your piano at every chance, for that’s important. Practize is what makes you perfect, that is my advice. Yes! To be better than the other guy, you must practize more than he does. And do not play the music too fast, play them all as written. Mr. Joplin always give me the holiest hell when I played faster than he wrote it should be. And don’t try to imitate anyone’s style, stay with what you feel in your playing.
Brun stopped, chewed at the top of the pencil, then wrote on:
You know from that book by Rudi Blesh (who found out that I was going to write a book on ragtime, and jumped in and stole my thunder. But what will be will be) that Scott Joplin composed MAPLE LEAF RAG in 1899 in Sedalia, Missouri. Well, they are finely getting round to paying him some of the honor he ought to get. On April 17 this year, there will be a big ceremony in Sedalia where they’re going to present a plaque to hang in the colored high school. It’s too bad you live so far away from Sedalia because if you could be there you’d hear both from me and my old friend Tom Ireland (colored) all about how ragtime got started, and you’d also hear a lot of Mr. Joplin’s music played like it should be, including by yours truly. I might give a speech, too, because in my opi
nion having a plaque on a high school wall ain’t close to what kind of honor Scott Joplin ought to have. By rights there ought to be a statue of him on a big street corner, and the city should start a museum about him and ragtime, because it all came from Sedalia. Yes! In fact I’m right now in some tough negotiations, trying to get Scott Joplin’s own personal journal from Mrs. Joplin, who lives in Harlem, New York. The reason why it’s tough is that Rudi Blesh is hot to get his hands on it so he can publish it, but I don’t trust him to do it right. He’d put in a whole bunch of his own comments and push Mr. Joplin right off the stage. Now if I can get that journal which tells all about Sedalia and announce at the ceremonies how I’m going to see it gets published, then I think people who make things happen in that city would understand, and get a statue and a museum built to honor Scott Joplin. I need to raise five thousand dollars this week, which I got no idea how I’m going to do it. But if I don’t I figure to die trying, because I owe that to Scott Joplin. Well, Alan, like I said, I was very glad to hear from you, and make sure you practize your piano all you can and keep your nose clean and you will some day be a great ragtime player. Will say so long for now. With my best wishes.