Five Night Stand: A Novel

by Richard J. Alley

  People drawn to making music are instruments themselves with strings of sinew, but these kids today are taut and rigid with technology. They’re unable to be tuned like a piano with its wood soaked through in gin and tears. That piano of old has been played for years in late-night, smoke-filled dungeons of lost hopes and dreams. Those are the places Oliver moved through—not even as a second home, having practically abandoned his first for the road, for strangers and their pieces of silver. Have these kids coming up today and looking to take his place on the bench, Dizzy’s on horn, and Roach’s on drums given anything up? Anything at all other than the safety of an office to work in with their daddy’s name on the door?

  Oliver’s kids had been the victims of his work ethic, drive, and passion, and it is he who pays for it now as he stares down at that empty table. He’d left them all word that he was retiring, and Charlene, living just across the water in Brooklyn with her own family, knows he’ll be moving away. He’s asked her to help him, to come to his rescue, but gets only stony silence and empty chairs in reply. His eyes sting with the hurt but are distracted by the kid who keeps moving as though he doesn’t want to get caught too long in any one spot—long enough to be asked if he needs something, where his seat is, or how old he is. This boy who watches him with his own daughter’s eyes and from a face with Francesca’s light complexion. Yes, he knows this boy.

  Once Oliver’s seated in his booth, he motions the boy over, pointing at the seat across the table from him. The boy slides in, his pressed suit cartoonishly big by one size. He looks down at the table while Oliver pours himself a Campari, taking his time to speak.

  “Cedric? That you buried in that suit?”

  “Hey, Pops.”

  “Look at me, boy. Grown up into a handsome one, ain’t you? How old are you now? Fifteen? Sixteen?”

  “I’m seventeen.” He looks up at Oliver and thrusts out his chin, proud of his age.

  “Seventeen? Shit, still too young to be in here. What you doin here?”

  The boy shrugs, a movement barely detectable coming from inside the jacket. “Came to see you.”

  “How’d you know I was playin?”

  “Mama.”

  “Your mama? Charlene here?” Oliver looks around the room, hoping he’s missed sight of her.

  “No, just me, Pops.”

  “Pops. Who told you to call me Pops?”

  “You ain’t like it?”

  “‘Pops’ what we call our elders out of respect, those who come before us and show us the way. Pops Armstrong. Pops Blakey. Pops Bechet. You know them names?”

  Again Cedric shrugs, more with his mouth this time than his shoulders.

  “I don’t expect nobody younger than that band onstage there thinks to call me Pops. Maybe not that drummer, though, he don’t look no older than you. Where you hear Pops?”

  “Mama.”

  “Mama? She say Pops?”

  Cedric nods sheepishly.

  “She comin?”

  Cedric shakes his head.

  Oliver sighs. “Why you here?”

  “See you, Pops, like I said. I got a band now, calling it Storyville. I want you to come see us.”

  “You? You a bandleader now? What kind of band is that? Rock and roll?”

  “Hip-hop.” Again, the same pride he’d shown with his age, the same jut of his chin.

  “Oh shit. Ha! Hip-hop?” Oliver has to take a moment to compose himself and uses the time to light a cigarette. “Hip-hop. Oh Lord, son, that ain’t music.”

  “It’s good. Me and my boys, we’re good, just come hear us.”

  Oliver shakes his head, blows smoke from his nostrils, and watches it pool blue around the light over the table.

  “It’s like bebop; it’s our music,” Cedric continues.

  “What you know about bebop, boy? What you heard about Storyville? You know much about bop as you do Pops.”

  “Just come hear us, Pops.”

  “Who is this?” Ben slides in next to Oliver, smiling.

  “This my grandson, Cedric. He was just leavin.”

  “Charlene’s boy?”

  Cedric nods.

  “I see the resemblance. A little Francesca, too.”

  Oliver beams at this despite himself. “Say hello to Mr. Greenberg, Cedric.”

  “I didn’t think Charlene would have a son old enough to be in a nightclub.”

  “Like I said, he was just leaving. Came to see his pops play some hip-hop. Boy don’t know his hip-hop from his bebop. Run on now, Cedric, before the man come in here and take Ben’s sandals away from him.”

  Cedric stands to go. “Come see us. Please? Around on Third all week, any night after your show.” And then, to Ben, “Nice to meet you, sir.”

  “Cedric.”

  They both watch him go.

  “Your suit he’s wearing?”

  “Shit, I ain’t got one that nice no more.”

  “Seems like a good kid, came to see his grandpa play. Broke the law to see his grandpa play, even invited you to hear his own band.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, he did. Shit, Benji, I’m the openin act for a boy’s hip-hop show.”

  The men sit and watch the room. Oliver takes another few sips of Campari.

  “Crowd’s getting restless. You better get up there and give them what they came for.”

  Oliver stands with a groan. “I’ll see if I got any more in me.”

  Frank grew up as part of a middle-class family in east Memphis within walking distance of his Catholic elementary school and church. It was a pragmatic upbringing based on the theory that hard work deserves a dollar. It was the 1970s and Frank’s father regularly held forth over pot roast and potatoes about the gas shortages and interest rates. The dollar Frank was told he would one day earn was to be expected and he was expected to earn it through smarts and sweat. “There is no simple way,” his father would say.

  His father was an engineer, his mother the school’s office manager. Little, if no, thought was given to the idea of inspiration; art as a vocation never even occurred to him. Not in elementary school, anyway, with its brick foundations laid out in syllables, prime numbers, dates, facts, and parts of speech. Not during those dinners when his father would speak of sums and overtime, and how a mortgage might be reduced. And not in the first few years of the all-boys Catholic high school that his father and uncles had also attended. It was an institution preparing boys to become the pliable material that would eventually be turned into men. The Jesuit order of Brothers ruled with a firm hand that would pull a boy up from his lazy, idyllic, hormone-laden ways by a haphazardly tied Windsor knot and march him along a path that led to finance, leadership, business, and loyalty. Responsibility! Catholicism was the faith, but pragmatism was the religion.

  Frank first saw her sitting under a tree and reading Vonnegut. Bluebeard. She was dressed in the plaid skirt and white uniform shirt of her own private school; her black-and-white saddle oxfords were marred with a blue ink pen in an attempt to make the uniform her own. Her fingernails were painted black, and tiny, silver hoops ran the length of one entire earlobe, visible below a closely shaved strip of hair. This girl did not give a shit, not about that school, not about the nuns or their rules, not about her classmates, and not about Frank—not yet. She didn’t say anything to him that day; it was simply the look on her face that told him she was uninterested in her surroundings, with the compass point of her nose in that unassigned book. Frank only came to know her later—she was the friend of a friend’s girlfriend. He was correct about her disdain, yet wrong about the order of such a list. At the top was not the nuns or school itself. The list began with athletes. Jocks. White-bread boys who spent more time concerned with defensive plays and stats and scores than with what she called “the poetry of the world.” (The very fact that she spoke that way made Frank dizzy.) Literature,
art, social equality, and beautiful men and women were where she cast her youthful, inexperienced lot. Frank was intrigued. He considered himself popular, well liked and sought out by girls and boys both for companionship and for his opinions, filtered as they were from his father’s. Her lack of interest was the most interesting thing he’d come across and he began to seek her out, this shadow, this pixie, this ripple in the calm tidal pool of high school.

  Her name isn’t important. It’s been kept closed up for decades in a worn copy of Bluebeard, along with her virginity, and placed on Frank’s shelf of favorite books. What lingers is his love of literature and art and beauty, his senses awakened in public parks, libraries, his parents’ living room, and the bedrooms of friends whose parents had left town for the weekend. For this awakening, he is eternally grateful to that nymph under the tree.

  Frank began reading—a lot—for pleasure. He couldn’t get enough of the authors, their stories and characters. He couldn’t get his fill of the ensuing discussions with her after school, over the phone late into the night and half naked in bed, delirious with a youthful familiarity. They listened to cassettes, flipping them over and over until the magnetic tape became faded and slack. Her music—the Cure, REM, U2, the Violent Femmes, Elvis Costello—were new sounds to him and with lyrics like poetry. It became his music; it became the sound track to young love and his awakening. It is her voice in his ear even now when he reads poetry and wonders, when a new and eagerly awaited novel is released, what she thinks of it, wherever she might be.

  He neglected learning defensive plays and working with his teams. The coaches noticed. His father noticed as well, and those dinnertime lectures turned from national politics to very local threats and consequences. His grades, however, soared—she found intelligence deliciously arousing—so his parents were torn on discipline. His longtime friends fell off one by one, disinterested in alternative music, magical realism, or the legacy of Andy Warhol. Fag, they called him behind his back. Pussy whipped, he was declared. So Frank absorbed her friends, scant as they were, and a new persona of his own. In the style of the eighties, he grew his hair long on one side only, pierced an ear over the summer so it had time to heal before the Jesuit Brothers could get hold of it the next fall. He wore bangles on his wrist and shuffled his feet with caustic emotion in worn canvas shoes. Once, at her urging, he let her paint his lids with heavy, black eyeliner.

  And he began writing.

  It was an urge as primal as eating or sex for him, and one he couldn’t explain. But it burned with a warmth in his chest, an ember he could only liken to the feeling of the first time he’d seen her beneath that tree on the campus of her school and, oddly, the sense he had on Sunday mornings when the priest would hold the Eucharist high overhead. There were tongues of fire, yellow halos, black fingernails, sex, literature, hymns, poetry, guitar riffs, creativity, gospels, and inspiration. Isn’t it all the same? He speculated on this; he woke up with it at midnight and wrote it down within stanzas of bad poetry and worse prose. He was unaware that what he wrote then was poor, only the feeling he had when the words were pouring from him. It was the sense of something being built, something created.

  It would turn out to be the foundation of a passion and a career. The writing continued throughout college, becoming honed and focused—favorite authors, a style developed, a voice, and career aspirations. He made new friends at college, sitting for hours on the brown and green grass of the lawn stretching out before the University Center of Memphis State University, or spending late nights in an off-campus bar that backed up to the railroad tracks. In these familiar places he would talk about writing. It was there in the wood-paneled bar, the sound of billiard balls clicking drowned out by the occasional train whistle, that he came the closest to giving his life over to passion, to creativity. It was on those nights in the bar that his blood boiled, the beer flowed, and Frank and his friends, packed into narrow booths, rubbed shoulders and thighs up against the confidence to live life on their own terms.

  It’s a frightening thing to say the words “I want to be a _____.” You can fill in that blank with “writer,” “musician,” “poet,” “artist” and none of it may come true. It’s akin to telling a woman you love her, with all its implications, promises, and inevitable doomed failure. In the believing it, and in the announcement of it, one is opening his chest up and allowing anyone, everyone, to crawl in and see what’s there. It’s inviting the public to see what it is that makes a person tick and come alive, to see the cogs and all their eternally moving parts glistening in blood and oil and the seminal fluids of art. Frank found that the words and sentences and paragraphs led him along a path to the door of journalism school. In journalism he found a home and a way to make a living at what he loved doing.

  Frank stares now at the black-and-white cardboard cover of a composition book the kid sitting across from him is holding in the lounge of the Capasso Hotel. He wrote in one just like it all through college, filling book after book with stories and verse, and placing them on a shelf, never even looking back. The young man facing him in the club, Frank believes, lives life on his own terms just as he and his college friends had planned. Dressed in a black peacoat over a red T-shirt with a houndstooth porkpie and smoking a slim panatela cigar, the kid is about twenty-five, Frank would say. He figures the appearance to be an affectation, a costume kept filed under “Jazz Club” in a plastic wardrobe shoved into one corner of a too-small Brooklyn apartment. There must be similar outfits labeled “Salsa Club,” “Grunge Show,” “Microbrewery,” and “Sushi Bar.” Perhaps a kimono for the last one. The kid (an unkind habit Frank has developed since turning forty is to refer to anyone under thirty as “kid”) is writing. He’s a writer. Frank feels self-conscious enough with his own notebook and pencil, but with someone else at the table taking notes as well, he feels as though he’s on a school field trip, a continuing-education seminar on the postwar jazz scene in Manhattan.

  The only thing Frank feels he can do is to introduce himself to the kid. “Frank Severs,” he says over the music, holding his hand out over the table.

  “Davis McComber.”

  Lost in his writing, he barely looks up from his book, his hand like a cold fish, limp and scaly. Frank instantly recognizes the name. Davis McComber is the byline on many of the contemporary articles on jazz in general, and Oliver Pleasant in particular, that Frank had Googled and printed to read on the plane. Frank had lost himself, not only in the stories of Pleasant and his colleagues, on the state of modern-day jazz and the future of the medium, but in the writing itself. Davis keeps a blog, as well as freelancing for music magazines, that is read by a staggering number of people—davismccomber.com has become the go-to site for what is and what was jazz.

  McComber is the antithesis to Frank’s dying industry, the very poison, some would say, that is being fed to today’s readers. Yet Frank couldn’t help being fascinated by what he’d read. The prose read like jazz, scatting and bebopping with flourishes and, when necessary, blank space. It was like poetry; it had a voice and a rhythm and maybe a little bit of trombone in it. There is no way the rigid style of the newspaper would allow such writing; newspapers refuse to bend, which is why they’re breaking. The kid is good and Frank feels himself, older by nearly two decades (a bio tagged onto one recent article in DownBeat magazine noted McComber’s age as twenty-three), shrinking from talent.

  On the first page of his own notebook is written “Jordan,” and Frank says to himself, “Details.” He conjures a history for this character across from him, one with musician parents and late-night adventures while still in high school into Greenwich Village to hear live music; family vacations to Paris to commiserate with musicians and writers; encouragement, at a young age, from family friends such as John Updike and Salman Rushdie before the inevitable acceptance of a short story by the New Yorker at the prodigious age of seventeen. Offers of assignments would hound this young man through his undergraduat
e studies at NYU, where he would decline offers of dates to fraternity parties and homecoming formals to, instead, fly to LA to interview the next big personality for Esquire or GQ or Playboy. Frank’s mind is fertile with images of Davis McComber in Iowa among Cheever, Smiley, and Roth.

  He’s finally caught staring at the composition book and looks into McComber’s smiling, eager face. Once the kid’s laser-like attention has been turned from his notes, Frank sees that it’s a boyish face full of life and the possibilities ahead of him. To Frank, it is as though the elegantly appointed table spans seventeen years, and he’s looking at his own twenty-three-year-old self.

  “I said, where are you from?”

  “Hmm? Oh, Memphis. Tennessee.”

  “Sun. Stax. Hi. Ardent.”

  “Rendezvous. Neely’s. Corky’s. Tops.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Barbecue joints.”

  “Ah. I’m vegan.”

  “Of course.”

  Frank sips his gin and tonic and laments, briefly, even coming to New York, the most expensive city in the country, to ostensibly work for free. The drinks in this place are more than he’d like to pay. More than Karen would like him to pay as well, and he wishes he’d taken more cash from the ATM instead of using his debit card here with its traceable records of spending to be placed in the ledger of bad decisions that Karen keeps. But maybe these drinks are free, he thinks, since Ben sat him here with Davis McComber, who is freelancing for DownBeat tonight and said, “Be my guest.” His guest? Is everything complimentary?

  “Come here often?” Frank says.

  “With what Greenberg charges for a drink? Christ. I only make it when I’m working, or when there’s somebody I really, really want to see.”