“Jazz fan?” Frank can play it cool when he needs to.
McComber nods, taking a sip of his beer. “Comes with the job. Actually, the job came with the habit.”
“Habit?”
“Buying up old albums became a habit, became a borderline obsession. So did writing letters to DownBeat and then the occasional review until they asked me to cover a show or two, profile musicians, that kind of thing. Weaseled that into music writing for some local papers and AP stuff.”
“Backed yourself into journalism, huh?”
“Yeah. What about you?”
“J-school. Shortest distance between A and B. I’m a traditionalist.”
“I heard that’s one way to do it.”
They sit and listen to Pleasant and his quintet, both nodding and sketching out notes from time to time. McComber finishes his beer and waves to the waitress for another and one for Frank. Frank holds his glass up in acknowledgment and in a silent toast to a fellow writer, to one who keeps the fire of inspiration—whatever that is—burning.
The second set is as tight and spot-on as the first and gives way for McComber to sit later at an all-night diner six blocks away, drinking shitty coffee, smoking, and beginning his review in longhand with a pencil in his composition book this way:
Oliver Pleasant hasn’t been seen or heard from much in the past twenty years, ever since the passing of his wife, Francesca. It is unfortunate because, in a time when a musician’s sense of history doesn’t seem to go back much farther than the birth of MTV, Pleasant’s goes back to the birth of cool and beyond. He is one of our last living icons from an age when the blues was heard through brass and bass, and that story of the blues had heaped upon it the sadness of slavery and emancipation, segregation, integration, and a couple of world wars. Jazz, simply, is the sound track to our modern-day history, and tonight one of our favorite and remaining historians took the stage at the Capasso Hotel in Midtown Manhattan for his final performances before retiring for good. It was night two of a five-night stand. . . .
Agnes doesn’t have the talent of language to say or write just what it is she feels while watching Oliver play. His music is something that takes her back to her childhood, to before she was sick, to a time so long ago that she can’t have known what it might be like to have been healthy. The music tells her what is inside of her better than Dr. Mundra’s scanners ever could. She likes to know that others love it as well and watches Lucchesi as he listens, the same wrinkles spreading around his eyes as he’d had while looking through the book of drawings that afternoon. Even Andrew stopped to listen to Oliver Pleasant off and on, his New York jadedness fading away with each note.
“Well?” Andrew says once the music stops and Oliver has rolled his weight through the crowd, again brushing past Agnes, to his booth in the front of the club.
“Good shit, again,” Agnes says. “Every note, from beginning to end, was perfect. Lucchesi?”
“Delightful,” he says. “Yet I must take my leave. If you’ll permit me, Miss Cassady.” He takes a bill from his wallet and hands it to Andrew.
“Oh, I couldn’t . . . ,” she begins.
“Tut-tut. I wouldn’t have even known Pleasant was playing if it weren’t for you, my dear. And then you shared your table in an otherwise packed room. It’s the least I can do. You take care and enjoy your time in New York.”
“Thank you.” She watches him go. He stops by Oliver’s booth and shakes the man’s hand, speaks a few words, and a smile spreads across Oliver’s face. They nod a few more times and appear to exchange more pleasantries. Before Lucchesi leaves, he takes a pen and small notebook from his inside jacket pocket and makes a note of something Oliver tells him. Agnes had noticed it back home between farmers and merchants, or on Sundays when she and her parents would have supper at the Cracker Barrel down the road, the way older people, people who might not have anything more in common with each other than their number of years on this earth, could strike up a conversation and, within only minutes, connect and construe all that a generation of living has taught them.
Just before Lucchesi left, he’d cocked his head backward a touch and Oliver had glanced her way. She felt her face flush hot.
“Well?” Andrew repeats, growing impatient as he stands before Agnes.
“You said that already.”
“How about us? Will you let me show you Manhattan tonight? At least, the parts I can afford.”
She laughs at this despite herself, and because Andrew Sexton looks as though somewhere on the helix of his DNA there sits a chromosome in the distinct shape of a dollar sign. Something is coming over her and she is hard-pressed to give it a name. She tries to lay blame on the alcohol that warms her stomach and spreads through her body, or on the brief touch and glance from Oliver Pleasant as he’d made his way through the room earlier. She’s just spent her first full day in New York City, the place of film and fame, and picked her way along its streets with a southerner’s sense of grace, keeping her awe to herself, though now it is gushing out in a geyser of music and familiarity, and she finds she wants every sensation of that city for herself.
Oliver pokes around his apartment. He remembers when this was the time of night he’d come alive, when he and his boys would be anxious to finish a gig and go on to the next thing, the next tear that might take them across town or across the country. Now he’s sluggish and tired, fuzzy-headed from work and drink. He caught himself nodding off earlier while talking to that reporter from Memphis. Oliver had rambled, the words coming to him through smoke and guesswork. He can’t be sure, as he slumps on the piano bench in his living room with a cup of hot tea, whether or not he conveyed the importance of that man’s city to his past and his future.
“Memphis was the first place I played professionally, on land anyways. There was New Orleans before, but that wasn’t for pay, that was just for me to get my nut. And since you came up here all the way from Memphis, we’ll talk about that.”
“Yes sir. That’d be great, Mr. Pleasant.”
“Here, you want a drink? Sit down. Benji, can we get the boy a drink? He been travelin since Memphis.”
“Certainly, Oliver. Gin and tonic, Frank?”
“Please.” When Ben left, Frank thanked Oliver again.
“Let’s do away with the formalities and all that mister talk. Call me Oliver. Gin, huh? Whoo! I been off that shit for forty years. ’Course, it’s probably better now than what we was drinkin back then. You born in Memphis?”
“Born and raised.”
“Married?”
“Karen. Seventeen years.”
“That’s nice. Yeah, that’s nice. Kids?”
“Well, no. No kids.” Frank hesitated, wondering if he should sink into the trying, the losses, the doctors and tests and medications. He decided against it and, in that brief stutter and stop, felt a flash of disloyalty to Karen and what she was going through, her inability to simply skip over the difficult parts.
“Maybe not yet,” Oliver laughed. “You still a young man; they’ll come.”
Frank took those optimistic words with as much weight as those of the doctors he and Karen had seen.
Frank listened to Oliver talk about Memphis just as he’d listened to him play the piano. It was with reverential awe and a slight disconnect in comprehension. Frank loves jazz with the mental capacity of a child. He doesn’t understand how it all fits together like so many wooden blocks or puzzle pieces. He grasps that it’s technical, that the men onstage so caught up in the tones and solos are also extremely intelligent and that the whole scene, as cool as it is, is closely related to working a mathematical formula. Three-fourths . . . two-fourths . . . four-fourths . . . Frank works in words and grammar, and the numbers only make his head swim.
It was with this same hazy recognition that Frank listened to tales of old Memphis. Talking after a show is like an extension of pian
o playing for Oliver, and he’d ramble for a burst of time as though taking a solo from his band. Frank tried to keep up. He knew the geographic locations of which Oliver spoke, but they’ve all changed in some way. They’ve been disinfected to within an inch of their lives or abandoned altogether to be torn down and rebuilt. It was like he was reading a road map of dirt roads being washed away as soon as he traveled them.
“Now, the first time I stepped foot in your city it was on them cobblestones at the river. Y’all still got them cobblestones?” Oliver said.
“Yes sir, they’re a national historic landmark now.”
“That right? I’ll be. Hell, I guess I’m what you call a historic landmark, too.” He laughed and poured a few more sips of Campari into the delicate cut glass in front of him.
Ben brought Frank’s drink to him and picked up a lighter from the table to light Oliver’s cigarette.
“When are you coming back?”
Oliver shrugged. “Next week, supposed to be. I ain’t ready.” He was lost in his thoughts and exhaled a tired lariat of smoke.
“Why can’t you just stay here? Isn’t New York your home now?”
“Shit, I been here for, what, seventy years? If this ain’t my home, then I don’t know what is. Unless it’s New Orleans, or Paris. Maybe even Winona, Mississippi. All comes down to money, Frank, it’s all money. Back then, back in the forties, fifties, we thought it was all about the music. We was young and dumb and full of come. And we thought as long as we was playin, we was livin. But, like all the other times in history, it was somebody else thinkin about the money. White man always thinkin ’bout money, Frank. So now he holdin it all and I’m only thinkin ’bout it.”
“But you get royalties, right? All those songs and compositions and recordings? Hell, I bought one of your albums on iTunes just last week.”
“The hell is that? Royalties, all that shit, that’s been gone for years. It’s been hell and gone. Now I got a small pension from Francesca’s years of teaching in the public schools and an even smaller pension from the musicianers union. That’s about it unless I play, which I ain’t, until now. Benji takes care of me time to time.”
“What about your daughter? I read somewhere that she lives in Brooklyn.”
“Charlene. Yeah, she’s over the river. She don’t have too much to do with me, though.”
“Can I ask why?”
“You can ask, son. I ain’t gonna tell, though. I reached out to her about maybe stayin with her, maybe gettin a little help, financially, you know. It’s a hell of a thing, askin a child for money like I was on allowance, like I want to go to a show or buy me some candy down at the corner store. I done my chores, I spent months and years away from home to play and pay for them kids, and I wasn’t perfect, I’ll say that, but times was different. I was a different man. But I was a man all the same and I did the best I could.”
“Your sons?”
“Hell, they travel more than I did. They ain’t got a home, from one end of the country to the next. Charlene, though, she’s right there. It’s like I can feel her right here with me, but she don’t want nothin to do with me.”
“So you’re moving to Memphis.”
“Yeah. My sister down there, lived there for fifty years workin as domestic help for some big-time rich family own half the damn city. Her daughter works for Federal Express now, not in a airplane but in the offices. Anyway, she got a room, told me to come stay down there. I imagine she been talkin to her cousin Charlene, maybe. Maybe not.”
“It’s changed a lot since that first time you were there. I hope, anyway. Was there any trouble that night you played? It was still so segregated back then.”
“Naw. Not that night, if I recall. We took the service elevator at the hotel, of course, and it was all black in them houses and on that street where we stayed. Whites, the law, left us alone mostly. I ain’t sayin there was never trouble there—I imagine whites got a head full of liquor and come lookin for trouble any night of the week, but not that night. It was same as when I was a boy in Winona and at the saloons in New Orleans. And it was the same party, too, I think, as all them other towns. Same lettin loose whether it’s Mississippi, Tennessee, Chicago, or New York. People blowin off steam. We all got steam—blacks and whites. You got steam, Frank?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I do.”
“Hell yeah you do. You don’t let that out sometime, explosions happen. White law knew that. You lettin steam out in New York, son?”
“No, no steam, Oliver.”
Another bark erupted from the old man.
“Were the parties in Memphis and New Orleans the same as in Paris?”
“You done your homework, boy, I’ll give you that. You a fine reporter but we just talkin shit here, right? No, Paris was a whole different animal. Wasn’t no white and black, just men and women.” Whispering: “Sometimes wasn’t even that.”
“Can you tell me about Paris?”
Oliver looked at his watch and downed the last of his drink. “Another time, son.”
“New Orleans?”
“Tenacious. I like that. Tell you what, I’m tired as shit right now, but you meet me at a diner called Junior’s up on 103rd tomorrow morning, I’ll tell you about New Orleans and feed you, too. You eat, Frank Severs, or just drink gin?”
“No, no, I’ll eat. See you then, and thanks again for talking with me.”
“My pleasure. You bring your paper and pen tomorrow, I got more stories.”
As if anticipating his thoughts and movement, Ben had appeared by Oliver’s side with his overcoat.
Oliver’s on his feet again and standing in front of Francesca’s wall of books. So many words, so many stories in that wall, in all of these walls. He briefly thinks of the little man with the white beard and touches the spine of a book. Lucky he met that man tonight, the man who sold Francesca all these books. What are the odds? He shrugs, shaking his head at the magic in old Mr. Lucchesi coming to hear his show and then offering to take all these books off his hands, tote them back down to the Village. Some things I can’t figure, Oliver thinks as he pads in sock feet to the sofa, then lowers himself slowly onto it.
The reporter had taken Oliver back to Memphis, to even more stories. Oliver was in Memphis in 1968 on the night of April 4, playing at the Club Tropicana in those faltering days of jazz when the crowd wanted more Otis, more Isaac. That trip will probably make a good tale for Frank Severs’s newspaper readers, Oliver thinks. His eyes fall on the photo of Francesca and the old, black rotary telephone sitting next to it—probably the last of its kind in New York City.
The phone rang that night in Memphis in Oliver’s motel room and brought him up out of a deep sleep, pulled him up away from the woman snoring softly beside him. Those motel phones rang loudly—louder than a house phone, Oliver thinks—and it wasn’t until he’d fumbled with the receiver to make it stop that he realized he heard the same clangorous noise from the next room over (his road manager’s) and the room next to that (his drummer’s). Those rooms were coming alive like they were their own switchboards. It was a cheap motel with thin walls—“Coloreds Only,” the sign read—just north of downtown Memphis near the river, but close enough to the Firestone tire plant that the smell of rubber was a fixture in the air, the carpet, and the cheap, stained bedspread.
“Hello?” Oliver said, years of smoke and booze already on his throat, mixed in with the sleep.
“Oliver? Ollie, baby, you okay?” It was Francesca in a panic, which worried Oliver.
He looked over to the woman in his bed, still snoring, still asleep, big brown tits lolling off her chest onto the graying sheet. She’d had enough gin to drink that no amount of motel phone ringing could wake her.
“What is it, baby? Francesca, you crying? The kids all right?”
Through sobs, Francesca choked out the words: “Dr. King.”
It took Fra
ncesca, a thousand miles away, to tell Oliver what had happened across town from him, and it wasn’t until she choked out the word “murdered” that Oliver heard the police sirens in the distance and then they were all he could hear. Like a war zone, there were sirens and the screeching of tires up and down the street. He heard shouting and other voices outside his door, commiserating and consoling, angry voices and sad. Oliver assured Francesca he was safe and out of harm’s way. He reached over and covered the chest of the woman beside him with a sheet and told Francesca, “I love you, too, baby,” before placing the phone back in its cradle.
The next day, some locals eating breakfast at a nearby diner considered it too dangerous to travel and suggested to the band that they not try to leave. “Bus breaks down in the country, as riled up as them white folks are, no telling what might happen. Might be like we in season out there now. I wouldn’t do it, not me. I’d stay my black ass in one place.”
Money on the road was tight, though, so their waitress made a phone call and had Oliver’s whole crew put up in a relation’s house. Oliver slept that night head to toe in a single bed with his saxophonist. Before that, though, they’d sat up watching a small black-and-white television enraged with static and news reports coming from just down the street. The lady of the house, in a housecoat and slippers and her thin, oiled hair in a net, cooked away her grief and anger in the tiny kitchen, handing dishes of greens, sweet potatoes, ham casserole, and chitlins to her young sons, who climbed over backyard fences to deliver to the houses of cousins, uncles, and grandparents. The blacks of the city were too frightened to leave the front doors of their own homes. She cooked as though it were a funeral, and the house smelled like a holiday as Oliver played a sad dirge between newsbreaks.
It was the same neighborhood he’d stayed in on his first trip to Memphis, though without the revelry and good times. A pall had fallen over the city, wound around that neighborhood like a lace veil. He played his piano for the city that night, but it was barely heard over the soft sobs of the people.
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