Rock star!
Rothschild
Gus was our roadie on a college tour of New England. This was to be our last tour. It’s so much easier just to Skype these days. He was quite upset about the idea, and made no bones about telling us that live music was a necessity for his life, even if it wasn’t one for ours.
He was as professional, and as libidinous, as ever, of course, when it came to both giving and receiving. I tried to reach out to him after the tour, but he never responded to my texts, returned my calls, answered my emails, or came to any of the parties I invited him to. I tried to find him at his apartment, but he either wasn’t in whenever I rang, or was hiding from me. I spent a week casing out his building from the deli across the street, but didn’t see a thing. I did notice that he never received any mail, not even flyers or other junk mail. But I’m sure he lived in that building. I’d been to the apartment before, and I asked his neighbors, and they all said that they saw him every day in the hallway, or in the basement doing laundry. Even the deli-counter man knew who I was talking about, and supposedly I’d just missed him virtually every day.
Eventually I gave up and went home. Have you seen him? Are you interviewing Gus for this project? Do you have any information on him? I presume someone from the old days is still in contact with him. I’d like to forward him a message if I can.
Fuentes
It’s just the sort of dumb rumor we don’t get in music anymore. Like Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads, or the previously undiscovered species of lice found in Bob Marley’s dreadlocks, or Rod Stewart and the gallon of sperm pumped from his stomach after a backstage collapse. A combination of magic, sex, and weird science. So, the story goes that Gustafson had some sort of mutation that made him sexually irresistible; his sweat was an aphrodisiac. Or that he was an incubus—a kind of sex vampire—who was empowered by the sexual energy of crowds who love music. He had a couple of Pinterest boards made in his honor, and was a name to drop for a while.
But in the end it’s just an overused memetic anecdote, just like Robert Johnson’s soul. Any query or review that mentions Robert Johnson selling his soul is an automatic rejection—otherwise we’d be publishing that shit three or four times a week.
Right now, with Gustafson, it’s like once a month that we have to roll our eyes and delete “Gustafson the incubus” when someone wants to talk about sexualized beats or hot chord changes in a review, plus the occasional suggestion that we find him and run a “Where is he now?” feature or something. Not that anyone knows where he is.
Leslie Muller—clarinet, Muller Fast Five
Well, it is certainly a remarkable resemblance. [holds photo to his chest] May I keep it?
I haven’t played in decades. My drummer soldiered on for years later, playing rimshots for jingles and giving music lessons to little kids who wanted to be the next Gene Krupa. He’s truly the connection between the old generation and the new, still, though I bet most of the people you’re interviewing don’t know him at all anymore. I did see that there were some Krupa videos on the YouTube though …
No, I don’t own a clarinet, even. I don’t listen to much music either. My granddaughter got me an iPod, and put a bunch of songs on it, so she says, but I can’t figure out for the life of me how to get it past the A’s. How often can a fellow listen to “Take the A Train” after all, eh? And that should be under T! What a blunder. It reminds me of old Ed Sullivan, who introduced the song on his show once as “Take a Train.” I’ll tell you, they let anybody on the television back then, except for the Muller Fast Five. Integrated band, not doing swing, maybe a little out there for some people. We didn’t play in Peoria, they’d tell us, except that we toured the Midwest and literally played Peoria a dozen times.
We finally called it a day in 1959. Twenty years on the road. We had some good nights and some bad nights. One night we were hot, the next we were in a Chicago catering hall playing some kid’s bar mitzvah. Our road manager was really something else. There was no out-of-the-way hole-in-the-wall dive he didn’t have a friend at. So we never went hungry, and our kids never went hungry, and that’s more than a lot of acts who recorded more frequently than we ever did are able to say.
We called him Gussy, and that was a joke. There was a bit of a swish about him, just in the way he walked and talked. It was like a kitchen faucet—he could run hot and cold. Turn on the left tap, and he would practically levitate, so light in the loafers was he. Turn on the right tap, and he’d have two women in his lap, and both of them loved it. No cattiness when he was around, no sir. There was plenty for everyone, a tasty buffet.
“The Return of Mister Hotsy-Totsy” was a song I composed for him. The bee-dee-dee-doop-ah-da was how I felt when I saw him, and the bass line, so rich and dark, like Mingus before Mingus made it big—well, that was just what Gussy was.
So, who is this fellow in the photograph? His son or grandson I presume. It’s the spitting image, I tell you.
The Queen of Them All
Ed Kurtz
At the checkpoint, Katie Ann paused to unload the contents of her pockets into her handbag: cigarettes, disposable lighter, car keys, and her most recent letter from Bez. She handed the purse to a stone-faced guard, who commenced pawing through it with detached indifference. Another guard, burly and unshaven for what she guessed to be the better part of a week, gave her a once-over with his watery brown eyes before gesturing for a female officer lingering in the dim hall. The officer loped over, patted her down, ran her fingers under the wire of her bra and up her crotch from back to front.
“She’s good.”
The final step in the procedure involved a cursory sweep with a beeping wand, which shrieked at her earrings but otherwise cleared her of contraband. She was handed her purse and escorted through the next locked door, which squealed on its hinges and crunched shut behind her.
While she walked silently beside the burly guard over the dirty white and gray tiles, she dwelt upon the letter for the hundredth time. For this, she did not need to dig it out of her handbag, because she had memorized it, line for line, before she arrived at Beaumont.
Beaumont was a state prison, maximum security, and home to Bez Horvath for the last seven years, three months, and nine days. This too she had memorized, the exact length of his sentence and the time served—as well as time remaining until his next parole hearing, which happened to be a week from next Monday.
She did not expect the hearing to go well. Bez was unpopular, demonized in the press, and an example for harsher sentences on repeat offenders. Had he remained incarcerated on his initial aggravated-assault conviction, he would never have had the opportunity to take the lives of most of the Weber family in Magnolia, Mississippi, the day after Christmas, 1989. Three people—two adults and a boy of eleven—would in all likelihood still be alive now, and poor Katie Ann Weber, only thirteen that day and the only one Bez Horvath suffered to live, would still have a family.
The door at the end of the hall buzzed noisily and the guard hauled it open, whereupon he gestured for her to pass into the next segment of the hallway. From there the guard yanked his key ring out on its retractable wire and selected the key that unlocked the third door on the right. A reedy guard in an ill-fitting blue uniform awaited her on the other side. He gently touched her shoulder and directed her to the second-to-last booth in a row of eight.
She lowered her slight frame into the orange plastic chair between the grimy partitions, set her purse on the chipped Formica table in front of her, and stared through the smudged glass that separated her from the empty, matching orange chair on the other side. She did not have to wait long. In a moment, he was led out, cuffed at the wrists and ankles, his jumpsuit clean and ironed. His hair was slicked back with pomade and the tattoo on his neck peeked out from beneath his collar, revealing only a hint of the barbed wire wound around the cross underneath. When he saw her, he smiled. Even his eyes smiled, which she always found to be a tell—false smil
es left the eyes alone.
Bez Horvath sat down, rested his elbows on the table, and blew her a kiss. She picked up the receiver from the handset on the wall. He grabbed its twin on the other side, chuckled lightly, and whispered into the mouthpiece.
“Hi, Katie.”
February 14, 1996
Beaumont Max
Mississippi
Dear Katie Ann,
Hi pumpkin. Thanks for the letter and the cookies. I felt like the cock of the walk, eating them in front of everybody. It’s the little things sometimes.
Thanks also for the books. I already read the Cussler and I’m starting on the Ludlum. I’m sure I’ll have to hit the library before you can send more. Not a lot to do in here but lift and read. The library doesn’t have much worth reading though, unless you’re studying law to try and get yourself off. But I’ll never get off, so that’s out for me, isn’t it?
I don’t mean to sound pessimistic. I know my hearing is coming up. There’s something to be said for the con who owns up to what he did and expresses repentance, but that doesn’t bring your daddy, mama, and brother back. Nothing can do that, and that’s what prisons are for, I guess. I’ll probably die in this place, but so long as I got you I can’t say I mind it too much.
It takes some crazy stuff to bring people together sometimes, doesn’t it, pumpkin?
Love always, Valentine.
Bez
“Some lady wrote from England, says she wants to marry me,” he said.
“More fan mail?”
“Every week. Week in and week out.”
“How many of those have you gotten?”
“Marriage proposals? I don’t know—fifteen or so by now. This is my first out of country, though.”
“Probably just wants a green card.”
“Hey now, I’m not such a bad catch.”
“No, baby. No, you’re not.”
“You should write a letter like that, maybe.”
Katie Ann blanched.
“Bez … ”
“Just a thought, pumpkin,” he said, grinning wolfishly. “Just a thought.”
In the summer of ’84 Bez got drunk in a Greenwood honky-tonk where he met a girl name of Sherri Grubbs. She showed him the two-step over a trio of songs on the juke, and he schooled her in the basic points of astrology, a favorite strategy for seducing daughters. By midnight the pair was kissing sloppily in the gravel parking lot beside Sherri’s El Camino, and by half past her old man came barreling down on them with a tire iron in his hand and hate burning in his pale, wet eyes.
Bez beat the old boy so bad he was in the ICU straight through autumn, on a liquid diet until the following year, and unable to walk without a cane for the remainder of his life. It was an error on Bez’s part, for when he left the guy on the gravel he was sure the man was dead. That was his intention.
The court-appointed defense attorney managed to bring the charge down from attempted murder to aggravated assault, whereupon Bez was convicted by a jury of his so-called peers and sentenced to ten in the pen. He was paroled after just four and half. Hitchhiked across the state. Found his way to a bump in the road called Magnolia.
And in Magnolia, Bez Horvath fell in love.
July 5, 1990
Darling Bez,
I dreamed about Mama again last night. It’s terrible weird how I don’t remember anything when I’m awake, but dreaming it all comes in clear, like a television. Used to be when I was little we only got the UHF stations at night. I never knew why, but at daytime all we got was static. It’s like that. When I’m asleep I can hear Mama caterwauling about Bobby and your boots on the stairs, and her turning out to the hallway just when you get to the landing with Daddy’s wood ax. She looks right past you, right at me, like she can see the whole thing before it happens. She knows you won’t take me too. She knows you love me. Was that really how it all happened? Dreams are funny sometimes.
And you, Bez—you’re always so bright, like a flash cloud in a bad storm, like hi-beams on a brand new Ford. My angel, an avenging angel in my dreams, come to take me away from it all. But here I am with Aunt Joelee in Liberty and you in stir and another three years before I can go where I please anyway. It just isn’t fair, baby. I can only see you in dreams till I’m seventeen. That may as well be a hundred years from now.
Don’t forget to send your letters to Crystal’s address. Joelee just burns them in the stove.
Yours forever,
Katie Ann Weber
The suggestion wormed its way through the pathways of Katie Ann’s brain while she undressed in room 325 of the HWY 10 Sleep Inn and ran a sputtering jet of warm water into the tub. When the bath was filled, she slid down into it and gave a long, hard look at the naked ring finger on her left hand. Katie Ann closed her eyes and let her hand sink into the tepid water, and she remembered sucking on a soda pop outside McCallister’s Sundries in Magnolia, MS, Pop. 2,071, in a pair of salmon clam diggers and asking the handsome stranger what kind of name was Bez?
Short for Bezaliel.
Is that from the Bible?
Sort of.
My daddy’s name is Amos, and that’s an olden times prophet.
I know.
He warbled a few lines of Carl Perkins’ “Pink Pedal Pushers” and gave her a wink. Katie Ann liked the way the skin around his big brown eye crinkled when he did so. She hoped she would see Bez-Short-for-Bezaliel again.
She did, naturally; and Katie Ann Weber was an orphan by morning.
Katie Ann dunked her head under and emerged half a minute later, blinking the soapy water from her eyelashes.
Pink pedal pushers has made her the queen of them all, ooh-wop-a-doo …
“Well, you sure ain’t going to marry no lady from England, Bezzie,” she whispered to the glimmering faucet with a giggle. She soaped up her chin-length chestnut hair and decided that she really was the queen of them all. Had been since that Big Day back in ’89.
(How does she go—pop!)
They were married by proxy, a file clerk in the JP’s office standing in for Bez and turning purple when he had to say I do. Katie Ann made a point of informing him that there would be no kiss at the end. Her lips were for Bez only, and all the rest of her besides.
When it was done, she stopped at a drugstore for another couple of paperbacks before driving directly to Beaumont. Her first order of business was to show the marriage license to the prison chaplain for proof and records. Only then would she and her new groom be permitted a modicum of time for a private visit—their very first.
The new Mr. and Mrs. Horvath were fortunate that Bez was incarcerated in one of only six states that permitted “Sunday visits.” After a thorough search and a review of Bez’s most recent blood test to attest that he was, in fact, free of VD, man and wife entered what could only be described as a “bedroom-like facility” consisting of a double bed, nightstand, and lamp. The floor was the same scuffed tile as the labyrinthine hallways that snaked throughout the compound. The walls were cinderblocks painted slate gray. The stale air smelled strongly of disinfectant.
Bez kissed Katie Ann on the nape of her neck. She shuddered. At twenty, she remained a virgin, having waited for this moment since she was still only a girl in her pink pedal pushers back in Magnolia. Primed by a pomaded drifter to become the queen of them all. Her eyes spilled over. Bez rasped, “Shh.”
Over the years, her period had been irregular. So irregular, in fact, that when she missed a month she rarely batted an eye. At two months without, however, Katie Ann batted both eyes. She rushed to the corner store and snagged a store-brand one-step pregnancy test, after which she filled up her basket with a passel of things she didn’t really need just so the test would not be the only thing she brought to the cashier. Katie Ann hauled her mini powdered donuts, diet cola, shampoo, travel deodorant, menthol cigarettes, and two milk chocolate bars along with the pregnancy test out to her Subaru hatchback and stepped on the gas all the way home.
The rest she left
in the car as she bolted into the trailer, unbuckling her belt. She peed with the bathroom door open. And she waited with her blue jeans and panties still bunched up at her tattooed ankles.
Five minutes passed and they felt like five days and when it was over there was a tiny pink plus in the little window.
Katie Ann was with child. Bez Horvath’s child.
She whooped like an Indian on the warpath in some old TV western show.
“Ooh-wop-a-doo.”
He crooned and sniggered while he washed up in the basin, rinsing the blood from his hands and neck with cold water. The wood ax rested on its head on the bathroom floor, the haft against the toilet bowl, and when little Katie Ann saw how far it was from Bez-Short-for-Bezaliel’s reach she knew how easily she could get to it before him. But this was nothing more than a passing fancy. She remained where she stood in the hallway in her ankle-length nightgown, all cotton and lace and just as pink as her pedal pushers.
“She wears a-pink pedal pushers, pink pedal pushers …
Pink pedal pushers has made her the queen of them all—”
Bez paused, ran his hands through his thick, wet hair, and turned his gaze on the child watching him from the hall.
“How does she go?”
Together, the blood-soaked killer and the sole survivor screeched, “Pop!”
She nearly collapsed with a fit of giggles. And Bez Horvath—he fairly glowed.
December 26, 1992 (A day late.)
Beaumont Max
Mississippi
Merry Xmas Katie Ann,
That makes it four years since I met you, and it makes you a free-and-clear woman of seventeen, too. Sorry I missed your birthday. I knew when it was but they were holding out on me, paper and pen-wise. The authorities here aren’t always very nice to us who live here, but it’s not always so bad. A roof, a bed, and three square. A man could do worse.
Four years. When I saw you, I loved you. And I knew then I would make you mine. That’s why I came down to you and sang you that song. That’s how come I set you free from them that would bind you.
Handsome Devil: Stories of Sin and Seduction Page 19