Coming Through Slaughter (8 page)

THREE

Travelling again. Home to nightmare.

The earth brown. Rubbing my brain against the cold window of the bus. I was sent travelling my career on fire and so cruise home again now.

Come. We must go deeper with no justice and no jokes.

All my life I seemed to be a parcel on a bus. I am the famous fucker. I am the famous barber. I am the famous cornet player. Read the labels. The labels are coming home.

Charlie Dablayes Brass Band

The Diamond Stone Brass Band

The Old Columbis Brass Band

Frank Welch Brass Band

The Old Excelsior Brass Band

The Algiers and Pacific Brass Band

Kid Allen’s Fathers Brass Band

George McCullon’s Brass Band

And so many no name street bands … according to Bunk Johnson.

So in the public parade he went mad into silence.

This was April 1907, after his return, after staying with his wife and Cornish, saying
sure
he would play again, had met and spoken to Henry Allen and would play with his band in the weekend parade. Henry Allen snr’s Brass Band.

The music begins two blocks north of Marais Street at noon. All of Henry Allen’s Band including Bolden turn onto Iberville and move south. After about half a mile his music separates from the band, and though the whole procession is still together Bolden is now stained untouchable, powerful, an 8 ball in their midst. Till he is spinning round and round, crazy, at the Liberty-Iberville connect.

By eleven that morning people who had heard Bolden was going to play had already arrived, stretching from Villiere down to Franklin. Brought lunches and tin flasks and children. Some bands broke engagements, some returned from towns over sixty miles away. All they knew was that Bolden had come back looking good. He was in town four days before the parade.

On Tuesday night he had come in by bus from Webb’s place. A small bag held his cornet and a few clothes. He had no money so he walked the twenty-five blocks to 2527 First Street where he had last lived. He tapped on the door and Cornish opened it. Frozen. Only two months earlier Cornish had moved in with Bolden’s wife. Almost fainting. Buddy put his arm around Cornish’s waist and hugged him, then walked past him into the living room and fell back in a chair exhausted. He was very tired from the walk, the tension of possibly running into other people. The city too hot after living at the lake. Sitting he let the bag slide from his fingers.

Where’s Nora?

She’s gone out for food. She’ll be back soon.

Good.

Jesus, Buddy. Nearly two years, we all thought —

No that’s ok Willy, I don’t care.

He was sitting there not looking at Cornish but up at the ceiling, his hands outstretched his elbows resting on the arms of the chair. A long silence. Cornish thought this is the longest time I’ve ever been with him without talking. You never saw Bolden thinking, lots of people said that. He thought by being in motion. Always talk, snatches of song, as if his brain had been a fishbowl.

Let me go look for her.

Ok Willy.

He sat on the steps waiting for Nora. As she came up to him he asked her to sit with him.

I haven’t got time, Willy, let’s go in.

Dragging her down next to him and putting an arm around her so he was as close to her as possible.

Listen, he’s back. Buddy’s back.

Her whole body relaxing.

Where is he now?

Inside. In his chair.

Come on let’s go in.

Do you want to go alone?

No let’s go in, both of us Willy.

She had never been a shadow. Before they had married, while she worked at Lula White’s, she had been popular and public. She had played Bolden’s games, knew his extra sex. When they were alone together it was still a crowded room. She had been fascinated with him. She brought short cuts to his arguments and at times cleared away the chaos he embraced. She walked inside now with Willy holding her hand. She saw him sitting down, head back, but eyes glancing at the door as it opened. Bolden not moving at all and she, with groceries under her arm, not moving either.

The three of them entered a calm long conversation. They talked in the style of a married couple joined by a third person who was catalyst and audience. And Buddy watched her large hip as she lay on the floor of the room, the hill of cloth, and he came into her dress like a burglar without words in the family style they had formed years ago, with some humour now but not too much humour. Sitting against her body and unbuttoning the layers of cloth to see the dark gold body and bending down to smell her skin and touching with his face through the flesh the buried bones in her chest. Writhed his face against her small breasts. Her skirt still on, her blouse not taken off but apart and his rough cheek scraping her skin, not going near her face which he had explored so much from across the room, earlier. When Cornish had still been there.

They lay there without words. Moving all over her chest and arms and armpits and stomach as if placing mines on her with his mouth and then leaned up and looked at her body glistening with his own spit. Together closing up her skirt, slipping the buttons back into their holes so she was dressed again. Not going further because it was friendship that had to be guarded, that they both wanted. The diamond had to love the earth it passed along the way, every speck and angle of the other’s history, for the diamond had been earth too.

So Cornish lives with her. Willy, who wanted to be left alone but became the doctor for everyone’s troubles. Sweet William. Nothing ambitious on the valve trombone but being the only one able to read music he brought us new music from the north that we perverted cheerfully into our own style. Willy, straight as a good fence all his life, none to match his virtue. Since I’ve been home I watch him and Nora in the room. The air around them is empty so I see them clear. They are for me no longer in a landscape, they are not in the street they walk over, the chairs disappear under them. They are complete and exact and final. No longer the every-second change I saw before but like statues of personality now. Through my one-dimensional eye. I left the other in the other home, Robin flying off with it into her cloud. So I see Willy and Nora as they are and always will be and I hunger to be as still as them, my brain tying me up in this chair. Locked inside the frame, boiled down in love and anger into dynamo that cannot move except on itself.

I had wanted to be the reservoir where engines and people drank, blood sperm music pouring out and getting hooked in someone’s ear. The way flowers were still and fed bees. And we took from the others too this way, music that was nothing till Mumford and Lewis and Johnson and I joined Cornish and made him furious because we wouldn’t let him even finish the song once before we changed it to our blood. Cornish who played the same note the same way every time who was our frame our diving board that we leapt off, the one we sacrificed so he could remain the overlooked metronome.

So because Willy was the first I saw when I got back I pretended to look through his eyes, the eyes Nora wanted me to have. So everyone said I’d changed. Floating in the ether. They want nothing to have changed. Unaware of the hook floating around. A couple of years ago I would have sat down and thought out precisely why it was Cornish who moved in with her why it was Cornish she accepted would have thought it out as I set the very type it was translated into.
The Cricket.
But I shat those theories out completely.

There had been such sense in it. This afternoon I spend going over four months’ worth of
The Cricket.
Nora had every issue in the bedroom cupboard and while she was out and the kids stayed around embarrassed to come too close and disturb me (probably Nora’s advice—why doesn’t she still hate me? Why do people forget hate so easily?) I read through four months’ worth of them from 1902. September October November December. Nothing about the change of weather anywhere but there were the details of the children and the ladies changing hands like coins or a cigarette travelling at mouth level around the room. All those contests for bodies with children in the background like furniture.

I read through it all. Into the past. Every intricacy I had laboured over. How much sex, how much money, how much pain, how much sweat, how much happiness. Stories of riverboat sex when whites pitched whores overboard to swim back to shore carrying their loads of sperm, dog love, meeting Nora, marriage, the competition to surprise each other with lovers.
Cricket
was my diary too, and everybody else’s. Players picking up women after playing society groups, the easy power of the straight quadrilles. All those names during the four months moving now like waves through a window. So I suppose that was the crazyness I left. Cricket noises and Cricket music for that is what we are when watched by people bigger than us.

Then later Webb came and pulled me out of the other depth and there was nothing on me. I was glinting and sharp and cold from the lack of light. I had turned into metal at my mouth.

Second Day

By breakfast the next day Cornish still hadn’t returned so Buddy walked the kids to school, he was quiet but got them talking. Soon however numerous friends of his kids joined them on the walk. They were the ones who began conversations now and though the dialogue took him in there were codes and levels he was not allowed to be a part of as the group bounced loud and laughing towards the embankment. Hands in his pockets he strolled alongside them, his two kids dutifully sticking with him.

Hey Jace—this is my dad.

Oh yeah? Hi.

As they hit the embankment he impressed all by answering three complex dirty jokes in a row. Riddles he had heard years ago. Dug into his mind for further jokes he knew would be appreciated and which spread like rabies the minute they got into school.

Stanley, what’s that note you’re passing—bring it here.

It’s a question Miss.

Bring it here.

Handed to her silently, creeping back to his desk.

What’s this … What’s the diffrence, difference is spelled wrong Stanley, what’s the difference between a nun praying and a young girl taking a bath? … Well Stanley, stand up, what’s the difference?

Rather not say Miss.

Come on come on, you know I like riddles.

You sure Miss.

Of course. As long as it’s clever.

Oh it’s clever Miss, Charles’ dad told it.

Go on then.

Well. One has hope in her soul and one has soap in her —

STANNNNNLLLLLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEY!

By the time they reached the school Bolden was a hero. He raked his memory for every pun and story. Finding out who the teachers were he revived old rumours about them. He suggested various tricks to drive a teacher out of the room, various ways to get a high temperature and avoid classes. As they approached the school the kids began to run from him fast into the yard to be the first there with the hoard of new jokes. He combed his fingers through his son’s hair, kissed his daughter, and walked back. He avoided the areas he knew along Canal. Eventually he cut into Chinatown and asked about Pickett. No one knew of him, no one.

A guy with scars on his cheek, right cheek.

He was directed to the Fly King.

He was home then four days before the street parade. The first evening with Nora and Willy Cornish. The first night with Nora. The second morning with the children, late morning (perhaps) with Pickett. Pickett should not have been that difficult to find. He had at one time been a power. His room was on Wilson. Chinatown however was a terrible maze.

But Bellocq had been there photographing the opium dens, each scene packed with bunks that had been removed from sleeping compartments of abandoned trains, his pictures full of grey light which must have been the yellow shining off the lacquered woodwork. Cocoons of yellow silence and outside the streets which were intricate and convoluted as veins in a hand. Two squares between Basin and Rampart and between Tulane and Canal through which Bellocq had moved, never lost, and taken his photographs.

So Bolden had probably been there before, with him.

Second Evening

Parading around alone. I walk to Gravier north past Chinatown and then cut back to Canal, near Claiborne. Along the water. The mist has flopped over onto the embankment like a sailing ship. Others walking disappear into the white and the mattress whores have moved off their usual perch to avoid being hidden by the mist. They walk up and down, keep moving like sentries to show they haven’t got broken ankles. The ones that have stand still and try to hide it. A quarter a fuck. The mist has helped them tonight. Normally now the pimps are out hunting the mattress whores with sticks. When they catch them they break their ankles. Women riddled with the pox, remnants of the good life good time ever loving Storyville who, when they are finished there, steal their mattress and with a sling hang it on their backs and learn to run fast when they see paraders with a stick. Otherwise they drop the mattress down and take men right there on the dark pavements, the fat, poor, the sadists who use them to piss in as often as not because the disease they carry has punched their cunts inside out, taking anything so long as the quarter is in their hands.

So their lives have become simplified by seeing all the rich and healthy as dangerous, and they automatically run when they see them. The ones who can run. The others drop their mattress and lie down and flick their skirts up, spread their legs with socks on, these ones who don’t care who it is that’s coming. If it’s a pimp he’s gonna check her for a swollen foot so she can’t slip back to Storyville. These broken women so ruined they use the cock in them as a scratcher. The women who are called gypsy feet. And the ones not caught yet carrying their disease like coy girls into and among the rocks and the shallows of the river where the pimps in good shoes won’t follow. But those who are lame thrusting their fat foot at you, immune from the swinging stick that has already got them swelled and fixed in a deformed walk, gypsy foot gypsy foot.

For them it is a good night. Standing like grey angels on the edge of the mist, stepping backward and invisible when they hear a fast rich walk. Like mine. God even mine, me with a brain no better than their sad bodies, so sad they cannot afford to feel sorrow towards themselves, only fear. And my brain atrophied and soaked in the music I avoid, like milk travelling over the border into cheese. All that masturbation of practice each morning and refusing to play and these gypsy feet wanting to play you but drummed back onto the edge of the water by your rich sticks and your rich laws. Bellocq showed me pictures he took of them long ago, he was crying, he burned the results. Thighs swollen and hair fallen out and eyelids stiff and dead and those who had clawed through to the bones on their hips. Rales. Dear small dead Bellocq. My brain tonight has a mattress strapped to its back.

Even with me they step into the white. They step away from me and watch me pass, hands in my coat pockets from the cold. Their bodies murdered and my brain suicided. Dormant brain bulb gone crazy. The fetus we have avoided in us, that career, flushed out like a coffin into the toilets and into the harbour. The sum of the city. To eventually crash into the boats going out to sea. Walk over the driblets of manure of the gypsy foot whores, they don’t eat much, what they can beg or take from the half-formed weeds along the embankment. Salt in their pockets for energy. There is no horror in the way they run their lives.