Five Night Stand: A Novel (10 page)

“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 piano 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 Francesca, 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.

That was Oliver’s last time in Memphis, and now he’s about to move there with his youngest sister and his niece and her family. He’s been told his niece has a big house right downtown on the river, that she flies around the country in small planes telling people what to do. Black woman in the same town Oliver had run from when they felt the coast was clear forty years before. Times have changed, he supposes, smiling at the photo.

“Leastwise, I hope they have,” he says to that picture. “Good night, Francesca, my love.”

(INTERLUDE NO. 2)

MEMPHIS, 1937

as told to Frank Severs by Oliver Pleasant

The Capasso Hotel, 1:00 a.m.

New York, New York

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.

The first time I stepped foot in your city it was on them cobblestones at the river. Y’all still got them cobblestones? Yeah? Shit, them stones seen slaves and cotton, freedmen and soldiers comin from and goin off to war. So here I come, down that gangplank all wide-eyed and starin up top them bluffs there where the city rests, lookin for all the world like I belong there. Like I got as much right steppin foot on them stones as any slave or soldier just because I play some music and got some tail five hundred miles downriver.

I was put in my damn place, though, ’cause when I stepped on land with the shakiness in my legs from bein on water since New Orleans, and the slickness there under my feet, I fell backward. And it wasn’t to the sound of no orchestra or cheerin for Mister Nobody Oliver Pleasant, neither. It was to the laughter of the riverboat men, the dockworkers, passengers, and my own boys from the band. That’s how I first entered Memphis, on my ass.

Suppose that’s how I’ll go back to it now, too.

Anyways, it was my first time in the city and the boys took me all around from Beale Street, down Main, lookin in all the windows to them fine department stores. There was movie houses, too, with their marquees shinin and barkers out front callin for folks to come in and watch a picture show. “It’s air-conditioned!” they’d shout.

It was full of people, Memphis was. Like New Orleans, only there seemed to be more purpose, I guess. There was bales of cotton bein sold and shipped right there on Cotton Row and pretty ladies dressed to the nines shoppin or goin for lunch, businessmen everywhere with folded-up newspapers under their arms and sharp-lookin lids to keep the sun off. There was a music to Memphis, the same as New Orleans, but it was different somehow and I’m hard-pressed now to say just how. It was the blues, be sure, shufflin through the town the way I suppose a sharecroppin Negro might have when he come in town for the day to shop or visit kin. Kind of wary, you know? New Orleans was brass and brash and in your face, and our people could be anywhere there, go anyplace we damn well pleased. But there seemed to be a little taste of the unknown in Memphis, like somebody might not like the tunes and have a mind to do somethin about it. Oh, but the sound was there. It was everywhere; you can’t stop the music.

We had a night’s stay over and some of the boys was known to the manager of the Gayoso Hotel, who wanted some new blood on his bandstand and hired ’em to play up on the rooftop. They needed a piano and asked me did I want to sit in. Cash under the table, all the booze you could drink, and white tail from here and gone? Shit, I’d of been a fool not to sit in on that. We had a hell of a time playin up there in the breeze and with a different crowd than we’d been playin to on that boat. Memphis, the river view, it was a good scene up there on that rooftop. Stars even seemed that much closer in the night sky.

After the show, we was scurried off that rooftop to the basement, where the colored staff and waiters was passing around a bottle taken from the hotel’s bar and some smoke I was told was taken from a guest’s room. Some a them staff was goin over to a block party not far away and took us along. It was in the black part of town, of course, past Beale and down to where them row houses get smaller and closer in. Had a scare on the way when a couple of cops, white cops of course, stopped us to ask where it was we thought we was headin. Home. Drinkin? Naw suh. Askin us where we was comin from and what’s in the case there and was we sassin them? I wasn’t but seventeen or so and it scared me a little, put me in mind of old Mr. Sheffield sittin up at my mama’s lunch counter and tellin her to bring him the pepper sauce. Tryin to tell her she burnt his pork chop tough. Motherfuckers. But they let us go. No harm no foul, I guess, just the white man’s idea of a good time.

Our idea of a good time was over in our people’s neighborhood. It was raucous and loud over there, boy. It was a fine time and all that party needed was some more musicianers from downriver. The girls liked havin somethin new to look at and touch like we was exotic animals from some far-off place. And we was, too!

There was parties all up and down that narrow street with dice set up in the front room of one of them shotgun houses, a bar set up in the house next door, and then music callin from the third. Amen, brother. But that music could be heard all up and down the street and, I imagine, all the way to the river and back. Them houses were packed so tight together you could pass a bottle from porch to porch, or peel the paint right off a neighbor’s clapboard. That was a good time, Memphis was. Somebody had a old upright pulled out on a porch so it blocked the front door and folks had to climb in and out of the windows to come and go. I played there all night long and my boy Hamlet blew his trombone from the sidewalk. Felt like we was celebratin somethin, but I don’t know what, just that free feelin and bein in the South, I suppose. That was thirty-seven back then. It was friendly, like bein among family, you know?

I’d like to get that feelin back when I move down there, but I reckon it’s done left with the current and the time. Hopefully them cops left, too—that ain’t good for nobody. But it’ll be nice to see my sis and baby niece. Get some more of that southern cookin, too, boy. And the music? It’s good everywhere, but with somethin just a little sweeter tastin down closer to where it was birthed, and in the face of them who weren’t so damn happy about it all bein born in the first place.