Viper Mad

Autumn comes to its peak around the Apple, and Laudette walks in the park. Now that she has it, the power that she craved weighs heavily on her stocky shoulders. It’s not so easy when you’re really the one in charge. She sits on a bench, ankle deep in the colors of the falling leaves, breathing the crispy, smoky October gold in the air and counting to ten, going over in her mind the things that worry her and the things that count.

Most people have a job they can come home from, but mine is always there waiting for me … damn that Sugar! She’s halfway around the world, having a ball with her fruity friends. I’ll bet she’s not worrying. Heaven only knows when we’re going to hear from her. She left me holding the whole bag! The truth is if I don’t worry, who will? Nobody, exactly nobody, that’s who. It’s not my fault that child was born unsocial as a wild animal, and that the staff is content to be malcontent good for nothings. Yes, indeed, I was a lot looser, and happier too, before Sugar came and got me out of Kane’s Top Hat Club. I do declare Baby might be right. I’m sick and tired of being a model of goodness for the baby, of trying to set a proper example. I’ve been working almost thirteen years now and haven’t taken one vacation, and hardly had a day off. I’m taking a vacation now, right where I feel most comfortable. The most important thing is saving my own soul. Let the rest of them go to hell if they want to.

Through such contemplations, and the smell of burning leaves having tender and nostalgic associations for her, Laudette experiences a measure of the wisdom of detachment. She comes to a mild state of euphoria.

She spends the following day, Gloria’s fourteenth birthday, hollowing pumpkins and carving faces into them. On the spookiest evening of the year every corner of the house is smiling with the fatuous light of jack-o’-lanterns. Then in honor of Glory she sets fifteen candles on a honey cake and, as she sets the match to the one to grow on, calls the Bee to see by singing “happy birthday.”

Gloria is happy for the attention, and glad that Laudette is lightening up but, she thinks, what a boring way to spend a birthday! She has to wonder how an in-house party with her sitter can outdo getting dressed up and going to the Cootie Club.

Knock, knock. Someone’s making a racket at the front door.

“I wonder who that can be?” says Laudette, with a give-away grin. “Oh, probably, trick or treaters. See who’s there, will you, Baby? Shoo them away.”

Gloria peeks through the peephole.

“Boo! Mademoiselle,” says a gravelly voice.

What a treat! It’s uncles Early and Bones. She notices right away Bones is carrying a leather case that contains his saxophone.

Laudette invites the staff to join them. “It’s your good-bye party too, snakes. Golden Rules of Xistential kindness or not, you’re fired. First thing in the morning I want you all marching. Funny how it happens to be the Feast of Saints.”

The stool pigeons know Hilda Swan has a lawyer who will contest Laudette’s authority to fire them. As for now, they turn their noses up at eating cake with the likes of Earl and Bones.

To make things more fun, Gloria’s uncles spread the world around town that there’s a party going on for a very special young lady on Easy Street. Knock, knock. Ring, ring. In twos, threes, fours, and fives about seventy people, kooky cats as well as elegant ladies and gentlemen, make an entrance, all bearing gifts of cake, ice, beer, wine, and liquor. The group is congenial and not too raucous, considering the racket at the last fruit and nut meeting. Everyone wishes Gloria a happy birthday, and goes off with due respect to find a niche in the house. Even those who crank up the phonograph in the library and set to swinging up and down in the front hall do it with cool.

Neat, Gloria thinks, it’s like having the Cootie Club right in my own pad.

After having her cake, she goes with Laudette, her uncles, and about two dozen of her guests into the back parlor and the party really begins. Earl sits right down at the piano and goes into a warm serene spiritual vein, playing full gospel chords that create a peaceful major key sanctuary. Bones takes out his horn, reaches back to his roots too, and uncorks a hank of hymn in a cool sweet hoarse falsetto. In such a small room, the giants of jazz are larger than life.

The guest of honor has some cushions in the corner for when she takes five from piano practice. Tonight she sits upright there, cross-legged, her heels on her thighs, attentive as a warrior at council, or a swami on cloud nine, taking in the people, the night, and the music. The others take their seats on the remaining chairs and on the floor. When those revellers outside hear the live music rattling the walls, they click off the phonograph and come down the hall to hear.

Laudette flops on the couch and sighs, “Ah, when I hear music like this, I rest assured my sins are forgiven.”

Gloria agrees. She closes her eyes, and there is nothing else in the world but the music: the thrill of the thunder sound in the old piano as Earl’s sure, strong, sweaty hands roll like a river. And how clear and loud Uncle Bonesy blows his horn! They slack off together into some minor alternatives, some standard and some idiomatic blues, a passage that builds a bridge into the old ballad I Don’t Give A Darn.

“Ooh yes,” Laudette murmurs, pleased when she recognizes the tune.

When they break there’s a round of applause both from those in the room and from those outside listening in the hall. Then conversations, laughter, and the phonograph start and drinks are poured. A well-dressed couple who speak with a Gourmet accent get up to congratulate Earl and Bones. The four go over to join the sitter on the couch. Curious Gloria watches intently, and keeps her sharp ears out, too.

“It’s been too long since I’ve gotten to loosen up,” Laudette says. She rises, goes to Harry Swan’s liquor closet, and comes back with a bottle of gin. She pours a round for the others and takes the same for herself. Gloria has only seen her sitter take one drink, never more. Tonight, as the conversation rambles from fish and chip joints to expensive Gourmet restaurants, Laudette has a second.

“I tell you,” Earl says to the Gourmet lady, “once they get that Reichmann devil out of old Elysée, Bones and I plan to move chez vous.”

“Oui, oui, mon frere,” says Bones, “where the bread is fresh, the wine is old, and jazz musicians get some respect.”

They all sigh, imagining post-war cafe life.

Relaxing a bit more, Laudette has still another surprise for Gloria. She says, “Hey, you know what I’ve been thinking about? Something I haven’t had since I came back east. Do you boys have any of those cigarette treats I used to have for you?”

“Is the Holy Peter a Patriano?” Bones asks and gets up and goes to his sax case which is on the floor near where Gloria is sitting. She watches as he opens his box of reeds and takes out a slim, festive-looking cigarette. He makes a vague, fumbling attempt to cover it up, so she can’t see it, which of course only draws her attention to it.

Gloria is hip enough to know that all cigarettes are not rolled equal. She knows that this smoke is illegal: marijuana, the coolest of cool things. But she is confused. Did Lawdy really just ask for it? She sees the old sitter is on the couch looking at the cigarette with a bulbous goggle in her eyes. Yeah! They’re fixing to get high!

Bones takes a seat on the coffee table, lights the stick, and passes it to Laudette who draws a whale of a lungful. As she exhales, hissing viper mad, her eyes get tranquil and a grin glows on her face so big and bright it matches the broad beam of her backside. Hoo whee! The big sitter is home at last, completely careless about whether Gloria is getting wind of what is going on. Others, seeing that the smoking lamp is lit, take out hemp sticks of their own, light up, and pass them around.

In her young heart, Glory applauds the tea party. Ah, the good life, to live and let live. Being responsible for yourself and not setting rules for others, that’s when the good times roll.

Earl and Bones play again, this time the old swing favorite Mellow Jive. The group in the hall laugh and clap their hands to beat the band. Laudette shakes her roly-poly legs from her big bottom to her booties. When the music crashes to a close, everyone claps, whistles, and shouts. Laudette bangs the coffee table with delight. “Hee hee hee,” she says. “Where there’s smoke there’s fire. I don’t know if you’re playing any better, boys, but that boo sure made listening a breeze. Earl, honey, where do you find all those notes? And, Bonesy, your voice comes out of that bell smooth as if it had butter on it.”

Again, the teenager is filled with respect and admiration for her sitter, seeing her on such intimate terms with her idols, drinking and using illegal drugs, saying “fuck you” to sobriety and to society. At the same time, her curiosity is more than she can bear. The kitten wants some experience, and she knows where she can find the catnip. When there is another break and the grownups drink, smoke, talk, and laugh some more, Gloria sidles over to her Uncle Bones’s leather case, slips a hand in, and takes one of the cigarettes from among the thin strips of cane in the reedbox. Now she can take a break herself. She steps over and around the bodies on the floor, goes upstairs to her bathroom, stands over the toilet, ready to flush on the off-chance that someone tries to roust her, and smokes.

She never had so much fun. She hisses like a dragon with the smoke between her teeth. She knows that she is taking a drug, and that drugs are supposed to bring pleasure, good feelings, or at least relief from pain, but as far as she can tell, after smoking the cigarette down to the stub, she feels the same as she did when she started. Maybe I didn’t smoke it right, she thinks as she goes downstairs, disappointed that nothing happened.

And nothing does until Earl and Bones start playing again. First, it’s another ballad, Moody Moon. Earl, the master of opposites, whirls up and down the keyboard, his gentle giant hands twisting out braided strands of black and white notes, classical and classy. Gloria’s mind rolls jelly-jelly with his every insinuation. Bones sings the melody through his horn, soft, deep, full moon tones, reflected in the rippling piano. The good listener rises with the glistening high register bridge. She can’t count how many ways the music says “I love you.”

And while her appreciation for the musicians is deepened, she wonders if they are really doing all that or if it isn’t in some measure in her. The drug confirms her Cootie Club experience of being the creative audience. It seems to her that she hears the music a split second before they play it, and when they play it satisfies her expectations perfectly, even going a little further, giving her sounds she didn’t know she craved.

Next Earl counts to four and races into an up-tempo original of his. The birds in his hands stretch the limits of the old Red Robin Boogie. Bones bops off the swing beat and flies bravura into a long loud complex melodic line. Gloria, too, catnip playful and giddy, is flying. The dizzying harmonics fill the bill of her wildest dreams.

All ears, she sits quietly, thoroughly transported for an hour that seems like days, and when everyone says goodnight and she goes upstairs to bed with all she’s heard still ringing in her ears, replaying in bits and snatches in her mind, she thinks she is too high to put her head down, but when she does she finds her pillow soft as a cloud. She thinks she will never drop off to sleep but finds herself falling nonetheless into dreams of Elysian Fields, a city of sound that never sleeps, whose fertile night air is filled with musical minarets, pagodas, obelisks, domes, all outlined in strings of sparkling colored lights.