Midway through my second set at the Embassy Club, a familiar figure glides into the bar and takes a seat at a table in the back. He wears a gray fedora, aviator shades, a dark suit, and a white shirt. He gives me a small nod, acknowledging that he’s here to really listen, that he’s a musician, that he knows me. The connection isn’t clear.
I start into My Romance, slow it down to match the crowd, full of introspective couples staring into their drinks. I’m having trouble getting over and the audience isn’t doing its part to fulfill the unwritten entertainer-audience contract.
I’ve already tried the usual tricks—playing a fast series, songs everyone knows, a couple of flashy solos. Nothing I play gets much of a response. The audience is involved in a collective and detailed study of the ice cubes in their drink glasses. I go through the set one song after the next, my hands moving along the keys without much thought.
I’m wondering about Cray. The last hundred miles of our drive passed in a blur of conversation, or more accurately, a nonversation, since Cray did all the talking. I try to listen. But since he told me about his fake girlfriend, all of Cray’s stories sound like lies, the kind that would wither under casual scrutiny. He hacked the Web site for the state of Vermont and changed the governor’s name to Smoksa B. Igdube. He aced his SATs without studying. He plays an online game called DragonSlayer so well that he has a cult following in Japan. He exposed a local minister as a freaking pornaholic and got him run out of town. Typed, printed, and bound, the lies he’s told me would fill a small bookshelf.
I wish I could be a good uncle to Cray, that I could care about all his problems. But I just want to be free of him. I’ve been alone for too long to be flexible. My routine is deep and unshakable. I want only to play the piano, steal, and give away the money. Is that asking too much?
Instead, Cray is relentlessly with me—talking, turning on the radio, television, anything that makes noise. I realize that this is what it’s like to be old, capable only of saying no in various ways.
I look at my hands. I’m somewhere in the middle of How High the Moon, though I don’t remember starting the song. I think of Les Paul, dead now, who must have played this song thousands of times on his guitar, Mary Ford perched next to him. When he had the car wreck that shattered his right arm, Les Paul told his doctors to set his arm bent at an angle so he could strum the strings of his guitar. After that, he could be a guitarist, nothing else. Had I become just as inflexible? If my rental car wandered off into a guardrail and flipped into the woods by the side of the interstate, would I have my mangled arms set at forty-five-degree angles so I could always rest my hands on the keyboard?
No one in the entire bar except the familiar stranger in the back seems to be paying attention. He orders another drink with a confident wiggle of his fingers. Then he points his index finger at me and clicks an imaginary pistol, tilting his head back with a soundless laugh. I squint, unable to figure out who he is. My fans tend to be oddballs who spend way too much time at home listening to scratchy records.
During my last song, Our Love Is Here to Stay, I recognize the black jacket the stranger wears. It’s my backup jacket, a lesser Armani hidden in my suit bag. The shirt is white with a spread collar, my favorite. I look closer, realize that the stranger looks more than familiar. He looks like family. He raises his glass in a sloppy toast. His eyes are inscrutable behind his aviator shades, face shaded by the fedora. But his shiny headphones glimmer in the light from the candle flickering on his table.
I botch a bass chord, then recover. It was incredibly naïve to leave Cray watching television in our room. I bring the song back together, add a little four-bar solo to end it, then thump down five or six strong final chords to rush the ending and finish off the set.
The clinically depressed people who’ve made up my audience for the last two hours make polite, perfunctory applause, like grade-schoolers after a boring assembly. I won’t be coming back for an encore. Now they are free to head back to their Little Rock ranch houses and watch televangelists or porn, eat micro wave popcorn, e-mail secret friends, review their stock portfolios—whatever people here do at one a.m. on a Friday night.
I stay in the back room for a moment, washing my hands and pouring a glass of soda water. The club own er isn’t around, just the bar staff, only slightly more animated than its patrons. Now that I’m done, they blast the sound system. I peer out at the crowd nodding along to Booker T. and the M.G.’s and smiling at the welcome sound of Motown. The musicians who recorded this song decades ago in Detroit could never have guessed that they would make so many white people so happy for so long.
Cray is still sitting at his table, but he has some new friends now, two couples who have dragged over their chairs to huddle with him. He raises his hand in the air, pale wrist poking out of my too-small suit. He points a crisp bill toward the ceiling, summoning the waitress and more drinks. The new friends laugh at something Cray says. Annoyed as I am at my nephew, I’m also impressed at his brazen ways, so different from the low profile I kept when I was sneaking into clubs.
I wander over to the bar manager, a blond woman, thirty or so, who wears two diamond studs in each ear. We talk for a moment, pleasantries that fill the time while she looks for my check in the cash register drawer. If I spent a few hours with her, she might tell me how she ended up spraying ginger ale from a little hose into glasses, pushing tips into the pocket of a shiny black apron. But she’s ringless and her earrings are crap. I take my check, thank her, then walk through the thinning club to Cray’s table.
“Hey, it’s my . . . brother,” Cray says in a voice that sounds remarkably like Ray’s.
I nod.
“Nice set.” He points to an empty seat. “Chill with us for a few minutes.”
I shake my head, turn to the others at the table, smile. “If you wouldn’t mind, we have some family business to discuss.”
They pick up their drinks and move slowly to another table, disappointed that the fun is over.
“Really nice to meet you all,” Cray calls after them, smiling. “Enjoy your conference.”
I push my face close to his and smell beer. “What are you doing?”
“Having a drink or three with some new friends,” he says. “What’re you doing?”
“I’m working. And wondering how long I can put up with this,” I say. “That’s what I’m doing.”
“Put up with what?” Cray lowers his sunglasses.
“With stunts like this.” I point to his clothes, the empty beer glass in front of him.
“Okay, so I ordered some drinks,” Cray says. “No big deal. I paid for them myself. And I’ll pay to have your suit pressed. Here.” He picks up a pile of bills from the table and waves them at me.
I hold up my palm. “I don’t want your money.”
“What then?”
“I need you to not cause any trouble,” I say, instantly hating how I sound, so much like Chief scolding Ray and me as boys.
Cray leans forward, drains his glass. “I think you need a little more trouble, Uncle Ross. If this is the way you’re spending your time . . .” He glances around the club, nearly empty now. “Then you definitely need to change something.”
“What are relatives for, then?” Cray says. “I’m here to help you out, Uncle Ross, you’ll see. Just like the Cat in the Hat, remember what he said?”
“No.”
“I’m here to help you have some fun.”
“Thanks for that.” We get up to leave.
“I’m full of exceptionally wide-ranging knowledge,” Cray says, then stumbles.
I catch his arm and lead him toward the door. “Full of beer, too.”
“Yes, beer and knowledge,” he says. “What could be a better combination?”
“I suppose a burrito might add something,” I say.
Cray brightens, turns to point at me. “Now you’re thinking, Uncle Ross. Now you’re really thinking.”
Out on the highway, Cray slumps against the window. He’s asleep, I think, blind to the lush farmland rolling by. We spent a couple of hours in the hotel room last night, talking about how to get along during the weeks ahead. Cray agreed to stay out of trouble and I agreed to let him drink two Amstel Lights every night in the hotel room. He promised not to lie to me and I promised not to bother him about his diet. We shook on it and went to sleep in a détente that seems to be holding in the light of morning.
Cray stirs, then reaches into his backpack and takes out a thick stack of twenties. He snaps off the rubber band and pulls off the first bill, crumples it into a ball, then straightens it with a practiced twist. He presses the button to roll down the window slightly, then feeds the bill through the gap, turns to watch it float off into the weeds by the roadside.
I say nothing.
Ten minutes later Cray is still jettisoning bills one after the other.
“What’re you doing?” I try to sound uninterested.
Cray startles, pulls off his headphones. “What, Uncle Ross?”
“I was just wondering what you were doing, Cray.”
He holds up the stack of bills. “Helping Dad. He asked me to put these into circulation.” Cray peels off another bill, crumples it, straightens it, and sets it free on the highway.
“Counterfeit, I assume.”
Cray shakes his head. “Dad isn’t a counterfeiter, Uncle Ross. He’s way beyond that. He’s a currency anticipator.”
“What does that mean?”
Cray holds up a twenty. “Okay, see the back here, where it shows the White House with all those weird little yellow numbers raining down on it? They’re changing the tree on the left in a month or so. They’re adding a hidden pattern, microprinting it’s called, to keep the regular counterfeiters guessing. Dad’s already on top of it.” He held the twenty near the window and let the wind suck it outside. “Counterfeiting is for amateurs, anticipating is art. That’s what he says.”
“How does he know what they’re going to change?”
Cray rolls his eyes. “Because that’s all he thinks about. He’s beyond obsessed, Uncle Ross. He even pays some guy in Washington to steal trash from the Committee of Four. You probably don’t even know who they are, do you?”
“No, Cray. I don’t. Sounds kind of ominous and Chinese.”
“It’s a committee at the Bureau of Engraving that figures out what changes to make to our dollar bills. Top secret stuff. It’s headed by James D. Croton.”
“Who?”
“Some government dweeb who runs the whole currency division. I think Dad’s just jealous, if you ask me. He’s always talking about Croton, trying to make him look bad. You remember back when they switched over to the big-headed portrait on the twenty, the ugly money, Dad calls it?”
“Yes.” I remember an endless stream of twenties shoved in mailboxes, mailed in envelopes, slipped beneath doors.
“Dad was on top of that. FedExed a Jackson to Croton in Washington on the day they announced the changes. That’s what being a currency anticipator is all about. Now he’s so far into the future that it’s spooky. He knows what the twenty-dollar bill is going to look like three years from now.”
“I bet. So, Cray, what do you think about his career?”
“I’m proud of him,” Cray says. “He works hard. He’s devoted to what he does. And he’s not just trying to make a lot of money like most of the other dads I know.”
“He’s just trying to print a lot of money.”
“That’s just it, Uncle Ross. He could print a lot of money, but he doesn’t. Just enough.”
“Enough to what?”
“Survive. To introduce doubt into the system, is what he says. Doubt, not debt. And stay under the radar.”
“So no one knows what he does?”
Cray shakes his head. “Everyone thinks Dad’s a printer. A really good one.”
“What if they ask what he prints?”
“I tell them he prints art books. The expensive kind. And in a way, what he does really is art, Uncle Ross. I mean, check this out.” He holds up a twenty-dollar bill and I take it in one hand.
I look away from the road for a moment. “Looks real to me.”
“That’s because it is,” Cray said. “I was just testing you.” He peels off another twenty-dollar bill. “Here’s one of Dad’s.”
“That looks pretty good too,” I say. “Maybe not quite as crisp.”
“That’s actually a real one, too, Uncle Ross. I was testing you again.” He hands me another twenty. “Here, this is hot off the Heidelberg.”
“Now I don’t know whether to believe you,” I say. “It could be real or not.”
“Bingo!” Cray shouts. “That’s exactly it. People should wonder whether it’s real or not. It’s just a piece of fancy paper and some ink. It’s not really worth anything. Dad says that when the country went off the gold standard it was the beginning of the end. Everything’s bogus now. That’s why the markets keep freaking out.”
“I might have to agree with him on that one. Except gold isn’t really worth anything either. There’s just less of it than paper.”
Cray reaches up and stretches his arms, presses his hands up on the ceiling of the car, leaving greasy smears. “I’ll tell you one thing, Uncle Ross.”
“What’s that?”
“You think about money differently when you see stacks of it lined up in your barn.”
“I bet.”
“I see people getting all weird about money and I think, what’s the fuss? It’s just a symbol someone told us we had to respect, like the flag. Or Jesus. Or Hallmark cards. When someone sends you some stupid card, you’re supposed to think it means they care. The Hallmark people made us think this through advertising or whatever, and their brand gets a monopoly on caring. And most people believe it. But if you don’t, then when you get a Hallmark card you’re like—HEY, WHAT A STUPID-ASS THING TO SEND ME. GO FUCK YOURSELF. WHY DIDN’T YOU JUST WRITE ME A LETTER OR, BETTER YET, TALK TO ME?” Cray stops shouting, rubs his face, settles. “It’s like that with money, too, in a way.”
Cray seems to take in all the world’s input—my brother’s rants, blogs, television, ads—and reflect it back out into the world like a chrome-plated oracle. I hear Ray’s angry voice intertwined with Cray’s uncertainty. Ray and Cray—what was my brother thinking? The father carried within the son.
We pass a sign—110 miles to go. It’s going to be a long afternoon.
“I mean, you’re scrambling around the country, getting paid to play the piano in front of a bunch of drunk chicks and sad sacks and geezers. Doesn’t it just seem kind of stupid to you sometimes?”
“Of course it does.” I’m tempted to tell Cray about my secret life, to point out that I do more than simply wiggle my fingers. But I stop short of any road trip revelations. Despite our current détente, I’m not sure that I trust Cray to keep a secret. To keep anything.
“Then why do you do it? For money?”
“I like to play the piano. And sometimes you have to put up with a certain amount of shit to do something that you really like to do.”
“You know what I should do with my life, Uncle Ross?”
He shrugs. “Neither do I, really. I mean, I just don’t want to end up like you or Dad, doing the same thing over and over. With minor variations, know what I mean?”
I press my eyes closed and swerve into the emergency lane for a moment, then open my eyes and pull back into my lane.
“Here’s what I like to do.” Cray counts off his favorite things on his fingers. “I like talking to girls. I like to drink beer. I like rock climbing and skiing. I like playing DragonSlayer. I like walking around town without having any idea of where I’ll end up. That pretty much sums it up.”
“You’ll figure out something that you want to do.”
“Everyone says that.”
“But I mean it. I wouldn’t send you a Hallmark card, Cray.”
“I know you wouldn’t,” he says, then pulls on his headphones, done with me for a while, turning to other voices to guide him as we drive across a long bridge, the coffee-colored Mississippi roiling below.
I met the man who pointed me toward my future one night when he was playing in Chicago at a dive bar called the Top Spot. Delmar Robbins might be my mentor, but that sounds too much like he was training me to be a jazz executive. The French word passeur is closer to his role—someone who brought me into a new world, a ferryman intonightlife.
Delmar played fewer notes than anyone I had ever seen play the piano. Watching from a rickety front table, I could see that he was putting his hands, flat-fingered as Monk’s, where they needed to be to play the entire melody, but just tracing it out with a spare fill or two, stabbing the keys. He turned a standard like Embraceable You into an unrecognizable minimalist work-out. Sometimes I couldn’t even remember what song he was playing—they were only a place to start.
Like Cray, I was sixteen, fast-talking, wise-ass, naïve. But I knew that I’d found someone who could point the way.
Delmar was a sonic house wrecker; he brought down the walls of a song with sledgehammer chords to let sunlight in. He seemed furious at the keyboard, swinging at some leftover scrap of melody hanging stubbornly at the end of a run. Delmar was a paint er, sketching only the outline of what he wanted the audience to see, sometimes just a couple of points, leaving us to draw the lines.
I failed to notice the truth—Delmar Robbins was one of the laziest piano players in the world. He was simply trying to play as few notes as possible because it elevated the amount he was being paid per note, notes being the commodity that he brought to the club.
I was mesmerized night after night, following Delmar up and down the row of almost-bankrupt, legendary clubs where I was always the youngest and straightest in the audience. Others were drinking, talking, trying to forget about work or find a new lover. I was there to watch Delmar’s hands. When he caught me, he would slip his right hand into his jacket pocket and play the rest of the song with just his left—an old Phineas Newborn trick, though I didn’t know it then—and wink at me.
On a Saturday night when Chief and Eileen thought I was staying over at a friend’s house, I talked my way into Tim’s Cast-away Club, a club packed with secretaries and their bosses, hipster couples, drug addicts, and drunks—in short, perennial nightclubbers.
Delmar’s bleary face hovered inches over the keyboard, right hand tracing a melodic outline, left hand smacking its way through the bass like a blind man. He shot me a look, one that told me to pay attention. He sat bolt upright for a moment, hands in the air. Then he attacked the keys, lowering his head slowly as he played four bars of breakneck melody. His forehead hovered over the keys, fingers racing, eyes closing in rapture. In all, the downward plunge took about ten seconds. Then he played the same complicated four bars backward while backing his forehead away from the keys and rearing up suddenly. His eyes popped open and his fingers jerked away from the keys as if they had suddenly heated up like a sidewalk in August.
The crowd jumped to its feet, applauding. Glasses shattered on the floor. I stood on my chair and watched as Delmar played the same four bars backward and forward, over and over. I don’t remember the song; it’s unimportant. The effect, though, is etched into my memory. Delmar stopped time, reversed it, then started it up again. Delmar was tinkering with the order of the universe, reversing the world’s inevitable spin.
I had never seen or heard anything like it. I already knew that every player had tricks to help get over with an audience. But this was more than a trick.
That night I walked up to Delmar after his set was over and the crowd had thinned out. I opened my mouth and an embarrassing paragraph of praise and ambition and youth popped out like a shiny lozenge. To this day, I cringe when I remember it, even though Delmar is long dead.
A pause. A long pause. Four beats at least, then Delmar spoke. “You got twenty green dollars, boy?”
I did. I took out my wallet and gave the money to him.
He smiled, revealed a dentist’s nightmare of twisted teeth and blackened gums. “Looking good. Now I can show you some things. Set right down here.” He patted the bench next to him.
I’d like to be able to say that over the next few months, Delmar taught me the inner secrets of the legendary jazzman, that he saw me as his pale protégé. A hundred dollars later, he did teach me how to do the trick that turned back time. But most of his teachings were more practical.
Never play out on Monday night.
Use a clear tip jar and seed it with a five, not anything larger. (Who’re you kidding?)
Audition a sideman by making him play something he’s never heard before.
Order a set from the middle, putting your best songs there.
When the club is dead, play slow songs for a while, then a jump number.
Get paid up front and in cash.
Don’t play for a cut of the door.
Never rush the ending.
This was the wisdom of Delmar Robbins, someone never mentioned in any jazz book or found on any dusty record. It’s as if he never existed. But to me, he was as real and unknowable as Miles.