SAY HELLO TO STANLEY

BUDDY HART HAULED the Hammond B-3 in a two-wheel trailer hitched to his father’s Willys sedan. The family thought Uncle Stanley’s talent as a barrel-house pianist had by some mysterious route passed down to Bud. And the miracle became even more fortuitous when Stanley lost two of his fingers in the cutting mill along with his gig.

The skaters loved Buddy’s jazz-riff music. He’d imitate their gliding, pumping motion as they rounded the back wall of the Hi-Way Roller Dome smiling up at him in the open air booth that cantilevered the skate floor. The more venturesome rollers who executed the “Backslider,” “Alice Goes to Market,” or the “Janey Mae,” he’d tease with several bars of Salt Peanuts. And Buddy sounded just like Chet Baker singing when he’d accompany himself on a ballad.

But on Saturday and Sunday night at the Bluebird Inn, no microphone banter accompanied his riffs. This playing was dead real. He dug into the organ’s bed for inspiration, and when he got real hot, he’d grab a D minor b5 chord in the upper register and sit on the damn thing for two unrelenting, screaming B-3 minutes. Buddy opened up Ohio’s skies with a machete, for Chrissake.

“Ain’t he one mean dude!” a lady cried. “Sing, Buddy. Sing. Oh my God!”

The sweat rolling off Buddy’s boy face, Chet Baker tears, dripping summery onto the Hammond B-3’s keyboard.

What a white black musician he was. Uncle Stanley reserved a table every Saturday night to watch his nephew. Then Celia Hubbard, a twenty-three year old auburn-haired socialite, began showing up. Her presence added a certain je ne sais quoi to the bar, and at evening’s close, she’d fold a fresh twenty dollar bill in a glass Buddy kept on the organ. Celia drove a 1948 Nash Convertible, one of 750 ever manufactured in America.

“She walks in here like it were a salon,” Peewee, the Bluebird’s owner, said. “Do you watch all the women eyein’ her, Buddy? I ain’t ever seen a red snatch, have you?”

“She just digs the organ, man.”

“I didn’t mean no disrespect,” Peewee nodded. “But she lights this place up like your music, Buddy. What you say her name was?”

“Celia Hubbard.”

“Where she from?”

“East Jesus.”

“Don’t shit me, man.”

“Patterson.”

“Uh Huh.” It made sense. Patterson, outside Warren, was an enclave for the rich. Homes on lots of several acres, many of them with their own barns and grazing horses.

“Her father invented the drinking fountain, Peewee.”

“Jesus, yes? You see that damn car she’s driving?”

“I been in it, Peewee. Cream leather seats, still smells new inside too.”

“Where you go, Buddy?”

“Over to the Glass Hat to catch Jolly’s last set.” Jolly Patchen was the local blues singer and guitarist many believed was better than John Lee Hooker, but who never made it out of Warren.

“She taking an eye to you, Buddy?” Peewee asked.

“Shit, I’m just a skate-wheel musician, man,” he replied.

The day Buddy ceased playing for the Rollerdrome all the regulars sat on the skate floor, the mirror ball chasing magenta, heliotrope, indigo and mustard-yellow lights circling the grand hanger in darkness, mechanical fireflies all on permanent tethers . . . It was the strangest melancholic night, almost masochistic for Buddy and the crowd. Some of the rollers had been attending regularly for the six years Buddy’d been playing. It wasn’t the skating so much as his cherubic face, his boyish laughter and his Chet Baker’s girl-voice ballads that kept them coming back.

He was moving onto the big time now. No more sweat effluvium wafting up the skate floor, the silly mechanical pas de deux, the skate-dancing charades, the maestros who only chose to dance alone. Forty-year-old women with hair freshly dyed and sculpted up like an Eiffel tower, their sequined skate costumes causing the colored lights to swirl on their derrières like the mirror ball on the ceiling. Or the men with pompadour-hair and cigarette packs—Lucky Strikes mostly—rolled up in their tee shirt sleeves, tight trousers held up by plastic belts, doing those leaps into the air to the beat of Buddy’s sweet music, lost in their odeons, barbers and telephone clerks by days, stars in the Rollerdrome orbit at night—Oh, God, he wouldn’t miss them . . .

They wanted Buddy to sing to them. He had this “wish board” up in his booth that controlled every light on the floor, the speed of the mirror ball, the speaker system. Buddy Hart, the Master of the mise en scène, the Harlin County Artaud, the Rollerdome wizard. Tonight they wanted Chet Baker.

The giant mirror-faced moon he ratcheted down to a drug-induced revolution, the thousand shards of light-illuminated flies with mirror backs, all the colors of a dreamer’s rainbow, and the B-3 began to drone, in the lower register, a reedy vibrato. Buddy wasn’t Jimmy Smith no more. Instead a lachrymose idol. Up there in the booth hovering over them. Long mournful ommmmmms.

As if he wanted to purge them with a colonic of sadness. The audience watched the flies circle the wall and the floors. Like some kind of star calliope jar they were inside, except lying on the floor looking up at the hangar steel-trussed heavens. Christ, it was strange out there on route I-27 on the outskirts of Niles, a dink copper-refinery town, its sulfurous odor hanging over the valley like a scrim. The skaters with their red-and-white yarn pom-poms on the toes of their skate-shoes parked forlornly alongside them.

And just when it became almost unbearable, Buddy began to sing “When Sonny Gets Blue” in his best Chet Baker voice . . . followed by “Nature Boy” and then—the surprise of the evening—“The Little White Cloud That Cried.” He was warbling like he was a damn skater, too; that he wasn’t any different than those folks down on the floor, surrendering to melancholy and nostalgia, ignorant of complicated chord changes, technique, and awesome Bud Powell lines . . . the stuff of the cognoscenti. Surely if Peewee were in this audience of colorfully laced skaters with pom-poms on their shoes and Waveset in their hair, he’d stab the keyboardist out of his self-indulgent stupor.

“‘Little Things Mean A Lot,’ Buddy!” one sequined matron bellowed up from under his booth. Buddy smiled his oleaginous grin and began tapping the tune into the Hammond B-3. Several of the women yanked the pompons off their skates, tossing them up into Buddy’s open box. The yarn balls rained on the organ bouncing down to its pedals.

Christ, what if Celia came in, thought Buddy. A shiver went up his spine. “Lady’s Choice!” he hollered, and beat out the “Beer Barrel Polka.” The mirror ball spun rapidly, its mechanical flies with mirror backs circling the skater’s hall like traffic on a freeway. It took sometime for the crowd to catch up. But they did. The crowd now circled the hanger like plastic fish in an arcade’s Fish-Until-You-Catch-A-Winner trough. The calliope!

But the Harts lived on DeForest road where the toilets, bathtubs, sinks, washing machines, all flushed into an open sewer. Barely a half dozen houses away alongside the railroad tracks sat one of the most notorious cathouses this side of Cleveland. (His mother worked as a nurses aid on weekends, turning patients over in their beds like flapjacks.) What the hell was he doing messing around with this woman whose father invented the drinking fountain?

“I’ll take away all your financial worries,” Celia urged. “You can devote as much time as you wish to your music . . . what do you say?”

“Jesus, we hardly know each other.”

“What’s there to know?” she said. Then embarrassed him by asking, “Sex?”

He didn’t respond.

“Say it, Mr. Hart. If it’s sex you’re wondering about, I got all that you want, too. Anything for you, Buddy.”

Every poor man’s dream come alive, a red-haired one no less with a magenta labial shrub. That and dollars, too, thousands of them. A sleek automobile instead of the old man’s turtle of a Willy’s. Horses. What the hell was the catch?

When Buddy mentioned it to his father, Rupert said, “Fuck her if you want, but don’t marry her, Son. You’ll be worse off than your Uncle Stanley. When she’s finished working you over, you’ll sound like Johnny Ray. You like auburn cooz?”

“How do you know she got red hair, Pap?”

“Every man in Harlan County’s got a wet dream off Celia Hubbard at one time or another. ’Cept you’re the unfortunate one.” Buddy’s mother just shook her head. She walked over to the kitchen sink, opened the faucet, and began scrubbing her fingernails with a vegetable brush.

When the newlyweds returned from the Bahamas, an indigo-blue Chrysler station wagon convertible sat parked in Celia’s driveway. Eustace Hubbard even suggested Buddy begin working in the corporate offices, and sent him off to his haberdasher for a fitting. Just like the movies. Buddy’s kid sisters couldn’t quite believe his good fortune. And within a year of the wedding the Hi-Way Rollerdrome closed for lack of business. Peewee began politicking Buddy to gig at the Bluebird every night. But that venue become more irregular. The Hammond B-3 sat at the ready covered over with a bed sheet on the back of the bandstand. Following one of the performances, Peewee asked why Stanley never showed anymore.

“No idea,” Buddy said.

“Your old friends. They gone, too.”

“It’s botherin’ you, Peewee?”

“She’s watered you down, Buddy.”

Buddy glowered.

“You dig, pal? Excuse the disrespect, but the cunt’s dimmed your lights.”

“Cut the shit, Peewee.”

“Can’t, brother. I known you too long. First a red-haired snatch. Then a yellow one. A magenta one. Puce. Goddamnit, the gash are gonna dry you up like the foreskin on a cadaver. Tonight, yeah, I could hear echoes of old Buddy Hart in there. But you just coastin’ man. That rich shit is dragging you down. You ain’t got the drive no more.”

“You saying you don’t want me playing the Bluebird no more, Peewee?”

“Buddy Hart’s always welcome here.”

“She’s my wife.” Buddy stood and headed for the doorway.

“Yeah, and her old man’s that drinking fountain hanging on our shithouse wall, too! Come back to the tunes, man. And say hello to STANLEY!”

It’s true, thought Buddy, traveling back to Patterson alone that night—no trailer on the hitch—having to pass the boarded-up Rollerdrome with its mirror-ball heaven that once moved and bounced to his B-3. He hadn’t seen Stanley. Or many of his other friends. But now he wasn’t a shiny-ass piano man playing for a couple of dollars in bars reeking of disinfectant either.

So what if I’m Celia Hubbard’s boy. Huh? Don’t have to worry about nothing no more. Chet Baker, Johnny Ray, Jimmy Smith, Bud Powell . . . Christ, none of that shit bothers me. I fucking got it made. Fuck Stanley. Let him chop his index finger and thumb off, the ungrateful bastard. Celia and I offered to help. But the bastard’s too poor . . . fucking jealous. One of us got lucky.

Just then the Chrysler came to a dead stop. He and Peewee had been drinking—that was new, too. But what the hell. He drank his shit. Screw the powder. He looked down at the dashboard and ground the starter several times, pumping on the accelerator. The engine wouldn’t catch. The bitch’s dry, he thought. Then Buddy saw a hot moon barreling straight for him. He fumbled with the window handle. It kept swinging on him, not catching like it should have.

“What the fuck’s gone wrong!” he cried. “Open up you cocksucker. Open up!” The engine caught the Chrysler’s front end, dragging the car several hundred yards up the track, screeching to a halt. A screaming screech. Ab of the B-3, Buddy thought, lying on the floorboards. This is fucking scary. That never was.

Soon the engineer and several track men were pounding on the windshield: “Are you alright, mister? Speak to us. Can you hear us?” Once outside, Buddy watched the water spit through his radiator’s chromium teeth, the automobile’s remaining headlight still shone and the horn stuck.

“Christ, I’m fine,” he sighed. “Ain’t a goddamn thing wrong with me, boys. Thanks for stopping,” he said, and let out a Chet Baker laugh.

The ride downhill went damn fast after that. “I don’t like wearing suits all day,” he told Eustace Hubbard one spring morning, who replied, “You either be one of us, boy, or none of us.”

“I’ll take the latter,” Buddy says, and parked his and Celia’s new car in Hubbard’s driveway, then hiked back to their house in Patterson.

Now and then he’d get a call for a gig. But he’d show up for a set in the bag, forget the damn chord changes, and the rare club that did hire him kept back-up musicians—brass on the stage—who could take over when he slid.

Nobody saw Celia much anymore either. She looked weird, her hair unkempt and lips darker than they ever were. Almost black now. She’d rouge her sallow cheeks with a magenta color. Folks thought she resembled some kind of mythical bird—her shoulders stooped over like a carrion eater’s—who glided in and out of town when she walked. Word had it that she began to drink as much as Buddy did. That the two of them would start in the morning and work through several bottles by day’s end. At dusk they’d mount the horses stark naked.

The grocery delivery boy would buzz to be let in. Soiled dishes lay piled everywhere. He stopped putting milk or butter in the refrigerator, for food in there had rotted, causing an unbearable stench.

“Can you hear any music being played in the house, Cal?” Charley Tompkins, the owner of Patterson Market, asked the boy.

“Sounded like some adolescent kid, like me maybe, Charley, you know unable to make the higher keys, a kind of voice like that coming from the bedroom and a sad trumpet sound.” Sure, thought Charley Tompkins.

Several months later that July, Rupert woke Myra over on DeForest Road one midnight. “Someone’s down pounding our door.”

“You’re hearing things.”

“Damnit, I ain’t!” he barked, slipping on his pants. He shambled down the stairs and saw a form on the other side of the curtained oval. “Who is it?” he asked. “Whadaya want?”

“It’s Celia,” came the reply.

Rupert was stunned. “Just a minute,” he says, fumbling with the key in the lock. Celia stood before him looking frightened, weary and bundled in one of Buddy’s camel hair overcoats. This flower has faded fast, he thought. Like one of those pretty things in his perennial garden that overnight becomes a shadow of its promise the day earlier, and three days later goes to seed. Fucking drinking fountain daughters. Same as copper smelt mill daughters and sons, fucking babies of the rich, all fair and shallot stocks for spines.

“Jesus, what is it, Celia? You look bad.”

“Is Myra here?” she asked.

“Yes. What is it?”

“Tell her to come quick.”

Rupert seeing the woman’s urgency, he’d been ordered about like this before—yells up to Myra. “Mommy, get down here quick!”

Myra comes running down the stairway with a nightgown covering her naked body like a sheer curtain, then, seeing Celia, draws it to her. “What is it, Honey? You sick?”

“I am, Myra. I’m sick as a dog.”

“Where’s Bud?”

“Don’t know. Does anybody, for Chrissake?”

Rupert understood. Buddy was probably out in some other woman’s bed. What else? The money eatin’ away at him like green cancer. Alexander Hamilton cancer.

Myra was solicitous. The young woman was in pain. No time to be thinking about any hurt or anger now.

Celia stared intensely at Myra, trying to answer her.

“Oh, shit. No, child!”

Celia nodded yes.

“Rupert, go put the kettle on for hot water quick! And get me some towels. They’re down on the line. Grab every damn one of them. And hurry, Rupe, hurry!” Myra put her arm around Celia and rushed her up the stairs.

Rupert knew what this was about, too. What else could it be? No surprises in this life. Were there ever any? So the kid falls into a cesspool of greenbacks and gorges himself, fucks himself up and everything he touches . . . including this once beautiful breeze of a woman. Yeah, breeze, that’s all she was. Fragile. Swept around the corner and cooled him off, smelling of magnolia and leather, Kentucky blue grass, clean underwear and stockings every goddamn day, and food in the cupboards—the pitcher of milk, this auburn haired breeze now shivering before Myra upstairs, vomiting her guts out in the toilet, her skin yellow as the shit carpet in our hallway, naked, the fluid dripping off her white breasts and rivuleting through her labial auburn forest with death. For that’s surely what this night was going to be.

I can goddamn tell. Oh shit. A water death. Fuck you, Buddy . . .

Rupert screamed to nobody in the kitchen, and the tea kettle begin to scream, too, but unlike the engine that caught Buddy’s lucky-ass Chrysler, or the Ab on the B-3—this one pierced like a bird of doom gone mad and flapping about on the kitchen ceiling trying to ascend, to escape this birth house of Buddy Hart on DeForest Road. Screaming Celia upstairs now echoing the tea kettle’s noise, she’s a bird up there, too. Rupert could hear a body slapping about on the tile floor of their bathroom. Like a fish now pulled out of the water still alive. The screaming and her flapping her white legs and arms against the tile walls and linoleum bathroom floor. Screaming. Screaming the B-3. Only this got under Rupert’s skin. And he turned cold.

“Goddamn it, hurry, Rupe! Hurry up here for chrissake!”

Rupert rushed up the stairs, teapot steaming in one hand, towels in the other, the bathroom door wide open and Celia now moaning, her legs wide open and Myra naked too down on her knees on the floor dragging something out of Celia.

Oh yeah, Christ, he’d been there. Do I have to watch this, Jesus? he thought. Fuck Buddy. Fuck Bud Powell. Fuck Jimmy Smith. “Oh Ray Charles,” he cried. “Ray Fucking Charles.”

Then there was this loud UMMPH.

Like Myra had smashed a thick round pole into Celia’s abdomen. But it wasn’t that. There were two things lying on the bathroom floor, beating like hearts. They were wiggling, and kind of looked like something human, but maybe like fish, Rupert couldn’t tell. He was down on his knees, thinking he was going to faint. The teapot on the floor next to him. Steaming. Christ, he was going to pass out. Hold onto me, he kept saying to himself. Hold onto me. Jesus. What those on the floor? Who are they, Myra? Jesus Christ. What’s she brought home? Fuck you, Buddy. Fuck you.

Myra bit the cords.

Then turned on her haunches to see Rupert dumbly staring at her on his knees. Christ, he looks like a circus bear in shock, she thought. And slammed the bathroom door shut.

“Let me see ’em,” moaned Celia.

“Ain’t nothing there except water and blood, honey,” Myra said soothingly. “It’s all over, dear. Put your head back down. Close your eyes. Let me wash off your face with a cool rag.”

Then Rupert heard nothing more till the toilet flushed. Twice.

“I saw Buddy a week ago,” Stanley told Rupert. “He invited me over to hear his Dexter Gordon Paris recordings.”

“He have anything to say?” Rupe and Myra hadn’t heard from Celia or Buddy since that fateful evening.

“Everything’s fine. Claims he’s gigging weekends in Cleveland again. They’re thinking about having babies. He’s bloated up like the Hindenburg. And full of shit. I can’t blame it all on Celia, Rupe.”

“I agree,” Rupert said.

“Damn depressing. She took me into their boudoir to show off her new ‘Louis the Fifteenth’ bedroom set. Seems like every six months she tosses the old furniture into the barn and goes shopping for new. This bed and dresser weren’t ugly enough, Rupe. You know what she did?”

“What?”

“Painted it sapphire. The gallon of wall paint and brush scumming up in the hallway. Mother’s-Day sapphire. You think it’s going to smell like some old patootie’s dusted bosom when you stand next to it. And ’round the mirror’s frame—she painted that, too, sloping it over onto the glass like she smears lipstick onto her teeth.”

“I said it was going to sour quick, didn’t I?” Rupe said.

“We all kind of guessed it, but none of us wanted to believe it.”

“Because all you bastards thought you were going to get rich, too! That old Eustace was going to come over here and drop a trailer-load of cash in your driveways. Well, he has. But it ain’t cash, brother. Money’s a plague, I tell you.

“Stanley, if there’s just one goddamn quarter left in my trouser pockets on my death bed, I promise I’ll swallow the fucker before I take my last breath. I ain’t leaving anybody shit. They’ll all be better off.”

Stanley could only shake his head.

Buddy Hart got up early a Saturday morning that September to begin packing his belongings in a trunk he’d hauled up from the basement, one of the old metal and wood variety fashioned for journeys to Europe on ocean liners. Celia kept hers down the cellar to store toys.

She was still asleep, hung over from a session with Buddy the night before. At some point before dawn, it all became clear to him. None of this was fun anymore. In fact it was ugly. He missed the Bluebird Inn, even the old Hi-Way Rollerdrome. And it was more than nostalgia. People were talking. Maybe he could turn his life around. A caricature of old Buddy Hart stared back at him in the mirror. Some men might choose to put a bullet through their heads, he mused. There were several rifles out in the barn. Eustace Hubbard had taken him clay pigeon shooting. Now he at least knew how to load the gun and blow his head off. Didn’t take much of a shot.

Yeah. And so what if Buddy Hart never made the lights outside Ohio? Jolly never did either. “Ain’t fucking enough lights to go around, Hart,” Jolly joked.

A lot of wisdom in that, too, Buddy agreed. I just got to get out of the nest. I don’t need this booze shit. I liked things well enough before.

One gig. I’ll get one gig. Clean my act up ‘n’ move onto the next.

And just as he was piling his sheet music into the trunk, Celia appeared in the hallway, naked, looking like a raven wraith.

Buddy broke into an ironic grin. Looking down at her stomach. Thinking how he and other men had dreamed about the auburn grove. It wasn’t so pretty now. The day before she’d painted his baby grand piano—a wedding gift from Eustace—tomato red. Buddy cried when he saw it.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“Heading out, Celia.”

“Oh, no,” she said.

“We’ll see each other,” he soothed. “Why don’t you work on the house here while I’m gone. Paint the kitchen cabinets. The floor, I don’t give a good goddamn. I need air, Celia. The Hubbards are stealing my oxygen.”

“You . . . Bunny Berrigan?” she laughed. “You going to go back to DeForest-by-the-Open-Sewer? All the shit of man in the gully outside your house, Buddy? Nothing that ain’t been flushed down there.” She lifted a cigarette off the coffee table and collapsed into the sofa. Buddy emptied the top drawer of his bureau where he kept his cuff links, wristwatch, and money clips—all Hubbard gifts—into the trunk.

“You ain’t leaving,” she said.

Buddy turned to her. “I am, Celia. It’s been goddamn interesting and in the beginning, fun.”

Celia stood. She offered Buddy a cigarette and lifted a chromium Statue of Liberty lighter off the glass coffee table, lighting it for him. It was as if she suddenly changed moods. Commiserative, helpful, solicitous. It’s how she was in the beginning. Nothing she wouldn’t do for Buddy Hart.

“What you got in there, honey?” she said.

Christ, what’s this about? he thought. She gonna let me go? Hot damn. And he bent over the trunk, grasping its edge at the metal rasp with his melody hand, and with the bass-driver, pointed towards the sheet music, when, without warning, Celia slammed the lid shut, causing to erupt from Buddy Hart, alias Chet Baker, alias Jimmy Smith, alias Johnny Ray, a big piercing Hammond B-3 vibrato—Ab diminished seventh. Along with the clothes, the spare change and the costume jewelry, now lay Buddy Hart’s middle finger. The Hammond B-3 screaming one.

“And say hello to Stanley,” she crooned.