T. Boyle: Rock and Roll Heaven: A Trio of Uncollected Stories

I died and went to rock & roll heaven. It looked like Houston Street. This can’t be rock & roll heaven, I thought.

A fat black man in a dirty white suit was sitting on a suitcase tootling on a saxophone. Other black men were lying on the sidewalk. They were asleep. I decided to ask the fat black man if this was rock & roll heaven. “This rock & roll heaven?” I said.

He stopped tootling. The saxophone was like a buttercup in his big black hands. “No, this be-bop heaven,” he said. “You want two blocks down.”

I passed a knishery on the way. The sign said: Yonah Shimmel, 97 Years in Business. I hadn’t eaten since I’d died. The smell of hot knishes was a siren song to a man who has no qualms about mixing metaphors. I stopped in. It was dark, but non-threatening. After all, this was heaven.

Two men in open-to-the-navel shirts were sitting on a table, making music. One of them had an acoustic guitar, the other had a mouthharp. What they were playing sounded a lot like rock & roll. “Hey,” I said, “that rock & roll you’re playing?”

The man with the mouthharp stopped sawing the instrument across his lips. His hair was in ringlets, his eyes were blue. “Where’s your ear, man? This is blue-eyed blues.” He pulled a second mouthharp from a glass of water and shot through a series of high stops, sucking and puffing. Music filled the room.

I took a table in back and rested my axe against a chair. The waiter was bald. I ordered a kasha knish and homemade yogurt. The waiter held the steaming knish in his hands and sang “Lassù in cielo” from Rigoletto .

“I had the impression this was blue-eyed blues heaven,” I said.

“This ain’t my neighborhood,” the waiter said. “I live over on the other side of town. In opera heaven.”

The next block was choked with organ grinders and dancing monkeys. I was confused. I stopped to listen to thick-eared man in a Pinocchio hat. He ground out a rendition of The Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy while his monkey executed a tricky series of glissades and entrechats. When it was over the man handed me a quarter. I put it in the monkey’s cup. “Tank-a-you,” the man said.

I followed my ears. They took me through reggae heaven, disco heaven, punk heaven and mariachi heaven. In punk heaven people were cutting themselves with razor blades and amplifying air-raid sounds. There was dancing in the streets in mariachi heaven.

I heard a sound like thunder in the distance. It could have been rock & roll. I hurried toward it. Three blocks down I turned a corner and found myself in St. Celia’s Square. All the buildings round the square had organ pipes, bronze like the sun, instead of chimneys. In the middle of the square, just under the statue, a man in a periwig sat at an organ. His fingers made mountains quake, his feet toppled buildings in distant parts of the city. No one had to tell me. I was in toccata & fugue heaven.

In showtune heaven I met Frieda. She was wearing a peasant blouse, chamois jumper and patent-leather shoes.

I’d just turned down a street of sand-blasted brownstones, dejected, axe under arm, when a man in ducktail haircut came bounding up to me. He vaulted a fire hydrant and a phalanx of parking meters. His mouth was open. “I’m the luckiest guy in the world!” he sang. Shutters opened up and down the block. Faces leaned from them. “He’s the luckiest guy in the world!” they howled. He spread his arms and threw his head back. “In love with the love-liest girl!” The faces retreated coyly, but reappeared on the upbeat to shriek, “He’s in love with the loveliest girl!”

“I don’t mean to be a wet blanket,” I said, “but I’m really not all that interested in your private ecstasies or the state of your soul. Not that I have anything against ecstasy per se, but the fact is I’m trying to get to the rock & roll heaven.”

“Rock & roll heaven?” he warbled interrogatively.

“Rock & roll heaven?” the faces returned.

He planted his feet and swelled himself with a titanic breath of air. “Neverrrrrrrrr,” he began.

“Neverrrrrrrrr,” echoed the faces.

“Hearrrrrrd…of it!”

“He’s never heard of it!” sang the voices on high.

I sat down on my sturdy masonite axe case and buried my face in my hands. When I looked up, the street was deserted and Frieda stood before me. Her cheeks were stuffed with cotton, her hair was in braids.

“Looks like you stumbled into the wrong heaven,” she said.

“I’m looking for rock & roll heaven,” I said.

She held out her hand.

Frieda was not in costume. Actually she lived in polka heaven, but worked musicals on the side. Her outfit pretty much restricted her to Fiddler on the Roof and revivals of Heidi . She took me home with her.

Frieda’s father weighed three hundred pounds. He was wearing lederhosen and a cap with a tassel. He played accordion. Frieda’s mother played tuba. Neighbors roasted chestnuts, kartoffels and bratwurst, raised steins of black beer and stamped over the floorboards of the tiny apartment. I danced with Frieda. She took me into a corner and held a wet sausage to my lips. Then she drew the cotton from her cheeks and kissed me. It was all very gemütlich. And yet it wasn’t rock & roll.

Frieda’s directions led me straight to rock & roll heaven by way of turkey-in-the-straw heaven and bossa nova heaven. Rock & roll heaven looked a lot like the Felt Forum. There were lines of people outside. The people were drinking white port from the bottle and smoking dope. Some of them were hawking tickets. I heard the strains of Jumpin’ Jack Flash and knew I was home.

I pushed through the crowd with my axe held high. A man in a Vita Brevis, Ars Longa T-shirt stopped me at the gate. “Where you think you’re going?” he said.

“Inside,” I said.

His hair was like plant life. He was big enough to break the backs of normal people like breadsticks. “Oh yeah?” he said. “Well let me tell you something: I don’t recognize you.”

I unhoused my axe, plugged it into one of the hundreds of amps stacked up round the gate, and gave him a dose of Treetorn Boogie from our last album.

He folded his arms. “Still don’t recognize you,” he said.

“Lead guitar with The Toads.”

“Never heard of them.”

I was stunned. “Never heard of us? We cut eleven albums for Electra. Cover of the Rolling Stone , coast-to-coast TV. When I split up with Krista I got 20,000 letters in one day.”

“Sorry.” He struck a match on his bicep and lit a cigarette.

I lashed into Serengetti Serenade , our big single. The chords mounted like leapfrogging thunderstorms. I played the savannah, the spring of the springbok, the roar of the lion. I played the heat of midday, the solitude of the baobab, the deathscream of the hyena. I played my heart out.

He was laughing. “You couldn’t even make a session man around here, brother,” he said. “I mean this is rock & roll heaven . We got the King here. And everybody else you ever heard of. What do you think, we let just any hack off the street in here?”

I stretched my axe on the blacktop like a crucified christ. Feedback hissed through the amp. Inside they were playing Rock & Roll Never Forgets . I turned my back on the gate and made my way through the crowd, wondering how long it would take to learn tuba.