Barry Hannah - Long, Last, Happy - New and Collected Stories

He was so good, or so wanted (guitars owned the world), the suspicion was Peets Lambert couldn’t get rid of him, even if he did know. When he let out, peerless amid the stage-packed Big Thunder Hounds, it was a sound such as not heard any where. Maybe he was addicted to that, too. Come another year he could fire Lambert and buy the band himself. He already had four records. Really, after three years and all that money, it was a miracle he remained with the band at all. He was an imitation of nobody, seemed unconscious of anybody before him, and had his own cult. All this with heroin. Edgar constantly expected him to fall over or go raving, taken off by ambulances and the police, but Parton didn’t.

Parton was docile, not sullen or conceited, uneasy with women, and in ways more boyish than Edgar. He was not stupid, but he didn’t know one state capital, and when they were headed to a city, he’d only ask, “Up North? Down South?” He seemed barely to have known an ocean, though Beaumont was on the Gulf of Mexico itself. The Pacific off Los Angeles — Venice rather frightened him. He believed, Edgar figured, that the United States didn’t end, ever. There was a lot in the world most of them didn’t know, some of them near-infantile despite their prodigy, but Peavey took the ticket. Even during his molelike existence in Athens, Edgar had never approached this insulation, practicing upward of twelve hours a day. The thing was, this made Parton Peavey likable, in a strangely hip way, and he began a fad of willful ignorance in the band. People would claim they knew nothing, had never heard of spearmint gum or a pocket calculator. He and Peavey became good friends. Everybody wanted to be close to him. There was a good, young quiet warmth about him, an endless politeness, too. And he was shot full of the world’s worst bad, all the time.

The band rose. Edgar had two cars — a Volvo coupe in Chicago and an old vintage Caddy convertible back home in Athens where he got the GED one idle summer at his parents’ insistence. He was a minor star down there. Nobody cared much for the trombone, but they respected him as an eccentric phenomenon, and the local paper kept up with him. He affected, newly, an old Harley-Davidson motorcycle and a pet weasel that clung to his neck when he dashed around Chicago and Athens. Edgar had a plain, narrow, long-nosed face. He let his hair grow down to midback, sometimes braiding it twice. He had the necessary headband — chartreuse — and he had a tattoo of an upside-down American flag right at the bottom of his throat where a tie-knot would have been. (His parents gasped when they saw it and he did, too, thirteen years later.) Edgar had always felt behind on his personality. It was near the end of the Vietnam War, so he had to get in fast on his outrage, and a bit louder. He’d gotten tattooed, sober, by the best in a New Orleans parlor, although the old mulatto was an ex-marine and hated the job—“Strictly for money, boy, you got the American right, you got the American right. Play your horn and sport while they dies for you.” Somebody gave Edgar books by Kerouac, Bukowski, Brautigan, Hemingway and Burroughs; also the poetry of Anne Sexton, which he liked especially and reread. He was coming on strongly to the bass-playing woman, Snooky, and barely knew that he was capturing her with his new vocabulary stolen from Ms. Sexton. With her and the others his library stopped. He could not conceive needing anything else, ever.

Edgar could afford to get a sitter for his apartment in Chicago, a jazz-smitten female student at the University of Chicago who was just a friend. She took care of his weasel, his Harley and Volvo, his books, his stereo equipment, and his collection of trombone recordings, which dated from the twenties on. Living the trombone had paid off in spades. He could buy and sell most college graduates his age. He had the leisure — holy smoke, he was playing all the time already — to take Caribbean vacations, playing trombone with West Indian steel bands (what a sound!) and drummers in Rio (salsa, salsa). The girl, from Louisiana, would boil crawfish for him on his return. He pretended to like them, but it was really Parton they delighted, by the potful, his chin shining with juice. What wonderful friends Edgar had then! Paradise, and Snooky slowly falling in love with him. She had a wild side, of course, especially liking midnight and later on the Harley, whipping around Lake Michigan on the back, hands under his armpits, in a dress with a bare twat underneath, her legs spread, the wind slipping around her joyful “womanity,” she said, confessing shyly to him after several rides. That, and the fact she was quietly but increasingly jealous of his house sitter, sitting closer to him and nailing down his thigh with her little hand, were the signals she was going for him in a long way, Edgar thought.

The band went by chartered plane. Snooky was flirted with by everybody, even Parton, but inevitably she’d sit by Edgar, trembling, and he would nurse her fear of flying. Her outfits became sexier and more garish as she was brought out front more and more to riot the house. It was a beloved thing to him that she remained shy and girlish as she aged. They were growing up together, a very privileged American jazz adolescence. In a way, though, to the crowd, Peets Lambert was her pimp. He went wow and stroked his chin at the piano when she came out nearly nude in her brief gaudy dress and stiletto heels, hamming with the happy lech smashed by her naughty rig, avuncular (old Peets had seen the wimmens in his time!). The public loved it, the Hollywood Bowl howled. Could it get any better? They did nine encores one night. Edgar played so well some nights that he knew he’d lucked into another whole planet of jazz, just a few of the greats nodding wisely around him. Somebody told Edgar that jazz was the only original American art form. He felt safe in history then.

Most of these nights he was secretly drunk. Edgar, still abhorring Parton’s habit, was becoming alcoholic, having never touched drink before age twenty-four. There was no great reason for it. The band was chaster and soberer by a long shot than any of their contemporaries. Some of them, get this, Rolling Stone noted, played dominoes and Scrabble at the hotels, enormous bars flowing around them, themselves oblivious, like a bunch of Mormons in the lobby.

Only Edgar and another man, a middle-aged survivor from the last band, a relative of Lambert, hid out in a dark rear booth, drinking, playing nothing but boozy arias back and forth, in prep for the gig. The older man was a veteran. Only vodka would do, maybe a dex on a tired trip, then Listerine and a quick Visine to the eyes before stage time. (Lambert would throw you out.) Woodrow, the saxman, assured him that liquor, when controlled, was a friend of music. It was no mystery then that Edgar was playing better. Woodrow argued that he should know, he himself wasn’t worth shit, never had been, and had plenty of time to listen, since Lambert rarely used him unless in a loud ensemble. But he knew music and Edgar, you cooking infant, you are away, man. You make other grown trombonists cry. Edgar rejected Woodrow’s claim: you’re the wise one, the dad, he said. You’re the tradition, the years, the true center. Holy smoke, man, you’re football , or a church .

Rolling Stone , concentrating on Parton, Snooky, the maniacal drummer Smith, Edgar and Lambert, had them in a big article called “Revenge of Big Jazz.” Life did about the same in huge pictures. Parton Peavey had never heard of either magazine. What a gas. He led both features, quoted in his wonderful innocence, drug-thin and solemn in nothing but boxer shorts backstage with a bottle of Geritol in his hand. The following spring their new record, Quiet Pages from Little Lives— the loudest thing they’d ever done — went gold. What jazz had done that lately?