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

Edgar let out an unusual, drunken obscenity of approval as they looked at the articles. Snooky was shocked. She accused the house sitter of pushing drinks on Edgar and maybe the black cigarillos, too, cutting into his breath, his life, and so on. The house sitter began crying. Though Edgar denied it, the upshot was that Snooky told the girl to leave. Nasty, but her man. This was the final signal. They soon married in her city, Jackson, with Parton and Lambert in attendance. Afterward, Edgar and Snooky began to make love clumsily. They had a long honeymoon in the apartment with only the heavenly gigs to interrupt it. Edgar would look up at the cold black Chicago sky and say, “Thank you.” Snooky loved this. She did not notice his drinking. He was such a perfect, gentle, vigorous husband. Nothing could be wrong. On the plane they were treated like two people “going steady” on a high school bus trip. He could swallow nearly a half pint of vodka at once in the jet’s restroom.

Lambert got cancer, but he could live with it. For a while the band’s celebrity increased because this fact was known. He never missed a show, even during chemotherapy. His piano playing became quieter, more wistful, more classical, his contemporaries noticed, adoring him further, if that were possible.

Then, pop, America forgot them almost wholesale, down to bargain basement at the stores. The band held a two-year discussion about this fact, but nobody could find a reason. Did Life kill people? They hated, in all their musicianship, and with saintly Lambert’s genius, to have been some vagrant novelty. The jet trips stopped instantly and the hotel rooms were poorer. They ganged up in rooms to make the budget. They traveled in a bus. None of them except Woodrow had saved much. Their foot had been in the door, they were about to step in as permanent guests, then. . But they had youth and were extremely loyal to each other and to the music. Edgar, who could barely read music, if truth be known, began trying to write for the band with a computer, but he wasn’t any good.

Two more records, then studio time became too expensive to make them — that kind of sales. So it was all over America, slowly and much more than anybody wanted. Lambert would fly ahead. Sick and more irritable lately, he’d greet them cheerfully, but his heart was down. All the kids were down. The halls became very thin, half deserted, echoing. Cocaine, more cigarettes, even cough syrup for its codeine became usual. Edgar stayed with the vodka. He’d tried Parton’s heroin once, over his protests, but it made him very sick. Snooky and most of them still took nothing.

One night out of Oklahoma City, Edgar had a sort of fit, insanely unlike him. He shouted another withering obscenity, grabbed the steering wheel away from the driver, and raced them off from the rest stop, screaming “I’ll take us somewhere! I’ll take us somewhere!” He turned the bus over on a curve, laying it down very fast in a long ditch. Everybody was shaken badly. Some had cracked ribs and terrible bruises. But there were no serious injuries except to Parton Peavey. His left hand would never be the same even after three surgeries. Also, something was wrong with the bus insurance — not a dime, and they didn’t have enough to get the bus fixed. The band canceled and laid up a month, leaking money.

The third week Lambert called for a band meeting in his small hot room in the motel. He began calmly. Then he insisted Edgar come up front. The general feeling was that Lambert would forgive him. Lambert was that kind of man. But then he saw Edgar was drunk. Edgar and the band had never heard that kind of profanity and hollering from him. Lambert kicked Edgar out and screamed at those, like Smith and Parton, who stood up for him. It was a bitterly sad thing. The worst, thought Edgar. But he was wrong.

Snooky left him. The pets, who’d been disturbed by his behavior, went with her — weasel Ralph and dachshund Funderbird. The house sitter came back. Edgar slept with her mournfully.

Parton, who’d left the band — several others had too — and gone on to solo celebrity (loved by the knowing for his crippled left hand; he was a real vet at twenty-nine now, a dues payer) came by for a last visit. He didn’t blame Edgar at all. Further, he was tearful about Edgar’s breakup with Snooky, who remained with the little-attended Big Thunder Hounds. He had no solutions, no black Beaumont wisdom, except, “Up to now, Edguh, we been lucky. Don’t rush it.”

Edgar looked at him through fuzz: a child. He felt much older than Parton. He didn’t think he could live at peace like that. He was often breathless and felt dirty around the neck, sweaty, where his tattoo was. An old Dylan thing chased around in his head: “boiled seaweed and a dirty hot dog.” Most of the time, he could not even eat that down, but it was what he deserved.

He’d made a lot of friends, however, gigging around Chicago, and for a long time he was known as a classy drinking man, an aristocrat of the ’bone, my man. Then he became a student at Northwestern where they had a fine-music program and worshiped pros. He’d heard Snooky was there, studying double bass, but he saw her only twice. Edgar was an uncommon freshman. He’d thought college was the thing to keep him straight, but it wasn’t. He felt elderly in the classroom, the reverse of his band experience. He did not know what the rest of them did. Against the odds, he played the clubs till five in the morning, around Rush and out in the burbs where jazz was a discreet rage with the young rich. His appearance in class — blasted, orange, looking thirty — was a miracle. But he pushed on through classes where he was not valued, making poor grades, keeping his mouth shut, and memorizing desperately. He fell down more than once, smashing his head on a desk. A mere pint a day was a masterpiece when he wanted the bar. The house sitter left. There went any order at home. He developed separate dumps of classwork. His refrigerator became green inside with uneaten food as the money got low. By the time he graduated at twenty-seven, thin and trembling, with a sociology major, he was a bum. He had no more time to fool around.

He crashed his old Harley into a pier post after a graduation party he gave himself and the fellow bums on the South Side, where he now lived with his few remaining possessions, a small dusty transistor radio and shower shoes. A lot of his clothes he simply lost. He was thinking an old thought about Snooky when he hit the post, his motorcycle flying out into the water of Lake Michigan. The yachtsmen were highly irritated. When the ambulance came, he still knew nothing. But he remembered what one paramedic said when they were lifting him in, looking at his tattoo: “Look at this piece of shit’s throat. Drive slow. He comes out of the booze, he’ll scream when to hurry.”

His sternum was cracked. For a month afterward he did not drink. The Dilaudid was pretty good, though. When they wouldn’t give him any more he had three especially lonely, agonized days. He wrote — why not? — an old aunt who was rich, and lied to her that he was in graduate school and poor. From La Grange came a note and money almost by return mail. What a mystic boon. He drank a great deal on it.

He would retell the story of how he’d had all the clubs going for a while with his “new” sound, but he was a sick drunk by then, the spitty and flat noise duplicating him. Even the avant-garde had found out he was merely drunk, and given him the door. But now his chest hurt too much to play. Plus, both instruments needed fixing.

He liked to travel light anyway, he told the fellows on the corner. Those cases were heavy , guys. One of them took him at his word and stole both horns. He knew who’d done it, but he was in such a world now that he just stared with his mouth open at the man and asked him, please, for a slug of port. The man refused. Edgar, forgetting the trombones, said he’d remember this. He wrote his aunt about his graduate studies and here came another money order from La Grange. Guilty, he began making notes on the bums. He used the back of his classwork pages. Some of the bums were long and vibrant narrators. Two of them spoke to Edgar in Russian. He kept scrawling on the page. As payment for their stories he would buy them drinks (sometimes the fellows cleaned up enough to get in a bar, hair combed in a bathroom). They thought he was very classy. The trombone stealer died. One of the narrators kindly took him to the pawnshop and he got his horns back.