“So what makes you thirsty, you old camel?” Cummings laughed.
“The insufferable impudence of today’s youth. I would have tenure now were it not for callow freshmen and the slippery matter of publication.”
“You were a professor?” I asked.
“Anthropology. My specialization was the use of mythology and theology as cultural rituals.”
Cummings interrupted: “Slow down, Mac. I never went to college.”
“How people use myth and superstition to explain the human condition. I was particularly interested in the pre-psychology of parenting and once started a book about rural practices in the British Isles, Scandinavia, and Germany.”
“So you drink because of some old flame, then?” Oscar asked, turning the conversation back to its origins.
“I wish to God it was a woman.” He spied the one or two females in the bar and lowered his voice. “No, women have been very good to me. It’s the mind, boys. The relentless thinking machine. The incessant demands of tomorrow and the yesterdays piled up like a heap of corpses. It’s this life and all those before it.”
Oscar chewed on a reed. “Life before life?”
“Like reincarnation?” Cummings asked.
“I don’t know about that, but I do know that a few special people remember events from the past, events from too long ago. Put them under a spell, and you’d be amazed at the stories that come out from deep within. What happened a century ago, they talk about as if it were just yesterday. Or today.”
“ ‘Under a spell’?” I asked.
“Hypnosis, the curse of Mesmer, the waking sleep. The transcendent trance.”
Oscar looked suspicious. “Hypnosis. Another one of your party tricks.”
“I’ve been known to put a few people under,” said McInnes. “They’ve told tales from their own dreaming minds too incredible to believe, but with such feeling and authority that one is convinced that they were telling the truth. People do and see strange things when they’re under.”
Cummings jumped in. “I’d like to be hypnotized.”
“Stay behind after the bar is closed, and I’ll do it.”
At two in the morning after the crowd left, McInnes ordered Oscar to dim the lights and asked George and me to stay absolutely quiet. He sat next to Jimmy and told him to close his eyes; then McInnes started speaking to him in a low, modulated voice, describing restful places and peaceful circumstances in such vivid detail that I’m surprised we all didn’t fall asleep. McInnes ran a few tests, checking on whether Jimmy was under.
“Raise your right arm straight out in front of you. It’s made of the world’s strongest steel, and no matter how hard you try, you cannot bend it.”
Cummings stuck out his right arm and could not flex it; nor, for that matter, could Oscar or George or I when we tried, for it felt like a real iron bar. McInnes ran through a few more tests, then he started asking questions to which Cummings replied in a dead monotone. “Who’s your favorite musician, Jimmy?”
“Louis Armstrong.”
We laughed at the secret admission. In his waking life, he would have claimed some rock drummer like Charlie Watts of the Stones, but never Satchmo.
“Good. When I touch your eyes, you’ll open them, and for the next few minutes you’ll be Louis Armstrong.”
Jimmy was a skinny white boy, but when he popped open those baby blues, the transformation came instantaneously. His mouth twisted into Armstrong’s famous wide smile, which he wiped from time to time with an imaginary handkerchief, and he spoke in a gravelly skat voice. Even though Jimmy never sang on any of our numbers, he did a passing fair rendition of some old thing called “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You,” and then, using his thumb as a mouthpiece and his fingers as the horn, blatted out a jazz bridge. Normally Cummings hid behind his drums, but he jumped up on a table and would be entertaining the room still, had he not slipped on a slick of beer and fallen to the floor.
McInnes raced to him. “When I count to three and snap my fingers,” he said to the slouching body, “you’ll wake up, feeling refreshed as if you have slept soundly each night this week. I want you to remember, Jimmy, that when you hear someone say Satchmo, you’ll have the uncontrollable urge to sing out a few bars as Louis Armstrong. Can you remember that?”
“Uh-huh,” Cummings said from his trance.
“Good, but you won’t remember anything else except this dream. Now, I’m going to snap my fingers, and you’ll wake up, happy and refreshed.”
A goofy grin smeared on his face, he woke and blinked at each one of us, as if he could not imagine why we were all staring at him. Upon serial questioning, he recalled nothing about the past half-hour.
“And you don’t remember,” Oscar asked, “Satchmo?”
Cummings began singing “Hello, Dolly!” and suddenly stopped himself.