Lilia whispered, “I know the location of a treasure trove of similar stuff.”
Larry nodded and distributed the items among the club kids and Nightwalkers alike. They became interested in this stranger. Then the young writer recognized Larry, got free of his handlers, hugged him and nipped his neck a little.
Lilia handed out faded cards for Reliquary while promising, “Memorabilia AND fashion. Come see us during the week.”
As she did, she thought about T-shirts—hip, enigmatic ones. She knew distressed fashions that could be turned over for very little money, and she believed capes could be brought back one more time. Larry clearly was fascinated, so the money was there
The crowd broke up, headed to the exits. Larry and Lilia followed them, but when they reached the street all of them—club kids and Nightwalkers alike—had disappeared.
He seemed a little lost as they went toward a spot Lilia knew would be open at this hour. She wondered if he was remembering the Ichordone, the withdrawal, the dental clinics where teeth got filed down, the group therapy where a dozen other recovering vampires talked about their mothers.
“Don’t worry, we’ll get the audience back,” Lilia said. There was a bit of blood on Larry’s neck. When she pointed that out he dabbed it with the Myrna’s Place napkin. And when she told Larry how much she’d need to get Reliquary up and going again, he nodded.
Lilia was certain she wasn’t going to get hooked again. Larry probably would. For a moment she remembered his little adopted girl and hesitated.
Then she recalled the moment thirty years before in the flea market when she’d tried to keep the Nightwalkers away from him and he’d shut her up by siccing them on her.
So instead of little Ai Ling, Lilia thought of Boyd, who might dump Larry but would make sure his daughter was well taken care of. She took Larry’s arm and led him to the spot where they could discuss the money.
The story Hat tells takes place far from New York, but you could never find Hat anywhere except New York.
PORK PIE HAT
PETER STRAUB
PART ONE
1
If you know jazz, you know about him, and the title of this memoir tells you who he is. If you don’t know the music, his name doesn’t matter. I’ll call him Hat. What does matter is what he meant. I don’t mean what he meant to people who were touched by what he said through his horn. (His horn was an old Selmer Balanced Action tenor saxophone, most of its lacquer worn off.) I’m talking about the whole long curve of his life, and the way that what appeared to be a long slide from joyous mastery to outright exhaustion can be seen in another way altogether.
Hat did slide into alcoholism and depression. The last ten years of his life amounted to suicide by malnutrition, and he was almost transparent by the time he died in the hotel room where I met him. Yet he was able to play until nearly the end. When he was working, he would wake up around seven in the evening, listen to Frank Sinatra or Billie Holiday records while he dressed, get to the club by nine, play three sets, come back to his room sometime after three, drink and listen to more records (he was on a lot of those records), and finally go back to bed around the time day people begin thinking about lunch. When he wasn’t working, he got into bed about an hour earlier, woke up about five or six, and listened to records and drank through his long upside-down day.
It sounds like a miserable life, but it was just an unhappy one. The unhappiness came from a deep, irreversible sadness. Sadness is different from misery, at least Hat’s was. His sadness seemed impersonal—it did not disfigure him, as misery can do. Hat’s sadness seemed to be for the universe, or to be a larger than usual personal share of a sadness already existing in the universe. Inside it, Hat was unfailingly gentle, kind, even funny. His sadness seemed merely the opposite face of the equally impersonal happiness that shone through his earlier work.
In Hat’s later years, his music thickened, and sorrow spoke through the phrases. In his last years, what he played often sounded like heartbreak itself. He was like someone who had passed through a great mystery, who was passing through a great mystery, and had to speak of what had seen, what he was seeing.
2
I brought two boxes of records with me when I first came to New York from Evanston, Illinois, where I’d earned a B.A. in English at Northwestern, and the first thing I set up in my shoebox at the top of John Jay Hall in Columbia University was my portable record player. I did everything to music in those days, and I supplied the rest of my unpacking with a soundtrack provided by Hat’s disciples. The kind of music I most liked when I was twenty-one was called “cool” jazz, but my respect for Hat, the progenitor of this movement, was almost entirely abstract. I didn’t know his earliest records, and all I’d heard of his later style was one track on a Verve sampler album. I thought he must almost certainly be dead, and I imagined that if by some miracle he was still alive, he would have been in his early seventies, like Louis Armstrong. In fact, the man who seemed a virtual ancient to me was a few months short of his fiftieth birthday.