I punch numbers. Nothing has changed. I am out of ideas. It is impossible to catch up with Charlie Shaw and now I am falling fast. It is impossible to live without leaving a trace. Hit the resonant frequencies of those long-distance waiting rooms and you understand soon enough. The thick dark muttering. The residue. Every complaint and every argument, every day of every year, happening simultaneously. A roaring in the consciousness.
There is no reply from my man. I put down the phone and feel a sort of flickering, an unsteadiness about my surroundings. I look down. At my feet, beside a crushed plastic cup and a burrito wrapper, is a sheet of yellowing paper, an old flyer.
KEY & GATE ARTISTS PLAY AND SING FOR YOU. ASK TO HEAR THEM!
The greatest stars perform for you only on Key & Gate.
“A smile on the face and a song in the heart!”
25000 Series latest releases
25800—Down On The Old Camp Ground and Father, Prepare Me, The New Cotton Blossom Minstrels
25801—My Old Pal Rastus and Beans, Beans, Beans, “Uncle” Vernon Sylvester and his guitar
25802—I Don’t Know Where To Go and Goodbye Honey Goodbye, Esther Shaver piano Acc. Will Robinson
25803—The Stars and Bars and Yessir I’m Going South, The Savannah Club Orchestra
25804—Mysterious Coon and Run Rabbit Run, Emmett Charles
25805—Dry Bones and My Old Dog Bow Wow, The Westmoreland Institute for the Blind Quartette
25806—Graveyard Blues and The Laughing Song, Wolfmouth Shaw
I look around. There is no one on the street, no place for anyone to hide. I scour the trash in the gutter, but see nothing out of the ordinary. I can feel the hair on my arms begin to stand up. My whole body is charged, expectant. “Graveyard Blues” and “The Laughing Song.” Now I know what is on the other side of the record. But what is “The Laughing Song”? I can only guess. At one time there was a fashion, a whole genre, music hall songsters emitting staccato bursts in time to upbeat rhythms. The laughing fad was all over before the First World War. It seems an unlikely choice of material for Charlie Shaw, or Wolfmouth Shaw, if that was his nickname or stage name, but then a raw country bluesman makes no sense on a list populated with bad-sounding vaudeville acts singing songs that went out of style before the turn of the century. None of it makes sense. Wolfmouth. The wolf’s mouth. What kind of person would have such a name?
At the bottom of the page is the label’s contact information. Write to us to find out more! An address on 28th Street in New York City. I look around again. There is no one on the street. No sign of life at all. The giant semis grind past as I shoulder my bag and walk down the road towards the bus station.
I WOKE UP AS WE CROSSED THE BRIDGE into Manhattan. Midtown lay under a fog, which moved and shifted uncertainly between the buildings. The bus riders coughed and stretched, preparing to face the city which had already closed around them. I didn’t recognize anything, not the rain-slicked stone buildings, not the crowd of men and women in their gray hats and coats. The bus reached the Capitol Greyhound Terminal, and I took a trolley downtown. I could remember certain places, though I was not sure when I had been to them. My memory was faulty, more broken every day.
I found a room, I kept a low profile. I knew better than to approach Key & Gate by any straight route. The phone number in the catalog did not work when I tried it. Too few digits. I understood that I would have to chance upon the path, that simply going to the address would not work. I spent my days walking far uptown. Mott Haven, Hunts Point. Empty blocks, drifts of rubble, a patchwork of gang territories. Boys in cut sleeve jackets made way for me to pass. Black Spades, Ministers, Seven Immortals. No one wanted the evil eye on them. X’s were marked on structures judged unsafe to enter, burned-out tenements that looked like rows of crying women, blind-eyed window sockets smudged arson black. Here and there I could see signs of life. A washing line. A little girl trying to ride a tricycle over a sidewalk that had degenerated into a mountain range of broken slabs.
One day I took the subway downtown, watching my fellow riders slump in their seats, the tangled magic marker tags over their heads ramifying like a shared map of thought. There was so much I could not call to mind. Was I being followed? I expected so. Someone, some agent, had put the flyer into my hands. Someone wanted me there. I tried to sense my pursuer. Who had come after me as I changed cars? Who had been behind me on the stairs? I rode downtown to the tip of the island and the sand and rubble of the landfill. A gaunt man was selling paletas in the shadow of the twin towers. I bought one and wandered through the abandoned waterside of the city, dawdling in the middle lanes of the empty West Side Highway, past the piers. Coal barges plied the river. A kingdom of rotting wood and rats.