Georgie has dinner and a bath, and Mrs. Kimball comes over and I say good night and drive over to Gerard’s apartment. We are going to have drinks there and then go off to the Dome Room at the Holiday Inn where he will play and I will sit in an elegant booth and mark up student poems all evening. And listen.
He is in the kitchen pouring bourbon over ice.
I pace idly about his apartment. Over his bed Gerard has placed a cheap gift-shop placard reading MISERY LOVES COMPANY. One of his Greece posters on the same wall is starting to come down. A tack is missing and the tape on the back is fuzzy with lint. “Hey, Gerard, where do you keep your tape? I’m going to fix your Kythera poster.”
“Try the drawer in the nightstand there,” he calls, making ice cube and glass noises.
I open the drawer. It’s crammed with a jumble of things — old sheet music, dice, masking tape, regular tacks, carpet tacks, unopened packages of condoms. I take out the masking tape. Gerard has come in with drinks and hands me one. I notice he has missed a belt loop. I slip the tape roll over my wrist like a bracelet and push the drawer shut with one hip.
“Cheers,” says Gerard, smiling.
“Go team go,” I say, former alternate cheerleader at Tomaston High. We drink slowly, deliciously. “Tell me, Gerard. Why is it that you keep your condoms in the same drawer as your carpet tacks and tape?”
Gerard slurps and swallows. “How else are you supposed to keep them on?” he says.
The Holiday Inn is more brightly lit than most places Gerard plays in. There are pink glassed candles on the tables, but the whole windowless place is a bright amberish yellow and the candles are merely gestures, splots of silly complementary colors, like decorator pillows. Gerard takes his drink, sips, places it on the piano up front. He has arranged for a free glass of chablis for me, and the waitress comes over, places it in front of me, smiles, goes away. I have connections. It’s all small town and rink-a-dink, but I have connections with celebrity.
I pull out student poems from my bag. I think about Gerard wanting to be an opera singer, his hunger to have something grander than this, the arrogance of a hunger.
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.” It’s Gerard, adjusting the microphone. A spotlight flips on and Gerard squints into it. That, too, wanders around like a searchlight, getting adjusted, and Gerard, along with Charlie by the speakers who is supposedly in charge of the lights, goes into some five-second Berlin Wall pantomime: expressions of chase and horror, arms thrown in the air. They laugh, then resume a more responsible mien.
“Good evening again, ladles and gentlespoons.” This time he strikes a few chords. “Welcome to the Dome Room”—two more, ascending tonics. “At the”—chord. “Holiday Inn”—big chord and glissando. I’ve seen him do this dozens of times. Usually he launches quickly into a lot of bad lady-cannibal jokes, prefaced by “Where’s the dome in this room? What a dome name.” At least, I console myself, he does this for money. Tonight he introduces himself: “I’m Gerard Maines. I know some of you were expecting Tammy Wynette, but these things happen.” Then he starts in with “Just You, Just Me,” his own jazz rendition, never looking at the keyboard. In front of me I have a poem about an alien. From another solar system. I have forbidden any poems about aliens, but sometimes students beg me—“Please, just one alien”—and they slip in. Now Gerard stops to banter with the audience: “What? You’re from where? Belittle, New York? You would live in a town with a name like that?” The people up front by the piano are loving it, the good-natured ribbing, they are starved for it. It’s still a weeknight and the place isn’t that full — only every other table has someone at it. Mostly businessmen, some couples, a group of women in their early twenties, smiling hopefully at Gerard then turning and whispering to one another, hands to lips. Gerard often attracts women like this. They come up to him on breaks and at the end of the night to chat and gush and ask him questions about the way he sang a certain song and what he does during the day. Sometimes they come up to him in pairs, stand there, hands in pockets, bodies leaning, sunk into one hip. Other times they come individually, a gesticulative drink in one hand, undulating cigarette in the other. Often, he’s confided, he’s gone home to bed with one of them, both of them awaking the next day, never in love, not always remembering last names. There was one woman, however, Hermione Miller, only nineteen, who had kept calling him, crying, showing up naked on his doorstep holding lighted candles, breaking into his car and sleeping in the backseat. He would spend whole hours talking to her, calming her down. She insisted she loved him and would go mad without him or at least have a hard time grocery shopping. She would phone him at Carpet Town and keep him on the phone, pretending she was interested in something in a lilac shag. Finally she fell for another musician, someone who worked the Double Bubble Hour at Howard Johnson’s.
“When I was in high school,” said Gerard, “I was moral and virile and sweet and trying to change my name to Buff, and no one would have me. There wasn’t a girl in Queens who would look at me.”
I don’t really believe this. It’s all part of Gerard’s poor-boy-in-Queens mythologizing.
“Now I’m a carpet salesman in an upstate suburb, a rat playing the piano, drunk with operatic aspirations, and people I hardly know say they’re in love with me. Christ.” He paused. “Middle age is dangerous.”
“Middle age? Gerard, you’re a year younger than I am.”
“I know,” he said.
Gerard’s still on the first set. He has another drink coming. The waitress leaves it on the piano. Someone near me at the bar is eating Vaseline. He has a jar and a spoon and is just eating. I try not to stare. I try to turn my attention to the stuff I’ve brought. I try to find things to cross out or circle, so I can feel like a teacher, like someone who knows things. This afternoon I was listening to the kids out in front of the house — Isabelle Shubby and some others — playing games, that timeless legacy of hopscotch and jumping rhymes children bring to one another, mysteriously, without adults, and I wondered, Is there a secret world of knowledge that adults know, that gets passed on from one generation to the next, the way there is with children? I think not. I think you’re blurped out into the world, you get a few jumprope rhymes, and from there on in you’re on your own. Nobody tells you anything. Nobody shows you how.
“Hey, you in the back doing my taxes,” shouts Gerard into the microphone. I look up and he winks. “This is for you.” I wait to hear what it is. “I Want Money.” I nod and smile. I’m now part of Gerard’s act. A few people turn to look at me.
One of them is Maple up near the front. I didn’t see him come in and now we wave enthusiastically. Maple stands, says “Excuse me” to a few people in chairs, and attempts to make his way over to my table. It takes a while before he is sitting next to me.
“So, this is your song?” he says.
“Not really.” Growing up we always said “Not hardly,” and I find myself almost saying it now. We also said “kranz” instead of “crayons,” and began all sentences with “Anyways …”
“How’ve you been? Lots of work, I see.”
“Oh, yeah. How about you?”
“Gotta new job,” he says. “I’m a waiter at a veggie and granola place on Roosevelt. I’ll have more time for my dancing that way.”
“Be careful. You know you can never really trust people who don’t eat meat.”