Fifteen years as a deputy sheriff, only to come to this.
Why tonight, he wondered.
A Fine Set of Teeth
I saw Frank drop two cotton balls into the front pocket of his denim jacket and I made a face.
“Those won’t help, you know.”
He smiled and said, “Better than nothing.”
“Cotton is not effective ear protection.”
He picked up his keys by way of ignoring me and said, “Are you ready?”
“You don’t have to go with me,” I offered again.
“I’m not letting my wife sit alone in a sleazy bar. No more arguments, all right?”
“If I were on a story-”
“You aren’t. Let’s go.”
“Thanks for being such a good sport about it,” I said, which made him laugh.
“Which apartment number?” Frank asked as we pulled up to the curb in front of Buzz Sullivan’s apartment building. The building was about four stories high, probably built in the 1930s. I don’t think it had felt a paintbrush along its walls within the last decade.
“Buzz didn’t tell me,” I answered. “He just said he lived on the fourth floor.”
Frank sighed with long suffering, but I can ignore someone as easily as he can, and got out of the car.
As we made our way to the old stucco building’s entry, we dodged half a dozen kids who were playing around with a worn soccer ball on the brown crabgrass lawn. The children were laughing and calling to one another in Spanish. A dried sparrow of a woman watched them from the front steps. She seemed wearier than Atlas.
Frank muttered at my back about checking mailboxes for the first of the three flights of stairs, but soon followed in silence. Although Buzz had moved several times since I had last been to one of his apartments, I knew there would be no difficulty in locating the one that was his. We reached the fourth floor and Frank started to grouse, but soon the sound I had been waiting for came to my ears. Not just my ears: I heard the sound under my fingernails, beneath my toes and in places my mother asked me never to mention in mixed company. Three screeching notes strangled from the high end of the long neck of a Fender Stratocaster, a sound not unlike those a pig might make-if it was having its teeth pulled with a pair of pliers.
I turned to look at Frank Harriman and saw something I rarely see on his face: fear. Raw fear.
I smiled. I would have said something comforting, but he wouldn’t have heard me over the next few whammified notes whining from Buzz’s guitar. A deaf man could have told you they were coming from apartment 4E. I waited until the sound subsided, asked, “Should we drop you off back at the house?” and watched my husband stalk over to the door of number 4E and rap on it with the kind of ferocious intensity one usually saves for rousing the occupants of burning buildings.
Q: What’s the difference between a dead trombone player and a dead snake in the middle of a road?
A: The snake was on his way to a gig.
The door opened and a thin young man with a hairdo apparently inspired in color and shape by a sea urchin stood looking at Frank in open puzzlement. He swatted a few purple spikes away from his big blue eyes and finally saw me standing nearby. His face broke into an easy, charming smile.
“Irene!” He looked back at Frank. “Is this your cop?”
“No, Buzz,” I said, “that’s my husband.”
Buzz looked sheepish. “Oh, sorry. I’ve told Irene I’m not like that, and here I am, acting just exactly like that.”
“Like what?” Frank asked.
“I don’t mind that you’re a cop,” Buzz said proudly.
“That’s big of you,” Frank said, “I was worried you wouldn’t accept our help.”
Buzz, who is missing a sarcasm detection gene, just grinned and held out a hand. “Not at all, man, not at all. It’s really good of you to offer to take me to the gig. Guess Irene told you my car broke down. Come on in.”
Buzz’s purple hair was one of two splashes of color in his ensemble; his boots, pants and shirt were black, but a lime green guitar-still attached by a long cable to an amp-and matching strap stood out against this dark backdrop.
There was no question of finding a seat while we waited for Buzz to unhook his guitar and put it in a hard-shell case. The tiny apartment was nearly devoid of furniture. Two empty plastic milk crates and a couple of boards served as a long, low coffee table of sorts. Cluttered with the several abandoned coffee mugs and an empty bowl with a bent spoon in it, the table stood next to a small mattress heaped with twisted sheets and laundry. The mattress apparently served as both bed and couch.
There were two very elegant objects in the room, however-a pair of Irish harps. The sun was setting in the windows behind them, and in the last light of day, they stood with stately grace, their fine wooden scrollwork lovingly polished to a high sheen.
“You play these?” Frank asked him in astonishment.
Without looking up from the guitar, which he was carefully wiping down with a cloth, Buzz said, “Didn’t you tell him, Irene?”
“I first met Buzz at an Irish music festival,” I said. “He doesn’t just play the harp.”
“Other instruments, too?” Frank asked.
“Sure,” Buzz said, looking back at us now. “I grew up in a musical family.”
“That isn’t what I meant,” I said. “He doesn’t just play it. He coaxes it to sing.”
“Sure and you’ve an Irish silver tongue now, haven’t ye, me beauty?” Buzz said with an exaggerated brogue.
“Prove my point, Buzz. Play something for us.”
He shook his head. “Haven’t touched them in months except to keep the dust off them,” he said. “That’s the past.” He patted the guitar case. “This is the future.” He laughed when he saw my look of disappointment. “My father feels the same way-but promise you won’t stop speaking to me like he has.”
“No, what you play is your choice.”
“Glad to know at least one person thinks so. Shall we go?”
“Need help carrying your equipment?” Frank offered. I was relieved to see him warming up a little.
“Oh, no, I’m just taking my ax, man.”
“Your ax?”
“My guitar. I never leave it at the club. My synthesizer, another amp and a bunch of other equipment are already at the club-I just leave those there. But not my Strat.”
Q: How do you get a guitar player to turn down?
A: Put sheet music in front of him.
On the way to Club 99, Buzz talked to Frank about his early years of performing with the Sullivan family band, recalling the friendship his father shared with my late mentor, O’Connor.
“O’Connor told me to come to this music festival,” I said. “There was a fifteen-year-old lad who could play the Irish harp better than anyone he’d ever met, and when he got to heaven, he expected no angel to play more sweetly.”
“Oh, I did all right,” he said shyly. “But my training wasn’t formal. She tell you that she helped me get into school, Frank?”
“No-”
“It was your own hard work that got you into that program,” I said.
“Naw, I couldn’t have done it without you. You talked that friend into teaching me how to sight read.” He turned to Frank. “Then she practically arm-wrestled one of the profs into giving me an audition.”
Frank smiled. “She hasn’t changed much.”
“Sorry, Buzz,” I said, “I thought it was what you wanted.”
“It was!” Buzz protested. “And I never could have gone to college without your help.”