Finally I had to get out, and I walked through the mist rain to a place on Bourbon Street, Fat Charlie’s, where we’d heard some real Dixieland. It was a small place and not clean, sawdust on the floor, mismatched hard chairs tucked under random tables. But the music was loud and beautiful.
What changed my life was this: after one fine set I gave the waiter a ten and asked him to buy a drink for Fat Charlie, who was the group’s clarinet player, and a good one. Fat Charlie brought the drink over and sat with me, and he was rather fascinated to find a Dixieland lover who was a woman, a white woman, a white woman from another World. When I admitted I played the clarinet, he was even more fascinated, and brought over his machine. He gave me a fresh reed to suck and asked me to “show my stuff.”
I amazed myself. His clarinet was a century-old LeBlanc, bored out for jazz. The sound was hard and bright and sexy. I did a few scales and intervals and then part of the wailing introduction to “Rhapsody in Blue.”
I looked at the clarinet. “Incredible machine.”
“How long you been playing, girl?”
“Thirteen years now.”
“Be damned.” He touched my elbow. “Come on up here.” He led me to the platform, where the other band members were lounging, nursing drinks.
“I’ve never played jazz with a live group before.”
“No problem. These fuckers won’t be alive till the sun goes down.” He gave a sideways signal with his head and the men picked up their instruments and did the reflex things with the spit valves and slides and tuning pegs. The pianist did a sarcastic arpeggio. “Saints in B-flat?” he said to me.
“Sure.” He was giving me the easy one.
Fat Charlie snapped his fingers like four sharp pistol shots and the drummer banged out a two-bar street beat introduction. We started clean and I went through the first verse and chorus almost automatically, not trying anything fancy. In this kind of pure Dixieland the cornet carries the melody and the clarinet rides an obbligato over him, subordinate but with more improvisational freedom than any of the others. After the first time around, each chorus is given to a different instrument, to improvise over a muted background of chords and rhythm. Fat Charlie gave me a nod for the second chorus; I closed my eyes and tried to forget there was an audience and waded right in.
It was good. It’s been a long time since I had any difficulty with the mechanics of improvisation, anticipating the march of chords and choosing appropriate notes, but this was better than I had ever done—feeding off the other players, trying to get out in music something about losing Benny and Jeff leaving, and about going home, and all the wonderful and terrifying things that had happened over the last half-year. All in sixteen bars, sure.
The eight or nine people in the audience applauded my solo, and Fat Charlie smiled and nodded. While the drummer was doing his sixteen, Fat Charlie came over and whispered, “Last chorus all together, in E-flat, okay?” It’s not my favorite key, but I managed to get through without too much pain.
Afterwards Fat Charlie held up two stubby fingers to the bartender and steered me back to the table. “Will you be in New Orleans awhile?” He said the name of the town as one three-syllable word.
“Only two days.” I explained about Cape Town and waiting for the shuttle.
“How ’bout sitting in here a couple of times? The novelty’d bring in business and you know you’d enjoy it.”
“I’d love to, if my lip holds out” You lose embouchure fast if you don’t practice every day. “We can switch off.” The bartender brought over two drinks in tall frosted glasses. “You tried a julep yet?”
“No, I usually drink beer or wine.” The cold sweet taste of it brought a double memory shock: mint tea in Marrakesh, with Jeff; bourbon in coffee at Perkins’s rough table.
“You don’t like it?” Fat Charlie looked at me-with a worried expression. I guess I’d paled.
“No, I do. It—it just reminded me of something.” I could almost remember something Benny had said about the force behind art.
He found a rumpled piece of paper and a pencil stub. “We don’t have enough violins for ‘Rhapsody in Blue.’ You got other favorites?”
I could fake anything from “Basin Street” to “Willy the Weeper.” But I gave him a list of nine or ten I was most familiar with.
“I’ll call and have some handouts printed up. What’s your name?”
“Marianne… Mary Hawkings.” I hadn’t taken Jeff’s name, but it didn’t seem smart to put my own on handbills.
“You have a picture we can use?”
“Please, I’d rather you didn’t.” I couldn’t think of a lie fast enough. “Don’t ask me why.”
“Sure, that’s all right. Mystery woman from outer space. Give you five hundred a night?”
I would have paid him twice that, for the experience. “Fine. What time?”
“Eight or nine. Well be playing till ‘round three.” He left to have the handouts made. I finished the drink and went out to walk off the nervousness. The rain had gone away.
So I had to come to Earth to be a soloist. There was a certain boy from school, a first clarinet, I wished could have been in the audience.
I went up on the levee to watch the sun set over the Mississippi and then went to a place Jeff and I had enjoyed, an old brick building by the levee that served only coffee and beignets, a kind of sweet fried bread dusted with powdered sugar, the coffee rich with chicory and heavy real cream. I felt so alive, so sad-and-happy, so full of expectation. I walked all of the Quarter, up and down and across, humming and whistling the songs I’d be playing, straightening out the melodies in my mind. In a Bourbon Street sitdown place, I felt like having a fish dinner, so I ordered crayfish, crawdads, and was nonplussed when the waitress brought out a large tray with a mountain of red-black insectoid creatures heaped on it. She showed me how to dissect them, a tiny pinch of meat in each one. Delicate taste.
For another hour I wandered up and down Bourbon Street, loitering in the doors of places that had music, stealing tricks. Then I went on to Fat Charlie’s. I passed dozens of handbills with my “name” on them.
There wasn’t an empty seat in the place. The bar was shoulder-to-shoulder and there were customers nursing drinks, leaning against the walls. Fat Charlie came out of nowhere and put his arm around my shoulders.
“This is a big crowd, girl,” he said quietly. “They came to see you.”
“I can’t believe that—what, two hours? Three?”
“It’s a small town. These’re not too many tourists … like I say, you’re something different. They come by to see.” He handed me five crisp bills. “Here’s some confidence. You go back in the kitchen and warm up a bit Machine’s behind the piano.”
“What will I be playing, what order?”
“You just name it We prob’ly know it.”
Well, that was an interesting challenge. I picked up his clarinet and went into the kitchen, trying to think of the most obscure piece I knew. The kitchen was barely big enough for me and the cook, since the only prepared food they sold was fried potatoes with lots of salt. The cook was a little fat white man who never looked up from the potato slicer, but said, “Bottle’s in the refrigerator.”
I didn’t usually eat or drink anything before playing, because of the saliva problem, but this wasn’t exactly Mozart, and I was nervous enough to appreciate a little liquid courage. The bottle turned out to be bourbon, of course. I poured a couple of centimeters into a rather clean glass and drank it in one gulp. Shuddered from the fire and memory.
I worked out a little opening line for “Stavin’ Change,” which they couldn’t possibly know. Feeling mischievous relieved some of the tension. Then I did fast and slow arpeggios, lowest note to highest, in all the keys we could possibly use.