Day Out of Days (13 page)

I’m telling you, he was dead standing up. Stone dead. I was there. Room #17, Andrew Johnson Hotel, Knoxville, 1953. I was right there with him in the room. Me, propping him up on one side and that driver-guy, that chauffeur of his, on the other. Believe his name was Carr, that driver. Charlie Carr. I remember all that. Don’t ask me how. Can’t even remember what I had for breakfast but I can remember all that back then clear as a brass bell. Sticks in your mind. A thing like that—dressing up a dead man in a fresh suit of clothes. I’m telling you, like a rag doll he was. And, all the time we’re putting the clothes on him that driver-guy, that Carr fella, thinks he’s still alive. Even called a doctor up to the room to give him a shot of morphine and B
₁₂
. On top of all the beer and whiskey he had in him already—pills and whatnot. Man was a mess. I think it was that doctor killed him, tell you the damn truth. That’s what I think because he was sure as shine dead when we was putting that fresh suit of clothes on him. Dead as a post. Made a noise, though. Kind of a rasping sound came out of him like wind rustling dry leaves. That’s probably why Carr thought he still had some life left in him. But all that is is the death rattle. That’s all that is. Air escaping the corpse, like some ghost getting the hell out the door before it slams shut. I’ve heard that sound before, believe you me. You see lots of comings and goings being a porter in a hotel like that. You see it all. Whores knifed in the face. Suicides. Had two young kids jump right out of a window once, on the eighth floor.
Jumped right out the damn window, holding hands. Boy and girl. Must’ve been nineteen, twenty years old is all. Girl was pregnant too. That’s the shame of it. But Mr. Williams—laying there like a stick. Never forget that. Got him all decked out in that new suit; bright blue with a fresh white shirt, yellow tie—little green palm tree embroidered right in the middle of it. All this stuff gets imprinted on your mind, for some reason. Shiny black boots made in Ft. Worth with musical notes and little gold guitars stitched into the leather, dancing all across the toe and heel. His cream white Stetson we set crown down on the bed beside him after we flopped him over on the mattress. That’s when that sound came out of him. He was flat dead, though, so help me, God. You could tell by the way he landed. But that driver-guy, that Charlie Carr, keeps saying he’s got to get him back in the Cadillac downstairs. He’s got some gig to make in Canton, Ohio, somewheres—some roadhouse or theatre or other. I don’t know. Had about two hours to make the show, he said. So we haul him up off the bed and prop him up again; throw his dead arms around our shoulders, squash that Stetson down on his head, and off we go, out the door, down the stairs, boots dragging and banging down every step till we get to the lobby. Desk clerk cracks wise as we go past about how Mr. Williams may have had one too many. We laughed about it, me and Carr, trying to make it all slide by; go along with the game. But I regret that now—that laugh. Man was dead after all. Dead in his boots. We got him out on the street through the revolving door and I remember how the streetlamp lit up that bright blue suit of his. Blue must’ve been his favorite color because that Caddie was blue too. Kind of a light powder blue like a robin’s egg. Carr opened the back door with his free hand and we slid Mr. Williams in, gentle as we could and here comes that awful sound out of him, one last time. I remember thinking then, that’s a terrible sound to come out of a man, like that. Man who spent his whole short lifetime singing like a beautiful bird. That’s a terrible, terrible sound.

I studied Eric Dolphy nightly, very close up, front row sometimes. 1963–64; something like that. Watched his listening; ramrod straight spine on a tall oak stool, like a monk, like a regal jaybird; black bass clarinet (or was it soprano sax?) hung between his knees, hung from a loop around his neck; eyes pinned to the bandstand floor, seeing right through it while Mingus mashed away with his meaty fingers, cruel smile. Jaki Byard, Dannie Richmond; “Fables of Faubus.” Dolphy’s Egyptian pharaoh goatee, long with a knob at the end, hieroglyphic, staring into the next phrase; seeing it coming up, seeing right into his death, in a matter of days. The dismay on Mingus’s face on return without him. Leaving Dolphy’s body behind in Germany, on tour; failed blood, medical inattention. The disbelief, the vacancy, the awful hole where he used to lift his licorice horn to the heavens and sail away, past the old Five Spot café, which is now a dumb-ass Pizza Hut.

How do you “teach” yourself anything? Assuming one part of you knows something that another part of you may not; some magical suspicion. In matters of the voice (aside from purely physical limitations like the size of the windpipes or the shape of the mouth and nasal cavities), is there possibly some territory of the imagination which might “inform” the singing of a song; shaping it to fit the timbre and character of a more legendary voice, such as Dr. Ralph Stanley possesses. Not an imitation of Ralph Stanley but a kind of incantation. I’ve been driving down through the mountains of Tennessee, below the Cumberland Gap, ripping my throat out trying to sing just like Dr. Stanley; repeating the track of an ancient recording he must have made on the back porch of his cabin in Virginia. In the background you can hear screen doors slapping, a baby cry, a distant dog, and intermittent blasts of cicadas. The song itself is far more ancient than the recording; an a cappella hymn called “Poor Pilgrim” that must have come across the great ocean with the first wave of Scotch-Irish immigrants. These are the haunted lyrics:

It’s impossible to depict on paper the extraordinary leaps of modulation and uncanny phrasing that Stanley’s voice carves through every word and line; tailing each verse with a light “yip” harking back to certain old sea chanties like “Blood Red Roses” which the early sailors sang with foreboding rounding Cape Horn through terrible currents, on their way to the Gold Rush. This same “yip” later found its way unfathomably into the campfires of cowboys in Texas, singing to the moon and stars, and must have even influenced the high yodeling of Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams, much later. Everything has its heritage. Sad to say, but the modal style of singing that Ralph Stanley embodies (which is not a style at all but a belief; a way of life) has all but died in this era of “sampling” and electronic voicings. The only other place I’ve heard anything like it was in a pub called The Cobblestone in Ireland where a man named Seamus Fitzpatrick stood up in the middle
of the day and began a twenty-seven-verse ballad in the Seannóis tradition in honor of his dead father. The entire pub went silent with bowed heads toward the black pints of Guinness except for those who knew the song from childhood and seamlessly joined Seamus, not missing a word of the tale. By the end of the twenty-seventh verse, the sun was just beginning to set through the tobacco-stained windows, and the melody still hung heavy in the air.

I had ideas for sure, the night before, of what it might be like. Projections. Pictures, I guess. In my head. Of what my head would be like. Severed like that. Suddenly cut off. Separate. Certainly, no one else can tell you what it’s like. Run the gauntlet and come back to tell the tale. Except me. Perhaps. Too soon to tell. I could be the only one. Who knows? You’d have to comb the planet looking for evidence. Could it be? I’m the only one. Certainly not. I don’t know. It’s beyond me somewhat. Now. I mean, now. Being out in the world. Out and about. Being out in the thick of things with no body at all. Just rolling around. No precedent. But nevertheless, things ran through my mind the night before the execution. If you want to call it that. My mind inside my head. Things running wild in there. Make no mistake. You can just imagine. The gleaming blade. The white neck. Anticipation. How do you describe it? The clean break. I had heard rumors that the suddenness of it, the abrupt clash of steel on bone caused a continuation, a certain suspension of belief that the two might still be connected. The head and body. The link of the neck. Like the way both halves of a rattler will keep twisting once you’ve cut him in two. Chicken running around with his head cut off. That kind of thing. Or the way they say Mary Queen of Scots’s head kept chattering for a full fifteen minutes afterward as the executioner marched up and down the scaffold presenting it to the crowd, clutching it by its thick red curly hair; eyes wide open, jaw and lips snapping up and down with no words. As though the head still belonged to the living; some last expression of self, a desperate attempt at being. I don’t
know. I wasn’t there. These things are hard to describe when you get right down to it. “Suspended”? “Floating”? Nothing quite nails it down. It was immediate, though. I’ll say that much. Not unlike the hackneyed magician’s trick where he jerks the entire tablecloth out from under the plates and saucers and they all remain exactly where they are. Something like that. Or the way all the lights in the city go black and suddenly everyone’s silent. Everyone waiting for the world to fall away but it already has.

It’s curious, though—this vague yearning for home. This yearning for place. Some place or other. Why would that be? When it’s all said and done. Why a lake, for instance, when I came from the desert? Heat and sand. Why a lake for Christ’s sake?

Suddenly—
the word most used by Dostoyevsky. Somebody told me that. Some Dostoyevsky expert.
Suddenly
. As though any kind of action could be drawn into words: Suddenly music. Suddenly turning. Suddenly silent. Suddenly. As though I never saw the process.

Everyone in the old house is sick but me. Silence, except for the snoring, coughing, and occasional trips to the bathroom. Snow everywhere through the windows. You can’t look out without seeing it. Suddenly winter. Frozen rivers. Bitter cold. Barren trees. Small silver plane etched out against a chalk, still sky. Suddenly, completely alone.

A tall thin white man in wire-rimmed glasses (from the thirties) stands in front of a mirror shaving his ears with an electric razor; mouthing words to himself (or someone else, we’re not sure), mouthing something to someone who is not there, unseen, imaginary (most likely a woman although this information is more for the actor than anyone else).

•   •   •   •   •

A naked, skinny, tall white man, well past middle age, stands in front of a mirror which is hanging from an invisible wire (possibly very light monofilament fishing leader) shaving his ear and nose hair; trimming his short sideburns then, squeezing some white cream out of a tube, he rubs it gently on his nose and starts speaking to an imaginary woman but in mime. The only sound is the sound of the electric razor.

•   •   •   •   •

A tall thin white man in glasses, well past middle age with a potbelly, white boxer shorts with his balls hanging out one side very visibly; white sleeveless T-shirt identical to the one worn by Paul Newman in
Hud
(or was it
The Hustler
?
)
. In any case, the tightness of the sleeveless T-shirt only accentuates the pot of his belly. He is meticulously shaving his ears, nose hair, shortish sideburns and spends a great deal of time on one pesky black curled-up hair protruding
from the top of his cheekbone (which the audience can’t see).

•   •   •   •   •

Periodically (not often) the tall thin white man shuts the razor off and speaks out loud to an imaginary woman, imploring her to reconsider her quick departure. He goes so far as to admit he misses her deeply even though she’s just recently walked out the door and clicked it quietly shut, intentionally avoiding the provocative slam. (This could all be improvised providing the actor doesn’t get too cute with it; pretending he’s a writer.)

•   •   •   •   •

An extremely tall (well over 6 feet 7 inches) thin, aging white man with a potbelly, sleeveless T-shirt, white boxer shorts, balls hanging nearly to his knees, stands in blank space (no set of any kind), side-lit with no music, staring blankly at the audience (no emotion can be read on his face), arms hanging limply at his side, one hand holding an electric razor, which is turned on, making a sound more like a dentist’s drill or a distant chain saw, maybe. After a while (not too long) he turns the razor off and there’s silence except for the sporadic coughing and nervous twitching of the audience, which gradually shifts to fascination as the tall thin white man’s stare becomes more and more specific and it begins to be clear that he is examining his own face in an imaginary mirror, picking at dry red spots on his nose that seem to have suffered from extreme exposure to the sun or wind or both or just abject neglect. He pulls a tube of cream out of his white boxer shorts, squeezes some out on his finger then rubs it on his scaly nose, then rubs some on his hanging balls. His nose turns white as a lightbulb. His balls turn blue. Now he begins talking out loud to an imaginary woman who seems to have recently departed. He explains in
detail the great gaping hole she has left in his chest (which the audience can’t see) and how impossible it will be to continue without her. His blue balls start blinking. Then his white nose. They blink in alternating syncopation.

He turns the electric razor back on and shaves his ears, his nose hair, and his short sideburns. In the course of this methodical procedure the lights (pale blue) fade very slowly to black. No music of any kind. The razor continues in the dark. The tall thin white man’s balls and nose keep blinking in the pitch black. They blink incessantly until the audience has entirely cleared out.