John Henry Days (30 page)

and there’s his gloomy father trying to import a Lithuanian village into Jake’s two tiny rooms. Victoria’s a classy name, a royal name, and royalty doesn’t need any peasant stuff dragging her back. His father makes a vague old world grunt whenever Jake says this is the twentieth century, and the sound isn’t musical at all. To heck with it all, Jake hasn’t the time. Barely enough time for the sun, some days. He started sleeping past noon once the rhythm came in. He learned the flow of the New York City evening, which joints hit their peak at what time, distinguished the drinking joints from the dancing joints, memorized the bouncers’ names and the tactics of competing pluggers. He made the rounds, wore down shoes that his cousin resoled for free if Jake told him stories about bawdy houses and what went on inside them. He got the songs out there in a good percentage. He’d pick up the new batch from the office on Twenty-eighth Street every night and hear the contract men in their cubicles attempting alchemy on their battered pianos and thought to himself, they shouldn’t call it Tin Pan Alley because all their racket sounds like tin pans clanging together, but because more often than not what they conjure up is just tin and not the gold of a bona fide hit. It didn’t take him long to figure out that if you became a contract man, a composer or a lyricist, you got a decent salary plus royalties. Knock out a few popular songs and you’re set up on Easy Street. He looks at those drunks at the office banging away at their plagiarized ditties and thinks, half these guys started out pluggers like him and they got nothing on him. But he’s the littlest cog in the machine. The women work in the daytime, demonstrating numbers in music shops and department stores, and the men work at night, plugging the dance halls. The songwriters knock them out, then above them the hit-makers spend their royalties. And above them the publisher got the best of it. The walls of Yellen’s office are crammed with framed copies of hits and above the names of the songwriters is his name, bigger than everything. Big Danny, before he got on the hop, before he got fired, said the minute he figures out the system it changes, a guy can hardly keep up. Some places got music machines, player pianos that play songs that are already set, and there’s no use for a plugger when they got a machine to do it. No need for a musician that breathes and bleeds when you got a machine to do it. Some places now got kinetoscopes showing motion pictures of what the lyrics say, so you don’t have to imagine what a song’s about, it’s up there on the wall in a picture. First it was slide shows and now it’s kinetoscopes. From where we are, out there hoofing it from place to place, we can’t see the whole thing. You ask Yellen about the distribution and he’ll tell you about how this new printer can
cut up thousands of copies a day, and how long it takes for the train to get it from here to Chicago and Philadelphia, and how much he makes off the ads on the back, and how when Harper’s prints a song, how many of their readers will buy it the next week. We’re just two guys, Jake. They got more than twenty music publishers on the Alley alone, and that’s not including the big guys like Von Tilzer moving uptown. We’re just two pluggers and they got a whole system over us. Jake said, this is the twentieth century. Big Danny said, no fooling. Now outside some man is beating his horse. How is a man supposed to get ahead with all this noise. He doesn’t know how Ruth and Victoria can sleep through this night after night. They slept through him being beaten, it was only two blocks away. He rubs his bent nose and drags a finger across the groove in his cheek. With his bashed-up face he looks like any Bowery brawler. No longer the choirboy. This is what the street has done to him. What gang they were from there was no way of telling, but they beat him good, came out from beneath one of the El struts and knocked him down with a brick. It was the first heavy snow of winter and he cut his plugging short because no one was out, but short meant it was still late. With his face pushed down into the piled snow he could still smell the horse manure beneath it. They cut his pockets straight out of his trousers and grabbed his meager bills. Sent that night’s songs soaring on a gust. But maybe his wife and child didn’t hear him because the snow swallowed all his screams. They left him in the snow, with a different face, a different nose and exploded cheeks that now testify to violence before uninterested juries of passersby, and only the people who knew him before say his kid looks just like him. This city is a crime. He pulled himself from the snow and leaned against the El, on one of the odd bluffs the wind made because it didn’t know what to make of elevated trains, he rested on halfhearted dunes and cutoff cliffs of snow. The mayor gets himself elected on a reform platform and still the gangs own the streets and the coppers turn a blind eye. Stephen Foster got paid ten dollars for “Oh! Susanna” and made millions for his publisher and died broke of drink at a Bowery flophouse just over there. He tried to lift himself up. You can fall into the city and no one will ever find you. When the snow melts they will find his body and a bunch of frozen drunks no one missed. He scraped frozen blood from his eyes and peered into the snow. He felt like he was at the bottom of an hourglass, it was coming down so hard. The man came up the street singing. Jake never saw his face. He had to have seen Jake, or at least the dark wings of blood around him. But he didn’t stop. No one cares about their fellow man. He walked by singing that John Henry song, coming up the street
right in between the tracks above. It was only when Jake finally marshaled himself out of the blizzard and Ruth had cleaned his face and he was falling into bed like it was a chute that he was able to think, that was a pretty good song. To a guy like him, you hear a melody like that and think it will be a tough plug. It doesn’t have the syncopated push of a rag, the rollicking swagger of a saloon song. It does not describe the orphan girl’s escape from the sinful life when the millionaire falls in love with her and then they take tea with Carnegie. But it has a power. The song of the horse getting beat reminds him of him getting beat, and some of the lyrics start coming back. He’s got to get them down on paper before they go away again, even if they were pounded into him that night. He touches his scar, and remembers how he hauled himself up from out of the snow.
John Henry went home to his good little woman, Said, Polly Ann, fix my bed, I want to lay down and get some rest, I’ve an awful roaring in my head, Lord, Lord, I’ve an awful roaring in my head.
Ruth’s tiny hands wrung the rag into the basin and turned the clean water pink. What the man was doing out in that kind of weather, who knows. Why he was singing that particular song, who knows. Walking into the wind, beneath the elevated, maybe it was the tracks that made him think of the song. Jake looked it up and no one had published a version of the ballad. Asked one of the contract men about it, the guy said, yeah I know that old song, what do you care about that slow stuff for? Jake thought with everybody chasing after the latest fashion, a ballad was going to sneak through. Yellen has coon songs coming out of his ears, and there is no way Jake is going to be the millionth guy to rhyme
mother
with
love her,
no matter how misty-eyed it makes the room. Him and Ruth and the kid moved into these two rooms and it was better than living with the airshaft blowing God knows what sickness into Victoria’s lungs. With all the garbage they throw down there it’s no wonder the gypsies in the basement are sick, but that isn’t going to happen to his little girl. Now they have a front room and their bedroom looks out on the street and when it gets warmer they can sit on the fire escape. They got air now, but it costs money. This John Henry isn’t going to be a million-seller, but it’ll show the old man he has initiative. A fellow’s got to start somewhere. This is the twentieth century and you got to make your own luck.

S
neaky Petes, both of them, aware of being in plain sight, sans excuses, without a hall pass, up the stairs from One Eye’s room, on tiptoe past the mastications of the ice machine and in front of room 29 of the Talcott Motor Lodge.

J.

This is stupid.

ONE EYE

(squinting with socket and eye alike, over a loop of keys)

You’re fucking up my movie.

J.

We didn’t synchronize our watches.

ONE EYE

(two keys down in failure and on to the next)

I got enough time for both of us. Time it takes them to get back and forth from Charleston we still have plenty of time. Man!

J.

(looking over his shoulder)

I thought you said you could open it.

ONE EYE

(with John Henry-like hubris)

I can open any lock made of man. With what I got here. Just be glad they don’t have those electric card things here yet.

J.

Who’d you write the piece for?

ONE EYE

Locksmith Today.
I met the editor at a conference. We were—fuck— digging at this lobster salad they had laid out. He said he’d throw some work my way, then a month later he calls me and says the oldest practicing locksmith in the world is retiring and they want an interview. The IRS was on me for some delinquencies, I don’t even know how I got back on the grid in the first place, how they tracked me down I still don’t know, so I needed the money. Went out to Jersey and talked to the guy. Man!

J.

(in halfhearted sarcasm halfheartedly delivered)

Have all day apparently.

ONE EYE

I’m getting it. He was liquidating his shop, we were drinking and he gives me a set of his master keys. Said he had a one-eyed friend in the army, back in dubya dubya two.

J.

The big one. Wait—there’s a car coming.

ONE EYE

Who is it?

J.

(recognizing the logo of a leading package-delivery service)

Just Federal Express. Strangely, I don’t know, I’ve changed my mind about this mission for some reason.

ONE EYE

(pushing against the palace gate in the manner of Hercules)

Here it is.

J.

(stepping into the den of Ali Baba)

Close it.

ONE EYE

(remarking, not for the last time, on the repetitive nature of existence and the disquieting universality of modern human experience)

I think this room is exactly identical to mine.

J.

(a grammarian)

That’s redundant. If it’s identical it’s exactly.

ONE EYE

(very like a sailor)

Will you just shut the f—

J.

(with a practical air)

I don’t see it. What if he took it with him?

ONE EYE

(not too proud)

Didn’t think of that. How do you like that?

J.

(pensively, index finger tapping chin)

Knowing Lawrence, you’re in a cheap motel in the middle of nowhere, and you have this computer, so—

ONE EYE

(recalling adolescent pornography-concealment procedures)

It’s under the bed.

J.

(ditto)

It’s probably under the bed.

ONE EYE

(brandishing)

Okay.

J.

Don’t look at me, I’m a Mac guy.

ONE EYE

(even as human endeavor is simplified by the advances of technology, some dilemmas yet await the intrepid inventor)

That’s not the problem. Gotta wait.

J.

(still capable of colorful imagery despite the rigors of prodigious journalistic output)

See how long it takes to boot up? They got like hamsters running around in there to power the thing.

ONE EYE

(lobbyist for the free enterprise system)

Spare me. All you artistic types and your precious Macintoshes. You gotta face reality. Even I can see that and I only got—

J.

Yeah, yeah, you only got one eye. We’re still waiting though.

ONE EYE

(with the casual aplomb of a jack of all trades)

Okay. Just gotta find the file. C drive …

J.

(examining)

What’s all these jars?

ONE EYE

What’s all this—Hey, looks like Lawrence is working on a book.

J.

(in a flash of horror over years wasted, all that lost time)

Yeah?

ONE EYE

I think it’s a memoir. Here: “I was a sickly child …”

J.

(as if lost in wonder among the capacious aisles of a glamorous new pharmacy)
Got tons of hair gel here.

ONE EYE

(drawn once again to the disquieting universality of modern human experience)
“Oftentimes I would go to the window and watch some of the
neighborhood boys engaged in the activities typical to that stage of childhood. Oh! How I would long to join in their games.”

J.

He’s got some serious NASA-type black ops hair gel here.

ONE EYE

(contemplating class differences)

Here’s something about an erotic attachment to his governess.

J.

Will you just find the file?

ONE EYE

No, yeah. You be the lookout.

(charitably)

Still, it’s not that bad if you like that sort of thing. Hmm. Okay here are his work files. Organized little fucker.

J.

Well.

ONE EYE

I’m sure it’s in here. Just have to find the file name …

J.

(looking between curtain and frame)

Try Bottom Feeders, Moochers …