Red House Blues (13 page)

As he was enjoying the daydream, he heard a
guitar climb up over the top of the recording, someone picking
around there in the house. He walked up the steps to the front door
and knocked, having nothing particular in mind except he wanted to
hear more of the music The guy who came to the door was a white man
in his twenties wearing a tee shirt and blue pegged jeans. That he
was white didn’t matter to Charles. There were lots of kinds of
people in the neighborhood and he had some white friends. What
mattered was the guy was holding a Fender Stratocaster. Charles
felt as if he’d turned over a dirty old scrap of street litter and
found a diamond right there on Fir. He’d never been this close to a
guitar of that class. He didn't know what to say to the dude,
stammered out something about digging the sound. The man motioned
him into the living room with a sweep of the guitar.

“Hey Walt, dig it, I got a fan club.” he
said to someone sitting on the couch.

The introductions didn’t take long. There
were three men in the dark living room in front of the stereo. The
guy with the Fender’s name was Palmer. Said he played with any band
that would give him the work and right now was playing steady with
the Tommy Buck Trio, as if Charles should know them, but he’d never
heard of them. Then there was Walt, big-shouldered with a red crew
cut. Walt motioned toward the vibrant paint splashes that covered
the walls. “That’s me,” he said, as if that said all that needed
saying about him. Slouched in a red velvet overstuffed chair in the
bay window to the left of the couch was Ferlin. Behind a haze of
what Charles knew to be weed, Ferlin studied him with a dark steady
gaze. Charles thought maybe he had seen Ferlin around the
neighborhood. He wasn’t a dude you would forget if you saw him - a
scrawny, rat-faced white boy with long blond hair tied back in a
ponytail like a girl. He had on green corduroy pants and one of
those black turtle neck sweaters. Like a beatnik. Ferlin didn’t say
anything - just acknowledged him with a slight nod of his head and
turned his attention back to the music. Not unfriendly, but not
friendly either.

Charles was pretty sure he’d screwed up and
shouldn’t have come up those stairs. But if there was even a small
chance Palmer would let him play that Strat - let him hold it even
- he wasn’t going to back out. This opportunity dropped out of the
sky right in front of him and he couldn’t let it go - wouldn’t go
running home like a scared little nigga in the wrong part of town.
Palmer would understand. He was a guitar man.

So Charles pretended he fit right in, made a
place for himself on the couch next to Walt. Palmer was spinning
groups Charles hadn’t heard before, playing along with the records,
embellishing here and there. Some of it he liked, some not. His
friends in the neighborhood didn’t play much top forty. That was
mostly white kids’ radio. He preferred the R and B sounds he heard
around the house. But that Strat sure sounded fine whatever kind of
music it was playing.

Walt had his feet up on the coffee table and
looked like he was sleeping except for his hand beating time on the
arm of the couch. Ferlin just kept on smoking and passing the joint
around to Palmer and then on to Charles, who hadn’t smoked hash
before but wasn’t about to admit it. Hash was a white man’s
pleasure. Kids he knew didn’t have that kind of money anyway. They
popped pills or drank booze they filched from their folks. He
watched the other men and did what they did. All the while aching
to play that guitar.

Palmer was toying with the kid. There was no
mistaking the kid’s lust. It was a lust Palmer well understood.
That kid could hardly contain himself. He was ready to piss his
pants, that was plain to see. Palmer expected that at any moment he
would get up and grab the Strat right out of his hands. But the kid
was polite, he was contained. What gave the kid away was he
couldn’t keep his fingers still. He was playing air guitar sitting
right there on the couch, his fingers describing every chord as if
he already cradled the Strat in his arms. It was love, pure and
simple.

He thought it might be time to put the poor
kid out of his misery. One more toke and Palmer took the strap off
over his head and held the Fender at arm’s length.

“Okay, kid. Let’s hear what you got,” he
said.

Charles got up from the couch like a man
bewitched and clasped the neck of the guitar with a slightly
shaking hand. His own instrument, even when it had a full
compliment of strings, was cheap trash. His second-hand amp sounded
like an overturned bucket. The Strat was a real guitar, something
he’d only seen on album covers and in his dreams.

He positioned his fingers and strummed a few
chords.

“What the hell are you doing, man?” said
Palmer. “You’re holding it all wrong. Let me show you.” He reached
for the guitar. Walt let out a low chuckle from the couch. This
might be fun after all.

Charles backed up, holding the guitar close.
“Hey, be cool,” he said. “I taught myself. Might not be the right
way but I figured it out.”

Charles launched into Duane Eddy’s “Forty
Miles of Bad Road” just to show him. Palmer sat down hard next to
Walt. “Holy shit,” he said under his breath. The kid could play, no
doubt about that at all.

That first night Charles played until Palmer
had to practically pry the Strat out of his fingers. Then they all
smoked a little more weed and listened to a garage tape Ferlin had
of a guy called Dylan who sang in a kind of folk style. He couldn’t
sing, thought Charles, but the lyrics were right on.

They didn’t hear Clay come in the front door
and go upstairs. Sometime around three, Walt opened he eyes to find
Ferlin had already gone off to his own room off the kitchen and the
kid was asleep, his head on the arm of the couch. Too late to send
him home now. Palmer stirred in the chair. “That’s it for me,” he
said, and turned off the stereo. Walt turned out the lamp beside
the couch and he and Palmer went upstairs to their rooms, leaving
Charles dreaming music on the fat couch.

Hours before dawn another sort of music
spiraled through the molecules of Red House on Fir Street, an
off-key melody worming through tattered paper and faded paint,
echoing from the memory of an anguished cry, of aching loss, of
privation. It was an old tune like a honky-tonk piano out of tune.
It clung like cobwebs to the corners of a deserted room, vibrated
through the residual acrid smoke of the drug, all snarls and claws,
caught in tangles of misery with nowhere to go beyond the
encapsulating walls. Those sleeping within its walls slept
restlessly but unaware what was growing in the acrid air
surrounding them.

The Negro kid was back the next evening and
the next, quietly coming to the front door, drawn out of his
painful shyness by the prospect that Palmer would once again let
him play the Strat. Donna decided she might as well invite him to
the dinner she planned for Friday night. He’d probably show up at
the house anyway. From the look of him the kid didn’t get many
meals.

Donna planned the dinner to be the occasion
where Clay would announce his college plans to the whole household.
It was sad, she thought, that the housemates almost never ate
together. She hoped that tonight they would sit down like civilized
people and share a meal. They’d have some wine, even if it weren’t
within the budget. She’d make a huge pot of spaghetti with
meatballs. The guys like pasta. Serve a plate of garlic bread with
it. And she’d mix up a punch bowl of sangria. She’d seen a recipe
in Sunset Magazine. That would go with spaghetti and be festive.
Donna wanted it to be a night they would all remember.

One problem. The dining room was Walt’s
studio. The housemates either ate at the kitchen table or took
their food into the living room. Donna’s first hurdle was to clear
at least enough of Walt’s art supplies to seat the five housemates,
and now Charles.

“It’s just for one night,” she told Walt.
“You can stack everything in the breakfast nook if you want. I
wouldn’t ask but this is important.”

“What’s going on Donna? Clay finally decided
to marry you? Pitter patter of little feet?” he said.

“You’ll find out with everyone else
tonight.”

Walt had to catch a master class with Mark
Tobey at Cornish, so moving the art supplies was left to Donna.
Tubes of oil paint, rags, palettes, and brushes covered every inch
of the gigantic oak table. Two easels held working canvases.
Completed canvases rested against all the walls. They were out of
the way so she left them there. Walt had two oak chairs piled with
sketches and smelly rags. The rest of the chairs, Donna thought,
were probably stored in the basement. In a pinch she could use the
old white kitchen chairs if she couldn’t get one of the men to go
down into the basement. She swore she wasn’t going into that
horrible hole.

Only once since she moved into the house had
she gone down there, and once was enough. It was a dark, stinky,
moldy cave with a dirt floor and spiders, bringing to mind all the
horror flicks she and her brother used to see on Saturday matinees
in San Jose. “Don’t go down there!” they’d scream at the screen
with all the rest of the audience as some stupid girl in a wispy
nightie started down the cellar steps. And even though Donna didn’t
believe in monsters anymore, her one trip down to the basement had
left her unaccountably shivering and shockey.

She hated the house. Once she and Clay were
married they could get their own place. It didn’t have to be much.
Maybe a little apartment north of town. Somewhere clean and new
that didn’t groan with every night wind, that didn’t smell of
mildew and rot.

Predictably none of the housemates showed up
before Donna had the table set with a large white cloth and the
household’s mismatched dishes. She was keeping an eye on the
bubbling pasta when Ferlin came in from the back yard, wearing his
usual layer of motor oil. No doubt he’d been working on Walt’s beat
up motorcycle. That piece of junk never worked right and never
would no matter how long Ferlin worked on it.

“Dinner’s almost ready,” she said. “Have you
seen any of the others?”

“Yeah, out back catching some cigs. I gotta
get cleaned up.”

Got to avoid helping with the dinner, more
like, she thought.

“Ferlin, before you wash up could you tell
the guys they need to get in here before the spaghetti’s ruined?
I’m draining the noodles right now.”

“I dig,” he said, and went back outside.

Donna emptied the spaghetti noodles into a
colander, then lit candles she had stuck into the mouths of empty
Chablis bottles. By the time the group was assembled in the dining
room the only thing left to do was mix up the sangria punch. Ferlin
volunteered for that. If there was one thing he knew better than
motors it was booze.

Ferlin never did tell anyone what he added
to the punch that night along with the wine and citrus. It was
going to be a far out trip. Mind expanding. Wouldn’t hurt to loosen
up serious Clay and uptight Donna. Even if he had told them, they
might not have heard of the stuff back in 1960. A little weed was
the extant of their highs. Not their scene. Ferlin had his sources
up in the University District, where mostly he’d trade a tune-up or
repair job for party chemicals. It was Charles who figured out what
happened, but that was several years after that night, when he was
using the stuff pretty regularly himself. And by that time it
didn’t matter anymore.

The dinner was everything Donna hoped it
would be and more. The guys devoured the food with gusto. Great
mounds of spaghetti and meat balls disappeared, washed down with
glasses of punch. Little Charles had a second helping of
everything. The talk got more brilliant as the evening wore on.
They discussed philosophy and art theory, Palmer and Clay
contributing their musician’s perspective, Walt speaking to the
visual artist’s point of view. Even Charles had some observations
on composition. Ferlin smiled from his side of the table. Donna
sipped her sangria, a feeling of contentment and love washing over
her.

The candles burned low and the food was
gone. Donna left the dishes right were they were. Caught in the
magic of the moment she realized she didn’t care about the mess.
Tomorrow was soon enough for dish washing.

The group was ready to move the conversation
to the living room but before they did Clay announced he would be
starting at the University of Washington the next quarter. Everyone
toasted his plans and congratulated him. It was such a beautiful
moment Donna wasn’t surprised to realize she had tears running down
her cheeks. Ferlin went to the kitchen, coming back with two six
packs of Rainier beer. The party moved to the living room, leaving
the candles to gutter out one by one.

It was a gold colored room, or rather
permutations of saffron, mustard aflame, dirty sunsets, and
contagion. A few years before, Walt and Palmer painted the walls
with dab-ends they found solidifying in numerous rusty paint cans
in a shed out back. None of the colors in the cans was in evidence
in the house so the paint was probably what was left from one of
Ferlin’s neighborhood projects but he couldn’t remember for sure.
They mixed every drop they could scrape into a galvanized pail,
swirling it around with an old wooden spoon. The resulting color
spread across the rough plaster in hectic streaks and splotches.
They left the woodwork unpainted, the native fir blackened by a
hundred years of smoke and bacon grease. Over the windows a
long-forgotten previous tenant had hung red and blue paisley Indian
bedspreads. Even on bright days they drowned the room in muted
smears like bruises. At night the porch light seeped through the
tattered patterns tattooing the room with twisting vines.

The room contained a couch, a red plush
monstrosity Ferlin found in the alley. Overstuffed chairs with
sprung cushions clustered around the dead fireplace. An iron
chandelier festooned with spider webs dangled from the center of
the ceiling. It had never worked. Ferlin suspected the wiring,
which was always shorting out. The housemates lit the room with
undependable floor lamps or candles. Candles worked best, since
every time the stereo and the lamps were on at the same time the
fuses blew. The carpets were threadbare Orientals that had probably
not been beaten or vacuumed in fifty years. They may have been
bright red at one time but had transmuted into the color of dried
blood. Walt’s paintings layered every wall with a crazy quilt of
dizzying hues. Opposite the fireplace the staircase ascended into
darkness. This was the living room. It encapsulated the housemates
like a cyst.