Cockfighter - Charles Ray Willeford [35]
He drained his glass and opened the door. His shoulder hit the side of the door as he left, and he staggered slightly as he walked down the hall.
I closed the door and sat down, facing the back of the chair. If a man accepts life logically, the unexpected is actually the expected. I should have known he wouldn't fire me. A nightclub owner, by the fact that he is a nightclub owner, must necessarily accept things as they are. Vernon had accepted the situation cheerfully, like a peacetime soldier who finds himself suddenly in a war. There was nothing else he could do.
I had wanted to quit, but now I was unable to quit. I was in an untenable position. I had only one alternative. Every time I played my twenty-minute stint, I would have to improvise something new. If I couldn't do it, I would have to walk away and not even stop to collect the five dollars I had coming to me. It was unfair to keep playing the same three songs over and over.
I took another drink, a short one this time. I was beginning to feel the effects of the whiskey on top of the beers I had had earlier. I made my decision. When my turn came to play again I would improvise music and play something truly wonderful. After Dick James announced me, I sat quietly in my chair, the guitar across my lap, a multicolored pick gripped loosely between my right thumb and forefinger. The room was filled to capacity. Under the weak, colored ceiling lights I could make out most of the faces nearest the stand. There was a hint of nervous expectancy in the room. Here is a freak, their silence said, a talented, deaf-and-dumb freak who plays music he cannot hear, who plays for applause he can only feel. This was the atmosphere of the Chez Vernon, caused in part by Lee Vernon's earlier announcement, and by my last session on the stand when the listeners had heard a different kind of music. Vernon sat at a table close to the platform, his face flushed with liquor, a knowing smile on his lips. On his left was a young man with long blond hair, dressed in a red silk dinner jacket, white ruffled shirt, and plaid bow tie. On Vernon's right, a tall pink drink before her, was a woman in a low-cut Kelly green evening gown. She was in her early forties, but she was the type who could pass easily for thirty-nine for a few more years.
Her lips were wet and shiny, and her dark eyes were bright with excitement as I caught them with mine and held them. She nodded politely, put long tapering fingers to her coal black hair. The woman and the young man at Vernon's table stood out from the crowd. Most of the patrons were wearing short-sleeved sport shirts. Only the younger men with dates wore coats and ties. Lee Vernon raised his glass and winked at me.
The microphone was less than a foot away from my guitar. I tapped the pick on the box. The sound, amplified by six speakers, sounded like knocking on a wooden door. Scratching the wooden box of the Gibson produced a sound like the dry rasping of locusts. The locusts reminded me of the long summer evenings in Mansfield, Georgia, and I thought about the bright silvery moths circling the lamp on the corner, down the street from Grandma's house.
I played their sound, picking them up and flying and flickering with them about the streetlight, teasing them on the “E” string.
Down the block, swinging to and fro on a lacy, metal porch swing, the chains creaking, complaining, a woman laughed, the joyful, contented laughter of a well-bred southern woman, a mother perhaps, with two young children, a boy and a girl, and the little boy said something that amused her and she laughed and repeated what the child said to her husband sitting beside her.
I played that.
And I repeated the solid rumbling laugh of her husband, which complemented her own laughter, and