Coming Through Slaughter - Michael Ondaatje [12]
Among the cornet players that came after Bolden the one who was closest to him in volume and style was Freddie Keppard.
‘When Keppard was on tour with the Creole Band, the patrons in the front rows of the theatre always got up after the first number and moved back.’
He found himself on the Brewitts’ lawn. She opened the door. For a moment he looked right through her, almost forgot to recognize her. Started shaking, from his stomach up to his mouth, he could not hold his jaws together, he wanted to get the words to Robin or to Jaelin clearly. Whichever one answered the door. But it was her. Her hand wiping the hair off her face. He saw that, he saw her hand taking her hair and moving it. His hands were in his coat pockets. He wanted to burn the coat it stank so much. Can I burn this coat here? That was not what he wanted to say. Come in Buddy. That was not what he wanted to say. His whole body started to shake. He was looking at one of her eyes. But he couldn’t hold it there because of the shake. She started to move towards him he had to say it before she reached him or touched him or smelled him had to say it. Help me. Come in Buddy. Help me. Come in Buddy. Help me. He was shaking.
TWO
Back then, Webb, there was the world of the Joseph Shaving Parlor. The brown freckles suspended in the old barber-shop mirror. This is what I saw in them. Myself and the room. Nora’s plant that came as high as my shoulder. The front of the empty chair, the fake silver roller for the head to rest on. The wallpaper of Louisiana birds behind me.
The Joseph Shaving Parlor was the one cool place in the First and Liberty region. No one else within a mile could afford plants, wallpaper. The reason was good business. And the clue to good business, Joseph knew, was ice. Ice against the window so it fogged and suggested an exotic curtain against the heat of the street. The ice was placed on the wood shelf that sloped downwards towards the window at knee level. The ice changed shape all day before your eyes. Each morning I walked along Gravier to pick up the blocks of it and carried them into the parlor and slid them onto the slope. By 3.45 they had melted and drained through the boards into the waiting pails. At 4.00 I carried these out and threw the filthy water over the few plants to the side of the shop. The only shrubs on Liberty. The rest of the day I cut hair.
Cut hair. Above me revolving slowly is the tin-bladed fan, turning like a giant knife all day above my head. So you can never relax and stretch up. The cut hair falls to the floor and is swept by this thick almost liquid wind, which tosses it to the outskirts of the room.
I blow my nose every hour and get the hair-flecks out of it. I cough them up first thing in the morning. I spit out the black fragments onto the pavement as I walk home with Nora from work. I find pieces all over my clothes even in my underwear. I go through the evenings with the smell of shaving soap up to my elbows. It is there in my fingers as I play. The layers of soap all day long have made another skin over me. The cleanest in town. I can look at a face and tell how long ago it was shaved. I work with the vanity of others.
I see them watch their own faces for the twenty minutes they sit below me. Men hate to see themselves change. They laugh nervously. This is the power I live in. I manipulate their looks. They trust me with the cold razor at the vein under their ears. They trust me with liquid soap cupped in my palms as I pass by their eyes and massage it into their hair. Dreams of the neck. Gushing onto the floor and my white apron. The men stumbling with no more sight to the door and feeling even through their pain the waves of heat as they go through the door into the real climate of Liberty and First, leaving this ice, wallpaper and sweet smell and gracious conversation, mirrors, my slavery here.
So many murders of his own body. From the slammed fingernail to the sweat draining through his hair eventually bleeding