From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [75]
Mazzioli and the other clerks who congregated mornings at Choy’s to discuss Art and Life were blind. He knew them, so involved in intricate conversation, so secure in pointless argument, they could not see the thing they sought to grasp lay right before them, all around them, and could be touched only momentarily, but never grasped and held by any sharp dissection. It spoke now from the bottomless shallows of a hillbilly song that in its artless simplicity said everything their four-dollar words could never say, went back to a basic simplicity that gave a sudden flashing picture of all life that could never be explained and an understanding of it that could never be expressed.
The clerks, the kings, the thinkers; they talked, and with their talking ran the world. The truckdrivers, the pyramid builders, the straight duty men; the ones who could not talk, they built the world out of their very tonguelessness—so the talkers could talk about how to run it, and the ones who built it. And when they had destroyed it with their talking the truckdriver and the straight duty man would build it up again, simply because they were hunting for some way to speak. He could feel it all there in the song, and in Sal Clark’s howling painful nasal noice. “Feelin mighty weary . . . never did have nothin . . . got a lowdown feelin . . . truckdriver’s blues.”
He had walked a zigzag trail through the parties of beer drinkers over to the corner and stood on the outskirts of the little crowd that always congregates around a guitar player. There was a small group of five actors who were the center. The others, lumped deferentially as onlookers, stood around and sang or listened, beneath the superiority of the creative circle. Andy and Clark had swung into San Antonio Rose, and Prew circled around the outer edge, listening but making no attempt to enter, and Andy had caught sight of him.
“Hey, Prew!” he called, a fawning in his voice. “We need a guitarman. Come on over and sit in.”
“No, thanks,” he said shortly, as ashamed of the flattery in Andy as if it had been in himself, and turned to go.
“Aw, come on,” Andy urged, looking at him through the opening that the crowd had made, his eyes moving all around his face but never resting on it.
“Sure, Prew, come on,” Sal seconded eagerly his wide eyes shining blackly with enthusiasm. “Boy, we’re havin a lot of fun. We even got beer tonight. Say,” he added, rushing the new thought out, “I’m gettin pooped out. How about you takin this one for a while?” It was the greatest offering he could make, but it was the obviousness of it that hit Prew.
“Okay,” he said curtly. He walked over and took the proffered guitar and sat down in the middle of the group. “What’ll we play?”
“How about Red River Valley?” Sal said artlessly, knowing it was Prew’s favorite.
Prew nodded and hit a tentative chord, and they swung into it. As they played Clark pressed the beer pitcher upon him.
“It aint as good as Andy’s new one,” Sal said, nodding at his guitar. “He sold it to me cheap when he bought the new one. Its beat up, but its good enough for me, to learn on.”
“Sure,” Prew said.
Sal squatted in front of them holding the beer pitcher. He was grinning with great joy and he sang the song in that whining nasal, his eyes half shut, his head back and on one side, almost drowning out the rest. When it ended, he took Prew’s empty beercan that had its top cut off to serve as a glass and filled it.
“Here, Prew,” he said anxiously. “You gonna play, you’ll want to wet your whistle. Singin makes a guy get dry.”
“Thanks,” Prew said. He drained the can and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at Andy.
“How about my Talkin Blues?” Andy offered. It was his specialty, that he never liked to do when there was a crowd, but now he was offering it to Prew.
“Okay,” Prew said, and hit a chord to start it off.
“I been lookin for you to come around,” Sal Clark said, above the music. “I been hopin you’d come around, Prew boy.”
“I been busy,” Prew said, not looking up.
Sal nodded quickly. “Yeah,” he said, with grotesque