• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 361 0

storefront of a Jewish fish wholesaler and a medical supply company whose grimy display windows featured, and had gone on featuring ever since, a miniature family of headless and limbless human torsos dressed up in exact, tiny replicas of hernia trusses. On the avenue side there were only a fire door and a rusted sign that said FRANKLIN’S in looping script; you got in through the alley around back, where you found a small parking lot and a large man named Clement, who was there to look you over, assess your character, and pat you down if he thought you might be packing. He didn’t come off as a very nice person the first time you met him, and he never got any friendlier. The owner, Carl Franklin, was a local boy—he’d grown up on Conkling Street, a few blocks away—who’d worked as a drummer in big bands and small combos during the fifties and sixties, including a stint in one of the late Ellington configurations, and then come home to open the Hi-Hat as a jazz supper club, aiming to attract a class clientele. There was a beautiful old Steinway grand, a luminous bar of glass brick, and the walls were still hung with photographs of Billy Eckstine, Ben Webster, Erroll Garner, Sarah Vaughan; but the place had long since devolved into a loud R & B joint, lit with pink floodlights, smelling of hair spray, spilt beer, and barbecue sauce, catering to a shadowy, not particularly sociable crowd of middle-aged black men and their ethnically varied but uniformly irritable dates.

I remember that I had been dangling unhappily from the rope of my new life as an English professor in Pittsburgh for about three months, friendless, bored, and living alone in a cramped flat over a Ukrainian coffee shop on the South Side, when Crabtree showed up, dressed in a knee-length leather policeman’s coat, with a sheet of Mickey Mouse acid and sixty-five hundred dollars in severance pay from a men’s fashion magazine that had just decided to fire its literary editor and get out of the unprofitable fiction business once and for all. I was so glad to see him. We set out immediately to reconnoiter the bars of my new hometown—Danny’s, Jimmy Post’s, the Wheel, all of them gone now—landing in the Hat, on a Saturday night, when the Blue Roosters, the house band at that time, were joined onstage by a visiting Rufus Thomas. We were not only drunk but tripping our brains out, and thus our initial judgment of the welcome the Hat afforded us and of the level of the entertainment was not entirely accurate—we were under the impression that everybody there loved us, and as I recall we also believed that Rufus was singing the French lyrics of “My Way” to the tune of “Walkin’ the Dog.” At a certain point in the evening, furthermore, one of the patrons was badly beaten, out in the alley, and came stumbling back into the Hat with his ear hanging loose; Crabtree and I, having consumed four orders of barbecued ribs, then spent a fiery half hour unconsuming them, taking turns over the toilet in the men’s room. We’d been going back ever since, every time Crabtree came to town.

It was about ten-thirty when I walked into the Hat and submitted myself to the X-ray gaze of Clement. I was glad that I’d thought to give Tony Sloviak the little gun; it was said that if you tried to enter the Hat with a weapon concealed even in the innermost recess of your body, Clement would still do what was necessary to relieve you of it. The house band was between sets, and the jukebox was playing Jimmie Rodgers. I stood a moment on the apron of baby-aspirin-orange carpeting that ran all the way around the lounge, trying to get my bearings. It had been a couple of years since my last visit and things seemed to have deteriorated. The plywood subfloor showed through the carpet, which was pocked with cigarette burns and stained everywhere by substances whose nature I didn’t care to speculate on. The wall of mirrored tile was gapped like a bad smile with empty spaces. Behind the bandstand someone had defaced the big mural, which showed the proprietor wailing away behind an enormous fortress of a drum kit.