The Strange Gig

He stood hesitantly inside the door. He was wearing the coat to the blue suit and the pants to the brown suit because the coat had gone of the one and the pants of the other. The shirt was a pale blue, a different shade from the coat, and he hoped that no one would notice that he was not wearing socks. He couldn't bear socks with holes in them; he didn't have any other kind.

He was hesitant because he was already wishing that he had not come. It was too late now; the young man bustled over toward him with the frown on his face that meant he was going to get asked why he was here.

"Yes?" the young man said in a voice that was ready to become belligerent though it was not belligerent yet.

"I'm Hardy Moon," Hardy said. He was ashamed that he had to clear his throat before he could answer.

"Oh, yes," the young man said, the frown and the incipient belligerence rapidly clearing. "Come this way, Mr. Moon."

Hardy followed the young man down a side aisle and through a doorway. Only then did Hardy realize why he had not been able to recognize any of the faces among the crowd in the small auditorium. They were all here in the back room.

All the old familiar faces, he thought as the door closed behind him and they turned to regard him. He stood still, looking in his turn, and for a moment there was a stillness across the distance before Bobby Rogers came forward.

"Why, Hardy Moon," he said. He hit him on the upper arm. "It's been a long time."

"Too long," Hardy said.

They came to him, then, and it was a time for shaking hands and talking in quick, short catch-up sentences. His hands were tender from the arthritis this morning and he tried to make the handshakes short. The door opened again and another old face stood there and again, this time Hardy Moon among them, they turned to recognize and assess.

A seedy bunch, Hardy thought. All in all. He looked at the careful clothing, the ravaged faces, the eyes that had long since been emptied from too much seeing, the twitches here and there and the pouches under the eyes and the nervous hands. He put his own hands into his pockets.

"What's the gig?" he asked John Thompson. There was only one man in the room who didn't look on his uppers. Bucky Waters. He had a cashmere overcoat over (continued on page 196)Strange Gig(continued from page 119) his arm, his shoes were shined, and he sported a sparkler on his little finger. Well, Hardy had known that Bucky was still big. His black skin glowed with health and good food and he had gone a little to fat. Bucky looked real good.

"A hundred dollars and travel money," John Thompson said.

"Travel money," Hardy said. "I won't collect much of that. But what's the bit?"

John Thompson shrugged his shoulders. "Don't ask me, man," he said. "They laid it on me, that's all I know."

Hardy saw a face that he had thought long since dead. He moved to greet Thursday, holding out his hand even though it was tender today. Thursday was as tall and lean as in the old days, but his shoulders were stooped now, his face sagged, his hands hung dead at his sides. He used to jig all the time, Hardy thought with a certain sadness. He never could stand still or sit still.

"Why, Thursday," he said. "Where you been?"

Thursday jerked around toward him, his face screwing up with tension. He relaxed when he recognized Hardy.

"Why, Hardy Moon," he said. "Where you been?"

"Around," Hardy said. "Here and there." He made a gesture with his hand. "You know. But, Thursday, I'd have sworn you were a dead man by now."

Thursday's face ticked at him. "I been dead," he said. "I just got out of Lex. Last week. It was a long dead this time, Hardy."

"What's the gig here, anyway?" Hardy said. "They don't look for us to play, do they?"

"I hope not," Thursday said hoarsely. "The old lip's gone, Hardy. Long gone." He stood back, looking at Hardy. "You still look healthy, Hardy boy."

"Sure," Hardy said. "I got my health."

He was a chunky man, with a beefy face, eroded now with deep wrinkles that cut the slopes of his cheeks. He did look healthy, if not prosperous in the mixed suit of clothes he was wearing. But he kept his hands in his pockets. They had always been big hands, with muscular fingers. Now they were knobby, painful hands, strangers to him; especially in the chill mornings they were strange animals attached to his body by nerves and muscles that served only to transmit the agony, that should have been their agony alone, to his sharing brain.

He stood beside Thursday, looking over the group again. He should have been happy to see the old faces that had warped through his life in the crisscross of travel and music that his life had been. But he wished he had not come. The faces were too old, too worn, too hurt by time to give him any happiness in the sight of them. It had been his immediate instinct to say no. But he had said yes instead.

A man came through the door and stopped still, lifting his hand. "All right, men," he said. "All right."

The talk stopped. They moved closer together against his intrusion and then waited for him.

"The Library of Congress is honored by your presence," the man said. "It is indeed a rare experience to bring together so many of the great old musicians. I know that our audience will be thrilled to know that so many of you have come."

They stirred among themselves, looking at one another. Bucky Waters stood tallest in their midst, his expensive cashmere overcoat folded carefully over his arm. Hardy wondered why he had come; he didn't need the hundred. Maybe he needs something else, he thought.

"We did not bring you together beforehand because no rehearsal was needed for this concert," the man said. "We realized that you would want only the best of your music to be played. So we are simply asking you to be introduced, and to sit on the stage while the best of your old records are played. An eminent jazz historian will delineate the development of the music and the part each of you played in it as the concert progresses. Let me express again how very happy we are to have you with us today."

He stopped, turned to a man standing behind him, nodded his head.

"We are ready now," he said. "If you will come?"

They began moving toward the door. Hardy saw that some of them had brought their instruments, stooping to pick up the battered cases, and he felt a sudden stab of shame. For every one of them, himself included.

But he went with the others as they were ushered onto the small stage and into the twin rows of folding chairs placed to one side of the lectern. The eminent jazz historian regarded them blandly from where he waited at the lectern as they shuffled to their seats.

We're a mixed bunch, Hardy thought, sitting still, staring out across the small audience. I wonder what they think of us.

He turned his head to look up and down the line. They were nearly evenly divided between white and black. Hardy knew almost all of them. Sitting among his contemporaries and peers, listening to the eminent jazz historian begin the introductions, he found it hard to believe that this group of men, with the few additions of those who had already vanished from knowledge or had died, had taken the music that had come out of New Orleans and had shaped it into a thing that could be talked about by the kind of man who was talking about it now. Now we're all here, he thought, playing this strange gig. He wished again he had not come.

He stood up to bow when his turn came and listened without emotion as the man talked about Hardy Moon. He no longer had his hands in his pockets. He let the audience and the old friends see them as they were, naked and knotty with arthritis, the fingers lumped ungainly by the accumulation of pain. He looked at the battered instrument cases at the feet of some of the others and he was glad all over again that he had been a piano man. Because he might have brought his instrument, too, if he had been able to tote it.

He sat down again. Because the music was all we had, he told himself. It was a big thing and it was enough. We beat ourselves with the music like it was a pair of fists in a dark alley. But it was a big thing. And now it's gone; gone out of all of us except Bucky Waters, maybe, and maybe it's gone out of him, too, and he's just learned to vamp it.

The music started then. He sat still in his chair and in spite of himself he had to listen. Because it started with the music that had taken him as a boy, played by the men who had been his heroes, and then after a while it was into the records he had sat in on, and it was like going back into time.

That first record; he remembered the barnlike studio where it had been cut, the scariness of the big control console on the other side of the glass wall, how nervous they had all been. They had passed around a bottle before they had started and then they had run through the tune. They passed the bottle again and then they ran through it again. The bottle passed and this time it was a master except somebody fluffed the last bar and they had to do it over again. They did it over a dozen times and by the last time they were all as high as a kite and swinging. They didn't even care that they were in a studio anymore. It had been a great record.

Listening to the eminent jazz historian discussing the wedding of techniques and styles, the careful purpose, the germinal qualities, Hardy Moon knew it didn't have anything at all to do with that cold studio, and the whiskey, and that inscrutable giggling shout that John Thompson had made at the very end.

There were more records. Between records, the eminent jazz historian talked and at the end of each record the small audience dutifully applauded. He looked out into them while the music was playing. They listened as though they were listening to Elizabethan madrigals. To them, Hardy thought, they might as well be. Because it don't connect, it died with the times. Like we ought to have had sense enough to do.

They had been around a long time. Some had hit the very top; but all of them had made their music. Then a new breed of cat came along and they not only had a new kind of music, they even had a language that the old cats couldn't understand. Didn't want to understand. And so, individually and together, they had slipped backward toward the starting places, the ratty little dives and the smoky joints, the scanty gigs and the no-pays. But now they were old, where before they had been young. That made all the difference; especially when the hands were beginning to be tender in the chill mornings and even while he was playing there would come an occasional inexplicable throb of pain.

He shifted in his seat with the sound of a familiar name, an absent name, in the mouth of the eminent jazz historian. Big Lu. Lord, he hadn't thought of her in years. He had closed off Big Lu into a compartment of his mind separate even from the compartment where he kept the memory of the music and the good pair of hands he had had then.

The record started and the voice assailed him, big and rough like always, but as always with that high overtone of promised sweetness that was just like Big Lu herself. Hardy Moon had backed her on piano when she had made that record. But he didn't listen for the sound of himself; he wallowed in the sound of her voice. Big Lu.

She had been a St. Louis society gal. Big. Blonde. Handsome. Oh my, how handsome. She had started coming over to East St. Louis to the old Blue Moon where the musicians went after their regular gigs. For a long time, for more than a year, she'd just sat and listened. Then one night she had stood up away from the table of her friends and started belting with that big voice of hers. She had it; she really had it.

After that she was welcomed onto the stand. Later, she left with one of the combos and by that time she was no longer St. Louis society, she was jazz. Listening to her voice now, he wondered what kind of guts it had taken to make that kind of switch, what kind of feelings she must have left behind her.

They had all loved Big Lu. She had a big body and a big heart and a big voice. Hardy Moon had loved her, not like the other musicians but with a personal aching kind of love. She had sung with Hardy's Boys while he was fronting that group, and every night for three years he had made up his mind all over again to ask her to marry him.

But he never had. By that time Big Lu was busy integrating her love life. She started out society and she became jazz. And she believed she couldn't be jazz without dropping all that St. Louis prejudice. God knows how many of those black boys had changed their luck for the first time on Big Lu. She went from one to the other like she had to keep on proving it over and over again and all the time Hardy Moon was aching to talk love to her like he talked piano behind her voice. But he never had. The time had never come when she had known that he was in the world as anything but a piano player, and so she had drifted on out of his life and he had sealed it all off and kept it as fresh as the day it was born.

Still fresh, he realized as the record came to an end and the dry voice of history took up the beat. He had been in San Francisco when Big Lu had died in Bellevue from too much heroin someone had smuggled to her in a comic book. She was old and finished by then, the magnificent voice become the croak of a crow, the great flesh gone to fat and then the fat lost so that the skin wrinkled and sagged and the face seemed a thousand years old.

Hardy looked down the line at Thursday. Thursday was jittering. Hardy could see his knee popping up and down, his hands moving unconsciously one over the other. He's gonna take that hundred bucks and travel money and pop himself right back into Lexington, Hardy thought.

We all beat ourselves to death with the music, Hardy thought sadly, listening to the next record. Horse and Mary-Jane, whiskey and gin, the no-sleep and all the traveling. We made the music everything there was, love and home and even friendship. And so the music used us up.

He remembered the drummer who thought he couldn't beat the skins fast enough. He remembered the trumpet player who couldn't hit the high note. He remembered the white boy who couldn't ever get the nigger-note on his horn.

There had always been the idea around, Hardy remembered, that the good jazz called for the horse and the gin and Mary-Jane. You had to loosen yourself up inside, turn loose that part that just wouldn't turn loose. Hardy hadn't ever believed it. He had said always, to himself and to the others, that the music came out of the good part of a man, the healthy part. He'd never taken to the vices, even though everybody kept telling him that the vices were a part of the gig, just like the travel.

It was expected, not only by the musicians, by the music, but by the audience. They wanted to see the tired unsleeping, the tics of dope hunger. They got part of the thrill that way. Hardy Moon had never done it, yet he had stayed with the best of them. He had told even the great ones that they could be better if they'd just lay off the stuff and the booze and get some sleep once in a while. They had all laughed at him.

Another record was on. He listened to the sound of the piano, looking clown at his hands, nursing the tender ache. Many were the times he had walked off that after-hours bandstand to go to bed. Many were the times he rose up in the morning the only man clear-eyed enough to get the group on to the next town and the next night. God, the guys he'd wrung out in his time.

And here we are, he thought, looking at the group of shabby men with shabby faces. We don't even play our own gigs anymore. We sit and listen to the ghosts of ourselves and we're glad, even though some of us brought our instruments, that they didn't ask us to play a set. Because the lip is gone, the technique is gone; the spirit is gone. We died when the music died.

Because Old Man Time is the biggest vice of all and everybody's hung up on him.

Abruptly the concert was over. The audience stood, applauding, and they all stood. The eminent jazz historian bowed and smiled, bowed and smiled. They started shuffling off the stage. The historian did not come to speak to them, but departed briskly on his lucrative way, his brief case swinging like a businessman's.

They clustered in the room behind the stage and waited until the man came. They shuffled into line before the table with the cashbox to receive their money. Hardy looked to see if the cashmere overcoat was waiting for its pay. Bucky Waters was gone.

Hardy came up to the table in his turn. "Transportation?" the man said.

Hardy hesitated. "The way I came," he said, "it didn't cost me anything."

"An even hundred, then," the man said.

Hardy took the money and put it into his pocket. He left the room and walked outside the building. Some of the musicians were clustered there. Thursday came toward him, and John Thompson.

He did not want to talk to them. He did not want to talk to anybody ever again. His arthritic hands were aching with a fierce pain.

"See you around," he said.

"We'll get together," John Thompson said. "Where you living, Hardy?"

"Here and there," Hardy said. "You know."

He walked away until he was in the clear. He went down the street without looking back at the massive old building. He crossed at the light and went into the park. He had closed it all off, shut the door again as it had been shut for so long now.

He sat down on the familiar park bench. The sun was shining on him and the warmth felt good. It used us, he thought. Maybe I was right in my idea or maybe the others were right. But right or wrong, it used us up and that was the all of it. Because didn't a one of us ever learn to vamp it. Unless maybe it was Bucky Waters. And maybe he didn't either, maybe he just found a way to last that the rest of us couldn't find.

"Where have you been today?" the old man who always sat on the bench with him said. He had the checkerboard under his arm.

"I been to the Library of Congress," Hardy Moon said.

"What you wanting to go to the Library of Congress for?" the old man said.

Hardy leaned back on the bench. He felt the warmth of the sun begin to penetrate to the pain of his knotted hands. He put one of the hands into his pocket to feel the smooth texture of the money.

"Well," he said. "You got to play your gigs where you find them."