Strange Jazz

By Steve Hermanos

From plucking antique furniture from abandoned rural Kansas homes, to exploring the wild underbelly of New York, narrator Jack Pierce describes the decline of his hometown and the kaleidoscopic New York he's privy to as a music critic. Jack is troubled by the rising tension between his two younger brothers: Benji -- a quintessential Wall Street Yuppie bent on becoming the
next Donald Trump -- and Archie -- an idealistic intern at the New York
Times. Archie and Benji clash after the Tompkins Square Riots, when Archie
turns Benji's largest building into a shelter for homeless people. When Benji finds out, he takes matters into his own hands. Jack tries to mediate, only to be kidnapped by a female Coca-Cola-addicted drug lord who develops a crush on Jack. Jazz, poetry, the wheat fields of Kansas, the colorful cast of characters from their dying home town, the edgiest and most beautiful New Yorkers, all are notes and chords in this wonderful symphony of a novel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 21, 2001
• ISBN: 9781469792385

Steve Hermanos

Steve Hermanos is a fiction writer, screenwriter, and film producer. His most recent film, Show Me The Aliens!, is currently finishing production. His short stories about New York City, The Vincent Mercey Sextet, will be published in 2001. He lives in Manhattan. He can be contacted at www.showmethealiens.com or [e-mail].

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Contents

Strange Jazz

Acknowledgments

Strange Jazz

Prologue

BOOK I

BOOK II

BOOK III

BOOKIV

BooK V

BOOK VI

BOOK VII

BOOK VIII

About the Author

Acknowledgments 

It would all be different without Lamar Herrin, Walter Slatoff, Jason Abrams, Tom Adelman, Rebecca Allan, Elizabeth Arlen, Benjamin Arnstein, Donna Bernstein, Brendan Ward, Larry Engel, Janet Roach, Voitech Jasny, David McKenna, Devin Crowley, Kirk Davis, Tommy Jenkins, M. George Stevenson and Constance Stewart, John Dean, Sam and Joyce Stempel, Michael Kunin, Seth Fein, Peter Kaufman, Tom and Lynn Fiffer, Ed Dorn and Janet Hard, Julia Hull, Eddie Wells, Aldon Addy, William Forrest, Julie Sessions, John Gabriel, Lori Mencarelli, Charles Gaspari and Kristen Hamre, Robert and Jodi Gelfand, Marilyn Gilchrist, James Goldstone, Robert and Susan Hermanos, Ellen Hermanos, Phyllis Safran, The Safrans, Michael Knapp and Dr. Laura Metsch, The Knapps, Virginia Rutter, Tracy and Athena Dutton, Alex Schulzycki, Adam and Meredith Klausner, Scott Knapp, Adam Klein, Molly Klein, Michelle Lavery, Monika Lavery, Christopher Lee, Wendy Riss, Larry Lomax, Lia Miller, Dr. Elizabeth Lawrence and Andrew Montgomery, Ross Muir, Dr. and Mrs. Kenneth Palmer, Geoff Potter, Frank Pugliese, Caroline Rhea, The Satloffs, The Cellis, The Potters, The Blocks, Susan Unterberg, Jeff Schaepper, Kayla Schwartz, Anton Schwartz, Rosand Shankman/Rowan Jackson, Sidney Smolowitz, Susan Stamler, Jon Weintraub and Susan Rose, Drs. Hunter Wessells and Bogkie Choi, David Winters, Hannah Wolfe, Susan and Frank Whyman, The Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, and Douglass Zang.

Strange Jazz 

Note to readers: This story takes place during the 1970’s and ‘80’s. Since then, the absurdity has deepened.

Prologue 

I never knew anyone who built up a fortune as quickly as my brother Benji. After plowing through the University of Texas at Austin in three years, he took a place in the investment banking program at Schumacher & Pollen in New York. Two years later he was making a quarter million dollars a year. Then he jumped to Sulzberger, Semel where his salary doubled and he got in on the ground floor of the leveraged buyout craze. He began investing in New York City real estate, especially in the quickly changing neighborhood below Fourteenth Street, above Houston Street and east of Avenue A—an area called Alphabet City.

BOOK I 

—♦—

1. The City

His nose snapped and squished flat against my fist. As Benji collapsed into the arms of his fraternity brothers and business friends, his head flopped back and his eyes rolled up. He was naked from the waist down. The only part of him still stiff was his dick, which waved back and forth as his friends set him on the carpeting.

The hooker he’d been screwing got up off her hands and knees, stood up on her long legs and spiked heels, and took a cigarette from a pack that lay on a round marble table.

A pain roared up from my hand. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d hit anyone. I had never hit Benji before.

Oggie, Benji’s Best Man, a Texas boy with a big, square jaw, cradled Benji’s head, and glared at me, You bastard! Benji’s silk tuxedo shirt was staining red.

He’ll be a mess for his wedding! a small, drunk man screeched at me. I walked away, out of the hotel suite.

2. The Country

Benji, Benji, Benji.

We grew up in Livingstone, Kansas, a town with a Main Street eight blocks long, mostly taken up by abandoned wooden warehouses, the names of the warehouses faded away. We watched rust spread through the orange and white Gulf station sign, as weeds blossomed in two thick clumps where someone had removed the pumps. There was Wheeler’s General Store that closed up when Mr. Wheeler died, and then there was the soda shop. We lived at the beginning of Main Street in a place called the Washington Arms, a two story apartment house, three sides around a parking lot. Me, Benji, Dad, and our youngest brother Archie.

The light at the intersection of Routes 71 and 52 flashed red and yellow through our bathroom window. Route 71 ran directly east-west. It was Main Street for eight blocks, then became 71 again, all the way to the Colorado border. On a hot spring afternoon, the school bus slowed as it approached town. A State truck was parked at the intersection under the traffic light. At first I figured that the man in the cherry picker was fixing the light. Then I noticed a bright, new stop sign at the side of the road. The blinking light never came on again. After that, you’d be sitting on the can in the middle of the night and a truck zooming by on 52 would shake the whole building.

The day they disconnected the light was the day I borrowed the N-No volume of the Collier’s Encyclopedia from school. That morning our Uncle Ernie said his good-byes after a two-day visit. He was working the midwest for the Eugene McCarthy campaign and he spent a lot of time telling us kids about his visits to New York City. He gave me five bucks for my ninth birthday.

Benji and I sat side by side on the blue shag rug, reading the encyclopedia article about New York City. Benji’s thick eyeglasses reflected Gilligan’s Island from the t.v. Behind us Archie watched from the middle of the couch, his tiny P.F. Flyers hanging over the edge. Dad came home and set his tool box behind the door. Stepping his dusty, cracked cowboy boots around Benji and me, he walked to the couch and touched Archie’s head. Then he turned and brushed the tips of his fingers over Benji’s head and my head. That’s the way he said hello to his sons.

Benji and I were bursting with questions about New York. I wanted to know if the mayor was still Fiorello LaGuardia, if the population was still 4.5 million. The encyclopedia was old.

Dad took a drink from a bottle of beer. He wiped his mouth on his white sleeve, and it struck me, with his arm straight and the bottle up there, he sort of resembled the picture of the Statue of Liberty spread out in the book in front of me. Then he stepped to the mantel, right next to the television set. The liquor smell drifted down and our attention alternated between Gilligan making a raft out of coconuts, the encyclopedia article on New York, and Dad standing at the mantel. Staring down at the twenty little photographs in their little frames, he reached into his back pocket, pulled out a pouch of Red Man and dropped a chaw in his mouth. He stood there looking from one picture to the next, picking one up and staring at it only an inch or two from his face. Then he put the picture in its place and he spread his elbows across the mantel, resting his head on his hands and staring into another one of the pictures, the top of his blonde crew cut slowly bobbing as he chewed. Next to him the television was selling Ivory Liquid and Die Hard batteries and Chevrolets.

The photographs on the mantel were of his cows. The earliest one showed Dad at about five years old, his little body bowed out as he held up a ribbon, his hair combed back, in pressed dungarees and a cowboy shirt, standing next to his prize-winning calf. There were group photos of cows, single shots, black and whites, hand-tinted color photos where the color was stronger than in actual life. Cows in the field, cows in the barn. He spat, bing, into the brass spittoon next to the fireplace. Then

he disappeared down the hallway into his room and Big Tex Edwards was crooning out on the old stereo set,

I been fightin’ all day,

Your love’s gone astray,

And I’m screamin’ at the Sun.

When Big Tex Edwards made the sound of wailing coyotes we kids raised our heads and wailed in chorus. This unnerved the neighbors.

Benji and I got up and scrounged the kitchen for food. Just peanut butter and jelly. So Benji, Archie and I went out and along Main Street in the warm, windy Kansas twilight to the soda shop where the women who worked there—everyone called them The Ladies—often took care of us.

3. The City

Full of fear and excitement I took a taxi cab from LaGuardia Airport. The thick lines of traffic snaked toward Manhattan. The cab rose up along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and slowed to a standstill on the viaduct leading to the Midtown Tunnel. The Manhattan skyline spread out in front of me, huge and hovering.

Wow, I said.

I punched my leg because I didn’t want the cabbie to think I was an out of towner.

Luckily he didn’t pick up on my naiveté.

This traffic is murder, he said.

He had long straight black hair. I looked in the rear view mirror and he had a ruddy, lined face. I wondered if he was an Indian, a good old Native American, and I wondered what the hell he was doing driving a taxi cab in New York City. I was too scared to ask him anything.

Did you hear they caught Son of Sam? the cabbie asked me.

Oh, I said. I knew all about Son of Sam, a murderer who later claimed his dog had told him to kill.

I was seventeen years old, and my heart was beating in my throat as I stared out at the skyline. Three weeks before my arrival, the whole city blacked out. No lights, no air conditioning, no burglar alarms. Just about everyone in Livingstone thought I was crazy or else suicidal for wanting to go to New York. I kept telling myself that, out of the eight million population, only a tiny fraction were murdered each year. Even so, all of the warnings, however paranoid, induced me to scrape the money together for a subscription to the New York Post. The Post covered the murders, robberies and assaults of the city in close detail, and I wanted to get used to the idea of violent crime.

Were you here for the blackout? the cabbie read my mind.

No, I replied. I missed it.

It was beautiful, he said. You could see all the stars.

The cab halted at $13.45 and the driver pointed to a blue police barricade blocking off a street. Beyond the barricade a dump truck and a back hoe were belching smoke and a jack hammer was throttling the pavement. The cabbie told me that instead of driving the long way around Washington Square Park, I could walk across the park and make a right and I’d be at Hayden Hall. I lifted my two bulging duffel bags and walked through the park: sunbathers, soccer players, guitar players, old folks talking on benches in the shade, a big circle of people surrounding a bare-chested man juggling fire atop a unicycle.

I stood at an intersection a few blocks past the park, trucks stuck in traffic coughing up smoke, car hoods and bumpers shining an array of suns at me. My shirt was sticking to my back. My gray-and-white-striped seersucker jacket wilted over my arm. The air was heavy and difficult to breathe.

As a drop of sweat dripped off my chin I looked up at the street signs, which were unfamiliar even though I’d studied many maps and guidebooks. I turned from the curb, retreated to a sliver of shade next to a building and dropped my bags. The shade gave no relief from the heat and the thick air. Sweat from my face rubbed off dirty on my white shirt sleeve.

Across the street, between two barely moving trucks, I glimpsed a pizza parlor and imagined sitting for a minute with a cold Pepsi, maybe getting up the nerve to ask the pizza man for directions. Then I heard a howling. Nearby. It sounded like a coyote, or a prairie dog, or a crow with a broken wing. For a second I thought that I’d imagined the sound, it seemed so incongruous in the cityscape, when the howl sounded again. My heartbeat zoomed as I reached down for my bags. Two steps away, an alley about a yard wide cut between tall buildings. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness I reminded myself about the New York Post murders.

Down in the middle of the alley, facing a sheer brick wall, a man sat on the ground, his legs spread. The back of his shirt was torn and his toes showed through his shoes. He shook his fists above his head, looked up, then let out a howl that echoed between the close walls. Opening his upraised hands, he let go a shower of little charms that clattered down in the triangle made by his legs and the building.

A stream of guttural sounds gushed from his mouth as he frantically picked up the little objects, some of which had bounced toward me. He glanced up at me, eyes wide. He had white, curly hair and deep lines in his chalky skin. I couldn’t tell if he was a white man or a black man.

Shaking his full fists with renewed force he turned to the building and again stared at the objects as they rained from his fingers. One of the charms popped up over his leg and as it rolled to my feet I saw that it was a little green house from Monopoly. There were red hotels, green houses, dice, the silver hat, shoe and cannon. I bent down to hand him the house but he rocked toward me and snatched it. Then he looked up, and rocked toward me again. A red hotel was perched on the tip of his index finger.

Boardwalk, Boardwalk, Boardwalk, he babbled. Take it.

I looked into his eyes, realized I’d seen eyes like that before, on a jackrabbit caught in a trap, and in the eyes of Homer, the man who lived in a burrow in the field behind the soda shop back in Livingstone.

I took the red hotel off the man’s finger, retreated into the hot light, picked up my bags and hustled through the traffic to the pizza parlor. I drank my Pepsi and asked directions to Hayden Hall.

Later that semester I found the red hotel in the dish where I kept my pocket change and my keys. I put a match to a pin, melted a hole through one side of the red hotel, and when it cooled I slipped it on the end of my key ring.

4.

The sun hung pale yellow just above the brownstones on St. Mark’s Place. Through the tall windows of Astor Wines and Liquors, the sun projected undersea shadows onto the bottle pyramids. I stretched my arms up, the first morning of fall, six-fifteen a.m. I hadn’t woken up that early since Kansas. It was over four years since I’d left Kansas and I had just about managed to graduate from N.Y.U.

I cut through the diamond shadow of the ten-foot tall brushed metal cube that stands on one of its points, seeming to defy nature, in the middle of Astor Place. In the depths of one drunken night long ago, my roommate Eric Shumpeter and I found ourselves at the cube. He demonstrated how you put a shoulder down and push the cube around on its creaky mooring. Now I yawned as I descended into the subway station. I hopped the No. 6 train to Fifty-first Street.

I was going to meet Benji. He telephoned five days before, on the sixteenth, even though he arrived in New York on the first. He had been too busy to phone me, he said, too busy to go out on the town, too busy to do anything but work.

After finishing his undergraduate business degree, here he was, at the start of his Wall Street training program, full of that all-important real-life word—DIRECTION. I was in my senior year at New York University although I’d been there four-plus years. And I didn’t know what the hell I was going to do.

Over the phone Benji suggested that we meet for breakfast at The Brasserie at six-thirty a.m. He had just finished telling me he was living at Ninety-sixth Street, so I pointed out that The Brasserie, on Fifty-third, was inconvenient for both of us, halfway uptown for me, halfway downtown for him. And I told him that six-thirty was absurdly early for me.

No really, The Brasserie. You’ll like it there, he said. I get to work at seven-thirty, so that’s the only time.

I waited outside the Brasserie’s revolving doors, in Eric’s blue tweed Brooks Brothers jacket that he never wore, a t-shirt, a yellow cotton crew neck sweater, and one of my three pairs of Navy surplus chinos.

From far down the block I recognized Benji’s long, thin face. The body looked like it was stolen from a football player. His chest was puffed up from weightlifting and the legs and torso had lengthened. But he was still half a head shorter than me.

He wore a spotless, dark business suit, starched white shirt, red tie, and held a leather briefcase. His brown mop of hair was chopped and tamed and parted on one side. His trademark thick eyeglasses were gone, replaced by contact lenses.

Damn! I smiled at him. Damn! Look at you!

We hugged. I gripped his hand and pumped it three times, starting one of our old secret handshakes, but his fingers slipped away. He stepped back and grabbed the bottom of my jacket.

Still dressing like a college boy, he said.

I figured he was making a joke, having skipped over me in college.

Screw you, I smiled. Look at you!

A kid who grew up in overalls and church-donated shirts and my hand-me-downs now wore a fine, dark-blue wool pinstriped suit, shining black loafers with tassels, and gold cuff links.

We went through the revolving doors, down a set of steps to the restaurant floor as silverware clanked and customers murmured and a French-tinged voice asked, Poached or fried?

Barely breaking stride, Benji casually waved his hand, Table for two René.

Mister Pierce! the maitre d’ bowed.

Benji introduced me to René, who bowed again. Benji reached in his suit jacket and discreetly handed René a ten dollar bill.

I’ll retrieve a waiter, René turned away.

I stared at Benji, still trying to come to grips that it was my brother on the other side of the table.

I waved vaguely after René.

You didn’t have to give him any money.

Benji shrugged his shoulders.

It’s nothing, he said.

How’s Dad and Archie? I asked. Ben had visited Livingstone in August.

Ben sighed, Dad was talking about going to Alcoholics Anonymous. He sits in his room, same as ever. He’s pathetic.

Why? I asked. It shocked me that Ben would call him pathetic. We all knew Dad had big problems. But none of us ever called him pathetic.

He just is.

Ben pulled back his sleeve and looked at his fancy dial wristwatch, I’ve got to get into work early. I’ve only got fifteen minutes for breakfast.

I laughed, brushed my hand through the air—again I thought he was kidding. Oh you’re nuts, I smiled. I was smiling so much my face muscles hurt.

No really, Jack. His close-set blue eyes were serious. Ben leaned his thin face forward. At school, kids used to tease him, Hot dog face! One kid got detention for going up to Ben and saying, Why such the long face, Benji?

I want to get to work by seven-fifteen, he said.

As the breakfast was served I asked Benji what Archie was like, now a senior in high school. I hadn’t talked to Dad and Archie since Archie’s birthday in June.

Instead of replying, Benji reached both hands across the table, wrapped his hands around my right biceps and squeezed.

I pulled away, What’s your problem?

You could use some working out there buddy boy, he said. Your arms are weak.

Calm down, I rubbed my throbbing biceps.

He held his arm up at a right angle and made a fist. The fine pinstriped wool curved smooth over his bulging upper arm. He leaned his tensed arm toward me.

Feel that, he said.

I looked down at my eggs benedict, the steaming hollandaise sauce. And I remembered the time, just before I left Kansas, when I pinned him to the carpet without much effort.

Go ahead, feel it.

My stomach was queasy. Right next to us sat a table of four tired prostitutes, each in skimpy dresses with fur coats flung over the backs of their chairs. Two snowy white rabbit coats and two silver foxes. They were smoking cigarettes and eating omelettes. One of them, who was holding a mirror and brushing on mascara, gently nodded toward Benji. The other three looked at him. Benji didn’t notice them.

I leaned over my eggs and in a shrill whisper said, The whole restaurant’s staring at us! Cut it out!

Benji whirled his head around at the hookers. Still holding his arm upright he smiled, Mornin’ ladies.

Hi, Morning, two of them smiled tired smiles.

We could get lucky Jack, Benji relaxed his arm.

They’re hookers Ben, I said.

I looked down at my plate, at the congealing hollandaise sauce. I felt sick. I leaned forward and tried to steer the conversation.

Remember everybody’s faces when they saw us setting up for our first rocket show?

Yeah. He took a spoonful of his fruit and yogurt plate and chewed.

It didn’t get much of a rise out of him.

Hey! I said. Remember when Judge Mattingly came over and Dad was passed out in his room and the judge brought us groceries and cooked us spaghetti and meat sauce. Archie stood on a chair next to the stove and watched him make the sauce. Remember?

Benji looked straight through me. He unfolded a Wall Street Journal and placed it on the table.

You’re not going to read this right here are you? I asked. Talk to me Ben!

His eyes narrowed and he leaned forward.

Archie told me you’re an Accounting major, is that right Jack? Elbow planted on the face of the newspaper, he stroked the side of his freshly-shaved face.

Yeah, I sighed, relieved that he was talking to me and not reading the paper. I guess so. I had declared Accounting as my major a few years before.

Then you’re going for an M.B.A. right? Benji continued.

I haven’t decided, I told him. I haven’t really thought about a Masters in Business. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do after college. I just wanted him to get that newspaper off of the table.

Benji grunted and looked at the paper.

Shoot Benji, don’t read the goddamned paper!

My heart was pounding and the veins in my neck were thick. After four-plus years he didn’t have time to talk to me. Or didn’t want to.

Just scanning the headlines Jack.

After glancing at his wristwatch, he asked for the check. Our fifteen minutes spent, we walked to the subway. Next to me, a new man was striding toward Wall Street. I wondered if my old brother was somewhere in that new man.

Down in the subway at the turnstiles, a man dressed in rags held out a paper cup imprinted, I Love New York.

Please, gentlemen, he said. You both look so nice today.

Sorry, I said and shrugged as I waited behind a woman with a bob of black hair, wearing a pinstriped skirt and jacket. A whiff of her floral perfume seemed completely out of sync with the dingy subway station.

Get a job buddy! Benji bellowed behind me. I stopped and turned. Chest puffed up, Benji was shaking his finger at the wide-eyed, stunned, homeless man. Everyone else here works! Benji lectured.

Benji swept his hand toward the platform, full of people holding the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times or reading paperback books. Men in business suits, women in business jackets and skirts. Blue blazers and sport jackets and solid color dresses, fine Italian shoes and clean white sneakers to be exchanged for pumps at the office.

Standing next to Benji on the platform, I offered a little advice, garnered from four years of New York living. You didn’t have to yell at that guy.

What guy? Benji was fumbling with his briefcase, removing the Wall Street Journal.

The homeless guy.

The bum?

Yeah, I said. The bum.

A bum, dum bu bum dum dum, Benji looked down the tunnel for the train.

Remember Homer? I asked him.

Homer lost his farm, and lived for a while in a burrow at the edge of Feiser Creek, a quarter mile south of Main Street. Benji stared up at me, his face flaccid.

Benji shrugged his big shoulders, Yeah I remember Homer. What’s your point?

The No. 6 train was barreling into the station.

Stuff happens to people all the time, I shouted, the muscles at the sides of my forehead coming alive from the combined effect of my shouting and the roaring of the train. That’s the point.

Brakes started squealing.

Benji turned to me and shouted back, a deep bass through the din, Not if they’re smart!

We squeezed into the train. One stop later, at Forty-second, he blurted Goodbye, shot out of the car, bolted across the platform and pushed into the express train.

5.

Goddamned jerk! Damn it! I can’t believe it! I was pacing in the living room, grinding my fist into my palm. It’s that fraternity he joined. That must be it! The frat boys did this to him. Somehow. Shit! Maybe it’s my fault?! Maybe I created this?! Maybe I started the ball rolling!

Stop blocking the t.v. man.

Eric, my roommate, sat lengthwise on the small green couch, his bare feet hanging over one end, the small of his back pressing against the other. His upper body rocked back and forth. A headset squished down his afro and covered both ears. A coiled cord connected him to the television set, which glowed on a table beyond his feet.

His glassy, red-rimmed eyes stared out of his mulatto complexion. He held a can of beer and a half-full liter bottle of Coca-Cola. Next to him our white coffee table was covered with books, cans, bottles, magazines, full ash trays and crusty white cartons of hardened Chinese food. At the edge of the table sat an eight by ten inch mirror of Ronald Reagan in a cowboy hat. A sterling silver Tiffany straw and a tin foil packet the size of a gum wrapper reflected themselves in the mirror.

Eric grew up on Fifth Avenue, had been around the world and concluded that there wasn’t any good reason to leave the island of Manhattan. From the first day I met him—my freshman year, the N.Y.U. computer put us in the same room though he was a sophomore—to the end of our time in college, he went out all night four or five nights a week. Sometimes he took me along and paid my way. I liked the jazz clubs. We often went to the one o’clock set at the Blue Note, and sat among the balding men escorted by women half their age, and the packs of Japanese tourists smoking Marlboros, and it’s also when they only charge