Blues and Trouble: Twelve Stories

By Tom Piazza

Exploring the diverse landscape of American life, the stories in Blues and Trouble: Twelve Stories capture the lives of people caught between circumstance and their own natures or on the run from fate, from a Jewish couple encountering a dealer in Nazi memorabilia to the troubled family of a Gulf Coast fisherman awaiting a hurricane.

Tom Piazza’s debut short story collection, originally published in 1996, heralded the arrival of a startlingly original and vital presence in American fiction and letters. Set in Memphis, New Orleans, Florida, Texas, New York City, and elsewhere, the stories echo voices from Ernest Hemingway to Robert Johnson in their sharp eye for detail and their emotional impact. New to this volume is an introduction written by the author. Drawing themes, forms, and stylistic approaches from blues and country music, these stories present a tough, haunting vision of a landscape where the social and spiritual ground shifts constantly underfoot.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Sep 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781496841957

Tom Piazza

Tom Piazza is the author of the novels City of Refuge and My Cold War, the post-Katrina manifesto Why New Orleans Matters, the essay collection Devil Sent the Rain, and many other works. He was a principal writer for the HBO drama series Treme and the winner of a Grammy Award for his album notes to Martin Scorsese Presents: The Blues: A Musical Journey. He lives in New Orleans.

Book preview

BROWNSVILLE

I’ve been trying to get to Brownsville, Texas, for weeks. Right now it’s a hundred degrees in New Orleans and the gays are running down Chartres Street with no shirts on, trying to stay young. I’m not running anymore. When I get to Brownsville I’m going to sit down in the middle of the street, and that will be the end of the line.

Ten in the morning and they’re playing a Schubert piano trio on the tape and the breeze is blowing in from the street and I’m sobbing into a napkin. L.G., she used to say, you think I’m a mess? You’re a mess, too, L.G. That was a consolation to her.

The walls in this café have been stained by patches of seeping water that will never dry, and the plaster has fallen away in swatches that look like silhouettes of countries nobody’s ever heard of. Pictures of Napoleon are all over the place: Napoleon blowing it at Waterloo, Napoleon holding his dick on St. Helena, Napoleon sitting in some subtropical café thinking about the past, getting drunk, plotting revenge.

I picture Brownsville as a place under a merciless sun, where one-eyed dogs stand in the middle of dusty, empty streets staring at you and hot breeze blows inside your shirt and there’s nowhere to go. It’s always noon, and there are no explanations required. I’m going to Brownsville exactly because I’ve got no reason to go there. Anybody asks me why Brownsville—there’s no fucking answer. That’s why I’m going there.

Last night I slept with a woman who had hair down to her ankles and a shotgun in her bathtub and all the mirrors in her room rattled when she laughed. She was good to me; I’ll never say a bad word about her. There’s always a history, though; her daughter was sleeping on a blanket in the dining room. It would have been perfect except for that.

The past keeps rising up here; the water table is too high. All around the Quarter groups of tourists float like clumps of sewage. The Black carriage drivers pull their fringed carts full of white people from nowhere up to the corner outside and tell them how Jean Lafitte and Andrew Jackson plotted things out, as if the driver knew them personally. The conventioneers sit under the carriage awning, looking around with the crazed, vacant stare of babies, shaded by history, then move on.

The sun is getting higher, the shadows are shortening, the moisture is steaming off the sidewalks. The Schubert, or Debussy, or whatever it is, has turned into an oboe rhapsody, with French horns and bassoons quacking and palmetto bugs crawling across the tile floor, making clicking sounds that I can’t hear because the music is too loud. If she didn’t love me, why didn’t she just tell me so? I asked her why she lied to me and she said she was afraid to tell me the truth. In other words it was my fault. She doesn’t even have a friend named Debbie.

I keep trying to look at what’s right in front of me. I want to stop trying to mess with the past. The last thing she said to me was, I have to get this other call. But I’m not going to think about her.

One cloth napkin.

One butter knife.

One fork.

One frosted glass containing partly melted ice and a slice of cucumber. Another frosted glass with similar contents. Where’s the waiter? A small menu, marked with coffee along one edge. Breeze from a ceiling fan. Three Germans at the next table. The pictures of Napoleon must make them nervous. A waiter on a stool, leaning back against the wall by the ice chest, hair already pasted to his forehead with sweat.

A white Cadillac just backed into a car parked right outside, making a loud noise and partly caving in the wooden column supporting the balcony above the sidewalk. People are getting up and walking to the door, looking. The driver is Black and is wearing a full Indian costume, plumes mushrooming as he gets out to look. He is about seventy years old; a five-year-old boy waits in the front seat. The driver gets back into the Cadillac and drives off.

One coffee mug at the next table. One crumpled pack of Winstons.

Hopeless.

I saw a sign once, on a building outside Albuquerque, that read ALL AMERICAN SELF-STORAGE. If you could just pay a fee somewhere and put yourself in a warehouse, just for a night.

Brownsville.

I picture a little booth at the edge of town, with a bored­looking woman sitting in it. You pay fifty cents and leave everything you can remember in a box with her. You walk down Main Street at high noon, on the balls of your feet, wearing a leather vest. The one-eyed dogs bark and shy away, walking sideways, eyeing you. You walk into the saloon, which is cool and dark, and order a bourbon. You look in the mirror behind the bar and talk to yourself in the second person. Maybe it would be better to stay outside in the sun.

Here is what morning is like in New Orleans. Just before the sky starts getting light, the last freight train inches its way through Ville Platte and the stars have drifted off to sleep. Slowly, the sky exhales its darkness and the trees look black against the deep blue over Gentilly. The houses along Felicity Street, and farther out toward Audubon Park, are cool to the touch, and dew covers the flower beds. A taxi pulls up to a traffic light, looks, goes through. The smell of buttered toast disappears around the corner and televisions are going in the kitchens of the Black section. The St. Charles trolley, as unbelievable as it was yesterday, shuttles its first serious load toward the business district. Later, the men will have taken their jackets off and folded them in their laps, staring out the streetcar windows, caught in that dream. Already the first shoeshine boys are out hustling on Bourbon Street, and the first dixieland band is playing for the after­breakfast tourists, and the first conventioneers are climbing into carriages at Jackson Square, and the Vietnamese waitresses at the Café du Monde are getting off their all-night shifts, and luggage is lined up on the sidewalk outside the Hyatt.

If there was just some way to stay in it, to be there and see it without starting in. If there was just some way to wipe the slate clean. As soon as I can, I’m going to pay my tab and step outside. I’m closing my accounts and going to Brownsville. I’ll leave everything at the edge of town. I’m going to walk in and take it from there.

BORN YESTERDAY

Laundromat in St. Augustine; I’m almost sure it’s the same one I stopped in ten years ago on my way to Daytona Beach from the Smokies on spring break. It’s raining now, too, stifling and damp. Fluorescent lights; endless hum of dryers. I’m not thinking about Louisa. At least the front door is propped open, so I can watch the cars steam by on Route 1 under the dripping trees. The rain can’t last forever.

A little after dawn I pulled into a rest area at the Georgia border and shaved in a water fountain, and now my chin feels like it skidded on some gravel. There are two others in here: a fat woman wearing black stockings and washing a bedspread, and a good-looking housewife in her mid-thirties, with red hair and long legs leading up into a pair of red short shorts. I’m not in the market, though; not this morning. I just want to get to Daytona, go for a swim in the ocean and eat dinner at the Captain’s Galley, if I can remember where it is. I don’t want to have to make conversation.

I don’t have that much stuff with me: a change of jeans, some underwear, and a couple of shirts is about it. And I’ve got no complaints at all with this Pontiac. What I paid for it doesn’t matter, although it cost me $350. I bought it a week and a half ago in Waycross. It’s sitting outside; feels like having a good woman waiting at home for you in bed. Or waiting in bed for you while you’re in the kitchen cleaning up the drainboard. Although why she couldn’t have cleaned the drainboard herself is another question, which you’ll argue about later, for hours probably.

My clothes are dry, except the waistband and pockets of the jeans are a little damp. This is okay; I can hang them over the balcony railing at the motel. The housewife is stealing glances at me. She is almost beautiful, a little used-looking, with quick green eyes, red hair, and high cheekbones. I’m not biting, though; I don’t want to get into it. I want to keep my mind quiet. You can only fold clothes so fast, but I do it as fast as I can and look forward to getting back to my car, still warm and waiting for me.

I get my stuff bagged up and throw it over my shoulder, smile and wave to her; she smiles a little exhaustedly, wiping her forehead with the back of her wrist. I turn away and try not to lunge for the door. Outside, I open the back door of the Pontiac, throw the bag in, slam the door shut, and climb in the front seat behind the wheel, dig out my keys. Daytona here I come.

Nothing happens when I turn the key in the ignition. Not even a shudder. I wait a second, try it again. Nothing.

The rain has slowed to an elegiac trickle; the sky is a few watts lighter, but still gray. Come on, Mama, I say out loud, patting the dashboard soothingly. Don’t let me down. I turn the key again; no reply.

I try to think if I left the lights on, or the radio, except there’s no radio. The guy said it gets funny sometimes when it’s wet. I get out and open the hood, but I don’t know what I expect to find. Car engines mean nothing to me. It’s like looking at a map of Shanghai. I get behind the wheel again, leave the door open, turn the key one more time; no dice.

I get out of the car and look around as if I might see the answer printed on a tree somewhere. I can feel my dream of Daytona Beach dissolving before my eyes. I’ve been envisioning pulling into the motel parking lot, getting the key at the desk, going up to the room and changing into my bathing suit, running across the sand and slamming into the water, a hot shower and then dinner at the Captain’s Galley. Now I face phone calls, tow trucks, explanations of the problem, and a long wait on a molded plastic chair next to a Coke machine, looking at racks of motor oil and fan belts, with a tinny radio going in the background. On Route 1, a blonde in a white halter top speeds by in a red convertible and disappears. In pure frustration I wind up and punch the back window on the driver’s side, bellowing as thousands of tiny fissures materialize in the glass.

I feel better for about half a second until I see all the blood on my hand, and now I realize that on top of spending hours in a gas station, I’ll probably get to hang out in an emergency room somewhere waiting for stitches, and fill out a whole medical history besides. I’m trying to think of something even more destructive that I can do, that won’t bounce back and hit me in the face, dripping blood on the asphalt, as the housewife walks out the front door of the laundromat. She looks at me, smiling quizzically for a second, until she notices my hand.

My God, she says, setting down her laundry basket. Are you all right? What happened? She comes over, looking at me searchingly.

If I could say something in Ukrainian, or Hindi, or start babbling pure nonsense syllables, I would, but the look of concern on her face is so genuine, and I say, The car wouldn’t start.

She looks at me blankly and I realize that this isn’t really an explanation, so I say, I got mad.

Now her expression is slightly darker, maybe a hint of fear in there somewhere. I don’t want to scare her, so I say, It was the culmination of a lot of small frustrations, and try to smile sheepishly.

She gives up trying to understand what I’m saying and looks at my hand. I’m a little dizzy, and I lean up against the Pontiac, feeling a pang of sadness that I punched it. She turns, says,