They took my password at the front door and I walked into that long ago I’d heard at the top of the stairs. The room I came into was large, maybe forty feet by sixty; it was most of the bottom floor.
It was a room full of black people, with a number of slumming whites.
The Black Chantilly was started to entertain these wealthy white folks, Jackson had said. They liked to feel that they had some connection with real soul.
The far wall was a big window that looked down on the nighttime vista of L.A. lights. It looked as if a galaxy had been pulled down out of the skies and laid, like a sheet, across the land.
In the center of that spectacle was a boy-sized man holding on to a silver trumpet. He was playing a high staccato riff that had temporarily dampened conversation. Behind the man was a simple wooden chair. I imagined how Lips McGee would fall back into that chair after finishing a set.
There was a big fat bass man and a beret-crowned drummer behind Lips but they had run out of ways of keeping up with the old master. Their hands were down and the only beat they kept was with barely nodding heads.
Lips brought it up as high as he could and stopped. He licked his lips and took a tight breath, then he hit a note that was somewhere west of the moon. He was a coyote calling up the dead; and we were all willing to hear his desecration.
When he finished, the bass man thumped in; the drummer decided on brushes after that fine high plateau. Lips sat down and wiped his face. The room cheered him. Cheered him for all the years he’d kept us alive in northern apartments living one on top of the other. Cheered him for remembering the pain of police sticks and low pay and no face in the mirror of the times. Cheered him for his assault on the white man’s culture; his brash horn the only true heir to the European masters like Bach and Beethoven.
Or maybe they were just applauding a well-made piece of music.
“Drink, mister?” She was young and doe brown. The high I got off of Lips’s music made me think that there were whispering secrets in her heart.
“Drink?” the young woman asked again.
“Yeah, I mean, no. I don’t drink.”
“Seventh-Day Adventist?” she asked.
“Naw. Just a man who’s seen one good time too many.”
She liked me. Her eyes said so. “I could get you a soda. You got to buy three drinks in here if you wanna stay. Either that or go up to the gamblin’ room. You gamble?”
“Only with my life,” I said. I guess it was the right answer because her shoulders bounced up and down telling me that she would have liked to laugh with me if she wasn’t on duty.
“You work here long?” I asked.
“’Bout a year or so.”
“You know Holland and Roman Gasteau?”
“The twins?”
“Yeah.”
“They dead.” She did something with her lips that meant she’d been through a lot in life, that she’d learned to leave the dead where they lay.
“You know ’em?”
“Not really. I seen Roman a couple’a times after work. He used t’go out wit’ some’a the guys out back after we closed up. You know we like to go out then.”
“Where you go that late?”
“Place called the Hangar,” she said. “Offa Avalon. They make scrambled eggs an’ serve it wit’ scotch if you want it.”
“That Roman owed me some money,” I said, speculating.
“You gonna need a shovel t’get it.”
“He had some partners. If I could find out who they were maybe I could collect what’s mine.”
“He owe you a lot?” Her interest in me was shifting but it was no less intent.
“To some people. I mean, maybe twenty-five hundred dollars don’t mean much to you but I could use it to fill out my pockets.”
“You got a car?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“You could come on an’ meet me up at the torch after three. I could take you on down to the Hangar. Roman’s friend Tony prob’ly be there. He works here but this his night off. He usually come down to the Hangar if he workin’ or not.”
I touched her arm and asked, “What’s your name?”
“Hannah.”
“Well, Hannah, maybe I’ll go see what’s happenin’ around here in the meanwhile.”
“I still got to get you a drink,” she said.
I laughed and ordered a glass of milk.
