Cockfighter (10 page)

I took a fresh sheet of paper out of my notebook, sat down at the desk and looked at it, trying to figure out a strong selling point for my slender abilities. At last it came to me, a simple straightforward statement of fact. In large capital letters I wrote JOB on the page, and put the slip of paper in my shirt pocket. If a prospective owner was interested in the word JOB he would give me an audition and my guitar would have to talk for me.

I checked the little square felt-covered box inside the case, and there were plenty of extra plastic picks and two new strings wrapped in wax paper. As I started toward the door, carrying my guitar, I caught a glimpse of my grim, determined expression in the mirror. I almost laughed. I made an obscene gesture with my thumb at my grinning reflection and left the room.

The time was only ten thirty. There were dozens of bars, cabarets and beer-and-wine joints in Jacksonville, and I decided to cover them all, one by one, until I found a job.

I entered the first bar I came to down the street and handed the slip of paper to the bartender. He glanced at it, gave it back and pointed to the door.

At the bar on the next corner I tried a different tactic. I had learned a lesson in the first bar. Before presenting my slip of paper to the man in the white jacket, I made the sign of the tall one, and put change on the bar to pay for the beer. Beer is the easiest drink there is to order, whether you can talk or not. No matter how noisy a place is you can always get a bartender's attention by holding stiff hands out straight, the right hand approximately one foot above the left. This gesture will always produce a beer, draft if they have it, or a can of some brand if they do not.

“Sorry, buddy,” the bartender returned my slip of paper, “but I don't have a music and dancing license. I couldn't hire you if I wanted to.”

I finished my glass of beer and returned to the sidewalk. A license for music and dancing had never occurred to me, but that simple requirement narrowed my search. I decided to become more selective. After bypassing several unlikely bars, and walking a half-dozen blocks, I came to a fairly nice-looking cabaret. There was a small blue winking neon sign in the window that stated Chez Vernon. The entranceway was between a men's haberdashery and a closed movie theater. To the left of the bar entrance another door opened into a package store, which was also part of the nightclub, and there was a sandwich board on the sidewalk announcing that the James Boys were featured inside every night except Sunday.

There were four eight-by-ten photos of the James Boys mounted on the board, and I studied them for a moment before I went inside. They wore their hair long, almost to the shoulder, but they had on Western style clothes. They were evidently a country music group. In the smiling photos two of them had Spanish guitars like mine, one held an electric guitar and the remaining member peeped out from behind a bass. I entered the bar.

The bar was in a fairly narrow corridor—most of the space it should have had was crowded out by the partitioning for the package store—but there were approximately twenty-five stools, and a short service bar at the far end. Only one bartender was on duty, and there was only one customer sitting at the first stool. The customer sat with his arms locked behind his back glaring down distastefully at a double shot of whiskey. At night, with a fair-sized crowd a bar this long would require at least two bartenders.

Beyond the bar there was a large square room with a small dance floor, a raised triangular platform in the corner for the musicians and two microphones. There were about thirty-five small circular tables, with twisted wire ice-cream parlor chairs stacked on top of them. The walls of the large room had been painted in navy blue. Silver cardboard stars had been pasted at random upon the wall and ceiling to simulate a night sky. The ceiling was black, and the scattered light fixtures on the ceiling were in various pastel colors.

Between the bar and nightclub section there were two lavatories, with their doors recessed about a foot into the wall. A crude effort at humor had been attempted on the restroom doors: One was labeled SETTERS and the other POINTERS. After sizing the place up, I sat down at the far end of the bar and made the sign of the tall one. As I reached for the stein with my left hand, I handed the bartender the slip of paper with my right.

“I only work here,” he said indifferently, eyeing my guitar. “The James Boys are supposed to play out the month, but the boss is in the back.” He pointed to a curtain covering an arched doorway near the right corner of the bandstand. “Go ahead and talk to him if you want to.” His face colored slightly as he realized I couldn't talk, but he smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “His name is Mr. Vernon. Lee Vernon.”

As soon as I finished my beer, I picked up my guitar, dropped a half dollar on the bar and headed for the back, pushing the curtain to one side. The hallway was short. There was a door leading to an alley, and two doors on either side. I opened the first door on the right, but it was a small dressing room. I knocked at the door opposite the dressing room and didn't enter until I heard “Come in.”

For a nightclub owner, Lee Vernon was a much younger man than I expected to meet. He was under thirty, with a mass of black curls, a smiling well-tanned face, and gleaming china-blue eyes. There were three open ledgers on his gray metal desk and a few thick manila folders. He tapped his large white teeth with a pencil and raised his black eyebrows. I removed my guitar from the case before I handed him the slip of paper.

Lee Vernon laughed aloud when he saw the word JOB and shook his head from side to side with genuine amusement. “A nonsinging guitar player!” he exclaimed, still smiling. “I never thought I'd see the day. Go ahead”—he looked at my name burned into the guitar box—“Frank, is it?”

I nodded, and wiped my damp fingers on my jacket so the plastic pick wouldn't slip in my fingers. I put my left foot on a chair, and cradled the instrument over my knee.

“Play anything, Frank,” Vernon smiled. “I don't care. I've never turned down an excuse to quit working in my life.”

I vamped a few chords and then played “Empty Pockets” all the way through. Mr. Vernon listened attentively, tapping his pencil on the desk in time with the music. This was the shortest of my three songs, but it sounded good in the tiny office. The ceiling was low and there was a second-listen effect reverberating in the room, especially during the thumping part.

“I like the sound, Frank,” Vernon said. “You're all right. All right. But I don't think I can use you right now. I'm trying to build the Chez Vernon into a popular night spot, and the James Boys pretty well fit the bill. I pay them eight hundred a week and if I pay much more than that for music, I'll be working for them instead of for myself. Do you belong to the union, Frank?”

I shook my head. The idea of any free American male paying gangsters money for the right to work has always struck me as one of the most preposterous customs we have.

“Tell you what,” Vernon said reflectively. “Do you really need a job?”

I nodded seriously.

“Okay, then. The James Boys play a forty-minute set, and then they take a twenty-minute break. They play from nine till midnight, an extra hour if the crowd warrants it, and till two a.m. on Saturday nights. In my opinion, a twenty-minute break is too long, and I lose customers sometimes just because of it, but those were the terms I hired them under. If you want to sit in by yourself on the stand to fill the breaks I'm willing to try it for a few nights to see how it goes. I can give you ten bucks a night, but that's the limit.”

For a few moments I thought about it, but ten dollars was too much money to give me when I only knew three songs. I held up five fingers.

“You want fifty dollars?” Vernon asked incredulously.

I shook my head and snapped out five fingers.

“You're a pretty weird cat.” Vernon laughed. “Not only do you not sing, you're honest. Five bucks a night it is, Frank. But I'll tell Dick James to clean out his kitty between his sets, and any tips you get on the breaks belong to you. You'll pick up a few extra bucks, anyway.”

I nodded, shook hands with my employer and returned my guitar to its case.

“Come in about eight thirty, Frank,” Vernon concluded the interview, “and I'll introduce you to the James Boys.”

I returned to the hotel and stretched out on my bed for a nap. Although I had taken a lower figure than the ten he offered, I still felt a little uneasy. After Lee Vernon heard me playing the same songs all evening he wouldn't be too happy about it. But during the days, maybe I could make up a few more. If so, I could ask for a raise to ten. The immediate problem was remedied. I could pay my room rent of three dollars a day and eat on the other two until I could work my way out of the hole with an ingenious plan of some kind.

A few minutes later I was asleep.

THE JAMES BOYS
were very good. If Lee Vernon was paying them eight hundred dollars a week, they were worth every cent of it.

I sat at the end of the bar where I could take in the entire room, enjoying the music and the singing, and the antics of the patrons at various tables. Not many of the couples danced. It wasn't the smallness of the floor that prevented them from getting to their feet, it was just that the James Boys were more amusing to watch than they were to dance to. They wore red Western shirts with white piping on the collars and cuffs, but they didn't restrict their playing to Western music. They seemed to be equally at home with calypso and rock ‘n' roll. Each of the boys, in turn, sang into the microphone, and they all had good voices.

Dick James was at the microphone, and his face had a mournful expression. He said, “It is now my sad duty to inform you, ladies and gentlemen, that for the next twenty minutes we will be absent from the stand.”

He held up a hand to silent the murmurs of disappointment. “We don't want to go. Honest! It's just that we can't afford to drink here. We have to go down the street to a little place where the drinks are cheaper. And I might add,” he said disingenuously, “unwatered!”

A very small ripple of laughter went through the room. Perhaps the patrons of the Chez Vernon thought their drinks were watered.

“But during our brief absence, the management has obtained for your listening pleasure, at
great
expense, one of the world's greatest guitarists! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Frank Mansfield!”

I had been so engrossed in watching and listening, and drinking a steady procession of beers, I hadn't realized how quickly the time had passed. To a burst of enthusiastic applause led by the four James Boys, I threaded my way through the close-packed tables to the stand. As I sat down in a chair on the stand and removed my guitar from its case, Dick James lowered the microphone level with my waist.

“Good luck, Frank,” he said, and followed the other members of the group into the hallway leading to the dressing room. I was in shirt sleeves, but wore my hat. I wished that I could have gone with them, picked up my coat in the dressing room, and made a getaway through the back door to the alley. In anticipation of fresh entertainment, the audience was fairly quiet. I felt like every eye was on me as I sat under the baby spot on the small, triangular stand.

I delayed as long as I could, well aware that I had twenty full minutes to fill before the James Boys returned, and not enough music to fill it with. I vamped a few chords, tuned the A string a trifle higher, and then played “Empty Pockets.” The moment I hit the last chord, I got to my feet and bowed from the waist to the thin, sporadic applause. Before playing “Grandma's Quilt,” I went through the motions of tuning again, and slowed the tempo of the song as I picked through it. The applause was stronger when I finished. By this time the crowd realized that my music was unusual or, at least, different. My last number was the best, my favorite, and my nervousness had disappeared completely. There was hardly a sound through the audience as I played “Georgia Girl,” but when I finished and stood up to take a bow, the applause was definitely generous.

“I could take lessons from you,” Dick James said, as he climbed onto the stand. “You make some mighty fine sounds, Frankerino.”

I nodded, smiled and wet my lips. The James Boys were also unaware that my repertoire only consisted of three homemade numbers. Lee Vernon, a tall drink in his hand, crossed the room and congratulated me. He whispered something to Dick, and readjusted the microphone. I had returned my guitar to the case and was halfway to the bar when Vernon's voice rasped out of the speakers in the ceiling.

“Ladies and gentlemen, there's something you don't know about Frank Mansfield!” His voice stopped me, and I looked down at the floor. “In view of his great manual dexterity, it may be difficult to believe, but Frank Mansfield is the only deaf-and-dumb guitar player in the world! Let's give Frank another big hand? Let him feel the vibrations through the floor!”

As the drunken crowd applauded wildly and stomped their feet on the floor, I ran across the room, pushed aside the curtain to the hallway, and rushed blindly into the dressing room. I supposed Lee Vernon meant well, but I was angered by his announcement. Not only did I want to quit, I wanted to punch him in the nose. In view of his stupid announcement, he would be damned well embarrassed when I played the same three songs forty minutes later.

There was an open bottle of bourbon on the dressing room table. I hit it a couple of times and smoked five cigarettes before my next appearance on the stand. Tiny James, the bass player, came and got me.

“You're on, Mansfield.” He jerked his thumb. “Dick's announced you already.”

I returned to the stand and got out my guitar. The room had twice as many patrons and the air was blue with smoke. Vernon's announcement had created a morbid interest. The bar crowd had pushed their way in and standees blocked the way to the service bar. The moment I picked up my instrument and strummed a few triplets, there were shushing sounds from the tables and the room was silent.