Los Angeles Stories. Ry Cooder
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“Look it up.”
Lou was getting nervous, he wanted me to leave. I looked up “Music Teachers.” It was mostly women teaching in the home. Mostly piano and violin. I came across The Saxophone Shop, Leo Schenck, 319 Spring St. R1121. I called the number from a pay phone. He sounded like an older man.
“This is Leo.”
“Do you teach clarinet?”
“Age?”
“Thirty-eight.”
“Too old.”
“I’d like to try.”
“Why?”
“I was given a clarinet.”
“Bring it in.” Leo sounded tired, and it was only eleven in the morning. I walked there. It was Saturday and the downtown streets were crowded with shoppers. Every restaurant had a line of people waiting to eat, but I had a salami sandwich in my pocket. The shop on Spring Street was tiny and dark, with saxophones hanging up and saxophone parts lying all around. Leo was a skinny bald man with horn-rim glasses and a green visor like pawnbrokers wear. He opened the clarinet case and stood there looking at it. Inside the case, the clarinet was broken down into four sections. You could see it was old, but it had been well cared for. Leo looked at me through his thick glasses.
“I don’t want to know how you got this,” he said. “I don’t want to know about you or who sent you.” He closed the lid and snapped the latches. “I got a sawed-off. I made it myself. You try anything, I’m taking you with me.”
“I represent the City Directory. No other medium can —”
“I got double-ought buck here. They’ll just turn the hose on you and wash you into the street.” He brought it up from under the counter and showed it to me, the meanest looking little thing I ever saw. I took the case and left. I started walking fast down Spring Street. I walked right through every red light and didn’t stop until I got to my bench in Pershing Square.
I tried to calm down. People were coming and going all around me: kids, old folks, men and women, laughing and talking, friends meeting and calling out to each other. I was too scared to move. After a while, I opened up the case and looked at the four sections of the clarinet as Leo had done. I took the pieces out and turned them around in my hands, but it meant nothing. It was just one more thing I didn’t understand.
“You don’t look like a reed man,” said a voice next me. I jumped, but it was only Finchley, the retired hobo. He took the case and began assembling the pieces like he knew all about it. “Le Blanc, very nice. Something’s stuck in here.” He fingered around inside one of the sections and brought out a rolled-up piece of paper. “There’s your problem,” he said, handing it to me. There was a little box in the case and thin pieces of wood inside the box. He took one out and moistened it with his tongue; then he fitted the wood into the end of the clarinet and put the end in his mouth and began to play a little tune. I recognized it. “Over the Waves,” which everyone has heard at some point. The woman in black appeared. She came out from behind a palm tree holding her arms straight out to the side and twirling around with the music. She had her Bible in one hand, but she seemed to have forgotten about it. People passing by stopped to watch her. She was a sight, with her torn black dress and her matted hair and those fingernails! After a while, Finchley stopped playing and tipped his hat. “Thank you, friends and neighbors, you’re very kind, I’m sure.” He passed it around. Some people put money in the hat, others walked off. The woman sat down on her bench across the path and seemed to go right to sleep. “We did good business,” Finchley said. “Let us repair to a nice, cool bar. Should we ask your friend?” I shook my head. “She’ll be fine,” I said “I need a drink bad.”
The nice, cool bar turned out to be the Tokyo Big Shot.
“Finchley!” said the Japanese bartender. His gold teeth lit up.
“And the shecker,” said the snaggletooth woman at the end of the bar.
“My friend is in a quandary, at a crossroads, and we have come here today to find resolution. For this purpose, we require your back table and a bottle of your cheapest whiskey, tout suite,” Finchley said. The woman grabbed her glass and made a beeline for the curtain behind the bar, but Finchley said, “You’d best remain on watch, my dear. Be on the lookout for a midget carrying an umbrella.”
Behind the curtain was a tiny room with a round table and four chairs. There was nothing else in the room except a telephone and a Mexican pinup calendar from 1936. A lightbulb hung from a nail in the ceiling. The bartender brought a bottle and two glasses. “That will be all, Sammy. We’ll call if we need you.” Sammy laughed and went back out front.
“A man conceals something inside a clarinet. He assumes it will be found by someone in particular, someone who will understand.” Finchley unrolled the paper and smoothed it out on the table. It was a photograph of three men, taken at a restaurant table. The men were looking straight at the camera. Their faces were flat and bright, like a flashbulb had been used. The picture was old, and the men were wearing clothes from another time.
I recognized one man. “It’s Mr. John,” I said. “He was my friend, up on the Hill. He’s dead now. But this is him, a long time ago. I know it’s him.”
“You have the clarinet, and you know this man.”
“But I don’t know why I have it,” I said. I explained how the widow Clark mistook me for someone else.
“But you might have been the right man. She was expecting somebody. She blamed them.” I told Finchley about Leo and the shotgun. “We’ll get to that presently,” he said.
“But what if they’re looking for me now?” I said. “Leo was scared. I’m scared.”
“That’s good. Danger sharpens up the mind.” The woman came in through the curtain. “The midget was ashking for you. I shaid you’d been here and gone,” she said.
“That’s fine, Lydia. Have a drink.”
“Well, I don’ mind if I do.” She held out her glass. Finchley poured her a tall one, and she tossed it down in one gulp.
“Shammysh rotgut is the worsht shince canned heat,” she said.
“Have one more,” said Finchley. She took her drink in both hands and went out through the curtain.
“What’s that about a midget?” I asked.
“Just a fellow I know. Trouble follows him, he’s like a human lightning rod. A sure sign that something’s up. ” Finchley rubbed his hands with enthusiasm.
I was beginning to form an opinion of Finchley. Had I fallen in with a madman? I kept hearing Leo, “They’ll wash you into the street.” It wasn’t hard to imagine: The gutter on Spring Street. Sewer pipes. Garbage in the riverbed down by Aliso Flats. “What about the dead man on Utah Street?” I said.
“Omit nothing,” said Finchley. I tried to remember details. The blood caught his attention. “Blood on the walls, delightful! Sprayed, smeared, how was it done? Think, man, think!”
“Smeared, I would say. I didn’t stick around there, I had to find a telephone.”
“Smeared how? Up high? Down low?”
“Low, definitely. It looked a little like letters. Maybe it meant something.”
“Close your eyes. What do you see? You knock. You open the screen door. You look about for someone in the house. Something makes you look down. Is something moving?”
“No, it’s just feet.”
“Do you smell anything?”
“Frying lard.”
“Music?”
“A radio. A soap opera. Ma Perkins?”
“Excellent.