After Bathing at Baxters (10 page)

You'll remember from the papers what happened. We lost 5–1, and never had a chance. All down to the weak midfield, the commentators said, but I wouldn't know. I went down on the bus and stayed in the hotel all right, but I was gone before breakfast. I can remember ending up in a pub in Oxford Street and coming out and hearing someone say that Liverpool had won, but not much else. The queer thing was that I could remember it all: that day knocking the ball about on the old park, my dad walking towards me over the wet grass. But I knew then, knew already, that it was all over. And that I never wanted to kick a ball again.

Three Stories from Cook County

I.
At Brackus's

His father, old Joe Brackus, had opened the first gas station up on Choctaw the summer after they had built the freeway extension and turned the stony plateau with its view out over Tennessee and the river into a tourist site. He had put in an ice-cream parlour and a kiosk which sold cigarettes and Seven-Up, and for a time the teenagers who drove their girlfriends up there at the weekends and the aged joyriding couples who strayed over the state border by accident would stop and ask him directions or buy guttering tubs of Dixiecup ice-cream which was the parlour's stock-in-trade. But then the ridge had been bought by a real estate company from Memphis who wanted to build a block of timeshare apartments, the teenagers started heading West to Dyersburg where there was a marina complex, and Brackus found himself with an empty forecourt and a ten thousand dollar compensation fee: so he put the money into Brackus's.

It was the sort of place you find occasionally in the South, which is emulative of so many other places in the South that the effect borders on parody. There was a neon sign that said
Brackus's Bar and Diner
, there were menu cards printed in the shape of opening saloon doors and bowls of sawdust for cigarette ends. And because old Brackus was a bluegrass boy whose family had originally come out of Kentucky during the Depression, there was a squat, rickety stage where country bands used to play on Saturday nights, and a set of buckskin gear which the waitresses sometimes wore to serve drinks at the bar. ‘Pure Annie Oakley,' Barrett the journalist used to say, but on the strength of it Joe Brackus got himself profiled in
Dixie
magazine standing under a Confederate flag on which was printed the slogan ‘The South Will Rise'.

The
Dixie
profile was a portent. Unexpectedly, Brackus's had paid its way right from the start. Saturday nights would find a restive, cosmopolitan crowd packed together on the narrow benches or seated raucously around the big pine tables which Joe had got out of an L.L. Bean catalogue. Denimed wiseacres from the farming end of Cook County, seventy miles away, moneyed Nashville brats with their daddies' credit cards, the local lumpenproletariat from the Choctaw sawmills. In its second year of existence Brackus's got a mention in one of the Nashville listings magazines. Not long afterwards the Dixie Dance-Kings played there at the end of their first Southern tour and Joe Brackus added on a children's parlour extension, bought his wife some cosmetic surgery and wondered about sending his kids to college.

There were two children: Scott and an older girl called Elaine. ‘Snipped right off the Southern vine,' Barrett sometimes said, in the days when he wrote reviews of the house bands in the local paper and occasionally had dinner at the Brackus bungalow on Sunday nights, but the precision masked an uncharacteristic lack of certainty. Joe Brackus was an easy-going, two hundred pound small-towner who, even after Brackus's got put into all the regional guidebooks and Waylon Jennings turned up unannounced to play at a charity benefit, would still walk into the local drugstore on a Saturday afternoon and treat himself to a family pack of See's chocolates. The kids were different. For a start they were brighter. They were sharper. They weren't your couple of average Southern kids who wonder maybe about going to Nashville and working in real estate but end up settling for a third share each in the old man's timber yard. All through the early years you could see old Joe figuratively scratching his head about Scott and Elaine. They dug around the local schools for a while – finishing up at high school in Jackson, which pleased Brackus – but you could tell that it was all temporary, that they viewed the old man as an embarrassment who happened to be their father. Eventually Elaine married a Florida lawyer she met at a rock concert one Fall in Miami and went to live down in Tampa Bay. She had a job in an architect's office and came home at Christmas, although Barrett used to say that the architect's office was a front and he had seen her once in an X-movie he had got from a video store. Yeah.

That left Scott. Cook County wasn't the easiest place in the world to be Scott Brackus, but he managed it somehow. He played baseball for the local team, the Cook County Pirates, and you saw him occasionally with the busty cheerleaders in the back parlour of Brackus's. When he was nineteen he won a talent contest hosted by the Nashville country station, and the picture of him dressed in his denim cowpoke's outfit shaking hands with some tubby little WA 125 announcer was taped to the wall of Brackus's. Old Joe had hopes for Scott, in that shy, puzzled way which substitutes ambition for understanding. When a second division country band played Brackus's Scott would be there backslapping with the musicians, helping to tune the steel guitars, sometimes bobbing up on stage to take part in an encore or emcee some starry-eyed pack of Louisiana grizzlies who thought Brackus's was the big time. Sometimes he did session work, away in Memphis, with the Dixie Stealers, the Cottonpickers, bands you had heard of. They had a habit of never putting the session players' names on the record sleeves. But he looked the part. He played a big, unwieldy Hofner Les Paul in a laboured style which the oldtimers said reminded them of Roy Orbison. And though the drinks at Brackus's were more expensive than anywhere else in the county, and old Joe wouldn't let him run up a tab, Scott was there drinking most nights of the week.

One Tuesday night when trade was slack and the jukebox was blaring out Allman Brothers records over the empty tables, I met him in the parlour. He looked ghostly, a little out of place amid the solidity of Brackus's cattleprod decor, the steerhorn wall fixtures and the giant bottles of Southern Comfort. There was a rumour going round, I later discovered, that one of the Pirates' cheerleaders had spent the weekend in an abortion clinic at La Grange. But we talked about my job – I had just got Photomax, the big repro business, to give me their local franchise which meant driving round the country with a mobile photolab – and after a while I suggested that he ought to be playing more, go into a studio maybe and cut a record.

‘I could do worse.' He didn't seem offended at this piece of simpleton's advice, which every bar-propper in Brackus's had been offering him for the last year-and-a-half. ‘The old man wants me to get a job.'

‘What sort of a job?'

‘That depends. If I wrote down my qualifications you'd piss yourself. I was an English major. Subsidiaries in economics and art and design. Round here they want you to chop wood or work at the gas station carwash.'

The way he said
gas station
made me think that old Brackus must have had a few words. ‘Maybe it doesn't have to be chopping wood,' I told him. ‘What did you specialise in on the art and design course?'

‘Christ. Ceramics. Expressionism. A little photography.'

I offered him an assistant's job in the lab there and then, which seemed to please him, and said I'd be in touch again after I'd spoken to the Photomax people. ‘Here's hoping,' he said, all lazy and wide-eyed, but as if he meant it.

It took a week to get a decision out of Photomax about funding an assistant. In the meantime Barrett filled me in on the pool-table gossip from Brackus's. ‘Let me tell you something, my man' – Barrett always talked as if he were some wisecracking negro from an NBC cop serial – ‘the word on Scott Brackus isn't good. Sure, Ruthie – the one with the tits and the snaggle teeth – had a hoover job over the weekend. Her pa was down to see me on Monday. Plus the old man finally got to lose his temper.'

‘The old man lost his temper with Scott?'

‘You got it' – and here Barrett positively bridled, as if he were Huggy Bear sashaying around the set of
Starsky and Hutch
. ‘Happened in here, a couple of days ago. Rockin' Dopsie was playing, you know, those zydeco boys from the bayou. The Cajun Twisters. Scott was hanging around with his guitar, the way he does for an encore, when old Joe jumps out from behind the bar and tells him to shift his ass away from the stage. Right there in front of the Twisters' manager. You never saw anything like it.'

‘So what did Scott do?'

‘What would you do, my man?'

I told Barrett about the job with the mobile photolab. ‘The South will rise,' he said tolerantly (Barrett had tried and failed to get a job on
Dixie
magazine). ‘It's a nice idea.'

I was busy that week, ordering up film from the suppliers in Nashville and checking the insurance for the lab, but it wasn't difficult to go on hearing about Scott. The local Kodak rep had been at Brackus's the night old Joe delivered his grand remonstrance. Ruthie with the tits and the snaggle teeth made a brief, etiolated appearance at the Pirates' midweek game. People in bars and at supermarket checkouts started to talk about ‘that mother', and Scott became suddenly that most typical of Southern whipping boys, the privileged kid who goes wrong, the strapping six-footer with the wide smile who breaks his daddy's heart. I saw him a couple of times down at the Stonewall, the gentlemen's club where old Brackus had bought him life membership on his eighteenth birthday, and he had that sullen, companionless look of the person who can't find anybody to accept his offers of drinks. Ruthie's father was on the committee of the Stonewall.

Then, when the letter of acceptance came from Photomax, he disappeared. Out East, people said, to see his sister, but Joe Brackus didn't know and none of the bar-proppers at the Stonewall had heard. The Pirates played their Saturday night game against the Johnson City Rednecks, but there was no sign of him down by the coaches' dug-out or swapping backchat with the Redneck supporters along by the burger stands. Midweek, the Atlanta Express were headlining at Brackus's but you looked in vain across the smoky cavern to the bar, past the rows of Choctaw saw boys in their black donkey jackets, for the sight of Scott shouldering his way towards the stage with the Hofner clasped under his arm.

As usual Barrett had the details. At the close of a discussion of the feature which he figured writing about the photolab he said shyly: ‘Looks as if Scott finally hit the big time, my man. Tuesday last week, down at the Winnebag. You never saw anything like it.'

I shrugged. The Winnebag was a blues bar on the west side of Cook County which might have held thirty people. Barrett went on in that half sassy, half respectful way he had: ‘Sure, I was there, my man. You know the score at the Winnebag. Some Memphis brats down to get a taste of country living, half a dozen niggers hollering for “Dust My Broom”, and Scott gets up and does a couple of standards – “D-I-V-O-R-C-E”, “Tennessee Slide” – you get the idea? And it's not the blues, but it's kinda tuneful and since he's a local boy and everybody remembers old Joe from way back people start clapping their asses off. Which could have been just fine, just fine, my man. A little novelty. A little
colour
. Yes sir. And it happens, it just so happens that there was a guy from Cherry Red' – Cherry Red was the big Nashville country station – ‘up at the bar. Seersucker suit, fancy cane, you know the sort of stuff those candyasses wear when they're out to impress the hicks. Looking at Scott with his tongue hanging down to his chin.'

Barrett flicked me an inscrutable look – the sort of look he gave when the paper sent him to coyer an Odd Fellows convention at Lafayette.

‘And after that he lit out?'

‘And after that he lit out. Nashville. Memphis. One of the Cherry Red studios someplace. But take it from me, my man, you can kiss goodbye to your photolab assistant.'

The crises of Joe Brackus's commercial career had been flagposted by his ability to bury the hatchet. Even when the real estate company had bought him out from the gas station the old man hitched up his trousers, marched into the Stonewall and stood the company lawyers a four-course dinner. So a week later when Scott got back from Nashville there was a tab at the bar at Brackus's and anyone who could claim the slightest acquaintance with the family was swarming after free beer. I saw him there one evening in the middle of a cloud of hangers-on: local guitarists who figured he might put a word in at Nashville, a flaxen-haired grandmother who had appeared at the Opry in 1957, a couple of the Pirates' cheerleaders. He looked tired and flustered, but when he saw me he prised himself free from the grasp of Ruthie with the tits and the snaggle teeth and came loping over. I told him I'd heard the news.

‘It's a break,' he said, a touch sheepishly. ‘Too bad about the photolab, huh?'

‘It doesn't matter,' I told him. ‘Congratulations. What's the deal with Cherry Red?'

‘The usual thing. A couple of weeks demoing. Some radio work – they got a majority stake in the two Nashville country stations. Maybe a billing at the Opry if I shape up.'

‘What does the old man think?'

Scott grinned. ‘He's on cloud nine. You know he used to play himself? Bluegrass. Kentucky stomp. I reckon I owed him this. You know,' he went on, ‘I've had so many people tell me I've arrived that I might just start believing it.'

The way he said
arrived
made me wish I hadn't written the polite letter to Photomax.

After that you couldn't walk into a bar or diner without hearing about Scott. It wasn't that there hadn't been people like him before – after all, you could hardly throw a stone in Cook County without hitting a pedal steel guitarist or a guy who figured he could write lyrics for Willie Nelson – but somehow they had all faded away, to playing hotel residencies or copier salesmen's conventions. Barrett's favourite story was of a faded family act called the Country Cousins (‘Cook County's Finest') whom he had discovered playing in a motel outside Atlanta. The irony, according to Barrett, was that the Country Cousins had actually
improved
. Set against this catalogue of blighted hopes and thwarted ambition, Scott looked a success. There was the letter from Cherry Red. People remembered the talent contest, and the youthful Scott singing at kids' parties and the boy scout barbecues of long ago. Even Barrett unbent sufficiently to write it up for the
Cook County Sentinel
and a second photograph of him, square-jawed and resolute, got taped to the wall of Brackus's.