Nine Fingers (10 page)
Authors: Thom August
The Apartment—Hyde Park
Sunday, January 12
I wasn’t driving today, and the band didn’t have anything scheduled. Last night’s magic was still with me, in the back of
my head. And it was talking to me. Maybe I’ve been resting on my laurels, which is kind of stupid because I don’t have any
laurels to rest on—I’m a second-tier piano player in a second-tier jazz band. This is why I’m flushing my $100,000 education
down the toilet, so I can be barely adequate? This is why I’m busting my ass driving the Fat Man’s cab, because it gives me
time to avoid practicing? Lazy, self-deluded, self-satisfied, and stupid.
After this first little lecture, I started to do what I’ve been settling for: I turned on some music to listen to other people
play, as if I can learn what I want to sound like by listening to what someone else sounds like. The truth is, it can sometimes
make it worse. When you listen, you pick up a few licks from whoever you’re listening to, without even trying to. Even if
it’s Art Tatum or Earl Fatha Hines or Horace Silver or Coltrane or Bird—the greats—it’s someone else. But surprise, surprise:
I caught myself at it and wouldn’t settle for it, for a change.
So I plugged in the keyboard, unplugged the speakers, slipped on the headphones and played. I picked a few standards, played
the melody, the accompanying chords, then a few choruses of solos on each tune. But I was just doing what I already know how
to do. It didn’t hurt to get the mechanism moving, but it wasn’t what I was looking for.
So I went to the bookshelf and pulled out the old practice books. Exercises, chords, arpeggios, runs, octaves, triplets, the
whole classical thing. It was a start, but it wasn’t enough. So I started transposing it all into different keys. I’m most
comfortable in the flat keys: F, B-flat, E-flat, A-flat, plus, of course, good old C-major. There’s nothing inherently tougher
about the sharp keys than the flat keys—the white keys are still white and the black keys are still black. But most of the
tunes we play are in the flat keys.
By the time I got into A, four sharps, I started making mistakes, stumbling, and this pleased me, showed me I was outside
my comfort zone. I’m not going to say “I played until my fingers bled.” My fingers don’t bleed from playing the piano, nobody’s
do. Whenever I fucked something up, I stopped, took the tempo way down, and played it again, slower, until it was right. Then
I moved it faster until the tempo was where it was supposed to be. And after that, I did it a few more times until it sounded
less mechanical, until it had some feeling to it.
I took a couple of handfuls of ice cubes out of the freezer, dropped them in a bowl, filled it up with cold water, and dipped
my hands in there, slowly stretching, then making fists, for ten minutes, until they started to get stiff. Then I plugged
the sink and started to run the hot water. I went back to the stretching and clenching in the hot water, resting every now
and then, turning the water off when it started to get too hot. This wasn’t punishment, it was work. A chiropractor recommended
this to me when I sprained a thumb once. He called it “The Pump,” and said the idea was to get the blood flow going to pump
out the lactic acid that builds up and stiffens the joints and muscles. If you just use heat it feels good for a while but
increases the swelling, leaves all that blood pooling. If you use just cold it feels good for a while but it traps the toxins.
With any kind of muscular inflammation, he said, use some ice to get the swelling down, then go back and forth, hot and cold,
as long as you can stand it.
This time I went for about thirty minutes, then shook my hands out for maybe five minutes. I could feel the tingle. The stiffness
I had felt at the diner was gone, and I felt energized.
I went back to the keyboard. I picked a tune, the first thing that came to my mind—“All the Way” (“When somebody loves you
…”)—and started just playing the chords, very slowly, but with feeling. I have a pedal attachment for the keyboard, and
I nudged that closer with one foot and started working that like a real piano, focusing on the dynamics of the sound. Then
I took it up a key and did the same thing, then up another key. I started losing it at around three sharps but I gave myself
another little talking to (“Come on, you lazy shit!”), and pushed through it into A (four sharps) and then B, not that anyone
is ever going to ask me to play anything in five fucking sharps, but that wasn’t the point. I was having trouble with the
five, so I went back to the base chords, letting it come to me. It was painful at first, not physically painful but awkward.
No rhythm, no dynamics, just getting my brain comfortable with my fingers on the keys. Then it started to come. I tried to
shut off my brain and pretty soon there it was, and I let it ring out, strong and true, and then jacked it into six sharps!
The ridiculous key of F#! And for just a minute it was there, like it was C-major and nothing but the white keys.
And then I stopped. I let the sound ring in my head, tried not to let anything else intrude. I flirted with the thought of
going to seven sharps, C#, but I stopped myself. Don’t finish satisfied, leave it incomplete, like some Tantric sex thing;
that was my thought process.
I went back into the kitchen, got out the ice and hot water and did the pump thing for about twenty more minutes. I dried
my hands, rolled a joint, twisted it off, and smoked half of it, feeling mellow and quietly righteous. I wolfed down some
soup out of a can, then stripped and went to bed early, feeling rectified, purified, solidified.
In the Fat Man’s Cab
Monday, January 13
I got up early this morning, drove my beat-up car to the cabstand, locked the car, unlocked the cab, got in and headed downtown
to the Drake Hotel. It’s Monday morning, and I have a regular customer I squire around town every Monday at 8:00. It’s a great
gig, really gets things moving at a nice pace, and I was looking forward to it. Sunday’s thaw had opened up the roads, the
planes and trains and buses were moving again, and the temperature was in the mid-thirties, sloppy but clear and crisp. The
sky was deep azure with not a wisp of gray or a hint of white. The humidity was down in the twenties, and the blue reached
all the way to the horizon.
I stopped for some coffee and a roll, got back in the cab, filled the pipe, had a few wake-and-bake hits, just enough to put
a sparkle on things, and sipped my coffee a milliliter at a time. I put away the pipe, sprayed around some Ozium, lit a cigarette
as I drove north on Michigan, and pulled in at the curb up the block from the Drake, at the top of what they call the Magnificent
Mile. I had flipped on the NOT FOR HIRE light so no one could scoop me up, and, wouldn’t you know it, a couple of people tried
right away; the lines at the Drake were six cabs and ten people long, and a couple of civilians thought they were more important
than everyone else in line and figured they’d shortcut the process. Hey, like it says, I’m not for hire.
The guy I drive on Mondays is a strange one, and I’m sure there’s a story there, and I’m also sure I don’t want to know exactly
what it is. I figure it’s one of those “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you” things. I think of him as “The Accountant.”
I started thinking of him that way the first time he climbed in the cab. He always wears a charcoal pinstripe suit, a white
shirt, and a rep tie in subdued colors. In the winter he adds a black overcoat and a black fedora with a snap brim. He’s maybe
fifty, fifty-five, around there, and short. Not just short, he’s small, maybe five-foot-two and not more than 130 pounds,
with these thin little delicate hands, and a plain gold wedding band. It could mean he’s married, but it’s on the left middle
finger, not the ring finger. Maybe there’s some code to these things that I can’t translate. He wears gold-rimmed glasses
with no frames on the bottom, almost too expensive and contempo-Euro-trashy for the rest of the getup, and he’s got a little
mustache, clipped so short you wonder why he grows it at all, although he looks like he could muster a real walrus if he wanted
to. He always wears a hat, even in the summertime, when he switches to a straw, and never takes it off, except to wipe his
brow with a white handkerchief, linen from the looks of it. And when he slides it off you can see he doesn’t have a lot of
hair, and what there is of it is kind of gun-metal in color and slicked straight back. No comb-over, but “this is what it
is; deal with it,” and I have to give him points for that. He carries this big old satchel in a dinged-up cordovan color,
like a teacher’s bag, with the two sides cinching together at the top and two weathered brass buckles closing it, and he keeps
it on his lap, with one hand on both of the handles. The satchel is accordion style, and when he arrives in my cab it’s kind
of thin, but when he leaves it’s bulging. He always just looked like an accountant to me, so I thought of him that way, and
one day, after about a month, when I asked him what kind of work he did, he stared off at the distance out the side window,
stroked his little mustache, and said, in his clear high voice, “I would suppose that one might place me in the financial
services category. I have a number of…clients…and I engage in my peripatetic rounds each week to visit with them
briefly, so as to handle some fiduciary matters concerning their, ah, accounts.”
That’s the way he speaks, educated, but maybe too much so, like some people speak when they’re trying to appear upper-crust.
What tips it off is that he mispronounces the occasional word—like “perry-pa-TEET-ick” and “fi-DUKE-ee-ary”—the sign of someone
who’s read the word but hasn’t heard it used. He always goes for the nine-dollar “Certainly, my young accomplice” phrase when
a simple “Yup” would suffice. It’s affected, in an almost British way.
He starts off at eight, like I said, and we drive around until almost twelve, when I drop him back near the Drake. We go all
over town—Near North, up almost to Evanston, West Side, South Side, the Western suburbs, a couple of stops downtown. It’s
always the same sixteen or twenty addresses, only varying slightly, but each time he varies the route and we do them in a
different order. It’s nothing to him to go all the way north to Evanston, then all the way south to Calumet City, then up
north again, then downtown, then west. I once turned to him at a stoplight and told him that I could save him a lot of time
and money if I could plot the route for him, you know, link it all together in some kind of rational Grand Circuit, but he
gave me a look that froze me, and then, chilling, said, “But then, dear boy, your remuneration would consequently suffer considerably,
and we would
hate
to see that occur, now wouldn’t we?” I hardly caught the words; it’s the look that I remembered.
My guess? He’s a bagman of some sort, a courier. The places are maybe gambling joints or whorehouses or dope dens, or they’re
the offices or the homes of the folks who run the gambling joints, the whorehouses, or the dope dens, and he makes the rounds
right after the busy weekend rush to pick up money or chits or whatever it is that they’ve collected, including, probably,
my own monthly contribution to my local weed purveyor. That bag looks pretty light when he slings it in ahead of himself into
the cab at eight and awfully heavy when he drags it out behind himself after noon, so he’s doing more picking up than dropping
off. Unless it’s some sort of ruse, and he’s filling it up with rolled-up newspapers as part of some misdirection ploy. But
I’ll say it again: I really don’t want to know. It’s a great gig, perfect for the start of the week, and he’s good company
in his hifalutin way, chatting incessantly all the way about nothing in particular, and the money is great and he tips really
well, way more than he needs to.
And to top it all off, we play our little game. We didn’t start this until maybe the second or third Monday; he must have
been sizing me up at first, the way I was sizing him up. But once we began, I couldn’t stop.
I’m not sure what he calls it—I’ve never heard him give it a proper name—but I call it “license-plate poker.”
Most of the Illinois tags have three numbers and three letters, not necessarily in that order. The are two roles in the game,
the player and the scorer. The scorer picks out a car coming toward us or coming up alongside or dead ahead, and calls out
the three letters on the tag, in order, like “TQM.”The player then has thirty seconds to call out all the phrases he can think
with those three letters, like “The Queerest Man,”“Two Quaint Mensches,”“Total Quality Management,” “Tension Quiets Me,” like
that. The scorer calls “Time” when the thirty seconds are up, then the two switch roles. One thirty-second turn for both is
a round.
There are a couple of side rules that we developed early on. You can’t repeat any words in any one turn, but you can use variations,
like singular/plural, or present tense/past tense. Words that start with a Q, a C, or a K are interchangeable (it’s not the
Q that’s difficult, but the K, surprisingly), and in any string with an X in it you can use a word that starts with the sound
“EX,” like “exhibitionist,” “excited,” or “extroverted.” You can be as vulgar as you like, and we sometimes get into some
really nasty grooves. But you can’t use names or foreign words unless they’re part of what you might call the standard American
lexicon, like in “GGD: Got Gehrig’s Disease,” or “ARJ: A Regular Joe.” If the scorer challenges a phrase, you have to repeat
it back in a sentence, and it’s double or nothing. The Accountant never challenges me on my phrases; he learned that early
on.
Most of the license plates in Illinois have three numbers and three letters. But some don’t. Some cars have four and two,
some have two and four, and some are vanity plates. With our rules, two-letter phrases pay the same as three, and anything
more than three is double-your-money. So two-letter license plates are a license to steal—the number goes way up—and fours
and fives and sixes can make you rich, but you have to work for it.
And, as that indicates, we play for money, a dollar a phrase. The scorer keeps count, out loud with his fingers held up, and
counts out the money from his end at the finish of each thirty-second round. If the traffic gets really bad or we hit a nasty
stretch of road, I’ll ask him to hold up, and he’s cool with that. And when he’s getting near one of his stops, he does the
same.
At first, he kicked my ass. He would hit four or five in a turn and I was averaging two or three. Not much, a couple of bucks
a round, but if you play for ten or twenty minutes straight, like we sometimes do, that can add up. I quickly figured out
that when I was totally wasted on weed I’d get skinned—“Wait a minute, wait a minute, uh, what were the three letters again?”—and
if I was totally straight I didn’t do any better, trying to over think it. But if I was just a tiny little bit buzzed, the
less-than-linear-connection factor kicked in, and the synapses hummed and popped, but not all of them at once, thank you very
much. So I altered my preparation and quickly caught up. I also got the knack of seeing the right plates to keep his score
down (I noticed he doesn’t do well on phrases starting with vowels, for some reason). Now we each average around five to seven
hits in a thirty-second round, sometimes more, sometimes less, but it pretty much evens out, with me usually a little bit
ahead. If he gets way up he usually makes it up to me in the tip, so I don’t get pissed and leave him to find another ride
the next Monday. If I get ahead, I get all aw-shucks about it and he takes it like a gentleman, and even seems to appreciate
it, like he’s looking forward to getting back at me the next week. He likes the competition, and I get the sense that he’s
done this before, with other drivers, but they dropped out or he got bored taking their money. I always remember to bring
change, maybe twenty or thirty singles, and he always carries a wad himself, in a money clip with the Franklins in the middle
and the Washingtons on the outside.
I’ve heard this called a Chicago roll when I was in New York and I’ve heard it called a Detroit roll here in Chicago. I’ve
also seen guys do it backward—a C-note on the outside wrapped around a wad of singles—and I’ve heard that called L.A.-style,
which fits. Since I met the Accountant, I started carrying my money in a clip, not in my wallet, and switched the big fat
wallet for a little leather credit-card case, and that’s all I keep in it: a Visa, an AmEx, a Triple-A, and my driver’s license.
I also keep my roll Chicago-style, with the ones showing, but that’s sort of related to the hazards of the profession: driving
around all day with strangers, and especially picking up anybody who flags you down like I do, you do not want to tempt the
mortals by rubbing General Grant in their faces.
I was musing on this when the door swung open and he hopped in, looking all bouncy and fresh and smelling of citrusy cologne.
“Good morning to you, young Vincent. And how are you comporting yourself this fine morning?”
“It’s hanging good,” I replied. “And you?”
“Splendid! What a magnificent morning, after all this unremitting gray, I must say.”
“Where to, sir?”
I call him Sir and he calls me Vincent—that’s our routine. He somehow picked up that I’m having this problem lately with being
called Vinnie, even though that’s all anyone has called me since forever. What it is is that maybe I think I’m getting too
old to be a Vinnie. Once you close in on thirty it sounds like the name of some guy who wasn’t too swift and never made it
out of the neighborhood. I didn’t say this to him, but he figured it out somehow.
“Let us begin our appointed rounds…” he said, with a dramatic pause.“7232 North California.”
That’s north and west, so I hit the meter, put it in gear, and off we went. He generally doesn’t like me to take the highways,
but prefers the back streets, north and south, east and west. He never complains about the routes I take, not even a dirty
look or a raised eyebrow. His confidence in my driving is implicit. He doesn’t want me to hurry—I picked up on that the first
time I raced a yellow light into the red and I looked in the rearview mirror to see him clawing the upholstery—so when he’s
in the cab I shift it down into limo mode and cruise it out as smooth as silk. He takes a very visible sensory pleasure in
this, lolling back in his seat.
I cracked the window and lit a cigarette, something for which I got his permission long ago. He doesn’t smoke, but he told
me he used to, and that he appreciated the smell of it and the sight of someone enjoying it. I’m sure I wouldn’t be so magnanimous;
if I had to quit I’d want the fucking things banished from the planet.
He started in about the weather, and what a bad storm we had last week, and how it must have been good for business “for someone
with your pecuniary interest,” and I nodded and uh-hunhed and let him carry the ball for a while, just smoking and sipping
my coffee. Traffic was a little thick, and the roads were puddling up with slush, but we were in no hurry, so I fell in line
and just slicked my way out west, keeping an eye out for whatever, checking the scene. About twenty blocks from the Drake,
he took his gloves off, pulled his big brass pocket watch out of his pants, reached into his other pocket for his roll, conspicuously
enough, caught my eye in the rearview and waggled the roll a few times.
“Would you happen to be available for a friendly game of chance this fine morning, Vincent?” he asked.
“A game of chance?” I countered, doing my W. C. Fields: “Not the way
I
play it.”