The Gorgon Festival (16 page)

On the first Monday after the beginning of the tea breaks, Ward brought the typed lyrics of the song he had titled “Mini-Boppers and Swingers” for a reading by the Welsh Bard. Perhaps as a joke, Glamorgan held his hand up for silence, set down his tea, and said, “Listen to these words from Jest Al.”

Ester were you grieving

When you heard my cycle leaving?

Warm, like the love of man, you

In your innocence care for, can you?

But as his fires bank lower

Boy comes to bedroll slower.

No matter, Ester, how you slice it,

Love’s a game with loaded dice. It

Can’t be won but only played.

All innocents into earth are laid.

Knowing then what you were born for,

Is it virtue that you mourn for?

When Glamorgan finished, there was a dead silence from his group, and his classical brow puckered. In admiration, or disgust? Ward wondered as he waited.

In reproach.

“Ester’s spelled with an ‘h,’ ” Glamorgan said.

Ward’s Ester never used the “h” because no one pronounced it.

“She’s a Cockney, Mr. Glamorgan. This song was written just for you.”

“Just ‘Glamorgan,’ please. And I’m not a Cockney… But the lines do have a pretty sentiment.”

“Sentiment, man,” Ward exploded. “It’s the real McKuen. Look at the sprung rhythms. You don’t see them, any more. And get a load of that mixed metaphor in the middle.”

Glamorgan was studying the script.

“You do talk rather strangely, Jest Al, even for a black… Pardon me, old man. I mean you’d talk strangely even if you were white… Ah, yes. I see. How does one slice a dice game? Rather odd, but amusing. Why don’t we use ‘Mary’? That’s an honest name.”

Glamorgan must have had a hang-up on a girl named Mary, Ward decided, but, more important, his use of the word “we” indicated an interest in the lyrics.

“Mary’s just fine,” Ward said. “And a name like that won’t distract from the sentiment.”

“Or even Margaret,” Glamorgan was lost in thought. “I had a bird in Liver… Cardiff, once, named…”

“Not Margaret,” Ward interjected. “I caught clap in Cleveland once from a girl called herself ‘Margaret.’ ”

“Oh, very well!” A bit of Liverpool whine invaded the Welsh lilt. Ward sensed he was in for a put-down, but negotiations had begun and Ward had deliberately written flaws into the lines to ease negotiations.

“How much do you want for this thing, as it stands?”

“Whatever you think it’s worth, sir,” Ward said. “Say, about two hundred bucks?”

“That’s more than this mucking dive pays me in a week.”

If Freddie had told the truth, the statement was either a thousand-dollar lie or the masterful bit of British understatement. But Ward, back-pedaling in sympathy, delivered a low blow.

“Man, that’s no bread in Birkenhead.”

“What do you know about Birkenhead?”

“Nothing,” Ward parried. “Just a Big John rhyming joke.”

“You are the peculiar one… Al, I’m willing to record the song and advance you fifty dollars against ten percent of the royalties. Is that fair?”

“That’s fifty percent fair on the advance, but only twenty-five percent fair on the royalties.”

“But I’m the artist,” Glamorgan jabbed.

“I’m the poet,” Ward jabbed back.

“It’s
my
name that draws. I compose the tune and play it. Playing sprung rhythms on a three-stringed lute demands skill. And the lyrics will have to be changed, old boy.”

Glamorgan had dropped his guard. Ward’s face froze in hurt and hostility.

“Sorry. I meant ‘old chap.’ ” Glamorgan was contrite.

“Half of that money goes to the AA2CP,” Ward said.

From the ropes, Glamorgan asked, “Is that something like Snick?”

“That’s me and my roomie. Our rent’s due… But what’s this about changing the lyrics?”

Still on the defensive, Glamorgan was glad to get back to specifics. “This line, ‘All innocents into earth are laid,’ won’t come off. I suggest ‘All maidens are eventually laid’ to give the lyrics an upbeat ending for mini-bopper virgins.”

Ward had rehearsed his answer. “That’d be all right for nightclubs, sir, but it would get you banned on radio.”

Puckering his brows, the Welsh Bard said thoughtfully, “And praps telly.”

It was a masterful maneuver. As Ward was translating the remark into “And perhaps television,” the Welsh Bard struck.

“Jest Al, you’re too bloody materialistic for a poet. I’ll go one hundred dollars against forty percent of the royalties.”

Negotiations were ended, but Ward hedged. “That’s fine, as long as you put my name Jest Al on the label.”

“Good, I’ll have my manager draw up the contract… But why not your entire name? Are you on the lam?”

Ward nodded. “Aggravated assault in Mobile. I broke a musician’s guitar over his head because he welshed on a deal… Beg pardon. Because he went back on a deal.”

“You felon.” Glamorgan smiled his bright smile as he pulled out a roll of bills. “Well, one confidence deserves another. I was rapped once with a statutory, myself, in Liverpool.”

Two nights later, Glamorgan sang “Youth Grows Wiser,” the ultimately agreed-upon title, to a whistling, whooping, foot-stamping ovation which had not stopped after four encores when Glamorgan carried on the remainder of his program. The next day, the Welsh Bard cut a 45 r.p.m. which the recording company air-expressed to its distributors. Within the week, “Youth Grows Wiser” had knocked a Johnny Cash from first place and had set the development of country and Western rock back by six weeks.

Glamorgan wanted more Jest Al lyrics, so he pushed for and got an early royalty payment which the company advanced on forecasts. Ward split his proceeds with Freddie, paid Freddie $449 back room and board plus services, sent Ester $1,000, tithed $280 in the poor box of Our Lady of the Angels to the memory of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and had enough left over for a wild weekend in Watts.

Thereafter money accumulated so fast he opened a checking account at a Western Avenue bank under the name A. Ward and halved with Freddie by check. Now cash stilled Ward’s conscience as he went plucking lyrics from the public domain. Poe’s “To Helen,” retitled “To Hattie,” disappointed him, but Burns’s “Whistle and I’ll Come, My Love” almost upset Hopkins. The Silky Sullivan in the pop lyrics field was Winthrop Mackworth Praed, 1802-1839, who held seventh place for six weeks and then jumped to second, hanging there for two weeks, then moving ahead of Wilde’s “The Ballad of Folsom Jail” which had, by then, edged out Hopkins.

But the listings were tabulated later. Ward spent the remainder of June swabbing floors, writing lyrics, looking for Dolores, and waiting for an answer to Dionysus’s message from Aphrodite. Diana’s failure to respond shadowed his triumphs with anxiety.

Next to her desecration, he feared Diana’s death. If she died, he would be consigned forever to youth and darkness, becoming, as it were, the Wandering Negro.

By the end of July, Freddie had bought a lavender Cadillac with his half of the royalties, and he became thenceforward Freddie the High Wheeler. While monitoring a new song by Glamorgan, Ward also met Margie again and found that Miss Frost had banned Dolores from the premises. She was too controversial, politically.

The climax of July came when Glamorgan refused to accept another extension at the Daisy Chain and accepted an offer to appear in Las Vegas for twenty grand a week.

At news of Glamorgan’s departure, Ward arranged with the record company to send a fourth of the music royalties to Ester. Actually, the giant step upward on the salary scale was a relief to Ward, who was overloaded with cash and welcomed a chance to lay by the Welsh Bard’s lute.

The new attraction at the Daisy Chain was Gollenberger and Stein, specialists in songs with a social message. They were in rehearsal two weeks before Glamorgan’s departure, and Ward’s maintenance work suffered. In soprano voices, the duet wailed discords about lonely lampposts, littered streets, forlorn garbage pails, and children leaning out of windows for love. Sometimes, between songs, they wept over their own keenings and their sorrows warped the orbit of Ward’s mop because he sympathized with despair.

Having heard of Jest Al, the Mop-Handle Poet, Gollenberger and Stein shyly let it be known that they would like a few of Ward’s lyrics if he could work in social content. Ward liked them although they were liberals and, as a black, white liberals turned him off. But Gollenberger and Stein had “schmaltz,” the Jewish equivalent of “soul,” and both had natural Afros.

He might have converted “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” into their style of protest music, but T. S. Eliot was not in the public domain. The 18th-century poets were lacking in social consciousness. In addition, he was too tired—tired of his job, tired of waiting, tired of writing.

An encounter with Miss Frost near the end of the week’s hiatus between Glamorgan’s final performance and the Gollenberger and Stein opening night pointed up to Ward the degree of his weariness.

On that morning he was swishing his mop two-thirds of the way from the bandstand to the edge of the dance floor, while unseen in the shadows Miss Frost was watching. Despite the high notes from the musicians at their final rehearsal, he ordinarily would have heard her elevator, smelled her, or sensed her through more basic vibration.

Suddenly she spoke from behind him.

“Al, you’re giving that floor nothing but a lick and a promise. If you keep this up, you’ll be reduced to a janitor.”

Her voice was snappish and without a trace of that furtive longing which Freddie called “the hots.” Looking toward the bandstand lights, he could tell from the reflection on the floor that she was right.

“Yes’m.”

“I declare, you’ve been mooning ever since Glamorgan left. Are you some sex degenerate? Is it Glamorgan that you moon for?”

“No’m.”

“Look at that mop. It’s not even wrung out properly. Fetch me the mop bucket.”

He hurried across the floor at her command and she called after him, “You’ve even lost your prance.”

After he returned with the bucket, she put the mop in the wringer, hoisted her skirt, and lifted her leg to press down on the wringer pedal.

“That’s how it’s done.” She brandished the dry mop in front of him. “Now, you do that whole area over again, you lazy no-’count, and put enough grits in your gizzard to write a nice song for those Jewish boys, unless you’re one of those anti-Semitic Nigras as well as a pervert. That pap they’re whining is entirely too negative for the Electric Daisy Chain. You write them a song about happy darkies, you hear?”

“Yes’m.”

Hands on her hips, she looked at him with something approaching contempt. “Dionysus, indeed. Hmmph.”

She turned and strode from him, heading toward her private elevator, as he wondered vaguely how she knew that he was Dionysus. Then another thought came to him, bringing with it overpowering evidence of his decline.

When the silver flash of Miss Frost’s inner thigh had glimmered in the glow from the bandstand, he had been no more interested in Miss Frost’s legs than he would have been interested in the legs of a jaybird.

Ward motorcycled home that afternoon on a hog his caution had turned to a piglet and walked into the apartment to sit heavily on the divan. Freddie entered and handed him a copy of the Los Angeles Times folded back to the fourth page.

“Is this your old man?”

Ward was looking at a one-column cut of himself made from a wedding portrait he had had taken with Ester.

FUGITIVE TOUTED
FOR NOBEL AWARD

Doctor Alexander Ward, biology professor at Stanford University, sought for questioning since early June in the disappearance and suspected murder of Doctor Ruth Gordon, Stanford gerontologist and financier, was listed among nominees for the Nobel Prize, Friday. Doctor Ward’s contribution was a system of analysis which extends mathematical reasoning to include organic reactions.

According to Doctor Sir Peter Waverly-Pritchard, visiting professor of theoretical mathematics at Stanford, Doctor Ward’s system opens the way to include organic phenomena in the Unified Field Theory.

Ward disliked “touted” for “nominated” in a story on the Nobel awards, although he supposed headline writers had to watch character count. But Freddie had asked him a question.

“Yes,” Ward answered.

“Murder must run in your family… I’m taking a nap. Would you give me a call about six?”

“Better set the alarm, Freddie. I’m dead myself.”

“Okay, but burn that paper.”

Ward went to the fireplace and burned the paper, thinking, even my brain’s tired. His ideas had been irrelevant, detached. The big story was his own nomination for the Nobel Prize, which meant he should have no trouble getting his grant extended on his terms.

No. He was a fugitive from justice, and the big story was that Ruth Gordon was a financier. With good reason he had always assumed she was poverty-stricken, but even if she had money to carry out experiments in human biological controls, she still did not have him, the missing link… linkage.

Getting back to the divan was an uphill effort. Galloping anemia? he wondered. There was so much he had to think about, and the most he could do was remember the afternoon in the patio and someone talking about a C note set on a tuning fork. Disassociated linkage?

Ward slept to awaken dully at the sound of Freddie’s alarm clock, dozed, and reawakened when Freddie slammed the kitchen door, going out in his “poor” clothes to hustle tips at the parking lot. Ward wondered why Freddie continued the work. Now that he was a Cadillac owner, he was parking cars so cautiously his tips were halved. Still, the parking lot was a listening post. Recently Freddie had brought news that both Army and Navy Intelligence had joined in the hunt for Ward.

When he heard Freddie’s car go out the driveway, Ward went to the garage to get his solution and electrodes. He felt rested, but he lacked the inward fire that composing songs demanded, and the missy had asked him to write a song about happy darkies. He would have to work a little social protest into the happiness for Gollenberger and Stein and a few acoustic patterns for himself.