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No Matter How Much You Promise to Cook or Pay the Rent You Blew It Cauze Bill Bailey Ain't Never Coming Home Again; A Symphonic Novel PDF

578 Pages·2004·2.67 MB·English
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Preview No Matter How Much You Promise to Cook or Pay the Rent You Blew It Cauze Bill Bailey Ain't Never Coming Home Again; A Symphonic Novel

This book is dedicated to Alyson But men have no secrets, except from women, and never grow up in the way that women do. It is very much harder, and it takes much longer, for a man to grow up, and he could never do it at all without women. —James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk There is no rule for painting al fresco. Every artist may do as he pleases provided he paints as thinly as possible and only while the plaster is wet, six to eight hours from the moment it is applied. No retouching of any kind afterward. Every artist develops his own way of planning his conception and transferring it onto the wet plaster. Every method is as good as the other. Or the artist may improvise without any previous sketches. —José Clemente Orozco, Mexican muralist Music, though it does not employ human beings, although it is governed by intricate laws, nevertheless does offer in its final expression a type of beauty which fiction might achieve in its own way. Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off but opening out. When the symphony is over we feel that the notes and tunes composing it have been liberated, they have found in the rhythm of the whole their individual freedom. Cannot the novel be like that? —E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel Table of Contents Title Page Epigraph First Movement - The Quest 1. Here and There 2. Name That Girl 3. Creature Discomforts 4. Zing! Went the Strings 5. A Latin from Manhattan 6. Identity 7. From A to Z 8. Catharsis 9. Sanity and Insanity 10. Dear Diary 11. Jamming 12. An Ideal Scenario 13. Families 14. Research 15. A Diaphanous Curtain 16. Meeting Monk 17. Slumming Second Movement - The Horizon 18. The Offering 19. A Road Less Traveled 20. Choices 21. Conjuring 22. African Antecedents 23. Banjo Blues 24. Going to School 25. Exiles 26. Philosophy 27. The Band 28. Of Promises and Leprechauns 29. Blind Walking 30. The Idea 31. Hanging Out 32. Just One of Those Things 33. Ruby Broadway 34. Consequences 35. Confrontation 36. Jazz 37. Going Home 38. Drums 39. Photo Album 40. The Music 41. The Piano 42. Faceless Shadows Third Movement - The Journey 43. The Four Horsemen of Avenue B 44. Economics 45. Tumba Santiago 46. Clave 47. The Return 48. Memories 49. A Day in Harlem 50. First Date 51. Threats 52. Explorations 53. Group Therapy 54. Back from the Jungle 55. The Lie 56. Race 57. Passing 58. People of Color 59. An American Boy 60. Sermon 61. Combat Readiness 62. An Awful Kaleidoscope 63. Where Have All the Flowers Gone 64. Flashback Fourth Movement - The Drum 65. Mourning 66. Never Coming Home Again 67. The Gig 68. Don’t Let a Little Black Stop You 69. Little Rootie Tootie 70. Santurce Also by Edgardo Vega Yunqué Author’s Note Acknowledgments Copyright Page First Movement The Quest 1. Here and There In the not so merry month of May 1988, when her studies had evolved into a drag, Vidamía Farrell, finishing her sophomore year of high school, again became as restless as she had the previous four years. In spite of ample evidence of her eventual metamorphosis into a scholar of consequence, the upcoming end of the school year had become an extraspecial time ever since her parents, but mostly her mother, and perhaps for the wrong reasons, had come to the understanding that it would be ethnically beneficial for Vidamía to spend part of the summer with her father. As she stood rigidly inside a quadratic equation and stared at a sky full of nimbusian elephants, Vidamía thought again of her father, Billy Farrell, in her mind a figure of considerable mythic qualities, whom she both admired and pitied once she got to know him, and decided that it was in everyone’s best interest to help him make a reentry into more acceptable human society. She didn’t meet her father until the age of twelve, when she learned that once upon a time her father had sat in the middle of a Vietnamese rice paddy, under a shower of steel, cradling the broken and forever useless body of her uncle, Joey Santiago of Rivington Street on the Lower East Side of New York City, whom she would never meet since time and space didn’t allow for such stratagems. Billy Farrell had cried while he held the eviscerated corpse of his ace, his homeboy, his reefer-smoking main man. Such was the shock, that Billy didn’t notice that the drizzle of steel, while it had barely touched his own head, had meticulously erased his catalogue of the musical techniques of Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, and other jazz pianists. However, even if that aspersion of steel had not removed from consciousness the complex knowledge of flatted sevenths, augmented ninths, intricate harmonic patterns, and improvisational virtuosity that Billy had at one time displayed, he would have been unable to perform adequately, he believed, his own renditions of such standards as “Moonlight in Vermont,” “April in Paris,” “Back Home Again in Indiana,” or “Autumn in New York” not because he lacked a geographical metronome, but because that baptismal of steel had neatly severed, at the root, the middle and pinkie fingers of his right hand, rendering him an eight-fingered jazz pianist, a phenomenon more rare than an arctic orchid. As Billy recalled, the medics finally appeared. Making their way through the sticky heat and the soupy stirfry of growing rice, detached limbs, and involuntary bowel movements, and the monotonic keening of thousands of flies, the medics removed the lifeless body of Joey Santiago from Billy’s semi- catatonic, eight-fingered, shock-induced clutches and placed it in a body bag. They then saw Billy’s lacerated scalp and the empty places in his hand, shot morphine into him, and whisked him off in a medevac helicopter. At the hospital in Da Nang, while they shaved his skull as preparation for neurosurgical engineering, the doctors, after cleansing and disinfecting the wounds, sent Billy, by way of various anesthetics, into a never-never land of painless musings. They then stretched the torn and jagged epidermis of his right hand over the first knuckles of his middle and pinkie fingers and stitched them up. Not a minute elapsed before the surgeons addressed Billy’s cranium. The shrapnel had removed one and a half centimeters of bone from the upper-left side of his head above the ear. After inserting a minute metal plate where the hole had been, the surgeons sewed up his scalp. Ironically, given Billy’s preference in music, on certain ionospherically hospitable nights, the metal insertion picked up a country-music station in Wheeling, West Virginia, so that his battlefield nightmares were now accompanied by music more suitable to the soundtrack for a moonshiner and revenuer film starring Robert Mitchum and his sons. The doctors, having failed, in his view, to scoop up from that rice paddy the spilled Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, McCoy Tyner, Horace Silver, Dave Brubeck, et al., plus his personal repository of blues, ragtime, Dixieland, swing, bop, West Coast, and progressive solos of hundreds of musicians ranging from Blind Lemon Jefferson to Ornette Coleman, were left wondering why Billy said nothing but simply stared at the ceiling. He often held up his right hand, now bandaged against infection, and, within that mitt of gauze, attempted to wiggle his absent digits, which at one time, together with the perfectly matched fingers of his gifted left hand, had surrounded intricate melodies as would the hands of a child a delicate spring butterfly, admiring it briefly and then letting it go to watch it dance lepidopterally away. For eight months, first at the hospital in Vietnam, then one in Japan, and subsequently in the States, Billy Farrell sat and stared bleakly at his crab hand, not recognizing it as his. Doctors and counselors and chaplains came and went, but none of them apologized for their failure to retrieve the music from the rice paddy. Having lost, along with the spilled music, his temperament, inventiveness, and musical technique, Billy Farrell had only love left. Eventually he told everyone he was fine, thank you very much and God bless you. When they asked him where they should send his disability check he said please send it care of my grandpa, Buck Sanderson, in Yonkers, New York, the chaplain has the address. As Vidamía grew up and learned that other girls were called Jane, Joan, Jean, Jeannette, Ginny, Ginger, and even Gloria, Carmen, Maria, Teresa, but not Vidamía, and if they had mothers who looked like her mother they had last names like Rivera, Rodriguez, Vásquez, López, but not Farrell, she demanded to know everything about her father. When her mother, Elsa, ignored her, brushing off her concerns as unimportant, she went to her grandmother, Ursula Santiago. All Grandma Ursula would say was that her father had been in the war with her uncle Joey. Her uncle had been killed and her father had been hurt. His name was Billy Farrell and he had blond hair and blue eyes and used to live in Yonkers. “How did they meet?” Vidamía had asked on one of those rare occasions when her mother brought her into the city and left her with her grandmother. “How? He and my mother, huh, güelita?” Vidamía inquired, practically pinning her grandmother against the stove where she had been stirring a pot of red beans in sauce for the better part of an eternity. “You have to ask your mother that,” Ursula said, in the accented English of the Island of Enchantment, Puerto Rico, tierra de mis amores, jardín de flores donde yo nací, linguistic cha-cha. “I’m sure she knows, mijita.” “She won’t tell me.” “She must have her reasons.” So in the summer that she turned twelve, aware that in riding the train back and forth between Tarrytown and New York one of the stops was Yonkers, she created a plan. Having saved six months’ of allowance, Vidamía set out to find Billy Farrell, going off one Saturday, ostensibly to visit the Guggenheim Museum with her friend from summer camp, thirteen-year-old Janet Shapiro, who lived on Sutton Place. Artfully coordinating her cover and promulgating the lie with the skill of a graduate of one of your best disinformation finishing schools, rather than making the complete journey to Grand Central Station she got off the train in Yonkers. Filled with trepidation but determined in her resolve, she went forward. Like some fear-maddened mammal, she burrowed

Description:
This sweeping drama of intimately connected families--black, white, and Latino--boldly conjures up the ever-shifting cultural mosaic that is America. At its heart is Vidam?a Farrell, half Puerto Rican, half Irish, who sets out in search of the father she has never known. Her journey takes her from h
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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.