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

578 Pages·2004·2.67 MB·English

by  Edgardo Vega Yunque

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