Wednesday, December 18, 2013
The piano montunos showered down on us from the speaker. The cries of
the leader were like great gasps in the air. The final trumpet choruses
that came with drum climaxes on conga and bongo drums, on the great mad
Chattanooga record, froze Neal in his tracks for a moment till he
shuddered and sweated, then when the trumpets bit the drowsy air with
their quivering echoes like a cavern’s or a cave’s his eyes grew large
and round as tho seeing the Devil and he closed them tight. I myself was
shook like a puppet by it; I heard the trumpets flail the light I had
seen and trembled in my boots. On the fast “Mambo Jambo” we danced
frantically with the girls. Through our deliriums we began to discern
their varying personalities. They were great girls. Strangely the
wildest one was half Indian, half white and came from Venezuela, and
only eighteen. She looked like she came from a good family. What she was
doing whoring in Mexico at that age and with that tender cheek and fair
aspect God knows. Some awful grief had driven her to it. She drank
beyond all bounds. She threw down drinks when it seemed she was about to
chuck up the last. She overturned glasses continually, the idea also
being to make us spend as much money as possible. Wearing her flimsy
housecoat in broad afternoon she frantically danced with Neal and clung
about his neck and begged and begged for everything. Neal was so stoned
he didn’t know what to start with, girls or mambo. They ran off to the
lockers. I was set upon by a fat and uninteresting girl with a puppy dog
who got sore at me when I took a dislike to it because it kept trying
to bite me. She compromised by putting it away in the back, but by the
time she returned I had been hooked by another girl, better looking but
not the best, who clung to my neck like a leech. I was trying to break
loose to get at a 16-year-old colored girl who sat gloomily inspecting
her navel through an opening in her flimsy dress across the hall. I
couldn’t do it. Frank had a 15 year old girl with an almond colored skin
and a dress that was buttoned halfway down and halfway up. It was mad. A
good twenty men leaned in that window watching. At one point the mother
of the little colored girl---not colored but dark---came in to hold a
brief and mournful convocation with her
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment