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More Wonder Boys
Crabtree and I had discovered the Hi-Hat together, in the course of one of his first visits to Pittsburgh, during the period between my second and third marriages -- the last great era of our friendship, of our pirate days, before stars were lost from certain constellations, when the woods and railroad wastes and dark street corners of the world still concealed Indians and poetical madmen and razor-sharp women with the eyes of tarot-card queens. I was still a monstous thing then, a Yeti, a Swamp Thing, the chest-thumping Sasquatch of American fiction. I wore my hair long and tipped the scales at an ungraceful but dirigible two hundred and thirty-five pounds. I exercised my appetites freely, with a young man's wild discipline. I moved my big frame across the floors of barrooms like a Cuban dancer with a knife in his boot and a hibiscus in the band of his Panama hat.
We found Carl Franklin's Hi-Hat, or the Hat, as it was known to regulars on the Hill, stranded in a forlorn block of Centre Avenue between the boarded-up storefront of a Jewish fish wholesaler and a medical supply company whose grimy display windows featured, and had gone on featuring ever since, a miniature family of headless and limbless human torsos dressed up in exact, tiny replicats of hernia trusses. On the avenue side there were only a fire door and a rusted sign that said FRANKLIN'S in looping script; you got in through the alley around back, where you found a small parking lot and a large man named Clement, who was there to look you over, assess your chracter, and pat you down if he thought you might be packing. He didn't come off as a very nice person the first time you met him, and he never got any friendlier. The owner, Carl Franklin, was a local boy -- he'd grown up on Conkling Street, a few blocks away -- who'd worked as a drummer in big bands and small combos during the fifties and sixties, including a stint in one of the late Ellington configurations, and then come home to open the Hi-Hat as a jazz supper club, aiming to attract a class clientele. There was a beautiful old Steinway grand, a luminous bar of glass brick, and the walls were still hung with photographs of Billy Eckstine, Ben Webster, Errol Garner, Sarah Vaughan; but the place had long since devolved into a loud R&B joint, lit with pink floodlights, smelling of hair spray, spilt beer, and barbecue sauce, catering to a shadowy, not particularly sociable crowd of middle-aged black men and their ethinically varied but uniformly irritable dates.
I remember that I had been dangling unhappily from the rope of my new life as an English professor in Pittsburgh for about three months, friendless, bored, and living alone in a cramped flat over a Ukranian coffee shop on the South Side, when Crabtree showed up, dressed in a knee-length leather policeman's coat, with a sheet of Mickey Mouse acid and sixty-five hundred dollars in severance pay from a men's fashion magazine that had just decided to fire its literary editor and get out of the unprofitable ficiton business once and for all. I was so glad to see him. We set out immediately to reconnoiter the bars of my new hometown -- Danny's, Jimmy Posts's, the Wheel, all of them gone now -- landing in the Hat, on a Saturday night, when the Blue Roosters, the house band at that time, were joined onstage by a visting Rufus Thomas. We were not only drunk but tripping our brains out, and thus our inital judgement of the welcome the Hat afforded us and of the level of the entertainment was not entirely accurate -- we were under the imprression that everybody there loved us, and as I recall we also believed that Rufus was singing the French lyrics of "My Way" to the tune of "Walkin' the Dog." At a certain point in the the evening, furthermore, one of the patrons was badly beaten, out in alley, and came stumbling back into the Hat with his ear hanging loose; Crabtree and I, having consumed four orders of barbecued ribs, then spent a fiery half hour unconsuming them, taking turns over the toilet in the men's room. We'd been going back ever since, every time Crabtree came to town.
Those of you who have been paying attention probably notice Chabon's technique of showing two sides of a coin: first illustrating the great attractiveness and virtue of a subject in order to get the audience to invest themselves in its fate, only to undermine that with an account of its seedy underside. I find this character-building technique very appealing. We all start off with great intentions, worthy of admiration on the basis of our theoretical idealizations. Then we succeed and fail, often in alternating measure, as factors outside of our control and a general wearing-down of our souls derail our lives from their perfect vision. It is this derailing -- the colorful breakdown of the sleek Bauhaus designs of youth into wrinkled complexity -- that is unique to each character and ultimately comprises the stories worth telling.
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