The Music Inn, Part II: George, Brenda and a Cameo by Raymond Carver

I relished the secluded atmosphere of the place, the red drapes behind the stage, the black tables, red leather seats of the bar stools, the glistening wood of that long bar, the smoke-softened red-shaded light. Everyone looked good in that light.

Jerome sat at the stool by my workstation, grey-haired and mellow. We had philosophical conversations on slow nights. “If you start sleepwalking through life, make a change,” he cautioned. The band went on break. “Gimme money for the jukebox, Jerome,” I demanded, took his quarter, punched in “Respect.”

Brenda taught me that. “Never spend your own money in this place,” she told me. Let someone else feed that jukebox. It was a different jukebox than I was used to, even though there’d been crossover by 1967. Black artists I hadn’t known. Jazz, also new to me.

Brenda taught me to keep the bank George gave us folded and wrapped around the middle finger of my left hand, the tip glass on my tray primed. When some new guy gaped and asked what I was doing there, she taught me to snap, “Working, baby. Can I get you a drink?”

In my funky kitchen, wearing one of Brenda’s dashikis

The singer was a big draw. She did jazz standards. She did Nina Simone. One night she closed her show with “Four Women.” The SRO crowd rumbled with a riptide of bitterness, gave her a standing ovation. The guy next to me exhaled loudly. “Oh, man, that’s telling it like it is.” I nodded, gooseflesh raised on my arms by that last, raging, “my name is Peaches.” Although the regular at the bar addressed his remark to me as if I weren’t, in that moment I was acutely aware of being white.

*

George lit a cigarette, stood with one foot up on the edge of the sinks, elbow on knee, smoking, stroking his gray mustache. I lit a cigarette too, glad for the thinning crowd so I could sit awhile. There was a military snap to the erect way George carried himself and the skill with which he did his work. He didn’t drink on the job, was straight with the money, kept a truncheon under the bar and a protective eye on his waitresses.

We were in the lull between an afternoon jam session and Saturday night. Across the dim room the front door opened, letting in a dagger of daylight.

“Why you people want me when this place is dead?” Brenda demanded.

“Why you wait till the rush is over to show up?” George retorted.

Brenda snorted and swung across the room, picking up empties as she went. I liked watching men at the bar watch Brenda. Those long lovely legs turned them to jelly. She set glasses on the bar and asked, “You guys eat yet? Well, go take a break for crissake. What’s wrong with you, George? If I didn’t show up, you’d starve this poor child.”

I don’t know how long it took for me to become a poor child, but my clearest memories come after that happened, after George started calling me “my waitress,” after Brenda took me in hand, made us matching dashikis we wore with black hot pants and fishnet stockings, flat black shoes. Our jeans pulled on over those fishnets, Brenda drove me to afterhours jams. She reached under her seat to check her pistol. I’d never known a woman who kept a gun, never known anyone who had one under the driver’s seat.

George’s truncheon under the bar with its leather grip, Brenda’s pistol under the seat alluded to potential violence but I never took that note. Violence was outside my experience and remained there. Too naïve to judge anything, I only soaked into it all like water sliding into a new course.

*

Brenda took me to a rehearsal of a play she was in. A famous play, but not covered by my Florida education and I didn’t know it. She had an office job, worked three nights a week at the club, was active in local theatre. I took those facts of Brenda’s life for granted. Now, I wonder how she juggled it all. And made matching dashikis besides.

I sat in the empty theatre and watched Brenda deliver her lines while serving her husband scrambled eggs. She was Ruth and her husband Walter complained that all she did was tell him to eat his eggs when he was trying to tell her about his dream. Brenda spoke fluently, but the others didn’t. She prompted them often during that rehearsal. I marveled at how she knew everyone’s lines.

*

One busy night as I returned to the bar after serving drinks, I saw Raymond Carver and a friend standing there. My first reaction was irritation: what the hell were those white people doing in my bar?

I didn’t know the friend, also a poet, but I knew Ray. He worked on the literary magazine with us at the communal house, helped me see my poems needed revision. That was another life. At the Inn, I wasn’t prepared to engage with white people, poets or not. George filled my next order. Recognizing me, Carver laughed and asked, “What are you doing here?” I hoisted my tray. “Working, Ray. Working.”