This is by way of a wee taster. The first few pages of Giselle and Mr Memphis. This piece was actually first published in Gutter Magazine 07 in around 2012 I think.
Frankfurt 1974
5th January
It’s five in the morning. I’m freezing, sitting up on a stool at the window staring out at the sparkling rooftops, my hands gradually warming on a mug of black tea.
I’d woken from the dream, panting and gasping for breath. Hannah’s contorted, screaming face had jolted me awake and stubbornly refused to disappear. I stumbled to the window, threw it open, and took a deep breath of air so sharp with frost it seared. It did the trick; shook me out of it. I looked out over the city, muffled with snow, beautiful, crisp and pure and I thought how beautiful the world could be. Yet what damage could be being done under any of those softly quilted surfaces? You’ve got to snap up the beautiful moments when they come.
There was a sound, at first quite subdued – crunching and a low, mumbled murmur. A figure turned the corner, and the murmur became a song, “We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun…”
The bulky form crossed the street leaving a confused record of its progress in the snow. It was a man. He stopped at the Dreikonigskirche wall, lurched from foot to foot, braced himself with one arm against it, fumbled with his fly then lost his balance and fell backwards into a drift. He lay there laughing, looked up at the sky, moved his arms to make Angel’s wings and joyously sang:
“But the stars we could reach were just… starfishes on the beach.”
I turned away and left him there. This is not the time for another rescue mission. The time has come to get some of this stuff down.
Giselle has given me the tools and I feel the pressure building. It’s like with the blues men and their hard luck stories – maybe naming it, spitting it out, serves some purpose?
So who am I and who is she? Better start with her. I wouldn’t be writing if it weren’t for her. She’s sleeping it off now, peaceful and sated behind that door. If I tune in I can hear her low breathing and then that sudden desperate catching of the breath, loud snorting, and something else – the crackle and clunk of a needle at the end of a record. Bless her, these days, most of the time, she is a she, and I prefer it that way. I never really knew her as a full blown he. Is this a partnership made in heaven? Not to look at us, but it has saved us both. Giselle gave me a new spark. Something caught between us and suddenly I was full of life again.
I’ve got to think about this, I’ve started and now I’m leading myself down a path I had not intended. I’m writing fast but every time I write a sentence something else bubbles up, in sixty odd years there is a lot to consider. Images, some like old black and white documentary, some vivid in their colour and accuracy, keep flickering around in my head, coming into sharp focus for a moment then passing, some all too real, some, I think, imagined. That’s the trouble, that’s what she’s been warning me about – how one thought takes you on a journey and suddenly you are not telling the story you wanted to tell.
Giselle’s educated, but ruined.
Bobby blew in one night, shook himself out of his raincoat and took up a perch next to mine. He gave me a nod, ordered a JD and sat listening to the low blues tones of that Mingus tape that was on continuous repeat. Over time he became more of a regular, we passed the time of day, exchanged jokes that weren’t that funny, stared into space and watched the smoke curl up under the lights. It seemed we came to the place for the same reason – it was low key, you could sit and smolder and slowly dampen the fires. He never commented on my shortness, if I held out an arm, he’d hoist me up on to the stool. I appreciated that.
Then one day something in him sparked. He stepped down from his perch, threw off his coat and revealed himself like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, stretching its wings in the sunlight. Of course my senses were heightened with pepper vodka, but he looked a vision. His femininity shone through, despite the shaved head and the army boots. He moved gracefully across the floor in a blue satin dress, the low light flickered off the fabric and his shiny blue/black head. His face contorted with emotion and he sang ‘Falling in Love Again’, with perfect timing, not overdone, just beautiful. My eyes and heart were opened. And I thought – well this is someone, this is someone I can go along with. It all started from there, the whole Giselle and Mr. Memphis thing. Her name stuck. Mine didn’t. I prefer Ignatz – I like to be who I am. Giselle, on the other hand, is trying to forget he was ever Bobby Crawford from South Side, Chicago.
All this was a few years ago now. After meeting Giselle my life lurched forward in a whole new direction. She’s reopened the world to me, she couldn’t help it, and having a willing learner, well that did her good too.
Giselle taught me to read and write. She sat me down and patiently formed letters for me to copy as she made the sounds – a a a a a, b b b b b, c c c c. She had me hold a pencil properly and write loops and strings of letters across the page. I have always liked mark making. I can carve and draw but writing was something I had never got on with. I worked things out by asking questions, by listening carefully by keeping my ear to the ground, and I voiced my thoughts and opinions in language and song. But Giselle’s teaching was a revelation. I came to realize you can think on paper, write down thoughts and descriptions, make up stories for yourself or who ever else you might care to share them with. I began to love the feel of that pencil between my fingers; I enjoyed the slight friction on the page and the easy way the lead glides.
Once these first lessons were learned I was possessed. I devoured all the writings she chose to throw at me. Truth is, it is what she needed – it took her back to what she knew, to a previous time when things were more solid, where progress could be charted. In her past life, before the draft, back in the world as those GIs were so fond of calling it, he’d been a good student, a Sunday school teacher. Their war had lost all that for him.
I remember what first hooked me in to story writing. We’d got an act together, slowly, and the gig had been booked – a warm up, down in the Jazz Keller. They were used to me down there. I’d been playing with assorted odds and sods for a while, making good use of my novelty value. But they weren’t prepared for this, probably just thought it would be the usual Zigeuner Jazz. The big black tranny and the dwarf blew them away. I had no nerves that night; Giselle, on the other hand, had needed a little help – she could only function high. I played my heart out and she sang a dream. We danced and waltzed and I played old Lisl from underneath her skirts, they loved that. Later we whooped it up at the Trompete. Giselle was speeding, manic, in world conquering mood.
We sat by the stove, coming down with a slow joint. There was a book on the table. It had seen better days and had a torn and stained yellow paper cover, red printed letters and a nicely engraved picture of a man in ragged clothes at the prow of a boat, out at sea, with a little bird sitting on a pole staring up at him. Something about that pole with the bird grabbed me, almost as if I had some memory of it, I could feel the grip of it in my hands. I picked the book up, flicking through it looking at the beautifully drawn images. On the inside cover was the same man in his little wooden boat, a huge swordfish leaping out of the water over his head, hook and line in his mouth. I stared at the picture and saw it had been engraved, block printed with beautiful use of light and shade. I peered at it closely. I was there in that boat, wrestling with that huge fish leaping up out of the water glistening and shining, but I wanted to know the story. Giselle knew. She took the book, looked at the cover and laughed.
”Hemingway – not that I appreciate the man, but if you gonna read any of his shit, you should read this… I have to read you this.”
She opened her arms, I climbed onto her lap and she began to read me the story. I felt cocooned, warm and mothered, and, at the same time, gripped by the tale of the Old Man and the boy. Here was something that carried you off into another world, like music but different, it took you, your thoughts and imaginings in a whole new direction.
But I’m jumping ahead here; lets get back to that night of revelation. I raised a glass and gave applause. He smiled, then, curtsied. He came over to the bar and I bought him a white wine. We moved to a corner. Sweat glistened on his brow. He was fired, quivering with intense excitement. I’d already figured him for a junky.
“Excuse me man, but it’s pressing on me – are you a dwarf?”
I don’t normally consider this question worthy of an answer. But after that performance he deserved some kind of response.
“Ignatz Himmelsputz. Human being, a short one I grant you, a dwarf if it helps.” Even I am tired of that line now, I’ve been using it so long.
“No offence meant – just curious. In case people ask who was present at the unveiling.”
“And you? A burn out from the army?”
I didn’t add junky, didn’t seem right at that stage. He stared at me with his sparking eyes, took a sip of white wine and smiled a big broad smile. “Yep. I’m out of there, done my time. No more man for me, no more Bobby Crawford from Chicago. Now I’m just Giselle.” He whispered the name and spread his arms out wide.
We sat at a table and supped and the stuff he had been through those past few years poured out of him. It took me back. There was a connection. He reminded me of a much younger me, sitting on the back of that jeep after they picked me up on the road, feeling I’d led one life and now I needed to forget it, stash it away in a strong box, bury it, throw away the key, and build another.
I suppose if you’ve killed up close, seen the gulping breaths, been in situations where your heart feels it is going to burst, seen your buddies blown to pieces, wiped their bits off your face, all the shit that happens in war – the fear, the burning, the stink, the chaos, the pain, the total lack of sense, you will want to bury it, forget it, be someone else. That seemed to be what was happening with Bobby. The heroin was helping, but becoming someone else was maybe helping more.
Later I brought him back to my lodgings, here on the top floor above the Trompete. We sat and drank tea. I rolled one up and we mellowed and listened to what I had on the tape – Memphis Slim. He wasn’t all that appreciative at first.
“Blues – man what’s a short-assed honky like you doin’ listening to the blues? It’ll bring you down man, it’ll bring you down!”
I had to explain my love for America, how American’s had saved me, for a while anyway, and how I’d only got back over from the East a few years back and found them again. Memphis Slim summed it all up for me – ‘Everyday I get the Blues’, ‘bad luck and trouble you know I had my share’, ‘Gonna pack up my suitcase’, ‘movin’ on down the line’. That stuff could have been written for me. Memphis Slim was my hero. I’d just seen him play in the Jazz Keller, him and Champion Jack Dupree, and I’d been working it out – accordion blues.
I didn’t torture him long. He came from a different place, was on a different journey. I shut down the tape. He moved around the attic, trying to take it in. Then he saw her on the workbench. He picked her up and examined her, put her to his lips and sharp little notes filled the room. Nobody had touched her before; nobody had played her other than me. I’m not sure why she was out on this occasion. He ran his fingers over the cool, off-white body and the lettering – LvB, examined the death’s head carving and then placed her back down asking no questions. He stood there in the room big and uneasy, slowly sober. I picked up Lisl, played some chords then tapped out a little Mazurka. He moved gracefully to the music. I pulled it into a blues and he stopped, and gave a long slow smile.
“Hey you are a real Mr. Memphis!”
That was it. That is how the act was born – Giselle and Mr. Memphis.
I’ve been writing this for hours. She’s still snoring and the groove of that record must be just about worn through.
Even as a mother at the risk of her own life,
Watches over and protects her only child,
So with a boundless mind may I cherish all living things,
Suffusing love over the entire world –
Above, below, and all around, without limit…
From the Metta Sutta
(Berkley Zen Center, translated by Mel Weitsman)
For Mum, Dad and Jayne
.
Frankfurt 1974
5th January
It’s five in the morning. I’m freezing, sitting up on a stool at the window staring out at the sparkling rooftops, my hands gradually warming on a mug of black tea.
I’d woken from the dream, panting and gasping for breath. Hannah’s contorted, screaming face had jolted me awake and stubbornly refused to disappear. I stumbled to the window, threw it open, and took a deep breath of air so sharp with frost it seared. It did the trick; shook me out of it. I looked out over the city, muffled with snow, beautiful, crisp and pure and I thought how beautiful the world could be. Yet what damage could be being done under any of those softly quilted surfaces? You’ve got to snap up the beautiful moments when they come.
There was a sound, at first quite subdued – crunching and a low, mumbled murmur. A figure turned the corner, and the murmur became a song, “We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun…”
The bulky form crossed the street leaving a confused record of its progress in the snow. It was a man. He stopped at the Dreikonigskirche wall, lurched from foot to foot, braced himself with one arm against it, fumbled with his fly then lost his balance and fell backwards into a drift. He lay there laughing, looked up at the sky, moved his arms to make Angel’s wings and joyously sang:
“But the stars we could reach were just… starfishes on the beach.”
I turned away and left him there. This is not the time for another rescue mission. The time has come to get some of this stuff down.
Giselle has given me the tools and I feel the pressure building. It’s like with the blues men and their hard luck stories – maybe naming it, spitting it out, serves some purpose?
So who am I and who is she? Better start with her. I wouldn’t be writing if it weren’t for her. She’s sleeping it off now, peaceful and sated behind that door. If I tune in I can hear her low breathing and then that sudden desperate catching of the breath, loud snorting, and something else – the crackle and clunk of a needle at the end of a record. Bless her, these days, most of the time, she is a she, and I prefer it that way. I never really knew her as a full blown he. Is this a partnership made in heaven? Not to look at us, but it has saved us both. Giselle gave me a new spark. Something caught between us and suddenly I was full of life again.
I’ve got to think about this, I’ve started and now I’m leading myself down a path I had not intended. I’m writing fast but every time I write a sentence something else bubbles up, in sixty odd years there is a lot to consider. Images, some like old black and white documentary, some vivid in their colour and accuracy, keep flickering around in my head, coming into sharp focus for a moment then passing, some all too real, some, I think, imagined. That’s the trouble, that’s what she’s been warning me about – how one thought takes you on a journey and suddenly you are not telling the story you wanted to tell.
Giselle’s educated, but ruined.
Bobby blew in one night, shook himself out of his raincoat and took up a perch next to mine. He gave me a nod, ordered a JD and sat listening to the low blues tones of that Mingus tape that was on continuous repeat. Over time he became more of a regular, we passed the time of day, exchanged jokes that weren’t that funny, stared into space and watched the smoke curl up under the lights. It seemed we came to the place for the same reason – it was low key, you could sit and smolder and slowly dampen the fires. He never commented on my shortness, if I held out an arm, he’d hoist me up on to the stool. I appreciated that.
Then one day something in him sparked. He stepped down from his perch, threw off his coat and revealed himself like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, stretching its wings in the sunlight. Of course my senses were heightened with pepper vodka, but he looked a vision. His femininity shone through, despite the shaved head and the army boots. He moved gracefully across the floor in a blue satin dress, the low light flickered off the fabric and his shiny blue/black head. His face contorted with emotion and he sang ‘Falling in Love Again’, with perfect timing, not overdone, just beautiful. My eyes and heart were opened. And I thought – well this is someone, this is someone I can go along with. It all started from there, the whole Giselle and Mr. Memphis thing. Her name stuck. Mine didn’t. I prefer Ignatz – I like to be who I am. Giselle, on the other hand, is trying to forget he was ever Bobby Crawford from South Side, Chicago.
All this was a few years ago now. After meeting Giselle my life lurched forward in a whole new direction. She’s reopened the world to me, she couldn’t help it, and having a willing learner, well that did her good too.
Giselle taught me to read and write. She sat me down and patiently formed letters for me to copy as she made the sounds – a a a a a, b b b b b, c c c c. She had me hold a pencil properly and write loops and strings of letters across the page. I have always liked mark making. I can carve and draw but writing was something I had never got on with. I worked things out by asking questions, by listening carefully by keeping my ear to the ground, and I voiced my thoughts and opinions in language and song. But Giselle’s teaching was a revelation. I came to realize you can think on paper, write down thoughts and descriptions, make up stories for yourself or who ever else you might care to share them with. I began to love the feel of that pencil between my fingers; I enjoyed the slight friction on the page and the easy way the lead glides.
Once these first lessons were learned I was possessed. I devoured all the writings she chose to throw at me. Truth is, it is what she needed – it took her back to what she knew, to a previous time when things were more solid, where progress could be charted. In her past life, before the draft, back in the world as those GIs were so fond of calling it, he’d been a good student, a Sunday school teacher. Their war had lost all that for him.
I remember what first hooked me in to story writing. We’d got an act together, slowly, and the gig had been booked – a warm up, down in the Jazz Keller. They were used to me down there. I’d been playing with assorted odds and sods for a while, making good use of my novelty value. But they weren’t prepared for this, probably just thought it would be the usual Zigeuner Jazz. The big black tranny and the dwarf blew them away. I had no nerves that night; Giselle, on the other hand, had needed a little help – she could only function high. I played my heart out and she sang a dream. We danced and waltzed and I played old Lisl from underneath her skirts, they loved that. Later we whooped it up at the Trompete. Giselle was speeding, manic, in world conquering mood.
We sat by the stove, coming down with a slow joint. There was a book on the table. It had seen better days and had a torn and stained yellow paper cover, red printed letters and a nicely engraved picture of a man in ragged clothes at the prow of a boat, out at sea, with a little bird sitting on a pole staring up at him. Something about that pole with the bird grabbed me, almost as if I had some memory of it, I could feel the grip of it in my hands. I picked the book up, flicking through it looking at the beautifully drawn images. On the inside cover was the same man in his little wooden boat, a huge swordfish leaping out of the water over his head, hook and line in his mouth. I stared at the picture and saw it had been engraved, block printed with beautiful use of light and shade. I peered at it closely. I was there in that boat, wrestling with that huge fish leaping up out of the water glistening and shining, but I wanted to know the story. Giselle knew. She took the book, looked at the cover and laughed.
”Hemingway – not that I appreciate the man, but if you gonna read any of his shit, you should read this… I have to read you this.”
She opened her arms, I climbed onto her lap and she began to read me the story. I felt cocooned, warm and mothered, and, at the same time, gripped by the tale of the Old Man and the boy. Here was something that carried you off into another world, like music but different, it took you, your thoughts and imaginings in a whole new direction.
But I’m jumping ahead here; lets get back to that night of revelation. I raised a glass and gave applause. He smiled, then, curtsied. He came over to the bar and I bought him a white wine. We moved to a corner. Sweat glistened on his brow. He was fired, quivering with intense excitement. I’d already figured him for a junky.
“Excuse me man, but it’s pressing on me – are you a dwarf?”
I don’t normally consider this question worthy of an answer. But after that performance he deserved some kind of response.
“Ignatz Himmelsputz. Human being, a short one I grant you, a dwarf if it helps.” Even I am tired of that line now, I’ve been using it so long.
“No offence meant – just curious. In case people ask who was present at the unveiling.”
“And you? A burn out from the army?”
I didn’t add junky, didn’t seem right at that stage. He stared at me with his sparking eyes, took a sip of white wine and smiled a big broad smile. “Yep. I’m out of there, done my time. No more man for me, no more Bobby Crawford from Chicago. Now I’m just Giselle.” He whispered the name and spread his arms out wide.
We sat at a table and supped and the stuff he had been through those past few years poured out of him. It took me back. There was a connection. He reminded me of a much younger me, sitting on the back of that jeep after they picked me up on the road, feeling I’d led one life and now I needed to forget it, stash it away in a strong box, bury it, throw away the key, and build another.
I suppose if you’ve killed up close, seen the gulping breaths, been in situations where your heart feels it is going to burst, seen your buddies blown to pieces, wiped their bits off your face, all the shit that happens in war – the fear, the burning, the stink, the chaos, the pain, the total lack of sense, you will want to bury it, forget it, be someone else. That seemed to be what was happening with Bobby. The heroin was helping, but becoming someone else was maybe helping more.