“They’re our friends!”
“Oh, God, yes.”
Trembling, trembling, trembling.
“But it’ll never work. They’re just not human.”
I am here in this night sky with my tapestry almost finished. I look forward to tomorrow when the captain will come again and we will talk. I look forward to the coming of all these good creatures who are confused now and somewhat alarmed but who will learn in time to love and be loved, to live with us and be our good friends. Tomorrow, the captain and I, I hope, will speak of rain and the sky and flowers and how it is when two creatures understand each other. The tapestry is finished. I finish it with a final quotation, in their own tongue, from the voices of the men in the ship, the voices that drift up to me on the blue night wind. Voices that seemed calmer and that accept circumstances and are not afraid anymore. Here ends my tapestry:
“You’ve decided then, Captain?”
“There’s only one thing to do, sir.”
“Yes. Only one possible thing to do.”
“IT’ S NOT POISONOUS !” SAID THE WIFE.
“But!” The husband jumped up, raised his foot, stomped three times on the rug, shuddering.
He stood looking down at the wet spot on the floor.
His trembling stopped.
I GET THE BLUES WHEN IT RAINS (A REMEMBRANCE)
1980
THERE IS ONE NIGHT in everyone’s life that has to do with time and memory and song. It has to happen—it must spring up with spontaneity and die away when finished and never happen again quite the same. To try to make it happen only makes it fail. But when it does happen, it is so beautiful you remember it for the rest of your days.
Such a night happened to me and some writing friends, oh, thirty-five or forty years ago. It all began with a song titled “I Get the Blues When It Rains.” Sound familiar? It should, to you older ones. To the younger, stop reading HERE. Most of what I have to offer from this point on belongs to a time before your birth and has to do with all the junk we put away in our attic heads and never take out until those special nights when memory prowls the trunks and unlocks the rusty hasps and lets out all the old and mediocre but somehow lovely words, or worthless but suddenly priceless tunes.
We had gathered at my friend Dolph Sharp’s house in the Hollywood Hills for an evening of reading aloud our short stories, poetry, and novels. There that night were such writers as Sanora Babb, Esther McCoy, Joseph Petracca, Wilma Shore, and a half dozen others who had published their first stories or books in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Each arrived that evening with a new manuscript, primed to be read.
But a strange thing happened on the way across Dolph Sharp’s front room.
Elliot Grennard, one of the senior writers of the group and a onetime jazz musician, passed the piano, touched the keys, paused, and played a chord. Then another chord. Then he laid his manuscript aside and put the bass in with his left hand and started playing an old tune.
We all looked up. Elliot glanced over at us and winked, standing there, letting the song play itself out nice and easy. “Know it?” he said.
“My God,” I cried, “I haven’t heard that in years!”
And I began to sing along with Elliot, and then Sanora came in and then Joe, and we sang: “I get the blues when it rains.”
We smiled at one another and the words came louder: “The blues I can’t lose when it rains.”
We knew all the words and sang them and finished it and when we were done we laughed and Elliot sat down and rambled through “I Found a Million Dollar Baby in a Five and Ten Cent Store,” and we discovered we all knew the words to that one too.
And then we sang “China Town, My China Town,” and after that, “Singin’ in the Rain”—yes, “singin’ in the rain, what a glorious feelin’, I’m happy again....”
Then someone remembered “In a Little Spanish Town”: “’Twas on a night like this, stars were peek-a-booing down, ’Twas on a night like this....”
And Dolph cut in with “I met her in Monterrey a long time ago, I met her in Monterrey, in old Mexico....”
Then Joe yelled, “Yes, we have no bananas, we have no bananas today,” which cut the sentiment for two minutes and led almost inevitably into “The Beer Barrel Polka” and “Hey, Mama, the Butcher Boy for Me.”
No one remembers who brought out the wine, but someone did, and we didn’t get drunk, no, we drank the wine, just the right amount, because the singing and the songs were everything. We were high on that.
We sang from nine until ten, at which time Joe Petracca said, “Stand aside, let the wop sing ‘Figaro.’” And we did, and he did. We got very quiet, listening to him, for we discovered he had a more than ordinarily firm, sweet voice. All alone, Joe sang sections of La Traviata, a bit of Tosca, and finished off with “Un bel dì.” He kept his eyes shut all the way to the end, then opened them, surprised, looked around and said, “For Christ’s sake, it’s getting too serious! Who knows ‘By a Waterfall’ from Golddiggers of 1933?”