Read Online Rhode Island Red by Charlotte Carter - Free Book Online

is a kind of shrine I have created. Hundreds of recordings. Hundreds, I tell you. And books. And photographs. Posters. Posters everywhere. And all concerning a single musician. The one who obsesses me. And until I have a complete understanding of him and his music, until I have comprehended his heart and his soul, he will obsess me. As long as I live. Do you see, Nanette, what I am saying?”
    â€œNot at all,” I said. “But who’s the musician?”
    â€œBird.”
    â€œBeg pardon?”
    â€œParker.”
    â€œAs in Charlie?”
    â€œYes. Of course.”
    â€œYou’re telling me you’re obsessed with Charlie Parker?”
    â€œYes. It is true.”
    â€œAnd you want me to help you understand ?”
    He nodded.
    This time I couldn’t hold it back. Before long, I was doubled over with laughter. Racism is a stitch, ain’t it? White people think you’re either a half wit, genetically determined criminal or an extraterrestrial with some kind of pipeline to the spirit .
    Oh well. There didn’t seem to be much point in going out on this weird guy, Valokus, whose face had again clouded over with pain and incomprehension. Besides, what was he asking of me, essentially? To talk to him about music. What was so bad about that? It wasn’t as though he was asking me to clean his place or suck his dick.
    So I pulled myself together and took another sip of my cognac. Charlie Parker wasn’t no goddamn mystic, he was a musical genius—for some, the musical genius—fucked up behind heroin and being an American Negro—so what else is new? But instead of saying that to Henry, I reached over and patted his hand a little.
    In turn, he took mine and kissed it lingeringly. Then he called for the bottle of Remy and poured me a really big drink.
    Valokus took me back to my corner and left me there with the paper container of cappuccino he had purchased at the new cafe in the neighborhood. He was going uptown now, he said, because he’d heard Colony Records had a new shipment of some live recordings of Bird club dates.
    Just the tiniest bit unsteady on my feet, I watched him walk up the block and disappear around the corner.
    Pity I’m not a true whore, I thought. I could take this fool for a real ride.
    Henry wasn’t kidding. His apartment, which I visited after our third lunch date, was a shrine to Charlie Parker.
    Everywhere you looked there was a piece of Bird memorabilia: poster size blow ups of old black and white photos of Parker, “Bird Lives” calendars, back issue jazz magazines, an unpublished PhD thesis, books, postcards.
    And then there was the music itself: records, cassettes, CDs.
    I was speechless. This time it didn’t occur to me to laugh at Henry’s Birdmania Something happened on that first visit to his shrine that made me a little less high handed about his obsession. A sudden shock of recognition, I guess. I realized that my feeling for France may not have been so different from Henry’s Birdaholism.
    France was hardly my home. Yet I kept fleeing there. It was where I felt safe, the most alive, the most understood, the most welcome. French was not my mother tongue. Yet if I had my way every school child would start studying it at age six. I tried to write in that language. I loved the way it felt in my mouth. I was positively turned on just hearing it on the radio. But that was all romantic crap. I’m not French. And no power on earth could make it otherwise. I’m as colored and American as Charlie Parker. That moment of recognition and empathy with Henry Valokus was a turning point in my attitude toward him. His Bird thing was no longer just silly; it had become endearing.
    We talked quite animatedly that afternoon about our shared disappointment with the film they’d made about Parker’s life, though we both loved the actors who’d played Bird and Chan. We chose five tunes and dug through all the