Crime Plus Music Read Free Page A

did.”
    He looked away from her with a sinking feeling. Of course, it was true. He was reminded of it every time he heard the song. It wasn’t about the thing when it happened. It was about imagining what it would be like just before it happened. Like when he was standing backstage at the Apollo, listening to all the girls scream, like they were promising all the love in the world. Before he realized it would never be enough.
    â€œYou taught at Stitt?”
    â€œFor ten years.”
    â€œI ever have you?”
    â€œOnly as a substitute. And you were a fresh-mouth lying little motherfucker even then.”
    He stared at her until the fog of years parted and she became faintly recognizable as Miss Brooks, the seventh-grade English teacher. Hiding behind her glasses with her hair up in a bun and her pigeon-toed walk with her flat shoes and long skirt that made a seething sound when she walked.
    She looked completely different now. The glasses were gone, along with one of her eyelashes. The sunken eye looking back at him had seen to the bottom of too many things. Of too many high-ball glasses, of too many lies, of too many men who couldn’t live up to their own promise. She didn’t believe in homework or steady diligence or poems or love songs that could change your life anymore. She was just looking for something to take her away for a while. And the thing that bothered Frankie the most was that it was like looking straight in the mirror.
    â€œWhat happened to you?” he said.
    â€œYou’re not the only one who’s had a hard time, Frankie.”
    â€œYou’re not teaching anymore?”
    â€œI got depressed. Especially after Kenny gave you all those letters and then moved away. He betrayed me. And I had to think about that every time that song came on the radio. And that’s why I cursed you.”
    â€œYou cursed me?”
    â€œLet me tell you something, Frankie.” She slid to the edge of her stool, so he could smell the rancidness of her breath mixing with lavender. “I went to City College, and I studied romantic poetry. I wrote my thesis on Keats. But some of my people were from the islands. And they know all about Voodoo and Yoruba. I lit a candle to try to get Kenny to come back to me. And when that didn’t work, I lit a candle to put a curse on all of you.”
    â€œI don’t believe in any of that.” Frankie took the little red straw out of his drink and put it in an ashtray.
    â€œAsk yourself. Doesn’t it seem like everyone who touched that song got cursed?”
    He smirked and raised the drink to his mouth, even as his mind started revolving. Morris’s brother stabbed to death at Birdland. George Goldner broke and on his last legs with gambling debts. Alan Freed disgraced, forgotten, and dead with cirrhosis at twenty-three. And Frankie himself an addict since fifteen, in and out of rehabilitation ever since, living his life like the Furies were after him.
    â€œYou may have cursed everyone else but it doesn’t look like you’re not doing too well yourself.”
    â€œThat’s how it goes with some curses.” She looked down at the purse. “You call forth the darkness, it overtakes you too. I got so down about what happened with Kenny and that song that I stopped being able to get out of bed in the morning to go to work. So they fired me. And then the same curse I put on you got put on me.”
    He saw now that her hands were swollen and her arms were unnaturally skinny in her puffy sleeves. If he rolled them up, he knew she’d have almost as many track marks as he did.
    â€œThat’s not a curse,” he said. “That’s drugs.”
    â€œThere’s a difference?”
    â€œLook.” He spun away from her on his stool. “I’m broke too. If you know anything about me, you know it’s true. If you want a piece of my song, go talk to the lawyers. Because I haven’t seen a dime