Joplin's Ghost Read Free Page A

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    Whenever Sarge returned from the road—sometimes after days, sometimes after weeks—he had new stories when he thought Phoenix was asleep and couldn’t hear him and Mom sitting up half the night at the kitchen table. You’d think they didn’t have mamas and daddies. You should have seen the mess they left in the hotel. He was so strung out, he fell asleep at the microphone. Phoenix loved Sarge’s road stories. When she heard her parents going toward the kitchen, she climbed out of bed to hide just out of their sight, next to the china cabinet beyond the kitchen doorway. The stories were a window into a world without rules, perfect entertainment. You don’t snort it, fool, was one of the punch lines that made Mom scream from laughing so hard. (Phoenix’s cousin Gloria told her later that joke had something to do with drugs, inside knowledge Phoenix thought Gloria had no business knowing at eleven—but that was Gloria.)
    Over time, though, Phoenix began to resent the performers her father worked for. It was bad enough Sarge was gone as often as he was home, but he was gone babysitting a pack of spoiled druggies who didn’t deserve him. By the time Phoenix was ten, show business seemed like one of the fancy chocolate candies her grandmother served from boxes every Thanksgiving: tempting on the outside, but likely to be licorice or cherry on the inside. Downright unappetizing, when you got to the taste of it.
    Phoenix’s own dream was to be famous with dignity, chiefly by finding her way into the Guinness Book of World Records. Every day brought new inspiration: holding her breath (she made it up to fifty seconds), longest moonwalk (she practiced moonwalking across the kitchen floor every day after school) and longest kiss (even with Saran Wrap separating their lips, kissing Gloria was mostly gross—mostly—so she didn’t have anyone to practice with). It was only a matter of time before she discovered her hidden talent, whatever it was, so it was best to get started early. She would break or create any record, as long is it didn’t involve performances of any kind, or a stage.
    Or, of course, a piano.
    The Silver Slipper didn’t help reduce her aversion to show business. When Aunt Liv couldn’t babysit or the weekend shows went late, Phoenix was a fixture on the club’s cot in the office upstairs, sleeping through the throbbing bass drums and whining trumpets from the stage beneath her. The Slipper wasn’t a big or popular club, so the acts who came through usually weren’t happy to be there. Some were frustrated because they wanted to be farther along, and most because they had already been farther along and were on their way back. Each night, Phoenix witnessed their neat trick of suddenly remembering to smile before they took the stage, where their restlessness and resentment were in her plain view.
    Her last shard of innocence was lost the night she heard her favorite singer say that if she had to do that fucking song from the radio again, she would lose her fucking mind, she swore to fucking G—d, which Phoenix was sure meant (1) her favorite singer wasn’t going to sing the song Phoenix had wanted to hear so badly that she’d begged her parents to stay up late on a school night, and (2) her favorite singer had blasphemed and was going straight to Hell.
    At ten, Phoenix would have been very disappointed to learn that show business, and music, were in her future. Downright horrified, really.
    Then came the piano. And the accident.
    The old piano had sat inside 565 Alton Road since the two-story brick building first opened its doors in 1927 as an all-girls’ school, before the building fell from grace as a flophouse, then found salvation as a jazz club. The piano had been collecting dust against the wall in the upstairs storage room as long as anyone knew: from when Phoenix’s grandfather, Bud Rosen, sold his club to his daughter right before he was indicted for tax fraud in 1982; from when the