Big Man Read online

  “A ’Vette,” said Clarence. “A yellow ’Vette.”

  “Mine’s black,” Bruce laughed. “Someday…”

  They finished their first beers without speaking. The lights of offshore boats dotted the water. Clarence wondered about the people on those boats. Were they fishermen or people who’d been out sailing all day?

  “I wonder who’s on those boats,” said Bruce.

  Clarence laughed. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

  “Some lawyer from the City out on his cabin cruiser all day with his secretary,” said Bruce. “But the engine blows up and he has to call the Coast Guard to come and save him, and he forgets that his wife’s brother is in the Coast Guard….” Bruce let the story hang in the air.

  Clarence was getting used to the fact that this was how Bruce talked. This was how the guy thought… in stories. And there was no end to them. He could go on and on and on, and the stories were actually fucking good. He’d throw in little insights and nuances that made the characters come to life. He gave them dimension. They all had secrets.

  “You’ve got a way with words,” Clarence said. But even as he said it, he knew it didn’t convey his admiration for the way Bruce created things out of nothing.

  “You’ve got a gift,” he added.

  “Nah,” said Bruce. “I’m just good at bullshitting.”

  “Real good,” said Clarence. “You could write a book or something.”

  “That’s what my mother says,” Bruce replied. “But that’s not for me. At least not now. Maybe when I’m done with music.”

  Clarence laughed again, and this time Bruce joined in as they both acknowledged the absurdity of the thought.

  “When we’re dead,” said Clarence. “That’s when we’re done with music.”

  “Yeah,” said Bruce. “Before music I could hardly communicate at all. I never said shit in school, you know? It was like they were talking another fucking language or something. I spent the first part of my life inside my own head.”

  “That’s probably where you got the story thing,” Clarence speculated.

  “Yeah, maybe I should be grateful,” said Bruce. “Maybe it’s good that I got ignored.”

  “Let’s just hope we don’t get ignored tonight.”

  “Yeah, well… who knows? Maybe we’ll sit in with whoever’s playing there. That always helps,” said Bruce.

  They drank, crushed the cans, and put them into the bag along with the fresh ones. They opened two more. It was nearly full dark now, and the evening stretched out in front of them like a highway that led everywhere in the world.

  And they were not afraid.

  “I want to make a living with the horn,” said Clarence. “I don’t ever want to have a straight job again.”

  “I hear you,” said Bruce. “Me, too. It’s going to happen.”

  “I think so, too,” said Clarence. “I think something big is coming. I think someday we’ll get a hit record and everything will change. That’s all it takes, you know, one fucking hit. It doesn’t even have to be a big hit. Just a fucking hit and then nobody can stop you.”

  “Yeah,” said Bruce. “Then we get ’Vettes, right?”

  “Right,” said Clarence. “We’ll race ’em down this fucking Boardwalk.”

  They laughed and toasted each other.

  As they watched the blinking lights of planes high above them, they wondered where they were coming from or going to, and they both thought that there might be at least one person they knew flying in one of those planes tonight. But neither of them said anything about that.

  “How many people do you think are in the air at any given time?” said Bruce.

  “Shit, I don’t know. Must be tens of thousands if you’re counting all the planes in the air all over the world,” said Clarence.

  “That’s an amazing thought, isn’t it?” asked Bruce. “There’s like maybe the population of Rhode Island up in the sky all the time. They’re not on Earth.”

  “Yeah,” said Clarence. “Which means they can’t buy tickets to see us and we can’t fuck them. The women in the sky.”

  Bruce laughed. “The women in the sky,” he said.

  You could almost hear him thinking, rolling the phrase around in his head and then filing it for possible use later. But he didn’t say anything out loud, and the moment passed.

  “What do you think is going to happen when you die?” he asked.

  “All over the world girls will break down and cry,” said Clarence.

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Bruce. “But you believe in life after death, right? The whole heaven thing?”

  “Of course,” said Clarence. “I come from a very religious family. I have faith. Don’t you?”

  “This stuff is hard,” said Bruce. “Bottom line? I think that after you die is exactly like before you were born. You know, you try to remember the first thing you can remember, right?”

  “Right,” said Clarence.

  “And what do you remember before that?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s what death is like,” said Bruce. A full thirty seconds passed before he spoke again.

  “I think,” he said.

  A woman holding a little boy by the hand came walking up the beach from the water’s edge. They were stragglers who didn’t want the day to end. The boy was about seven years old and had a blue and white tube around his waist. It had seahorses on it, and he was struggling to hold it up with his free hand while he walked in the deep beach sand. He wore a Garden State T-shirt.

  The woman sensed Bruce and Clarence sitting there in the dark and instinctively started to veer away from them.

  “It’s okay,” said Bruce. “We’re harmless.”

  She looked closely, shielding her eyes from the pier lights above.

  “Is that you, Bruce?” she said.

  “Yeah,” he replied. “Who’s there?”

  “I recognized your voice,” she said, walking toward them. “I’m Vinnie Testa’s mother.”

  “Hey,” said Bruce.

  “I’m Marie Testa,” she said. “And this is Vinnie’s little brother, Carl.”

  “How you doing, Carl?” said Bruce.

  “Fine,” said the boy, looking down at his tube.

  “Bruce is a singer,” she said to Carl. “He’s got a band. Vinnie turned me on to you guys. He said, ‘Mom you’ve gotta see this guy.’ ”

  “How’s Vinnie doing?” asked Bruce.

  “Oh, you know,” she said. She was wearing a frayed man-cut white shirt over a damp one-piece bathing suit, and Carl tugged at the hem of the shirt as she spoke. “He’s doing much better since he got into that trouble back in May.”

  “Right,” said Bruce, nodding.

  “He’s in the union now,” she continued. “And people will always need plumbers, right?”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Bruce with one of his little laughs. “This is my friend Clarence Clemons.”

  “I know you, too,” she said. “You play with Norman Seldin.”

  “Guilty,” said Clarence.

  “He’s good, too,” she said. “I used to wait tables at the Student Prince, so I got to hear everybody. That was a while ago, but still… it was before my accident. I’m on disability now.”

  Neither guy could discern any kind of disability, so they didn’t say anything. They knew a lot of able-bodied people on disability. She looked like a typical Jersey Mom. She had light brown hair that she wore big and teased. She was about forty-five years old and maybe twenty pounds overweight. In one way or another she was like almost everybody they knew.

  “Tell Vinnie I said hello,” said Clarence.

  “I will,” she said with a big smile. “He’ll be thrilled I ran into you guys. He talks about you all the time and the stuff you’ve done together. You’ve got to promise to keep him out of trouble.”

  “He won’t get into trouble with us,” said Clarence. “I promise.”

  “Me, too,” said Bruce. “We’re law-abid
ing citizens.”

  “Right,” said Clarence.

  “Want a beer?” asked Bruce.

  “No thanks,” she said. “I’ve got to get home and start dinner. Anyways I gave it up for Lent and never went back to it.”

  “Probably just as well,” said Clarence. “I mean not that you were a lush or anything.”

  She laughed. When she did Carl looked up at her and smiled.

  “No, I know what you meant,” she said. “I was a lush, but that’s a whole ’nother story.”

  “I hear you,” said Clarence, for lack of anything better to say.

  “Well,” she said. “You guys take care.”

  “Okay,” said Bruce. “Bye, Carl.”

  “Bye,” said the kid. He waved and dropped his tube. He picked it up without letting go of his mother’s hand and slid it back up to his waist, where he balanced it on his hip. They headed off toward the stairs.

  “Tell Vinnie to call me,” said Clarence.

  “I will,” she called back.

  They went up to the boardwalk.

  Bruce sipped his beer, then turned to Clarence.

  “I have no idea who Vinnie Testa is,” he said. “Do you?”

  “Not a fucking clue,” said Clarence.

  Everglades National Park II

  Don

  So when did you and Bruce finally get together?”

  “When he was recording Greetings from Asbury Park,” said Clarence. “I think the record company was pushing him to spice it up… thought it needed something more.”

  “It needed you,” I said.

  “I’m glad it did.”

  “And the rest is history.”

  “Yeah, but not right away. I think our first gig was opening for Cheech and Chong, and whoever the promoter was, he was expecting a folksinger. He thought he was getting just Bruce and his guitar, and we go out there with this entire band. They pulled the plug on us halfway through the first song.”

  “And how long was it before you knew this would be big?”

  “Moneywise?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Money and fame.”

  “A long time. I always knew it was good. Better than that. I mean the music was always fantastic. But I spent a lot of time riding around in vans and sharing rooms for fifteen dollars a week. It gives truth to the phrase, ‘I play music for free, I get paid for the bullshit.’ ”

  The Legend of Daphne, 1972

  The girl in this story is a compilation of all the girls who ever used me. It’s a sad story of love and betrayal. The names have been changed to protect the guilty. It’s set on the day that a phone call changed my life. —C.C.

  How you doing, jelly-snack?” said Clarence to Daphne.

  He was driving through the New England countryside. It was a beautiful place he’d never been to before. It was also very white. They were in the fucking White Mountains, and he had a white girl in the car. It was disconcerting. Daphne was writing in her leather journal with her fancy blue pen. She seemed to spend all her time writing.

  “Jelly-snack,” she said. “That’s cute.”

  “I could call you the wonder waif,” he said. God damn, she looked young. And it didn’t help that she dressed even younger. Today she was in one of those shift dresses with big pockets that had little ducks appliquéd on them. And her shoes were those Mary Janes. She looked about twelve.

  “Turn left up here,” she said, as she finally closed the cover and clipped the pen to it.

  “You sure you know where we’re going? Lots of woods up here.”

  “I know this part of the world pretty well,” she said. “Just follow the signs for Cornish. There’s a coffee shop there with the best apple pie in the Northeast.”

  “Left up ahead,” he said. “Lights on, flaps up, visors down.”

  “You say things I couldn’t think of in a hundred years,” she said. She opened the book and began to write again.

  “You’re keeping track of what I’m saying?” he asked.

  “Clarence, I’m a writer,” she said. “I’m just gathering things that go into the big writing stew that’s in my head. Someday when I’m hungry for a certain word or phrase, I’ll dip into the stew and see what I come up with.” She closed the cover again and clipped the pen to it.

  “I liked your book,” he said.

  “I’m glad,” she replied. “It came out… okay.”

  “Quite an accomplishment to get published at nineteen,” said Clarence.

  “How old are you?” she asked.

  “Old,” he replied.

  He made the turn and pointed the car toward Cornish. He wondered if that was where the game hens came from.

  He had met her at a wedding in Boston. He and Hal Hollander played it for Hal’s cousin, who was the groom. Daphne was a friend of the bride and had flown up from New York where she lived. One thing led to another, and this trip to upper New England resulted.

  “My mother is a painter,” she said.

  “Houses?” he asked.

  “No,” she laughed. “She’s an artist.”

  “What kind of stuff does she paint?” he said.

  “All kinds of things: landscapes, seascapes, street scenes. It runs the gamut. But somewhere in everyone of them is a screaming woman,” she said. “It’s her signature.”

  “Wow,” he said.

  She wrote for a while.

  “How long are you going to keep traveling around?” she asked, turning toward him.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m sort of in a state of flux. I might be joining a new band. I’m not sure yet. At the moment I’m a razor in the wind.”

  She laughed and opened her journal again.

  When the tall guy in the jumpsuit walked into the restaurant, something in Daphne’s face changed. Not in a big way, but there was a shift of some kind. Her eyes seemed to widen and get a little brighter. The guy looked at her and Clarence seated in the booth along the back wall. He hesitated a moment, looked at his watch, then took a seat at the counter.

  “You know that guy?” said Clarence.

  “He looks familiar,” she said. “I know so many people in this neck of the woods. I’m pretty sure…”

  “What?” asked Clarence, when she trailed off.

  “I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a picture of him, but it was taken a long time ago,” she said.

  Before Clarence could respond she put her fork down next to her half-eaten pie and wiped her lips with the napkin. “Excuse me,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

  She got up and started toward the man in the jumpsuit, who had swiveled his stool around to watch her approach.

  “You gonna finish that pie?” asked Clarence, as she walked away.

  But Daphne didn’t answer.

  A few hours later, and they were in the guy’s house. His name was Jerry. Clarence thought he was weird and that his house was weird. It was a modified A-frame kind of structure filled with books and a lot of Asian statues and artwork. You couldn’t even see it from the road. Jerry himself was kind of hawklike, and he stared at Clarence in an unnerving way.

  Daphne had come back to the table and said that he was indeed someone she knew, and would Clarence mind if they went by his place? Why the fuck not? The guy looked to be about sixty years old or something, so it was unlikely he’d be hitting on Daphne. Although there was that look on her face when the dude walked into the place that was so strange.

  Now, sitting in his living room, Clarence noticed that she was still staring at the guy like he was the next big thing.

  “May I get you something to drink?” asked Jerry.

  “I’m fine,” said Daphne.

  Jerry looked at Clarence and raised his eyebrows.

  “Beer?” said Clarence.

  “I have ginger beer,” said Jerry.

  “Nah, that’s okay,” said Clarence. “We’ve got to get going anyway. We’ve gotta find some place to stay tonight.”

  “I’d love a ginger beer,” said Daphne. />
  “Coming up,” said Jerry. He smiled at Clarence and stood. “Sure you don’t want one? They’re quite tangy.”

  “I’m sure,” said Clarence.

  Jerry shrugged and walked off to the kitchen. Clarence spoke to Daphne in a stage whisper.

  “What the fuck are we doing here?” he said.

  “He’s a writer,” she said, as if that explained every mystery in the fucking universe.

  “So what?” said Clarence. “He’s weird and I don’t like being here. I can tell he wants me out of his house.”

  “That’s not true,” she said.

  “It’s true,” he replied. “It’s a vibration that only registers on black skin.”

  “Nonsense,” she said.

  He could tell she was nervous. She was acting like a schoolgirl, which fit with the way she looked.

  “So he’s a writer. Why are we staying?” he asked.

  “Well, I’m a writer, too. We have a lot in common,” she said.

  Jerry came back with two bottles of bubbly brown liquid with what looked like Japanese writing on them.

  “I figured we’d forego glasses,” he said.

  “Fine with me,” she said.

  They sipped their ginger beers, looking at each other the whole time like they were sharing some kind of ginger-beer-drinking secret.

  “So Daphne tells me you’re a writer, Jerry,” said Clarence. “What kind of stuff do you write?”

  Daphne looked down at her Mary Janes. Her body language seemed to suggest an apology.

  “What a good question,” said Jerry. “What kind of stuff do I write? Well, let’s see. I would say that I write subversive things. My work involves a lot of oblique angles.”

  Daphne coughed, but she might have been stifling laughter. It was hard to tell.

  “And what do you do, Clarence?” asked Jerry.

  “I’m a musician,” said Clarence. “I play the saxophone.”

  “You don’t say,” said Jerry.

  “No, I do say,” said Clarence.

  Jerry smiled then looked at Daphne who was sipping her ginger beer.

  “Delightful,” he said.

  Later: