Don's Guests

DON'S GUESTS

I had hoped there might be some sort of affordable doss house or commune in the small American town that turned out to be less hippyish than I had expected. The only place to stay was a full-price motel, either that or sleep rough through the chill creeping down from the mountains. It was already dusk by the time I decided to hitch a lift going south.

I hadn't so much as stuck my thumb out when Don pulled up in his dirty pickup truck. Judging by the heap of full paper bags in the back he was returning from his monthly trip to the grocery store. He swung open the passenger door and I climbed into a cloud of Pall Mall filterless tobacco smoke. The first impression of Don was smoke: the smell of tobacco would announce his presence, he made it his very own. Really he wanted strong dark European cigarettes such as Gitanes  - it was a subject dear to his heart - but they didn't sell them at the store, so he made do with Pall Mall filterless. In rare emergencies when a filterless wasn't immediately within reach he would break the filter off the nearest cigarette. Lit cigarettes seldom left his lip nor touched his hand. I noticed this after a few miles when Don pulled up for gas and filled his tank while the fag in his mouth sprang up and down like Andy Capp to the rhythm of his speech, cursing as he patted and emptied out his many coat pockets for money, clumsily dropping loose change and ash all over the petrol-soaked ground, the cigarette glow inches from blowing us sky-high. 

First impressions came easy with Don. His conversation was as unmysterious as his appearance: a Groucho Marx novelty mask combo of purple drinker's nose, dark moustache and glasses on a bald-topped ball of eyebrow, ear and nose hair - he looked like a snorer. Tobacco, booze, jazz, reefer, painter, beat poet, original surviving hepcat ... he didn't need many words to convey all these. "Hey, do you dig Eric Dolphy?" he asked, fumbling for a cassette among the rubbish on the dash. Squealing saxophone mayhem jumped mid-solo out of the car speakers and he cranked the volume up and shouted things like "Cook it!" in time to the squawks, sending quick puffs of smoke up around his grinning moustache as he drummed on the steering wheel. Through steamed up glasses he asked me "You ever notice how when a chick's really horny her breath smells of garlic?" 

We arrived at his house as though it were just a quick pause in the conversation: “Yeah man, Eric Dolphy...you cats appreciate jazz in Europe” he enthused, spilling groceries as he barged the door open with his shoulder. ”I bet you dig Trane in England, huh?" he continued, as kids and pets ran to the door and clambered all over him. "And art from Europe, man...Picasso! Miro! What do you say?" he went on, disappearing into the kitchen with some of his bags. I heard him clunk away and then slam another door, then the kids and pets rushed over to me: "What's your name? That's my sister, she's a year and a half younger than me. It's my birthday next week, I'm gonna be ten. Are you going to stay, will you come to my party? Do you like mice? My sister thinks they're gross but I wanna get one. How long are you gonna stay for?" I hadn't thought about whether I was staying, I hadn't discussed it with Don. He'd indicated with nods that home was not far down the road while he flung names of great artists, musicians and beautiful women about, but nothing more.

 A woman came out of a room at the back. When she opened the door I could hear a TV and a small child being noisy. I wasn't immediately sure whether she was Don's wife or daughter. She was almost half his age, insofar as you could guess Don's age at all.  "Hi, I'm Ronette" she said matter-of-fact. I told her my name and she sighed and made a face toward the kitchen with a little shrug, as if to say ‘where's that silly man disappeared to again?’. "Don!" She called to the kitchen. She smiled at me as we waited for his reply. I blushed to notice she was pretty: dark lashes and cute cheeks. "You seem nice. Shawna likes you, my daughter. Most of the people Don brings home are cool. It's just, he can be too trusting sometimes, I have to keep an eye on him." The door beyond the kitchen opened, the little Jack Russell dog stopped licking my face and bounded up to Don who appeared at the kitchen door with a bottle of wine and a corkscrew. "Stravinsky! Outta sight!" he said, winking at me. 

I slept on a bed already made up at one end of the long living room. It was a pitch black, still, moonless night; the blackness and silence of the unpeopled foothills a reminder of how used I had become in London to the constant murmur of traffic. A kitten startled me in the dark by pouncing on the bed and biting my toes that stuck out from under the duvet.

 I woke from a dreamless sleep to pale sunlight and the smells and sounds of a Saturday family breakfast. Framed abstract drawings and paintings hung on the walls: these were by Don, Ronette told me from around the corner in the kitchen; she had sensed that I was up pretty much before I knew it myself. I guess she was used to visitors, to Don's guests. Don had been quite the acclaimed artist in his day - there was even an encyclopedia entry about him somewhere: in a European one, no less. She'd hung his art on the walls - Don wasn't interested in his old stuff. If it was down to him alone he'd never so much as sell another painting, what with all the coffee and wine stains and cigarette burns he'd get all over them: Ronette kept the show on the road. She made me french toast and coffee which I ate with the girls while three year-old Elvin patiently held forth about what he did and didn't like to eat. I had never met a three year-old with an opinion about grownup food such as artichokes and olives. It was Elvin who informed his older sisters that the England I was from was not in America - he knew his stuff alright. I wondered whether his daddy had already given him the lowdown on jazz and modern painting. 

Don and his tobacco waft appeared on cue as soon as we'd finished washing the breakfast dishes. He had drunk far too much wine before bed to have anything other than black coffee for breakfast anyway. His clothes looked as though he hadn't bothered with the ritual of undressing for sleep. In fact, sleep was a mere interruption to his train of thought, and he continued where he'd left off the night before: “He could blow the shit outta that horn man, I'm telling you. He could really swing! 1961... I'll put it on for you so you can check it out."   

That evening Don took me to see his longtime buddy and fellow diehard beatnik Jimmy some miles further into the night along the silent, treeless dust road. Jimmy had bushy grey bristles and he wore a kilt. He told me he was a Scot, which he clearly wasn't, but after volunteering his clan heritage and showing me various tartans I understood that he meant he had Scottish forebears and was proud of it; Americans do love to fuss over their ancestral roots. He performed a hopping sword dance, which he probably assumed was still commonplace in the old country. This made him very red in the face and short of breath, so he sat down at the table with us to drink and smoke. I never saw his legs again. Don knew it was time to go after he'd set his eyebrows on fire for the third time by leaning into a candle as he nodded off. When you drink as much wine as Don does, smoking grass often puts paid to the evening; he had begun to slow down after the second pipeful. He staggered into his truck and drove us home through the blackness without looking at the road. 

The next day I woke up sick. I rushed outside and threw up on the weeds in the dusty yard, retching and sweating; I don't know if anyone saw me. In the kitchen Ronette asked me how long I intended to stay. I told her I felt queasy. I was still callow enough to imagine that anyone other than my mother would feel properly sorry for me when I was only slightly poorly, and with a self-inflicted hangover at that. She threw me a glance like I was a little boy trying to keep something obvious a secret. " Do you feel sick sick, or the kind of sick when you don't want to leave?" She gave me a squeeze and I blushed again. 

I stayed another two nights. I helped a father of one of the girls' schoolfriends plaster the house he was building for himself on the third day, so I didn't feel too guilty about freeloading, and treated myself to one more day of Ronette cooking for me while I played with grownup little Elvin and answered the girls' questions, letting them give me funny hairstyles and makeup. I didn't want to leave but I couldn't think of an excuse to stay. I wondered what it was that Don did right to deserve a woman like Ronette. A pretty, smart young lady to feed and love you, run a household and produce sweet children who call you daddy, without ever raising her voice at you for not lifting a finger. I guess she just liked him for the lovable old bum that he was. How funny women are, I thought, the things they like. 

Don was still sleeping off his hangover when I set off in the white midmorning sun. The dog walked with me some of the way to the tarmac road until he heard something more interesting and trotted back. When I reached the road and set my bag down, I looked for a fag in my pocket and found a note from Ronette. It was a sweet short note wishing me luck and signed 'Ronnie', along with a little drawing of Don's that she'd remembered my liking. It was of a scribbly nude with pointy tits, holding a flowerpot. It didn't take me long to lose, but for a while there I owned an original Don Crawford.