Tales of Uncle Ernest – (Continued)

Section 4, “The Fish” – Chapter 4

When Uncle Ernest returned I asked him about the man he had sat next to on the curb. “Well, he was all hunched over with his head down, writing in a notebook. As I sat next to him, saying, ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ he raised his head slowly and said, ‘Pleasure to make your acquaintance, my good man.’ He was wearing a discolored white shirt, a black, soiled jacket (even though it was summer), and a black top hat.

“He had a jet-black mustache that accentuated his exceedingly white face, a face, it seemed, that had never been exposed to sunlight. And something else, something really bizarre … his eyes were small and pure black, and when he looked at me I felt as if those eyes were penetrating into the essence of my being.”

“Geez, Unk, that’s scary, it makes me feel kind of weird.”

“Oh, he was all right though, Moose,” Uncle Ernest said, calming me down with a pat on the back. “He said his name was Ed, and that he lived in the city and would be ‘delighted’ to show me around. That’s how he expressed it, Moose; he said, ‘Why I’d be delighted to enlighten you with the singular beauty of our fine metropolis, with its exquisite buildings and manifestations of melancholy elegance, which will engender in your countenance a brilliance of awareness unheard of in recent times.’

“As you may imagine, I was quite disturbed by this weird talk, and I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right, I don’t take that kind of language from most people and I would’ve decked him on the spot, but he said it so naturally and with such conviction that I let it pass. He seemed like a nice enough sort and I thought that maybe I could teach him to speak right if I hung around with him for a while. He declined my offer to share one of my beers so I knew from that that he wasn’t a wino, but he did say that he might ‘succumb’ to one later for the sake of ‘conviviality.’

“We began walking around Baltimore and the first thing we passed was the big library where Ed said he spent a lot of his time. Then we pushed open and peered into a crowded barroom where loud honky-tonk piano music was playing. Ed pointed to the side where a black man was playing energetically. Ed said that the type of music he played was called ‘towels,’ and that the players name was Scotty, I think he said.

“We stood there listening for a while and I really enjoyed it. Most of the towels he played were lively and bouncy, but a few were slow, soft, and dreamy. Ed explained that Scotty wrote all the pieces himself, but said that he would never become well-known except for this limited area of Baltimore. What a shame, Moose; I could have jived to those towels all night long and sure wish I could hear them again some time.” [To be continued Friday, 3/9/2012]