Two Micros
by Kevin Grauke
Please Play the Play Misty for Me ‘Misty’ for Me
There are so few of us left who remember. When he answers, even before I make my request, I hear everything he knows in the quivering silver of his voice, which summons the flutters of Ben Webster’s ballad vibrato, though without its design. He understands.
Because he knows vinyl and needles and turntable platters, Blue Note and Prestige and Riverside, too, he knows without being told that it’s Erroll Garner who’s desired, from the year 1955—on Contrasts, side two—both moody and sparkling and over too soon.
Together we laugh at how Clint nearly died at the hands of a comely admirer who listened every night to his purr over the airwaves as the tide came in, but we didn’t laugh at his love of jazz—no, never—as it was even purer than ours, willing as he was to redden the rocks at the bottom of Carmel’s cliffs, all in the name of not quite three minutes of beauty in E-flat major.
And Introducing Sydney Greenstreet
after The Maltese Falcon
There he is in the background, our man of sixty-two in his very first film role, rising from a chair to greet a visitor. His dark suit, though large (he is, after all, a large man), is immaculate, with its white pocket square and chained pocket watch, its pearl tie pin and prim boutonnière. From a decanter he pours two tumblers of whiskey. He is a man suspicious of men who say when and also of men who mute their tongues. He is a man who likes drinking with and talking to men who like to drink and talk. He offers the visitor a cigar and lets it be known whom else he distrusts: any man not looking out for himself, first, last, and always. They smoke and eye each other and then he harrumphs—both the first and the last man ever to do so so delightedly, so splendidly, so well. And then he tells of the black bird, the stuff that dreams are made of (yes, yes), how its enamel shields priceless bejeweled wings. But all this talk comes to naught, as he has already lost what he seeks, outdone as he’s been by the visitor, a man who has never played the sap or taken the fall.
Treasures of other sorts do exist, however. And one’s in dusty Morocco. There our man will be a knoll of buttercream garnished with a dark velvet fez. Drinking at a gin joint’s polished bar, he’ll listen to the man at the piano playing requests. The most painful songs are always the best.
Kevin Grauke has published work in such places as The Southern Review, Cimarron Review, Sycamore Review, Blue Mesa Review, Sou'wester, and Quarterly West. His collection, Shadows of Men (Queen's Ferry Press), won the Steven Turner Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Originally from Texas, he teaches at La Salle University in Philadelphia.
