If you read this blog regularly, you already know I’ve been working on a pulp-adventure novella featuring characters based on Grace and myself; their chemistry and repartee are based on ours, so much that I often cried or laughed while writing and proofreading it, and many of the characters and places are based on ones from my own life. Now at last it’s done; it will be the centerpiece of my next collection, Lost Angels, which is beginning to look like it will be published in late spring or early summer. But in the meantime, I’m happy to share an excerpt introducing the main characters; if you’re a paid subscriber and would like a PDF of the whole story, please email me; the rest of y’all will just have to wait for the book!
Friday, October 23rd, 1931
It all started one night at Lulu’s. Diane and I had taken my Tante Mathilde to see the new Marx Brothers talkie, and we decided to have a drink before taking her home. Well, to be honest, Tante Mathilde insisted we have a drink, and she had not accepted “no” for an answer from anybody since her husband died 33 years before. She was the family matriarch, my paternal grandfather’s younger sister, who had already outlived him by 23 years and Maman, my paternal grandmother, by 13. She was under 5 feet tall in heels and under 100 pounds soaking wet, but she conducted herself like the Empress Dowager and kept up with popular culture better than a lot of people half her age, which is why nobody who knew her would’ve been surprised to see her with her grandniece in a speakeasy.
I had a Brandy Alexander, which is what I always had in those days; Diane had a highball, which is what she always had after it became impossible to get decent bourbon; and Tante Mathilde had a Bee’s Knees. It may seem strange that I remember that over thirty years later, but it’s because Diane hated lemons and had apparently made some sort of comment about it while I was in the Ladies’, and when I got back to my seat my aunt was pontificating about how Diane didn’t “know what’s good.”
“Honestly, I can’t leave for five minutes without coming back to static.”
“It ain’t my fault if your aunt’s opinions are still stuck in the 19th century.”
“And it’s certainly not my fault if your friend there is a bumpkin.”
“Who you callin’ a bumpkin, you old crow?”
“Waiter! Another round please!” I wasn’t actually worried; they always sounded like that. It was just their way, and they actually loved each other as much as if they’d been blood kin. They practically were; Diane’s father had worked for Tante Mathilde’s husband his whole life, and she made him the general manager of the sugar cane plantation after the old man died in ’98, so she’d bounced Diane on her knee from the age of three. Of course, nowadays the size differential was almost the opposite: Diane was a tall, solidly-built woman of 5’9″ with long, straight black hair and strong features that hinted at her Houma ancestry, and she had a husky voice which made my aunt’s thin soprano sound childlike.
Anyhow, I wasn’t in the mood for their shenanigans, so I figured I’d throw some cold water on it. But my aunt was not having it. “She doesn’t even like ‘Stardust’. Who doesn’t like ‘Stardust’?”
“When did I say I don’t like ‘Stardust’?”
“Just now, when Angela was off to the loo.”
“I said nobody can play ‘Stardust’ like Armstrong, is what I said!”
“Well, the band here did a lovely job of it just now.”
“It had no damn pep at all. Them cats play jazz like they was playin’ at the Frumps and Fogeys Society.”
“Nonsense!”
“Really, Auntie! Diane knows more about jazz than both of us put together.”
“Especially since she don’t know beans about jazz.”
“C’mon, Diane, you’ve gotta admit Auntie’s pretty hep for eighty-one.”
“Nobody who can’t dig Cab Calloway is hep in my book.”
“I think Mr. Calloway is a fine musician, but I also think all his nonsense singing is silly. All that scooby-doo and hi-dee-ho foolishness, what is that supposed to be? Why can’t he sing sensibly like Jolson?”
Diane had been rolling her eyes while my aunt opined about scat, but in response to that last question she suddenly stopped, looked at her as though she had just upchucked on the table, and stated matter-of-factly, “The only word for Jolson is ‘grotesque’.”
“Grotesque! You want grotesque? I’ll show you grotesque!” With that she reached down as if she were going to get something from a bag that wasn’t there, then said, “What am I doing? Of course it’s at home.”
“What is, Auntie?”
“This simply awful thing I got at an estate sale this morning, and meant to give you.”
“Um…thanks?”
She laughed and patted my hand affectionately. “Oh, I didn’t really mean it was for you, but I thought your Mr. Girard might like it, since he’s a connoisseur of the outré.”
“Which is probably why he likes Angela so much.”
“Look who’s talking!” I said in mock offense, but Diane and my aunt had apparently left off of teasing each other to have a giggle at my expense instead. At the time, Armand Girard was my sugar daddy, and though Diane sometimes joshed me about him, Tante Mathilde had no room to judge because his age exceeded mine by exactly as much as her late husband’s had exceeded hers. Plus, he was basically the only thing standing between me and penury at the moment, and Diane was especially fond of him since he’d given me his “old” car – a 1927 Packard Custom Eight sedan – last year when he replaced it with a new Dusenberg Model J. That of course meant she got to tinker with the Packard, and let me tell you, she had that thing purring like a kitten when it idled and roaring like a lion when I stepped on the gas…
I’m sure you won’t consider it a “spoiler” if I tell you that the “simply awful thing” Angela’s aunt bought led our intrepid heroines into the greatest adventure of their lives, one that required all of their wits and derring-do; I hope everyone who reads it has as much fun as I had writing it!
