By

Harold A. Bascom

Ezrick Harker listens to the playback. He marvels at his melody line on his new, and hopefully innovative, arrangement of the Caribbean classic, “Yellow Bird”.

Yes! It feels okay, but for him, it isn’t outstanding or unique.

“It’s not different. They’ll say it’s old. They’ll say, Harker is stuck.”

He shakes his head.

“What’s not working here? Is it the bassline? The drums? The bird sounds too much?” he whispers and settles back in the chair before his mixing console.

He takes a deep breath. “You know what, maybe I should take a break. It will come!”

He relaxes, straightens up, and cracks his back to get the stiffness out of it. He glances at his gold-plated Rolex and smiles, and thinks of his wife, Mandy, upstairs.

He surmises that she has long fallen off to sleep with the Ebony magazine she has been reading. He chuckles. “Probably in dreamland,” he whispers and shakes his head. She often tells him that he loves his “steel drums” more than he does her. He smiles and turns the lights off in his home recording studio. His “Soca-Jazz Fusion Memento” album has sold well over in Europe. Reviewers were especially full of praise for his unique arrangement of steel, brass, and woodwind.

A boat of some sort is puttering by on the Essequibo River, where, on one of its many islands, he has built a five-bedroom mansion on the massive Essequibo River, with his earnings from his successful album in Europe. He steps onto the verandah and looks at the sky. He inhales deeply, then gazes at the grove of short coconut trees down by the riverside, where Mandy likes to swim naked at night. The squawking of a night bird, hurtling high above, filters down. He looks up as a wisp of cloud crosses a full moon.

He closes his eyes, fills his lungs with tropical air, and smiles. Then he thinks of Mandy—thinks that she may still be up and reenters the studio. He turns things off and starts up the curved stairway for the huge self-contained bedroom where the woman he knows he will love forever is.

He enters the cavernous bedroom and sees that she’s sleeping. He approaches the four-poster bed on tiptoe, so as not to wake her, then looks down, smiling, at the love of his life. He carefully removes the open magazine on her naked chest, rising and falling ever so slightly, then gently kisses her neck. He drinks her scent. He loves her scent like that of the flesh of a freshly sliced turpentine mango. He kisses her, she awakes, and soon they are making love.

##

They lie beaded in sweat, together. “You’re finished in the studio?” she whispers.

“Nah, an arrangement was beating me, but I think I know now how to make it work.”

She looks at him impishly. “O-o-o-o! So, I have magic!”

He laughs. “Yes. Maybe I ought to have you with me when I work.”

“You won’t work,” she chuckles. “I know you.”

Grinning, he gets up and wraps himself with a towel from the sturdy mahogany clothes horse near the king-sized poster bed. “I’ll be back up in … say, thirty minutes?”

Mandy turns on her elbows; her undulating curves gleam in the low light of the bedroom. “I’m hot,” she says, “I’ll take a swim.”

“Okay,” he says.

“Why you don’t join me, if you’ll finish up soon?”

“I will,” he says and leaves for his studio as she slips out of bed.

“I’ll wait for you,” he hears her say.

##

Ezrick Harker, now a mocked drughead in Hackensack, New Jersey, was heading back to the old garage on Union Street in which he was allowed to sleep. The open air was like tranquil music through his matted hair.

Mandy!

The Projects Complex, in which he had partly slept, was a couple of blocks behind him now. Police sirens threatened from afar, but he wasn’t apprehensive about being stopped and searched. If what he had heard only yesterday were true, there would be no drugs on him.

“I heard Crack Charlie was arrested!” Frankie at the liquor store had said.

“That’s what I heard, too,” Crip in the wheelchair rejoined.

But Ezrick didn’t believe a word of it; he would only do so if he got home without seeing the scourge of a man as the blocks ticked down towards Union Street and the dilapidated garage aback Pastor’s Hutson’s House, where he was allowed to live, after she found out that he too was a Guyanese, one who had been a successful musician in England.

Through past years, he had thought of Miles Davis, who had dug himself out of the addiction pit and reinvented himself as the genius he was. He always thought he could have done the same. In his mind, he was going to go back to Brooklyn, where he would find someone like an executive in the music business who might remember the outstanding musician he had been and give him that chance to find himself again. But thinking about it was as far as he ever got. He was yet to catch the 165 Bus to New York City.

As he trudged the lonely foredawn street, he thought of a news feature he had seen on the TV in the liquor store on State Street, a story of recovering addicts finding new meaning and purpose in life through sailing on the Hudson. It so reminded him of his paternal grandfather, a fisherman, in whose boat he sailed on the Atlantic. Ezrick Harker wished he could have drifted away from what he had become.

As he trudged to what he now called home, he found himself holding his breath while peering furtively up and down each cross street he came upon. The intersection of Central Avenue and Railway Avenue was next: Crack Charley’s haunt. Esrick found himself treading softly, found himself singing ‘Yellow Bird,’ a Caribbean classic, below his breath:

The bus stop shed was coming up. It was thereabout that he always seemed to find the dealer dressed in black and on a BMX bicycle, and then the bus stop was behind him. He crossed the intersection and began to breathe easier. Two blocks away from his street, however, he heard a familiar sound—that of a bicycle’s crankcase getting closer behind him and knew he was lost.

“Wha’appening, Drehd?” a deep, gravelly voice said.

Esrick turned but did not look Crack Charley in the face; he’d never see much of the man’s face anyway; Crack Charley always wore a dark cap, raked over his eyes.

A lone car was going by; its headlights caused a gold-capped tooth to gleam from the shadows of the face of the dark man on the BMX bicycle as he reached down into a sock that looked like a clown’s. “I-man got the real stuff, Bro! —Pure! The deal is the same as usual. You pay I-man later. Sight?”

Esrick Harker slipped the little packet of small rocks deep into the crotch of his dingy briefs and felt a chill stir in his belly. He knew that the fierce, tearing pain of the need for the crack cocaine on him was soon going to rip into his chest.

Mandy!

He could not stem his tears and wanted to be alone—to hide himself and abruptly detoured into a gloomy cross street that led to the large nursing home with the lit, green about it being soaked by an array of sprinklers.

Esrick found one of them especially fascinating; the water spewed higher and fell heavier than the rest. Drawn to its crystallized allure, Esrick stood gazing at it for a bit, then he did a very strange thing. He walked off the sidewalk and stood under the direct downpour of the huge rooster tail of water.

He closed his eyes and found himself at the boat landing down from his mansion on the Essequibo River, where he called out Mandy’s name and she didn’t answer … where he shouted for her before he started screaming and then sobbing her name.

And Mandy appeared to him naked and pure. She hugged him under the sprinkler. “I am fine,” she whispered, “and you too will be, now that you know I am waiting for you. … And that I still love you and will love you forever. …”

Mandy.

He felt parts of him changing as his t-shirt and jeans began clinging to his skin, and soon he was soaked down to his dingy briefs. He dug into them, brought out the little packet of drugs, then tore it open under the deluge. The crack melted away … and soon his hands were clean.

For him, time stood still under the sprinkler. … And when he stepped from under it, drenched like a baptism … his crazed hunger for a fix was gone.

Ezrick Harker wept.