Note: the short story below (“Gumbo”) is being updated/continued every few days

Gumbo

About the time the two crackheads were driving lead shrapnel into his bound and gagged family’s skulls at the old house on Hargett and Salisbury, which would become famous for one of the most horrific crimes the city had ever endured, Smedes Westerbeek was cooking.

If you stood there and watched him from behind the stage, you’d hardly see his arms moving, he was that smooth. Just elbows rising and falling and shoulders digging into and out of the rarified air bubble surrounding him and his comically small set of blue, sparkly kicks.

Smedes Westerbeek was a huge man with hands the size of pizza paddles. When he held the sticks, clasped loosely in between his thumbs and forefingers, balanced just on the top groove there, all you could see were the nylon tips and maybe a few inches of wood below. He drove into the drumhead with controlled ferocity and energy, which somehow seemed to flow down into his limbs and elongated digits from nowhere. People who saw him work (from all angles) always said the same thing, shaking their heads: he looks like he’s stirring a pot of gumbo on a Saturday late night about to go into a Sunday.
—Saturdays is for fish fryin’
—Where y’at?
—Still though, he smoove.

And he was that. Smedes Westerbeek was smoove. If you asked him how or where, he’d tell you: paradiddles.
Right, left, right right. Left, right, left, left.
Forty-five years of paradiddles. That’s what he’d say.
Pa-ra-di-ddle. Pa-ra-di-ddle. Get it, boss?
And you’d get it. You’d stare at his impossibly-stretched digits making like drumsticks rat-tat-tatting on his thighs like a Tommy Gun and you’d get it.

Started out in Cleveland in thirty-three on a ol plastic bucket on the street front a the Rocky River Brew Com-ny. Drove ‘em all crazy in there under thar winda, but I earned. Had to. They’d drop they money into an old Irish hat of my pops I had turned up so’s it can hold the coins like a piggy bank. Some a them boys in thar’d drop ‘em from the windas; some a them jes to quiet me down. They’d tell me that too and laugh: ‘ere ya go kid, nah shut the hell up wid dat racket, fer chrissakes. Still. Made about two bucks a day bangin’ on that ol’ bucket. Still got it too, trunk a the Caddy out back there in the alley. Keep me it full a kitty litter for them icy nights. You know’m sayin?

—Hey Smedes, when you gonna be done ho’mes? You stankin’ up the mothafucka all the way out here. Mafacka comin’ thru the slits a’ the doors and shit. Goddaimn!
The door slammed shut and there was explosive laughter from the boys, followed by coughing and hacking and general razzing back and forth.
And then it faded out with their high five-ing ghosts floating back into the acrid-smelling club.
Smedes shot up in any type of bathroom. He didn’t care. Porta-potties, gas stations, outhouses. The way he saw it, if he was pushing in shit, he might as well be around it. It’s what he deserved for being hooked. God saw to that, his mother said. It’s what he deserved. Only he didn’t believe in God. Not then.
There was one time in Erie, Pennsylvania at a public craphouse off of Rt. 90 when some guy stuck his penis through a glory hole while Smedes was pushing in the junk. It was an ugly, leathery, used, half-erect, uncircumcised organ bullying him into taking it. He pushed the plunger and said Nah ho’mes. It’s aiight. And the man pulled it out and zipped up and called him a high brow faggot.
He made one hundred and seventy-six dollars that night and a twenty dollar bill in his pocket as a tip for doing a Gene Krupa vs. Chick Webb battle of the drummers bit for a couple of old timers with brilliantine in their hair and a tray full of empty gin glasses littering the table.
Easy now. Here it come.
And the junk flooded into him.
Hey ho’mes…
ho’mes…
you aiight, ho’mes?
you aiight?

¿sǝɯ,oɥ ǝɯ ɹɐǝh noy ¡sǝɯ,oH

—Compton?
—Come on slick. Let’s get you up off a this piss wet floor. Come on now.
—Aiight. Who left?
—Nobody. Uhr-body gone. They closed.
—Took the bus?
—Mmhm. Come on now.
—Aiight.
—Come on! Get you ya shoes. They by ya hands.
—Aiight.

In the coda of the second set, every night, the boys would have their solos. Smedes never went beyond eight bars. He thought the bottom ought to be just that. The bottom. No one needed to hear more than eight bars of triplets or sixteenth notes on the skins. The bottom held up the tunes. It was there to lift up the horn blowers, the piano players, the banjo, the guitar. It was the podium. The lectern for the professors. No one ever needed to hear the bottom step up into the lights. Otherwise it wouldn’t have been the bottom anymore. You un-earth the foundation and you got yourself some trouble mister. All kinds of things come up to bite you from the soil. Worms, maggots, moles, snakes, mud dawbers. Even rotten corpses. Zombies. Men with revenge on their minds. Don’t go digging too far, is what Smedes believed. There’s nastiness alive down there. Eight bars. That’s all Smedes agreed to do. And that’s what he did every night, in the coda of the second set. But the one thing they loved was when he got in on top of “Ivory” Waller’s solo. They went crazy for the schtick. “Ivory” did his thing for ten minutes sometimes, all on purpose. And so the act went where Smedes would cut in finally, exasperated and showing it on his face. Checking his watch. Would cut right in with the bass drum, and the rest of the boys made a big fuss about it. Really gave it to him.
“Let ‘im walk, let ‘im walk” they’d say and the crowd loved it. Smedes would shake his head and check the watch again, wind it, tap it, listen to it, stretch his muscles, yawn. Some nights he’d open up a book and flip pages from time to time. Some nights he’d twirl the cubes inside his rocks glass with the tip of the stick. They went crazy for Ivory. And for Smedes as the bad guy. But after, in the dressing rooms, on the streets or overnight bus to the next gig, the boys would tell you:
— Ain’t nothin’ cookin’ without Smedes and the bottom. Nothin’ in that mafacka pot ‘cept burnt ol’ and some nasty onions.
—Mmmhm.
—Straight up.
And they played cards. The Night People. Taking over shifts from the daywalkers, the bricklayers, the mothers and fathers who floated checks to the landlord and got their grocery tabs paid at the corner store with crumpled-up dollar bills and handfulls of quarters and nickles. End of the week piggybank raids.
—What key is this in?
They drank Muscatel or Mad Dog 20/20 out of pint bottles stuffed in paper bags and kept at the breast, safe from light and the blue boys rolling around in black-and-whites, looking to write citations or bust somebody up
—What key is this in?
The Night People. Shift workers. Bottom dwellers, only the bottom was a good place to be. The bottom was strong and smooth. It was a pair of shoulders made of brimstone and treacle and granite and titanium all mashed up and held together by Smedes in his hundred-dollar wingtips.

At 6:06, the start of dinner in most respectable American households, Sunday evening in the middle of a nasty, bug-infested July in Cleveland’s Battlefield section, Smedes Westerbeek checked in under the given name of James Adams Edward Kennedy Westerbrook. When he busted through, bloody and screaming and making a general racket that was heard all the way out to Funky Joe’s where his long-gone daddy was killing his tenth finger of whisky, the midwife who held up the baby for his tired mammy pronounced a most un-welcomed opinion of that long day:
—He looks a bit like a mutt we had one summer when I’s six or seven. Went by the name of Smedes. Was a devil of a dog, black as night. And nasty, as well.
His mother, herself just turned 17 years but with sensibilities of a sage, thought he looked less like a bloody, snarling dog and more like one of those elusive night creatures from Madagascar with the giant, round corneas and prehensile tails. She’d read about them and seen pictures in Life Magazine.
—Jeesus he’s a grumpy one.
And the midwife went to wipe him.
—You’d be too if you was pushed into all this with no say in the matter, the mammy said and shifted her hips to ameliorate the pulsating pain of the still-contracting uterus.
—What’s the father’s name, said the midwife. —I got to fill out some papers for the gov’ment after.
—Father?
—Yes. I got to write down some…
—He ain’t got no daddy. Can you write that for the gob’ment?
The midwife stopped cleaning the newborn. She didn’t look at the bloody bed.
—Yea, I s’ppose so. They’s a box on there I can check. I think.
—Good. Then check it and be done with it.

When Smedes turned seven he went to work for the Stravinskys, a Russian-Jewish family who provided coal to the prostitutes of Fairytown—the salacious parish of the city. He pushed along a cart filled with the black rock up and down the streets and yelled out at every block. Behind him came another kid with another cart. And a full-grown man behind them both, advertising his own affairs:
—Bottles, rags, sacks! Bottles, rags, sacks!
Coal!
Bottles, rags…
Coal!
sacks!
Coal!
The Stravinskys always did him right. Mrs. Stravinsky made sure he ate a hot supper every night before he went home. Potatoes, boiled cabbage, string beans, borscht, and sometimes even pork or beef stew. Smedes never forgot what the family did for him. Later, in their honor, he wore a Star of David on his suit lapel every time he performed.
When he turned ten, Smedes took a train south and left his mother for the streets of New Orleans. On July 4th, he was arrested by Constable Eddie Jones (two weeks short of making sergeant) for firing an unregistered pistol into the air, during the festivities. “Besides the gun,” Constable Jones wrote in the report filed at the 5th District Station, “the boy had on his person an old, British-style brass band cornet (probably stolen).”
The next morning, James Adams Edward Kennedy Westerbrook and his (probably stolen) instrument were signed into the “Chalmette Meraux Waif’s Home” with dozens of other restless boys. He would spend the next four years there, playing in the brass, military-type band and various city parades. Those who heard him blow said he was the closest thing to Ruby Braff or King Oliver.

2 lbs okra, sliced
½ c. bacon fat or oil
¼ lb. diced ham
2 large onions
2 T. flour
1 large green bell pepper
3 stalks celery, diced
¼ c. minced parsley
3 bay leaves
6 cloves garlic, chopped
½ T. oregano
½ T. thyme
½ t. garlic powder
2 8-oz. cans tomato sauce
3 qts. Beef stock
1 can tomato paste
2 chicken breasts (chopped and cooked)
1 pkg. smoked or andouille sausage
Salt and cayenne pepper to taste

In a heavy pot, cook okra in oil, with a lid, for 25 minutes. Mash with a potato masher. Add diced ham, onions and cook 10 minutes. Sprinkle flour over, stir and brown the mixture. Add enough water to keep from sticking. Add pepper, celery, parsley, bay leaves, garlic, and thyme, stirring constantly. Add tomato sauce and simmer 5 minutes. Slowly stir in stock and tomato paste. Add chicken and sausage. And love. Simmer 2 ½ hours. Stir well and taste for seasonings.

(continued)