ROOT WORD PRODUCTIONS
EXCERPTS
from
MOVING PICTURES
by
Paul Root
from: LITTLE ELTON and THE KINGS
I.
1966
Ray Lachman and Morrie Moore have spent the night jamming clean R and B and straight-ahead rock-n-roll—Elvis, Chuck Berry, Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Herman's Hermits, Sam and Dave, Wilson Pickett, Spencer Davis. They played Enid’s from seven to nine, a crisp session for the college kids who know their stuff. Then ten-thirty to near midnight at Alex Brothers' Coffee House for more of a mix of working-class teens and twenty-somethings, some black, most white, a sprinkle of the collegians either doping their way out of school or trying to gain their street credentials by hanging out with the blue-collar kids—proletariat through osmosis. And finally they’d played Randolph’s for the midnight show. Randolph’s: the club for the never-left-town-crowd and those who never would leave town, whether or not they yet knew it.
After the graveyard shift at Randolph’s, Ray and Morrie have ended up here: the after-hours party in Sheila Bromwell’s basement. Sheila is queen of the sundowners, fifty-six years old, divorced two times and widowed once. She provides a crash pad, a respite for the other veterans who come to Randolph’s faithfully to add some music to the slow screech of their decelerating lives.
Now, even among a roomful of sundowners, the sun is beginning to rise, a touch of garish orange seeping through the bars of the cellar windows. Ray Lachman and Morrie Moore are the only two fully conscious now, the only two with any kind of communication passing between them other than a weary grope between a pair of debauched lovers or the sluggish contemplation of another drink that a grizzled mope at Sheila’s makeshift bar is having.
Ray sits at a piano quietly keying snippets of pieces that pop in and out of his mind. He is thin, too thin, but handsome in a feral, lupine way. His green eyes burn brightly, always have, but these days their incandescence that has always drawn people to him now only serves to make people notice that the rest of him doesn’t seem to be burning so brightly. His complexion is going gray, washed out, the musician’s midnight-hour electric suntan settling in permanently. The crow’s feet are beginning to splay even when he’s not laughing or squinting.
If Ray is a thin and hungry wolf, Morrie is a lumbering bear, literally a hundred pounds heavier than Ray’s buck-and-a-half, albeit nearly half a foot taller at six foot four. He has long dark hair striping white down the middle like a skunk’s hide. A bear in skunk’s clothing, Ray likes to say. In an age when freaks are trying to outdo each other for attention, Morrie’s hair is unique. People know when ‘Ray Keys’ and Morrie Moore are in the room. And if they sometimes forgot, they might be given a friendly reminder.
Ray gives Morrie a nod and a wink. Time for a triumphant exit. Morrie notches up the amplifier that the house electric guitar is plugged into. As Ray suddenly pounces upon the old Steinway’s ivory like Jerry Lee Lewis with his great balls on fire, Morrie lets loose a couple of searing notes that rip the quiet like a dream-vaporizing drill. The dazed and the dozing, the drunk and the drugged are all jolted out of their current drift into the netherworld, brought abruptly back to consciousness by the electric prod of noise Ray and Morrie have applied. Edmund at the bar knocks over a whiskey glass that shatters. Big Lilly falls off of the couch that she’s managed to squeeze the hefty roll of her body upon. Jersey Dukes, who’s stretched out royally on the Barclay lounger, awakens with such a start that he releases at least a shot-glassful or two of piss in his pants before he gains control of his senses and functions. Stunts like this, living by old credos of former days, rules like you snooze you lose, help Ray and Morrie maintain the illusion that they are still young, not a pair of thirty-three year old musicians destined to play Randolph’s and Sheila Bromwell’s basement from here to eternity.
Amidst unspecified grumblings and a few direct insults by those with the wherewithal to realize who the culprits of this sound-ambush are—Big Lilly manages to wing a shoe across the room that grazes the large target of Morrie’s backside—the pianist and the guitarist ride a wave of their own laughter out of the door, up the stairs, and onto the city streets that are lightly stained with the summer day’s first coat of sunshine.
