Ruby didn't care about any of that...she just loved to sing. She loved to sing in that husky, smoldering, smoky voice of hers. To sing her bittersweet tales of broken dreams and broken dreamers...of jilted lovers and jilting heartbreakers...of passions lost and passions willfully indulged (in the shadows...in the wee uncaring hours of the night...)
Yes, Ruby loved to sing the blues. And she loved to casually smoke unfiltered cigarettes. And to laugh loud and hollowly at jokes she would never explain to anyone. And she especially loved to drink Johnny Walker Black from beer mugs.
She loved to feel the weight of burly, leather-palmed, cigar-smoking truck drivers on top of her wide-hipped, ample-bosomed body. They came to the club to drown themselves in watery beer and try to forget about their wives and/or their lives.
And they found some small solace in Ruby...she loved their world-weary, sweating bodies and the way their practiced hands roamed hungrily over her letting her slip away to another plane for a while.
She reveled in their smutty, boozy endearments...whispered feverishly and grunted uncouthly in the throes of lust and ill‑focused anger and loneliness offered as they tried to find from shelter from the vagaries of the world in the lush, liberating humidity of her sturdy golden body.
In their brutal gentleness she found some small measures of solace and amnesia in them...and, after a fashion and only fleetingly, she loved them for that.
But most of all...most of all...Ruby Brown loved to sing the blues.
The stories about Ruby's past were many...but all were unsubstantiated by her. She steadfastly refused to discuss her past with anyone. And, even when she had downed one mug of Johnny Walker Black too many, she never did.
Her reticence had, almost as a matter of course, gave birth to many colorful legends. Some said that she'd left a husband and 5 (or 6...8...12...the number varied by the storyteller) children in some backwater Midwestern town (or grimy East Coast ghetto...or insulated and insular bayou village in Louisiana) to come to L.A. in search of fame and fortune. ("Freakin' A!" Ruby would exclaim whenever she heard that one. She'd raise her mug and offer a toast "to hubby and all of the little rugrats".)
Others claimed that she'd left home...running away from her daddy...when she was 13 to move in with a 50-year-old blues harp player who taught her how to sing the blues (and how to drink...and how to smoke unfiltered cigarettes...and how to make love...)
Ruby just smiled wistfully at that one. (Old Nate, the harp player in Ruby's band, always just smiled enigmatically whenever he was asked about the veracity of this particular legend.)
The more fanciful among the usually-inebriated legend-weavers claimed that she had no beginning...no mama and no daddy...and that she would have no end. That she'd been put on this Earth to bring the healing power of the blues to the sad, tired souls whom God had led to her smoky, dingy little "church".
Ruby, for her part, tolerated the storytelling but resolved to leave her past in the past. She just wanted to sing.
And so she sang...urgent torch songs that could bring melancholy (and/or redemption) to the most calloused of hearts...roaring gutbucket blues stompers that could make a dead man dance (or, at very least, make him tap his foot admiringly, devil be damned, for a soulful instant.)
And always, at the end of the last set of the evening (and for no one but herself), there would be a mournful reading of Lady Day's self-affirming "God Bless the Child" that always, without exception, ended with a tear on her cheek and a perceptible choke in her voice.
"God Bless the Child" always made Ruby Brown cry.
And she sang it every night.
One August night, the air was thick with summer's humid heat and the Holiday's End's air conditioner was in its customary state of disrepair and Ruby and her quartet were playing languidly to a sparse, loyal gathering of regulars.
Ruby's eyes were closed as she swayed her hips lazily while Old Nate blew sweaty harp riffs over the rhythm section's chunky bottom. Richie, one of Ruby's more regular lovers, smoked his pungent cigar and smiled...fondly and expectantly...at Ruby's sassy, undulating body. None of them noticed when the tall man in the three-piece blue suit came into the club and sat at a table in the back of the room. He ordered a club soda and watched Ruby impassively.
Old Nate saw him first as he came out of an intense solo and a wince of recognition stole over his withered face. Ruby noticed him then and her face gray-green eyes went hard and alert.
Ruby abruptly called for "God Bless the Child", a song she never performed so early in the evening, and the band...spurred on by her sudden intensity and by Old Nate's urgent, wailing intro...launched into the song with a vengeful spirit of triumph...and finality.
Ruby sang the song..."god bless the child"...with sober, tear‑free eyes..."that's got her own"...staring all the while at the tall man in the three-piece suit. The man, undaunted, sipped his club soda and stared back.
The song ended with a flourish and there followed a long, tense silence. The whole room was keyed into her emotional state. Ruby stood defiantly, her hands on her hips, staring at the man in the three-piece suit.
The man finished his soda staring back at her all the while. Then he stood up, adjusted his tie, laid a ten-dollar bill on the table, and nodded, almost imperceptibly, at Ruby. He turned and walked out of the club without looking back.
Old Nate leaned over and whispered something to Ruby squeezing her shoulder affectionately. Ruby smiled weakly and nodded. Ruby shrugged her shoulders and picked up the bottle of Johnny Walker Black that was waiting, as always, at the bar for her. She took Richie's beefy, calloused hand and led him through the back door and up the stairs to her apartment above the club.
"Who was that guy?" Richie asked.
"My daddy," she said without rancor.
Ruby never sang "God Bless the Child" again.
She smoked her cigarettes...and drank her scotch...and loved her men...and let yesterday stay as far away as she possibly could.
And she sang the blues.
Because most of all...most of all...Ruby Brown loved to sing the blues.
©2004 neverending rainbow enterprises, ltd. All rights reserved.
©2004 neverending rainbow enterprises, ltd. All rights reserved.
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