...into the Golden Nugget where a bunch of us ex-sailors were sitting around putting a little package on with a bottle of Jameson's and pushing the boat out with an ocean of cheap draughts, The Nugget a greasy little Wales Street watering hole in a broken down city which a broken down me was haunting in days long gone.
He's got his trumpet with him Albee does and he's second to no one with it, well maybe third behind Satchmo and Wynton, but he's good, even drunk he's good, and he is drunk believe it, hammered, eyes rheumy and red and fairly dripping down his bright red chipmunk's cheeks, practically in tears he is because Barbie-doll has left him again, boarded a bus for LA or some Godforsaken place so the lawyer Albee is on a screaming broken-hearted bender.
Lately Albee was drunk more often than not...why he suddenly had broken out his trumpet I know not; actually I think it was a cornet, not that I know the difference, but anyway I think that's what it was and this early morning as we dypsomaniacs vibrated our double shots down our ululating epiglottises he put it to his lips and began the sweetest Spanish mariachi music you ever did hear and the three old harridans I was sitting with suddenly were lovely senoritas swirling around the floor in a lunatic's sarabande, graceful as one can be when lurching about under the influence and we all were soon writhing in alcoholic's melancholia, a twirling mass of repudiated reason personified in The Drunkards' Demented Dance.
As an exclamation point to The Dance, Ray came winging out of the kitchen with a tray of bacon and eggs & two huge pitchers of beer and in a somewhat clumsy pas a deux he caught his heel on the grate and went flying sending the tray and its contents washing over the filthy floor where it was shortly ground in and soaked up by our chorus line dancing.
Later, exhausted all, Albee sat and reminisced fondly-drunkenly about his days playing with Pops (Louis Armstrong) and we humored him patronizingly which he caught on to right away and said, "You don't believe me do you?" We assured him we did but he wouldn't buy it and went out to his rubbish-strewn office and when he returned a few minutes later had in hand a picture of him and - sure and begorra an 8 X 10 black and white glossy - there he was with Louis playing at the Lake Bomoseen Pavilion sometime in the 50's. A picture is worth a thousand words and we hoisted yet another pitcher to the picture until we were all completely wasted and Ray finally shut us off and ushered us out into the blinding-bright and bitter cold February morning...
Whatever happened to Albee I don't know. He was sometimes brilliant at one bar and not so brilliant at the other bar...
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