Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
The Oystercatcher
I took in the Vancouver International Jazz Festival this weekend. For about 17 minutes. Solo piano. Noon. Ten blocks from my home.
I left the house in a transparent dress with a slip that rode up too high. This was happening as I strode in sandals, flat, under a snug pink corduroy coat, mid-calf, that soon would be too hot. I decided to return to the house to change into something I felt better about myself in. Square-toed boots, jeans, studded black belt, citron tank top with a very short, wooly double-breasted grey jacket. Yes.
I was early. The waitress seated me at a table for two near the back. No one of interest (to me) was there. I switched glasses to read The Oystercatcher, an anarcho-surrealist zine I’d been given. The menu was boring. Brunch. Bagel and cream cheese $3? Fuck off. Fuck off. Fuck you, you stupid fucking bagel. I hate you and your stupid boiled chewiness greased with white muck meant to be understood as acceptable. Cream cheese my ass. A fucking Kraft product in a king-sized tub sitting out open on the counter beyond those swinging galley doors, no doubt.
I was sure the coffee would be bad. The musician arrived with coffee from elsewhere to confirm this near-fact. I ordered water. Two women in their late 50s sat directly in front of me. The only attribute of this arrangement was that they blocked my view of a young husband, new mother, baby and one set of grandparents. The baby was new. New? Young? Small? It would have been the couple’s first. The mother looked to be rather unused to pushing her face into something like a smile, but she knew she was supposed to make this face, a facsimile of a smile, for the baby to see, for the grandparents to see, to complete some strange part of a ritual that seemed very far from anyone’s actual truth.
The woman directly in front of me—grey hair, blunt bangs, overly-big glasses—was very confident in her indelicate dealings with a pleasant-enough waitress, suggesting to me that she had never been regarded favorably. By anyone. I was trying to imagine how, unless through some form of forgetfulness (which is possible), a woman her age could go forth into a restaurant with such a large quotient of insensitivity. She didn’t appear to be wealthy. Maybe she grew up on a farm without mirrors more miles from men than were possible to travel for the purpose of courtship. Perhaps all the other girls of the region were somehow more desirable, and while not loathsome in any exact way, she just didn’t measure up in the field. These were my thoughts as I watched her face and listened to her voice as she explained, head tilted, bangs now hanging at new angles to the waitress, that she was gluten-intolerant and her breakfast had arrived splayed uselessly across soggy toast.
“I’ll get very, very, very sick if I eat anything that has come into contact with gluten,” she is saying, her knife and fork motionless above her plate in mock horror at the discovery of the killer toast, elbows up and out, and it really does seem like she believes the waitress should care about this more than anything happening in her own life. The waitress herself might be about to get very, very, very sick of people telling her things she really doesn’t want to know, and then there’s the pretending to care that must follow. Mostly it’s the pretending. That’s what gets to her, the waitress, most.
The music started. I moved to the bar and waited to feel inspired. I had a good view of her hands on the keys, but I wasn’t convinced of anything other than her extremely good posture. Were they her songs? Did she love jazz? I couldn’t tell. The second song seemed very T. Monk to me, but I wasn’t with her in the playing—her playing and my listening.
A man wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat came in, sat at the end of the bar and ordered food authoritatively. I heard him say “the wings,” and when they arrived, they were very shiny with lots of goopy sauce. I continued trying to get into the music. I sipped my water. The 55-year-old farm girl was up out of her chair taking photos of the grandmother at the next table holding the baby. The look on the grandmother’s face: This is very inappropriate because we don’t know this woman.
I looked at the pianist’s posture, her lovely legs below her capri-length slacks, her long-fingered hands, the keys. From the end of the bar, to my right, I heard sucking. Fingers, one after another, rhythmically. One hand, then the other. The wings. The sauce. Suck, suck, suck. I didn’t look. I put $2 beside my water glass, swiveled off my stool and gathered my things to leave.
