Chamber Music — Part 1
On the night of Joshua Strauss’s employee party, pretty girls and matronly women whirled their men around the Stratford’s gleaming dance floor against the music of a golden oldies band. On the night following the party, a chamber music ensemble took the stage, after that, a crooner. Oddly, it’s the crooners who generate the most trash. The crew dreads cleanup after a crooner band. Chamber music is the crew’s favorite. We can damn near clean up after a chamber music party with a whisk broom and a damp mop.
Passengers spilled drinks and dropped trash on the polished ballroom deck. Drunks tossed paper cups and cigarette butts into the river. The crew cringed. We would rather clean up their mess than have it spoil the river that is, anyway, little less than a running sewer. For all its faults, though, the river was our life and livelihood, our mistress, the source of our fantasy life, and an aorta that coursed through our collective psyche. We didn’t do it for the pay, certainly not the pay.
We, the crew, were not permitted on the upper decks during an excursion. We hung out on the lower deck and listened to the party on the ballroom deck above. Curious passengers touring the boat often came down to view the engine, paddle wheel, and galley in the stern. The remainder of the deck was given to offices, the crew’s cabins, and the foc’s’le. Ray Danborenea and his wife watched the ancient engine that turned the wheel. A valve pops with each cycle of the wheel, limiting conversation to 15-second packets.
Ray introduced himself and his wife, Audrey, a raven-haired beauty who seemed mismatched with her big, jolly, glad-handing husband.
He was not a Joshua Strauss employee, but as a friend and de facto partner in Shelby’s economic miracle, Joshua had invited him and his wife to the floating party. Ray was the manager of the Ice House, a restaurant/bar/illegal casino that drew tourists from as distant as St. Louis to Pittsburgh and Gary to Chattanooga.
“What’s it like to work on the river?” he asked. “It looks like a stress-free dream job.”
It is, I thought.
I instructed them on the precision timing of the four-hour cruise: forty minutes downriver to the confluence of the Rolling Fork and another hour to the meeting of the mighty Ohio River at Westport; then, another hour and forty minutes back upriver to the home port at Shelby. I told them about the thick forests that line the northern banks: that land had been clear-cut for agriculture during the Great Depression. I pointed to the knobs, the cone-shaped hills and steep ridges that gave this region, “the Knobs,” its name, and explained how they were formed by receding glaciers during the last ice age.
“That,” I said, indicating the receding blue hills, “is where the state and county award a contract to log certain areas. There is a fortune up there in oak, pine, hickory, and walnut.”
I recited the Civil War history of the salt flats, their occupation by the Union army in violation of Kentucky’s neutrality. I showed them my tiny cabin, the small, hot ship’s kitchen, and the gears, cranks, and shafts of the paddlewheel. Hissing steam, splashing water, and the din of pressure-release valves created an ambiance of power and action. Ray stood in awe of the raw energy that fills the enclosed stern. I saw that he was a man fascinated by power.
Before he returned to the party on the upper decks, Ray handed to me a twenty-dollar bill, as crisp and fresh as if it had just come off the printing press.
“Take this as a ‘Thank you’ for the educational tour,” he said. “it was very interesting.”
As the boat came ashore at its homeport at Shelby, Kentucky, passengers gathered at the forward rails to watch the dormant crew come to life. I leaped from the moving craft to shore to pull a line to anchor the boat to a capstan on the wharf and raised my arms to signal to the pilot that the lines were secure. The big paddle-wheeler lurched against the now-taut lines. Passengers spilled drinks and dropped loaded paper plates onto the deck. The crew heard the usual laughter above as passengers groped each other to maintain their balance.
I stood at the foot of the gangplank to smile and nod as each guest departed. The band had grown quiet, the wheel had stopped turning, an elderly passenger, enthusiastic in his thanks for a wonderful time, staggered down the gangplank with the bo’sun’s mate at his side to assure he didn’t go into the muddy water below. Joshua Strauss, the last passenger to depart, stepped away from his fellow celebrants to approach me.
“It looks like everyone had a great time,” he said.
He had leased the boat for an employee party to celebrate the acquisition of an important contract. He had negotiated the construction of a new hotel-casino on the Las Vegas Strip through his contacts there.
He handed an envelope to me. “Will you see to it that this gets divided up among the crew?”
“Sure,” I answered. Knowing Joshua as the second half of the Shelby economic miracle, I assumed the tips would be generous — and they were. Each of the eight workers on the Stratford got fifty bucks that night, and I made another twenty from Ray, on top of my meager pay.
With the seventy dollars still fresh in my pocket, I gave the church collection plate a five-dollar donation on the following Sunday, and I did it with a flourish so that Matthew Carter would see my largesse. I sat at one end of a pew. Matthew Carter sat near the center. The man watches me constantly. I immediately regretted showing off my unusually large contribution. If Carter had seen my generosity, he might have questioned me about it, and I didn’t want to deal with another of his frequent rants about the sinful things that go on inside the Ice House. Matthew taught Sunday School class. His lessons were almost always a mirror of the preacher’s sermon that came later in the morning.
“Do not pity the unbeliever and the apostate for their journey into hell,” Matt preached. “He arrives there for his own daily decisions to refuse to give of himself to his Creator.”
Matt obviously held fantasies about people he didn’t like burning eternally in hell.
He also had an ill-concealed desire to preach. The rumor mill said he wanted the preacher’s job but Robert Hauser, the preacher, was years away from retirement and, anyway, Matt had a well-paying job in Louisville, up in the next county.
“Among those for whom hell awaits are gamblers and evil-doers who sell their souls for money, rather than engage in honest labor,” Matt continued. He had preached in that Elizabethan language every Sunday morning since Ray Danborenea came to town.
Ray Danborenea was a large man, given to a gourmand’s taste in food and drink. He bought a home on the south side of the river, on the “good” side of the L&N tracks, and followed that up with the purchase of a low-slung building with a small second floor at the center of the town’s downtown strip. The structure had once been an ice warehouse in the days before refrigeration and residents of the town continued to refer to the abandoned and decaying structure as “the icehouse” until Ray refurbished it as a tourist-trap night club complete with a back-room casino reserved for “special” guests and The Ice House came to be pronounced with an uppercase accent. There, visiting high rollers had access to a casino the rival of anything seen on the Oklahoma reservations.
“I have interested the state police and the governor’s office about the rot that has come to our town,” Matthew told his Sunday School class. “Unless Ray Danborenea can buy the state the way he has bought West County, we shall soon see the Lord’s wrath descend upon Shelby.” I found it disturbing that Matthew conflated the Lord’s will with his own, but I had no choice but to hang on to his words like an enthusiastic student. Matthew did, after all, rescue me from a felony assault charge with a promise to the judge that he would get me into counseling through his church. Fortunately for everyone concerned, the judge was also a member of the Shelby Baptist Church. So, I became joined at the hip to Matthew Carter and his self-righteous hatred of sin.
Matthew’s power over me came from an incident eighteen months earlier. While eating breakfast at a greasy spoon diner, I was harassed by a drunk. I tried to ignore the bully, but the man would not let up. Finally, I took a swing at him and broke his jaw. The county charged me with Assault and Battery, my second offense. The town’s Baptist preacher intervened in the case to promise the judge that he would get me into counseling through his church. My goal is to get out of the clutches of the demanding and self-righteous preacher’s sidekick, Matthew Carter. I still had six months left on my probation at the time of Joshua Strauss’ onboard party. I feared that Carter would advise the judge to extend the probation period. To him, I am a project.
Matthew spent his evenings watching the stream of visitors to the Ice House. He kept a notebook of physical descriptions, times, and license tag numbers. He wrote weekly letters to state officials. He preached to all who would listen about Shelby’s transformation into Sodom and Gomorrah and God’s judgment on the likes of the Ice House’s proprietor.
Though under the watchful eye of Matthew Carter, I visited the Ice House. I took a weekday evening off to see for myself what took place in a place steeped in his version of sin. There, in the line that snaked down Main Street, I took my place among people dressed in slink and bling and sport coats over knit shirts, and me, in brown shoes with white piping.
“I would like to play the slots,” I said to the bartender. “How do I get into the casino?”
Without a word, the bartender turned and did something with his hand under a back bar countertop. “Wait here,” He said. Soon, Ray Danborenea approached.
“James,” he said, extending a hand. “Good to see you again. What can I do for you.?”
“I was just asking about seeing the casino. I’ve heard so much about it that I thought I would check it out. Scratch that itch, you know?”
He handed a plastic card on a clipboard to me. “This is your key to the back room and an agreement that, should you lose the card, you are to notify the Ice House management immediately, and that you will not loan to card to anyone who might use it unaccompanied by you. Sign the form and you can begin enjoying club privileges immediately.”
I signed it.
Ray escorted me through the high double doors Inside, the casino dazzled: Once beyond the Front Room Tavern, I stepped into a room of flashing lights and lighting displays that rivals a rock concert and the sounds of milling crowds, voices calling out for the dice, the slot machine, or the roulette wheel to bring fortune to the shouter, of gambling devices, whirling, spinning, rolling, and announcing winners with bells, whistles, beeps, and pings. The sensory overload intoxicated.
A minimum wage does not afford such luxuries as the Ice House offered. I spent a couple of dollars on the quarter slots, and a few more beer in the tavern — four hours of labor and cruise time aboard the Stratford, but the generous tips from Ray and Joshua the previous week gave a rationale for my splurge.
“Can I help you find a game?” Ray asked.
“Oh, no, thank you. I’m just looking. I’m afraid your club is too rich for my little budget.”
“Well,” he said. “You showed my wife and me a good time aboard the Stratford, let me return the favor.” He flagged down a passing waitress.
“Tell Roger to send me a roll of five-dollar chips,” he ordered.
He made small talk about the pleasures of small-town living and his enjoyment of Joshua Strauss’ floating employee party when the waitress arrived. She handed something to Ray who in turn offered it to me. “Take the chips and have some fun on me.”
He excused himself to attend to a signal from a roulette table. He left me with one-hundred and twenty-five dollars in negotiable chips emblazoned with a stylized image of a pair of ice tongs against the words, “The Ice House” floating on a pale blue field. A hundred and twenty-five dollars! More money than I took home for two weeks of work on the river.
“Can I trade these for cash?” I asked a passing waitress.
“Of course, but I think Mr. D. might be offended if you didn’t at least have a drink and a couple of tries at a slot machine.” Her smile was the stuff of male fantasies.
I put five dollars into the slot machines, drank a few dollars in beer, tipped the waitress, and pocketed the rest. Between the Ice House and Joshua’s Summit Construction Company, I was getting flush.
Those beers were more than I normally drink. My probation required that I avoid alcohol altogether, but I enjoyed a beer at the honor bar in the Stratford’s kitchen occasionally. Every three months I saw my probation officer up in Louisville. I lied to him about my alcohol consumption. It was such a small amount that I didn’t experience any guilt over it.
Leaving the Ice House I encountered people on the sidewalk, cars cruising the street, flashing lights, and all the signs of a party in progress. Shelby had come a long way since its days as a sleepy little burg lost in the Kentucky knobs.
I somehow made my way to my small apartment building on the south side of the river, away from the revelers, and fell asleep with visions of dollars and beautiful women in slinky gowns and come-hither smiles and free casino chips dancing in my head.
The following day the Stratford sailed downriver on one of its box office wilderness cruises to the town of Westport and the Ohio River, where she returned to her wharf at Shelby. There, Matthew Carter waited as I tied the bowline.
“The Ice House is a haven for sinners,” he said. “Why were you there last night?”
“I wanted to see for myself what you told me.”
“Didn’t I describe it properly? Did you see anything even more depraved than our knowledge of that place?”
I lied. “If anything, your warnings about the place didn’t do it justice.”
The county sometimes granted permits for logging timber at the old sawmill on King’s Ridge, 12 miles south of Shelby. People living around the logging site got the first word about impending permits and were first in line when the paperwork went on sale. Once the paperwork and a financial exchange were completed, the lucky logger goes looking around town to see how the downhill people live. There, he is drawn by the crowds and the air of excitement around the Ice House, or the festive atmosphere at the Stratford’s wharf. When a party rents the boat, they agree on an arrangement in which the purser can sell tickets to their cruise at a rate set by a percentage of the boat’s capacity less the number of party cruisers. If the newly permitted logger shows up at the right time, he can get a ticket. When he gets back to the hill, he will have stories to tell about the weekend in Shelby.
He will buy a hat at Emily’s Hillbilly Hats where she sells everything from straw sun blockers to felt fedoras to berets. Some locals resent the word “hillbilly” displayed in lights on the main street, but most see tourist dollars and act the part for the gambling tourists’ entertainment.
Clarence Biggers, the most recent winner of the logger lottery, dressed the part, though not for the tourists. Up on Holcomb’s Hill, where he lived, the coveralls and baseball hat were the cultural norm for any event save for Sunday church service, where clean blue jeans and a button-up shirt were required. He and his coveralls and his Cincinnati Reds baseball cap had gone up to Louisville where he had a snoot full of cheap whiskey at the Trolley Inn (“Trolley in, stagger out,” the unofficial motto), a favorite of the locals when in Louisville. He drove back to West County, stopped to replenish his buzz at the Ice House, and got pissed off when told he was not dressed for the casino, but he was welcome at the bar. In the melee that followed, one bouncer got a bloody nose, another tore his tailored suit, and Clarence rehearsed the enhanced story he would tell about the time he was kicked out of the Ice House as he drove back to Holcomb’s Hill.
Someone had called the police during the struggle to bounce Clarence. It was not the paid-off county cops in khaki that showed up, but a couple of blue-uniformed state troopers. one of them asked, pointing to the door that led to the reception room for the casino “What’s back there?”
