Banjo Grease - Softcover

Must, Dennis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1597090352 ISBN 13: 9781597090353

Publisher: Red Hen Press, 2019

Synopsis

But it’s the dead folks that do him the damage. It’s the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and don’t try to hold him, that he can’t escape from. —William Faulkner, Light in August

There is an inexplicable gravity in a small town. It can be read and enjoyed like a favorite book for most of its inhabitants. Comforting are its streets and institutions, its wedding and obituary announcements. Banjo Grease is about life and death in a mill town where at each epiphany and rite of passage, the narrator yields a ration of innocence. Characters portray class as a marker as strong as race and gender, and distrust that they will ever escape in their lifetimes. Faulkner uses the term “eager fatalism.” These stories’ cumulative effect asks: When exchanging naivete for worldliness, what is lost in denying one’s past?

About this title

About the Author:

Dennis Mustis the author of three novels: Brother Carnival (Red Hen Press, November 2018), The World’s Smallest Bible (Red Hen Press, March 2014), and Hush Now, Don’t Explain (Coffeetown Press, October 2014), as well as three short story collections: Going Dark (Coffeetown Press, 2016), Oh, Don’t Ask Why (Red Hen Press, 2007), and Banjo Grease (Creative Arts Book Company, 2000). He won the 2014 Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award for Hush Now, Don’t Explain, and The World’s Smallest Bible was a 2014 USA Best Book Award Finalist in the Literary Fiction category. His plays have been produced Off-Off Broadway and he has been published in numerous anthologies and literary journals. He resides with his wife in Salem, Massachusetts.

http://www.dennismust.com/index.html

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

From “Say Hello to Stanley”

The day Buddy ceased playing for the Rollerdrome all the regulars sat on the skate floor, the mirror ball chasing magenta, heliotrope, indigo and mustard-yellow lights circling the grand hanger in darkness, mechanical fireflies all on permanent tethers . . . It was the strangest melancholic night, almost masochistic for Buddy and the crowd. Some of the rollers had been attending regularly for the six years Buddy'd been playing. It wasn't the skating so much as his cherubic face, his boyish laughter, and his Chet Baker's girl-voice ballads that kept them coming back.

He was moving onto the big time now. No more sweat effluvium wafting up the skate floor, the silly mechanical pas de deux, the skate-dancing charades, the maestros who only chose to dance alone. Forty-year-old women with hair freshly dyed and sculpted up like an Eiffel tower, their sequined skate costumes causing the colored lights to swirl on their derrieres like the mirror ball on the ceiling. Or the men with pompadour-hair and cigarette packs—Lucky Strikes, mostly—rolled up in their T-shirt sleeves, tight trousers held up by plastic belts, doing those leaps into the air to the beat of Buddy’s sweet music, lost in their odeons, barbers and telephone clerks by days, stars in the Rollerdrome orbit at night—Oh, God, he wouldn’t miss them . . .

They wanted Buddy to sing to them. He had this “wish board” up in his booth that controlled every light on the floor, the speed of the mirror ball, the speaker system. Buddy Hart, the Master of the mise en scene, the Harlin County Artaud, the Rollerdrome wizard. Tonight they wanted Chet Baker.

The giant mirror-faced moon he ratcheted down to a drug-induced revolution, the thousand shards of light-illuminated flies with mirror backs, all the colors of a dreamer’s rainbow, and the B-3 began to drone, in the lower register, a reedy vibrato. Buddy wasn't Jimmy Smith no more. Instead a lachrymose idol. Up there in the booth hovering over them. Long mournful ommmmmms.

As if he wanted to purge them with a colonic of sadness. The audience watched the flies circle the wall and the floors. Like some kind of star calliope jar they were inside, except lying on the floor looking up at the hangar steel-trussed heavens. Christ, it was strange out there on Route I-27 on the outskirts of Niles, a dink copper-refinery town, its sulfurous odor hanging over the valley like a scrim. The skaters with their red-and-white yarn pom-poms on the toes of their skate-shoes parked forlornly alongside them.

About this edition

• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1597090352
• ISBN 13: 9781597090353
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 168