Jazz Funeral

door. She threw up at the curb.
    “You got the worst case of stage fright I ever saw in my life.”
    “I’ve got to go back up and brush my teeth.”
    She blocked everything out of her mind.
    Just get through it!
    But why? Why not just die now?
    Because I don’t want to! I want to sing before I die. I want to perform just once. Just this once.
    But she wasn’t sure she really did. She felt tired now, tired and wired at the same time. She wanted to lie down on the bed and stay there till she could gather enough strength to find a tall budding.
    She went downstairs. She wasn’t going to ask where Joel was, she had too much pride for that, but Terence said, “Joel’s sorry he couldn’t come. His daddy made him pack up all the equipment.”
    “It’s okay.”
    But she thought he understood how sad she was, wondered if Joel had told him why he didn’t want to come. He said, “You look just like Rwanda Zaire, you know that?”
    It was the name they’d decided to give her.
    Raymond had said, “Janis Frank! It sounds like a poor man’s Janis Joplin.”
    “We need a show biz kind of name,” said Martin, the patriarch, the one three or four of them called Daddy. “Something that sounds made-up and African. Kind of modern and political.”
    “Yeah,” Joel said. “Something to explain the weird outfit.”
    Rwanda Zaire was what they’d come up with. Melody liked it. It was stage magic, sleight of hand—if she kept saying she was black in a thousand different ways—her outfit, her skin, her name—it wasn’t going to occur to people that she wasn’t. She’d heard it said that magicians worked by telling the audience to look at their left hand while they did the trick with their right. She was an octopus with seven arms to distract them; it had to work.
    Terence said, “You know what, Rwanda? You’re lucky you got me instead of Joel. ‘Cause I got somethin’ that straight-arrow’d never have in a million years. Cine that stage fright so fast you forget its name.”
    “What?”
    “Hash. I got some hash you’re not gonna believe.”
    He packed a pipe—it couldn’t have been easy while driving, but he’d obviously had plenty of practice. “You light it.”
    She did, to be a good sport, but she was afraid to really inhale, not at all sure what it would do to her performance. “I’ll be okay,” she said. “I don’t really need it.”
    Sweat was running down her neck, and her teeth were chattering. Her heart was a jackhammer. Just as they pulled up to the fairgrounds, she said, “Terence? Could I change my mind?”
    He handed her the pipe. “Listen. We can’t close with ‘Blues for a Brother.’”
    She sucked on the pipe, knowing she’d made the right decision, hoping the hash would knock out the pain of the blow, her last and greatest disappointment. The great gesture she wanted to leave the planet with, and Terence was telling her she wasn’t going to get to do it. Her last fucking act on Earth!
    She said, “I sing that song or I don’t go onstage.”
    “What you so excited about? We’re gon’ do the song. Why you think we wouldn’t do the song? It’s a great song, we’re gon’ do it. It just can’t be last, that’s all.”
    “What are we going to close with?”
    “‘Tell It Like It Is.’”
    She’d argued against doing that one at all. It belonged to Aaron Neville and she couldn’t see the point. But they said that was the point—the audience knew it and loved it. It was a favorite.
    She didn’t care. The hash was working. She was going to sing Ham’s song and nothing else mattered.
    A couple of tokes was all it took. But Terence looked at her like a doctor: “That ain’t gon’ last long. Here.” He gave her a little bit to eat.
    She was a new person, a floaty, African kind of person, someone who glided rather than walked, and who couldn’t remember how she got onstage. All she knew was that Tyrone had said, “Miss Rwanda Zaire!” and she, Melody Brocato, was on the Ray-Ban stage at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. Singing to thousands and thousands of people. Singing her heart out. Belting “Something’s Got a Hold on Me”; belting like Janis; maybe better. She wasn’t aware of anyone or anything except the music, how damn good it felt to be there, to be doing it, singing it, feeling it, feeling the thing whatever it was, that came up through her feet and worked her body and her voice. Melody had melted. Even Rwanda had melted. There was