Blues in the Night

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Blues in the Night

Carol Lem

Now the rains are falling,

hear the train a'calling...

My mama was right.

there's blues in the night.

- Johnny Mercer

Over dinner talk, friends say
they don't know me--"so your parents
were born here...and your grandparents?"
Chinese immigrants, but I don't know
from what village, or how they got
their money to make a family here.
As the lace curtains whisked in,
a twilight breeze blew out the candles,
the talk became noirish.
My mother said her father owned
the first herb shop in L.A.'s Chinatown,
but I never saw it--nor him.
I don't know why she was allowed in
only during the day, or who those shady men
were who crept in after sunset.
Or what those jars on the top shelf
in our kitchen were filled with.
In the early 40s, I was not born yet.
And this is her story:
"The rails on Alameda swallowed up
our baseballs, my sign to get out.
"Your father with his diamond rings, fedora,
foot propped on the Chrysler running board,
winked me away from the rattling tracks."
But,later years in Little Tokyo she'd say
she never knew what her husband was doing
at the family restaurant after closing hours.
The dank alleys of East First Street
were filled with old survivors of Hiroshima,
who used to hang out there for safety,
still haunted by things falling, but now
they were kids tossing cans from the street
that my father kicked aside
as he made his way to the dingy hotel
next to Far East, the rancid sweet and sour
snaking up to the third floor
where once our waiter saw my father
and another woman. The maroon drapes
opened just enough for him to see,
my mother said, hands changing
money, grabbing the lump of folded bills
in a tug of war.
Whether that woman was a contact
or a girl friend, she never knew.
The slippery streets of J-Town
slinked away fallen notes that might
have hugged the curb for the cop to find,
but even his nightstick beat a rhythm
for the tawdry singer from the club
whose words echoed "Blues in the Night"
against the walls like a distant siren.
It was now the early 60s but the 40s
was a dog tagging along without a home.
And the streets---
were the new baseball field with no
homebase as mother made her rounds
of unanswered calls to Lem's Café.
6/15/11