Imperfect Solo

by Steven Boykey Sidley

  Innocent is my son from my first marriage. He arrived unplanned when I was way too young. My then girlfriend, Grace, was a Zimbabwean who—like many of her white compatriots—had to flee her family’s farm when Mugabe’s henchmen went from merely menacing to beating her dog to death and cooking it. She ended up in LA.

  Grace was also too young and she named him Innocent because it is apparently quite a popular name among Zimbabwe’s rural people. This may be a good idea in the Zimbabwean hinterlands. Not such a good idea in LA, where he rebelled against his name, eschewing innocence in favor of everything but. Grace and I got married, but that lasted no more than a year. She was good with him, though. She did not rebel against her name. I should have tried harder with her. Ah well. We are all young and foolish for a time, some of us for longer than others.

  Innocent is now in his early twenties and has emerged from the trauma of his name a wiser and stronger man. He was born with my ear for harmony. When he was about twelve, and I was finally resigned to the fact that I was not likely to make a living as a musician, let alone ride the supernovae of celebrity (those damn odds again), I once snuck him into a club at which I was playing. I think it was Cherokee, off one of the Boulevard side streets in Hollywood. It was a studied dive, with muted lighting and black paint and mismatched furniture determined to advertise its street cred, in stark contrast to the high-flying dreams of its hopeful young denizens. We had a strange little band, a mash of Dixie and funk, with enough chord changes to keep me focused. I had already given up on trying to play bebop licks, it was not in my blood, and I had wasted years trying to be Charlie Parker-derivative, to sound intelligible on “Giant Steps” and “Scrapple from the Apple.” Still, I wanted my lines to move smoothly from chord to chord, wanted to sound like I was composing, not improvising.

  Innocent watched me intently from the inconspicuous corner table where I had hidden him. At six he understood the structure of the twelve-bar blues, at eight he was experimenting with altered chords on the piano. At ten he could hear things that I never would. Part of his general rebellion against his name and the parents who bestowed it on him was disinterest in ever becoming a professional musician, a circumstance for which I am eternally grateful.

  I finished the set and sat down with him.

  “What did you think?”

  “You’re trying too hard, Dad.”

  “The hell you say.”

  “You’re trying to play right. Just play easy.”

  The little tyke had me.

  At UCLA, when I was a bright-eyed and freshly minted BS graduate migrating to a Master’s program, I had become interested in the study of Artificial Intelligence, and specifically the omnipotent mind-machine that sits inconspicuously behind acts of creativity, whispering instructions so quietly that the protagonist doesn’t even register them. I was aided by a very short, very fat, very old Frenchman, a longtime professor of Computer Science, a Holocaust child, an intellect of breathtaking dimensions.

  “Do you believe in God?” he asked me when I sought him out as an adviser for my Master’s dissertation.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “A question of a belief does not allow a ‘don’t-think-so’ answer. If you are not sure, then you believe in God.”

  “I don’t believe in God.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “Because the study of Artificial Intelligence presupposes that we can analyze the very essence of what it is to be human, learning, empathy, emotion, creativity. And it presupposes that we can reduce it to algorithms. And it presupposes that we can code these algorithms and, ultimately, create a species superior to ourselves. If this bothers you, go to Professor Ixtapa and study Database Design.”

  So I tried to find out what it was about Diana Krall that made me weep. What it was about Tatum, Peterson, Davis, Fisher, Brecker, Pass, Ellington, Marsalis and Norah Jones and Dixie Dregs and Sting and Steely Dan and Quincy Jones arrangements and Bach and Mozart and Stravinsky and Chopin and myriad unheralded singers and guitarists in all the end-of-the-line bars in Las Vegas and Lubbock and Albany that tore me to shreds, that made the universe larger, more filled with wonder.

  Which led me to a set of algorithms. Underpinned by probabilities. This note with that chord played with this degree of prior proximal rhythmic repetition and preceded by this or that is less or more likely to be boring, dissonant, tense, expectant, unresolved. I set values on these, fine-tuned, created secondary relationships with intervals, pitches, relative keys, tritone substitutions, altered chords, vocal limitations. And produced, well, a kind of music, somewhat otherworldly, but haunting. Even real. And correct, composed within the boundaries of hundreds of years of classical, jazz, and popular music academia.

  It never made me weep. But I suspect that if I had kept at it, it may have, one day.

  It was enough, though. I published a paper in the journal of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence Press. My one and only. Now framed and on my wall. A testament to peaking too early. A great sax player would not have known what the hell I was talking about, nor would he have cared. And when I played, the algorithms interfered. Don’t play right, play easy, the boy said. Nailing me to the wall.

  Still, there were things he didn’t realize, perhaps even now. Playing on a stage for people was never that pure for me. Nobody, except for Brecker, perhaps, who would never come, nobody would ever have the faintest idea whether I played a good solo or a bad one. Wouldn’t notice if I played a bum note, or even if I played in the wrong key.

  Listen, listen, I would silently plead. Listen to how clever these notes are. Did you hear what I just did with that note over this chord? How I set up the tension and resolution? How I left a question mark at that end of the phrase? Aren’t you all just stunned into mute admiration? No, nobody gives a fuck. You are all looking to drink and forget, to get laid, to find love, to make the score, to beat the odds, to be heard. To be noticed.

  As was I. As am I.

  I look at Krystal’s face, a long composition of thin straight lines, all of which I have often seen conspire to rearrange themselves into sharp distaste.

  “Innocent is fine, thank you.”

  Another silence repeats like an echo.

  “So, Meyer …”

  “Yup?”

  “Remember that thing?”

  “What thing?”

  “With the silk scarves?”

  The thing with the silk scarves. That was long ago. But not that long ago to forget the heat of it. She liked soft restraint then. She doesn’t like much of anything now.

  “Uh, yes I do.”

  “Want to try and push it?”

  I feel a spike in blood pressure. A surge of blood to familiar places. She continues.

  “I’m thinking we add rubber bands and a candle. A thick one.”

  Rubber bands and a thick candle.

  “What do you mean rubber bands and a thick candle?”

  Her eyebrows swish up and down, like a sigh. Then she stands and walks up to the bedroom, raising her skirt to reveal an uncovered butt cheek.

  Fuck. I am just a pawn in a complex chess game. Love has nothing to do with it.

  I follow like a brainless supplicant.

  CHAPTER 4

  I AM SITTING in the boardroom of the company for which I work, the company that makes stuff. It is a big boardroom with an oval table that shines and stretches almost to the horizon. There is large expensive-looking art on the wall, peering on in mute disbelief at what transpires here.

  The CEO walks in. Everyone stands, so I do too. He stops when he sees me.

  “Good morning, Mr. Meyer, why are you here?” the CEO asks. The same question every damn time.

  “I was invited, sir.” He hates it when I call him sir, I think. Or maybe he likes it.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  He turns to one of his executive sycophants. “Why is he here?” At this poi
nt I have morphed from Mr. Meyer to a distasteful object in his boardroom.

  “We are going to be talking about how to leverage social networking for enterprise marketing. Meyer may have some input—he understands this stuff,” the fat fuck COO offers.

  Leverage social networking for enterprise marketing. Anybody who uses that phrase should have an iPhone shoved up his ass. Generally, these meetings are very long, with a signal-to-noise ratio of about 1:10. So they are generally ten times longer than they could be. Most of the time is spent on slavish and verbose agreement with the CEO, or the CEO offering other people’s good ideas as his own, or the CEO offering the most stupid and irrelevant and loquacious of ignorant opinions, or the CEO shrieking and yelling at somebody.

  And Krystal wants to know why I am not ambitious enough to climb up to the corporate suite.

  I have been at the big company that makes stuff for fifteen years. In this day and age of career-zigzagging and job-hopping, this makes me somewhat unique. And quite valuable to the company, being a rare recipient of fifteen years of institutional knowledge, particularly in the arcane processes that govern the complex information paths that are taken from making stuff to getting it to the people who buy stuff.

  Along the way, there have been a number of attempts to interest me in taking management roles. Had I acceded to the whims of earnest and well-meaning HR professionals, it’s likely I would have been at the top by now, sitting on all manner of committees and boards and eating at fine restaurants. But I didn’t want to. Not my game. Krystal, no doubt, would put it down to lack of ambition. I, of course, put it down to a need for a stress-free life so that I can pursue other plans. Originally it was music, but as that tailed off into melancholy resignation and semi-retirement, I have replaced it with others. Which are going to come into focus any day now.

  So anyway, my extended tenure here sometimes results in invitations to sit in meetings of the bigwigs, who will occasionally look stupid and turn to me for some wisdom about processes or IM governance, or work flow, or new media trends. Mostly I am silent, though, a witness to the crushing boredom of long meetings, and the sad state of American corporate leadership. And it is through this occasional privilege that I have gotten to know the CEO. He is an abrasive, vitriolic, spitting, angry, arrogant, vituperative, friendless, dictatorial, talentless piece of shit who should be put in stocks and drawn and quartered by cackling employees.

  OK, maybe not talentless; the company does, after all, make lots of money. But the world, on average, would be a better place if he was locked in a dark hole for the rest of his life. This is a guy who likes making waitresses cry, which I have seen firsthand.

  “Waitress. WAITRESS! Did I or did I not ask for medium rare?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Does this look like medium rare? Do you have eye problems?”

  “I will have it put back in the grill, sir.”

  “How many university degrees do you need to be a waitress? None that I can think of. Therefore, I conclude that it takes little or no skill to get an order right. It is the only requirement of your job. How is it possible to fuck it up?”

  “I am sorry, sir.”

  “No, I don’t think you are. Do you know who I am? If you worked for me I would have you frog-marched to the door because you would be useless to the enterprise. Do you understand? Do you hear me or are your ears as bad as your eyes?”

  This was at a “morale booster” dinner, organized by the Human Resources people. No one really wanted to be there. I watched the waitress’s eyes start filling with tears and the sycophant executive committee stare into their salads.

  I leapt across the table, shoved my fingers into the CEO’s nostrils, and ripped his nose off.

  No, actually, I stared into my salad. That’s what you do if you have a high-paying job. You compromise. You sacrifice. You bring home the paycheck. You hope that your children never get to witness your cowardice.

  Van has no sympathy.

  “Why don’t you just hit him?”

  Van is a big guy. He has never hit anyone. He likes to think that it is a simple matter. Also, he has never worked a day in his life. He is a trust-fund baby, somehow connected to the Velcro fortune, or maybe it’s the earbud fortune, I forget. So the prospect of losing a good job has no emotional resonance for him.

  I, on the other hand, am not a big guy, but I have hit plenty of people. Almost all of them have hit me back harder. Except for the kid with the broken leg at grade school who I knew couldn’t catch me.

  “Van, he is a big guy, he works out and he owns a Maserati.”

  “So what?”

  “Any guy who owns a Maserati can beat up anyone who doesn’t. It’s just a natural law.”

  “Horseshit.”

  “Besides, he would sue me so hard, he would impoverish my entire extended family. Perhaps my entire tribe.”

  “You can’t impoverish all the Jews in the world. Even if you own a Maserati.”

  “Yeah, maybe. But I would probably end up in jail for aggravated assault or something.”

  “I will bail you out.”

  “Yes, but not before my sweet white butt has been raped by a big black guy. Or worse, a white biker gang.”

  “So you’re just going to suck it up?”

  “I guess.”

  Van is a simple man. He reads and plays guitar and doesn’t spend much of his money. He tries to fend off the incessant attacks of his ever-vigilant neo-feminist girlfriend, Marion, who secretly believes that he has the makings of a closet misogynist wife-beater, which doesn’t prevent her from insisting on proposal ultimatums, which he ignores. He plays guitar well. We have been playing together for twenty years. Great sense of rhythm. Great composer. Terrible soloist, so he doesn’t even try. No stage presence. Leaves that to me and the others. He has a keen ethical sense of right and wrong.

  “We should have him killed,” he offers.

  “Nah, been there, done that.”

  “Who did you kill?”

  “The beast within.”

  “Then you must steal the thing that he loves.”

  “What’s that?”

  “His money.”

  Not a bad idea.

  How did I get here, to this point? The trajectory of my life fills me with fucking dread.

  CHAPTER 5

  DREAD CAN BE wrestled to the ground. It is a quiet portent, full of vague menace. It can be exiled to dark corners of the mind, where its dull moans and thumps can be barely heard. It is manageable. But once it breaks free, once dread morphs into the sharp incarnation of its promise, beware.

  Bunny, my ex-wife most recent, calls. Her voice is raw. “Meyer, Isobel never turned up at school today. They just called. Is she with you?”

  Like most people I know, she calls me by my last name. This strange appellation now seems disrespectful. My beautiful daughter is kidnapped, dead, raped, tortured, overdosed, drowned, run over, smoking meth with people with black teeth. Why the hell is she calling me by my last name?

  “What do you mean she didn’t turn up at school?”

  “I dropped her at the bus stop. She didn’t turn up at school.”

  “You dropped her at a FUCKING BUS STOP? ARE YOU KIDDING ME?”

  “Meyer, calm down. I have been dropping her at the bus stop for two years. I am sure there is a simple explanation.”

  “THERE ARE NO SIMPLE EXPLANATIONS. SHE DIDN’T ARRIVE AT SCHOOL. THERE ARE ONLY COMPLEX EXPLANATIONS.”

  “If you don’t stop shouting I am going to hang up.”

  I pull the phone away from my ear. Stare at it. Breathe deeply.

  “OK, what do we do?”

  “I have already called the police. They are not that interested unless a child has been missing for twenty-four hours.”

  “WHAT DO MEAN THEY ARE NOT THAT INTERESTED?”

  “Meyer, I am giving you one more chance.”

  OK, dread. You win. You took my daughter, leaving me to a life of misery and regret, pos
sibly to self-hate and suicide, a painful one. Swallowing caustic soda. Self-immolation in front of some awful country’s embassy (yeah, that’ll help). Drug addiction and overdose. Cirrhosis of the liver from booze. Finding Jesus and thanking him for the excellence of God’s plan.

  This is not amusing. I start hyperventilating. I sit.

  “Meyer, are you there?”

  “What do we do?”

  “Let me call some of the moms. Maybe she’s playing truant with a friend.”

  “She doesn’t play truant. She doesn’t smoke. She doesn’t lie. She doesn’t do this stuff.”

  “She’s fourteen. You have no idea what a fourteen-year-old girl does or doesn’t do. Neither do I.”

  “Fuck. What does the school say?”

  “They think she is playing truant. Notwithstanding nearly five years of perfect attendance.”

  “OK. OK. OK. Let’s think. Bunny, you make the calls to the moms. I am going to drive around near the bus stop. Where is the bus stop?”

  “Pico and Lincoln.”

  “OK, call me or I’ll call you.”

  I hang up. It was always going to come to this. A wise man once told me that a life without tragedy is a life well lived. How does one avoid tragedy? It’s the fucking probabilities again. You can’t control them. It decides to visit or it doesn’t. It’s the mother of black swans. An unlikely event at the extreme end of the bell curve tail, whose consequences are a lifetime of sadness and horror, undiminished by the passing of time. And it can start with a simple phone call, a passing of information. Small sentences suffice. “She’s missing.” “There was an accident.” “It’s about your daughter, your son, your mother.” “I am sorry to inform you.” “I got the test results back.” Here it is then, the great divide between one life and another, announced to me by an ex-wife on the phone. I am rooted to the spot. I can’t move. I can’t breathe.

  The phone rings again.

  “Meyer?” It is Krystal.

  “Krystal. We’ve got a problem. Isobel’s been kidnapped.”

  “What in the world are you talking about? She’s with me. She just turned up at my office. She’s fine. Didn’t want to go to school.”