I catch Van’s eye now and we know we are in big trouble because we start shrieking so loudly that the poor schmuck in the water, head recently emerged, gives us the finger. The shrieks turn into a rusty, breathless keening as we now lose the ability to stand and collapse to earth, trying to get in enough oxygen to stay alive. I am going to die here, I am sure, killed by inappropriate humor and uncontrolled laughter born of drugs and surrender and wayward sons and dying ex-wives.
When we have recovered, we head out again. I am still hungry and we stop at one of those hanging-over-the-waves patio restaurants and order burgers and fries.
“So enough about me, Van. What’s up with you?”
He looks taken aback.
“What d’you mean?”
“How you doing? What’s going on with you?”
“Jesus, Meyer, you shouldn’t smoke this stuff. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“How’s your life?”
“I am going to stab you in the neck with my fork. Try to have a normal discussion. That means music or women.”
“OK. How’s your woman?”
“Marion? She scares me.”
“And this is … a good thing?”
“Well, at least it keeps me from straying.”
“Et voilà. You have solved the ancient problem of how to maintain a good relationship. Hook up with a scary woman.”
“Nah. She’s OK, I guess.”
“And, ladies and gentlemen, spice up your relationship by telling the lady—you’re OK, I guess.”
“Get off my back. How’s Innocent?”
“Don’t ask.”
“Why don’t you ask him to sit in with us sometime when he gets back. You know, take his mind off and all.”
“I did. He’s not coming back from Zimbabwe. Gonna find his roots and all.”
“Shit. Are we that bad?”
“You’re a funny man, Van.”
“Damn. Sorry, Meyer. Not a good month for you, huh?”
“You think?”
“How you holding up?”
“Why am I not allowed to ask you about yourself, but you can ask me?”
“Because I don’t like talking about myself. Or anything else for that matter. You, on the other hand, revel in self-broadcast.”
“Mmmfmm.” This is because I had stuffed the entire hamburger into my mouth. If the cow had been on my plate, that would have been gone too. When I finish chewing and swallowing, which seems like an inordinately long process, I resume.
“Well, I’m into the ‘why me?’ mode. Farzad warned me about this.”
“It’s a good question.”
“Has bad shit never happened to you?”
“Never. Wait … I once lost my wallet.”
“Gee, that must have been harsh.”
“All relative.”
“So why me?”
Because I am a student of the fucking odds, that’s why. When you understand the basis of statistics, when you realize that there are no systems to beat the casino, when you understand why there is a fifty-fifty chance of two people having the same birthday in a room of twenty-three people, then you understand why you. When you watch while clueless, ignorant, and venal dipshits eat the lion’s share, when you understand evolution and its cruel certainties, when you think it can never happen to you, then you know why. When you live a life of rare and relative privilege in a world of arbitrary suffering, sitting atop the pile of aspirants to comfort and peace, averting your gaze from the mayhem below you, then you know why. When you are graced with enough talent to sail effortlessly through math and science and English, and your ears hear the edge of complex harmony, and you have sufficient charm and intelligence and cosmetic luck to attract the affection and respect of many, and you casually piss in their faces so that you can live by your own rules, and not theirs, then you know why you. Then you know why.
I am about to verbalize this marijuana-stained swath of genius, when I am whiplashed onto another plane by a shimmy and swish at the periphery of my vision. Turning my glazed eyes toward the source of this distraction I am met by the disturbingly dark eyes of a young woman, which graze past mine as they sweep the restaurant patio on which we sit. She is with a friend, similarly young and bursting with the brashness of youth. They are between thirteen and twenty-four, depending on one’s interpretation and predilection, which in my case is diminished and untrustworthy. I settle on nineteen. They are still wet from the sea and glisten threateningly.
We leer carnivorously at them as they sashay over to the bar and wiggle into tall chairs.
I prod Van with a french fry. “Go and talk to them.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“’Cause I have a girlfriend.”
“Chicken.”
“What are you, twelve?”
“So why won’t you go over and talk to them?”
“Because I have a trust fund. Other people always make the first move. It’s in the preamble to trust-fund-baby bylaws.”
I turn around to look at them, now inserting their straws, phallic if skinny, into interesting-looking cocktails. I am not sure if they see me looking. Perhaps. But there is interesting stuff behind me as well. Like the sea. They have noticed, for sure.
I stand up. I am very stoned. I can see this playing out. They are rich kids. They are staying in a bungalow in Malibu. It has two bedrooms and an open-plan kitchen and living area, which faces a rattan-furnished patio. It is all white wood, with pale brown indoor furniture and tasteful abstract paintings, mainly in yellows and blues. There are fresh flowers. And a fruit bowl. She will lead me to the bedroom, without even the pretense of a tour or a drink. It will be warm, perhaps too warm. She will have a thin sheen of sweat on her back as she walks ahead of me, tiny blonde hairs reflecting light, a faint glimmer. I will simply be sweating. She will smile and fall back on her bed, which will be covered by a thick white duvet with girly patterns on its edges, and it will be cool to the touch. She will still have her two-piece bathing suit on, but her legs will be slightly spread, slightly more than they should be. A stray pubic hair or two will protrude.
I now have a hard-on. Marijuana fueled. Explosive. A thing of beauty. I carefully adjust it under the table, using simple physics to flatten it flush against my stiff denim jeans zipper, and to make sure that my white linen shirt is positioned for deniable cover.
“Fuck it. I’m gonna go.”
I stand up and wander over to the bar. A last-minute prick of cowardice causes me to adjust direction by a few degrees and head for a space at the bar on their left. The bartender looks up.
“Corona, please.” This notwithstanding a perfectly full pitcher of draught standing accusingly on our table.
I glance at the girl on my right. She is staring into her drink.
“Interesting-looking cocktail, that. What is it?”
She looks at me surprised, eyes smiling, lips slightly parted, a glint of corn-fed white teeth radiating. She turns to her friend and then the barkeep.
And in a deep Cockney accent, “Oy, tell this old cunt to fuck off ’fore I kick him in the cobblers. Fooking geezer.”
I fall asleep in the car on the way home.
Fucking marijuana. A Ponzi scheme.
CHAPTER 43
IT IS A Saturday night and we are setting up. I am vaguely thinking about playing every solo a half-tone out of key, just to see if a single solitary person notices. But I back down, because Eric Marienthal or Chris Potter or Benny Golson at eighty-fucking-something years old may wander in. And if they do, then just maybe they will say something nice and validate the last thing in my life that seems to be intact.
Everyone in the band seems depressed and gloomy. Perhaps I am contagious. Van is noodling around a riff with some inscrutable time signature. Tim is limbering up with high-speed Celtic violin stuff. Mike is futzing around with the digital mixing equipment, immediately causing me aggravation because the settings are the same week after week. Billy has his feet up on hi
s amp, his bass nestled in his lap, and is staring meaningfully at the ceiling, presumably conjuring up assignations.
It strikes me that a band like this is little more than a weird high-school boys’ club. We think that we are important, but we are not. Not really. We have spent a tiny fraction of our lives gaining a tinier fraction more competence than our peers on instruments that play a pitch or strike a skin. Then some of us have gotten together to learn how to march pretty much in lockstep for a few minutes, regurgitating a pale version of someone else’s inspiration. All in order to stand on a stage under the pretense of a higher status. It is a deformed expression of the evolutionary principle. We get to be envied and obeyed for a short while. It feels good. We think we are making art. We deceive ourselves for a few hours and then we go back to our lives and so does the audience, and that’s that. Remember punk? I loved the underlying principle, which is that you didn’t have to bother with learning how to play an instrument at all. Or sing. They cut out the middleman, which was some minimal talent and all that damn practicing. Just get up onstage and assume the position, the clothes, the fucking attitude. That is all it requires. The audience will buy it, they will clap, whistle, go home to your bed. Audiences need heroes, and bands are as good a simulacrum as any. But pretenders to serious music, like our little outfit, are little more than sleazy fakirs. I hope we are never found out.
We jostle into position and kick off with a desultory 12-bar, while we attempt to get mojos working and try to remember why we do this, when many other weekend delights beckon.
There is a table of five or six youngsters making a racket. Good-looking, drunk, pumped, up for a night. Screeching and laughing, each one battling for attention. Nothing unusual. But I am not in the mood. And they are right in front of the stage. And they are having a much nicer time than I, and I am full of resentment at their uncomplicated lives and burnished youth.
We play through our set—some blues, some tangos, some swing, some Manouche, a klezmer and a Celtic. Van has a goal, he says. He wants the pieces to be so tight that they are driven by muscle memory alone. I differ. Once muscle memory takes over, we will marvel at their polish and mourn at their lack of spontaneity. Tonight, we are on autopilot. I am too dampened to even think about my solos; I just borrow phrases from previous outings and mash them together.
The table in front has gotten louder. I am struck at how a drunken woman can transform from pretty to coarse under the influence, with exaggerated mouth gymnastics and glazed eyes and oversized giggles and undisciplined eyebrows. The men just look drunk and stupid. They are shouting to be heard over the music; it is a distraction to them, an impediment to their awful clatter. We finish on a ballad, an elegy to love entitled “The Wedding” by Abdullah Ibrahim, with a searing sax melody and deep gospel chords. Solos would sully, so we simply deliver the composer’s intent as accurately as our competence allows. While I am in the final eight bars, where the climax peaks up to a high-pitch fortissimo, and where deities appear, heads thrown back in bliss at the edges of the simple church harmonies, I can hear the following lovely full-throated refrain from the table, “Blow job, blow job, blow job.” I open my eyes, which have been closed as I gamely try to give it my best, and one of girls is under the table, pretending to perform fellatio on a giggling Lothario.
I snap.
I step offstage and walk up to the table.
“Think you can keep it down? It is possible that someone may be trying to hear the music. More likely it is possible that someone may be trying not to hear you.”
There is a stunned silence from the table. A young fellow in leather and jeans, tall and broad, with eyes stunned into asymmetry from alcohol, stares at me and then stands up.
“Fuck you. No law against talking.”
I am past it now.
“No law against being a tone-deaf, drunk, ignorant asshole either, so fuck you.”
I glance behind me. The stage is deserted. The boys have taken their leave into the alley for a smoke.
“You calling me ignorant?”
“No, sorry, that would be a compliment. You are thicker than elephant shit.”
A few of the others stand up.
Oops.
Fuck it. I probably deserve a beating. It would color-coordinate with the rest of my life.
A shadow crosses the table. There is a hand on my shoulder.
It is the big black guy from jail. Really big. On a different planet big. My head reaches up to his sternum.
“What, do I have to save your sorry ass twice?”
He looks at the table, the cocked-and-ready drunks.
“My friend the sax player apologizes. But he does have a point: you guys make too much fucking noise. Go to a bar without a band. We all on the same page?”
Everyone looks at him. His arm is thicker than my chest. He makes Tall White Boy look like Anemic Dweeb. They sit down, manage a small scowl, enough to save face. He turns to me.
“You owe me a drink. Maybe I owe you, I don’t know.” He is not smiling.
We thread through the crowds to the bar. Gordon spots me, comes over.
“Everything OK?”
I am not sure if he saw my near beating or if Big Black Guy concerns him.
“Do you care?”
“No. As long as you’re onstage in fifteen minutes.”
We find a spot. Or rather, the Red Sea parts as my new buddy approaches. People this big send out their own force field, like the weird change in the air before a thunderstorm. I am reminded, without rancor, of my own youthful insecurities in the large-and-tall department. Grade school rewarded the cheeky and flirtatious, and I thrived. High school rewarded the football team, leaving me pawing for the attention of girls more seduced by brawn than, well, desperate claims of over-imagined intellectual and cultural superiority. Sure, we scored, occasionally, my sports-challenged friends and I. Scored with Goths and Indies and Bookworms and other subcults. But what we really wanted, to be truthful, was Cheerleaders and their skimpy wherewithals. Skimpy clothes, skimpy underwear. Skimpy morals. At my height, nah. The Goths would have to suffice. My new buddy here, looming gigantic like an oak dispensing shade and protection—he knows. High school would have been his zenith.
We sit down. I look up at him, sitting as straight as possible so that I am not talking to his nipple.
“So, you doing OK after lockup?”
“Yeah. Thanks. And you didn’t have to do that.”
“I felt I owed you something.”
“Nah, you didn’t. I was just not in the mood for watching some poor white boy get stomped. Normally I don’t give a fuck.”
I put out my hand.
“Meyer.”
“Name’s Jonas. I like your band.”
“Thanks, Jonas. What are you having?”
“Water.”
“I’m buying.”
“Water.”
“No drunk and disorderly tonight?”
“You never know, maybe later. Why were you in jail?”
“Misunderstanding. They thought I was someone else. Driver’s license mix-up.”
“Sure, that’s what they all say.”
“No, true, in this case. What d’you do, Jonas?”
“Anything anyone will pay me for. Which these days, is not much.”
“Sorry about that.”
“Yeah. This your main gig?”
“Didn’t use to be. I am a software guy. But I bust out.”
“That was dumb.”
“Probably. What was with the drunk and disorderly?”
“Got pissed off.”
“With who?”
“With life.”
“Right. Know the feeling.”
“I doubt it.”
“Hey, I may look like a cool sax player in a cool band, but some shit has gone down lately.”
“Yeah? I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”
“Ex-wife got killed in a car accident.”
“OK. Not bad. Better ex tha
n current, though.”
“Not in this case. My dad shot up a department store.”
“Why?”
“Bored.”
“He in jail?”
“Nope, he got off.”
“Then it doesn’t count.”
“Lost my job.”
“You told me you bust out. That’s not the same as losing it.”
“I guess. OK, someone close to me is in trouble with drugs.”
“Don’t make me laugh, boy. Everybody I have ever known is in trouble with drugs.”
“My girlfriend left me.”
“Oh, please.”
I take a sip of my beer.
“That all you got, Meyer?”
“I suppose.”
“You got money in the bank?”
“Some.”
“You got people who love you?”
“I do.”
“You got friends?”
“Yes.”
“You got kids?”
“Yeah.”
“You close to them?”
“I am.”
“You got health?”
“As far as I know.”
“You got prospects?”
“Maybe.”
“You’re a fraud, man. You life is just peachy. Wanna hear some shit?”
“Yeah, actually I do.”
“Big and black.”
“So?”
“Most people are scared of me. Especially white people.”
“So?”
“This includes people who interview for jobs.”
“Ah.”
“No education. Grade 10 and I faked that.”
“OK.”
“No skills. Being a star quarterback in high school don’t get you shit.”
“Right.”
“Long rap sheet. Assault. Drunk and disorderly. Selling dope. Resisting arrest. Gangbanging. Now I’m law abiding and clean, and it don’t mean nothing to nobody.”
“OK.”
“Four children, four moms. None of them speak to me, with good reason. I want to see my kids. Every second of every day. I can’t.”
“OK.”
“No prospects.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Read my lips. No prospects.”
“OK.”
“You want my life? Wanna trade?”
“Uh—”
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