Life on Sandpaper

by Yoram Kaniuk

  Bird looked like he was enjoying the place, he said, I’d live life all over again if it could be Chock Full o’Nuts with music, like that pretty boy Liberace. He talked with unexpected excitement about Liberace and his pink clothes and the smile stuck to his face and that pink voice. And pink piano. And pink hair. And pink teeth. It’s a shame I’m not him. Money drips off him and thousands applaud. Go be a jazz musician in America—you play the nigger of music. It’s not Hopalong Cassidy, because he was a man, he had a long-barreled Colt 45; and Bird talked excitedly about some Hindemith he’d heard recently. As we left I said something pompous about his music being the link between the sewer and God or maybe something about its being terror shrouded in cotton and he yelled at me, Yo, jazz is jazz. It’s rhythm. Rhythm. Rhythm. Syncopation, something banal, some preplanned improvisation and phrasing, and most important, timing and timing and timing; I asked him why he was called Bird and he said it came from yardbird, I asked what a yardbird was and he said, The chicken I loved eating when I was a kid, and I said I’d already asked around and hadn’t ever come across such a bird, and he said that a yardbird wasn’t only a chicken but also a guy who cleans shithouses in the army, or a deserter, or a rookie, but I ate the bird, he said, and maybe there aren’t birds like that in New York or Jerusalem, but there are in Kansas City. He suddenly said, Let’s go to your studio. I took him to Broome Street where I’d rented a new studio that was slightly larger than the previous one. He said, Now, you sweet white boy you, open the door nicely for the nigger. He wasn’t making fun and I understood what he meant and said, It would be an honor. He said, Don’t be a creep, it’s not such a great honor. He came in and had some of the sweet wine he’d brought with him and looked at the paintings. He saw a new painting of Shabtai Zvi, also on horseback but different from the one I’d shown on Steve Allen’s show. I explained that I had a soft spot for kings, angels, and messiahs. I said there’d been hundreds of messiahs in Judaism and he asked who’s the guy that isn’t Jesus, and I told there’d been a guy, Abulafia, who’d gone to the Pope to warn him that if he didn’t convert to Judaism right away his end would come, and he hadn’t been heard from since. Bird liked the painting and said, Nobody’s ever painted me from life, I don’t have too much time. Don’t talk that way, I said, there’s time, and he almost yelled at me, Don’t tell me what there is and what there isn’t and don’t be my grandma and don’t say what you think should be said, and listen, do you want to paint me or not? I said I very much wanted to and he asked if I’d paint him with a revolver in his hand and I said I’d paint him playing the saxophone and I didn’t have one here so I’d give him a stick and I’d put the saxophone in afterwards. He said, I want royalty in the painting. Negro splendor. You like kings, so let there be a king in this Negro that’s me. I gave him a stick I had and he held it as if he was really playing and I began painting. I painted for an hour and a half at a speed I’d never known.

  I thought of Giotto who was the first modern artist to come to the Pope, though not Abulafia’s, and he painted an absolutely perfect circle that resulted in his being given the wall of the church at Assisi that the older artists had fought over. He talked and I talked, but I was on a trip now and he evidently understood and was happy to see somebody on a trip and apparently also went into a trip because he was humming and singing bebop without the instrument in his hands and without words, scatting like Ella Fitzgerald or Sarah Vaughan. After knowing him for a few years I was now seeing him for the first time. The high forehead was now a single canvas crammed with expression—the smiling cheeks and the terrible sadness covered with thick oily skin and the eyes wide with childish wonder and a kind of troubling and heavy old age in them. I reached his sweet, dreamy, and submissive expression that was sometimes strong, his gentleness that appeared frozen in the jaws of defeat. In his eyes was an adult understanding, but at the same time the child seeing rain for the first time remained in them. I saw all this, but I also painted the royalty, Ellington the Duke, Lester the Prez, Lady Day, and although the painting wasn’t realist but was a new interpretation of the man, a new expression, there was also royalty in it. He got up and looked at the painting, didn’t say a word, and left. I found a photograph of him with his saxophone on the sleeve of a record he’d made under the name of Charlie Chan, because for a time the Mafia controlled the record market and he had to appear under another name. I painted the saxophone into his hands and put it in his mouth, it wasn’t easy because in the mouth’s meet-up with the instrument there is a certain trembling, the cheeks blow up and then sink back, the mouth is clamped onto the mouthpiece and small wrinkles appear in the lower part of the face and the chin juts outward. I painted through the night and all through the next day. I didn’t eat, then ate a little, until Lee came looking for me. She looked and said, You’ve painted a dead man.

  Ruth Sobotka was waiting for me outside. We went to her nearby home so she could feed me. Her husband, Stanley Kubrick, was hunched over his old manual editing machine in the other room where he was editing his first feature film, Killer’s Kiss, in which Ruth played Iris the ballerina and Kubrick stopped on a freeze of Frank Silvera and enlarged it and there was something in Frank’s expression I recognized from drinking together in the Village and that I’d already seen when he played with Brando in Viva Zapata! I rushed to the studio and brought the painting back. Kubrick looked at it for a long time and said, Bird’s a genius. Ruth and Lee were doing ballet exercises in the studio. I looked at Kubrick’s stubborn and tormented work and told him that in Hebrew we had an expression about “a man wise in his work.” The scene in the huge warehouse with the naked mannequins, the thousands of plastic women, the ax fight, all contributed to New York’s narrowing the gap on Hollywood as far as full-length feature films were concerned. By the time the film hit the screens I was no longer seeing Kubrick, because Lee and Ruth, those two Jewish-Russian girls, had apparently drifted away from one another.

  I went to see the movie with Bird. Next day, at the Five Spot Café, he did a variation on the movie’s theme music and said, That bastard’s made a great movie. In that last year of his life Bird went through a lot of mood swings. There were days when he sounded like the black power revolution that would erupt years later, but what he was really proud of was the recording he made with a bunch of white violinists in tuxes who played with Parker at Carnegie Hall. The violins and the white musicians. It was a triumph for him, but I still felt the sword of black anger that America had left in him, in his blood, the slavery and the heroin and the disgrace and the Pullman porters. Lee had said, Bird is about life, and then he started talking about Thelonious Monk who wasn’t popular yet but Bird took me to hear him and said, This cat is great.

  On March 12, 1955, Tony Scott called to tell me that Bird had died at the home of a friend from the Rothschild family who had been looking after him. We went over and I sat with his wife, Chan. At the funeral I stood holding her trembling hand. Bird’s black friends brought a previous wife who he’d left when he was young and who’d refused to divorce him. His only real wife was Chan, he’d said, who he couldn’t marry because he couldn’t get a divorce. He left everything for Chan and she bore his two children. But his family and friends got back at her. Solidarity with the black woman he’d left overcame emotion. Even his best friend, Gillespie. It was as if they had been given permission after his death to walk all over Chan, and so they paid their respects to Doris; and I’m talking about Bird’s very best friends, though not Gerry Mulligan. Not Art Blakey. Not Ben Webster. They paid their respects to the white Chan. And Doris didn’t want them to play jazz at the funeral, so they didn’t play jazz at the funeral. Chan felt angry and betrayed. Bird’s mother too was on Doris’s side. Somebody said, The Negroes won’t forgive Bird for his wife, and Chan was quivering like fine down in my hand. They brought a priest who prayed. They held a service in a church where they sang gospel songs and swayed, and although the ceremony was beautiful, Chan was all alone and felt unacknowledged, an
d then they took Bird away for burial in Kansas City, the place he’d said so many times that he wouldn’t want to go back to even if he was dead.

  A few months later Chan and a few friends held a memorial at Carnegie Hall, the place he’d been so proud of playing at. Chan stood next to me. Gerry Mulligan and Art planned everything. When they played “Now is the Hour,” Chan wept. They say there’s no second act in American lives. Just a memorial. Before the event, Chan asked me and Lee to look after little Baird. She had lots of things to arrange. Too many women claimed that Bird was the king. Chan took care of her son and the recordings. She sent the Mickey Mouse wagon on little rails that Bird loved so much and his big old model railroad from the thirties, an original Lionel, a Model M, one of the 10,000 originals. Each car was huge. The terrifying locomotive sent out sparks, and when it passed through a station the lights would flash and bridges would open and close and there were grade crossings and points that switched and a station from which porters appeared when the train arrived and the locomotive whistled. The train that Bird loved to play with and when he did he wore an engineer’s cap, took up almost an entire room. Now it was sent along to little Baird in our apartment on Fifty-second Street.

  Little Baird wore his father’s cap and played. Charlie Mingus came by to play with him and asked forgiveness for the funeral. Chan didn’t answer, but she didn’t not answer either. I was afraid that Miles would come along and ask for the painting of Bird because he was the only one who knew I’d done it. But it wasn’t appropriate and later he forgot. It was nighttime. Little Baird fell asleep in Lee’s studio and we in the small bedroom and we woke up in panic in the middle of the night to the sound of screaming. The train was going around, roaring, the engine was shooting out sparks, the lights were flashing and the bridges opening and closing, and someone was shouting, running like a maniac around the dark room, banging into walls, the door, the closet, fleeing the train, Lee and I could see him running around in fright, shouting, What is it? What is it? And Lee, who at first had been frightened by the noise and the lights and the clattering of the train, started laughing, Poor guy, she said, he came up the fire escape to burgle the place and ran into the train, and the scared burglar shouted, What is it? What is it? And Lee, who knew the seamy side of life better than me said, And what did you come up here to knock off, anyway? What did you think you’d find here? The frightened burglar tried to find a way out. The door was hidden behind the angle of a small wall. The train went round and round and went on making noises and shooting out sparks and the guy was hysterical. Little Baird clapped his hands and laughed. Like an idiot I ran after the burglar with a skillet I’d picked up in the kitchen, I threw a shoe at him, I threw a little stool, the guy turned and tried to get back to the fire escape, but the widow had closed behind him and there was the train flying around, sparking, and the guy was begging, Look, let me out, I’m sorry, let me out, I’ll never steal again, and I almost punched him, wanting to impress Lee who I’d always told that I had been a brave soldier; the guy found the door finally and ran down the stairs, I ran after him but he was too quick and I came back. Lee stopped the train and switched on the lights. Little Baird said, Poor man, he wanted something and we interrupted him. I told him I’d go downstairs and give the guy something because he was probably waiting. I took a wedge of cheese from the fridge and an old pan and I went downstairs and threw them into the garbage. Little Baird asked if I’d given them to the burglar and I didn’t want to lie to the kid so I said I’d left them downstairs because he wasn’t there, but he’d be back. And then Lee and little Baird sat on the floor and laughed their heads off.

  At the time Lee had made friends with a Yugoslavian dancer who said she was in love with a doctor called Arthur Brandt. One day she brought him over. He looked at us and smiled and the first thing he asked was whether we’d ever had an Indian meal. We said we’d never had an Indian meal. He came back next day, this time alone, carrying a huge sack filled with ingredients. He begged our pardon and told us not to disturb him in the kitchen. He started preparing an Indian meal. The house was filled with exotic aromas. Little Baird went into the kitchen. Arthur was tall and pleasant and we watched him go in and out of the kitchen wearing an apron he’d brought with him. About two hours later we began to smell smoke. We went in and saw Arthur fighting flames. The meal was burned. Bottles were standing on the table, the draining board was full of empty bags, strong aromas vied with the smell of burning and Lee saw how apologetic he was and said we’d eat the food even though it was burned. She said afterward that she’d never eat Indian food again. Arthur looked at the paintings and asked if he could buy one and pointed to a painting of a woman. I said yes. He explained that he was interning at a psychiatric hospital in Brooklyn and would be able to pay me ten dollars a month because his salary was forty a month. I didn’t really want to take money from him but my pathetic pride got a kick out of the idea and so he began visiting us frequently. He married his Yugoslavian dancer and after completing his internship he opened his own clinic. He had a good name because right from the start he had a bunch of clients; it began with the dancer, who went through life going from shrink to shrink, and moved on from there. I wondered who’d want to tell their problems to a kook like Arthur, because in the meantime we’d realized that he was as nutty as they came, and I told him so and he said that only a nut was capable of understanding another nut and his clinic thrived.

  He met Mira and wanted to treat her, but she said she was past it. His Yugoslavian wife started pacing their eighth-floor roof balustrade like a cat in heat, stretching, and he ran after her begging her to get down and she’d dance a bit, like a high-wire artiste, and Arthur lost his patience, he’d had enough of her, and some time later she started sneaking down from the roof to his office window and spying on the women who came to see him. She was unpredictable and irresponsible and threw things at him whenever he came out of a session with a woman. There was a certain malice in her, and it was a pity because to all appearances she was a gentle woman. They separated, shouting, at our apartment, and then Chan came and took little Baird and the model railroad away, and Adele turned up to say that Wally was in a bad way and was taking drugs and Marilyn wouldn’t last much longer; Wally was bringing women home, hookers, strippers, and they were leaving their smells in her bed, and Marilyn just brought them coffee and begged Wally to love her and forgive her for her jealousy.

  Krissoula came back from the Greek shipping tycoon who’d died on her and threw a party and she invited Avi Shoes, but Stephanie, Krissoula’s sister, had a boyfriend, Baron Hans von Noy, who lived downstairs and got angry about the party and called the police. All the stories that were around at the time—that he’d been attacked by his comrades in an Allied POW camp because he sided with the United States—were of no help to him then. A young man came out from the party and yelled to a cop that he was a Nazi. The cop left and the young man who’d yelled was James Dean. He started talking to me in all the racket of the dancing and Avi Shoes’s shouting and Dean said he had a friend, or maybe he said a teacher, a Jewish musician, and for some reason I reminded him of that guy and the man had influenced him a great deal. He said his role model was Brando. He spoke in a whisper with a shy, sweet smile on his lips. He asked if I was really Krissoula’s artist friend and I said yes. He said he’d heard some good and not-so-good things about me from Brando and I said that for me the subject was verboten and then he asked if he could come and watch me paint. I said that would be fine.

  Next morning I was in a deep sleep after all the whiskey and at nine o’clock Dean showed up. Lee, who was only half awake, opened the door and said, Jimmy Dean’s here. I made an effort to wake up. He’d brought a brown bag with hot coffee and rolls with butter and jam and Lee looked around with her despairing morning expression and sipped the coffee and closed her eyes and started to say something and fell asleep in the middle of her sentence. I carried her back to bed and locked the door. Over two weeks, day after day at nine in t
he morning, Dean would show up with coffee and rolls with butter and jam. He sat behind me but a bit to one side so he could see the painting too, he sat on a not particularly comfortable barstool I used for resting my palette on, he sat and watched as I worked. I bought a small round mirror at a five-and-ten that I hooked up so I could see him looking intently at every movement I made with the brushes and what happened with them on the canvas. When he thought I’d succeeded he’d smile his captivating smile. I don’t know why he kept coming. I asked him if he was doing research for a movie and he said no. In Lee’s studio meanwhile with its huge mirrors they were rehearsing a number choreographed by Lee. The music enveloped the painting. Dean sat watching and appeared not to be hearing the music at all. He spoke very little. I don’t know how a guy can sit on a barstool hour after hour just watching, but that’s what he did. When he did speak, he was entirely self-effacing.