“It’s beginning to get warm,” Johnny said. “Bruno, look what a pretty scar I got between my ribs.”
“Cover yourself,” Dédée ordered him, embarrassed and not knowing what to say. We know one another well enough and a naked man is a naked man, that’s all, but anyway Dédée was scandalized and I didn’t know how to not give the impression that what Johnny was doing had shocked me. And he knew it and laughed uproariously, mouth wide open, obscenely keeping his legs up so that his prick hung down over the edge of the chair like a monkey in the zoo, and the skin of his thighs had some weird blemishes which disgusted me completely. Then Dédée grabbed the blanket and wrapped it tightly around him, while Johnny was laughing and seemed very cheerful. I said goodbye hesitatingly, promised to come back the next day, and Dédée accompanied me to the landing, closing the door so Johnny couldn’t hear what she was going to say to me.
“He’s been like this since we got back from the Belgian tour. He’d played very well everyplace, and I was so happy.”
“I wonder where he got the heroin from,” I said, looking her right in the eye.
“Don’t know. He’d been drinking wine and cognac almost constantly. He’s been shooting up too, but less than there …”
There was Baltimore and New York, three months in Bellevue psychiatric, and a long stretch in Camarillo.
“Did Johnny play really well in Belgium, Dédée?”
“Yes, Bruno, better than ever, seems to me. The people went off their heads, and the guys in the band told me so, too, a number of times. Then all at once some weird things were happening, like always with Johnny, but luckily never in front of an audience. I thought … but you see now, he’s worse than ever.”
“Worse than in New York? You didn’t know him those years.”
Dédée’s not stupid, but no woman likes you to talk about her man before she knew him, aside from the fact that now she has to put up with him and whatever “before” was is just words. I don’t know how to say it to her, I don’t even trust her fully, but finally I decide.
“I guess you’re short of cash.”
“We’ve got that contract beginning day after tomorrow,” said Dédée.
“You think he’s going to be able to record and do the gig with an audience too?”
“Oh, sure.” Dédée seemed a bit surprised. “Johnny can play better than ever if Dr. Bernard can get rid of that flu. The problem is the horn.”
“I’ll take care of that. Here, take this, Dédée. Only … Maybe better Johnny doesn’t know about it.”
“Bruno …”
I made a motion with my hand and began to go down the stairway, I’d cut off the predictable words, the hopeless gratitude. Separated from her by four or five steps, made it easier for me to say it to her.
“He can’t shoot up before the first concert, not for anything in the world. You can let him smoke a little, but no money for the other thing.”
Dédée didn’t answer at all, though I saw how her hands were twisting and twisting the bills as though she were trying to make them disappear. At least I was sure that Dédée wasn’t on drugs. If she went along with it, it was only out of love or fear. If Johnny gets down on his knees, like I saw once in Chicago, and begs her with tears … But that’s a chance, like everything else with Johnny, and for the moment they’d have enough money to eat, and for medicines. In the street I turned up the collar on my raincoat because it was beginning to drizzle, and took a breath so deep that my lungs hurt; Paris smelled clean, like fresh bread. Only then I noticed how Johnny’s place had smelled, of Johnny’s body sweating under the blanket. I went into a café for a shot of cognac and to wash my mouth out, maybe also the memory that insisted and insisted in Johnny’s words, his stories, his way of seeing what I didn’t see and, at bottom, didn’t want to see. I began to think of the day after tomorrow and it was like tranquillity descending, like a bridge stretching beautifully from the zinc counter into the future.
When one is not too sure of anything, the best thing to do is to make obligations for oneself that’ll act as pontoons. Two or three days later I thought that I had an obligation to find out if the marquesa was helping Johnny Carter score for heroin, and I went to her studio down in Montparnasse. The marquesa is really a marquesa, she’s got mountains of money from the marquis, though it’s been some time they’ve been divorced because of dope and other, similar, reasons. Her friendship with Johnny dates from New York, probably from the year when Johnny got famous overnight simply because someone had given him the chance to get four or five guys together who dug his style, and Johnny could work comfortably for the first time, and what he blew left everyone in a state of shock. This is not the place to be a jazz critic, and anyone who’s interested can read my book on Johnny and the new post-war style, but I can say that forty-eight—let’s say until fifty—was like an explosion in music, but a cold, silent explosion, an explosion where everything remained in its place and there were no screams or debris flying, but the crust of habit splintered into a million pieces until its defenders (in the bands and among the public) made hipness a question of self-esteem over something which didn’t feel to them as it had before. Because after Johnny’s step with the alto sax you couldn’t keep on listening to earlier musicians and think that they were the end; one must submit and apply that sort of disguised resignation which is called the historical sense, and say that any one of those musicians had been stupendous, and kept on being so, in his moment. Johnny had passed over jazz like a hand turning a page, that was it.
The marquesa had the ears of a greyhound for everything that might be music, she’d always admired Johnny and his friends in the group enormously. I imagine she must have “loaned” them no small amount of dollars in the Club 33 days, when the majority of critics were screaming bloody murder at Johnny’s recordings, and were criticizing his jazz by worse-than-rotten criteria. Probably also, in that period, the marquesa began sleeping with Johnny from time to time, and shooting up with him. I saw them together often before recording sessions or during intermissions at concerts, and Johnny seemed enormously happy at the marquesa’s side, even though Lan and the kids were waiting for him on another floor or at his house. But Johnny never had the vaguest idea of what it is to wait for anything, he couldn’t even imagine that anyone was somewhere waiting for him. Even to his way of dropping Lan, which tells it like it really is with him. I saw the postcard that he sent from Rome after being gone for four months (after climbing onto a plane with two other musicians, Lan knowing nothing about it). The postcard showed Romulus and Remus, which had always been a big joke with Johnny (one of his numbers has that title), said: “Waking alone in a multitude of loves,” which is part of a first line of a Dylan Thomas poem, Johnny was reading Dylan all the time then; Johnny’s agents in the States agreed to deduct a part of their percentages and give it to Lan, who, for her part, understood quickly enough that it hadn’t been such a bad piece of business to have gotten loose from Johnny. Somebody told me that the marquesa had given Lan money too, without Lan knowing where it had come from. Which didn’t surprise me at all, because the marquesa was absurdly generous and understood the world, a little like those omelets she makes at her studio when the boys begin to arrive in droves, and which begins to take on the aspect of a kind of permanent omelet that you throw different things into and you go on cutting out hunks and offering them in place of what’s really missing.
I found the marquesa with Marcel Gavoty and Art Boucaya, and they happened just at that moment to be talking about the sides Johnny had recorded the previous afternoon. They fell all over me as if I were the archangel himself arriving, the marquesa necked with me until it was beginning to get tedious, and the boys applauded the performance, bassist and baritone sax. I had to take refuge behind an easy-chair and stand them off as best I could, all because they’d learned that I’d provided the magnificent sax with which Johnny had cut four or five of the best. The marquesa said immediately that Johnny was a dirty rat, and ho
w they’d had a fight (she didn’t say over what) and that the dirty rat knew very well that all he had to do was beg her pardon properly and there would have been a check immediately to buy a new horn. Naturally Johnny hadn’t wanted to beg her pardon since his return to Paris—the fight appears to have taken place in London, two months back—and so nobody’d known that he lost his goddamned horn in the metro, etcetera. When the marquesa started yakking you wondered if Dizzy’s style hadn’t glued up her diction, it was such an interminable series of variations in the most unexpected registers, until the end when the marquesa slapped her thighs mightily, opened her mouth wide and began to laugh as if someone were tickling her to death. Then Art Boucaya took advantage of the break to give me details of the session the day before, which I’d missed on account of my wife having pneumonia.
“Tica can tell you,” Art said, pointing to the marquesa who was still squirming about with laughter. “Bruno, you can’t imagine what it was like until you hear the discs. If God was anywhere yesterday, I think it was in that damned recording studio where it was as hot as ten thousand devils, by the way. You remember Willow Tree, Marcel?”
“Sure, I remember,” Marcel said. “The fuck’s asking me if I remember. I’m tattooed from head to foot with Willow Tree.”
Tica brought us highballs and we got ourselves comfortable to chat. Actually we talked very little about the recording session, because any musician knows you can’t talk about things like that, but what little they did say restored my hope and I thought maybe my horn would bring Johnny some good luck. Anyway, there was no lack of anecdotes which stomped that hope a bit, for example, Johnny had taken his shoes off between one cutting and the next and walked around the studio barefoot. On the other hand, he’d made up with the marquesa and promised to come to her place to have a drink before the concert tonight.
“Do you know the girl Johnny has now?” Tica wanted to know. I gave the most succinct possible description of the French girl, but Marcel filled it in with all sorts of nuances and allusions which amused the marquesa very much. There was not the slightest reference to drugs, though I’m so up tight that it seemed to me I could smell pot in Tica’s studio, besides which Tica laughed in a way I’ve noted in Johnny at times, and in Art, which gives the teahead away. I wondered how Johnny would have gotten heroin, though, if he’d had a fight with the marquesa; my confidence in Dédée hit the ground floor, if really I’d ever had any confidence in her. They’re all the same, at bottom.
I was a little envious of the equality that brought them closer together, which turned them into accomplices so easily; from my puritanical world—I don’t need to admit it, anyone who knows me knows that I’m horrified by vice—I see them as sick angels, irritating in their irresponsibility, but ultimately valuable to the community because of, say, Johnny’s records, the marquesa’s generosity. But I’m not telling it all and I want to force myself to say it out: I envy them, I envy Johnny, that Johnny on the other side, even though nobody knows exactly what that is, the other side. I envy everything except his anguish, something no one can fail to understand, but even in his pain he’s got to have some kind of in to things that’s denied me. I envy Johnny and at the same time I get sore as hell watching him destroy himself, misusing his gifts, and the stupid accumulation of nonsense the pressure of his life requires. I think that if Johnny could straighten out his life, not even sacrificing anything, not even heroin, if he could pilot that plane he’s been flying blind for the last five years better, maybe he’d end up worse, maybe go crazy altogether, or die, but not without having played it to the depth, what he’s looking for in those sad a posteriori monologues, in his retelling of great, fascinating experiences which, however, stop right there, in the middle of the road. And all this I back up with my own cowardice, and maybe basically I want Johnny to wind up all at once like a nova that explodes into a thousand pieces and turns astronomers into idiots for a whole week, and then one can go off to sleep and tomorrow is another day.
It felt as though Johnny had surmised everything I’d been thinking, because he gave me a big hello when he came in, and almost immediately came over and sat beside me, after kissing the marquesa and whirling her around in the air, and exchanging with Art and her a complicated onomatopoetic ritual which made everybody feel great.
“Bruno,” Johnny said, settling down on the best sofa, “that’s a beautiful piece of equipment, and they tell me I was dragging it up out of my balls yesterday. Tica was crying electric-light bulbs, and I don’t think it was because she owed bread to her dressmaker, huh, Tica?”
I wanted to know more about the session, but Johnny was satisfied with this bit of braggadocio. Almost immediately he turned to Marcel and started coming on about that night’s program and how well both of them looked in their brand-new grey suits in which they were going to appear at the theater. Johnny was really in great shape, and you could see he hadn’t used a needle overmuch in days; he has to take exactly the right amount to put him in the mood to play. And just as I was thinking that, Johnny dropped his hand on my shoulder and leaned over:
“Dédée told me I was very rough with you the other afternoon.”
“Aw, you don’t even remember.”
“Sure. I remember very well. You want my opinion, actually I was terrific. You ought to have been happy I put on that act with you; I don’t do that with anybody, believe me. It just shows how much I appreciate you. We have to go someplace soon where we can talk over a pile of things. Here …” He stuck out his lower lip contemptuously, laughed, shrugged his shoulders, it looked like he was dancing on the couch. “Good old Bruno. Dédée told me I acted very bad, honestly.”
“You had the flu. You better now?”
“It wasn’t flu. The doc arrived and right away began telling me how he liked jazz enormously, and that one night I’d have to come to his house and listen to records. Dédée told me that you gave her money.”
“So you could get through all right until you get paid. How do you feel about tonight?”
“Good, shit, I feel like playing, I’d play right now if I had the horn, but Dédée insisted she’d bring it to the theater herself. It’s a great horn, yesterday it felt like I was making love when I was playing it. You should have seen Tica’s face when I finished. Were you jealous, Tica?”
They began to laugh like hell again, and Johnny thought it an opportune moment to race across the studio with great leaps of happiness, and between him and Art they started dancing without the music, raising and lowering their eyebrows to set the beat. It’s impossible to get impatient with either Johnny or Art; it’d be like getting annoyed with the wind for blowing your hair into a mess. Tica, Marcel and I, in low voices, traded our conceptions of what was going to happen that night. Marcel is certain that Johnny’s going to repeat his terrific success of 1951, when he first came to Paris. After yesterday’s job, he’s sure everything is going to be A-okay. I’d like to feel as confident as he does, but anyway there’s nothing I can do except sit in one of the front rows and listen to the concert. At least I have the assurance that Johnny isn’t out of it like that night in Baltimore. When I mentioned this to Tica, she grabbed my hand like she was going to fall into the water. Art and Johnny had gone over to the piano, and Art was showing him a new tune, Johnny was moving his head and humming. Both of them in their new grey suits were elegant as hell, although Johnny’s shape was spoiled a bit by the fat he’d been laying on these days.
We talked with Tica about that night in Baltimore, when Johnny had his first big crisis. I looked Tica right in the eye as we were talking, because I wanted to be sure she understood what I was talking about, and that she shouldn’t give in to him this time. If Johnny managed to drink too much cognac, or smoke some tea, or go off on shit, the concert would flop and everything fall on its ass. Paris isn’t a casino in the provinces, and everybody has his eye on Johnny. And while I’m thinking that, I can’t help having a bad taste in my mouth, anger, not against Johnny nor the things tha
t happen to him; rather against the people who hang around him, myself, the marquesa and Marcel, for example. Basically we’re a bunch of egotists; under the pretext of watching out for Johnny what we’re doing is protecting our idea of him, getting ourselves ready for the pleasure Johnny’s going to give us, to reflect the brilliance from the statue we’ve erected among us all and defend it till the last gasp. If Johnny zonked, it would be bad for my book (the translation into English or Italian was coming out any minute), and part of my concern for Johnny was put together from such things. Art and Marcel needed him to help them earn bread, and the marquesa, well, dig what the marquesa saw in Johnny besides his talent. All this has nothing to do with the other Johnny, and suddenly I realized that maybe that was what Johnny was trying to tell me when he yanked off the blanket and left himself as naked as a worm, Johnny with no horn, Johnny with no money and no clothes, Johnny obsessed by something that his intelligence was not equal to comprehending, but which floats slowly into his music, caresses his skin, perhaps is readying for an unpredictable leap which we will never understand.
And when one thinks things out that way, one really ends up with a bad taste in the mouth, and all the sincerity in the world won’t equalize the sudden discovery that next to Johnny Carter one is a piss-poor piece of shit, that now he’s come to have a drink of cognac and is looking at me from the sofa with an amused expression. Now it’s time for us to go to the Pleyel Hall. That the music at least will save the rest of the night, and fulfill basically one of its worst missions, to lay down a good smokescreen in front of the mirror, to clear us off the map for a couple of hours.
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