To be honest, what does his life matter to me? The only thing that bothers me is that if he continues to let himself go on living as he has been, a style I’m not capable of following (let’s say I don’t want to follow it), he’ll end up by making lies out of the conclusions I’ve reached in my book. He might let it drop somewhere that my statements are wrong, that his music’s something else.
“Hey, you said a bit back that there were things missing in the book.”
(Attention now.)
“Things are missing, Bruno? Oh yeah, I said there were things missing. Look, it’s not just Lan’s red dress. There’re … Will there really be urns, Bruno? I saw them again last night, an enormous field, but they weren’t so buried this time. Some had inscriptions and pictures on them, you could see giants with helmets like in the movies, and monstrous cudgels in their hands. It’s terrible to walk around between the urns and know there’s no one else, that I’m the only one walking around in them and looking for … Don’t get upset, Bruno, it’s not important that you forgot to put all that in. But Bruno,” and he lifts a finger that does not shake, “what you forgot to put in is me.”
“Come on, Johnny.”
“About me, Bruno, about me. And it’s not your fault that you couldn’t write what I myself can’t blow. When you say there that my true biography is in my records, I know you think that’s true and besides it sounds very pretty, but that’s not how it is. And if I myself didn’t know how to blow it like it should be, blow what I really am … you dig, they can’t ask you for miracles, Bruno. It’s hot inside here, let’s go.”
I follow him into the street, we wander a few feet off and a white cat comes out of an alley and meows at us; Johnny stays there a long time petting it. Well, that does it; I’ll find a taxi in the place Saint-Michel, take him back to the hotel and go home myself. It hasn’t been so awful after all; for a moment there I was afraid that Johnny had constructed a sort of antitheory to the book’s and that he was trying it out on me before spilling it at full speed. Poor Johnny petting a white cat. Basically, the only thing he said was that no one can know anything about anyone, big deal. That’s the basic assumption of any biography, then it takes off, what the hell. Let’s go, Johnny, let’s go home, it’s late.
“Don’t think that that’s all it is,” Johnny says, standing up suddenly as if he knew what I was thinking. “It’s God, baby. Now that’s where you missed out.”
“Let’s go, Johnny, let’s go home, it’s late.”
“It’s what you and people like my buddy Bruno call God. The tube of toothpaste in the morning, they call that God. The garbage can, they call that God. Afraid of kicking the bucket, they call that God. And you have the barefaced nerve to mess me up with that pigsty, you’ve written that my childhood, and my family, and I don’t know what ancestral heritage of the Negro … shit. A mountain of rotten eggs and you in the middle of it crowing, very happy with your God. I don’t want your God, he’s never been mine.”
“The only thing I said is that Negro music …”
“I don’t want your God,” Johnny says again. “Why’ve you made me accept him in your book? I don’t know if there’s a God, I play my music, I make my God, I don’t need your inventions, leave those to Mahalia Jackson and the Pope, and right now you’re going to take that part out of your book.”
“If you insist,” I say, to say something. “In the second edition.”
“I’m as alone as that cat, much more alone because I know it and he doesn’t. Damn, he’s digging his nails into my hand. Bruno, jazz is not only music, I’m not only Johnny Carter.”
“Exactly what I was trying to say when I wrote that sometimes you play like …”
“Like it’s raining up my asshole,” Johnny says, and it’s the first time all night that I feel he’s getting really sore. “A man can’t say anything, right away you translate it into your filthy language. If I play and you see angels, that’s not my fault. If the others open their fat yaps and say that I’ve reached perfection, it’s not my fault. And that’s the worst thing, the thing you really and truly left out of your book, Bruno, and that’s that I’m not worth a damn, that what I play and what the people applaud me for is not worth a damn, really not worth a damn.”
Truly a very rare modesty at this hour of the morning. This Johnny …
“How can I explain it to you?” Johnny yells, putting his hands on my shoulders, jerking me to the right and to the left. (Cut out the noise! they scream from a window). “It isn’t a question of more music or less music, it’s something else … for example, it’s the difference between Bee being dead and being alive. What I’m playing is Bee dead, you dig, while what I want to, what I want to … And sometimes because of that I wreck the horn and people think that I’m up to my ears in booze. Really, of course, I’m always smashed when I do it, because, after all, a horn costs a lot of bread.”
“Let’s go this way. I’ll get a taxi and drop you at the hotel.”
“You’re a mother of goodness, Bruno,” Johnny sneers. “Old buddy Bruno writes everything down in his notebook that you say, except the important things. I never would have believed you could be so wrong until Art passed that book on to me. At the beginning I thought you were talking about someone else, about Ronnie or about Marcel, and then Johnny here and Johnny there, I mean it was about me and I wondered, but where am I?, and you dish it out about me in Baltimore, and at Birdland, and my style … Listen,” he added almost coldly, “it isn’t that I didn’t realize that you’d written a book for the public. That’s very fine, and everything you say about my way of playing and feeling jazz seems perfectly okay to me. Why are we going on talking about the book? A piece of garbage floating in the Seine, that piece of straw floating beside the dock, your book. And I’m that other straw, and you’re that bottle going by bobbing over there. Bruno, I’m going to die without having found … without …”
I catch him under his arms and hold him up, I prop him against the railing above the pier. He’s slipping into his usual delirium, he mutters parts of words, spits.
“Without having found,” he repeats. “Without having found …”
“What is it you want to find, brother,” I tell him. “You don’t have to ask the impossible, what you have found is enough for …”
“For you, I know,” Johnny says bitterly. “For Art, for Dédée, for Lan … You donno how … Sure, every once in a while the door opens a little bit … Look at the two straws, they’ve met, see they’re dancing, one in front of the other … It’s pretty, huh … It began to open out … Time … I told you, it seems to me that time business … Bruno, all my life in my music I looked for that door to open finally. Nothing, a crack … I remember in New York one night … A red dress. Yeah, red, and it fit her beautifully. Okay, one night we were with Miles and Hal … we were carrying it for about an hour I think, playing the same piece, all by ourselves, happy … Miles played something so lovely it almost pulled me out of my chair, then I let loose, I just closed my eyes and I flew. Bruno, I swear I was flying … And I was hearing it like from a place very far away, but inside me just the same, beside myself, someone was standing there … Not exactly someone … Look, the bottle, it’s incredible how it bobs along … It wasn’t anyone, just that you look for comparisons … It was the sureness, the meeting, like in some dreams, what do you think?, when everything’s resolved, Lan and the chicks waiting for you with a turkey in the oven, you get in the car and never hit a red light, everything running as smooth as a billiard ball. And who I had beside me was like myself but not taking up any space, without being in New York at all, and especially without time, without afterwards … without there having to be an afterwards … for a while there wasn’t anything but always … And I didn’t know that it was a lie, that that happened because I was lost in the music, and that I hardly finish playing, because after all I had to give Hal his chance to do his thing at the piano, at that same moment my head would fall out, I’d be plunged into myself …
”
He’s crying softly, he rubs his eyes with his filthy hands. Me, I don’t know what to do, it’s so late, the dampness coming up from the river, we’re going to catch cold, both of us.
“It felt like I wanted to swim with no water,” Johnny murmurs. “It felt like I wanted to have Lan’s red dress but without Lan inside it. And Bee’s dead, Bruno. And I think you’re right, your book really is very good.”
“Let’s go, Johnny, I’m not getting offended at what you think’s bad about the book.”
“It’s not that, your book is okay because … because it doesn’t have urns, Bruno. It’s like what Satchmo blows, that clean, that pure. Doesn’t it seem to you that what Satch’s playing is like a birthday party or a decent action? We … I tell you I felt like I wanted to swim without water. It seemed to me … no you have to be an idiot … it seemed to me that one day I was going to find something else. I wasn’t satisfied, I thought that the good things, Lan’s red dress, even Bee, were like rat traps, I don’t know how to put it any other way … Traps so that you would conform, dig, so that you would say everything’s all right, baby. Bruno, I think that Lan and jazz, yeah, even jazz, were like advertisements in a magazine, pretty things so that I would stay conformed like you stay because you’ve got Paris and your wife and your work … I got my sax … and my sex, like the good book say. Everything that’s missing. Traps, baby … because it’s impossible there’s nothing else, it can’t be we’re that close to it, that much on the other side of the door …”
“The only thing that counts is to give whatever one has that’s possible,” I say, feeling incredibly stupid.
“And win the poll every year in Down Beat, right,” Johnny agrees. “Sure, baby. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure.”
I’m moving little by little toward the square. With any luck there’ll be a taxi on the corner.
“On top of everything, I don’t buy your God,” murmured Johnny. “Don’t come on to me that way, I won’t put up with it. If it’s really him on the other side of the door, fuck it. There’s no use getting past that door if it’s him on the other side opening it. Kick the goddamn thing in, right? Break the mother down with your fist, come all over the door, piss all day long against the door. Right? That time in New York I think I opened the door with my music, until I had to stop and then the sonofabitch closed it in my face only because I hadn’t prayed to him ever, because I’m never going to pray to him, because I don’t wanna know nothing about that goddamned uniformed doorman, that opener of doors in exchange for a goddamned tip, that …”
Poor Johnny, then he complains that you can’t put these things in a book. Three o’clock in the morning, Jesus Christ.
Tica went back to New York, Johnny went back to New York (without Dédée, now happily settled at Louis Perron’s, a very promising trombonist). Baby Lennox went back to New York. The season in Paris was very dull and I missed my friends. My book on Johnny was selling very well all over, and naturally Sammy Pretzal was already talking about the possibility of an adaptation for Hollywood; when you think of the relation of the franc-rate to the dollar, that’s always an interesting proposition. My wife was still furious over my passage with Baby Lennox, nothing too serious overall finally, Baby is promiscuous in a reasonably marked manner and any intelligent woman would have to understand that things like that don’t compromise the conjugal equilibrium, aside from which, Baby had already gone back to New York with Johnny, she’d decided that she’d enjoy returning on the same boat with Johnny. She’d already be shooting junk with Johnny, and lost like him, poor doll. And Amorous had just been released in Paris, just as the second edition of my book went to press and they were talking about translating it into German. I had thought a great deal about the changes possible in a second edition. To be honest within the limits permitted by the profession, I wondered whether it would not be necessary to show the personality of my subject in another light. I discussed it at different times with Delaunay and with Hodeir, they didn’t really know what to advise me because they thought the book terrific and realized that the public liked it the way it was. It seemed I was being warned that they were both afraid of a literary infection, that I would end up by riddling the work with nuances which would have little or nothing to do with Johnny’s music, at least as all of us understood it. It appeared to me that the opinion of people in authority (and my own personal decision, it would be dumb to negate that at this level of consideration) justified putting the second edition to bed as was. A close reading of the trade magazines from the States (four stories on Johnny, news of a new suicide attempt, this time with tincture of iodine, stomach pump and three weeks in the hospital, working in Baltimore again as though nothing had happened) calmed me sufficiently, aside from the anguish I felt at these ghastly backslidings. Johnny had not said one compromising word about the book. Example (in Stomping Around, a music magazine out of Chicago, Teddy Rogers’ interview with Johnny): “Have you read what Bruno V—– in Paris wrote about you?” “Yes, it’s very good.” “Nothing to say about the book?” “Nothing, except that it’s fine. Bruno’s a great guy.” It remained to be seen what Johnny might say if he were walking around drunk or high, but at least there were no rumors of the slightest contradiction from him. I decided not to touch the second edition, to go on putting Johnny forth as he was at bottom: a poor sonofabitch with barely mediocre intelligence, endowed like so many musicians, so many chess players and poets, with the gift of creating incredible things without the slightest consciousness (at most, the pride of a boxer who knows how strong he is) of the dimensions of his work. Everything convinced me to keep, no matter what, this portrait of Johnny; it wasn’t worth it to create complications with an audience that was crazy about jazz but cared nothing for either musical or psychological analysis, nothing that wasn’t instant satisfaction and clear-cut besides, hands clapping to keep the beat, faces gone beatific and relaxed, the music that was driving through the skin, seeping into the blood and breath, and then finish, to hell with profound motives.
First two telegrams came (one to Delauney, one to me, in the afternoon the newspapers came out with their idiotic comments); twenty days later I had a letter from Baby Lennox, who had not forgotten me. “They treated him wonderfully at Bellevue and I went to fetch him when he got out. We were living in Mike Russolo’s apartment, he’s gone on tour to Norway. Johnny was in very good shape, and even though he didn’t want to play dates, he agreed to record with the boys at Club 28. You I can tell this, really he was pretty weak”—I can imagine what Baby meant by that after our affair in Paris—“and at night he scared me, the way he’d breathe and moan. The only thing that softens it for me,” Baby summed it up beautifully, “is that he died happy and without knowing it was coming. He was watching TV and all of a sudden slumped to the floor. They told me it was instantaneous.” From which one inferred that Baby had not been present, and the assumption was correct because later we found out that Johnny was living at Tica’s place and that he’d been there with her for five days, depressed and preoccupied, talking about quitting jazz, going to live in Mexico and work in the fields (he’d handed that to everybody at some time or other in his life, it’s almost boring), and that Tica was taking care of him and doing everything possible to keep him quiet, making him think of the future (this is what Tica said later, as if she or Johnny had ever had the slightest idea of the future). In the middle of a television program which Johnny was enjoying, he started to cough, all at once he slumped down all of a sudden, etc. I’m not all that sure that death was as instantaneous as Tica declared to the police (Johnny’s death in her apartment had put her in an unusually tight spot she was trying to get out of, pot was always within reach, and probably a stash of heroin somewhere, poor Tica’d had several other bad scenes there, and the not completely convincing results of the autopsy. One can imagine completely what a doctor would find in Johnny’s lungs and liver). “You wouldn’t want to know how painful his death is to me, although I could tell you some other
things,” sweet Baby added gently, “but sometime when I feel better I’ll write you or tell you (it looks like Rogers wants to get me contracts in Paris and Berlin) everything you need to know, you were Johnny’s best friend.” And after a page dedicated to insulting Tica, you’d believe she not only caused Johnny’s death but was responsible for the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Black Plague, poor Baby ended up: “Before I forget, one day in Bellevue he asked after you a lot, he was mixed up and thought you were in New York and didn’t want to come see him, he was talking all the time about fields full of things, and after he was calling for you, even cussing you out, poor baby. You know what a fever’s like. Tica told Bob Carey that Johnny’s last words were something like: ‘Oh, make me a mask,’ but you can imagine how at that moment …” I sure could imagine it. “He’d gotten very fat,” Baby added at the end of her letter, “and panted out of breath when he walked.” These were details you might expect from a person as scrupulous as Baby Lennox.
All this happened at the same time that the second edition of my book was published, but luckily I had time to incorporate an obituary note edited under full steam and inserted, along with a newsphoto of the funeral in which many famous jazzmen were identifiable. In that format the biography remained, so to speak, intact and finished. Perhaps it’s not right that I say this, but naturally I was speaking from a merely aesthetic point of view. They’re already talking of a new translation, into Swedish or Norwegian, I think. My wife is delighted at the news.
SECRET WEAPONS
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