And it was Winston who introduced me way back then to many of the local circuit's luminaries, cats like Abraham Apollo, Redfoot Keefe, and Deadeye Willie Waterhouse, so called because he'd been an Army sharpshooter in younger days. Cats like Gabrey Masselin and Lucas Price, whose names aren't widely known outside of Pittsburgh but who could burn with some beautiful stuff when they felt like. And it was Winston who took it on himself to sneak me into the concert halls with his backstage musician's privileges when the big touring bands came into town, The Emperor's among them, so I could check out firsthand the stuff I'd only heard on the records I bought and borrowed, records I only played in Mr. Taylor's room and at my girlfriends' houses to avoid The Rev's suspicion.
And Winston was also the one who first asked me did I think I was ready to sit in, and when I said yes he said, I think so too, and offered to take my horn after school and meet me with it later at Small Talk. I realized when I got there that I'd been set up. I walked in with Winston at one A.M. to see a lineup of the city's finest musicians waiting on the stage: Abraham Apollo at the piano, Deadeye Willie Waterhouse behind the drums, and Shelton Langley and Lucas Price respectively on tenor sax and trumpet. Winston swung his bass onstage and said, When I asked if you were ready, I meant are you really ready, drawing laughter not only from the band but from the two dozen other musicians and scene-regulars sitting at the tables with their drinks and cigarettes in hand. I got onstage and Winston clapped me on the back, saying And I think you are, so here we go. Let's see how big your ears are, and they proceeded to tear into one hell of a burner.
What I did was keep up. Not just keep up but do what martial artists do and respond to the attack, as it were, by redirecting the attackers' energy back at them. They gave me speed and I gave speed back double time. Winston dragged on purpose but I paid no nevermind. Willie turned the tune around three times and I kept with it, so finally he just dropped out on me. But man, I'd been watching him play every week for two years by then and I could feel it coming from the way he started building up momentum on the crash and ride cymbals. I knew he would grab a hold of them all of a moment and leave me wailing without anything behind because the rest of them would cut out too when he did so.
I finished my phrase and just as he cut out, I cut out too. It sounded like we'd planned it. I turned and winked at him and Winston said Whoo, show us what you got Al baby, and they all grinned and I started back where I'd left off, bright orange and fast as hell, and Willie came back in and so did Lucas and Shelly and we brought it to the out chorus.
We played five more tunes and I managed to make it through all the tricks and turns they threw at me and play a little something too while I was at it. My socks were squishing in my shoes by the end: That's how hard they worked me. I traded speed and power with Shelly four for four and eight for eight, but I wasn't so much thinking about cutting his head as I was just soaring on my own. I think the happiness I felt just being up there served me well, because I came off like a noncombatant not out of timidity or confusion but rather like somebody who was beyond that kind of thing. Like you the other night. Latif's smile looked more like a grimace.
After that I never came without my horn, said Albert and out of tradition and also as a running joke those guys never let up on me for a moment. Everyone would shout out School's in session! whenever I stepped in to take my turn.
Van Horn chuckled. So you see, what I put you through was downright friendly next to the way I had to cut my teeth trying to cut those dots. Though I did lay a little headgame on you off the bat.
Mmm-hmm, Latif confirmed with overblown churchy conviction, making Albert laugh.
Never underestimate the value of high stakes, said Albert. The reason I came in that night with Winston and blew like that was because in my mind those sessions were not just about proving myself or even getting next to somebody. My goal was a lot more real: to get the fuck out of Pittsburgh on the next thing with an engine, motor, or turbine. I would have stowed away on a carrier pigeon if I'd had to.
And as it turned out, all that was preparation for the night a year later when The Emperor's Big Band came to town in need of a tenor man to replace Alvin Reece on the next leg of their tour, from Pittsburgh to Wheeling and then over to Virginia and down through Chattanooga, Knoxville, and Memphis, more than thirty dates in all. Reece's wife was sick and he'd had to go back home to New Orleans suddenly, so what was needed was at least a stopgap fill-in and at most an indefinite replacement. Someone in town, and I was not surprised to find out later on that it was Deadeye Willie Waterhouse suggested that The Emperor take a listen at me, and lo and behold into Small Talk walked the man himself.
I didn't see him until after we finished the set, and no sooner had Winston introduced us than Emp said I like what I hear, young man. I was told to listen for you and I am not disappointed. You playing a lot of horn up there. We had just closed with two of his compositions, Monarch's March and Alchemy, and Emp asked me how much of his songbook I was familiar with. I told him I knew practically everything he'd put out on a record in the past ten years and that I'd transcribed several of his piano solos and a few of Alvin Reece's parts as well. I was hoping you would say something like that, he said. Tell me, how would you like to come on the road with me for the next few weeks and maybe longer, depending on how things work out?
There's nothing I'd like better in the world, I said. Shoot, I'd leave right now with just the clothes on my back if I had to.
It wasn't until Tennessee that The Emperor finally got around to asking me my age. I was pretty tall and acted older than I was on account of keeping so much older company—like somebody else we know—so naturally it threw him and everybody for a loop when they found out. We were sitting together on the bus, and when I told him he thought I was kidding. After I convinced him that I wasn't he stood up and said Attention, attention, loud enough to wake the cats sleeping in back it is my pleasure to introduce to you the eighth wonder of the world. Get ready to feel like old men when I tell you reprobates that our new tenorman here, Mr. Albert Van Horn, is all of seventeen years old, out here on the open road and fitting right in with the greatest band in the world like he was born to do it.
I got a full round of applause and also the nickname True, as in truant, due to the joking speculation that I had skipped out on my final months of high school to join them on the road. Everybody had already known I was a neophyte and taken special pains to school me on everything from the history of the places we were passing through to how The Emperor ran the band and general aspects of life on the road, including and particularly women, but when those cats found out how young I was they began to take even more seriously the responsibility to bring me up to speed and fast.
The way they took care of me was really something. I was barely making any bread back then, and after drycleaning my bandstand suit and sending Ms. McKinney her weekly payment, I could barely afford better than hot dogs. I'll never forget how wonderful guys like my roommate Milford Montague and our drummer Doxie Tillerman were to me. They'd invite me out to dinner with them, knowing I didn't have the scratch to go where they were going and taking care of me instead. The band was like a family; some cats might be your brothers and your uncles and others more like second cousins, but still in all you were related.
Albert crossed his arms over his chest. I still worry whether I'll ever be able to teach anybody as much as those cats taught me.
Well, Latif said you can try. I need everything you got to give, and fast.
What you need is patience, said Albert. Take it easy, greazy. You can't always be getting better. He studied Latif. All you young cats nod your heads, Van Horn said gravely, but none of you hear me. That's alright, though. You'll learn when you have to.
FLATNESS | SCRAPING | SNAKES
The doorbell rang for the first time at twelve and for the last by quarter past. This session was bigger than Latif's first: half a dozen horns and three cats each on bass drums and piano, rotating so that
each of the nine possible rhythm permutations got some run. Latif kept to his kitchen table seat as everybody ate and mingled. He chatted a little bit but not much; what could he say to these cats? Most of them diddy-bopped around the city and the country and the planet, dipping in and out of bands and hooking each other with gigs. They spoke in first names only, telling stories about Don and Tony while Latif wondered Moye, Pullen? Williams, Hart? and couldn't ask. Half of them, as he'd thought, had met Albert during master classes at Manhattan School or Berklee College of Music in Boston, where Latif had considered applying for about four minutes, until he told Wess and Wess said That's great if you want to sound like a Berklee cat. Berklee cats worked, though.
Latif sat out the first tune like a surfer straddling his board, watching small unridable waves roll underneath him. The only soloist who got his shit off was the trumpet player, a stocky untall cat—what trumpet player wasn't?—with rings on seven fingers which threw light across the room when he fingered his pedals. Latif watched the band thump through the tune and noticed Albert wasn't even in the room and got to thinking: Maybe playing with the Van Horn Quartet had ruined him for other musicians. Having Murray and Amir and Sonny behind him and Albert watching like a patron saint was very different from—he stopped, knowing he was bullshitting himself.
He'd blamed everyone and everything for what had happened here last week. Decided he was just burned out like every other New Yorker and taken Tuesday off and slept for fifteen hours, woken up and played like a doddering old man whose stories piddled into mumbling senility. Cursed the New York Police Department and Spliff and Tristan and went to dinner Thursday night with Mona before work and sat in an Upper West Side cafe chewing morosely on French bread and animosity. I'm not playing, he said, mouth moving dead around the words. It was a disclaimer, Mona realized a few minutes later. I'm not playing meant I'm not responsible for my actions; I'm about to start being an asshole. His tone became acidic and his manner harsh; he answered her as if she'd interrupted matters of portent with stupid questions. Like all of this was her fault.
This is how it ends up, she thought. They get a little close to you and before long you're the only person near enough to hurt. And here she was letting him, becoming Mona at fourteen again, locked into a mode where shit was all there was and taking it was all you did and it was bad but you got good at it and that was life. Mona hadn't had the chance to walk out back then—walk out into what? They just followed you, yelling.
This is one hell of a solo you're playing on me, Mona almost said as they sat cutting and stabbing at their meals, eyes on their plates. She wondered just what it would take for her to leave, what nasty word or insolent expression would make her calves tense instinctual and slide the chair back.
Latif sipped his water and wondered whether he should say some of the things he felt, flip Mona's whole sharing-giving-knowing shit around and tell her that at this moment, he felt for her the same thing he did for Dutchman's and his horn: an inextricable connection so great that it was indistinct. It might have been love, hate, or need; he couldn't tell.
He'd stared at the painting for hours that day and thought about The Picture of Dorian Gray, a book Wess had given him the summer after high school in which the portrait of a man absorbs his sins and leaves his body unspoiled by age or sin. Mona's picture only bounced his maladies back at him, and the longer Latif looked, the more wrong colors and ideas he noticed and the angrier he got. Below Mona's presumptuous blind-guess artlessness was his own, and it glared at him until Latif didn't know whether Mona had been desperate and crazy or just cruel to paint his dream. He'd stood up and stepped into his pants and cinched the belt one-handed, already late to meet her and unhurried. He moved to hit the lightswitch and then changed his mind. Latif wanted the painting to be waiting for him when he got back.
He thought of it now and peered into his hornbell, looking for snakes as the rhythm section switched up, snare rattling with everybody's movement over the wood floor. No snakes. He would've settled for a fangful of venom just to feel something, but the horn was hollow as a cave. The new musicians settled in and the horn line made room for him. The tune was a fast blues and when his turn to play came Latif was still thinking of snakes and the time Mona had asked him if he ever felt out of control, deciding that if he lived through this session he'd call her and say Yes, I'm out of control now; I don't want to treat you this way but I can't stop myself.
The drummer was playing fast and light; he was the type of cat who hadn't realized yet that there was more to the trap set than the snare, hi-hat and bass drum, that the toms and floor toms and the crash and sock cymbals could be used for more than just effect. Instead, he'd mastered one corner of the kit and was content to play it with great intricacy.
Latif came in fast, after a marchingband snare fill, and immediately found himself ensnarled in his own bullshit. What made it worse was that it was the kind of bullshit that covered for itself, that fooled nonplayers and even some musicians for a minute because it was frenetic, nimble: nutritionless ear candy. Latif was making no decisions, playing every note, filling up whitespace like a blabbering idiot. He rocketed through the air executing meaningless tricks and felt that everything he knew, all the speed and style he'd picked up, was useless. So what if he knew how to fly the plane; he had no bomb to drop. He could play these flashy lines forever and feel nothing. He might as well be lying on the couch watching TV and eating frozen pizza.
Van Horn beckoned him into the kitchen when the tune was over and sealed the doorway with his frame. Number one, he said, pep-talky you know you're bullshitting. Nobody has to tell you that, and that's good. All it takes for a lotta cats to convince themselves otherwise is some handclapping or a nice write-up. You're too honest for that.
Latif leaned against the wall and hung his thumbs from his belt. Great, he said.
Listen. Writers get writer's block, ballplayers slump, dancers sprain their ankles. The important thing is not to panic. The same old stuff that got you here will get you out. You wouldn't be here in the first place if it wasn't some damn fine stuff from the beginning.
I feel like everything I know is trickling out of me, Latif said, grimacing. I swear, if there was anything that would kickstart me even a little bit I'd take it, even if it killed me.
Don't joke about that, Van Horn snapped.
Latif sighed. He knew he sounded immature, alarmist, willfully ignorant, but something self-destructive in him pushed relentlessly ahead. He felt the way he sometimes did after a quick couple of drinks, when a slight buzz demanded loudly to be reinforced and he drank with determination. After a third drink the feeling always faded and drinking bored him, but for that raging half-hour, Latif plunged toward obliteration with intensity. Wess told me once about this French poet who just stopped writing at nineteen, he said. Just disappeared into the countryside and never wrote again. That's what I feel like doing. I don't know if I have anything to say anymore, much less how to say it. I pick up my horn, Albert, and I feel like I'm sign-languaging a poem with my hands all burnt and bandaged up in gauze.
It's not that you can't play, said Albert. His voice was soft and funeral serious. He pressed his hands together in a prayer position and pointed his fingertips at Latif. And it's not that you have nothing to say. It's that you won't say it. What are you afraid of? What's so ugly that you can't play it?
Latif had no answer. He was dying to play; how could Albert not see that? What are you afraid of? Was Albert calling him a coward, even as Latif paced back and forth in his own cavernous head and wondered what mortal sacrifices he could make to get this music back?
He mumbled an I-need-to-think goodbye and Van Horn nodded and Latif walked out the house and toward the water wondering what people did, people in general who didn't play music or write or paint or draw or dance, or have religion. How did stockbrokers and bartenders reckon with the world; how did men decide to start families? Was it the same love that made a man get married as made him blow a horn
or pluck a bass? Did the raw desire to create, the only force in Latif's life he'd never doubted would guide him forever, did that certainty manifest in some men as love for another person, a woman? A son?
Latif couldn't imagine knowing that he wanted to be with someone for life, bound to her, the love between them superseding what he felt or used to feel when he picked up his horn and blew his soul. He had been a son, he had seen husbands and wives. His own father had not been so bound to either wife or son that he hadn't moved on in course of time. His own love for his mother hadn't filled him; he'd been hollow until he found this music and what was love anyway without a vent hole, a way to proclaim it, sing it, celebrate it, and interrogate it? Latif tried to imagine being happy, so happy that he didn't need to testify to it, and could not. Nor could he envision a despair so deep that proclaiming it, beating it out of the underbrush with drums and shouting, would be impossible. Nothing scared him that much. Only the thought of being without drums and shouting.
He reached the water and the sun was setting. Plastic baby carriage wheels clicked across the stone pathway behind him and Latif rested his elbows on the railing and stared. Everything around him whispered with music and he felt suddenly like an abomination, a mistake of nature, horribly deformed and staggering with crooked legs and twisted eyes through the wholenumber harmony of life. The water rippled evenly, a plush-plush walking bassline rising and ebbing along its own axes of movement. The trees swayed and stood when and where they should, and Latif bent over the iron fence wanting to vomit up his lungs as an apology, a penance for falling out of synchronization with the world.
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