Albert shook his head. I'll never forget that. I was about twenty-two and we were somewhere in the Midwest. I don't remember where exactly, but we'd played Chicago the week before, so probably one of the big college towns like Madison, Wisconsin, or Ann Arbor, Michigan. Milford and I met two fay college chicks at the afterparty and went for a drive, which usually meant that although she didn't want to come back to your hotel room by herself, the woman in question was comfortable messing around with you in her own automobile while your friend and her friend did the same thing in the backseat two feet away. He laughed: nerves. Latif looked bad and Albert wanted to keep him awake. You listening?
Fucking white chicks in the backseat, Teef mumbled.
Right. Except that on this particular occasion one of the young ladies instead pulled out some horse and I watched as first she and then her friend and then Milford proceeded to snort it. It looked no different from cocaine, which I'd tried and hadn't cared for but neither did I have any strong aversion to it, so when it was my turn I followed suit and that was how I started. The next morning Milford and I were up early, calling these chicks back to get more stuff, and it was on from there.
Two weeks later I changed over to needles, and that was when I knew I was in deep, because I'd hated and feared needles my entire life, dreaded my annual physical for days in advance when I was young and always declined to give blood when there were drives at school or elsewhere. In the car Milford said he had done horse before, but when I cornered him later that same night and threw him up against a wall and shouted What the fuck was that, already wanting more, he broke down and admitted he had only said it to seem hip to the girls, whatever that was worth. The fact that he was as scared as I made me forget my anger toward him for fooling me into trying that shit, but a month later it didn't matter anymore because Milford Montague overdosed and died in the back of a nightclub in East St. Louis.
Shit, Latif said, sitting up a little.
Only I knew what had happened, and I kept it to myself. We were roommates and they found his hotel key and called me. I went down there and identified the body, dealt with the paperwork and so forth, but when it came time to inform the band I told them Milford had had a congenital heart problem and that was what had killed him, plain and uncomplicated. I did it for both him and me; I didn't need either one of us associated with dope, alive or dead. The Emperor didn't have any strict prohibitions against anything, but I knew he would have had something to say if he'd found out, and I was already so twisted in my thinking that all I wanted from him was money for my dope. I educated myself frantically about the drug so that it wouldn't happen to me, which should tell you something about how addicted I already was; my homeboy and bandmate dies and rather than thinking about quitting, my mind is on learning to use the shit correctly.
Albert exited the West Side Highway and drove slowly through the Harlem backstreets, left hand on the wheel and right stroking the middle of his upper lip absently. The band was devastated, he said, but we went right on working; couldn't very well cancel our tour. I feel sorry for anybody who came to see us at that time. Nobody much felt like playing or traveling or anything. Which also meant that nobody noticed for a while how messed up I was, that I was always either high or crazy low, and that my playing was getting distracted and flashy; I would lose my focus and then snap back to attention with compensatory theatrics which sometimes worked beautifully and oftentimes did not.
By no means was I the only junkie in the band, as I found out in the coming weeks to my surprise, dismay, and relief. And thus began a whole new phase of my education about the dynamics of the band and of the life, one I wish I never had to go through. The unspoken rule, as I found out, was simply that if you could play your parts and be on time, anything else you did amounted to your business and your problem. He squinted out the window, reading numbers. Latif had given him only the building address; before he could tell Van Horn a cross street, Albert had waved him into silence: I'll find it.
In the course of the next year, though, my problem became the boss's business. Emp called me into his hotel room one night, and sitting on the edge of the bed in a pair of charcoal-gray slacks and an undershirt, he calmly and kindly explained that he could not have me on the road or in the studio in my condition. He said I would always be welcome back when I was ready, advised me to get help, and told me that if there was anything he could do to help me just to ask. I asked him for some money, and he apologized and said he couldn't in good conscience give me any for fear that I would only hurt myself with it.
Albert pulled up in front of Latif's building and double-parked. Thanks, Teef muttered. I'll be right back down. The stench pounced on him when he unlocked his door; flies buzzed the Chinese food container and red drops dotted the floor like he'd been painting. Latif snatched a duffel bag from the closet and stuffed it with fistfuls of clothing: a tangle of pants, shirts, socks, the belt he'd used to tie off. All of it was dirty. The needle lay on the floor; he picked it up with two fingers and dumped it and the rancid number-four lunch plate into a plastic bag, tied it and threw it in the hall and turned his attention to his horn, lying on the bed. He didn't want to bring it, but he knew it was an essential traveling companion if his facade of normality was to be believed by anyone who knew him. With quick, inattentive gruffness he undid the mouthpiece and packed the instrument into its case, then slung the duffelbag over his shoulder and looked out the window. Spliff was nowhere in sight and the rain was coming harder. Latif slammed the door behind him, walked slopebacked down the stairs to Albert's car, and dumped his life into the trunk.
So there I was, Albert went on, sliding the car out of its spot and swinging it downtown toward Port Authority Bus Terminal, broke, jobless, and addicted, stuck in San Francisco. Higgins came over from Oakland to see me. We were still talking about the band we wanted to get together, but nothing was much further from reality right then. Murray was in far better shape than I was, although he had a habit of his own and still does, but then as now Higgins was just so goddamn strong that nothing seemed to jack him up too badly. The only thing I had going for me was the fact that it was not yet common knowledge why I'd really left The Emperor, even in musicians' circles, and thus my services as a sideman were still somewhat in demand.
The Brazil gig, which I almost missed along with the rest of my life on account of shooting some bad dope the previous night at a bar in San Francisco, was when things began to turn around. Marisol had come to see the festival with her parents, and they were staying in the same hotel as we were. I met her in the bar the first night, after the concert. She spoke almost no English. You genius, she told me. The way you play like magic. She was right about that night: After my near-overdose, my body hadn't wanted any heroin at the airport and I'd been straight for a day or so and played my best set in a year—then celebrated by shooting some local shit with Murray in his room.
For that reason alone, I don't remember much of our initial conversation, except the rapt attention Marisol paid to the slurred who-knows-whatness I was talking. She was small, energetic, and very beautiful, with long black hair and calm black eyes, and we stayed at the bar until it closed and then went upstairs to the roofdeck. I was drunk and still high, and Marisol had to lead me up the stairs when I stood from my barstool. We fell asleep together in my room, woke up at four the next afternoon, and kept on hanging. I found her very easy to talk to, even though or perhaps because she spoke so little English. I didn't speak slowly or try too hard to make sure she understood, just rambled on and on and watched her eyes to check out what she thought, caught, and missed.
She didn't miss much, as it turned out, and I held nothing back. By the second night I was crying on her lap, taking off my shirt to show her my track marks, telling her how close to death I'd been only a couple days before and how close I still felt even now.
And Marisol said, Albert, I gonna save your life. I gonna give you help. I swear, the way she said it, I believed her. Her face was set so firm
, as if now that she'd decided it was good as done. I've asked her since then what made her say those things, and she told me that one hundred percent of her mind, body, and soul were in those words, and she knew she was leaving everything behind and coming to America with me. She also told me that both her grandmother and aunt married their husbands within a few days of meeting them and lived happily ever after, and that her mother met her father on a train the day he was leaving Brazil to go to university in France, fell in love with him, and showed up unannounced in Paris three months later with only a name to go on. Needless to say, she found him.
What Marisol told me that day, as I lay sobbing and hugging her knees in my hotel room in Brazil, was that her family was rich and her grandfather had left her part ownership of a leather processing factory he'd founded. And just like that, by the next evening in fact, Marisol cashed her assets and flew us both to Stamford, Connecticut, which is where the best dope rehabilitation center I had ever heard of was supposed to be. That was where I spent the next four months, at a phenomenal financial cost which I no more want to go into than the phenomenal pain which was involved in quitting. And when I got back out and Murray Higgins and I put together the band we'd been discussing for so many years, Marisol remained my savior still, coming on the road with us and keeping me a safe distance from temptation in the form of all the drug dealers who'd come to know me so well.
She hasn't been back to Brazil since then. It was the last thing Albert said until they pulled up outside Port Authority. He shifted into park and rested his left arm on the wheel, and they looked at each other. Raindrops drummed against the Cadillac's old body and a sheet of water glossed the unwiped windshield like a submarine portal. Latif choked back his shame and wondered what to say: I'll beat this, with halfhearted through-the-tears conviction, and Albert would nod back in the same fake reassuring register? Or I'm sorry one last time, and Albert would do what? Tell him absurdly that it was alright? Or Thank you for everything, when everything had come to this?
But it was Albert who spoke. You're gonna feel pain like you ain't yet imagined, he said. But while you're going through it, your mind is gonna clear and you're gonna have a chance to do some thinking. To figure out why—with all the war and hatred in this world, and as righteous-minded as you are—you want to be a musician. How you can devote your life to this. He popped the trunk. You come tell me the answer when you can.
EN ROUTE | CLENCHING | WESSEL GATES
Bonzai Bus Incorporated employed more than fifty drivers on the New York–Boston express route, but it was Eddie who was leaning up against the side of the vehicle when Latif stepped through the terminal door, the same cat who'd been behind the wheel when Teef had redeye-jetted from the Bean.
Eddie was a blues head who defied company policy at the lowest volume possible, the strains of his transistor radio barely audible above the engine sounds. No one could hear it except him and perhaps the person in the seat over his shoulder, usually the last one to be taken. It had been Latif's on the way down to New York, and Eddie had been only too happy to shoot the breeze with someone on the early a.m. run. Their conversation slid easily from music into life, and for the first time Latif had verbalized his plan. Hearing himself say it out loud with the craggy Massachusetts highway cliff slabs out the window made it real, shook loose the stardust crust of fantasy and hardened his resolve.
Eddie gave him the address of a boardinghouse in Harlem and told Latif that in the ten years he'd been driving, so many blankfaced folks had filed on and off his bus, sallow and nonspeaking, that he had started to feel a little like old Charon, the underworld ferrydriver who transported dead Greeks across the river Styx in ancient myths. Eddie hadn't known a thing about music until a year into the job, when the tedium of seeing the same gray highway every day kicked in and his wife bought him a radio to fight it off.
At first Eddie stuck strictly to the news station, but the steady gray monotone recitation of despair and tragedy coupled with the grayness of the road and multiplied the ghoulishness. Then he discovered the blues huddling at the lowrent end of his FM dial, at ninety-point-three and eighty-nine-point-one, significant degrees below normal body temperature. If he was carting a busload of dead souls it didn't matter; he had found a soundtrack for it. He gripped the big bus wheel now with a sense of drama, elbow on the armrest, brow wrinkled, leaning back into the mood and nodding through gutbucket grooves.
So I'm in London last Christmas to see my wife's family, right? said Eddie over his shoulder, bringing the bus back and around and then out onto the road. The way the huge craft cornered amazed Latif; from his perch it never looked like the hulking thing could make the turns it did, but Eddie swung the wheel expertly. I get off the plane and take the tube to Victoria Station to meet her, only I'd gotten confused and given her the wrong flight info and I'm there twelve hours before I told her to meet me. It's late at night and I haven't been over there in years. I don't even have the right change to use the phone cause like an idiot I didn't get my money switched back at the airport and now everything is closed. All I can do is sit outside the station and hope Gloria doublechecks the flight and shows up.
So I'm sitting there, humming a tune to myself, and these two white kids come over and start drinking beers on the corner, right next to where I'm at. They're loud and drunk and I'm just kind of watching them; I guess maybe I was even staring, because I tend to do that. And one of them looks over at me, swings his head around and sort of readjusts his weight to follow his eyeballs. I can't quite make out what he's saying, so I lean forward to hear him and what he's saying is Are you alright. Now, for all I know Are you alright? is British for You got a problem? and he's leaning at me pretty aggressively, or at least I think he is. I decide to play it off like he's genuinely concerned for my well-being, so I raise up and say Yeah, yeah, I'm okay. How you doing?
He comes over and gets up in my face. I'm still not sure if he's on some drunken confrontation shit or some drunken friendly shit, and his expression isn't giving anything away. He's straight deadpan, like he might up and hit me with a beer bottle out of nowhere, plus there's two of them and I got all my stuff with me, Christmas presents and the whole nine yards. I decide I've gotta do something to try to flip the situation, so I say, real tough Hey, I got a question for you. They both look at me kind of curious, like they think maybe I'm gonna kick some kind of one-liner and then take a swing like in the movies. The one kid bobs his head at me like Go ahead, and I say Is there any place a man can get a drink around these parts? real corny, like a cowboy.
That was probably the best thing I could have done, because all of a moment I'm their new American drinking buddy. All the pubs are closed already, which I already knew because it's the one thing I remembered about London from last time, but they tell me they've got a pint of whiskey, and they break it out. So I figure what the hell, and I unwrap the bottle of cognac I bought for my father-in-law at the duty-free shop and spend the rest of the night drinking on the street with these blokes. And the funny thing is, I'm still not sure if I almost got jumped.
Latif smiled. Eddie was a low-maintenance conversationalist; he was a good listener, but left to his own devices he could talk for hours with only an occasional uh-huh or hmm! dabbed in like grout between his words. Latif halflistened as the bus chugged on along the highway, the vibration of the engine underneath him fucking with his tender empty stomach until he closed his eyes and let it lull him into sleep. He dozed on and off and woke up each time feeling worse, sweaty against the fuzzy bus upholstery and itching. He had to take a leak and walked on wobbly sea-legs to the back of the bus, but when he bolted the bathroom door and stood bracing himself against the front wall, cock dangling over the bottomless-looking toilet swishing with blue antiseptic, he couldn't do it. He strained and squeezed the piss muscles and stood there foolishly until finally a weak dribble of yellow urine leaked painful from his dick. Only then did he remeber Sonny Burma emerging from the bathroom at a bar one night wincing and m
uttering smack piss underneath his breath.
Latif walked back up the aisle with his hand inside his pantspocket, holding his smarting organ. The bus just entering Massachusetts: forty-five minutes until they pulled into South Station and from there it was a short subway ride home. Latif hoped he could still find Wessel at his old outdoor woodshed spot, standing on the street just down the block from Giant Liquor Mart providing Saturday night music all week long to sundry passersby. Wessel stood hunchbacked over his horncase in between the sign of the little storefront church, Jesus Saves, and the one that said Food Stamps, not caring—or maybe enjoying—how crazy he looked.
Might as well make some money while I'm practicing, he'd told the Boston Globe, pointing at the forked-open instrument case between his feet, speckled with change. They'd sent a reporter down on what must have been a slow news week to do a human interest story on him: Monday through Friday, Wessel Gates teaches jazz to students at Mercer Sparks High School, and as many as five nights a week he plays tenor saxophone at clubs around the city. But in warm weather, residents of Roxbury can hear Gates for free, or for the price of a small donation, right on the street. As the self-proclaimed town crier, Gates has been playing on the same corner for the past twenty-five years, to the delight of many and the consternation of a few.
Most of those consternated few were just the delighted many on off-days. The storefront church people usually hollered bits of chatter at him: Mmhmm well well well watch it now come on say it mmhm blow that horn now brother, amen, a curious blend of bandstand language and the way folks talk in church. Occasionally they would cuss him out You better git from out front this here building with that racket, and Wess would usually oblige, tip his hat and take a few steps down the block toward the men playing Beat The Champion timed chess on a dirty card table. People joked that Wessel's yearly reemergence on the block was a more reliable proof of spring that any robin redbreast.
Shackling Water Page 18