Someone plays a Monk record in Paris in the middle of the night many years ago and the scratchy music seeping through ancient boardinghouse walls a kind of silent ground upon which the figure of pitter-pattering rain displays itself, rain in the city, rain Verlaine claimed he could hear echoing in his heart, then background and foreground reverse and Monk the only sound reaching me through night's quiet.
Listening to Monk, I closed the book. Let the star-crossed poets rest in peace. Gave up on sleep. Decided to devote some quality time to feeling sorry for myself. Imagining unhappy ghosts, wondering which sad stories had trailed me across the ocean ready to barge into the space that sleep definitely had no intention of filling. Then you arrived. Silently at first. You playing so faintly in the background it would have taken the surprise of someone whispering your name in my ear to alert me to your presence. But your name once heard, background and foreground switch. I'd have to confess you'd been there all along.
In a way it could end there, in a place as close to silence as silence gets, the moment before silence becomes what it must be next, what's been there the whole time patiently waiting, part of the silence, what makes silence speak always, even when you can't hear it. End with me wanting to tell you everything about Monk, how strange and fitting his piano solo sounded in that foreign place, but you not there to tell it to, so it could/did end, except then as now you lurk in the silence. I can't pretend not to hear you. So I pretend you hear me telling what I need to tell, pretend silence is you listening, your presence confirmed word by word, the ones I say, the unspoken ones I see your lips form, that form you.
Two years before Monk's death, eight years into what the critic and record producer Orrin Keepnews characterized as Monk's "final retreat into total inactivity and seclusion," the following phone conversation between Monk and Keepnews occurred:
Thelonious, are you touching the piano at all these days?
No, I'm not.
Do you want to get back to playing?
No, I don't.
I'm only in town for a few days. Would you like to come and visit, to talk about the old days?
No, I wouldn't.
Silence one of Monk's languages, everything he says laced with it. Silence a thick brogue anybody hears when Monk speaks the other tongues he's mastered. It marks Monk as being from somewhere other than wherever he happens to be, his offbeat accent, the odd way he puts something different in what we expect him to say. An extra something not supposed to be there, or an empty space where something usually is. Like all there is to say but you don't say after you learn in a casual conversation that someone precious is dead you've just been thinking you must get around to calling one day soon and never thought a day might come when you couldn't.
I heard a story from a friend who heard it from Panama Red, a conk-haired, redbone, geechee old-timer who played with Satchmo way back when and he's still on the scene, people say, sounding better and better the older he gets, Panama Red who frequented the deli on Fifty-seventh Street Monk used for kosher.
One morning numerous years ago—story time always approximate, running precisely by grace of the benefit of the doubt—Red said, How you doing, Monk.
Uh-huh, Monk grunts.
Good morning, Mr. Monk. How you do-ink this fine morning, Sammy the butcher calls over his shoulder, busy with a takeout order or whatever it is that keeps his back turned.
If a slice of dead lunch meat spoke, it would be no surprise at all to Sammy compared to how high he'd jump, how many fingers he'd lose in the sheer if the bearish, bearded schwartze in a knitted kufi returned his Good morning.
Monk stares at the white man in white apron and white T-shirt behind the white deli counter. At himself in the mirror where the man saw him. At the thin, perfect sheets that buckle off the cold slab of corned beef.
Red holds his just-purchased, neat little white package in his hand and wants to get home and fix him a chopped liver and onion sandwich and have it washed down good with a cold Heineken before his first pupil of the afternoon buzzes, so he's on his way out when he hears Sammy say, Be with you in a moment, Mr. Monk.
Leave that mess you're messing wit alone, nigger, and get me some potato knishes, the story goes, and Panama Red cracking up behind Monk's habit of niggering white black brown red Jew Muslim Christian, the only distinction of color mattering the ivory or ebony keys of his instrument and Thelonious subject to fuck with that difference too, chasing rainbows.
Heard the story on the grapevine, once, twice, and tried to retell it and couldn't get it right and thought about the bird—do you remember it—coo-cooing outside the window just as we both were waking up. In the silence after the bird's song I said Wasn't that a dainty dish to set before the king and you said Don't forget the queen and I said Queen doesn't rhyme with sing and you said It wasn't a blackbird singing outside and I said I thought it was a mourning dove and then the bird started up again trying to repeat itself, trying, trying, but never quite getting it right it seemed. So it tried and tried again as if it had fallen in love with the sound it had heard itself coo once perfectly.
Il pleut dans la ville. Rain in the city. When the rain starts to falling I my love comes tumbling down / and it's raining teardrops in my heart. Rain a dream lots of people are sharing and shyly Monk thinks of how it might feel to climb in naked with everybody under the covers running through green grass in a soft summer shower. Then it's windshield wipers whipping back and forth. Quick glimpses of the invisible city splashing like eggs broken against the glass. I'm speeding along, let's say the West Side Highway, a storm on top, around, and under. It feels like being trapped in one of those automatic car washes doing its best to bust your windows and doors, rapping your metal skin like drumsticks. I'm driving blind and crazed as everybody else down a flooded highway no one with good sense would be out on on a night like this. Then I hit a swatch of absolute quiet under an overpass and for a split second anything is possible. I remember it has happened before, this leap over the edge into vast, unexpected silence, happened before and probably will again if I survive the furious storm, the traffic and tumult waiting to punish me instantly on the far side of the underpass. In that silence that's gone before it gets here good I recalled exactly another time, driving at night with you through a rainstorm. Still in love with you though I hadn't been with you for years, ten, fifteen, till that night of dog-and-cat rain on an expressway circling the city after our eyes had met in a crowded room. You driving, me navigating, searching for a sign to Wood-side you warned me would come up all the sudden. There it is. There it is. You shouted. Shit. I missed it. We can get off the next exit, I said. But you said no. Said you didn't know the way. Didn't want to get lost in the scary storm in a scary neighborhood. I missed the turn for your apartment and you said, It's late anyway. Too late to go back and you'd get hopelessly lost coming off the next exit, so we continued downtown to my hotel where you dropped me after a good-night, goodbye-again peck on the cheek. Monk on the radio with a whole orchestra rooty-tooty at town hall, as we raced away from the sign I didn't see till we passed it. Monk's music breaking the silence after we missed our turn, after we hollered to hear each other over the rain, after we flew over the edge and the roof popped off and the sides split and for a moment we were suspended in a soundless bubble where invisible roads crisscrossed going nowhere, anywhere. Airborne, the tires aquaplaning, all four hooves of a galloping horse simultaneously in the air just like Muybridge, your favorite photographer, claimed, but nobody believed the nigger, did they, till he caught it on film.
Picture five or six musicians sitting around Rudy Van Gelder's living room, which is serving as a recording studio this afternoon. Keepnews is paying for the musicians' time, for Van Gelder's know-how and equipment, and everybody ready to record but Monk. Monk's had the charts a week and Keepnews knows he's studied them from comments Monk muttered while the others were sauntering in for the session. But Monk is Monk. He keeps fiddle-faddling with a simple tune, da, da, da, da, plun
ks the notes, stares into thin air as if he's studying a house of cards he's constructed there, waiting for it to fall apart. Maybe the stare's not long in terms of minutes (unless you're Keepnews, paying the bill) but long enough for the other musicians to be annoyed. Kenny Clark, the drummer, picks up the Sunday funnies from a coffee table. Monk changes pace, backpedals midphrase, turns the notes into a signifying riff.
K.C., you know you can't read. You drum-drum dummy. Don't be cutting your eyes at me. Ima ABC this tune to death, Mister Kenny Clark. Take my time wit it. Uh-huh. One-and-two and one-and-two it to death, K.C. Don't care if your eyes light up and your stomach says howdy. One anna two anna one anna we don't start till I say start. Till I go over it again. Pick it clean. All the red boogers of meat off the bone then belch and fart and suck little strings I missed out my teefs and chew them last, salty, sweet gristle bits till the cows come home, and then, maybe then it might be time to start so stop bugging me with your bubble eyes like you think you got somewhere better to go.
Once I asked Monk what is this thing called love. Bebop, hip-hop, whatever's good till the last drop and you never get enough of it even when you get as much as you can handle, more than you can handle, he said, just as you'd expect from somebody who's been around such things and appreciates them connoisseurly but also with a passionate innocence so it's always the first time, the only time love's ever happened and Monk can't help but grunt uh-huh, uh-huh while he's playing even though he's been loved before and it ain't no big thing, just the only thing, the music, love, lifting me.
Monk says he thinks of narrow pantherish hips, the goateed gate to heaven, and stately, stately he slides the silky drawers down, pulls them over her steepled knees, her purple-painted toes. Tosses the panties high behind his back without looking because he knows Pippen's where he's supposed to be, trailing the play, sniffing the alley-oop dish, already slamming it through the hoop so Monk can devote full attention to sliding both his large, buoyant hands up under the curve of her buttocks. A beard down there trimmed neat as Monk trims his.
Trim, one of love's names. Poontang. Leg. Nooky. Cock.
Next chorus also about love. Not so much a matter of mourning a lost love as it is wondering how and when love will happen next or if love will ever happen again because in this vale of Vaseline and tears, whatever is given is also taken away. Love opens in the exact space of wondering what my chances are and figuring the hopeless odds against love. Then, biff, bam. Just when you least expect it, Monk says. Having known love before, I'm both a lucky one, ahead of the game, and also scared to death by memories of how sweet it is, how sad something that takes only a small bit of anybody's time can't be found more copiously, falling as spring rain or sunlight these simple things remind me of you and still do do do when Monk scatters notes like he's barefoot feeding chickenfeed to chickens or bleeding drop by drop precious Lord in the snow.
I believe when we're born each of us receives an invisible ladder we're meant to climb. We commence slowly, little baby shaky steps. Then bolder steps as we get the hang of it. Learn our powers, learn the curious construction of these ladders leaning on air, how the rungs are placed irregularly, almost as if they customize themselves to our stepping sometimes, so when we need them they're there or seem to be there solid under our feet because we're steady climbing and everybody around us steady climbing till it seems these invisible ladders, measure by measure, are music we perform as easily as breathing. Playing our song, we smile shyly, uneasily, the few times we remember how high and wide we've propelled ourselves into thin air step by step on rungs we never see disappearing behind us. And you can guess the rest of that tune, Monk says.
You place your foot as you always do, do, do, one in front of the other, then risk as you always do, do, do your weight on it so the other foot can catch up. Instead of dance music you hear a silent wind in your ears, blood pounding your temples, you're inside a house swept up in a tornado and it's about to pop, you're about to come tumbling down.
When your love starts to falling. Don't blame the missing rung. The ladder's still there. A bridge of sighs, of notes hanging in the air. A quicksilver run down the piano keys, each rib real as it's touched, then gone, wiped clean as Monk's hand flies glissando in the other direction.
One night in Paris trying to read myself to sleep, I heard the silence of rain. You might call silence a caesura, a break in a line of verse, the line pausing naturally to breathe, right on time, on a dime. But always a chance the line will never finish because the pause that refreshes can also swallow everything to the right and left of it.
Smoke curls from a gun barrel. The old poet, dissed by his young lover, shoots him, is on his way to jail. Rimbaud recovers from the wound, heads south toward long, long silence. Standing on a steamer's deck, baseball cap backward on his head, elbows on the rail, baggy pants drooping past the crack of his ass, Rimbaud sees the sea blistered by many dreamers like himself who leap off ships when no one's looking, as if the arc of their falling will never end, as if the fall can't be real because nobody sees it or hears it, as if they might return to their beginnings and receive another chance, as if the fall will heal them, a hot torch welding shut the black hole, the mouth from which silence issues thick as smoke from necklaces of burning tires.
Monk speaks many languages. The same sound may have different meanings in different languages. (To say = tu sais = you know.) And the same sound may also produce different silences. To say nothing is not necessarily to know nothing. The same letters can represent different sounds. Or different letters equal the same sound (pane, pain, payne). In different languages or the same. A lovers' quarrel in the rain at the train station. The budding poet seals his lips evermore. The older man trims his words to sonnets, willed silence caging sound. Their quarrel echoes over and over again, what was said and not said and unsaid returns. The heart (ancient liar/lyre) hunched on its chair watching silent reruns, lip-synching new words to old songs.
Monk's through playing and everybody in the joint happy as a congregation of seals full of fish. He sits on the piano bench, hulking, mute, his legs chopped off at the knees like a Tutsi's by his fellow countrymen, listening in the dark to their hands coming together, making no sound. Sits till kingdom come, a giant sponge or ink blotter soaking up first all the light, then the air, then sucking all sound from the darkness, from the stage, the auditorium. The entire glittering city shuts down. Everything caves in, free at last in this bone-dry house.
Silence. Monk's. Mine. Yours. I haven't delved into mine very deeply yet, have I, avoid my silence like a plague, even though the disease I'm hiding from already rampant in my blood, bones, the air.
Where are you? How far to your apartment from the Wood-side exit? What color are your eyes? Is your hair long or short? I know your father's gone. I met a taxi driver who happened to be from your home town, a friendly, talkative brother about your father's age, so I asked him if he knew your dad, figuring there would have been a colored part of your town and everybody would sort of know everybody else the way they used to in the places where people like our parents were raised. Yeah, oh yeah. Course I knew Henry Diggs, he said. Said he'd grown up knowing your dad and matter of fact had spoken with him in the American Legion Club not too long before he heard your father had died. Whatever took your father, it took him fast, the man said. Seemed fine at the club. Little thin maybe but Henry always been a neat, trim-looking fellow and the next thing I heard he was gone. Had that conversation with a cabdriver about five years ago and the way he talked about your dad I could picture him neat and trim and straight-backed, clear-eyed. Then I realized the picture out-of-date. Twenty years since I'd seen your father last and I hadn't thought much about him since. Picture wasn't actually a picture anyway. When I say picture I guess I mean the taxi driver's words made your father real again by shaking up the silence. Confirmed something about your dad. About me. The first time I met your father and shook his hand, I noticed your color, your cheekbones in his face. That's what I'
d look for in his different face if someone pointed out an old man and whispered your father's name. You singing in his silent features.
Picturing you also seems to work till I try to really see the picture. Make it stand still, frame it. View it. Then it's not a picture. It's a wish. A yearning. Many images layered one atop the other, passing through one another, each one so fragile it begins to fade, to dance, give way to the next before I can fix you in my mind. No matter how gently I lift the veil, your face comes away with it...
James Brown the hardest worker in show biz, drops down on one knee. Please. Please. Please. Don't go. A spotlight fixes the singer on a darkened stage. You see every blister of sweat on his glistening skin, each teardrop like a bedbug crawling down the black satin pillowcase of his cheeks. Please. Please. Please. But nobody answers. Cause nobody's home. She took his love and gone. J.B. dies a little bit onstage. Then more and more. His spangled cape shimmers where he tossed it, a bright pool at the edge of the stage where someone he loves dived in and never came up.
God's Gym Page 5