“Coolidge,” I said, and took off my fedora to bow to her all charming, the way women like when you first meet them. “Robbie Coo lidge.” I stepped into the room, and could hear the music clearly: it was Nat King Cole, “Stardust.” Her can-can outfit was draped over the makeup mirror with the light bulbs all around it, huge peacock feathers sticking up above our heads, and I could smell mentholated smoke in the air.
“I am called Monique,” she said. No last name then, just Monique. Then she asked, “You would like some coffee?”
“Mmm, yeah, coffee sounds good.”
She excused herself for a minute, and when she came back, she had two cups of coffee in her hands.
“You ’ave cigarette?” she asked.
I nodded. “Got a whole pack,” I said, and I fished it out of my coat pocket and set it on the table with a pack of matches on top. They were Mercury Barron’s Ultras, the new kind that were supposed to make you live longer if you smoked three a day. “Want one?”
“Non,” she said, and smiled. “Maybe later.”
The coffee was fine, really good French coffee, steaming. Even the goddamn steam smelled good. I held the cup and breathed deep and looked at her sipping from her own cup.
“So where you from?” I asked, and she stared at me for a few minutes. She rubbed an eyelid, and a little of the makeup smudged.
“I don’t t’ink you really care, do you?” she asked, and sipped her coffee.
“Sure, girl, I care,” I lied, and she leaned forward, and blurred herself, and a million breathy whispers of gay Pa-ree tickled in my ear.
That ended up being the night the ship took off for Mars, though Monique and I were too busy to notice. We only found out later, when one of the guys in the band ended up wandering into the lobby and noticing the stars were moving, nice and slow, but still moving.
It was a couple of weeks before Monique was in the habit of coming up and listening to the band play, and some of the guys didn’t like it. That was when some of the cats in the band were starting to act all high-and-mighty, turning into what my father used to call “political negroes,” and taking it upon themselves to tell everyone else how a black man oughtta live.
What made me real sad was that J.J. had fallen in with that pack of nuts. He used to be real nice, real cool and thoughtful. He’d always been a soulful kind of cat, but when he was with them space-Muslim gum-flappers, talking all that nonsense about how the black man was supposed to colonize the solar system for Allah’s glory and to show the dev il white man and all that, I couldn’t stand to be around him. I hated it when he talked that bullshit.
So this one day, between sets, I’m sitting there at one of the tables with Monique and having a nice time. She’s drinking wine and I’m having a cigarette and we’re talking, and J.J. comes up with this look on his face. I knew it was trouble, that look, and I stood up before he got close, and said, “J.J., I already got one daddy, and he’s in Philly, so I don’t need you to . . .”
“Robbie, goddamn it, you listen to me,” he said, and glanced at Monique as if she might leave if he glanced at her the right way.
“Who is ’e?” she asked, standing up.
“Sit down, Monique,” I said firmly, and she instantly got that look on her face. You know the look: the one women get when you tell them what to do for their own good.
“Robbie, something’s going on round here! We gotta cut out, brother! Them Frogs, they been in my room, man! They put something inside my stomach. Like a worm. No, a woman. Yeah, a woman worm! She been crawling inside my stomach, screamin’, like, ‘J.J.! J.J.! Gimme some ice cream!’ Help me, Robbie! I’m fuckin’ dying here, man!” he screamed and blurred before my eyes, all his voices screaming at me at once. Poor cat was scared shitless, and he scared the shit out of me, too.
I pushed Monique off to the side and blurred myself, and each of me reached out to one of them blurs of J.J.
“J.J.,” each of me said, all together. “Listen, J.J., you sick or something, man. You need to cool it. Cool it right now.”
He screamed louder, each of him started to shake, and his blurred selves started moving farther and farther apart. I didn’t want him to pull me apart like that too, so I quickly unblurred myself, relaxed back into one, and stepped back from him.
A couple of big old bad-assed Frog bouncers smeared themselves out into an army, and rushed around the room in pairs, grabbing all his blurred selves and hauling them, every last one of J.J.’s selves screaming at the top of its lungs, out one of the exits of the room.
The room went tense and quiet, and many eyes, Frog and human alike, were on me and Monique. Whispering started, and I caught Big C’s eye. Set-break’s over, his look said. Back on the goddamn bandstand. Now.
So I tried to kiss Monique on the cheek—she pulled away a little, but I still got her for a second—and hurried back up with my tenor in hand.
“Apologies, everyone!” Big C said into the microphone with a big fake smile on his face. “Show must go on, like they say. Luckily for us, we got a Mphmnngi in the house who’s proficient at bass.” Mphmnngi, that was what the Frogs called themselves. Then Big C started saying some bizarre sounds, and I thought he was going crazy too, until some stank old Frog in a tight black suit stood up and bowed his big old froggy head at Big C. Then I realized those weird-assed sounds were this Frog’s name.
“Come on up and join us!” Big C said, and the Frog came up on stage, picked up J.J.’s bass with his three-tentacled hands, and strummed the strings to check the tuning.
“Goddamn shame,” said Winslow Jackson, the alto player who sat beside me on the bandstand. He and Big C were almost the only guys who had toured before. “Seen too many many guys end up like that.”
“How’s that?” I asked, wondering if maybe some of outer space had got into the ship, and fucked with J.J.’s head.
“Must’ve forgot to take his pills,” Jackson said, shaking his head. “It’s a damn shame.”
Not taking your pills for one day would make you go crazy like that? I ain’t never heard of no drug like that, and to this day I’m not so sure it was the pills at all. What if I had took my pills every day and ended up the same as him anyway? Poor J.J. I didn’t know whether I’d ever see him again, but I didn’t have any time to worry about that: Big C was talking to the crowd again, and I had to get ready to play.
“Before we dig into the music, I’d like to share some important news with you! We have arrived at Mars orbit!” Big C hollered into the mike, and behind him, a big piece of wall just suddenly went transparent. Everyone turned to look at the red planet out there, except Big C, who kept talking about how exciting it was to be playing at Mars again, how much he enjoyed it every time.
Mars. We were at Mars. That shit blew my mind.
“And now, we have another special guest who’s going to join us,” Big C said into the microphone.
A short, weird-assed looking Frog got up, a long black bassoon under his arm, and started walking toward us. He was wearing a fine brown suit, tight as a motherfucker, and a brown fedora hat that matched his fern-colored Frog skin. He waved his little tail behind him as he went up to the stage.
“Everyone please welcome Heavy Gills Mmmhmhnngn,” Big C said. The names were starting to be more and more pronounceable to me, a fact I didn’t exactly appreciate.
Big C turned from the microphone and faced us, snapping his fingers on two and four, and loudly whispered, “Stardust.” We all got our horns ready, and he nodded and the rhythm section started us off with a mild blur. We usually played it as a tenor lead tune, meaning it was usually my solo, but of course, when you have a guest feature sitting in, the melody gets played by the guest, so I just improvised harmonies with the other saxes.
The bassoon was awful, like a dog being beat down by a drunk master. It wasn’t music. Ain’t no other way to say it. He played the whole time blurred up so bad that not a damn thing fit together. The tunes didn’t line up right, there was no fugue or harmo
ny or counterpoint that I could find. It was just like a bunch of jumbles laid up on top of one another. I swear, I got dizzy just hearing it. He ended the tune by playing a high E and a high F-natural and a high D-sharp all together, this ugly dissonant sustained cluster that went all through the outro and kept going for two minutes after the rest of the band had stopped playing.
At the end of it, all the Frogs in the audience cheered and groaned and waved their tentacled hands in the air, which was their way of clapping, and I hunkered down for a long night of bullshit.
So J.J., he came back a week later. I saw him drinking coffee in one of the open bars when I came back from window-shopping with Monique in the station dome on Mars. Not that there was anything for me to buy, or that I had any money—that was all waiting for me back on Earth. But there was a lot to see on the station at Mars in those days, and I even picked myself up a real live Mars rock. Still got it, too, at my house.
“Hi,” I said to J.J.
He looked up at me and blinked, sniffed the air. “Hello. How are you? I’ll see you at rehearsal tomorrow.” And then he turned back to his coffee, as if I’d already walked away.
Still, weird as that was, I didn’t quite believe it when Big C told me he wasn’t J.J. no more. “Might seem like it, might talk like it, but he ain’t J.J.,” Big C said. “They made some kind of living copy of him, fixed it up all wrong—fixed it up to think more like them than like us—and now he just plain ain’t J.J. no more. Just accept it.”
Me, I figured that Big C had been on the ships long enough to have lost his mind too. But thinking back on that conversation, I could see that J.J. was different. He talked like some kind of white lawyer or something, for one, his voice all stiff and polite. And when time came for the next rehearsal, his playing was dead. There wasn’t nothing original in it, no spark. I’d listen along to his bass lines and then go back to my room and listen to my LPs, and I’m telling you, there wasn’t a single line he played after he came back that wasn’t lifted out of some someone else’s playing.
But I really knew it wasn’t him because of the time I finally saw how he got himself off. He’d been dropping hints, every once in a while, but I never figured it out until one night, when I went to get back some Mingus LP I’d loaned him. I banged on his door, I knew he was in there, but he didn’t answer.
So finally I opened the door myself, and there he was on his bed with two Frogs on top of him, tentacles stuck down his throat and wrapped round his legs, slithering their eyed-tongues all over his balls and shit. I slammed the door and just about threw up.
J.J., he had been always as much of a sex-freak as any other cat in any band I played with, and maybe he was so pent-up with all that celibate living that the space Muslims got him thinking he had to do. Maybe his balls got so blue that he lost his mind. But he’d never, ever talked about screwing no Frogs. That was what convinced me, finally, that J.J. was gone.
I found Monique in the lobby a few days after that, staring out the window at the stars. I hadn’t seen her around in a week and a half, hadn’t gone down to the French floor, but we were already on our way to Jupiter. It was supposed to take a month or two to get out there, and we’d stay for a week or so, or that was what Big C told us. There was a lot to see and do on all the moons, and some shows not to be missed.
“Where you been, girl?” I asked her.
“Busy,” she said. “Very busy.”
“Doin’ what?” I asked her, as innocently as I could.
“One of our girls, she is sick. She was taken away by les grenouilles,” she said, and made a face.
“Must’ve forgot to take her pills,” I said, almost to myself.
“Euh? Quoi?” Monique said. She surprised me. I looked at her. “Que dis-tu?”
“I said, she must have forgotten to take her pills. Like what happened to J.J.”
“Non,” she said. “One of the alligator . . .”
“Frogs . . .” I corrected her.
“Frog, oui, les grenouilles, one of the ‘frog,’ ’e ask ’er to come to ’is rooms, and she say non, and next day she become very sick.” Suddenly I could see J.J. in my head with those tentacles in his mouth and wrapped around his legs. I couldn’t stand to think about all that again.
“But baby, you’re okay, right?” I took her hand.
She turned and looked at with those eyes of hers, green like Chinese jade. “I want to go ’ome,” she said, and squeezed my hand. “I don’t know ’ow you can t’ink you are falling in love on a Frog ship. I don’t know ’ow anyone can believe in love in a ’orrible place like this.”
“Baby, come with me,” I said to her.
“Oui, I will come with you. But I will not love you, Robbie,” she said, and squeezed my hand a little. “And you must not love me, either,” she said.
And then she turned her head and looked out at all them stars for a little while more.
The month we spent traveling out to Jupiter passed so goddamn fast, all blurred awkward sex and blurred awkward music and J.J. all sad and serious up there on his bass, and that dumb, stank-ass Frog Heavy Gills Mmmhmhnngn sitting in on his sadassed bassoon at least once a week. The band still played like a well-oiled machine, still hit every note exactly right, but there was something going wrong, and I think we all could feel it.
And then one day, right in the middle of our show, Big C does that hamming-up thing that he was always so good at, and the wall went all transparent and I swear, Jupiter—fucking Jupiter—was right there in front of us covering the whole window. It looked like a giant bowl of vanilla ice cream and caramel and chocolate sauce all melted together and mixed up, with a big red cherry in the middle of it. It was big, man, biggest thing I ever saw, with these little moons floating around it. I couldn’t breathe for a second. I looked out into the audience for Monique, but she wasn’t at the table I’d left her at. Too bad, she would have loved to see Jupiter like that, right there in front of us.
“Now, as you all know, the orbit of Jupiter is a special place, a place where many people travel and choose to stay because it’s so beautiful. While you’re here, you should all go down to Io and use this opportunity to see some of the greats of jazz, people like Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Cab Calloway, Johnny Hodges . . . don’t miss them.” When I heard that, I couldn’t believe my ears. Bird? How could they have Bird up here, when I’d seen him in New York? Had he come back for another tour? I had no idea how that could be. I didn’t think it through so good, though, then. My mind went right on back to that other name: Lester Young.
“Now,” Big C said, “in honor of the jazz mecca that we’re at, we’re going to play a little tune called ‘The Jupiter’s Moons’ Blues.’”
He counted us in, four, five, four five six seven, and what do you know but that damn Frog’s bassoon started up again with the head. By then I swear I would have broken the thing over Heavy Gills Mmmhmhnngn’s head if I ever got the chance, I’d heard so much of it.
There was all kinds of cool shit to do on them moons, submarine trips on Europa and Ganymede, volcano jumps on Io; they even let us humans ride along in these special ships that could drop down into the atmosphere of that badass old Jupiter himself and see the critters that the Frogs had transplanted there from some planet near where they came from.
But none of that interested me. Some of the cats in the band, they told me, “Robbie, man, what you doing missing a chance to see all this fine shit?”
“Man, all I wanna see,” I told them, “is Lester Young. I’m gonna go see the Prez.”
The club on Io was small, quiet. The Frogs didn’t get interested in jazz until sometime after they’d checked out everything else that their people had done on Jupiter and the moons, and since ours was the only cruiser to show up for a while, right away was the best time to go in and check out the Prez.
That’s what we called Lester Young, “Prez,” because he used to be—and according to me up till that day, still was—the P
resident of the Tenor Saxophone. Man, that sound. I’d seen him in New York a few times, and a bunch of times in Philly too, and he always had it, that thing, what Monique always called je ne sais quoi, which means who the fuck knows what? Man, before the war, Prez always had that up there in his sweet, sweet sound.
So anyway, Monique and me, we ended up in this little club in a bubble floating over Io. There were these big windows all over where you could look out onto the volcanoes spitting fire and smoke and shit. There was even one of them windows in the club, and Monique kept looking out of it.
Prez wasn’t playing when we got there, it was too early so some other cats were on the bandstand. Trio of cats, didn’t know their names but I was pretty sure I’d met the pianist before. They were alright. Sometimes guys like Prez, man, they did even better with those plain bread-and-butter rhythm sections, playing that kind of old swing style. It was all about his beautiful voice, his sound. Waiting for Prez, I could hear his tenor sound, man, that touch of vibrato, that strong gentle turn in his melody riding his own beat, just a little off of the bass, you know what I mean.
Monique started to get bored. I could tell. She fiddled with her hair, looked out at the volcanoes.
“Baby, Prez should be on soon,” I told her.
She frowned at me, that sexy baby-I’m-pissed-off kind of frown. “I want to go for a walk. See the bubble.” We’d passed some nice shop windows and cafes out there, and I guessed she really just wanted to go shopping. But it also felt a little bit like a test, and I never in my life let no woman test me.
“You go on and go shopping if you want, but me, I ain’t gonna miss Prez for the world. Not a tune, not a single damn note.”
“Fine,” she said, and adjusted her purse. “I’ll be back later. Maybe,” she added with a pout, and turned on her high heel and marched out, adjusting her hair as she went, and wiggling her ass because she knew I was checking it.
I didn’t give a shit, man. French can-can girls you can get any old time if you really want one, but there wasn’t nowhere to see Lester Young except on Io. This was my last chance to see him in my life, unless he came back to Earth, and he’d been in bad shape the last time I’d seen him.
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