“Anyway, then we went off to bed and it had started to rain and, next thing I knew, I heard a calf outside, it was mooing, you know, and it was so lonely sounding…
“I told Jim we had to get it, had to take it out to the barn.”
“He laughed at me.
“I never minded when Jim laughed at me. If that fuckface Tony Curtis laughs at me, if that fly boy even dares, I’ll pull his panties up around his neck and strangle him, but I liked it when Jim laughed at me.
“’Babe,’ he said, ‘don’t worry about that calf. Little guy will be all right. He’s covered in leather.”
Marilyn was silent.
She thought she needed silence.
But I knew otherwise, of course, because I was her need.
She had to tell me—
—the worst, the most tragic and horrible animal story she knew. She needed to tell me the story—
“No.”
No?
I am her need and a need is patient, patient but insistent. She had no choice, not really: One must acquiesce to need, always, always.
She began to cry then.
So many tears, Marilyn, so many tears so many times.
Then she said, “I had a dog once, Cinders. I was in a foster home then. Cinders was only a puppy, a very sweet puppy, and funny, and like puppies do, Cinders barked a lot. A neighbor got mad about it, just really furious and what he did, I saw it, he picked up this hoe and he chopped Cinders in half. I saw it.”
Again, a silence. A needed silence.
“Maybe it was then I started to go crazy.”
VI
August 4, 1962
The Brentwood Section of Los Angles
Marilyn Monroe is dying.
Her diaphragm has quit working and her breathing is now all from the stomach. The color of her aureoles is fading. I touch her hand, then her wrist. I can find her pulse but only with difficulty, regular but slow, so very slow and thin. There is a tranquility to her flesh that morticians strive for and never achieve.
She is dying because she needs to die.
And, curious, so curious, I do not understand it but I, I feel no abatement of my selfness, no ebbing away of my consciousness.
I who have never been alive feel no less alive than… Than previously.
I am her need.
And to myself I am becoming an enigma.
VII
You need to hear about the sex, don’t you?
I know what you need. After all, she fascinates you, compels your ever so avid interest, Mr. and Mrs. Main Street America:
—you regular fellas at the Tip Top Lounge who with the wisdom imparted by the old after work boilermaker know you’d have her wailing once you gave her the old Jack Hammer John.
—you Lutheran housewives in Michigan who have begun to get the hint from her this hyperbolic persona that is MM: women are supposed to like it, too.
—you, the 13 year old horn rimmed smart boy who’s been a whiz with his slide rule but is now discovering there’s something about Marilyn Monroe’s gyrating buttocks that puts lead in the little pencil
—you, the desperate 19 year, selling ribbons at Woolworth’s, just a little orthodonture shy of being beautiful, dreaming of love, dreaming of Hollywood, dreaming of magic
All of you, all of you, I understand your need. How can I not?
So, addressing the topic of Marilyn Monroe’s womanhood, I speak with a degree of expertise, a PhD, if you will.
Marilyn Monroe not infrequently needed fucking and I am her need.
And so, on occasion, I fucked her the way she needed to be fucked, fucked her hard and then harder, knowing she relished the sensation at the spot just above her anus where the testicles go slapslapslap, the hot juices flowing along mounds and fissures, fucked her with her hips doing the comma wriggle bump and pump, fucked her with the exact length and girth and temperature of cock her need demanded at that particular time for that particular fuck, fucked her saying all the amorous vulgarities she needed to hear: You beautiful, wild bitch, you hot cunt, you whore, you sweet pussy, you…
I fucked her.
And so many times, when she came (came because she needed to come), she cried and she cried out, “Daddy!”
I am her need.
she needed daddy and she needed fucking and she needed home and she needed sanity and she needed respect and she needed dignity and she needed
she needed she was a sucking vacuum she was an endless deep need at the core of the universe she was
she needed limits and laughter and kindness and concern and gentleness and daddy oh god she needed daddy she needed she needed she needed love she needed love she needed love she needed love she needed love she needed love she needed love she needed love she needed she needed she was
All Need. All Consuming Need.
and I am
VIII
August 4, 1962
The Brentwood Section of Los Angles
I am often surprised by all that I know and by all that I do not know.
I have told you that, haven’t I? I must be telling you again because it is something you need to know.
I heard the wet rattle within the V juncture of throat and collar bone. It was a death rattle. I had never heard it before (how could I?) but I knew it.
Marilyn Monroe was dying.
She would die and I would be no more.
Then I was startled, that’s what it was, I was startled at the sudden slow movement, as her head lolled on the pillow, and white-tinged mucus bubbled at the parched corner of her mouth.
She sat up. It was melodramatic but no less comic and grotesque, like an inexperienced vampire in a Universal Studio’s monster film. Her eyes sought focus and found it.
She looked at me. She smiled.
“No,” she said. “Not this time. Not ever. No.”
I am her need. I have always been her need.
I understood her, understood her even when she did not.
Lie down now, I told her. You need to die.
I know.
I am your need.
And I made her die.
IX
August 4, 1962
The Brentwood Section of Los Angles
Marilyn Monroe is dead.
Her heart has stopped. Her blood no longer circulates. Lividity discolors and distorts her features. You might no longer know who she is.
She isn’t.
Marilyn Monroe is dead.
And I?
X
A mystery, if you need a mystery.
I am here.
Marilyn Monroe is gone and I am here.
And if I do not understand, then, very well, that is the way of it, I suppose, I assume, I would think, I surmise: who attains full understanding? Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy, Norman Vincent Peale, Bishop Fulton Sheen…
But I think I am beginning to realize, to know:
you
you are alone in a lonely night and you cannot bear the sound of your own heart cannot tolerate the touch of your mocking breath as it leaves your nostrils to brush your upper lip and the weight of your existence offends you
you
you are at the city’s busiest intersection on this busy day and the sunlight that pours down is weighted and cutting and you feel it slice away the flesh slice away your protection slice away all that protects and keeps you hidden
you
you have children and they hate you and you hate them
you are watched all the time watched by secretive men who know what uncle did and know how dirty you are and though they are biding their time for now they will act they will
you are lies covered over with lies covered over with lies and all covering the truth the terrible impossible unendurable truth
you are 52 years old and you still cry for daddy
you have no satisfactions
you have no joy
you (all of you) you are unloved and you are unlovable and you a
re cursed (all of you forever children alone in the dark) and you cannot try cannot dare cannot hope (all of you the forever lost
you and you and you
and you cannot hope and you need you need you need
and you need
you need death
and
I am
your need
Bird’s Dead
By Mort Castle
here’s a sign with a tipped top hat out in front.
It’s got nothing to do with nothing because this is The Commodore’s Blue Note.
You walk in. The smoke encircles you and drags you in. Drags you into the music. And there’s always music, even when there is no one on the stand. There’s a juke box. There’s a phonograph. There’s a battered to hell upright in the corner – It’s Mr. Jelly Lord mainly tickles that one. There’s a violin on the wall, supposedly carrying with it a Gypsy curse, but when Stuff Smith comes in and he’s feeling all right, he takes down that fiddle, says, “Curse of the Romany, I defy you!” and he sets to hard swinging, and though the notes don’t always come in tune, the man is pure virtuoso.
Here. That is right where you are.
The Commodore’s Blue Note can be like staying high all the time.
The Commodore’s Blue Note can be like when you are under the lowest.
This is it, the place, the joint, the saloon, the pad, the locale of… hipsters and shysters and mooches and backsliding preachers. And tailgatin’ muffaletta chompin’ juke jointers and swingers and malingerers and zoot suiters and add in a shouter and a professor and a half dozen unclassifiable unreconstructed originals.
In The Commodore’s Blue Note you sometimes find Ben Webster. Ben Webster at the bar, floating on reefer and slugging down Scotch and there is something pinning the eyes that isn’t Scotch or reefer and Ben Webster looks for all the world like an obsidian statue of a gorilla. An ugly gorilla. An acromegliac, brow bone bulging, lantern jawed, lowland gorilla. But did anyone ever play a sweeter horn? Could anyone do that sweep up the register into nothing but breath and heartbreak like Ben Webster?
Ben Webster is the Ugly who plays so beautiful.
However, unless you want your next suit of clothes to be made out of pine, you do not want to insult Ben Webster. You do not want to hurt Ben Webster’s feelings in any way, because Ben Webster is sensitive. He is a soulful man. He is a man who can all too easily take umbrage.
I saw this once. We were at a rent party. Ben Webster came in, sax around his neck, Scotch fumes trailing him like Mighty Clouds of Glory. And some damn fool, this little bit of a country boy, with his hair all country parted down the center, this hayseed, rube, chicken plucker, happened to give offense to Ben Webster.
What country boy said to Ben Webster was, “Sir, even with that saxophone hanging on the neck, you look like a statue of a gorilla. Obsidian “ Ben Webster’s feelings were hurt. Ben Webster sort of whispered sometimes when his feelings were hurt and he wanted to sound like Dexter Gordon. Ben Webster whispered to the country boy, “I take umbrage.”
The he took Country Boy to the window. What he said was, “I am so full of umbrage that I feel like throwing you out the goddamned window.”
Well, if you know anything about Ben Webster, then you know for Ben Webster to fool was no different than to do. He threw Country Boy out the window.
Did I mention that we were about fourteen or fifteen stories up?
As I said, Ben Webster was a sensitive man.
You know who else you might find at The Commodore’s Blue Note? Damn near everybody, that is who. One night in walks Miles Davis with Billy Eckstine. Billy was trying to get back into Miles’s good graces because Miles had tried to punch him out over five dollars he had tried to cheat Billy out of and Billy had raised up several major lumps beneath Miles’s eyes. (He never hit Miles in the mouth. Billy Eckstine was a good friend to Miles and he also understood commerce.) Now Miles was sulking.
Miles’s father was a dentist. This shaped Miles. The offspring of dentists are likely to become architects or abstract painters or Existential Christian theologians. Anything but a goddamn dentist.
On any given night at The Commodore’s Blue Note, this could be your—
Roll Call!
Behind the bar. It is The Commodore. They call him that because some years ago somebody who claimed to be Wallace Beery gave him a pirate hat. “This here, matey, be the very chapeau I was a’wearin’ in the movie Treasure Island. Now, if you could give me a drink on the house.”
Nobody drinks on the house at The Commodore’s Blue Note. Forget it. But the Commodore liked the hat. He gave the man who claimed to be Wallace Beery a drink for it. He perched it on his head. “Avast, lubbers,” the Commodore would say. “Keelhaul the bilges. Mizzen the poop deck.” Even bartenders dream of the sea.
Roll Call: Billie Holiday, here. That gardenia in her hair. Oh, doesn’t she think she is the stuff?
That is because she is the stuff. Ethel Waters didn’t like her. Ethel Waters said, “She just thinks she’s the stuff, don’t she? And when she sings, she sounds like her shoes are too tight.”
Ethel Waters. This is the real Ethel Waters. This is not the Ethel Waters who got to being the Godly Negro Lady for the Billy Graham rallies in Madison Square Garden and The Cow Palace and Comiskey Park and Ecuador and the South Sea Islands. This is the Ethel Waters who starred in Blackbirds of 1928 and quite possibly coined the legendary bit of advice, “Walk softly and carry a big razor.”
Roll Call!
Roll Call!
Roll Call at the The Commodore’s Blue Note.
Buddy Bolden?
Present.
Jelly Roll Morton.
Here. Where the hell else has he got to go, now that his career is in the toilet and the hoodoo is on him?
Eddie Condon?
Present and drunk as Cooder Brown.
Bix? Bix? Biederbecke, you here, boy?
Yeah, I’m here… That smile. Jesus, that smile. That smile was so shy and easy, you knew he came from Indiana.
Yeah, Bix is here. He’s lost in a mist.
You know who smiles like Bix?
Chet Baker. A man utterly lacking in guile. Mr. Innocence. Right. My ass in two parts. Baker the Faker swiped the smile and about three-quarters of Bix’s chops.
Not that Chet Baker smiles like that anymore. Drug thing, you know. He burned some people, you know. People who were called names like The Bear, and Perpetual Scar Tissue, and Emergency Warning Buxton, and Guido and Fat Tony, and Big Tony, and Large Tony, and Tony Kick Your Ass Esposito. What happened was the people he burned in this drug thing – and this is just something I heard, okay? – they got together and knocked every tooth out of Chet Baker’s mouth.
It did nothing for his looks.
Of course, with what he had picked up from his father, Miles Davis could have fixed Baker right up, but Miles hated Chet. Miles hated everybody.
And of course, there at the bar, tonight and every night, it is The Detached Cop. He is Webster’s size. He wears suits that make you think of Bulgaria. Some nights, he sits and drinks and listens to the music and he weeps. Sometimes someone tries to talk to him. Usually, the Detached cop says, “Get away. I am undercover.” You want him to say more. You want him to confess all, become maudlin and confidential. You hope he will reveal, “I am investigating the Lindbergh baby snatch. I am investigating crop circles and Judge Crater and those mysterious strangers and the celebrated rain of frogs that would have been the clincher for anyone except that dumbass Pharaoh. I want to know if Ambrose Bierce and Pancho Villa changed their names and became a tag team on Wrestling from the Marigold. I’ll sure as hell find out who threw the overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s chowder. And who was it played poker with Pocahontas when John Smith went away?”
The Detached Cop never says anything like that, though. I think he’s afraid it would make people like him.
Every night, every night, you will find the Two Metaphysical Wineheads at their tabl
e.
They are good luck for the joint.
They somehow always have money for Dago Red.
They have discussions which are so laden with insight and all that that the Dali Lama would instantly give them his Rolex and autographed picture of Marilyn Monroe and one of those funky Sherpa hats if he heard them talking.
Consider this conversation:
Man, what time is it?
Now.
Yeah, now. What time is it?
Now.
Yeah, I say now. What the hell you think I say? What time is it now!
Now.
Oh, hell with you. Just drink some wine, that’s right.
I will, says a profoundly philosophical Metaphysical Winehead. I will drink some wine…
Now.
Thing is, everyone is alive. Everyone who ever was in jazz, everyone. Alive! They’re alive, I tell you. 100% guaranteed and bona fide and assured by an electrocardiogram on record.
They are alive.
Right.
Now.
Except for Bird.
Charlie Yardbird Parker.
Yardbird is dead.
That’s is why The Commodore’s Blue Note is down tonight.
Nobody wants to believe it. Nobody believes it. Paul Whiteman is alive, for Chrissake, and he’s so lame nobody even thinks he should be, and Fats Navarro is alive and Bill Evans is alive and Benny Goodman is alive and Robert Johnson is alive.
Robert Johnson. Poisoned and shot and stabbed and chopped up in a cotton baler and with his head caught in a punch press! Acid thrown on him by one old girl, ice pick stuck in his nose, ear, and ass by another, Robert Johnson is alive.
But the word has spread throughout the community.
Bird is dead.
Naw, says one Metaphysical Winehead.
Naw, says the other Metaphysical Winehead.
Bird joking. Bird always one for the jokes.
Bird, naw, he ain’t dead.
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