The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

  "'liere you going?"

  "Tin Palace maybe and jam. Maybe I'll just do Hke Sonny Rollins, go up on the bridge and play. Stand there suspended between heaven and the deep and wait for something to happen."

  "W^ait up, I'll go ^ith you, run interference."

  "Not tonight," said the Bear, sho\dng teeth. "^Tiat I do I must do alone. Go quickly. Robert Jordan felt his heart beating on the pine floor of the forest. Gan^ Cooper. Ingrid Bergman. The End."

  "Don't talk crazy. I'll come with you. Wait up."

  "Look, if I go up on the bridge and play we might get a writeup. W^ich bridge was it?"

  "BrooklTi. WlUiamsburg. I forget."

  "Rainbow. The spectrum. See ya."

  The Bear was already out the door and trundling down the stairway when Jones started buttoning his shirt and looking around for his socks. Shit, he thought, I knew this was gonna happen one of these nights. He's going out there looking for trouble. Looking for it. Thank God he can handle himself in a fight but New York's changed a lot since the last time he was out alone. Too many people out there carrying heat.

  The Bear Comes Home 17

  Jones found the other shoe and shpped it on. I've got to get a move on if I'm gonna catch him at all. He ran slapdash for the door and made sure he had the keys.

  But the Bear was already standing outside the glass doors of the tenement, adjusting the brim of his hat. I may be wearing a hat and a raincoat, thought the Bear, but no one's gonna mistake me for Paddington. I have always rejected the cutesy-poo. And I am, objectively speaking, one heavy bear.

  He came down the seven steps to the sidewalk and turned right, toward the Avenue. From behind he looked like an enormous, burly man in a coat, his body thick with power. The weight of the alto case did not affect his walk in the least. He didn't roll, didn't lean or sway, but went straight in a line along the pavement.

  Maybe, it occurred to the Bear, someone seeing me from behind might think: he's carrying a gun in that case, or a bomb, or the secret of my life that I myself have lacked the courage to live completely, or the secret of this great and terrible city, or perhaps instead—something strange was happening—an oblong, self-illumined emerald three feet by one by one and a half that glows neither like the moon (silver), the sun (gold), nor the stars (diamonds) but like some inner, unsuspected, spiritual globe or light, of which man has hardly begun to learn the existence, the qualities, the name: an all-suffasing green gem with unprecedented powers: the key and catalyst to new emotions, attributes, lives and unifications, the secret of secrets, center of centers: the microcosm, the mandala for real, the obverse of the manifest and the key to all possible liberations. Perhaps, thought the Bear, someone behind him might have thought this, and perhaps for a moment, flickering wholly in and then wholly out, the saxophone case might actually have contained the sole and abiding principle, the locus of revelation—who knows?—but at the moment the only person behind the Bear was Jones, coming scattered and dishevelled down the seven steps to the street. His first impulse was to run after the Bear and bring him back, but then he thought better of it, dropped back and followed at a distance.

  In the meantime, the Bear had attained the Avenue, where bHnding, bril-Hant traffic travelled like a line of light from north to south, as if between worlds. But it was Jacob who saw the ladder, wrestled with the angel, and obtained a birthright under false pretenses. The Bear had done none of these things. He pulled the hatbrim farther down on his face and walked south beneath the vault of darkness, above him like guardians or heralds the electric signs of bars and stores—white, orange, yellow, gold, red, brilliant blue and green, occasional imperial purple—as if they were angels that had descended to earth only to hire themselves out as lures for business, possibly for reasons

  i8 Rafi Zabor

  of pity. The Bear walked beneath them Hke a resolute and powerful man, the saxophone case at his side swinging hke a cache of fate, love, gold or vengeance. When he realized that he could have his pick of them—that all options, attributes and possibilities actually were open to him, that he was, at the moment, exalted, liberated, free—he stopped walking for a moment, put down the saxophone case, looked gradually around him at the Avenue, raised his snout and smiled broadly, and there on the pavement stretched out and aloft his great and inevitable arms. Aah. The night entered him like honey, and he began, so heartily and with such a depth of pleasure that it might have been for the first time in his life, to laugh out loud.

  dcspile the fact that the Bear weighed about four hundred pounds, carried a saxophone case and wore baggy pants, a raincoat and a hat, only a few people noticed him in the dozen blocks from his apartment to the Tin Palace. He was trailed by Jones and a remnant of grace. Jones bit his nails and wondered when to make his move. Grace kept the police cars on other streets and serious troublemakers out of the Bear's path. Some people saw him coming from a block or so away, but even at that distance they were sufficiently impressed by his size and shape to cross the street and feel their hearts hammering against their ribs until he was gone. They did not get to see him for what he really was. One young man came out of a tenement doorway and saw the Bear up close, but he had just come back from a year with the dervishes in Turkey and took the Bear for a curveball God had decided to throw him that night, either that or an elemental nature spirit off his turf A second individual was merely confirmed in his opinion of what life in New York was coming to these days, and only an hour and a half later in the middle of a movie uptown did it dawn on him that he had seen a large and literal bear he gripped the arms of his chair and let out a little scream. The third human the Bear encountered was the inevitable wino two blocks north of the Palace who, the time-honored gag to one side, did not swear to give up drinking on the spot but offered the Bear half his pint of Night Train. The Bear took it. "I haven't seen you since lemme see," the wino said.

  The Bear Comes Home 19

  "Only you can prevent forest fires," the Bear advised him.

  The Bear came through the doors of the Tin Palace Hke a force of nature. The band, he noticed, was between sets and the house half empty: a deep room sided by a brick wall on the right, a long bar with a mirror behind it opposite, cheap wooden tables, a worn slat floor, and a diminutive piano and bandstand tacked on as an afterthought halfway back. He headed for the tables at the rear of the club behind the bandstand past the end of the bar. Most of the people in the club failed to notice him in significant detail. The few that did were too wary of being uncool to say anything. A jazz critic sitting at a front table decided that since Lester Bowie was in the house the guy in the bear suit was Joseph Jarman stopping by to say hello. The bartender, a large man with Hemingway hair and beard, had taken the Bear in for what he was and checked his supply of ice.

  It turned out that the band was sitting at the tables at which the Bear had aimed himself. Without nodding hello, he swivelled his enormous body into a seat against the wall and did his best to exude the air of being where he belonged. The first person to speak to him was the girl who worked the door, pale, dark-haired, dressed top to toe in black. She had been on the phone when he came in and had hurried to the table to ask him for three dollars admission. She looked at him just before speaking. "Gack," she said.

  "Gack," said the Bear, and pofitely raised his hat.

  Steve McCall, the drummer for the night and, it must be admitted, a large and bearlike man, was in the seat next to the Bear on the right. He had a large oval face, the bottom half of it covered by a beard, and wore round-lensed steel-frame spectacles. "It's okay," he told the waitress. "The gentleman is with us."

  The woman backed uncertainly away. She felt overwhelmingly sleepy, and wondered if coffee would help. Coffee would not help, but she would settle down in about an hour.

  Lester Bowie, who was not on the bill for the evening but had dropped by to sit in for a couple of sets, had meanwhile come out of the men's room and was staring at the Bear with a wild, delighted grin on his face. His
goatee was waxed to two fine points, he wore an immaculate white surgeon's coat and a stethoscope hung from his neck. "Holy shit," he said finally. "Ho-lee shit." Bowie had recently come in from the street, where he had been smoking an unusual cigarette that rendered him peculiarly susceptible to hilarity and awe. "Hey," he concluded. "I think I'm gonna like this."

  "Doctor doctor I got this terrible pain," said the Bear. "Every time I walk into a room people make a fiiss and I feel just awfiil."

  Bowie's grin became, if possible, even wider.

  20 Rafi Zabor

  "Want a beer?" asked McCaU.

  "Sure," said the Bear.

  McCall raised a glass and waved to the bartender, who nodded back.

  "I even love it," said Bowie, and jolted himself into a seat across the table from the Bear. "And I know I'm gonna love it one hundred fucking times more when I find out what it is."

  "It's a bear," said the Bear.

  "One . . . hundred . . . fucking . . . times . . . more," repeated Bowie, with the kind of rh}thmic variation for which he has been noted.

  Jones had gotten hung up at the front door trying to pull three dollars out of his pants while watching with mounting panic the tables at the rear—it's all over, it's all over, he was thinking, it's only a matter of minutes before someone calls the cops—but he had worked himself clear and now he lunged into the seat next to Bowie, and ran a hand through his sweat-soaked thinning hair, his mind in tatters. "Now this is not what it looks like at all," he said in a hurried voice. "My friend here is my friend here he's okay and there is absolutely no need for for for panic. Right? Nobody move."

  xMcCall raised two fingers to the bartender, who already had one beer in his hand and nodded again.

  "^^o's this guy," McCall asked the Bear.

  "My manager. My best friend."

  "How you doing," McCall said to Jones.

  "I'm a little edgV'Jones told him.

  "I see that," said McCall. "Tn- to relax."

  "Look," said Jones, "if he's seen here, if anybody sees him, and the cops come in, or the scientists, it's all over, I mean his freedom goes out the window, you know? It'll all be over. It's ven^ dangerous for him here."

  "He's right," said the Bear. "He's absolutely right."

  "Wait a minute," Bowie said authoritatively. "If anybody tries to fuck with the Bear they're gonna have to deal with us, \ith me, with Steve, with the management and with ev-ry fucking musician in this place, you understand? So you just take it easy, ain't nothing gonna happen to him and ain't nobody, no body, gonna fuck with a friend of mine while I'm around. Okay?"

  The bartender brought the beers himself, put them on the table and nodded a discreet hello to the Bear. "Anybody tries to leave in too big a hurnV he said in a low voice, "or has to make a sudden call on the phone, is gonna run into delays. Make yourself at home."

  The Bear nodded and took a first sip of his beer. "Aah," he said. "Well, I want to thank you all for your, um, hospitality^ and while I'd really love to sit around and talk," he went on, "what I reallv came in here for is to play.

  The Bear Comes Home 21

  Would it be all right if I sat in." Noticing the general look of incomprehension that greeted this speech, he picked up the alto case by its top-handle and set it on the table.

  "Can you sit in," said Bowie. - "Goes without saying," said McCall.

  "Where's Fred and Hilton?" asked Bowie.

  "Outside," said McCall. "What do you say we all have another beer for a minute. And what do you want to play?"

  "Say we start with a blues?" the Bear suggested.

  At length and a few beers later, the band reassembled and regained the bandstand, although the Bear had chosen to remain in his seat, hat pulled low, until it was time for him to play. The blues the band had decided on was "C. C. Rider," mid-tempo in B-flat, no customary shuffle this time out but loose-limbed, au courant, at its ease, a groove. The main thing that the Bear had failed to realize about the band was that it was Arthur Blythe's date, and as the band finished the repeat of the head and the human altoist stepped forward to the mike for his choruses, the Bear marvelled at the fluency of his playing. It was a pleasure, as he remembered having read somewhere, to hear the alto saxophone played so well. I could never play like that, he thought, and took his own axe out of the case and assembled it, turning toward the club's rear wall and warming up inaudibly. Working the mouthpiece down, he tuned it before returning his attention to the bandstand and Blythe.

  He saw the short, round, brown man in profile, the golden saxophone held delicately out in front of him toward the microphone, each note coming out of it perfectly shaped and finished, as if turned on a lathe. The saxophone, as Blythe held and played it, began to seem less and less like a musical instrument and more like some part of a jeweler's apparatus, something that might be used to cut and facet a precious stone. The Bear enjoyed Blythe's approach, but it was far more polished and deliberate than what he felt drawn to personally, and although he knew he could not in some respects match Blythe technically—listen to those two-octave leaps, those cleanly articulated sixteenth-note runs over chord substitutions, the way he milks the reed for inflection—he felt a competitive edge rising in his chest, felt, for the first time as a musician in fact, his very bearness rising in him to assert itself against what he had always thought of as the merely human world. He felt a great mammahan warmth begin to fill his deep barrel chest.

  "You sure you want to do this," he heard Jones' thin voice ask him.

  "Abyssolutely," said the Bear, feeling his great fur-covered body sitting like an original form of Power in its seat. Soon, this Power would act. Only I

  22 Rafi Zabor

  can prevent forest fires, he told himself. Only I can shape, harmonize and render generous and benign this rising conflagration.

  Bh^iie was finishing up his solo with a series of fast runs that ripped repeatedly into the lowest octave of his horn and came up shining, then, no, he was returning to the poised, perfectly positioned blues figurines with which he had begun. The Bear, realizing that his moment had come, rumbled up from his seat and made his way to the stage, finding himself thinking with unusual rapidit}' as he did so. He was led instantaneously to consider, now that he was onstand with the demonstrably bearlike McCall and the smaller but equally ursine Bhthe, whether there was some deep, even fundamental connection bervveen his own species and that of the jazz musician in general. Bird had taken on some bearish quahties when he put on weight and years. Mingus was a grizzly. Jaki Byard. Jack the Bear. But Ellington was a tiger, even'bodv knew that, elegant too, to the tips of his claws and his velvet voice.

  Finding himself completely onstage now, with BKiJie stepping discreetly backward, the Bear dismissed his thinking as frivolous and prepared himself to play. Lord what a rhthm section, he found himself thinking as he raised his saxophone to his snout and heard McCall's unfashionably simple qTabal beat opening up a free infinit^ of time and space, Hopkins' bass sinking deep shafts of darkness into the beat and Ruiz's chords, even from that scandalous piano, feeding him strength and ideas fi-om bar one.

  The Bear proceeded to attempt a few things he had never really done before, partly in reaction to Bh-the's lapidan* stie but far more for reasons that overwhelmed him and which he could not all identify. He began his solo with iolent, almost inchoate downward smears of sound—hadn't Omette Coleman's early recorded solos always reminded him of broad smears of red paint?—which bled down over bar lines and the beat but stayed somehow within the statutory framework of a B-flat twelve-bar blues. He heard someone in the audience call out "Yeahl" and this, surprisingly (since he had always thought such exclamations tasteless and out of place), spurred him on. He continued squeezing sound out of himself like paint out of a tube until it was gone and then. haing established this crude, expressionist impasto for a few choruses, he began to raise up out of it fast runs that blurred past him hke fireworks, fike the streak of ambulances at night. From this he passed to so
mething nearer the conventional blues with which he had begun, as if he were ridmg the storm of what had gone before, but not entirely: the conventions, Hke the notes and phrases themselves, had been bent, bled and burned away: they were collapsing houses and flaming cities of themselves, they were fling doorways and bursting lives, they were preny* damn good. This is all right, the Bear told himself as he played, this is really all right.

  The Bear Comes Home 23

  Hilton Ruiz played a last block chord on the piano and laid out, and in response McCall and Hopkins bonded their sense of time still more indissol-ubly together and gave the beat such urgency the Bear thought for a moment that they had sped up. But they were solid, on the money and sailing clear.

  The Bear had never played with musicians like this. He reared his head back to take a larger breath, and had he been aware of the audience he would have realized that the sudden sight of his opened jaws—great white tearing teeth, livid purple gums and broad, slavering tongue—had made it collectively gasp and jump back a foot, where space allowed.

  The critic had leapt from his front-row seat and made his rapid way to the pay phone at the far end of the bar. He had already dialled the first four numbers of his photographer's exchange when the bartender reached over, dashed the receiver's brains out against the wall and told him, "I'm sorry, but this telephone is temporarily disconnected."

  The musicians in the house—and David Murray, who lived upstairs, was among them, his lidded savvy eyes already calculating what use he might make of what the Bear was putting down—all found themselves most impressed by what the Bear took most for granted in his work: his unmatch-able capacity for breath, the incredible volume he could get from the instrument without breaking up his tone. As for what he was playing, yeah, it was all right. Maybe there was a new musician in town, maybe not. One solo does not an artist make.