The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

  "What else you got there?"

  The Bear held up the two cassettes of Les Enfants. "Ever seen it? Really? You've got a treat coming, if you have the time. It's a long movie."

  "Let's see."

  While the Bear set up the tape, Garrett had a few things to say. "You might think of treating tonight as a hallucination. You know you can play. I

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  know you can play. I know I can play. And so on. This happens sometimes. Because it was so distasteful it will cling to us awhile. All we have to do is work it away bit by bit. The music will come back."

  "It will?"

  "It always has. Don't let the tension flip you. I'm not saying we'll be cured tomorrow, but you know how it is: one of us will start playing and someone else will catch it and pretty soon, you know. We might start having a good time."

  "We lost money tonight," the Bear said. "I can't go on doing that. I'll have to pay you off and cancel."

  "Didn't Jones tell you the other clubs are for real? Chances are if Nancy's hadn't been like that we would have played okay."

  "I don't believe that," said the Bear.

  ''It could he true"

  "And it was all Jones' fault for booking us there? Jeez, just when I was starting to lighten up on the guy."

  "It was an honest mistake," Garrett told him, "but the point is, you're the one who'll have to deal with it, not him. If you can get it out of your mind completely, that's the best, it never happened. But chances are you won't be able to blow it off so you'll have to use it."

  "How would I do that?"

  "You'll figure it out."

  "You sure?"

  "Absolutely"

  Garrett spoke without any special emphasis, not pushing the beat, his note choices discreet and subtle, and the Bear didn't think it was a particularly rousing old-school pep talk or anything, but by the end of it he knew in what he could contact of his better self that Garrett was right. Right enough to take a chance on anyway. And, oh yes, do remember to thank him for dropping by. "Okay," said the Bear. "We'll try it for a few more nights. Now, as to this picture ..."

  As to the picture, they watched it medium-impressed until—and for the Bear it always happened at the same moment, when the apoplectic owner of the Theatre de Funambules raised his hands in the air and cried that his theater was torn by rivalry and hatred—it turned into the greatest movie ever made. "Wow," Garrett said, in all the usual places, and then "Really? You sure?" when the Bear said he was going to lie down in the back but Garrett could keep watching the movie if he wanted.

  After Garrett left, around first light, the Bear woke from an hour's nap lying on his back and with his eyes still closed saw, as if it were proposed to

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  normal sight but without final clarity or focus—saw by analogous light as it were—the hmit of the world as a series of worn grey wooden slats with gaps between. Through the gaps stretched a bluegrey slate of sky against which white birds passed, their tapering, hooked-back wings spread wide.

  Which was interesting.

  But it was a little while later, after he'd washed, had some coffee and run the engine to get the airconditioning going and blow off the night-damp, that the tour began to assume what would be its real aspect for the Bear. He unpacked his horn, examined it for traces of last night's insult, worked the keys and fixed a new reed to the mouthpiece. At first walking up and down the aisle and later perched on the edge of a bunkbed in the back, he played, alternating scraps of tunes, scalar explorations and technical workouts for embouchure and paws. He played for an hour, spelled by a few mugs of coffee and the occasional pause for thought; and while he didn't want to make too much of it, didn't want, in his usual graceful fashion, to pounce on the poor thing with all four paws and worry it to death before it had a chance to live and breathe a little, he had a feeling, a certain intuition . . .

  Despite having pulled off a largely successful record with Sensible Shoes —a triumph of self-impersonation, done under unsustainable stress—and having coasted his way through an agreeable weekend of rehearsals with the band at home that spring, the Bear felt that his relation to the music had been inau-thentic at least since the night of his bust at the Tin Palace. Oh, his technique had multipHed and his harmonic knowhow had deepened and taken on detail, but had done so in a sort of vacuum. He had practiced a lot, but it had been busywork, bereft of essential savor. Now, oddly enough and who knew for what reason, he was starting to get something: the float was dipping on the surface of the water and he was pretty sure he felt the beginnings of a tug on the Hne. Who'd believe it? Something living down there yet. He played for a second hour and most of a third and didn't feel tired. What he felt was . . . interested. Quietly interested.

  Yesterday Hatwell had asked him what his pastime on the tour would be.

  Well, you never know, it might turn out to be music.

  The daily rhythm of bus and road, the nightly rhythm of club and crowd, assumed their place in some external orbit of his consciousness, almost as peripheral as the billboards ticking past in the summer haze of highway America. It may have helped that Monongahela had provided him with such a deep pit to climb out of—on their second night at Nancy's they occasionally achieved the competence of a student band—since shame was such a long-familiar motivation; but the Bear's new descent into the music, whether alone

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  in the back of the bus late at night or roUing between towns on long afternoons and sometimes even in a nightclub, quickly acquired a contemplative aspect, his large form bent above the fall and rise of his horn, making what he hoped was the beginning of a fresh adventure into the intricacies, the matrix, the logic of the given forms. Eventually he might find his way out of the maze and back to beauty—who knows?—but for the moment there was work to do.

  "It's a Coltrane thing," was Bobby Hatwell's opinion.

  "Am I starting to sound hke Trane?" the Bear wanted to know. "Because it's true I'm getting pretty scalar."

  "Naw, I just meant I never heard of anyone else practicing that much. You must be playing ten twelve hours a day by now? Oral fixation I figure. Maybe we could all chip in and buy you a lollipop. Or some animal tranquilizer so the rest of us could live in peace."

  The Bear stumbled forward guarding his alto as Rondo jammed the brakes on and screamed at some fucking fool in a Japanese bug-car ought to get crushed by a bus only I got a tour to do don't I? The bus rocked front to back to front before changing lanes and passing.

  "Join us awhile," Linton invited him, "before you hit the windshield."

  The Bear dropped into a seat by a wingtable. "Really, am I bothering you guys playing this much?"

  "Let's hear it for the higher mammals," Hatwell said. "You ever see a human musician this considerate?"

  "Not me," Linton said. "Want an Earth Chip?" offering the bag.

  "Actually," Garrett began, and Linton and Bob groaned in rough unison. A carhorn blared past.

  "Fuck the fiickyou too," Rondo remarked.

  "Actually the Coltrane question is pretty interesting I think," said Garrett.

  "Who cares."

  "Yeah who cares."

  "Because although you're getting pretty scalar I hear a more muscular grip on the beat than Trane had—"

  "Puh-leeze."

  "—because Trane had this soaring thing going and you, well, you—"

  "Garrett please shut the fiick up."

  "Okay."

  "Looka that," Rondo announced. "Three clear lanes of interstate in fronta me. I can drive."

  "So you say," Linton said.

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  "News to us," Hatwell agreed.

  Whenever the Bear phoned Iris to tell her that the imminent rebirth of his musical sense was thanks to her, really, because beauty is truth and truth beauty, she said Thank you very much, and when he asked how she was doing she answered Fine, and sidestepped further inquiry, repeating that she, and things, were
fine.

  What? the Bear wondered, and: Luminous being on the end of my life's line what's up with you? but once he got off the phone the music quickly reabsorbed him, and with stabs then flickers then mere wisps of misgiving he consented.

  In Youngstown they played a club that would have been in the middle of the tracks, had there been a train coming through: a neighborhood bar on the line between the white and black parts of another dying American industrial town. The stage was an alcove across an open wooden floor from the bar—did people dance here?—^with mismatched tables and chairs set around the edges. The street entrance was on the left, the room deep toward the rear of the club on the right, and this place did have a Hammond B-3 organ: Hatwell licked his chops and rubbed his hands together at the sight of keys and pedals and especially the big old Leshe unit. "Ventilation," he said happily. "Garrett, you can take off and read up on chemistry tonight, and Bear you can go visit your folks in the zoo, cause Linton's all I need and I'm not sure about him."

  "Plug in your sampling devil just in case," the Bear advised.

  They started the first set playing to a scattering of neighborhood drinkers, and sounded pretty good, opening with a version of "Giant Steps" on which the Bear had to growl at Hatwell to lay off the footpedals and let Garrett play bass. The band achieved a certain amphtude of swing, and toward the end of his solo the Bear got where he wanted to on the tune, vaulting over those steeplechase changes with a fine gathering and ungather-ing of muscle, notes fluently cascading, making Coltrane's obstacle course sound inevitable and easy. Hatwell had some trouble with the organ—all of it mechanical, he swore later, stuck keys, bad action, electrical fluctuations— and switched to piano-sample midway through.

  The Bear got through the first set without embarrassing himself. In the middle of the second, the bar revealed its true nature as a place for all the musicians in town to jam in after the gig or instead of one: a bunch of young guys with instrument cases began strolling in, assembling at the tables to the left of the stage, nursed their beers and looked up at the bandstand with the usual contradictory mix of cockiness, skepticism and diffidence: the Three Fates of jamming. I wish, thought the Bear as he called "Skylark"—love that

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  bridge—I wish these guys'd show up a week from now, when I could handle them fine, instead of now, when I'm not so sure; and in a flash and with some surprise realized that he knew exactly how he would be playing in a week's time. This was a faculty he'd possessed in ^e old days: pick out a musical target, see it clear, intuit the trajectory between here and there, know how long it would take, and fill the space between with the necessary but secondary details of work and hit the mark cleanly at the appointed time.

  This recognition of what might prove to be the old acuity threw him off for two beats, and he saw the faces at the musicians' tables all come up, a clutch of predators. He made sure to play especially well through the remainder of "Skylark," employing viciously complicated reversals of accent out of Bird and Sonny Rollins, and, having at the moment no shame, he took care to employ every trick of inflection and tone that his ursine embouchure made easy: those slurs and grace notes, that thickening of timbre, the sardonic growl amid lyrical blossoms: no shame at all. He watched the faces recaU-brate the parameters of night as he drawled his solo's end into Hatwell's opening.

  Finished the set with "Take the Coltrane," played well although he knew he was still pretty much faking it, irritated that the stuff he was playing in the bus had yet to swing into full function, and stepped to the floor when he was done to gladpaw the young lions, already unpacking their axes, and rough out a solo order.

  A quick six beers at the bar, a little light humor with the band, and the Bear was as ready as he would ever be. He attained the stage all huffed up for combat, called "Oleo" at a less than prohibitively fast tempo, played three professional choruses of "Rhythm" changes with lots of chord substitutions on the last sixteen bars just to show the Idds where Bobby, Linton and Garrett would go if beckoned thither; then he waved the first kid up, a tenorist, and stepped to one side of the stage next to Hatwell. Linton tucked his ride cymbal time back in, chicked the hi-hat tighter on two and four than usual and cracked out the occasional Philly Joe Jones accent on the snare. The Bear nodded at Bostic to acknowledge this kindness to the kids coming up.

  It turned out that most of the youngsters would need it: a tenorist who made his way through the changes with some esprit until the rhythm section responded to him, opened things up so that he responded to them and got lost; three trombonists, no surprise, who couldn't work the slide sufficient to bebop at this tempo, although one of the three was an interesting colorist; a guitarist who plugged in and did a credible impression of Kenny Burrell until he got ambitious and ended in a tangle of fingers; two altoists with a certain amoimt of talent still working their way through the fundamentals who were

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  not ready to play with this rhythm section, which was beginning to lose its patience and make trouble—the Bear stepped in for a couple of choruses to restore due process; a guy on flugelhorn who would almost certainly lash himself to tatters in the next few days over the shame of it all, although the Bear was careful to give him a friendly nod and wave at his departure from the stage and then hurriedly out the door into the night, where the weather obliged his sense of personal drama by starting in to rain; a tenorist who had some Sonny Rollins together but probably had downed a beer or two too many while mustering up his courage; another tenorist who swaggered his way through five ill-fitting choruses in which it was painfully obvious he would have been happier playing in another key: he came offstage with his swagger not just intact but inexplicably magnified. And then there was Jerome Parris.

  A shy brown bony kid maybe nineteen with big eyes, a long jaw, cheekbones the rest of his face hadn't made friends with yet, a head shaven just short of clean, and rumpled slacks too long for him that wreathed to a gradual halt on reaching at last his worn-out shoes. He was so shamefaced in his chmb to the stage that the Bear prepared himself to hear the night's most uncertain music so far. And in fact the trumpeter did start off a tad uncertainly, hesitating at the top of the chorus for two bars, head down, watchful, licking his lips, then pursing them and lowering himself to the mouthpiece to meet his rising horn halfway, rather than raising the horn all the way to his chops. By the time he finished the first A section he had shown a fluttery, cumulative sense of line out of Clifford Brown's lyrical side—Dupree Bolton and Carmell Jones instead of Lee Morgan—and the Bear exchanged a round of small nods with his rhythm section to acknowledge the young man's gift; but by his second chorus the kid began to unwrap a gleaming, forthright, brass-proud sound that straightened the Bear's spinal column and won his complete attention.

  Bobby Hatwell looked up and raised impressed eyebrows. Garrett deepened his traction. Linton broke out something wide and shining from his storehouse of grins and came up with a big pressroll out of Blakey to cheer the kid on.

  The complete second chorus was an impressive construction with only one clinker that came in his transition to the bridge, when the kid let loose a lick he had too much practiced or too long treasured—his sincerity betrayed him—but he recovered quickly and the chorus ended on the upsweep to a climax in the third: an array of lines arcing upward to a set of clarion calls at the top of his range at chorus' end. Then he delighted them all by coming down from this peak in his fourth and last chorus—Brownie liked to put Mount

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  Everest in the middle of his solos too—in a series of fallaways, back-references and interstitial spurts of fresh invention before ending just short of fluttertones at the bottom of the horn.

  The house applauded, and Hatwell's solo and the Bear's pro-forma wrap-up had the aura of an aftermath.

  When it was over, the kid tried to escape the club alive but the band encircled him at his table before he could shake his spit-valve clear and get the mouthpiece bac
k in its pouch.

  "Jerome," he said. "Jerome Parris. Excuse me? Yes, nineteen. Oh thanks. Thanks very much." He was unable to retract his head beneath his collarbones. Linton came back with ten longneck bottles of beer on a tray and, although there was some momentary doubt on this score and a quick helping hand from Garrett, got it onto the table without tipping them over.

  "Definitely," Hatwell was telling the young trumpeter. "You definitely ought to come to New York and fiick your life up with the rest of us. I mean, I don't care what you think is wrong with Youngstown, but if you want to see brutality and ugliness, if you want to be shit on enough to make you sing, you got to come visit. We'll show you the town, Jerome."

  "Well, actually," said Parris, "I was thinking of going to the Berklee School of Music. If and when my folks can spare me."

  "Been there done that," Hatwell told him, "and . . ."

  Well actually the Bear was thinking what it might be like to have a quintet, another horn to spell him and a bright young talent to introduce to the greater world, and were it not for the fact that he was still basically hiding out, not really on the scene, only emerging for the occasional peep and payday . ..

  "Actually. . ."

  "No shit?" said Linton. "Trane's father was a tailor too."

  "Really?" And it seemed that Jerome's father's tailor shop had closed down lately, all the jobs leaving town and not a lot of work in the neighborhood, so that Jerome felt he had to stay on just now, help as best he could and continue his trumpet studies with Mr. Middleton—any of you hear of Mr. Middleton?—for the next foreseeable while . . .

  "Aw c'mon, man," Hatwell told him. "You old enough to disappoint your parents by now. Get with the program. Come to New York and get fucked

  up."

  Parris' eyes grew even larger, and looked as if they were welling up with tears. "I love this music so much," he said, and even Hatwell had to put a hand on the kid's shoulder and stop talking.