The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

  On the way out of Madison to St. Paul a few saHent points were confirmed bv phone: the guy from Doz'?i Beat would meet up with them in Minnesota and yes, they were getting the cover of the September issue. The Bear spoke with the inteniewer on the phone, and after the ritual prelude of childhood reminiscence about animals, the man had wondered if the Bear was basically pro-\Titon or anti-^Tlton, and this seemed a dire omen. Don't fence me in, he'd told the guy, I love eventhing \ }Titon does and he keeps getting better at all of it, and if an art form that throughout its histon* seemed to invent whole new forms of consciousness even' ten years now seems to be pausing for thought and codification that's not VTiton's problem though occasionally it's mine. Yes, the parameters of a classical art form chafe some, but as it happens I'm working my way more deeply into them myself at the moment.

  Now. rolling between cities, he was working up a speech that would compare the explosion of genius in jazz this centur' with the Italian Renaissance—good sense of scale there, he thought—but would point out, however, that there hadn't been a major innovator in the music for thirty^ years. . . .

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  The more he thought about it the more he lost himself in a thicket of quaHfi-cations: the early moderns possibly equal to the cinquecento —nah—or the unimportance of innovation to traditional art forms outside the insatiable maw of Western Sieve, etc. . . . There was no end to it. I'm not talkin', it just don't pay. The interviewer is gonna have to spin the usual line of crap about his childhood and Baloo and Smokey and make the rest of it up.

  With time to spare between Madison and St. Paul, Rondo had taken a byroad along which farmland swept radially past the window, crops of corn fanning past in ordered rows, white farmhouses in the medium distance beneath aluminum phalloi full of grain.

  "Buncha people fucking farm animals when they can't get ahold of their daughters," grumbled Harwell. He was off Percocets, had begun to tipple and hadn't gotten laid last night.

  The Bear reholstered the cellphone and told the band the news.

  "You mean you're getting the cover of Down Beat'' Linton laughed. "Don't you."

  "All they're getting of me," the Bear told the band, since they were watching, "is the back of my hat, a few inches of neckfur and the general shape of my shoulders in a raincoat. You guys get to face the camera and smile for the people."

  "What human musician would treat us this well?" Hatwell asked aloft. "From now on I'm working with paranoid higher mammals exclusively."

  "Also," said the Bear, "the guy just told me if you hook your laptop up to the cellphone in five minutes he'll modem us an advance review of Sensible Shoes. He says they liked it."

  "Modern times," said Hatwell, rummaging in his gigbag for the wiring. "News fi-om the mothership. He said five minutes?"

  But they had to wait ten.

  "C'mon Rahim," the Bear asked Hatwell, who was hogging the screen and slapping Linton away, "what's it say?"

  Hatwell pivoted away from the Bear on the chair. "The album got four and a half stars, I'm a precociously gifted young pianist—we all knew that— and Krieger's meticulous production style, get this, 'failed to capture the Bear's real farriness.'"

  Laughter generally.

  "Would there be anything in there about how I played?" the Bear wondered.

  "Yeah," Bostic interjected, "what's it say about me}""

  "I seem to remember you're not on the record, Lin," the Bear told him.

  "So the fuck what? I'm on the bus."

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  "Wonder what you lost the half-star for," said Hatwell, scrolling up and down. "I know it wasn't me."

  "Actually," said the Bear, "don't tell me anything else, it'll only fuck my head up."

  Bostic started laughing again. "Bear, you're a show," he said.

  "Maybe I'll go in the back and practice."

  "And I love the way you do dedication," Bostic said.

  " 'Not so much an excellent new jazz record,'" Hatwell read aloud, " 'as an unprecedented act of God.'"

  "It says thaty said the Bear, dropping back into his seat and putting a paw to his brow.

  Hatwell snickered at him: "Gotcha."

  "River coming up," Rondo announced from the driver's seat. "The mighty Mississipp in just another mile or two. Real nice crossing on this road. You want to take a look."

  "Yeah, you should check the river out," Hatwell told him. "Where I come from it's all industrial sludge—not to mention the floods this year, though thank God my folks' place is cool. East St. Louis Toodle-00."

  "We could visit them when we ..." he began. Oh but look at the river. The bus soared out, and the Bear looked through the aluminum girderwork at the expanse.

  The light that day was golden: long grassy islands lay here and there shouldering the blue immensity, and the declining sun spilled gold on tall grasses and bluffs back on the eastern bank.

  "Is there any way," the Bear asked Rondo, "we can pull up somewhere on the other side, stretch our legs and have a look?"

  "Sure thing."

  "The Bear discovers America," Hatwell said.

  "T Lobsang Rampa," the Bear agreed.

  Rondo cackled happily. After landfall the bus turned north along the river and followed two-lane blacktop until they came to a place where the shoulder widened sufficient for scenic overlook. Rondo checked the prospect and said it looked cool for wary mammals.

  The Bear was first out of the bus. "See you guys later," he said, waving a vague paw in the air, and dropping to all fours he began to shoulder through the tall dun grass down the bluff toward the blue.

  "Half hour tops," the Bear heard Rondo call, but didn't bother to acknowledge him. It was hot and humid but still sweet rumbling down the bank, a hint of cooler scents coming up to him on a gust from the river. The Bear broke into a trot and let the hillside take him, faster, stumbling, then

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  letting the slope spill him into a somersault—cries and whoops from up there on the roadway as he went over—dry grass breaking under his weight, sweet friction, and an explosion of dust flurrying up into the sunlight and working into his frir. Righting himself, he accelerated to his fastest pace, his head full of pleasure atop this power and pull of muscle, free, then one more tumble over a stray redoubt and a last gallop to the blue running edge of the river. He hit the water fast and hard, stumbled a moment in the unexpected mud underfoot in the shallows, but finally reached sufficient depth and pushed out from shore, volumes of water bellying out from him in waves. Not as cold as he would have wished but it would do.

  During his swim he was unable to rid himself of anxiety over the chance of being observed by cops or other strangers, although he knew that once in the water and from sufficient distance he could be mistaken for a log. He dove, couldn't see very far down there, and came up wuffing his mouth and nose clear. Give me a decent stretch of natural landscape and I'm at the top of the enjoyment chain, I swear. No creature alive takes greater pleasure from the premise of the world as given than I do. So what's my problem really?

  The Bear dove again, deeper this time, testing the capacity of his breath and bumping nose-first into riverbottom—^whut?—long before he'd expected it to be there. Having a great time anyway. Wish you were here. Why was she so uncommunicative on the phone?

  He came out of the river in what he figured was ten minutes, shook himself dry and climbed the bank to where the grass was tallest, chomped down some sweet-tasting green shoots and reclined on his back and elbows to admire the prospect, glad to be delivered from the labyrinth of music back into the apparent simplicity of the world—look at that river; put your nose into that breeze out of the north and wuff down the insinuating texture of its woven scents: there is no end to this except the one we make, sheer tedium. All the same, within a very few minutes his mind wiped an eraser across the view.

  Something in his playing oppressed him, something, it might be, unpleasant about him generally. It had to d
o with the heaviness of obsession.

  Look at the wind combing waves through the grass on that island. That's music for you. That's the way to play. He felt the same wind ruffle the fur on his head. You've always been ambitious. It's fouling your music. There's a heaviness, an obsessiveness, to your work. You're not having enough fun with it. Why can't you play more like the guys?

  What?

  He heard it again, a voice calling from up the bluff, and understanding it was time to go he took in the blue of the river and the gold of the banks and

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  islands one last time, turned his head uphill, and caught Bobby Hatwell sky-hghted by the reddening sun. "What?" he called.

  "Come back to the raft, Huck honey," came Hatwell's voice, brought nearer by a change in the wind.

  The Bear shuffled to his hindfeet, waved acknowledgment, and shook himself dry one last time.

  Back on the bus again, rolling away from the river, music was declared necessary, but there was some discussion as to what to put on the box.

  ^^Black Saint and the Sinner Lady,^^ was Garrett's vote.

  "Again?"

  "There is no end to Mingus," Garrett said.

  In the end Hatwell insinuated a Keith Jarrett trio disc into the machine, but after awhile he began imitating Jarrett's vocal impression of a goat being horribly tormented with a sharp stick in its privates—"I think I'll start doing this onstand," he said, "but I'll do it during the bass solos"—and since he wouldn't stop bleating Garrett got up and switched the music off.

  "You're no fun," Hatwell told him.

  "I know," Garrett said.

  "You know what?" Bostic asked, settied low in the benchseat, legs draped over the table—it had taken him weeks to find this posture but once he had achieved it he could stay in it for hours at a time. His right foot nodded in its hi-top canvas sneaker. "We oughta work on our shit for the Donim Beat interview."

  "Good point," Hatwell said. "Bear, you spoke to the cat, dinchoo. He white?"

  "The interviewer? Think so."

  "See," Hatwell explained, "Linton's right. We should work our shit up. We should keep it dignified—Garrett, I'm talking to you—and we should be extra extra careful not to bring up any unfortunate cultural stereotypes." He leaned across the aisle toward Bostic with an empty beercan in his hand and extended it like a microphone. ^''Down Beat here. First question. How do you like to beat yo' ho'?"

  Bostic laughed. "I likes to give de ho' the back of mah hand," he said into the beercan, "when de ho' ain't lookin. Trick is, look left, hit right, 'cause if de ho' see it comin' she move her head and I could hurt mah hand and den I has to cut her."

  "And how do you like to cut yo' ho'?"

  Garrett got up, walked back to the CD player and rummaged amid the plastic boxes. Bostic watched him.

  "Appalled?" Hatwell asked the Bear.

  "Yes thanks."

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  Garrett had selected a disc, and they could hear the anticipatory whirr of the player above the roadnoise and the air conditioner. Coltrane came on.

  "Oh shit. God is in the house," Bostic said. "We have to cut this shit out."

  "Our bassist has shamed us," Hatwell said, and hung his head.

  It was "Crescent," and they sat listening to Trane's evolving solo, the gathering crests of his phrasing, the periodic releases as thematic waves broke smooth and ordered on the shore.

  "Well," said the Bear, "there it is."

  "Yeah let's all play like that," Hatwell agreed.

  "You ever see Trane play live?" Bostic asked the Bear.

  "I was just a cub."

  "We hate you an}^way. Tell us about it."

  "Jones took me down to Birdland on a leash. Don't laugh. We used to play with the imagery. Once or twice Jones wore shades and acted blind and I'd lead him. Our surrealist phase. You should've seen the double-takes."

  "Coltrane," Hatwell reminded him.

  "He was pretty hard to hear over the drums once Elvin Jones got going."

  "C'mon, what was it likeV

  "Something Hke being burned alive," said the Bear, back there, seeing it. "I was still a cub but I thought I'd experienced everything there was in the world and Trane was this enormous dose of Oh no you haven't, either. It was too much for me but it left a deeper mark on me than anything else I've ever heard." ^

  "Uh huh."

  "Part of my problem was that I had to keep acting like your typical ani-mule and instead I kept moving to the music and watching Trane. Jones kept yanking on the leash and telling me to keep the act up. You guys really interested in this?"

  "Yeah."

  "What can I say? I remember thinking once or twice that there was nothing left for Trane to do but levitate or burst into flames. Because the resources of music as such were over, exhausted."

  "Look at his eyes," Hatwell said.

  "Nice glaze," was Bostic's comment.

  "Elvin used to come over, hunker down and play with me between sets. You have any idea how strong his hands are?"

  "I shook hands with him a couple times," Linton said. "It hurt."

  "Then you know. He practically tore my head off. Trane came over once or twice and just stood there looking at me."

  "You talk to him?"

  "Are you kidding? I couldn't have talked to him if I tried, I was in such

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  awe of him. I loved looking at his face, though. Those eyes. That smile. He smoked cigars."

  "Thank you for that important fact," Hatwell said.

  "Carla Bley used to stop by the table and scratch me behind the ears too. She thought I was cute. You know she was the cigarette girl at Birdland, right? her way of getting in to hear the music for nothing, but she did the whole thing, pink costume, fishnet stockings, big tray of cigarettes and teddy bears. Jones was hung up on her but she just wanted to play with me."

  "You was coppin' feels off her," Bostic said laughing. "I know it."

  "I really don't remember," the Bear sniffed. "J™my Garrison wanted to bring me some food from the kitchen but Pee Wqq Marquette told him no .. . You know who Pee \ ee Marquette was?"

  "The midget emceed the place," Bostic said.

  "The guy Lester Young called 'half a motherfucker,'" Garrett remembered.

  "Right," said the Bear, "and Jimmy got in an argument with Pee \ ee about feeding me and once the band went back up Pee \ ee told us we had to leave. His cologne smelled worse than amniiing. God, he stank."

  "W^e're so pri^'ileged just to be on this bus with you," Hatwell said piously.

  "He saw Trane."

  "He copped feels off Carla Bley in her prime."

  "He has experienced more than we \ill ever know."

  "He weighs more than all of us put together."

  "He smells like shit from the river."

  Onstand in a suburb of St. Paul that night the Bear felt something in himself let go. He uncovered a creamy hiicism on ballads, a greater amplitude of swing on the mid-tempo tunes and didn't feel rushed on the quick ones. Toward the end of the evening he experienced the first flutters of something like the old bliss at the entrance to his heart, and isions beckoned him from beyond the edge of things. He wasn't ready for that yet—too much work to do down here—but he began to experience, for the first time in ages, the music actually beginning to lift him, to invite himi level upon level through higher, ampler, more satisfying worlds. Xot yet, he said firmly. I've botched this stuft" before, but I hope if the time is right again I'll be ready.

  If you stand where I stand you will see what I am.

  Little one.

  WTien he went to sleep after the gig that night, the Bear had no idea he was dreaming when he walked into a theater that might well have been set up in a tent. The stage, brightly but not harshly ht—in fact the light was exceptionally pleasant—had a square of white canvas for backdrop, and when the

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  jugglers were introduced, a number of red
, orange and yellow geometrical objects—circles, triangles, squares—appeared onstage and began tossing themselves to each other across the stage, sometimes changing into each other—red triangle into orange square—as they were caught.

  The Bear thought it was the most wonderful thing he had ever seen.

  "And now," a voice announced from offstage, "ladies and gentlemen, the Circle."

  The brighdy colored objects now began to whirl in a circle against the white canvas backdrop, going faster and faster, wider and wider, and beginning to blur slighdy with the speed of their motion. The Bear was so completely taken with the charm of the show that it did not even occur to him to laugh or applaud: he felt Hke doing both, but did neither because it would distract him, and besides it wasn't needed. As the circle widened, the whirling shapes began turning green, blue and purple at the edges of their orbit and the light onstage brightened still more pleasantiy. It was wonderful to watch. That was when the Bear woke up.

  He lay there in the bunk awhile, enjoying the memory of the show and wishing he could see it again. He knew he would never be able to explain to anyone, or even to himself, how enchanting a dream it was: the bright colors, the cheerful light, the sense of play. It took him about five minutes to realize that these "jugglers" were in some sense the guys in the band, and that what he had been enjoying was their essential freedom, unmediated by the conditions of world and place and time: what he had called their youth.

  The fanny thing was, every time he went outside the changes on them, which he'd done once or twice on an experimental basis and for a whiff of the old days, for all their hoo-ha freedom the guys didn't know how to come up with a group response. Bobby, who had done so well when they were taking it outside on the Shoes session—but he'd had Charlie Haden to steer by—now either laid out or played meandering empty octaves, looking for home and a glass of tonic. Garrett tried to follow the Bear's tonal drift but unlike Haden had to think four beats and by the time he'd made his choice the Bear had moved the action elsewhere. When Linton heard the Bear going out, he played more eccentric polyrhythms and left some of his phrases unfinished— you know, weird —which didn't really cut it. The Bear gave up on it after two tunes and wouldn't try it again. It must be a generational thing, he supposed.