The Day the Bozarts Died

by Larry Duberstein

  “And which is nothing but a dumb tourist trap.”

  “Is that so, Stanley? And here we were, convinced it was right at the cutting edge of genetics.”

  “Point taken.”

  “Do come visit, though. Bring your clubs! Isn’t that what one says?”

  They sounded so dotty, so fraudulent, they simply had to be covering up the truth. Here’s what I think. I think the B’s were zeitgeisted. They decided to leave because so many others had. The weapon of choice isn’t raw muscle, it’s subliminal messaging. Just make the Bozarts a half-empty inhospitable place instead of a lively hive and colorful haven, make it reek of death instead of life …

  … and keep nicking up the rents. In 1979, even in 1989, there was no place near as affordable. Since then we had lost people to lower rents in funkier neighborhoods, surrounding towns. Jan got herself cheap digs right in Sycamore Square; Richie went farther out, half an hour of hard travelin’ from a decent cup of coffee. Though I told him (when he took that charm-free loft in Woburn, where they famously poison their citizens, we’ve all seen the movie) “Why not fucking Chernobyl, man? I hear you can get something there for just a few kopecks a month.”

  The B’s did leave me a small legacy, bless them. They absolutely knew my lifelong reputation for murdering every plant I have ever been entrusted with, sometimes killing with kindness (overdoses of water, overdoses of brutal sunlight), sometimes through neglect, and just the one time with displaced anger, when I hurled a spider plant out the window at Stefanie as she was leaving me.

  (“You forgot something,” was my line, as I threw it. “I’ll forget you, Stanley, hopefully within the hour,” was hers.)

  They had heard that story and yet they entrusted me with the three sturdy gerania, in full red flower. It is a source of pride to see those plants still blooming today (hardy fuckers) because the B’s mattered to me. I did not want to let them down.

  So now we were five (and barely alive, to quote) in four studios. Down to seeds and stems, as Clapper ruefully observed. In Kristen Dane’s parlance, we were at 33% occupancy, though good-natured undepressible Ed was prepared to keep kidding himself. If we could simply imagine that the “physical plant” was smaller, that it could accommodate only five artists, “Then heck, we’d be at 100% occupancy,” he cried, adding, as he often did, “Q.E.D.”

  Well yes, Eddie, and if the fat man was thin he would probably weigh less. But there was nothing for it but to knuckle down and keep working. Be the artists and let them be the assholes. And luckily, I had just begun digging into a new play, a humdinger potentially, which revolved around that cadre of great old Cuban musicians discovered (or rediscovered, since they had been Famous Long Ago) a few years back.

  They had been celebrated and prosperous, they had played the big clubs and hotel ballrooms around pre-Castro Havana. Then came the Revolution and, like their counterparts throughout Eastern Europe, they were thenceforth compelled to scratch out a living away from their music. They dug ditches, rolled cigars, swept the streets—in Cuba, all the jobs were “day jobs”—while music became a recondite leisure activity, reserved for house parties, pig roasts, yards and verandahs on Saturday night. The gaiety went underground.

  By chance I had met two of those guys shortly before they became the happening thing. Nina was going to an academic conference in Havana and managed to bootleg me along on a three-day visa. Adjunct Professor Noseworthy!

  Our government had finally come to understand that the whole Cuba policy was absurd (this was the inter-regnum, we were between Bushes) yet could concede this truth in veiled ways only, by allowing such cultural and educational exchanges. So we were lucky enough to hear the dudes play in a back alley café, to an audience of six (but hey, if the joint had held only six, they would have enjoyed 100% attendance!) and we bought them a bottle afterward. They were sensational: just keyboard and drums, and snatches of vocals.

  Two years later they were playing to a packed house at Carnegie Hall. Their music was irresistible and America, for some strange reason, did not resist it. It bought and bought, and the Cubans were hot hot hot.

  They were known as the Buena Vista Social Club, though they were neither a club, a band, nor even an entity. Sometimes there were two of them, sometimes eight or nine. They were simply the best older musicians in Cuba. Some were old friends, some were meeting for the first time. They ranged in age from 55 to 90, in skin color from the near white of the invading Spaniard to the near black of Dinka tribesmen, in class from the menial sugarcane fieldworker to the bass player whose brother went to law school with Fidel. Of the two we encountered that night in Havana, one lived with his mother and the other had been married four times, siring 27 children whose names and birthdates he insisted on reciting to us. “I take care of my kids,” he declared, proudly and in English.

  These men would form my cast of characters. The scenario would unfold aboard a dilapidated bus (brilliantly low budget, a single clever set) as it goes rollicking through the Cuban countryside in an imagined moment when Ry Cooder is pulling together the documentary film and the recording that will soon set them free. In the course of a two-hour bus ride, we would witness the gamut of their experience, see them both in conflict and in communion, as half a dozen smoldering subplots played out. A rich stew, bubbling along. And since there were no women in that first wave of players, I would conjure ways to get a few onto the bus (hitchhikers, mistresses, runaways, prostitutes, groupies …) so that we could also see that side of their lives directly, not merely through the tall tales told by men.

  My apologies for going on about this, because the details hardly matter. What matters is that I was engaged and productive, living large in a downer-free zone. Nina and I were going great guns on the home front, too. We had come roaring past the five-year hash mark (a new personal best for each of us) with no end in sight. True, she sometimes expressed the wish to breed, but she also seemed willing to trade her strict timetables on breeding for the rare connection we so clearly possessed. And remember, even for a woman on the Bioclock, a child will not necessarily increase the happiness.

  So we took our latesummer trip to Maine, we dinnerpartied with her circle, we played Friday night poker with Barney and Chloe and their gang. We had a life and continued living it together in a house which, thanks to the curious ways and means of a divorce court, had previously belonged to the parents of Nina’s ex-husband Bob.

  The provenance did strike me as tricky. “This doesn’t bother you?” I asked her one night, as we lay where her ex-in-laws had lain for decades, quite possibly where Bob himself had been conceived.

  “Not a lot, no. Though I do agree we should sell it and buy a new house when we’re married.”

  Agree? Married?

  “Maybe you’re right,” I said. It is a line I have found to have a soothing effect on women when such subjects crop up.

  “I don’t mean new new. The house itself has to be old.”

  “The plumbing works better in new houses,” I said, steering the conversation toward our recent struggles with the drains. For the past month, we had been on first name terms with the Roto Rooter Man. (Hey, Stan. Hey, Carl.)

  “Jenna swears that new plumbing is just fucked up in different ways than old plumbing.”

  “Maybe she’s right,” I said, before launching us in a more romantic direction (with Nina, you start where the neck curves softly into the shoulder …) and closing the can of worms I had so carelessly opened.

  We were good, we were stringing months together, building a sixth year of beer and skittles. Nina was doing her thing and I was doing mine. A rough stab at the Cubans had made its way to an agent’s desk, and from there into the paws of a producer. It had come back with a raft of suggestions, which was fine by me. I wanted to get those old gents right. They had begun as mere sketches, for portraits; ideally, they would become the people who sat for those portraits.

  Such was the status on a November day which at first blush appeared completel
y ordinary. Or better than ordinary, for that morning we had worked the two-backed beast to perfection (like two old smoothies moving together out on the dance floor) and had gone on to install our bagel and coffee quotas, sitting contentedly in our assigned seats in Nina’s ex-husband’s parents’ ex-sunroom. We were sugar and cream, dammit. Kissed and went off to work, heigh-ho heigh-ho.

  At the Bozarts, I tweaked a few scenes, watered the gerania, chatted with Ed … and did not chat with Rose Gately, though twice she paraded in blue jeans worn so thin they were white at the seat, a second skin encasing the splendor of her buttocks. I pretended not to notice. Pretended she had been blessed with no such buttocks—had, so far as I knew, no buttocks at all! I gave the approved grunt of greeting and returned to my studio. Such a good boy.

  Then, just as I was leaving for the day, Jan Edelman dropped by to ask a question. She had the old team photo with her, the Original 12 taken on the first anniversary, 1980, and she could not remember the guy in the cowboy hat, standing next to Monk.

  “Early Alzheimer’s, I guess. I can not remember who this dude is.”

  “Do you at least remember sleeping with him?”

  “Very funny. That I did not do.”

  “How can you be so sure? I mean, what with the Alzheimer’s—”

  “Just tell me who the hell he is, Stan. And rest assured, I remember everyone I have ever slept with.”

  “Do you remember sleeping with me?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “Vaguely!”

  “I’m kidding. Of course I do. Three times in all, 1982 the year, each of us mildly harmed by others and seeking solace. Or me seeking solace, you as usual seeking sex. It didn’t take and we didn’t push it.”

  “I recall thinking it took just fine.”

  “Not me. I recall thinking: he doesn’t find me that attractive, it will ruin our friendship, what’s the point?”

  “Solace, is what you said. And sex.”

  “Who is he, Stan. What did he do here?”

  “Nothing. He was a friend of Carla’s, here from L.A. or maybe San Diego. The Coast. And Deirdre was away the day that picture was taken, so there are 12 people but only 11 are real.”

  “He’s a ringer.”

  “Yes, and that’s precisely what you called him that day. Clapper said let’s put him in the picture, what the hell, he looks pretty good—”

  “Great hat.”

  “—and you, my dear, objected on purist grounds. He doesn’t belong, the picture will be fraudulent, he looks like a fucking rhinestone cowboy …”

  “It’s true. And you resolved it with some of your inimitable bullshit about the flaw in the weave, and how it would symbolize the Bozartian embrace of inclusiveness.”

  “That was it. We all said cheese and there we are. Or were. Just look at us.”

  The 12, man, and the good old days. Kicking around some of the stories, Jan and I couldn’t help getting a little sentimental. We were staring back at our youth, our prime. Hell, when that photo was snapped, Jan was thin and single, with Joan Baez hair. I could still run a 4:35 mile, still high-jump six feet easily. Now I can barely jump my sister’s dog, albeit he is a big ’un.

  There we were, the menfolk with dark drooping mustaches and long long hair (Clapper sporting the Guinness Book of World Records Jewish fro) and the ladies in peasant skirts and shawls and long long hair—except for Carla whose hair was short short, a Fort Bragg buzzcut to proclaim her militancy. Tech got a bang for its buck from that lineup of freaks, though. They have stuff in galleries and museums, stuff on the walls of the rich and the night-tables of the famous. They were good.

  They were also clearly dated. People do not look like that anymore, nor do the corridors of this building ring with the glorious sound of their ferment. The joint was jumping back then. Every connection—pharmaceutical, philosophical, sexual—was at least to be considered. Why not?

  Now as I watched Jan leave, saw her fasten the bloody seatbelt in her new silver Subaru (and yes it’s trite, but back in the day she drove an old VW bus with the slabsides painted trompe l’oeil to resemble ecclesiastical stained glass) I felt the full force of change. The illusion that we were viable or ongoing (whether at my 33 % or Ed’s 100) fell away with a thunk, because we were in the toaster, man. We were toast.

  So as I trudged home to Nina’s ex-husband’s parents’ ex-house on Euclid Street, I was sorely in need of her consoling restorative love. I was counting on her bigtime, maybe to the point where I might let her count on me in return, for this was one of those moments when our deal felt like a bountiful compromise. Had Nina posed her central question (“How do I know you will be there for me in 20 years?”) I might have dropped directly to my knees and thrust forward a brilliant diamond ring. Skaty-eight carrots, man. I might have rendered for her Ben Jonson’s very best line: “Drink to me only with thine eyes/And I will pledge with mine.”

  My heart was that way risen as I came to the gate. Beyond it lay Nina’s vision of happiness: a jungle of house plants, Chinese lanterns, bright orange blankets from Mexico. I was never so ready for the music of her voice (a voice which routinely caused men to fall for her over the phone, sight unseen), ready for the hazel eyes, the silken hips. Nina my love!

  Synchronicity is a seriously underrated factor in our relationships. If mutual attraction were sufficient, there would be fewer ships in the night. The lovers must be revealed to one another at the right moment in time, they must be ready to fall in step, and they will need luck to stay in step. On that slushful downcasting day, my luck with Nina Spiller had run out.

  I came up the short path from the street, opened the storm door, and stumbled upon a clue the size of Rhode Island before I got anywhere near the orange blankets. My true love had packed my “things” (which is to say she had stuffed two mongo trash bags with my clothes and three cartons with my contributions to our cultural inventory) and placed them in the vestibule.

  Important contributions, by the way. All the blues, jazz, and gospel was mine, and all the hardcore country-and-western. That girl had never even heard of The Hanks before she met me. Hank Locklin, Hank Cochran, Hank Thompson, and Hank Snow, you could maybe not hear of—but Hank Fucking Williams?

  This generation gap thing is brutal, because it’s really an education gap in disguise. The roots of knowledge do not go wide or deep in the age of “communication.” Those kids can put 10,000 tunes on a P-pod and 10,000 e-mails in a BlueBerry, but the Greek dramatists? Euripides? Who he? And forget about Volpone or The School for Scandal? So it only starts (or ends) with The Hanks.

  The vestibule, though, and Stan needy. Stan vulnerable, remember, so much so that he has been leaning here toward long-term bondage, only to find his worldly belongings on the launch pad. He comes “home” to this.

  Isn’t there supposed to be a process? You can’t just stick someone with the black spot in a vacuum (and please don’t tell me I have to footnote the fucking black spot), you need a context. You need mounting tensions, angry bedtimes, ugly misunderstandings. The mongo trash bags are counter-intuitive.

  Yet there they are. (Stan taking them in. Stan weighing his options in the damp vestibule, preparing to select a Response from the Response Menu …)

  For it is the case that Stanley Noseworthy has played this scene, in roughly this same drama, a few times in the past. On some stages (Francie Waters, Anna Klein) it was badly done. Love is what charges both player and script with the necessary dramatic tension and I did not love Francie Waters or Anna Klein.

  With Stefanie Olmsted it was another story. Steff, love of my life; Steff, who would not only leave me flat but forget me within the hour, I presume, since she announced that intention and never again granted me audience.

  Steff was 28, the magic number, when I plummeted into what I have since concluded was love with her. I could acclaim that girl from here to Harlan and never begin to convey what she brought to the table, or to the bed. I could compare her to a summer’s day, as Shakespe
are did, or confess with him that I had eyes to wonder yet lacked tongue to praise. Steff was the Bomb.

  Also the prototype. Every woman who came to me in her wake has been 28 upon matriculation. Nina may have been 33 on the night of the long knives, but she too was 28 when we met, standing in the shipping channel at Onset Beach. Waist-deep that afternoon, we were soon up to our necks when back in Canterbury she ceased nitpicking definitions and just went for it, two days straight, with breaks for meals and showers.

  They have all been 28, give or take: Francie, Anna, Dawn, Sylvia. So was I, for that matter, back when Steff and I combined our talents. But then it seems I was 35, and 38, and 42.… It starts looking not good. Where’s our endgame, 82 and 28? A nice numerical palindrome, but heads might turn.

  “I finally figured this out, that’s all,” said Nina, when the discussion that had not happened did at last happen. (Still in the vestibule, I might add.) But was it Nina I heard, or was it Stefanie? The words were the same. But it was not the words that surprised me, it was the timing. Steff and I had been battering each other for months, whereas Nina and I had never been closer. Nor had I ever been so inclined to make the long-sought-after concession speech. Whatever I was looking at here, it was the exact opposite of synchronicity.

  “What are you even talking about?”

  “I am talking about the fact that you, Stanley, are a hopeless toad. A lost cause. A bad penny. A loser.”

  “Where is this coming from, Nina?”

  “A shit-heel, a lemon, a loser—”

  “You already said loser. But go ahead and vent, if you need to. Whatever this is actually about.”

  I knew as I recited my lines that the game was over, and I knew why. The passion wasn’t there. I sounded cold. Plus, you never want to be witty, or be scoring any points when facing the full nutty. When the Bioclock hits the big tick, you are looking at pure emotion and any sharp phrasing can only make things worse.

  I also knew what might get me back into the game. I knew what was “non-negotiable.” Baby Tess.