Dancing in the Dark

by David Donnell

  But Hayden never worried about his hands when he played football, and he never worried about his mind. He didn’t joke around with the older guys in the locker room that much, not especially, not so you would notice, Hayden was very contained, again, not very much like Tom who is tall and thin and likeable, but at times a bit of a schlemiel, a sincere guy but a guy who babbles a bit too much.

  Hayden lived in a garrett, well, a third-floor maid’s room, when he studied in Paris. Not quite like Erik Satie, to whom Hayden’s heart belonged absolutely, although he was not to follow in Satie’s direction. He lived on croque monsieurs and cheap hamburger meat from a little Algerian butcher down the rue. So when he first met Tom in the spring of 1976, Bats brought this tall pale Italian guy with a huge smile into Dempster’s where they were eating after a rehearsal, down on the Lower East Side, he was immediately sympathetic because he thought of himself living in the cold third-floor maid’s room in Paris.

  Following this pace, which was really more a scheduled pace than he really wanted, his feelings about music were pretty wide and handsome, and free and full of initiative. He came back to New York a little restless and wound up doing more work than he really wanted, for NBC and ABC, which is when he first met up with the Desperados.

  Hayden loved the funk of jazz, and the history of European music. He had been named after a great German composer, whom his father had picked up a book about almost by accident, when he was in one of his reading phases, trumpet, reading, lamplight, bourbon and burnout, off to horses and Fox & Wilberson. But Hayden’s father, at that point in time, 31 years ago, knew fields of sweet peas about arranging, knew fields of sweet yams and tobacco about the history of music, European included, historical or otherwise, compared to what his brilliant son Hayden came to know, even some bits and pieces from contemporary South American, although those bossa nova and bossa samba trips were not really Hayden’s specialty.

  So Hayden Washington Jones, 29 at the time, about 4 years older than the other members of the Desperados and much more experienced, in matters of music at least, in matters of composition and genre, half note and full note, harmonic shading and harmonic disruption, continued his daytime work for NBC and ABC, and gave up most of his evening freelance stuff, including an interesting film offer. He became the resident keyboards player and resident arranger for the Desperados. They numbered 7 at that time because Tom had not yet become a member of the group, nor had Tom yet introduced Whitney to the group. And Yvonne had not yet come into the group to do her fabulous one-of-a-kind, Detroit back-up turned around R&B background vocals.

  “I could have a nice tight,” he reflected, “little quartet of my own.” He said this to Tom out of the blue, and it was a very blue day outside, golden, they were going through Kansas, on the tour bus one afternoon. “Cool,” said Tom, and Hayden smiled sideways at him, scrunched a little in the expanded seat. “But then we’d be playing small clubs and I wouldn’t be changing the conventions of large music.” So that was Hayden’s dream.

  “My man,” Tom said, and Hayden leaned over in the cramped quarters of the seat and slapped him gently on his dimpled chin.

  Satie was often one of his main concerns, but most of his jazz friends in New York thought he took Satie too seriously. So after a few sessions together, Hayden helped to form the Desperados, about a year before Tom came along, and apart from the occasional disagreement with Stash, for example, the results were really powerful. He played a major role on keyboards, but more importantly, he wrote everything they played. There were some furrowed brows from time to time, Stash would shake his head, but he would get into it, Stash could play a wicked Stratocaster, Mason would shrug once in a while and say, “I can’t play this.” But, then he would. They were all very good musicians, and they came through for him.

  “Go, white boy, go,” he said under his breath, at the keyboards, in the middle of a concert one night as Stash was lunging out at the very girders of the place with some really impassioned improvisation. And Stash, even though he was lost to the world, black leather pants and a t-shirt that said SAVE THE SOUTH, not the usual blue denim garb favoured by the Desperados, and was in the middle of this deep solo, heard him, even though he said it under his breath. Impossible of course, men are supposed to believe in miracles, because they both wore earplugs. Most of the time, they did. Stash caught his eye a few chords later, and he smiled.

  When Hayden was 15, which was a turning point, he was at a neighbourhood basement one day after school. There were some friends, older, and a couple of girls. One of the boys, Jaime, had a small envelope of white powder. Shit, there wasn’t even very much in the envelope, just a little corner.

  Four or five of them took a small snort each, and they wanted Hayden to try it. Hayden was younger, he was 15, but he had big status partly because he was such a good high school football player.

  “No way, man,” he said, “no way.”

  “Chicken, the football player’s a chicken,” one of the older boys said, and a couple of the others picked up the word, repeating it or changing it to sissy or baby.

  “It won’t bust your gut,” said Jaime, “you don’t want to do it because of your sport.”

  And Hayden had said, “No, it’s not because I’m an athlete, it’s because of my music.” He associated getting high with not being able to play as well as he wanted to play.

  Later that day, in the evening, he was at home sitting in the kitchen doing some math homework. His mother was out at a public school meeting. He had the big radio in the living room turned up loud, listening to it on and off as he worked.

  He was about half-way through his work when he heard some German soprano, he didn’t catch her name, sing Mozart’s amazing aria where the young knight, a sacrificial figure, goes off to meet his death, but first says goodbye to three different people.

  After the aria was over, he sat staring at the table. The radio was still on, it was loud, but he couldn’t hear a thing. When he looked at the sheets of paper in front of him on the table, the sheets seemed to be blank. Then he lit a cigarette, he hardly ever smoked, but his mother had left a package sitting on the table. And when he looked back down at the table, the blank sheets seemed to be alive with muscular and lazy musical notes.

  There was his friendship with Tom, for example, how they complemented each other in different ways, how these two guys, one 27, one 31, one white, Italian, the other black, from Brooklyn, both into music, Hayden much more so, but both into music, the two of them were wildly different in certain ways as individuals. But they complemented each other and were at many times, without being sentimental about this kind of thing in life between people, a bulwark for each other and a sounding board. Hayden with his street smart attitudes was very much alive and open to the world. But this openness was often closed behind a cool polite exterior as far as easy perception might be concerned. Hayden often spoke from a weight of academic courses, his exact reaching for the perfect note, speaking French, speaking, basic vocabulary, a little German, switching in his speaking of American English from Sam Adams to southern drawl, from Boston to a New York downtown accent to a voice that was a little gruffer, perhaps, but delicately, unpredictably shaded with a French phrase.

  There was also the fact that Hayden never really got along with Stash, the player, a southern senator’s son, for Christ’s sake, he had first helped to form the Desperados, after meeting him at a party uptown somewhere; and Henner, the older guy, and ex-con, some people said, they had taken on as manager, sharp, very sharp. He didn’t like Henner very much but didn’t have anything specifically against him. And Whitney, of course, Whitney became a sort of garden of hanging flowers of Ur for Hayden, something to admire gruffly and almost indifferently from a distance, and close up, be outwardly very calm and avuncular. Like Tom’s girlfriend, Whitney, Hayden was better-educated than the other guys, although Hayden, tight end, 6’5”, solid, black, had obviously not gone to Vassar; he had however gone to Yale and Juilliard, so he was
like a professor, a fellow player, a distant often humorous musical genius and a friend.

  His friendship with Tom was more general and full of huge open spaces where they would talk, with only a few tokes of a single joint perhaps, and only a drink or two of bourbon, although the other Desperados drank like fish, maybe some coffee and they would talk long into the night after a concert that had gone well but left them with a variety of ideas to shuffle.

  One of the things they talked about, naturally, Tom and Hayden sitting up late maybe in Hayden’s room or maybe in Tom’s, Whitney off drinking with someone, Mason off to sleep early, Swift, in Sacramento at least, out at the old town Reservoir with two redheads, he hadn’t believed his good luck, he loved redheads and he loved two women at once, “Two redheads is two many women,” said Hayden, but whatever, sitting up late, a few tokes each on one joint, maybe just two drinks each with tons of ice, that sort of thing, one of the things that Tom and Hayden talked about sometimes was how Tom wrote songs, which Tom did naturally, unconsciously, almost spontaneously, in an easy way that he could never possibly, despite however much frustration, duplicate when he wrote stories, fiction, what the class writers wrote, literature, you know, lit terr atchoore, this pain, that was important: and how Hayden wrote music, arranged music, knew where to put the horns, knew how to start off in one time signature and develop a certain kind of rhythm turning into melody and guitar dominated back-beat, and then suddenly turn the whole thing over to keyboards and sonic percussion.

  Tom’s songs, brilliant scribbles really, were nothing without Hayden’s arrangements, without Hayden’s use of the French Horn on “Summer Cottage & Skunks,” a new Tom song, then where would Tom be? Tom made his respect and admiration very evident; but what wasn’t evident, not always at least, was Hayden’s intense interest in how Tom wrote songs like “Summer Cottage & Skunks,” or any other song for that matter. Because Hayden, who could have become a greater composer than the original Haydn, really longed at times to write songs as well, not that it was his main longing, his main longing was obviously music, music, pure music, pure music of a certain kind, what would later be called a “new American avant-garde.”

  But these were subjects Hayden had to lay aside more than he had planned after he began to tour with the Desperados. And it wasn’t because of Whitney, by any means, or, as in Tom’s case, because of the influence of his father. It was simply that he didn’t have enough time. That big word that, after what happened in Texas, came to mean a lot to Hayden.

  Music, time, and various things Hayden associated with his mother, who loved Hayden’s work, not just because she was his mother, but who always preferred, just to be honest, certain Gospel songs, like “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” and “We Shall Gather at the River,” and “Swing Low,” and “Joshua at the Battle of Jericho.” And certain Broadway musical songs, even that somewhat broad comic song from South Pacific, “There Ain’t Nothing Like a Dame,” or “Porgy’s Song,” from Porgy and Bess. Songs she had grown up with, sung in church in some cases, that she preferred to the brilliant and explosive music that her most talented and oldest son wrote while he was with the Desperados.

  And afterwards, after, for example, they put Hayden in prison for three years for somewhat brutally murdering, killing, it wasn’t premeditated, old redcheeks ratshit Henner, their fallible and mendacious manager, then there was time, to think about the angularity of unexpected chords. And to reflect on the fact that Satie is a great composer, but “Will the Circle …” is also a great song.

  But that’s another story, and of a somewhat different colour, or, as the French say, couleur. Couleur, couleur, the bitter fruit of my vengeance is mercy, saith the Lord, or maybe that’s what the road and freight trains have to say.

  DUTCH TOMATOES

  We’ve been getting Dutch tomatoes at Loblaws

  all summer long this year. They cost about 10¢more

  per tomato,

  but they’re a lovely dark red, crimson,

  they’re almost blood red, no splash of green, geogstadt,

  no rough marks or punctures,

  they’re hot house

  but ripened on the vine, & I buy 4 or 5 of them

  plus a snatch of dark green vine and put them on the kitchen

  table.

  Tama Janowitz was cute,

  she wasn’t Dorothy Parker’s big blonde

  with a coarse realistic laugh and a high IQ; she’s small

  & petite & dark

  with an enormous blowsy mass of dark hair

  & a squeaky voice & she wrote a bad splash-of-consciousness

  novel about New York called

  Slaves of New York,

  the title was catchy, she probably got it from a 40s film,

  but there was nothing realistic about the book after all.

  Bart Simpson’s view of Brad Pitt? I don’t think Bart

  Simpson has any view of Brad Pitt, Bart is just a cartoon

  figure, not in Jules Feiffer’s league, that you watch

  while you eat some hot buttered popcorn. Nobody hears anything

  about Tama Janowitz any more, but the Dutch tomatoes come all

  the way from Holland & they’re good & fresh & sweet

  but they lack the character of the Ontario vine-ripened field tomato

  with its stake marks & splashes of field sweet pale green.

  LAKE SIMCOE

  Lake Simcoe afternoons. That was his story

  about why we broke up. My story

  is that he wanted sex every night & when he didn’t get it

  he would be up early in the morning

  walking around in the kitchen with nothing on but a t-shirt,

  blond pony tail slapping against his back,

  dark patch of frown between his sweet blue eyes,

  making good dark coffee

  & standing there with his dick slapping against his thigh

  being brusque. “How did you sleep?” How didja? As if it’s

  just a question of sex

  & physical exercise like sports

  or swimming;

  attentive, sure,

  & self-indulgent & moody.

  Of course that’s what I loved about him, his boyishness, how

  he would sit at the dinner table with one hand loose

  between his legs, elbow of the other arm resting

  on the table while he ate,

  talking excitedly,

  the collar of his J. Peterson blue houndstooth checked shirt

  that I don’t think Thos. Jefferson actually wore

  pushed back against the side of his neck.

  HIGH LINERS

  I used to come home from a film

  or a play

  by somebody like Genet or Ionesco

  when I was in college – 4th year, English Lang & Lit –

  & my roommate

  a big tall moody guy with red hair

  from southern Manitoba, loves basketball, ice cream & girls,

  would be sitting at his blond study desk with all the lights

  on & at least a dozen books spread out on the floor –

  every single book,

  Ulysses by James Joyce, Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence,

  would be opened at the appropriate page

  & high lined in yellow

  or blue or shocking pink. “Hi,”

  he would say, my friend the high liner, “so what didja

  see, anything good, anything sexy?” And I would say,

  “O, The Bald Soprano, by Ionesco, it was really funny.”

  “O,” he would say, “I saw that, they should do it in the

  nude, make it more interesting.” I collapse on an

  available chair & pour out the beer I’ve brought upstairs.

  “So what happens in Women in Love? How does the plot develop

  to the point where Gerald loses his cool?” “O. I don’t know,”

  he’d say,

  “a couple
of good parts, they fit right in to my

  thesis,” & he’d put his feet up on the desk & cover his short curly

  red hair with both hands & moan like a goose.

  ALL THE COOL GIRLS HAVE BIB OVERALLS & ANKLE TATTOOS

  You come in here with those bib overalls

  & walk around

  & I don’t know what to do. You come in here

  with those bib overalls with the carpenter’s pencil

  in the little ½ inch carpenter’s pocket top left full breast

  with no singlet or t-shirt.

  It’s summer, of course, it’s hot,

  & just a flash of pink tropical sherbet briefs

  as you move your long arms

  – there is a bib,

  hence the name, but the overalls are cut low at each side

  & loosely clipped with large steel buttons.

  I don’t know

  if I should offer you a big double gin&tonic with lots of lime

  or if I should excuse myself – another woman – & go for a walk

  up to the store

  or down to Bloor Street, look at some books,

  a new biography of Georgia O’Keeffe, sounds interesting,

  cappuccino at Prego Della Piazza,

  or buy some ice cream.

  It’s hot,

  it’s summer. I’m glad you live on my 3rd floor

  walking barefoot on the polished hardwood of my living room

  2nd floor & you’ve got a cd of Wallace Rooney

  & ½ a fresh musk melon. I should listen,

  but I don’t want

  last week to become a habit, I don’t want to get involved,

  that great gorgeous ball of yellow yarn my mother