Late Arcade

by Nathaniel Mackey

  Later in the day, still bothered by the dream, I told Djamilaa about it, how much it had me disconcerted and how much it puzzled me. I went on and recounted it for her. After hearing it, she sucked her teeth and said, “Don’t worry. It wasn’t yours. You were dreaming someone else’s dream. That was Penguin dreaming about Drennette.” She would say no more.

  I haven’t had a chance to talk with Penguin but she said it so summarily, said it with such utter finality, confident to the point of dismissiveness, I can barely imagine she might be wrong.

  What do you think?

  Yours,

  N.

  17.II.84

  Dear Angel of Dust,

  I got a chance to talk with Penguin and I asked him about the dream. He says yes, he has dreamt it, more than once in fact, but he wouldn’t go so far, he says, as to say it’s about Drennette. The “certain someone” in the dream when he’s dreamt it, he says, looks nothing like Drennette and doesn’t, in the way she speaks, walks, carries herself and so on, resemble Drennette. “Anyway,” he said emphatically, “I haven’t dreamt that dream in a very long time. I dreamt it two or three times, the last about five or six months ago. Since then it seems to have gone away or been put away, like a tune a band retires from its book.” I was struck by the analogy. He too, as soon as it left his lips, appeared to be struck by it, pausing as if hearing an echo of it, giving it further thought. “How strange,” he went on to say, “that it popped up again, not to mention getting dreamt by someone else.”

  Why me? He couldn’t help wondering nor could I. Is it my listening to his going on about Drennette, his bending my ear the way he so often has, my sitting still for it? Did that do it, did that open me up in some way? Did that in some way make me a surrogate or a host? “It’s not about Drennette,” he shot back when I asked out loud. “Of course not,” I said, not wanting to make an issue of it, and went on to wonder, again out loud, what order of dream transfer it was we were dealing with, dream theft, dream contagion or what. Neither Penguin nor I could help recalling Dredj’s dream, its roundabout exchange with “Dream Thief,” ideas of dream transit, dream transport, crowding in on us. Was Dredj the connection, we wondered, the conduit, Penguin’s dream’s way into my sleep? Yes, that was it we agreed.

  We no sooner agreed than Penguin looked at me and said, “Getting back to Drennette, whom it’s not about, or getting back, I should say, to it not being about Drennette, I need to say about ‘a certain someone’ that she’s the one we have that we don’t have or the one we had that we don’t have, the one we have by not having, that we have to have without having. You being new to this, I need to tell you she’s the one whom to have would be not to have, to have let slip away in a presumption of having.” He stopped as though winded by what he’d said, as though it were an hour-long speech he’d finished. I found myself set back, silent, not knowing what to say, and when he gathered himself again, got his wind back, he said, simply repeating himself, “I tell you this because you’re new to it.” He paused a beat before adding, “I haven’t dreamt that dream in ages.”

  I wasn’t sure anymore. I thought maybe I’d agreed too soon, settled on Dredj as the connection too quickly. Maybe, to begin with, “Why me?” isn’t the question. What if Lambert dreamt the dream too, like the time the three of us dreamt the Djeannine dream? Maybe this was us dreaming a collective dream again, staggered instead of dreamt at the same time, and if Lambert hasn’t dreamt the dream, could it be that he just hasn’t dreamt it yet?

  It may turn out to be inconclusive, I know, but I need to speak with Lambert and I’m going to speak with him next.

  As ever,

  N.

  18.II.84

  Dear Angel of Dust,

  A quick note to say I spoke with Lambert. I didn’t recount the dream or go into particulars. I simply asked had he dreamt of “a certain someone,” figuring he’d know what I meant if he had. (I didn’t want his dreaming the dream, if he hasn’t yet but goes on to dream it in the future, to have been influenced by my telling it to him.) He had no idea what I meant. “A certain someone? Meaning who?” he asked. I told him he’d have known if he had. I told him he must not have and that I’d leave it at that, except that if he eventually does dream it he’ll know it and to let me know if he does.

  So that’s it for now, the upshot being it’s up in the air, still up in the air. What exactly my dreaming the dream signifies we won’t know until we see whether Lambert dreams it too, which could take a while. At what point, if he doesn’t do so soon, do we decide he most likely never will? The five or six months it took between the time Penguin last dreamt it and the time I did? More than that? Nine months? A year? We’ll see I’d like to say but I’m not sure.

  Otherwise, not much is up. We did venture up to Hollywood the other night to a place on the Strip called Club Lingerie, a pop music spot that’s been there about ten years, though it’s not a place we normally frequent or had even been to before. What took us there was a one-night gig by Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society, a band we’ve heard on records but not live. It was a chance we couldn’t pass up, no matter how incongruous the venue seemed to the music or to the way we, at least, hear the music, though on further reflection it made a certain amount of sense, given labels like “free funk” and “avant-funk” that’ve been applied to it. Anyway, I’m not sure the Club Lingerie crowd was quite ready for what Jackson and his band brought, not sure they knew what hit them. I can’t exactly say we were ready or that we ourselves knew what hit us.

  For one, even though we’d heard some of their albums—Eye on You, Street Priest, Mandance, Barbeque Dog—we weren’t prepared for how physical they got live and in person, how physical the music got. To begin with, the place was packed, teeming with bodies and body heat before a single note was hit, and then when the band began to play it came on strong, loud, hard, the guitar amps and the PA system turned up to peak volume it seemed, ear-splitting volume, an impact or effect aided by the piccolo range Jackson likes to compose in (something Ornette pointed him toward, we’ve heard), the timbral ping the music typically rings with. It made one’s head ring, one’s bones and body ring, subject to an avant-primal assault bent on recalling the word avant-garde’s military roots it seemed, a ringing the club’s occasional recourse to strobe lights further assisted. You felt the music at least as much as you heard it.

  Club Lingerie, our initial senses of it notwithstanding, proved in many ways to be the perfect venue. A young, beautiful, hiply dressed crowd filled it with glamour and gams, miniskirts on the waitresses and on many of the patrons as well, making for a sexy ambience that was lent further sexiness by the very name of the club, its conjuration of chemises, teddies, babydolls, g-strings, corsets, garter belts and stockings, shelf bras and the like. It was Hollywood to the core, Frederick’s of Hollywood in another guise, all the more congruent, by virtue of that, with the physicality of Jackson’s music, the bodily press it put on, its purveyance of a bodily aromatics the word funk attempts to get at. We knew nothing, the band instructed us, the way it got physical, the way it came on, if we ignored the sexiness of sweat, the wet working-out of beauty’s mandate.

  It would have been impossible not to pick up on all of this. Indeed, Penguin, during the break between sets, remarked that the Decoding Society’s brand of funk seemed “exquisitely its own, high-end and, exactly as has been said of it, avant-funk.” He went on to liken it, wincing a bit as he spoke, as if the extremity of the figure gave him pause, to “an ever so uric whiff coming off the crotch of a pair of silk panties.” It was, though, a figure Aunt Nancy not only agreed with at once but went further with. “Pee and perfume,” she said simply, “piss and perfume.”

  I mention this outing because we appear to’ve uncovered the origins of the 4/4 shuffle that visited us a year ago at The Studio and once again, in a bit of a teasing, attenuated form, at the Comeback Inn in September. Why we’d never noticed
it before will always be a mystery but there it was in Jackson’s music, the 4/4 shuffle, in one of the pieces they played that night, “Man Dance” it seemed at the time, though it might’ve been “Shaman.” Drennette was the first to notice, leaning over our table and all but shouting to be heard above the music, “You hear that? It’s the 4/4 shuffle.” We all picked up on it eventually, buried as it somewhat was beneath an extended shiver the horns maintained.

  On our way out of the club, after the second set ended, it all came back to Aunt Nancy, who had introduced the shuffle during the gig at The Studio, that a couple of Cecil Taylor records, 3 Phasis and Live in the Black Forest, made while Jackson was in the band, had probably been her subliminal prompt. I gave both records a listen earlier today and I could definitely hear it, on the second side, as it turns out, of each record—the second half of 3 Phasis and what’s a bit like the same piece under a different title on Live in the Black Forest, “Sperichill on Calling.” It seems to me, in fact, to epitomize the difference Jackson made in Cecil’s band.

  It was reassuring to hear the shuffle come up in Cecil’s music, to hear it could be avant without the funk. It relieved us of some of our qualms about it, our fear of a certain concession to pop. We enjoy the Decoding Society and we had a good time at Club Lingerie, but we wouldn’t want our music to go as far as they go in that direction. The venue and the music did fit, as I’ve already said—the glamour, the sexual glitz, the not so oblique appeal. Lambert summed it up as we were leaving: “I’m surprised the balloons didn’t show up.”

  Yours,

  N.

  27.II.84

  Dear Angel of Dust,

  As Lee would say: Boy, what a night! The owner of the Comeback Inn called Lambert earlier in the day and said it was his wife’s birthday, that he wanted to do something special for the occasion and he was wondering if we were available, wondering if we’d be willing to play. He said something about coming back to the Comeback Inn or coming back into the Comeback Inn, Lambert told us, with or without a straight face, he added, he couldn’t say, seeing as they were on the phone. Be that as it may, Lambert went on, he answered yes and they settled on the money and what time we’d be there. Talking about the gig after Lambert let us know, we decided it might be a good time, as good as any at least, to try handing out balloons to the audience, the idea I wrote you about a few letters back. There’d likely be balloons decorating the place for the occasion anyway, so why not? This would give us a kind of camouflage Penguin pointed out, doing so without saying why he thought we might need it, a potential nit the rest of us chose not to pick. We agreed it was all the more reason to give it a try.

  I’d actually grown to be a little reserved about the idea since I last wrote you about it, more and more coming to see it in relation to the night I sat in with the Crossroads Choir, the “Only One” balloon the audience kept afloat during “Body and Soul.” I had already been there it seemed, been there and done that it seemed. I already knew the participant quantum that contained air in the hands of an audience could be, in their hands or just outside them, either way. Would it be a return to that I wondered, knowing in particular I wanted no more of the halfway-around-the-world romance I had recourse to that night, no mere mention even. At some level I knew there was no reason to think the balloons would bear such baggage but at another level they seemed as bound up with it as the “Only One” balloon had been that night. Warmed-over romance I called it, dismissing it with a sneer, haunted, even so, by the possibility that an equally warmed-over social romance, a stale albeit yet to be achieved romance of collectivity, took its place in what we thought the balloons might do or what I thought they might do. Did I want us to revisit the “Only One” balloon, revise it, in some way pluralize it?

  Just thinking about it, problematize it though I did, conjured a musical motif whose contour had the feel of having come the way my way out of my qualm would track and retrace, a bent-winged bird of a motif my lips veritably itched to work out on a mouthpiece, reed or brass no matter, a lick-driven theorem concerning the one, the two and the many. (Listen, to hear what I mean by lick-driven, to Wilber Morris’s “Miss Mack” on his Wilber Force release or to Dewey Redman and Ed Blackwell’s “Willisee” on Red and Black in Willisau.) Could a lick be said to grow legs or a motif to grow them for it, that’s what what I heard sounded like, what the motif I had in mind would do. I heard a symphonette of sorts, a micro-symphonette wound up in a four-bar motif whose unwinding one would never complete, return to the tonic no matter, the one, the two and the many each only more active the more apparently moot.

  There would be or might as well have been, that is, an “Only Two” balloon and there would be or might as well have been an “Only Many” balloon, “only” by turns a valorizing claim to singularity (one two, one many) and a dampening, a disclaimer, putative singularity disavowed (merely two, merely many). Two would be one only as the many would be one, a social predicate or a political prerequisite I’d advance with an austere pucker (it more and more appeared to be brass I had in mind), an austere pucker free of all recourse to recollected sex—as though, I wanted to say, one “wet” one’s lips with dry ice, as though what would again have been touted as closure came off as cosmetic arrest.

  “Marginal center,” I said instead, as much tonguing the eventual mouthpiece as muttering it to myself. I meant no more than to stencil a self-correcting wobble, sonically rendered or regraded warble, a slaptongue sputter as high as the horn would go. So it was I not so much overcame as incorporated the reservation I’d come to feel. I was ready for whatever lay in store at the Comeback Inn, as were the rest of the band.

  We got there a little before 8:00 as Lambert and the owner had agreed, having set up and run thru a sound check late in the afternoon, left and come back. Not as many tables had been cleared away as when we played there in September (they were expecting a larger turnout), so the space in the corner that served as a stage was even tighter than before. It reminded me of the time in the late sixties I went to hear Sun Ra at Slugs’, the twenty-piece arkestra packed onto and spilling off of a stage that appeared to be the size of a dining table, two at most, “Space Is the Place” given a whole new meaning by the cramped quarters they issued the music from. I thought it a miraculous negotiation of shrunken premises. I thought back and thought something of the same would be required of us, nowhere near twenty pieces large but backed into a corner somewhat.

  When we got there the place was already full, every table taken, every seat as well. There were indeed balloons decorating the room, lining the door we walked in thru as well as the walls inside, balloons of all colors. Of more than one size, some were strung along the walls where they met the ceiling, some from ceiling to floor where one wall met another. The mood was upbeat, festive, people ready to party, most of them friends of the owner and his wife we assumed, some already doing so. This, I have to admit, gave us misgivings. We don’t consider festivity to be exactly our thing and we began to wonder had it been a good idea to accept the gig.

  Penguin was the first to say it. “I’m not sure about this,” he said once we got to the storage room that served as our green room. “I’m not sure about playing for a birthday party,” he went on. “I’m especially not sure this is the gig to try passing out balloons, despite what I said earlier about camouflage. Too much chance of them taking it the wrong way.” He went on in this way for a bit and the rest of us admitted we had the same apprehensions. Aunt Nancy, however, having allowed she felt exactly such qualms, went on to say that we were there and that there wasn’t much else we could do but go on with it, play (“The show must go on,” she even said), make the most of it. She got the look of hard thought on her face just before asking, “Remember the time we played the Scarab and someone yelled out ‘Uterine hoofbeat!’ as we played ‘Bottomed Out’?” With the exception of Drennette, who wasn’t yet in the band when we played that gig, whom we hadn’t, in fact, even met, we all nodd
ed yes. Aunt Nancy went on to say it was up to us to set the tone, to darken festivity or strike a note of dark festivity, that it was exactly the understanding of birth bound up in the “Uterine hoofbeat!” cry we needed to bring to bear, that the run of apocalyptic beat, repercussion and possession thereby implied (the Four Horsemen allied with Haitian vodoun) was ours to introduce, a complicating note we would insist accrues to each natal occasion, the owner’s wife’s no exception.

  We all knew what she meant. It was a dread, gnostic note she was insisting on, birth as an issue of misconception, conception itself as an issue of misconception, dubious arrival into a miscreant world. Dubious cause for celebration, dubious or at best ambiguous cause for celebration, birth, we needed to insist and get them to see, was a bottoming out, a slippery descent down what she said was “the chute of incarnation,” bodily being a forfeiture of immaterial essence, bodily being material exile, detour. She suggested we open with “Bottomed Out.” We agreed and then decided the other pieces we’d play. She rolled coach, cheerleader and gospel diva into one, exhorting, just as we went out, “Let’s wreck this place!”

  So it fell to Penguin to set the tone, “Bottomed Out” opening, as it does, with him solo. He more than rose to the occasion—natal, dark, anti-festive in one swipe—or I should rather say he descended to it, more than descended, taking the baritone to his mouth and muscling a low B-flat from it, a call to order calling for close attention, dialing the party atmosphere down. Most of the patrons heeded his call, ceasing to speak and turning their attention to the music, though there continued to be something of a buzz at several tables, conversations carried on with lowered voices and with not so low voices now and then, an outburst of laughter rising out of the buzz.

  As always with his entrance into “Bottomed Out,” Penguin plied a “Lost Generation” line or allusion, a reference to and a reabsorption of Sonny Simmons’s piece, only here he freighted it with something new, something we hadn’t quite heard before, the very dread, gnostic strain or insistence Aunt Nancy had prompted us with, primed us with. He parsed a certain seepage in the horn’s low register, a low-to-the-ground if not below-the-ground shuttle or shift, stealing away from concept or conception. Reconsideration proposed as concept, conception as misconception, the triplet-laced line he pressed or pursued equated lost generation with generating loss. It was nothing if not the unbottoming of birth, a caveat so severe, so categorical, it uprooted all track not in some way sealed by trepidation. No one yelled “Uterine hoofbeat!” and no one would, but uterine tread, uterine trot, uterine gallop were very much with us, there not all that long after Penguin started playing, low buzz notwithstanding.