Late Arcade

by Nathaniel Mackey

  Penguin worked his low-to-the-ground or below-the-ground shuttle or shift into a medicinal sweat, the all-out shimmy or shake of a body possessed, a hatching pool of heat. He shook as though powered or possessed by the keys of the horn, shook in such a way as to make the horn rattle. Each key was a peyote button, shriven cactus toughness, a bitter, withered vestige his finger could almost taste.

  With the advent of all-out shimmy or shake the crowd turned more attentive. The few tables at which conversation had continued fell into silence, everyone’s eyes and ears turned toward Penguin, whose pooling hatch turned out to be more feint than shimmy or shake. He now had them exactly where he wanted them, where we wanted them, and it was at this point that Aunt Nancy, on congas, and Drennette, on batá drum, joined in, the implied, immaterial hooves (vodoun horses, lucumí horses, santería horses) more palpably afoot. Aunt Nancy and Drennette’s drumbeats were hits to the head, kicks to the head, horse’s hooves intent on awakening any who remained inattentive, alerting all to the uterine bottomlessness they trod.

  Penguin let the triplet figure go and let himself be lifted by the uterine carpet the congas and the batá drum rolled out, the uterine precinct or premises we were now on or in made all the more obvious, to any who somehow hadn’t noticed, by Drennette sitting slightly gap-legged with the latter on her lap, its pinched midriff looking anything but pregnant notwithstanding. The batá’s hourglass shape intimated nothing if not time, birth’s inauguration of which and the ravages and wear brought with it “Bottomed Out” would be intent on one bearing in mind. Penguin not only rode this awareness or admission but rode it out, leaving the horn’s lowest register for a climb into its highest, a raised eyebrow and a rocket launch rolled into one. He ended his climb with a squealing, roll-with-it peal of acceptance that grew falsetto-like, a peal he held for sixteen measures before coming back down.

  It was as if only after making all this clear, clearing the way in a sense, only after the natal, dark, anti-festive note had been struck, could anything approaching festivity be indulged. Penguin’s approach was to calibrate his peyote-button plea or appeal as longstanding romance, returning to the bottom of the horn to recall Ronnie Cuber on Eddie Palmieri’s “Yo No Sé,” an approach whose low annunciativity and quizzicality rolled into one, whose namesake agnostic tone if not timbre, was nothing if not the foot in the door locked-out festivity needed. Someone in the crowd shouted, “Alright!” It was on.

  The rest of the piece, indeed the rest of the evening, would prove to be a standoff, sometimes fluid, sometimes tense, between a will or a willingness to party and the music’s more austere demands. Penguin dangled his Cuberesque salsa riff, his bolero riff, long enough to let the audience know it was there, no more than a passing taste to let them know romance and festivity were a part of our repertoire, withheld, whenever withheld, neither out of inabiliity nor disinclination but in the interest of a larger design, a certain rigor and recognition. Having served up that taste, he fell back into his triplet-heavy quandary, kicked and had at by the congas and the batá he made it seem, a thrashing bob and weave outmaneuvering would-be assault, as though, knowing every reason to despair, he chose not to. By way of a stoptime pivot opening like velvet stage curtains, he went again to Cuber’s matinee-idol suavity and sagesse, not only not despairing but dancing instead. There was no shout of “Alright!” this time. The audience could sense he simply visited the salsa motif. They knew he was not there to stay. Indeed, he was again plying his triplet-laden qualms before long and back to the salsa motif not long after that. It was this back and forth he now lingered with, limning the contours of the mixed-emotional occasion he took birth to be.

  Aunt Nancy and Drennette chose to linger as well. Not so much underneath what Penguin played as around it, they built a serrated, bentlegged amble founded on an aspect of godly limp, a gallop true liquidity accrued to, horses at ocean’s edge it seemed. The batá rang with echoic reach, a watery, concussive lilt it was all one could do to keep one’s feet upon hearing, a sweet-wood sonance, water notwithstanding. One found oneself asking, “Maple? Cedar?” The congas meanwhile plied a bass tack, lengthier legs than those the batá stepped with, a deeper, asymmetrical step taken twice for each the batá took. Anyone familiar with lucumí and santería recognized the interplay of congas and batá as the pattern consecrated to Yemaya, the orisha of the sea and of motherhood. Aunt Nancy and Drennette sought to season if not in some way temper Penguin’s mixed emotions it seemed, advancing a more accepting, celebratory take on birth, mixed in its own way though it was, acknowledging the saltiness of birth.

  Aunt Nancy was nothing if not the mother and the mistress of mixed possibility. Each conga leg stepped into a hole, a giving way of ground if not the ground being lower than expected, foot missing a rung or a stairstep thought to be there, a giving out of leg or an extension of leg. The tone she’d insisted we set she thereby deepened, an exemplum she invited the audience to ponder, peel back.

  The audience did exactly that. The introspective space Aunt Nancy’s “drop step” apprised one of they now occupied. The low buzz gone, they sat silently, caught up in the music, attentive to every inflection, caught up in thought. Each of them listened closely, brows furrowed in some cases, visibly given pause by Aunt Nancy’s leg-in-a-hole polymetrics.

  As always in “Bottomed Out,” Penguin pled a certain weakness, a watery-kneed insecurity of limb he called out for support from. Drennette and Aunt Nancy offered that support, the cane or the crutch or the ushering arm around his waist he cried out he needed, but this went only so far. It came to be time for Djamilaa, Lambert and I to join in, which we did, odd as it sounded or seemed, with a waltz-like figure not unlike Billy Harper’s “Cry of Hunger,” a cradling, chorusing, to-the-rescue riff that was anything but without bottom. Djamilaa was on piano, Lambert played tenor and I played trumpet, offering a unison statement of the line that we repeated again and again, Penguin, recalling Shepp’s version of “Frankenstein” on The Way Ahead, growing more distraught each time we played it.

  It was as though rescue, would-be rescue, only made Penguin more aware of his predicament, more painfully aware of his predicament. He thrashed and bellowed, fought as though caught in quicksand.

  I’d been wondering how the owner and his wife were taking to the new tone we set, festivity’s hallowing-cum-harrowing, Penguin’s predicative distress. I caught a glimpse of them out of the corner of my eye as Lambert, Djamilaa and I bore down on the cradling rescue riff, spotting them over to the right toward the back of the room. I could’ve sworn I saw the owner’s wife blow us a kiss. It might only have been me, I’m not sure, but, not only that, even more than that, it seemed all the souls there’d ever been and all there’d ever be sat in bleachers looking down at the stage we stood on, poor excuse for one though it was. It was as if the Comeback Inn had turned into a stadium and a Renaissance memory theater rolled into one, elastic locality suddenly on the ascendant. It seemed as though the Comeback Inn had become a balloon, an inflated premise that was more than one premise, a gradually pneumatic enlargement equating place with play as well as play with proliferation, locality and prolixity rolled into utmost palimpsest.

  This was only a glimpse ahead to what was to come it turned out, a sideways glance lasting only an instant might it be said to have lasted at all. But for an instant (if it was, if that’s what it was) the bleachers climbed toward the heavens in a flash exposing us all to the sky, soul seated beside soul, soul seated above and below soul, souls packed in, piled high.

  Ahead somehow lay to the side I noted to myself, there though not yet there, eventuality’s lateral outpost, festivity’s debt or dispatch. No sooner did the thought arise than I put it away, though to say the thought was taken away might be more exact, swept along as everything so abruptly was. Penguin’s opening gambit gave way, that is, to a tricky ensemble section—key changes, tempo changes, dotted notes, double-dotted slurs. Whether we’d really been
blown a kiss or it only seemed we’d been blown a kiss one could’ve wondered but that was now moot. The audience was obviously with us, the owner and his wife included. The steeply ascending bleacher seats, briefly glimpsed and gone, had made it clear everyone was all in.

  Our tonal reset, our setting a new tone, had not only taken but taken well and we were on our way. Lambert and Djamilaa took terse, meditative solos, rousing in each its own manner, each an understated tour de force, and the one I took wasn’t bad either. At the conclusion of “Bottomed Out” there was a hearty round of applause. Two people, in fact, stood up to applaud, so taken with what was only, we’d make sure they’d see, the beginning. We had the house in the proverbial palms of our hands and we were just getting started.

  The mood was more mindful now, not averse to festivity but in touch, even so, with all that would give it pause, the wages whereby festivity would have to be won, had had to be won. We were ever, the tone we set insisted, at a point of having reason to despair but also, having looked at it, seen it, stared it in the eye without blinking, at a point of winning reason to rejoice. It was nothing if not a note of hard-won festivity we struck.

  We now felt less uncertain about handing out the balloons. We and the audience were now on the same page we felt, closer if not all the way there in any case; the balloons would not be taken the wrong way. It wasn’t, though, that we had a particular way in mind we wanted them taken, only that they not be confused with those decorating the room, that musicial purpose and decorative purpose not be confounded. We were pretty sure but we’d see, we’d wait and see, make sure the new tone persisted. That being the case, we’d hand the balloons out before our final number.

  Having opened with one of our older pieces, we played one of our new ones next, “Dredj’s Dream,” following that with another new one, “1489.” We then went back to the older part of our book for “Opposable Thumb at the Water’s Edge” and then to another newer one, “Sekhet Aaru Struff,” to end the first set. Our intensity grew with each piece, as did the audience’s attentiveness, a kind of absorption drawing all of us in. It grew more and more clear, more and more certain, that this was the night to hand out balloons. It grew all the more so when, the “green room” such as it was, we stayed out and mingled with the audience between sets.

  Everyone we talked with had something hip to say. “When I closed my eyes during ‘Dredj’s Dream’ I saw a shade-late incision of light” was only one of the interesting comments we got. When Djamilaa and I overheard a man in his thirties remark to Lambert, “It was like the music admitted to time only to suspend it, put birth on hold only to know it all the more, take us back to it. We all were the very thought of life again,” she whispered in my ear that she was struck by how much it sounded like something I’d write in a letter to you. It did, I had to admit, nodding my head and made to wonder had our correspondence crept into the music, seeped into the music, so seeped in it put words in our listeners’ mouths. A woman with dreads wearing a UCLA sweatshirt did say to Aunt Nancy that “Sekhet Aaru Struff ” was “a beautiful woman’s face conjugated into limnings of stride and striation, an implied walk compounded of structure and stroll.” Others, on the other hand, were content to let it go with “You guys kicked ass, mucho ass,” “You really tore it up” and the like. Still, I wondered.

  The mood was good, fun but not frantic, a festive sense being somewhat low-key made more abiding. The party vibe was definitely still there. Drink flowed freely and food abounded of course. Laughter was no stranger of course. The balloons on the wall, of course, did say something about lightness and color, something about pneumatic provision, the tenuous, necessary containment of aerobic endowment. The music had let no one forget the balloons were breath’s bounty, an always tenuous bequest.

  We played five pieces for the second set, as we had for the first, opening with a newer one, “Fossil Flow.” From there we went to something we hadn’t played in a while, Shepp’s “Like a Blessed Baby Lamb,” then to a couple of our older pieces again, “Aggravated Assent” and “Tosaut Strut.” We decided we’d put matters in the audience’s hands in more ways than one, performing another older one, “Drennethology,” as the ostensibly last number, reserving “Some Sunday” for an encore should they demand one. It would be right before this encore, were there one, we’d hand out the balloons. The chance of there not being one, of the audience not demanding one, was a snowball’s in hell we felt. We would do what we could to make sure.

  The level of intensity we left off on at the end of the first set we started on to begin the second, starting out as on fire as we’d been and building to be more on fire. “Fossil Flow” got its best reading yet, punctuated by a number of what Rahsaan would call bright moments, setting the stage for yet even more. Indeed, there were more such moments in the pieces that followed than I can go into other than sketchily, mentioning one or two to represent them all. Lambert, to mention one, soloed on “Like a Blessed Baby Lamb” in a way that went off-script or perhaps pre-script, working an expectorant, self-excavating vein worthy of Joe Henderson at his five-o’clock-shadow best. It seemed he proposed a radically articulate clearing of the throat, a veritable book of clearing the throat upping the ante on his “Book of Opening the Mouth.” It was as though such clearing were no longer preparatory to speech or as though, better, it were prior to being preparatory to speech, as though such clearing constituted speech—or, if it were indeed preparatory, it remained adamantly preparatory, promising an arrival preparation preempted, endlessly prior, endlessly proto-, a seeming endlessness packed into a four-minute solo, a four-minute string of ahems. Throat-clearing took the place of talk in a gruff serenade insisting thus would its book be, talk not arrived at as such, talk already there otherwise. Less expository than agonistic (exposing nothing, that is, if not exposition’s insecure ground), the solo purveyed a beautifully possessed hemming and hawing, expectorant scratch attenuated by namesake bleat. It culled a particular tension and it kept the audience on the edges of their seats, an expectant stress it offered, in the end, no release from, simply ending mid-hem (or was it mid-haw?) as Lambert backed away from the mike. The audience, finding themselves more negatively capable than they’d have otherwise thought, burst into wild applause, as though declaring themselves to be the release the solo had so impeccably withheld. Aunt Nancy, who followed, was more than a few bars into her solo by the time they settled down.

  Djamilaa, to quickly mention another, brought an inrush of Eastern undulation into “Aggravated Assent,” quoting from Gurdjieff and de Hartmann’s “Reading of a Sacred Book” behind Penguin’s alto solo. Giving Gurdjieff and de Hartmann’s austere Central Asian modalities a more southerly, Persian bent, she drew from another recording I know she listens to a lot, Nasser Rastegar-Nejad’s Music of Iran: Santur Recital, Volume 2. She teased out the slightly mallet-like attack one hears in “Reading of a Sacred Book,” the ringing hammer held in check but held, one clearly hears, nonetheless. She held it less in check, moving over into what it hovers on the edge of, reminding us the piano does deploy mallets while exacting ictic, hammering runs that brought nothing if not the santur to mind. She did more than simply accompany the solo, daring Penguin, with a jabbing persistence reminiscent of Monk, to ride the swell her tremulous left hand kept advancing. It had a way of building and backing off a bit and then building and backing off a bit again, potentially going on that way forever. She plied an Ibrahimic reach into the center of the earth that was also a stairway to the stars. It oddly amalgamated climb and cascade, a watery stairway made of watery cloth Penguin bounded upon more than outright rode, an unrolling rug or an unwinding scarf he trod securely on, an escalating splash after his own heart it seemed. It was after everyone else’s too it seemed, so effortlessly did the other four of us work behind them (Lambert and me riffing under Penguin’s lead), so far forward did the audience, holding its collective breath one sensed, lean and let themselves be hit by the aggregate hammer it a
ll, for the moment and, for a while, moment to moment, turned out to be, all but unbearably beautiful, borne up and out and all the more enduring we irrevocably knew. “Quantum-qualitative” doesn’t even come close.

  Let these two suffice. What I most want to get into is how things went when we handed out the balloons. The audience did indeed demand an encore when we finished or ostensibly finished with “Drennethology.” They applauded loudly, whistling here and there and here and there shouting out an “Oh yeah!” They rose to their feet as we bowed and they remained standing as we made our way back to the “green room.” We walked single file, carrying ourselves as we’d agreed beforehand we would, our bodies given over to a stolid rectitude. Their eyes followed us into the “green room” and we closed the door once inside, at which point the applause grew louder. We let it go on for a while, the whistles and the shouts escalating, and then, each of us grabbing a package of balloons from the box we’d brought them in and ripping it open, we opened the door and went back out. They were still standing. Each of us, as we’d agreed beforehand we would, took a different route back to the performing area, handing balloons out to the audience as we did.