No Matter How Much You Promise

by Edgardo Vega

  “Oh, man, cut it out,” he said.

  “Like I shouldn’t give a fuck, right?” she said.

  “No, Becky,” he replied. “It ain’t like that, man.”

  “Don’t ‘Becky’ me, mothafucka,” she said.

  “Sorry, Rebecca.”

  “Right, but forget that shit about my name right now. The thing is you gotta stop putting shit up your nose. You got a responsibility, man. An artistic responsibility. This country ain’t shit without the music, and you’re the one that’s gonna set all this jive straight and play and compose and make the thing go forward again, and never mind all this funk, fusion, and electric mothafuckin’ bullshit these people are trying to sell folks. Or are you another of these self-destructive brothers that gotta throw their life away?”

  Wyndell looked at her in her baggy pants and her butch haircut, no makeup, and bad beautiful self, and wished for all the world Rebecca wasn’t into women, because there was no telling what would have happened. After graduation he’d lost touch with her for nearly a year, but then he’d heard she was still living in Boston, found her number in the directory, called her up, and a week later he was driving up there, mostly out of boredom. She was giggin’ at a small club. She and a bassist and drummer. She now affected a derby, which she wore even when she was playing. He sat in, and even without rehearsal, after a couple of tunes they fell into a groove and people who’d been drinking and talking began listening. After the last set they went out to eat and Rebecca began to tell him about how great things were between herself and Meredith, her lover, a small delicate blond girl, who was becoming a respected poet.

  Later, she invited him to the house, and they sat around talking. Meredith smiled tenderly at him when Rebecca introduced her to Wyndell. She served them drinks and returned to her studio. An hour or so later she came back and said good night, kissing them both good night like a dutiful child. Wyndell and Rebecca stayed up, catching up with each other. Around three in the morning she showed him to his room and they’d said goodnight. He couldn’t fall asleep and knew it was because of Rebecca, and the feelings he’d always had for her. But Rebecca acted more married than most of his married friends, male or female.

  As she slid into bed with Meredith, Rebecca was still thinking about Wyndell. To her he represented jazz and its promise, but also its pain. Wyndell Ross’s message on her answering machine had unearthed once again the feelings she had buried concerning the last days of her father’s life. Her only consolation was that she had loved her father. She wondered whether she loved Wyn as a man. She let herself imagine herself naked with him and the thought made her feel cold and frightened. She decided she loved Wyn because he was about jazz and not because he was a man. But she had loved her father. And of course she had loved her Grandpa Iggy as much as her father, perhaps more since she’d spent more time with him. During her childhood, her father was gone for long periods at a time. Whenever she asked, her mother replied that her father was at the hospital. “In surgery,” she said. Not until she was seven did she fully understand that her father was performing the operations, and not being operated on. She still recalled sitting at the piano with her grandfather, not being tall enough to reach the pedals, knowing even then the difference in sound between when her grandfather used them and when she played the same melody, without them. Where had they gone, her father, her grandfather? She had never held much hope in religion and the promise of seeing loved ones again. She had no family other than her mother. Her father’s mother, her abuelita, had returned to Puerto Rico, up in the mountains to a place called Cacimar, which made no sense since it wasn’t near the sea. With Puerto Ricans, even though she considered herself one, things were always weird. Later she learned that the name had nothing to do with the sea, and casi mar, which meant “almost to the sea,” was two words; and Cacimar was spelled differently, and it was one word, and was the name of an Indian chief.

  She couldn’t fall asleep and didn’t want to wake Meredith up. She recalled that in her second year at Berklee, when she had become quite proficient at playing jazz piano and her technique was beginning to develop, able now to play fast and coherently, the choruses coming whole and her improvisations extending fluidly, her left hand chording and her right hand flawless in its runs, fear set in and Rebecca Feliciano became convinced that she would never be good enough to play the music. Her grandfather had died years before, so she couldn’t speak to him, but she recalled sitting on Iggy Marginat’s lap as a little girl, listening to him talk about music.

  “I knew all the great ones,” he said.

  “Like who, Grandpa?” she said.

  “Oh, like Diz and Bird and Thelonious Monk,” Iggy Marginat said.

  “The loneliest monk, Grandpa?” she asked, puzzled.

  “No, no,” he laughed and tickled her. “Thelonious.” He spelled the name, then set her on the floor and went to the record rack. From it he extracted an LP, which he placed on the turntable. “Listen carefully,” he said. When the record was over he said, “Can you dig it?”

  “I can dig it,” she said and her grandpa would put out his hand for her to slap. She slapped it and said, “I can’t play like that. My hands are too little.”

  “You definitely can play, so don’t worry about anything. You just play. You’ll grow up and your hands are going to be real strong. You’ll see. You just keep playing. At least you won’t have to worry about where your next meal’s going to come from. Life is rough if you want to play jazz. You won’t have those problems. You’ll always be taken care of.”

  And then her grandfather said that for most people, playing jazz is a difficult thing, financially. And back then when things were rough during the Depression, he’d bring the fellows home to eat.

  “The house was always full of jazz musicians. Your grandmother didn’t like it too much.”

  “Who else, Grandpa?” she said.

  “Musicians who just loved the music like me.”

  “Who?”

  “Oh, Pop Butterworth, Pete Carroll, Bobby Russo, Candy Donovan,” he said, sadly. “They never became great. They were like me, they just loved the music. Sometimes we’d go up to Buck Sanderson’s house in Yonkers and jam and have cookouts,” he said, his mind back in those days.

  “Jam, Grandpa?”

  “Yeah, jam …” he said and then explained.

  Those memories sustained her through her doubts until she began to feel her confidence returning. And then each day she’d sit for three or four hours at a time just chording and playing melodies against their chord structures, trying out new things, complicated runs and imagining others soloing and she laying out and just comping, working on her rhythm and time and then imagining herself coming in and soloing, playing chorus after chorus, letting the music at times explode from her so she could feel the piano shivering with excitement. This drove her to experiment with her strength in a greater and greater desire to play well. She began listening to Charlie and Eddie Palmieri, Cal Tjader and Ray Baretto, Dizzy Gillespie and the Latin influence on jazz, and began evolving an especially percussive style of playing the piano.

  She also recalled speaking Spanish with her grandfather, learning things about his life as a little boy in Puerto Rico. He taught her games. “Ambos a dos,” “Aserrín, Asserán,” and “A la limón.” Her father, Dr. Paul Feliciano, had once told her, after he revealed to her the truth about his own private life, that her grandfather, till the end of his life, was also very proud of the fact that he spoke a good Spanish. He told her that during that same period of time when Iggy Marginat went into Harlem, around 1929 or 1930, her grandfather met a young man from southern Spain whom he always referred to as “Federico, the poet.” The young man was a writer in residence at Columbia University during those years. The two men became friends and often Ignacio Marginat traveled to the university, picked up his friend Federico, and they walked down the hill on Broadway, across 125th Street, and entered that wondrous world of Harlem.

  Rebec
ca’s father, Paul Feliciano, first told her the story of her grandfather’s friendship with the young Spanish poet the evening they returned from their second Gay Pride Day parade down Fifth Avenue. The first time he’d marched with her in support, but the second time he was doing it for himself. They had bought Chinese food and returned to the house and that’s when he told her he’d marched for himself. “I thought so,” she said, and he laughed. That’s when he told her about her grandfather. Paul Feliciano said he had often asked his father-in-law, Ignacio Marginat, whether he was talking about Garcia Lorca. “Your grandfather said that was a secret, but admitted that his friend, the Spanish poet, had visited the house and written about his time spent in New York.

  “Pick up Garcia Lorca’s Poet in New York. I can’t be sure, but I’ve always believed they were lovers,” her father told her—this when he had already begun losing weight and there was no longer a doubt that the HIV virus was affecting his immune system.

  “Grandpa was gay?”

  “Yes. Closeted, I suppose.”

  “Three generations?” she said. “That’s like a tradition.”

  She was serious, but he laughed uproariously, his eyes suddenly blazing with health.

  “I guess it is,” Paul Feliciano said. “There were times when I’d kid myself and think that I was bisexual, but of all my sexual and emotional experiences, my gay ones were the most intense.”

  “That takes a lot of courage to admit,” she said, taking his hand. “I love you, Daddy.”

  “I love you, too,” he said, and she hugged him.

  He asked her if she wanted to go with him to Sevilla in the summer. They could go to Andalucia and see Córdoba and Granada and swim on the Costa del Sol. She said she would if Meredith could come along. He said he had no problem with it, if Meredith didn’t mind seeing him wasting away. A month later, after classes were over, they flew to Madrid, traveled by train to Sevilla, and then rented a car, which Rebecca and Meredith alternated driving, stopping often to examine the sights, the girls listening patiently as Paul Feliciano told them about the Moors and their conquest of Spain. “The Catholic kings were very foolish to kick the Moors and the Jews out of Spain in the fifteenth century,” he said on more than one occasion. Arranged ahead of time Paul Feliciano had rented a small, two-story house outside of Málaga with a spectacular view of the Mediterranean, and there Rebecca and Meredith took care of him as best they could. He had taken a leave of absence from his duties at the hospital six months prior and closed his private practice, certain that he wouldn’t survive too long. To all appearances, her father still seemed healthy. Thin, but in good health. Yet to Rebecca, who had known him as strong and decisive, it was obvious that the most minor exertion pained him now, the effort making him tentative, unsure of himself.

  They returned to New York and no more than a month later he began dying in earnest. For three months, she came from Boston twice a week to endure the pain and horror and disgust of watching him wither and ooze before her, his cavernous eyes pleading for one last expression of love, which she could produce only with her presence and her words.

  Meredith moaned in her sleep and turned toward her, seeking her out. She placed an arm under her blond head and like a child the smaller woman snuggled against her. Soon Rebecca felt sleep coming on. Out of the despair of losing her father, and her grandfather before that, and feeling alone, a ray of hope, brilliant as the sun of those Andalusian mornings a year prior, again emerged as Rebecca thought of Meredith next to her and their love for each other. So much had happened in the past five years. She had graduated from Berklee, taught piano privately for a while, and then began gigging regularly up and down the East Coast, avoiding New York for no other reason than that she didn’t want to be reminded of her father.

  She thought of Wyndell often, keeping in touch through cards and telephone calls. Once in a while he came to Boston and they went out to dinner like the first time he had come to her house and met Meredith and slept over. On those occasions they found other musicians and jammed. There was no doubt that Wyndell was becoming stronger, fighting his demons. She was certain he would win.

  It was now the late summer of 1990 and Wyndell had called her, left a phone message in which he sounded a bit desperate and wanted to know if she would come to New York. She’d have to return his call and see what was up. Jazz was a trip in more ways than one.

  37. Going Home

  Back then when they were students at Berklee, Wyndell had promised Rebecca Feliciano that he wasn’t going to use cocaine anymore, and that had been the case until two years after graduation, when he was at a party in Beverly Hills after some gig at some stupid-ass movie star’s house and stupid-ass, guitar-playing, blues-singing Willie Jones had accepted, as partial payment, some blow. Wyndell had ended up with some young blonde from UCLA, who hadn’t taken her baby blues away from him, alternately looking at his eyes, his crotch, and his ax from the time they were setting up to the time they stopped playing, and whose family were members of some country club in Hilton Head, South Carolina, or Augusta, Georgia, since ’86, meaning 1886, and after they’d had some blow she had properly sheathed him with her own supply of contraceptives, using not one but two “rubber duckies” as she called them and mounted him as they lay behind the bushes, down by the swimming pool. After they were done and she had nearly torn him up with her gyrations she boldly told him that she had been determined to make love to a black man that month and she sure was glad it had been him because she’d never forget him even when she was married and balling her old man. Wyndell felt totally useless and like his life was eroding from within. Later that night, after driving back to his apartment in Santa Monica, he thought more carefully about his life and what awaited him. He wasn’t playing jazz and he wondered whether he ever would really be able to do so, given the meager demand for the music.

  He recalled graduating from high school and spending that summer studying at the university in St. Louis, staying at the home of the trombonist Glenn Briscoe, who was a friend of his father’s and taught in the music department; Wyndell sitting in with professional musicians and learning more about the music; at the end of the summer, flying to Boston with his mother to register at Berklee, being brave but feeling lonely and a little bit afraid after his mother left because in spite of his size and his musical confidence he was only seventeen years old. The first time it snowed it wasn’t anything like Denver. There was a sadness in the weather, the sky was low and dark and the architecture and landscape looked old and tired.

  In time, however, he grew used to the rhythm of the school, and of Cambridge and Boston and the T and the accent and the absolutely collegiate climate of the city, plus the respect with which he was treated by everyone connected with the music. There was, everywhere he went in the school, a sense that they were part of a very serious endeavor whose consequences would be felt for hundreds of years.

  His first friend there was Rebecca Feliciano. By definition a piano is a percussion instrument, but Rebecca Feliciano attacked the instrument as if it were a long drum. And it was understandable, because the first time he’d shaken hands with her it was like shaking hands with his dad’s friend Wilfred Atkinson who had played tackle at Bethune-Cookman College, or Alcorn State, and now coached at a little college in Arkansas after he had tried out for the Los Angeles Rams and torn up his knee so badly on a kickoff return during the exhibition season that he could never play again. But that was what Rebecca’s hand felt like when she gripped his, not like some men who loved squeezing the life out of you, but like the entirety of Rebecca’s hand had swallowed his.

  His life had become a nightmare in Los Angeles and in the midst of a profound depression, in which for the first time in his life he considered suicide, he decided he had to get away. He was involved with Leslie Alton, a senior at USC and a former finalist for Miss Black Teenage America, whose father made snide remarks about musicians and was a partner in an extremely prestigious entertainment law firm in Los Ange
les. Leslie, on the other hand, praised him for his love of jazz but, too often to be ignored, talked about his going back to school and getting something besides a musical education, something more in line with Dr. Ross, as she referred deferentially to the man she considered her future father-in-law, even though she had yet to meet him. She was sure Wyndell could become a fine lawyer and play on weekends like his dad, and were they going to Denver for Thanksgiving like he’d said?

  He said they were on, but three weeks before Thanksgiving of 1988 he packed his ax, his tapes, and his clothes, and called up Teddy Banks, his technician buddy at KSRF, and told him he could have anything in his apartment, that the keys were downstairs in Lily Dunn’s crib. He was going up to San Francisco to see if he could play up there. If that didn’t work out he was going home to Denver, or wherever, but that Teddy wasn’t to tell anyone where he’d gone. And off he went, leaving about three in the afternoon, regretting everything about himself and not really knowing what his life would become, his eyes moisting and blurring his vision as he drove; hoping his life and talent didn’t extinguish itself in some horrible car crash like trumpeter Clifford Brown’s, or disappear in a haze of alcohol and drugs like Bird’s.

  When he was away from Los Angeles and traveling up the coast on 101, the sea on one side and the mountains on the other and the music going on the radio, mostly fusion and idiotic stuff from guys just about his age whose music had no feeling but who were already household names, he began to calm down a little. He read the highway signs and cursed the sameness of American highways, everything so impersonal and antiseptic; names and distances. From Santa Monica he sped north along the Pacific Coast Highway, flying through Malibu, where he’d gone to parties in expensive beachfront homes and had his fill of beautiful women and exotic drugs, and, before getting to Oxnard, passing the exit to Camarillo, where they’d held Charlie Parker, working on his mental health, convincing him that he was just another crazy, worthless Negro and ought to straighten out his life and accept that it’s one thing to be a genius if you’re white but something else altogether if you’re black, and it’s not supposed to hurt to be unappreciated and unrecognized.