No Matter How Much You Promise

by Edgardo Vega

  They came off the bridge and walked east along Delancey Street, turned north on Pitt Street to Houston and east again until they reached East River Park. The awareness of his lie stunned him and made him feel nauseous. He sat on the park bench with Lurleen patting his arm. Had he gone into the Marines hoping that he’d be killed and never have to face playing jazz? Why did it have to be that way? Why couldn’t he just play music and not have to measure himself up against others? How could anyone equal Bud Powell or Thelonious Monk? But maybe he wasn’t even good enough to compete with any of the lesser ones. They had something he lacked although he couldn’t say what it was; he’d proven to himself that he could play better than some black pianists and even black musicians preferred him to their own.

  God, Miles Davis had wanted him to play with him. It may have been that when Miles began exploring alternatives to straight-ahead jazz, he’d wanted a white kid with a connection to rock in order to create a fusion between rock and jazz, which he eventually did. But Miles’s reasons shouldn’t have mattered. Ladies and gentlemen, the Miles Davis Quintet, with David Holland, electric bass; Tony Williams, drums; Wayne Shorter, tenor saxophone; Billy Farrell, piano; and Miles Davis on trumpet. Ladies and gentlemen, the Miles Davis Quintet. It wasn’t about color, because both Chick Corea and Joe Zawinul had played with Miles. And it wasn’t technique, because he had that. And it wasn’t lack of a repertoire because he had always remembered everything he ever read or heard. All he’d have to do was look at the music a couple of times and he’d remember. And it wasn’t the capacity to improvise, because the music always flowed into his mind easily, coming up from inside of him like there was an inexhaustible, sweet fountain of melodies and harmonies in his soul.

  He tried recalling those days back in 1968, after he turned eighteen and graduated from high school. It was as if everything then was happening to him and he was just walking in this fine mist, enjoying the moistness on his skin, his mind almost nonexistent. Each moment felt as if he and the events in his life were inseparable, and he was at the mercy of some force. He felt as if God had a hand in the matter, and he went slowly with what he felt were deeper feelings. He wanted to set aside his selfishness and like Christ give himself up for others, but it had all been a lie.

  He looked up and smiled at Lurleen. Later, in telling her friend Gloria Myers at school, she described his face as one of total purity and innocence, like she recalled her son when he was totally and absolutely trusting of her, before he began to question the world around him.

  “Lynn, as long as I thought that I had let Joey die I didn’t have to face my hang-ups about making it in jazz. All I did was cover that up all these years.”

  “You could’ve played with anybody. I’ve always felt you could. I talked to your ma and she said growing up there were always musicians at her parents’ house. She said she’d heard a hundred different pianists, but that you were special. And not because she was your mother, but because it was obvious. That it was as if you became transformed when you went near a piano. She said that as your mother she always saw you as her little boy, even when you had grown up and were in high school, before you went into the Marines. But that when you were sitting at the piano, you seemed grown-up, complete, a man. She said it was the only time she didn’t worry about you because it was then that you reminded her of your daddy.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Billy said. “I guess I fucked up, didn’t I?”

  “Don’t think of it that way, baby,” she said gently. “Stuff happens. The important thing is what’s happening now. I mean, I don’t know where these girls get their ideas, but having that piano, practicing the way you do, and getting that gig on Cornelia Street, you’ll be playing full-time before you know it. It’s gonna be great.”

  “We should go back,” he said. “You have to get up early.”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I’ll leave a note for the kids. I told them I’d get up and fix them breakfast before they leave for the store. They’ll be fine. How do you feel?”

  “I’m okay, I guess,” he said.

  They sat in the semidarkness, the lights from the lampposts in the park hidden by the foliage of the trees. At three in the morning the park was still populated by young lovers and groups of seemingly parentless children playing their games, their English-Spanish chatter like a background melody to Billy Farrell’s decanting of his misery and lost youth. He was quiet a moment and then knew that there was still doubt in him, that the most important person in his life didn’t know how truly cowardly he’d been. And then, painfully, he began telling her about coming back and speaking with Pop Butterworth after the first rehearsal with Miles and the other musicians, when it was almost certain that he’d be playing with them on the album.

  “Pop, he wants somebody to play electric piano.”

  “You’ll do fine on electric piano.”

  “I didn’t like it. The music sounds funny. It doesn’t seem right.”

  “You’ll get used to it. There’s nothing wrong with it. You’ll be playing with Miles and Wayne Shorter, son. That’s the important thing.”

  “Pop, they play like I never heard anybody play. They don’t stay in the changes.”

  “I know, but you’ll pick up on that. The times you did it, it sounded fine, and Miles liked it. That’s why he asked you back. He explained how it works and you understood it.”

  “It’s like I’m too young, like they know so much more.”

  “Don’t worry about being too young. That don’t mean nothing. Sure, you’re eighteen, but you got the talent and the capacity to play with anyone. I ain’t never seen somebody that could retain a tune as good as you. And when you start digging into the changes, you come up with stuff that makes a person wanna cry with joy. You’re good, Billy. Real good. Miles can see that. All the good ones had it when they were young. You can keep learning as you go along. You’ve heard Miles when he first started. He didn’t sound nothing like he does now. He was eighteen years old when he hooked up with Bird. And look at Herbie. He was playing with Miles when he was just a little bit older than you.”

  “I can’t, Pop. I can’t do it.”

  “Well, fine. It breaks my heart to see you turn down such an opportunity, but whatever you do, don’t go in the army. Go to Canada and wait out the war. Plenty of American boys are doing that.”

  “That’s wrong.”

  “Billy, Billy. What are you talking about? What did you tell me a few months ago when they fined Muhammad Ali and sentenced him to five years? Didn’t you tell me how much you respected Ali for what he did?”

  “Yes, I did, but this is different.”

  “I know some people that can take you up to Canada in no time. You can play up there. There’s plenty of good jazz folks that’d help you out. Please, Billy.”

  “I can’t. I’d feel like I was betraying everybody. Like my father died for nothing.”

  When he finished telling Lurleen about his conversation with Butterworth, he had his head down in his hands and was stiff with tension. She leaned up against him and told him everything was going to be all right.

  “It’s over now, honey,” she said. “We’re done with that. Finished, baby. It’s going to be great from now on. I can feel it. Just wait and see. You wanna go back and make it? I do.”

  He pulled her up to him and held her before he kissed her, feeling again how sweet she still was to his taste. For a brief moment he couldn’t tell whether he was himself or had blended into Lurleen, or whether the two of them had drifted off into a wonderful ether that was the night and memories of other times when they had made love. Their arms around each other, they walked back to their home and then quietly, in their bedroom at the end of the loft with the open summer sky pouring into their window, they made love, slowly, until they were both spent, and slept until nearly ten the following morning.

  When they got up Cookie, Vidamía, and Cliff had all left, and Fawn informed them that there was a note on the kitchen table. Caitlin
was watching television and eating cold cereal. The note poked fun at their middle-age folly of trying to recapture their youth and questioned how seriously they took their parental responsibilities. They knew the note had been written by Cookie because the word “responsibilities” looked like a fruit salad of letters—“respansonblitys,” or something like that. It was signed “with love, from the Video Crew.” Billy and Lurleen both laughed. Lurleen said they should eat something and he insisted on making blueberry pancakes and serving her breakfast. Caitlin wanted to know if he was okay. He said he was fine and she wanted to know why. “I don’t know, I just am,” he said. Caitlin shook her head and said she would never understand grown-ups, but that when she grew up she was going to make sure they were locked up. She talked like that. Off-thewall Caitlin, Cookie had started calling her. That, or else she called her Cuckoo Puffs.

  56. Race

  As things got closer to the day of the gig, tempers became frayed, and little brushfires of hurt feelings sprang up everywhere. Wyn felt that the rhythm section was always either playing too fast or dragging its feet. Cliff, after a great deal of pouting, confessed that he felt he wasn’t being given enough opportunities to solo. From time to time Billy would get so lost in an improvisation that Buster Williams had to stop him and explain that in that particular piece he and Cliff and Wyndell were supposed to be trading fours. The tension spilled over to the people not connected with the gig. Cliff ended up yelling at Cookie and Lurleen. Billy nearly spanked Caitlin because she filled an ice-cube tray with oatmeal and when they were frozen she set the cubes on a bookshelf to see how they would melt.

  One afternoon when Wyndell and Vidamía were returning from the Bronx, where they’d gone to ask Tumba if he wanted to sit in on a couple of numbers, they once more got on the subject of race. In the past, they had never argued about it, but Wyndell had mentioned the likelihood of her having an African heritage. She had had no problem with the idea. Wyndell had been in New York a while and had seen plenty of Puerto Ricans, so it was obvious to him that many had African ancestry. In the past they had laughed about it, but now something was up. Maybe he was annoyed because most of the conversation at her grandfather’s had been in Spanish. Wyndell had wanted to know what her grandfather was talking about when the three of them—that is, she and her grandfather and his friend Flaco—were laughing so much.

  “Was it a joke?”

  “Flaco and my grandpa don’t really get the deeper meaning of the joke, about the self-destructiveness of Puerto Ricans. Or any other oppressed people. But the joke is funny to them. You want to hear it?”

  “I guess.”

  “Anyway, this Dominican, this Cuban, and this Puerto Rican are walking in the jungle, and this tribe of cannibals captures them, right? So they tell the three of them that they’re going to throw them in a big kettle of boiling water, peel their skin off, make canoes with their skin, and then eat their flesh, but that they each have one wish before they die. So they point at the Dominican and the Dominican says he wants to hear some merengue music. The cannibals get up a merengue band, and after the Dominican has danced about an hour, they strip off his clothes, throw him into the boiling water, he screams, dies, they peel off his skin and start eating his flesh and making the first canoe. Okay, so the next day they point to the Cuban and he says he wants to hear “Guantanamera,” so the cannibals get up a band and a chorus and they sing “Guantanamera” until the Cuban is in tears. The same thing, and they start making the second canoe and feasting on the Cuban. Okay, so the next day they point to the Puerto Rican and they say, ‘Qué queriendo último deseo?’”

  “The cannibals spoke Spanish, right?”

  “Stop, okay. I don’t know if they spoke Spanish. Maybe they did. Anyway the joke’s in Spanish, and that’s what my grandfather said. So … they asked the Puerto Rican what he wanted for his last wish and he said he wanted a fork. They asked him if he wanted food with the fork, but the Rican shook his head and said, ‘Yo, I told you. Just bring me a fork.’ So the cannibals brought him a fork and he grabs it and starts stabbing himself in the chest and stomach and saying, ‘P’al carajo con sus canoas, p’al carajo con sus canoas,’” Vidamía said, dissolving into laughter, catching herself and realizing she had been speaking in Spanish. “Oh, sorry. So, anyway, he’s stabbing himself with the fork and saying, ‘Fuck your canoes, fuck your canoes, fuck your canoes,’” she said and was laughing again as she pushed against him. When she looked up, Wyndell had a look of disapproval on his face.

  “What’s the matter?” she said. “You understood the joke, didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t think it was that funny,” he said.

  “See, the Rican was saying that he’d rather put holes in his skin than let them make a canoe out of him,” she said, doing the same thing her grandfather had done in explaining the joke.

  “Yeah, so?” Wyndell had said, dismissively.

  “What’s the matter now?”

  “Cannibals, right?”

  “Yeah, cannibals. That’s how my grandfather told it.”

  “In Africa, right?” Wyndell said.

  “Hey, I don’t know where they were,” Vidamía snapped. “Maybe they were in the middle of some shopping mall in San Juan. Maybe standing on a street in Nairobi. What’s the matter with you? What difference does it make?”

  “A lot of difference. Whenever people talk about cannibals it’s always Africa.”

  “God, you’re sensitive, Wyn,” Vidamía said, slamming herself against him playfully.

  “Cartoons have big-lipped black cannibals throwing a white man into a kettle.”

  “Oh, my God, Wyn,” Vidamía said. “Maybe idiots think like that, but anyone who’s studied knows that the eating of human flesh was practiced everywhere at some time or another.”

  “Europe?”

  “You’re damn right, Europe. My mother said there are anthropological records of cannibalism in the British Isles as late as the fifth century A.D.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Wyndell said, looking like he was being put on. “That’s bull.”

  “No it isn’t,” Vidamía said, and then she got serious and told him that attitudes like his were the ones that were perpetuating the African cannibal myth. “Maybe some white people believe that, but so do you.”

  “I still don’t believe you,” Wyndell said. “I have to go to the West Coast to record, and I’ll ask my sister. She’s an anthropologist. England, right?”

  “Yeah, the British Isles. Ask her. She’ll tell you it’s true, and that it’s pretty common knowledge.”

  “Great! And now just because I’m black I’m supposed to know this shit?”

  “I didn’t say that it had anything to do with being black. I said it was common knowledge. I know about it and I’m not black,” she said.

  “You’re not?”

  “No, I’m not,” Vidamía said, outraged and turning her head away.

  “Even after seeing your grandfather?”

  “Yeah, even after that,” she said, turning back to him, her face fighting the anger. “I mean, what is your problem with wanting me to be black? You’ve insinuated it before.”

  “Are you telling me that even after you saw your grandfather, you consider yourself white?”

  “I never said I was white. I told you all that stuff is bull. I have a white father and a Rican mother, who has a father who defines himself as a man, a musician, a father, a grandfather, a husband, lover, Puerto Rican, and maybe once in a while thinks about color. I don’t know. Maybe he does, but he sure doesn’t go around obsessed with the thing.”

  “And how do you define yourself?” he said, a little too arrogantly in her opinion.

  “I don’t want to discuss this right now,” she replied, aware of people staring at them.

  “Fine,” he said, pursing his lips and looking away, so that they rode back in silence. At Grand Central, where he should have changed to go west to his apartment, he stayed on and tried to talk to her, bu
t she was impassive. At Fourteenth Street she got off to take the Number 6 and he followed her. She got off at Astor Place, and again he followed her, up into the street. He said goodbye. She said whatever. She walked east on St. Marks Place, still seething. At one point she looked back at the black cube where that night they’d stopped and he’d recited the drum poem. Still standing there by the cube, he put his left pinkie and thumb up close to his face and pointed at her to indicate that he’d call her. She turned angrily and continued down St. Marks Place, toward the store.

  She walked fast now, ignoring everything around her, her head boiling over with thoughts. Who did he think he was, imposing his values on her? Didn’t she have a culture of her own? Granted, it included a partial African heritage, but why did she have to go along with the notion that even if you had one ounce of black blood you had to be black, or at least Afro-American. She knew Wyndell hadn’t said those exact words, but that’s what he was implying, and so did American culture insist. It was nonsense, and it wasn’t fair. But Puerto Ricans were the same way, weren’t they? No matter who they married, the kids were Puerto Rican. Or the Jews. If the mother was Jewish, the kids were Jewish—even if the woman married an Eskimo. Barry had mentioned reading a book about a Puerto Rican Eskimo, but she’d assumed he was putting her mother on because she hadn’t believed him. He’d gone out of the room and returned from the library with the book. Vidamía hadn’t read it, but she would have to at some point, since Barry said it was fascinating, and pretty funny. Puerto Rican Eskimos. What about Jewish Eskimos? And then she began smiling as she remembered the seder she’d gone to at her friend Linda Gould’s house on Long Island, except that the seder she was imagining now took place inside an igloo, and, imagining everyone wearing parkas and asking why this night was different from all other nights, she began to relax. And then she wondered if whale blubber was kosher and cracked herself up. And in the next beat she asked herself if she loved Wyndell, and the answer came back, absolutely, and she almost turned back to try and find him, but she knew that she was expected at the store to relieve Cookie. Her mirth and good humor lasted only a block, and then she was again thinking about the subject of race.