The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

  What galled him most was that, bear or not, novelty act or bizarre and singular door, he played so much better than they did. It wasn't as if they were razzing an incompetent. Looking out at the unimpressed house and remembering the Kansas City story about a contemptuous Jo Jones throwing his cymbal at the feet of the teenage Charlie Parker, the Bear decided almost wearily to do what he had done in rehearsal once or twice and try to turn the show around. Here we go, gentiemen. This way forward. Let's take it a littie out.

  First thing he did was start dismantling the tune. He played a series of violent lower-register honks, then some angry, disordered runs that violated the cadence at the end of the chorus. And there went the tempo: the rhythm section was forced to break ranks and stutter to make it look as if they might be playing free. As the Bear applied more pressure, the time splintered like boxwood beneath the weight of his phrasing and the home key collided smartly with two or three others, motivic fragments flying off at the edges like electrons from a critical mass about to go fission.

  Divide and conquer? On the contrary; say Allah and leave them to their confusion.

  Either way, with the rhythm section cut out from under him, he started slow, played a mid-tune, out-of-tempo cadenza that reduced the drummer to cymbal filigree, then began a long, deliberately constructed accelerando they all had to pick up on or look foolish, and took it up to a tempo so fast they could not really manage it in style. He played a few furious straight blues choruses with more fire than they could muster, then turned his back to the audience and played a vile twelve-bars blues in no particular key hideously out of tune straight into the three faces of the band. He lowered his sax, showed his teeth in all their rending horror and stomped his way offstand, setting the microphone stands awobble. The audience applauded as if it had

  46 Rafi Zabor

  been wonderful, wonderful, and the rhythm section, once restored to trivial competence for the duration of their own solo outings, granted him a wary and uninspired professionalism for the remainder of the set: "Skylark," "Afro Blue," "Oleo" and out.

  "I don't understand," he complained to Cummins and Jones afterward in the booth. "I've tried to talk with them, be a buddy and like that, but it's always the same. Bob, you gotta help me out, you've got to find me some other people to play with. Razzing the novice may be the oldest ritual in the book, but I've had it with these guys, it's enough."

  "I'll see what I can do," Cummins promised.

  "I mean, how many of these tours do you think I'm gonna do?" the Bear continued, then noticed that there was a woman standing beside the booth, waiting on the brink for a break in the conversation. "Excuse me?" he asked her.

  "Sy^/7," Cummins greeted her, half rising. "Join us. Sit down."

  Cummins and Jones were sitting opposite the Bear. The only empty seat was the one next to the Bear, and Sybil looked uncertain.

  "You're perfectly safe," he assured her. "It was beauty killed the Beast."

  After a moment's pause, she sat alongside him and gave him, within a general context of shaky eye contact, a remarkably clear-eyed look. "You look pretty impregnable to me," Sybil said.

  "What you see is nothing," he said. "I have a feeling heart and severe self-division."

  Sybil laughed, and raised her right hand to cover her mouth.

  "No," he told her. "Go ahead, laugh. It's why I live. Nice to meet you."

  "Nice to be met." She took his paw with a polite if unconvincing show of fearlessness and shook it hello. "Sybil Bailey."

  "The Bear. Bear to you."

  "I'm Bob's law partner."

  "Yes," said the Bear. "I've heard of you."

  Sybil, the Bear decided, had a graceful, softened beauty to her rather than the imperious, heart-conquering kind—Jones looked like he might see things differently—but there was fire in her despite any trepidation she might have felt in the presence of so much living fur. She had tumbling light brown hair, a clear unworried forehead and greenish eyes. He liked her implicit warmth, even if for the moment it was veiled by whatever else. And had she just moved marginally closer to him on the banquette?

  Jones was doing a nervous cough routine and chewing on his plastic cocktail straw. The Bear decided to give him a break and turned away from Sybil in his seat.

  The Bear Comes Home 47

  Sybil looked across the table and said, "Hi Ray."

  Ray? Who's Ray? the Bear almost asked aloud, but finally remembered that it was Jones' first name. It had been so long.

  Jones and Sybil touched hands across the table and the Bear felt a stab of his own loneliness. Jones had been telling him about Sybil, how happy he was to have met her, how maybe they were going to get something going. . . . The Bear was brushed, then saturated by the memory of a small slim woman with a radiant, beautifully detailed face, large bright eyes into which, it seemed, he was always falling, and red hair tumbling about her small square shoulders. Iris had been a biochemist friend of Jones' left him from his college days, and after the bear he had won in a card game began talking a blue streak and developing a musical gift of surprising proportions, Jones had called her in to test the animal's capacities. Astonishment loves company even more than misery, and craves lots of reassurance.

  Jones still had some of the family money then, and they lived in a fairly spacious apartment. Iris came over, listened to the Bear's family lore, and over the weeks ran what tests she could on him without taking him down to the lab—portable EKG, cell samples, blood, urine, semen (the Bear had refused to masturbate but he did allow the leavings of a wet dream to be placed upon a slide). Soon Iris was hanging out at the apartment, staying for dinner and sitting up talking with the Bear late into the night, the radio on, the ashtray filling, and Jones trying to sleep in the next room, bothered by the sound of their laughter, their equable, affectionate conversation. What had emerged from the genetic inquiry was not a pat quotidian answer to explain the Bear away but an intimacy that surprised the Bear and Iris both, and as it deepened, as the correspondences between them multiplied and wove them closer, they found that the obvious next step was one they were too shocked or surprised to take. Iris in particular was pained and confused— while she was not in any obscene or kinky fashion attracted to the transgression of doing it with the Bear, thank God, she had fallen in something resembling love with him and didn't know what to do about it—and the Bear, with a delicacy of feeling left him from cubhood of which his hookups with hookers had not entirely deprived him, would have done anything, or been anyone, to relieve her of any pain and disarray he might have caused to trouble her spirit. He began by suggesting that she stay away from him, go away more or less forever.

  She asked why she should be deprived of the pleasure of seeing him.

  The Bear said, Um, I thought, whatever.

  Iris and the Bear were allowed their season of indecision and then, without knowing exactly how or why, they were separated from each other, like

  48 Rafi Zabor

  swimmers in opposing and indifferent currents, and were swept into separate, self-coherent streams. Although since then the Bear had slept with three she-bears (two in the woods and one rented from the circus for a night) and too many human prostitutes, and although between him and Iris there had been everything but, finally, physical union, she remained the only woman he had truly, in the complete and soul-transpiercing sense of the term, ever loved. Oh, he had been able to rationalize it away, and apply the balm of irony to the wound, but that was the last stone laid on his heart and the sharp final edge whetted on the grudge he held against the world: he had never been able to complete the circuit of his love. By now, unused and suppressed for so long, that capacity for love was not what it had been—weaker certainly, grown morbid like as not, turned bitter . . . the works. Iris was receding from him, not only into the past but into a world of sensibihty he could hardly even visit anymore. Life had coarsened him. All he had left was the insufficient substitute of art. The last he had heard of Iris, she had gotten mar
ried, had tw o kids and moved to Kansas City.

  Someone had spoken to him. "VV^at?" said the Bear, and collected himself back from memory and regret to find himself still at the table and still the only bear in the house. He tried to feel happy for Jones' possible good fortune with this Sybil, but when he trundled back onstand for the next set all he wanted to play were ballads, and his beloved saxophone seemed to him the cruel and sinister instrument of his own undoing. Instead of the cross, the albatross. Vita brevis^ he thought, ars nada^ nada, nada.

  A few days later the Bear came into some good fortune of his own. Billy Hart, who had recently left his longtime stay in Stan Getz' band, was picking up ever^ available gig and record date he could get his hands on in order to keep his family afloat now that he was off a steady wage. He had agreed, Cummins told the Bear on the phone, to do the bulk of the Bear's clubdates and be on hand for the recording session at the end. In addition, he would bring the rest of a rhythm section with him—Scott Lee on bass and Armen Donelian on piano—and although a hefty chunk of the Bear's tour bread would go to pay for them he was ready to part with it by then. The first night he played with them he felt sure the expenditure was way past worth it. Ideas surprised him coming out of his horn; he began to touch again on the deeper pleasures of playing, the joys of an evolving line happy in its element, and felt the intermittent stirring of fresh creativity, the uncoiling of new energy in his belly, chest and limbs.

  The Bear effectively dismissed the self-suggestion that this new mastery of the materials of his chosen music would enable him to rule the world, and

  The Bear Comes Home 49

  found himself developing a particularly tight accord with Billy, a mellow brown cat in his forties with his hair gone white and a sweet habitual smile more or less ever-present on his features, even when he was pounding drums and cymbals to bits and threatening to roll thunder all across the night. There was a smile in Billy's drumming too, a smoothness that suffused it, for all the transgressed barlines and all the smash and scatteration. Something friendly, something warm. The Bear was learning to run with it, and sometimes even fly.

  He got along with Scott Lee pretty well without ever getting to know him much. Armen Donelian opened up when the Bear told him that his ancestors had always been grateful for the kindness of Armenian keepers on the Turkish circus circuit.

  They did a round of unadvertised gigs in the city, letting enough word of mouth leak out to half fill the nightclubs. The Bear thought himself an inconsistent player, but the rest of the section and particularly Billy Hart kept assuring him that he was doing fine. "You mean you don't know about the three kinds of chops?" Billy asked the Bear one night when he was accusing himself of greater inconsistency than usual on the horn.

  "Something to do with Goldilocks?" the Bear asked him. "There's a bear in that story too."

  Billy's face broke into a wider grin. "You're a trip, Bear. Look, there are three kinds of chops and they have less to do with each other than you think: the kind of chops you have when you're practicing alone, the kind when you play with other people, and then there's the kind of chops when you play with other people in front of an audience. They're three different things. The way I understand it, you've been sittin' home for a long time. Of course you're gonna have some off nights. There's no possible way you can expect yourself to know how to road."

  "No?"

  "How could you know how to road? The tension you're feeling? That's one of the things that puts cats on booze and drugs just to take the edge off. You've got to lay back, you've got to let yourself develop. Otherwise how are you gonna get ahead? I got to tell you, you're doing better than I expected the first time I heard you. I think you've got the talent to take it as far as you want to."

  "So I just need more chops, type three?"

  "There you go." Billy had such a winning smile and so positive a spirit that the Bear lost track of whether he thought the guy was conning him or not. "Lay back. Bear, take your time, learn how to road and you'll be fine."

  But the Bear, an expert in giving himself a hard time, felt sure there was

  50 Rafi Zabor

  more to it than that. Even accepting what Billy said, because until now he hadn't been out there performing night after night there were large areas in his music that were blurred, insufficiently realized in conception and execution both. It might be that when he practiced he had gravitated to his strengths and left the rest unconfronted. Now that he was out there palpably exposed, and especially since Billy was raising the level of play, it showed, it showed. He heard the absences and unworked areas, the dead transitions, the insufficiently attended lifeless notes and the wholesale acres of unfinished business—heard it every set, every night, heard it without shelter or mercy, and felt that whatever guilty rush of practice he attempted now was too little, too late.

  He said some of this to Billy Hart.

  Billy told him it was always like that. "The music^s like that, B. Whatever level you get to, there's always something further to reach for, something you haven't seen and didn't know was there. Once you stop feeling that, you're finished, basically."

  "Really?" asked the Bear.

  "Yeah. Once that happens it might look like you can play, but the light's gone out. The thing is dead. It may feel uncomfortable now, but that's because you're alive and kickin'. Trust me on this," Billy said. "Trust me on this one. It's true."

  The Bear nodded yes and tried to believe it but something in the pit of his belly said no and tightened its grip on his innards. Some stupid self-will demanding doom. Or a case of nerves most likely.

  The band took a weekend trip in tuo rented vans to play New Haven and Boston. The Bear enjoyed the Boston gig more than any other he had played so far. It was at a place called Michael's, near the conservatories and Symphony Hall, and he found the bandstand ringed by bright and eager faces turned up toward him, smiling and nodding yes while he played. Music students: Berklee, the Boston Conservatory. They had come in fair numbers to hear the advertised rhythm section, but after the first set they must have phoned their friends: by eleven-thirty the place was full; there were even some people sitting cross-legged on the dusty wooden floor around the bandstand.

  Between sets he was besieged by questions—up until now he had hidden himself in the backs of clubs, in booths and dark corners, but in a student-heavy joint like Michael's there was no room. They asked him not what was a bear doing playing alto but where did he pick this or that lick up, did he do deep-breathing exercises and if so what were they, what kind of reed did he

  The Bear Comes Home 51

  use, what did he think of Anthony Braxton and had he done anything special to adapt his mouthpiece to his, um, you know. The Bear was unused to coping with so much acceptance and feh desperately awkward and out of place. He tried to be friendly, but seldom had he been so aware of his physical size and obvious potential for violence—no way to sheathe those claws—and his fugitive impulse to run for the door made him realize that acting it out would injure a couple dozen friendlies and break some chairs.

  On the late ride back to New York, he sat in the front seat of the utility van—the rhythm section making its own way back to the Apple—occasionally woofing out the window at passing cars. Jones, who had accepted gift reefer at Michael's by the handful, giggled to himself and drove more unpredictably than usual: a certain tendency to drift from lane to lane. "Who would have believed it, man," he said finally, at about four a.m., when the highway traffic had diminished. "A few months ago, that it would come to this."

  "Uh huh," said the Bear dully. The gig at Michael's had been tonic, but as so often after pleasure his useless crapstrewn unconscious nature was kicking clods of misery at him, and they were beginning to soil his regalia.

  "You having trouble coping?" Jones asked.

  "I don't feel with it all the time. It's getting better but sometimes 1 feel out of phase."

  "Jesus, Bear. You ought to get stoned more."

  "I
don't Hke smoke," the Bear told him firmly.

  Jones waved his arms for a moment before resuming his grip on the wheel. "This is the stuff of legend we're doing here. Bear, riding out of the night in vans and playing music at unannounced gigs in dark and midnight America. We used to dream about this. You ought to be participating, Bear. This is what you wanted."

  "You're right," the Bear admitted. "I'm just slow to adjust. It's been a big change very fast. Parts of me aren't catching up."

  "I wonder if the Indians in these parts had a myth about Participating Bear, the van-riding saxophonist of the American dream. . . . The audience is just starting to latch onto you, you know. I sense a groundswell. I intuit recognitions. . . . Jazz people, they're such outsiders you're the kind of mythology they can relate to. You're a dream figure, you're their hip little secret. I think they're beginning to catch on."

  "Being everybody's dream figure's not exactly what I had in mind," said the Bear. "All I wanted was to play some music and go home. . . . Maybe I'm really best as a contemplative, you know? Sitting back from it all and, um, dreaming about it on my own."

  52 Rafi Zabor

  "We're all contemplatives," Jones assured him, "only we found out we couldn't pay the rent. So you want to go back to the apartment and frustration and the street act? You amaze me, you really do. Look at us, B. We're rolhng."

  "I know," said the Bear. "I'm a crank and a complainer. I get everything I've wanted handed to me on a platter and all I do is criticize the silver plating. I'm a schmuck."

  "You're doing fine." said Jones. "Considering."

  "That's what everybody tells me," said the Bear, "but I dunno. I mean, is this what I wanted? I don't recognize it at all."

  "Cummins wants to record as soon as possible. He wants to try live two nights at the Tin Palace next week and if it doesn't work out he's got a studio on tap. I already know you're too good for this world, Bear. What is it now, you're too good for art?"