The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

  The Bear faced front again and sat with his paws in his lap. No shoes, and I came upon a man who had no feet. That's some hard blues, Julius. God bless you, wherever you may be. The Bear sat there thinking about Julius and his leg until "When a Man Loves a Woman" ended. They hadn't rehearsed an ending, but they'd pulled off a standard tag smoothly enough, with a httle Bowie whisper fluttering off the finish, and it worked.

  "Excuse me?" he asked Krieger.

  "I said I think we need another one," the producer said.

  "Really? I thought we were done," said the Bear.

  "In general the session has gone well," Krieger told him, "although nothing since the first tune has risen to the level of'Vehicle.'"

  "Uh huh," said the Bear, who had to admit that the producer was saying what he thought himself.

  "'When a Man Loves a Woman' is possibly perfect of its kind," Krieger continued, standing up from his chair and stretching his arms, "but I think even you will admit it is a novelty number still, and we don't have a take of 'Tengri' that is strong all the way through. This leaves us two fast tunes, one

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  of them very long, a duet with you and Chadie, and a well-played novelty item in slow triplets. It's not an album yet."

  The Bear wearied himself up from the sofa and scratched the top of his head. "Oh," he said. "Yeah."

  "Correct me if I'm wrong. You would like to make this record in first takes all in one day and get out of here," the producer said, getting his Hcks in. "And I am willing to aid you and abet, but if you want to finish today you will have to work for it some more."

  The Bear nodded.

  "It is still possible, the Bear. Even so, I would like you to contemplate coming in a second day."

  "We could do something tomorrow," the Bear admitted unwiUingly.

  "Given evidently your frame of mind, I think the day after tomorrow would be better. After you have a chance to clear your mind. Do not understand me too quickly. Extend me that favor, and I may be able to return it you. It may be that I imderstand you better than you think."

  "Could be we have a couple things in common," said the Bear. "I mean, I got a case of perfectionism could kill me if I let it loose, you know what I mean?"

  "I do."

  "I'd Hke to close it today if I can," said the Bear. "What do you think we need?"

  Krieger seemed gratified to have been consulted. He pinched the bridge of his nose, shut his eyes and thought about it. "A ballad," he said.

  "Even with the duet we already have with Charfie?"

  "I think," Krieger said.

  The Bear stepped up to control-panel level, looked down at the sHdes, and read the masking-tape labels for the channels: kick, snare, ride, crash, 1 tom, r tom, f tom, sock—it seemed Hke almost all the microphones were there to deal with the drums. Where was his channel? There it was. Just one: Bear. Harwell had three and Haden two. It hardly seemed fair. "You know 'Billy Heart' from the live album?" he said. "I finally got around to writing a B section for it. Which it always needed. Would that be acceptable? I mean, we could always do 'Everything Happens to Me' or 'Chelsea Bridge' or whatever."

  "'Chelsea Bridge' would be good," said Krieger. "But I think an original is preferred."

  "Long as you don't mind that it's partly a repeat. Me, I'd like to do it."

  "All right," said Krieger. "Try."

  "Cool," said the Bear. It was a refreshing change to have a conversation

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  with the producer that wasn't an argument or a contest. "Everybody else cool with that?"

  "You have parts?" Hatwell asked him. "I haven't seen this tune before."

  "Parts I got," said the Bear, bent to his saxophone case and started riffling through his papers.

  "These are some damn tough changes," the pianist told him when he had scanned the sheet the Bear gave him.

  "Yeah, but they make sense and they come at you slow," said the Bear.

  "Kind of a Mingus texture to it," Hatwell noticed.

  "There you go."

  Charlie Haden was peering at the sheet music over Harwell's shoulder. He cleared his throat before speaking. "This is really nice, man, but I don't think we should play it cold. Can Bob and I go out there and work it through for a few minutes before we do a take?"

  While Haden and Hatwell were out there working on it, Krieger asked the Bear if he had thought about touring when the record came out.

  "I suppose," said the Bear, "although there are still security considerations. The last time I played a gig they tried to shoot me. What did you have in mind?"

  "It might be safer for you in Europe," Krieger suggested.

  "You mean like bears aren't quite so discriminated against over there?" The Bear laughed. "I've always wanted to see Paris. You know, wear a beret and shades and sit around in a cafe and talk to the world going by, but there are problems. You'd have to fly me over in a private jet and sneak me through customs, cause I'm not willing to fly in a cage as cargo and deal with a quarantine when I get there. And have you ever tried crossing international borders with a bear? Sig, much as I like the idea, I think it'll have to be the good ol' USA, if I can get my security concerns addressed. Billy, can you come out there with me this summer?"

  "Actually," Billy said, "I'm kind of committed through early autumn. Doing the European festival circuit, then Japan, get my family expenses covered for the year."

  "Huh," said the Bear. "Wonder if I could get McCall."

  Bowie and Billy were looking at him funny.

  "What," said the Bear.

  "You don't know," Lester said.

  "Oh shit," said the Bear.

  "Steve died," Bowie told him. "Heart attack back in Chicago. Nobody told you?"

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  "What the fiick is goin' on?" asked the Bear. "A bear goes inside for a few months and when he comes out the avant-garde has been outlawed by Wyn-ton Marsahs, JuHus is getting his leg chopped off, and some guy called Michael Dolton—"

  "Bolton," Bowie corrected him.

  "Some guy named Michael Bolton's fucked up 'When a Man Loves a Woman' for the rest of us and Steve McCall who was forty-what years old?"

  "About that," Lester said.

  "Drops dead of a heart attack? What is going on?"

  "Seems like some more of the famous same-old same-old to me," Bowie said. "And a sort of Rip Van Bear effect."

  "Welcome back to the waking world."

  Nobody spoke awhile.

  "Actually," Billy eased back in, "if you want some people to work with, Bobby Hatwell's got some friends you should get to know."

  "They as good as he is?"

  "About."

  "Huh," the Bear said. "Steve McCall. I'm really gonna miss that guy."

  The Bear had to instruct Hatwell on how he wanted "Billy Heart" chorded— not too lush, easy on the pedal, articulate the dissonances enough to bring the bitterness out, think good strong coffee with cognac but don't freeze me out with clusters—then they ran through sections of it twice and were ready for a take. Billy, if you want to go with sticks at some point it's all right with me, and we could belt the out-chorus if it feels right but if it doesn't let's not.

  The photographer, still a long slim girl with frizzy hair, was out there with them on the floor. She'd flitted on the fringes of the day all along, but he had excised her from his working consciousness and seemed to have voodooed one of her motor drives. Maybe he should make it up to her now. He walked up to her and watched her tr^ not to retreat.

  "Hi," she managed to say.

  "Dress me in Chinese colors," the Bear told her, nodding at her dangling Nikons, "for I think the glass is evil."

  "You don't Hke being photographed," she said.

  "That's it. But I have a cunning plan."

  "Uh-oh."

  "You know it's part of my deal with Krieger that there's to be no portrait of me on the album."

  The photographer nodded. "I've been taking them for
myself."

  "Fine, as long as you know that if you distribute them without permission

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  you will be killed and eaten," the Bear told her. "Only kidding," he added when he saw how pale she'd gone.

  "WTiat a wonderful sense of humor you have," she said.

  "A trifle on the dark side but it's mine," he told her. "I do have an idea for the album cover, though."

  "More wonderful news," she said. He was glad to notice some of her color coming back.

  "Can we start over? What's your name?"

  "Deborah."

  "Yeah, I've seen your work in the music magazines and I like it. You do some hand-tinted color, right? How about you take a black-and-white picture of my feet standing on some cables on the floor here, legs in the picture up to the hem of my raincoat or up to the knee, and you tint it realistically but kind of pastel."

  "You have a degree in design or something?" Debbie asked, and cocked her hip sideways with ironic self-assertion.

  "It came to me in a vision. That's the cover and the name of the album is Sensible Shoes. I'm a very graphic bear," he said.

  "I bet." Debbie set him up on the floor and shot a quick roll of his feet variously engaged with audio cable, pivoting around him and whirring her motor drive between shots. "I'd like to shoot a second roll," she said, screwing a new lens of choice onto a second camera back.

  "I've got to play," the Bear said. "I've got to play right now."

  Debbie fired off a quick series of portrait shots as she withdrew. ''Playbofs getting these," she said. The Bear whipped his raincoat open wide.

  He heard throats being cleared behind him, and a certain restlessness at the drums.

  "'Billy Heart.'" Right.

  The Bear was glad to get another chance at the bittersweet composition, especially since probably no one would shoot at him this time and the B section had fallen into place. The head went by in an okay mix of passion and clarity. When it was time for his solo, the Bear began it confidently, Haden nudging some extra lyricism out of him with some strums and surges, and the Bear went down into what the bassist suggested. He met Billy there in a rise and fall of cymbals, a troubled hush of drums. Something opened out of him and he let it have its run in the form of multinoted music full of minor sixths and ninths and fourths and polytonal suggestions. This was the second time the tune had worked something complicated out of him, and he was willing to let it happen. Big of me, ain't it, he thought, and blotted a run with a low E-sharp honk before moving on. Two choruses and then Hatwell had it

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  handled. Look at that, thought the Bear. I finally got to play a difficult chord sequence and it worked. Well, it's a tune I already had do^.

  Harwell looked at him at the end of one chorus and the Bear nodded him forward for another, or maybe he'd decide to come back in at the bridge. Charlie? The Bear looked over at him, but the bassist shook his head no, he didn't want an outing. Something was happening on the tune and everyone was obedient to it. I'm so great. Shut up and play the head and get out.

  At the tune's final cadence, the Bear was surprised to hear the band fall away from him and only then remembered he'd written in a space for a cadenza. Okay, he thought, and went into it feeling nothing much. More or less, he played the current contents of his heart out, summed up the record date for himself, how he'd felt coming into it and what had happened once it started. He discovered significant differences between the bitterness of the Tin Palace version of the tune and the more complex if still soul-puckering bouquet of today's equivocal cup of wine, and he explored for awhile the implications of the gap between them. He took note of the victories and limitations, nodded his thanks to the equivocal riches the moment allowed, tossed some last chromatic skirlings into the day's departing wake, and watched the last waves recede. Justice, thought the Bear. Time spent, imperfectly perforce but all in all not completely bad. As he held up his last high note, inviting the band to set down the final chord, he knew they had played something that reached about the same level as "Vehicle," and that was fine, and also in the oceanic ordered amplitude of the universe no big deal. He said okay to the day's experience and to such world as had brought him to it, acknowledged his still pervasive sense of constricted entrapment, and nodded a last thank-you to whatever grace had supervened to let some not-bad music through. His flawed coin had been accepted ana a measure of gold returned him. Good, he thought, and pulled the tune down with a last obeisance of his horn.

  "You know," the Bear told Jones in the anteroom while Krieger was there listening to the day's work to see if it made an album, "it's been a little weird."

  "What isn't?" asked Jones.

  They were slouched in armchairs and the band was wandering around waiting to hear what Krieger thought and would they be coming in tomorrow.

  "What I mean," the Bear told Jones, "is that it only occurs to me now that I was probably in a trance for the duration. You know, I still don't need to use the bathroom. That's weird, Jones."

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  "I see," said Jones. "You don't need to pee equals you're in a trance. How about you levitate and I'll believe you."

  "No, listen. I don't feel a thing. I'm anaesthetized. Everything's kind of two-dimensional, flat. Emotionally it's a blank, my body's pretty much not here, and still I was able to negotiate the emotional world while I was playing, because I knew emotion had to be there, but I did it in a very, very detached way. Not to make a big thing about it. It's just kind of interesting to me, as experience."

  The control-room door opened and Krieger walked past Jones and the Bear looking somber, but when he reached the loitering band he went into his portfoHo and handed out mint-green paychecks that were received with gratitude and thank-you smiles. The band looked at the Bear past Krieger and beamed him grateful smiles.

  Then Krieger came back to the Bear. "You did it in one day and it's all right," the producer told him, "but I don't think I will work with you again personally. If you do another record for my company James will produce it."

  Krieger may have meant this to sound Hke a punishment, but "Fine," the Bear said.

  "Also I'm leaving the studio open for you the day after tomorrow. I will speak with you on the phone in the morning and we will agree whether or not to come in again."

  "£/; bien, mon prince. I'll keep an open mind."

  Krieger squinted at him but said nothing and left.

  There was more human movement around him, the guys in the band coming through, Billy manhandling some black fiber drumcases through the doorway, Haden coming by with a big soft bass case, but the Bear didn't register all these motions in detail. "Right now," he told Jones, "I'm just tired and played out, but I think I was clinically insane for the duration of the date."

  "Bear," Jones said, and laid a hand on his forepaw, "I don't think anyone who lived through this one with you would dispute that."

  "Really?" said the Bear. "And I thought I was being so cool."

  "You were cool like Antarctica is cool," Jones told him "We were up to the neck in penguins here. But you made a pretty good record and that's what counts. How does that make you feel? Just speak into the flower in my lapel here."

  The Bear had to think a moment. "Actually," he said, "it makes me feel Hke quitting music."

  What with his dropping jaw and all, Jones seemed unable to form the intended word Wha? "Ww," was what he said.

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  "I'm serious," said the Bear. "The music came out fine, but if I had to do it like this all the time I'd be destroyed in no time flat. I ain't no burning bush—I'm consumed by what I manifest. I'm clear about this. If getting out of the way stays this hard, I'd have to drink or do drugs to ameliorate the tension. I won't do that. I'd rather not play."

  "You talking about stage fright?"

  "Oh it's the same old bullshit, fear of judgment, transfer of the inside to the outside and how scary that feels. But the solution t
hat came up today was in certain respects worse than the disease. Too much self-separation. I don't think I can make you see it, but I was so alive and dead at the same time, so full of feeling and at the same time so empty of it, that I was looking around at the guys one time, and nothing mattered so completely that I saw Bobby Hatwell sitting there and it occurred to me how easily I could open the back of his head up with one slap and his brains'd fall out. I could kill him or play the next Uine or yawn. It was all pretty much on the same level. It's hard to explain."

  "No shit."

  "I didn't feel actually murderous, and there was no will to violence as such. It was just that everything seemed about as null and void as everything else. I could swat Hatwell's head open or not. Time was nothing, flesh was grass. I knew I wasn't going to do anything strange, but still it was some kind of controlled psychosis, some fucked-up blend of dissociation and control, and all of it was pretty cold. There were interesting states and waves along the way, but it was not a pleasant way to be. I wouldn't want to live there. It would be intolerable. I'd have to stop or get blotto. If I can't get to some other way of playing music, I'll stop."

  "You're serious."

  "I'm completely serious. If I had to live Hke that I'd quit in a minute. It's not the intensity but the degree of self-division. If I can't play hke a whole spirit again I'll give it up. I didn't come to music in order to find some new way of being all fucked up. I don't think you should have to cripple yourself into beaut}^. For one thing it makes any beauty you might arrive at kinda suspect, don't you think? It's too dark, there's a wrong turning in it, and I betcha more than a few cats have gone up that path and disappeared around the bend. Press of circumstance, unskillful means, and hey presto you're a Martian. The next record date, the next night's gig, the apparent demands of so-called art—that's nothing I want to be ruled by. Yeah, absolutely, if it stays like this I'll quit, go live in the woods, eat grass and caterpillars and grubs. Anything's better than this."

  It took awhile for Jones to answer him. "You know. Bear, you've got a complicated nature," was what he said.