The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

  They were a quintet for the last set, but it seemed to the Bear that Parris

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  had retreated back into the shell of a CHfford Brown impersonation and that those peaks and gleams of his real, illumined self were less readily seen. "What do you think of him," the Bear asked Hatwell privately after the set.

  "I'll be twenty-six in October. He makes me feel like a dead old fuck."

  "No. Really."

  "Really?" Hatwell asked. "If he doesn't blow it one way or another he could be immense."

  "Hope for the future. Pappy?"

  "Up yours. Ma," Hatwell said.

  Gedunk, gedunking over seams of road north to Parma—he would not let Jones pull these gags on him again—the Bear fuddled himself in a forest of notes and was able to recall how easy it is to lose track of yourself in even the simplest search. Music ought to be simple enough—right?—it was just a bunch of notes and not a terribly resistant medium compared to life in general, so how could you lose the essential thread in anything as simple as that? Yet one did it all the time. Like money, the essential thread was only important when you didn't have it.

  He phoned Iris in the afternoon and she came close to getting normally conversational with him but eventually reverted to being fine, fine, and telling him she hadn't been doing much really. Tension in her voice? Tension? What tension?

  The Bear made another call.

  The club in Parma, Jones told him, was supposed to be the hottest venue on the tour outside a college town, and as usual there were college towns and larger cities within National Public Radio range.

  "A rock joint," Bostic said when the manager let them inside before sunset.

  "I guess," said the Bear. There was a bar on one side of the club, a stage way over there on the other, but no tables between, and everything—floor, walls, pillars and heating ducts—was painted black. There were blue and red neon signs high up the walls saying party on, and neon martini glasses blinking GO GO GO in the corners. Daylight slashed into the space when some secondary attendant banged the loading doors open.

  "Typical American music installation," Hatwell said.

  "Really?" said the Bear. "Looks pretty strange to me."

  "I didn't say it wasn't strange," Hatwell told him. "You're gonna learn something about the country tonight."

  "What?"

  "That Americans are the most miserable bunch of motherfuckers on the

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  planet but they have to keep pretending on pain of death they're having a great time. The country fucked up its last chance in the Sixties and been dying ever since but that don't stop it from getting bigger and louder, does it."

  The sound check went well, however, and the Bear had his first experience of decent stage monitors: it was interesting to hear the band clearly, even if the instruments' true acoustic was lost in the crudeness of the circuitry and cones. What would it sound like in the room?

  The Bear would never know.

  When they attained the stage that night the club was packed pretty much wall to wall with white kids whose main problem turned out to be that they had to shout at each other in order to be heard above the band. This was a new experience for the Bear, and he stepped back from the microphone after two choruses of "Now's the Time" that the band heard okay but probably no one else did.

  "Take a long one," he said, bending over Harwell.

  "Welcome to America," Harwell said, chording. "Let me show you how it works."

  "At least the place has a piano," the Bear said hopefully.

  "Is that what this is," Hatwell said. "Watch."

  Hatwell played two impeccable bop choruses, then began his third by quoting "Amazing Grace" fortissimo in block chords with both hands, forearm muscles bulging below his pushed-up jacket sleeves. This elicited a round of applause, some stomping feet and a scattering of wolf-howls.

  "Get it?" Hatwell asked the Bear. "Q. E. fucking D."

  A brief allusion to "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" yielded a somewhat smaller roar. The Bear walked to a rear corner of the stage to contemplate the situation. It made him feel hke a hamburger joint. It made him feel like he was working the drive-thru window. And it wasn't just a rock joint, he noted. There were posters in the room celebrating past gigs by Son Seals, the Meters, Luther Allison, Bela Fleck.

  When he stepped to the microphone for his solo he got a roar just for being who he was, but the noise subsided only slightly as he began to play. Conversation was widespread and energetic. He played the house some Dave Sanborn, and when this proved insufficient to inspire a response he hit them with a medley of the world's hoariest blues cHches high up the horn at top volume—held them up and fairly shook them at the audience—and this yielded an ovation that did not diminish as he performed a cheap trick and held one note through a full chorus without recourse to circular breathing. He finished off by biting the reed into a high squeal and got a wicked grin and a nod from Bobby Hatwell on his return to the rear of the stage at solo's end.

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  This is the way it's supposed to be, he figured, and decided to go with it for the rest of the night.

  By set's end he had reahzed how soul-destroying the setup was and saw how the vulturine cynicism of the tactic would pick his liver clean. He remembered seeing older musicians back in his clubgoing days, when he still looked credible on the end of a leash—^Max Roach, Art Blakey, Coleman Hawkins, Sonny Rollins—and now was able retrospectively to recognize a certain presence in them—a granitic solidity, a massif of stoicism at the center of themselves—and the Bear understood that it was only by this kind of inner substance that you could endure decades of unbelievable bullshit and still have something left to play. You had to be some kind of colossus to keep anything going out here down the years.

  Jesus, he remembered Sonny Stitt, who never had a band, always played with the house rhythm section and usually found someone to insult in it, and who delighted in tearing to pieces anyone unwise enough to bring a horn onstage and match wits with him. The bitterness in that man's face. Sixty years old, play better than anyone alive, and they still call you Sonny.

  I'm not him.

  The Bear finished the set without superficial flourish and decided to play the second show as if he were in the back of the bus meditating the puzzle of his being through the maze of chordal structure and the volutions of pure sound. In any case there was a big ovation at the end. It even rose above the roar of talk for a good ten seconds.

  "Jesus," he remarked to Hatwell in the greenroom, which was blue.

  "He don't come here," Hatwell said.

  Garrett told them the story about how one night Mingus stopped in the middle of a bass solo at the Village Gate and told the audience that he hated to interrupt their dinner conversation, and had the waiter bring a table onstage and set it for two, and sat down with Dannie Richmond and ate three full courses, occasionally chatting about this and that with the audience over the microphone.

  "They don't serve food here," said the Bear.

  "We could play cards."

  They began the second set with "Well, You Needn't," and the Bear tried to keep his concentration despite the ubiquitous bellow^ from the pit. He almost managed. Toward the end of his solo he was pleased to see Jerome Parris climb up from the audience horn in hand: true, it would have been better if he'd said hello first and waited to be invited, but think of it: he must have driven a hundred miles to be here.

  The Bear ended his solo that chorus and leaned down to the microphone

  35^ Rafi Zabor

  to introduce him—"Let's hear it for Jerome Parris, for the young, the astounding Jerome Parris, everyone!"—and as Parris began to play, the Bear pulled the mikestand higher for him and screwed it tight before stepping back.

  The kid began his solo with a bit more confidence and brass than he had in YoungstowTi, and built his way nicely through iMonk's chordal motion in the first chorus, developing some phras
es in the last eight bars that he had set forth in simpler form in the first two A-sections, and in general beginning to pile things up. Sure enough, came the bridge of the second chorus Parris climbed his first peak, effectively moving stepwise up the range of his horn as Monk's harmonies moved stepwise down: nice contrary^ motion opening up massive archiectures in conceptual air. Bobby and Garrett responded happily and emphatically to the tactic, and Linton accorded it something hke applause on the snare. As for the audience, forget it, except for a few souls near the lip of the stage, who had raised their faces fi-om the start and were still Hstening.

  Parris brought his solo to a second exclamation point and then began the expected decfine—at nineteen it was probably too soon to tell him that this Brownian motion sounded increasingly mechanical with use, and that he shouldn't tongue absolutely ever^ phrase with that little upflick into clarity the way Brow^nie did—but then, at the end of his fifdi chorus, which everything in his solo had foreproclaimed the last, Parris went on into a sixth chorus, and a seventh. The ninth confirmed it: he was turning into the Soloist Who Wouldn't Stop. By the tenth his chops were failing and when he wasn't recycHng ideas he'd already played twice he was fingering complicated new ones that maybe he could execute at home but had no idea how to fit in or swing with now.

  The Bear knew the kid was in the middle of his worst nightmare and didn't know how to end it. At the end of Parris' eleventh chorus, just as he was inhaling the air of a twelfth, the Bear stepped to the microphone, signalled to the house and began to applaud. "Let's hear it for the wonderful Jerome Parris, everyone!" he said, obtained the ovation, and when Parris, looking shamed and panicked, made an attempt to bolt ft-om the stage, the Bear, wearing a big showbiz grin, seized him by the arm and walked him off, stage left, and into the greenroom.

  "Listen," he told the poor kid, who looked like nothing so much as an engorged and palpitating ego caught in the cruel light of day, unable to either expand or contract or get it over with and blow up. The Bear himself had no ego problems of course, but he was sufficiently learned in the ways of empathy to offer effective commiseration of a kind. "Listen. You're a terrific young

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  player and the whole band loves you but you really shouldn't've ... Aw forget it, sit down and have a beer. Have several, and don't try to leave. Because I want you onstand next set."

  The Bear didn't really, but, you know . . .

  Between sets the whole band went to work on Parris, telling him how good he was and what he'd done on the Monk tune was not some terrible debt he owed to suicide, only something less than a propos. It took awhile to calm him down, but the invitation to join the band for their third set and the insistence on giving him gas money practically collapsed him with relief.

  We're all the same, thought the Bear. We're idiots together, behind the mask and beneath the fur, aren't we.

  So it was a busy night, but what amazed the Bear at the end of it was that Bob and Garrett and Linton had managed to abstract a woman each from the general blur below and it looked, at spotlight's last gleaming and despite all the gosh-golly tremors of maidenly embarrassment at the musicians' unmodulated directness, as if at least two out of three were going to get laid.

  A number of women gave the Bear himself a still more nervous eye, and one or two came up to him gushing fantasy on the protective arms of edgy boyfriends, but the Bear contented himself with parkland outside town. After Rondo headed back to the hotel in the taxi that had followed the bus out, he enjoyed the late-night cool amid trees under stars and wished it weren't too late to phone Iris. Although, if their only fitfully communicative telephone conversations were to be believed, she was doing fine, relentlessly, unambiguously fine.

  After fifteen minutes back on the bus and some desultory diddling with the television, practice claimed him, and he submitted to its complexities imtil even a bear had to get his rest.

  "I'm out here in America," he said that morning.

  But Iris seemed a flickering presence out there on the line, and their conversation that day could have been any of the others they'd had since the Bear had hit the road.

  Fine.

  And the doves?

  They're fine.

  The swallows?

  Also fine.

  Any trouble from Siege?

  She had hardly seen him. Everything was fine.

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  I miss you.

  She missed him too. How was the tour going?

  Well, he allowed, things were beginning to look up.

  Okay then, bye.

  What? Iris . . . Iris ... are you there?

  Of course I am. Is there something else you wanted to say?

  How about, thought the Bear after he had replaced the receiver in its sling, how about Duh, what's happening, sweetie?

  The Bear retired to the back of the bus, sat down on the edge of the bed, hooked his saxophone back on the neckstrap and thought about what to work on next.

  What he was beginning to find was that all the work he had done piecemeal and in the dark over the past year was beginning to cohere: it was precisely as if the essential work had been done without his consent—in fact he had fought it all the way, hating to be imposed upon by these false, misleading comphcations of quantitative harmony, these million-odd notes all over the place—his necessary music assembHng itself as best it could without him, knowing he'd come around and join it sooner or later. The Bear would have resented this intrusion into the workings of his will were he not beginning, if not to see the light, then at least to take some pleasure in the sweetness of the first fruits of this odd and self-divided labor. He also began to have the old feehng that he and not the saxophone was the instrument, and that all the work he put in was no more than making sure the keys worked smoothly, the pads didn't stick and the reed wasn't thick with slobber. After that, if and when the right moment came, it was time to step aside and be played upon. Listen to this reed reborn. He wished.

  The first of the tour's college towns gave him the leisure for a prolonged taste of these new pleasures. Ann Arbor: meaning nice woodsy club with a decent Baldwin baby grand and an attentive if sometimes overstudious young audience: impossible for him to get through a set without noticing all the elements he'd been struggling with starting to line up and dance. He felt like a supersaturated solution into which the crucial crystal had been dropped, and now all this music was precipitating out. Even so, he had to admit that he was being outplayed by his rhythm section; the good part was that it didn't especially bother him: he knew his place on the tour's evolutionary curve and did not try very hard to exceed its limits or run ahead, look back and see how he was doing. It was almost like being intelligent again, and besides, he could rationalize the situation a bit: most of the interesting playing going on these days was happening in rhythm sections anyway: he could abide a week or two

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  of looking secondary. More than that, of course, he'd be thinking bloody murder.

  His dreamlife was popping, though, parked out there in the campground outside town. One dawn, just as he was starting to nod off, a typical pale Mid-western type in neat hair, madras shirt and chinos appeared, leading a small boy by the hand. "Hi, Fm Tom," the man said, extending a friendly hand, "and this is my son Kevlar."

  This jerked the Bear's head up, and he v/oke up laughing rather stupidly. After that he went back to sleep and about half an hour later had the most charming dream of his life. He was standing in a grassy field, feeling large and awkward, surrounded by a three-deep ring of children, five or six years old, dressed in bright colors. When they began to sing their voices were exacdy like those of real children, reedy and only approximately in tune with each other—nice touch, thought the Bear—but the song, in the simplicity of C major, was even better.

  §

  May you be an old man, may you be as tall as I am

  —such a nice reversal, thought the Bear, I don't mind them calling
me a man.

  # # W

  And if you stand where I stand you will see what I can

  —I get it, he thought, but then the kids skulled him by adding, by calling him:

  Lit- tie One

  He woke in a state of addled bliss, feehng graced, as if he had been promised something much better than he could consciously imagine—not just a restoration of lost innocence but something finer and more fully formed. One question: in the fourth line had some of the children sung "You will see what I am''? It was possible. It worked either way. Kids had always loved him.

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  He wrote the tune down even though he knew he would not forget it— the dream had been so clear, and he had awakened from it in a wonderful brightness of mind—and before going back to sleep he parted the window-curtain with a claw and looked out: a few bodies in sleeping bags beside their cars, no one stirring in the early Hght. Perhaps some child had run past and that had . . . Xo, the dream had come from some other place entirely.

  In a soft doze on another morning, he had had an erotic dream about doves: twent}' or so descending on him, and he died in the rose underblush of their breasts as they pressed upon him, beating their wings. He understood that it was a dream while he was having it and knew that he would wake up with a laf>-ful of seed, but even as the beating of their wings—ribbed, deHcate—took him deeper and as he began to come he thought that there was nothing in this much beaut}- that was not impUcit and surpassed in the embraces of Iris. Or maybe, he thought in his slow persistent way when he voke, that while he might be taking the world on one species at a time. Iris was their sum.

  He liked the club in Madison Wisconsin too, though for some reason he experienced a shiver of fear on entering. He had Rondo double-check the security arrangements and back-door access, and made him promise to keep a particularly sharp lookout for amthing that looked even remotely like the Law. All that happened was that he caught up with his rh-thm section and had a few nights of feehng inhabited by an increasingly large body of music.