The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

  "They also have to deduct bus and hotel money and per diems from the tour from your record sales account—"

  "Wait a minute. I thought that was covered by income from the tour."

  "I could lend you a few bucks if you need it," said Jones, "though tell you the truth I'm barely clearing forty grand a year and there are secretaries —do you believe it?—secretaries with seniority who are getting—"

  "They're paying a flack like you forty grand," the Bear exploded, "and running all this doubletalk on me? Without me there wouldn't be any music for them to make their money on!"

  "It's not all you. There are actually some other musicians on the label."

  "I was speaking globally."

  "Big of you."

  "I'm getting screwed."

  "Welcome to the real world."

  "You want to see reality? I'll show you reality."

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  "Look, Badhi's supposed to be coming down to the club tonight," said Jones, immediately wishing he hadn't. "Maybe you could talk with him about it."

  "Ain't no fucking maybe. I'll crucify the executive son of a bitch. I'll punch his Hghts out. I'll eat his Uver. He's not a drinking man, is he? Persian, right? I love foreign food."

  Jones let the Bear grouse the frustrations out of his system as the van hauled south to the cit^, its signature fug of toxins visible up there in the sky ahead, hovering Uke whatever the night would bring.

  ©Itoy I admit it," said the Bear, his eyes beginning to adjust to the hght after coming into the club through the heay green doors. "It really is a hell of a place."

  "Thanks," said Bob Levine, but he looked imcomfortable, kept smoothing his hair back and looking off to one side. Well, reasoned the Bear, by now I ought to be used to people acting nen'ous when they meet me first crack out of the box. So why was a warning-bell dinging softly in a small room in the rear left quadrant of his brain?

  Rahim Bobby Harwell rose unsteadily from the dimness at the rear of the club and, lurching sideways, grappled with, a momentarily treacherous chair-back before emerging from behind a table. The Bear squinted: a tilted Hatwell was leaning much of his weight on a wooden cane on which his right hand and arm were pressing down. "Brooklyn Bridge?" Hatwell said, grimacing vixh. the effort to suppress pain. "You'd think it's the Bronx Zoo the way they let the animals in. Ouch. How you doing, you fat farn' fuckhead? Christ it's good to see you. Ouch. Shit. Fuckl" Tottering, Hatwell lapsed backward, and one of the club's woven rattan cafe chairs caught him as he fell, juddering backward on the floor. "Fuckl Shit. Ouch. Ahh."

  "A cane?" asked the Bear. "Miat the hell is up?"

  "It's temporarv' Hatwell said, and settled himself more deeply in his safe harbor. He managed an old-man pose with his hands folded atop the cane-handle in front of him. "A purely temporary thing."

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  By the time the Bear got over to him, Linton Bostic had come away from behind the bar, where he'd been making an informal census of the bottles. "Bob here was trying to paint a moustache on the Statue of Liberty and he slid off her nose and fell down," Bostic said.

  From a dim table off left came Garrett's voice: "Bobby fucked up. It comes as a big surprise to us all."

  "But I can play," Hatwell said, looking at the bright side of things and up at the Bear with an uncharacteristically hideous grin. "The perfect jazz musician: half dead but still able to play. There are noble precedents. Plug me in. Bury me later. Send the check to my mother. He had so much promise. Boo hoo. Who can we eat now that's he's gone?"

  The Bear reversed a nearby rattan chair—these things take up more room than the usual sardine jazz economics allow; did Levine know what he was doing?—and sat down across from his piano-playing outlaw genius buddy. "Are you all right?"

  "Fuck no, I'm still alive."

  "You don't have to tell me anything you don't want to."

  "Which means I do have to tell you. I expected a higher grade of hypocrisy from you, but why? Fur? Fur's not enough." Hatwell came out with a stage sigh. "I went up to 120th and Adam Clayton Powell one night on my motorcycle to cop—don't interrupt, okay?—and I have a reputation, they know I'm carrying a lot of cash—my metabolism, whatever; it takes ten bags a pop to get me high instead of one or two. So I was cruising down the block and a coupla guys jumped out from between two parked cars and tried to take me off."

  "Ah shit," said the Bear, and placed horrified, belated and inefficacious paws atop his head.

  "One of them tried to get my neck from behind and the other one came at me with a tire iron from the right. I got my leg up and kicked him and he went down, but the one behind me got my shoulders and I pulled him down the block till the bike came down with both of us attached. That's how I got this," he said, and raised the cuff of his pants up his right leg. A deep scabbed-over gash, cruel and serpentine ran dark red down to his ankle.

  "No wonder you're on a cane."

  "That's not what put me on the cane. My helmet was still on and the guy couldn't do shit to me, so I worked him over pretty good while lying in the gutter on my side with half the bike on top of me." Hatwell snorted proud air from flared nostrils. "That's when an unmarked car pulled up. The other guy tore ass out of there and the cops decided why not bust me. They went through my pockets and found no drugs but did find three hundred dollars.

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  Pissed them off they didn't have enough dope to plant on me for a felony-bust and three hundred wasn't gonna make their night and I called them on it. See, time passes but they still don't like an uppity Nigra. The mistake I made wasn't doing dope but talking back."

  The Bear put a paw over his eyes.

  "They got me in the car, drove me to the river by the sanitation plant, pulled me out and beat the shit out of me with their nightsticks. Kicked me too, thanks for asking. Fucked up my ribs, my kidneys and both knees. I crawled awhile and found a gypsy cab that would take me. Believe it or not, when I got back to where it happened my bike wasn't torn up too bad and there was some kid I gave twenty who told me he watched it for me. I should've died from the beating the cops gave me, but all I did was piss blood for three days and live. It wasn't one of my better weeks but I can still play piano."

  "Bob Bob Bob," said the Bear.

  "Bear Bear Bear," Harwell said. "I take a lickin' but I keep on tickin'. You want to do a sound check or you think you're such hot shit you don't have to anymore?"

  "Where'd Garrett go?"

  "Standing right behind you," the famiHar voice said.

  "Bassists," Hatwell grumbled. "That's what they all say. But where are they when you really need them?"

  "Someone needs them?" Linton wondered.

  "We'd better do that sound check," said the Bear, "before war breaks out."

  In the event they didn't do a sound check. They played what amounted to a set, all of them lapng back a little to save their energy but nudging the music hard enough to be sure that it was there. It felt good to be able to do that, bring the music up to the brink and leave it for later. Everything they'd accomplished on the summer tour was still in place. All the ease they'd earned. They looked at each other in the middle of a laid-back, humorous "Doxy" when the Bear quoted "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" in a related minor, and exchanged small knowing smiles, savvy laughs, nods of the head. What arrogance, what cool. It still felt pretty hip to be a musician. The Bear figured if he could make it through the night without getting shot he'd feel cool in the morning.

  Hatwell was in obvious pain, though, and the Bear wondered if he could carry a trio, like Sonny or Ornette. If he had to he would. You had to be such a melodist. He didn't want to say it out loud, but the Bear felt that he had again become such a melodist. Which was an interesting way for life to turn

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  out. Come back to where you started and wonder if you've gone a few turns up the spiral or only made a circle, flat, for all the experience you've been through. No: he still had not
hing, but he wasn't who he'd been.

  The place had interesting acoustics. The club's main floorspace was roughly cruciform—or maybe say a plus sign or a crossroads for safety's sake—and the low square riser of the bandstand was set slightly to the rear of the center point so that, playing, they faced a broad inverted T-shape of tables with green metal graded balconies above in all four limbs so that there were box seats not only out in front of the band but behind them as well: the Bear didn't like playing to people who could see him but whom he couldn't see, but it couldn't be helped. Behind the bandstand on ground level was an oval service bar—the Bear could see a sound-problem coming up, cocktail shakers during the bass solos, blenders whirring up daiquiris, all the usual nightclub bullshit—but he had to admit that the acoustics were interesting. He made the mistake of mentioning it to Bob Levine and had to listen to a speech about the acoustic engineer Levine had brought in at great expense. Whatever. The sound went up into the arches and came back sweetened without losing much definition or detail; the PA had been intelligently integrated into the space; everyone in the band could hear everyone else without special effort; and the Bear, walking out front during a Harwell solo—he sounded only shghtly handicapped so far—found the house sound satisfactory, only a trifle bright without the hush of seated bodies. All in all, it was the best-sounding place they had ever played in. Even the guys in the band said so.

  "Just don't tell Levine," Hatwell warned them. "He's insufferable already. You believe the guy?"

  "No," Garrett said. "I don't think I do."

  The Bear took them through tunes they'd played on the tour, and a few stray standards they hadn't. He also passed out sheets and worked up a head arrangement for a httle waltz he had lifted from the soundtrack of Gigi: "Say a Prayer for Me Tonight." He thought he might use it for a light touch, a bit of comedy, something like the way Sonny had done "Shadow Waltz." As the light in the windows declined from twilight to early dark and the kitchen and the bartending and table staff came in—a lot of aspiring fashion models, tall girls of all colors defying gravity in a number of ways, their architecture closely followed by the band—the Bear found that Sonny Rollins was much on his mind. How could he not be? This was, after all, the Bridge; and even though Sonny had spent his famous nights practicing on the walkway of the Williamsburg, this place was close enough for a brush with the legend. Even the Bear would have preferred that Sonny Rollins was opening the joint.

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  They finished the rehearsal set nth a rambUng but together version of "Oleo" in which Bobby Hanvell. picking it up fi-om the Bear on "Doxy," kept quoting "The Battle HTrm of the RepubHc'' even though it didnt fit the changes. The Bear cocked an appraising ear toward the pianist; he was playing fine, although given his leg problem he wasn't using much pedal. Fair enough. \ e'll get through tonight, do three sets tomorrow, take Sunday and Monday oft, and ought be in shape to play ^ve days next week, assuming they don't shoot me.

  But...

  \Tiat was it? Something important was missing or had been left undone.

  Yes—he'd forgotten it completely, and where was Jones?—they weren't supposed to even set up their instruments before the cash guarantee was in hand, in full. They'd acted like musicians and played a warmup set. "Jones?" the Bear called into the obscurit' of the house. ^WTiere the fuck is he?" he asked the band when no answer came. "If he doesn t have our front money we've already played more than we were supposed to according to the deal."

  "Hey gu^-s," Bostic asked, "isn't this just like planng with the Bear? This is exactly like placing with the Bear."

  They stepped away from their instruments and scoured the house—no Jones—but finahy heard voices coming from the greenroom offside the kitchen doors.

  "Why not let's go in there," the Bear suggested.

  "Kill," said Bobby Harsvell, hobbling across the floor on his walking stick He poked at the greenroom door with the rubber end. "Pillage. Maim. Cheese dip."

  The Bear stepped around Harwell and pulled the door open, then led the way inside and surprised Jones and Bob Leine in the act of igorous conversation. Jones had been reading Leine a version of the Riot Act. but he barred the Bears way across the room and said, "Let me ex-plain."

  "The front mone''s not here," said the Bear. "Am I right?"

  Hat*'ell b)-passed the cheese dip. foimd the tub of free beer and fell into the sofa beside it.

  "I hate it." said the Bear once the situation had been ex-plained to him twice. The band was eating antipasto from the trays and pulling bottles of Feathered Serpent from the big iron tub of cold water and ice. "The money was supposed to be here in front. Wc weren't even supposed to set up our instruments."

  "The money will be here,'' Leine began explaining for a third time, "only I don't have it rieht now because basically the whole house is comped for the

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  first set—the whole world of press and the music business is coming down to hear you—but they'll pay for their drinks and once the bar receipts start coming in . . ."

  "I have to wait for a bunch of critics and music-biz vampires to order Per-rier with a water chaser before I can pay my band?" the Bear asked Levine. . "White man speak with forked tongue," Bostic explained.

  Levine didn't look so good: the Bear knew flop-sweat when he saw it. The man was leaking gesture: he ran his hand through his hair front to back, took his silver-rim glasses off, put them back on, picked imaginary lint from his Italian sweater of many colors, pulled a handkerchief from the back pocket of his cords, seemed to forget what he wanted to do with it and put it back; all this as he paced back and forth across the room. "Jones," said the Bear. "You were supposed to take care of this."

  "He's good for it," Jones told him, but Jones looked tired. "I mean look at all the money he's put into the place."

  "How much he got left?" Bostic asked the ceiling. "I think that's the question. We're sposed to have two thousand dollars in our pocket before we play note one. He got that much do you think?"

  Levine fretted the hair that protected his temples. Maybe, thought the Bear, it will go an increment greyer as we watch. "I'll tell you something I'm not supposed to," Levine told the room. "It's a fucking event, the opening of this club. Salman Rushdie's supposed to be here tonight."

  "He comped too?" Bobby Hatwell wanted to know.

  "British Secret Service," Levine told him.

  "Then I hope he's got lots of guards and they drink," said the Bear. "I find his books unreadable but it'd be a welcome change to see someone in greater danger than I am." He began to visualize the worst of all possible worlds: Iranian fundamentalists busting the door in and heading for Rushdie, the Bear getting in front of them with quotes from 'Arabi or Rumi to convince them they'd misconstrued the dispensation, cops rising up to turn their guns on him and the final battle commencing—a typical Friday-night gig in New York. The fruitiness of the imagery helped relax him somewhat.

  Bostic was playing foghorn sounds into the mouth of a beerbottle, Bobby Hatwell was paring his fingernails with the end of the corkscrew on his Swiss Army knife, and Garrett seemed interested in Bob Levine.

  "I can't tell you how much I wanted you guys to open this place," Levine said.

  "Tell us anyway," Garrett said.

  "You think we fiicking care?" was Harwell's question.

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  "You were supposed to come up with two grand," the Bear said again, feeling calmer now. "A lot of money went into putting this place together. It shows. But it's not fair if there's nothing left over to pay the musicians. You know what I mean?"

  "Look," Levine said, "once people start coming in .. ."

  "But the house is comped," the Bear persisted.

  "Your own record company has got like six tables down."

  "My own record company has like six tables down? Jones, is there something you haven't told me? Do I own a record company?"

  "I'll get you money from the door," plead
ed Bob Le'ine. "From the bar as soon as they start drinking."

  Silence, untrusting looks.

  "Okay," said Levine in final desperation. "I'll give you my car. Actually, my girlfriend's car."

  "WTiat's wrong with you?- car?" Bostic wanted to know.

  "For Christ's sake it's a Mercedes."

  "And he's a bear."

  "Yeah but Georgia's Accord's got a book value of fifty-five hundred and you can have it clean against the guarantee if the cash doesn't come in, which it will. I'll sign the title over to you right here."

  "You asked her?"

  "I don't have to ask her."

  "Aw man," said Bobby Hatwell, "we can't take your girlfriend's car ..."

  "I'd give you my wife's car but we're separated."

  "They throw a bucket of water over you?"

  "Look, we can't take the car . . ."

  "Naw, we can't take the car ..."

  Le'ine paced the room in a tightening ambit. "I'll talk to her in a minute. She won't mind. The club's gonna work. It's a great place. My father's gonna kill me. It's gonna do business. Help me out, guys. I swear I'm doing this with the best will in the world. You think it's easv^ to have money? It's not easy to have money. I don't have money. I mean I have money but I don't have money. Maybe people have been coming in by now. Let me go out and check receipts at the bar. There's like a three, four hundred percent markup. Couple bottles of champagne and I can pay you for the week." With a sweep of his hand through his hair, he left.

  "I trust the guv because he's so together," Hatwell said, and tossed an empt' bottle into the trash. "If there's amthing I'm a judge of, it's character. I trust him because he acts so cool. WTio's gonna drive me home?"

  "We can't take his car," Linton said.

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  "Of course we can't take his car," said Garrett.

  "WTiat would we do with his car?" asked the Bear.