Setup: A stranger who looks like John Coltrane, but has no memory, arrives in New York in the year 2000. Searching for clues to his identity, he finds his way to a septuagenarian Juilliard professor named Albert Hill and two young jazz students (Peony and Les), who join up to help him find his way home. First stop, the Village Vanguard.
A combo from Los Angeles was taking the stage. It was a tiny stage, so it was easy to take. Anyone could do it. The Gene Czernak Group, GCG, had made their name at the Lighthouse, a hot little coal in Hermosa Beach. Classic West Coast bop. Gene was seventy, round about Hill’s vintage, but in far better shape. Reedy and spare, stretched out like a long divan, Gene still had a stout clump of straw-blonde hair, grayed for atmospherics at his temples, and an open, sunshiny manner. His teeth were bright, and he wore his chestnut-brown chinos like the thoroughbred he was. Hill hated him but kept it to himself. God could have channeled his genius through ugly men, but he didn’t. Hill hoisted his pants as high as he dared, catching the waistband on his belly.
“Mack Morris stopped by and told me a story,” said Mavis.
“I bet.”
“That the cat?”
“What do you think?”
“I’m not paid to think.”
“You’re not paid.”
“Oh, so I guess that means I can think.”
“Give it a shot.”
“I don’t know what’s playing here,” said Mavis. “Is the guy for real?” Hill inhaled. The air in the Vanguard lacked O2, but it more than made up for it in the perfume of sweat, smoke, and whisky sours. Mavis was tired, and what she really wanted to do was count the house. Hill crossed his arms.
John’s back was to the wall, his face turned towards the bright patch on the stage. Gene blew into his sax like a man who had just paid off his mortgage. His jazz was uncomplicated jazz, and Czernak was smooth—too smooth—and sounded rehearsed. He never faltered, so he never fell, and his risks were the decorous kind. Out in that summer sea was a swimmer who would never be carried past the point of his energies. No one had ever seen Gene Czernak wave a weakened arm, spent and triumphant.
Just behind John, Mavis poked Hill with the tine of her elbow.
“Is he yours now, this cat?” Hill stroked his goatee. It felt even grayer since the last time he’d touched it.
“Mine? Don’t be ridiculous. We’re trying to help him get home, wherever that is.”
The room had gone quiet. For how long, Hill had been too sunk into himself to notice. Gene had stopped playing and was staring from the stage straight at Trane.
“Couldn’t be…” he whispered. Gene forgot to compose his manner. The chestnut-brown chinos bagged at the knees; the confidence of his easy life escaping him in gusts.
“Couldn’t be what?” said his drummer, the legendary, but now papery with age, “Bub” Boswell.
“That you, Trane?” Gene said from the stage. John did not move.
“Where’s Mack Morris? Get him down here to prove it.” Voices were calling from the dark corners of the Vanguard. “Yeah, we heard all about it!” “Heard what?” “Why’d you stop?” “What gives?” Hill could not see their faces. John took a step backwards and bumped up to the wall.
“Would someone tell me what is going on?” This was a woman’s voice, hastily aggrieved, as if she’d been waiting a long time for explanation. New Yorkers, thought Hill. Irritation first, patience second.
She had a monstrous head of frizzy blonde hair backlit by the pool of light on the stage. Nasty people always have nasty hair.
What was going on was that the crowd at the Vanguard, warbling and cooing like pigeons, stared at the stranger.
“I shouldn’t have brought you here.” It was Hill.
“It’s okay,” said John. “But who do they think I am?”
“John Coltrane,” said Hill.
“That’s what people keep saying, but I don’t know the guy. Who is he?”
“A guy who played well—as well as you.”
Wanting a thing to be true was its own drug fix, greenish and sweet, and as Hill’s blood sugar began to drop away, he wished such a thing could be possible.
The aggrieved woman stood up and flapped an arm. “Oh, this!” the gesture seemed to say. This is too much. “I paid a thirty-five-dollar cover charge and drove in from the Five Towns. So, could one of you get a move on, or what?” She had a monstrous head of frizzy blonde hair backlit by the pool of light on the stage. Nasty people always have nasty hair.
Gene stepped into brighter light on the stage, revealing his age. Even a life of comfort wears its grooves into the flesh. He did not look elegant now: his mouth hung open absently, the upper teeth and gums bared like an old sea wall at low tide as he peered past the stage lighting. His sax dangled from a cord around his neck, polished and fine, its owner fading behind its brass.
John dropped his gaze away from Gene on the stage and swung it to Hill who was now overpowering a wooden café chair that boasted only one sturdy leg. John couldn’t help but contrast his youth and strength with Gene and Hill’s dissipation. He approached the stage and held out his hand for Gene’s sax. Mavis held up a shot glass filled with vodka in which to dunk the mouthpiece.
His muscles asking for glucose, Hill imagined biting into a Milky Way. The bartender eventually came up with a bag of peanut M&Ms, which Hill dumped into his hand, and from there into his upturned mouth, flung in like seed for planting. The candy crunched down easy enough—with all the caps, his teeth were sturdier than Gene’s. Hill’s belly warmed quickly, and his digestive chemicals fiddled away like grasshoppers. It was enough to quell the anxiety over what might happen next. He felt culpable, as if knowing the mess would be his to clean up.
Gene hopped down off the stage, and his West Coast breeziness was traded for the humility New York always extracted from him. Californians came to the city and sensed right away that their East Coast peers had been raised in leather shoes, while they, half-real citizens of lesser places, had skidded around on rubber and canvas.
John rubbed that wide, unlined brow and looked down at the sax. A pleasing memory came to him.
“My Favorite Things,” he said. Then he blew gently into the saxophone. A familiar melody entered the room. A melody that moves on two planes, “My Favorite Things” found its targets without fuss, the higher spot of the intellect and the lower field in the terra incognita of middle torso. How playful it is, and how melancholy. John did not follow the melody, but rather he charted it with a series of pins on a map, winding a red thread around them, creating a delicate pattern. Here was the hopeful tone of the past, the child’s song, practically a ditty, which he had taken up and molded into a sculpture of shifting form. John held Gene Czernak’s gleaming saxophone and blew a piece of Venetian glass, clear and strong. But the shape was not finished; the sand was still hot and malleable. On he blew, and as he pushed the air along its pathway, he too went exploring.
That melody rode along. La la la la la la. The crowd kept the thread, stringing it around the pins, winding the red onto those silver posts. John took the eighth notes up to the corners of the room, seeking a hatchway to the chilly street above. Then he sent whole, held notes across the floor to wash the feet of the audience. “My Favorite Things,” thought Hill. This is one of my favorite things. The cat had the chops. Behind the man, the boys were keeping up. Any paper and scissors—Hill’s term for the drummer—should be able to hang onto this one. There was no one present who did not know well the map of this track. My favorite things, Hill thought again. Honor’s cardigans seemed to creep under his fingertips. Cashmere, with a round neck. Yarn in a tight weave that read soft. There must have been fifteen or twenty feet of city between him and the snappish cold of the street. And he had been snappish too. So very biting, impatient and unfriendly, there towards what they later called “the end.” But “it” had never ended. Thirty years after his divorce, Hill was waiting for that curious phase to conclude and lead onto the time when his next life would begin. For him, the scene had never gone dark, and he anticipated more to play amongst that furniture and in those now outmoded costumes. He stood forever waiting for another line, but the show begged for the heavy drop of a velvet curtain. Let the actors go home. Instead, the male lead blinked and shielded his eyes, and held fast to the spot in the center of the prop sofa, the prop chairs, the prop door that led nowhere.
La la la la la la… The melody was shimmering now. John’s eyes were closed, his white shirt open at the throat, and the saxophone unblinking under the house lights. Hill felt the notes strike under his breastbone, the curled fingers tapping gently on his knee. How weightlessly this tune bounced, like a small boat bouncing over foam. Hill’s head felt expanded, wide as the horizon. “And then I don’t feel so bad…” Aw, man, he thought, if this was another one of those blood sugar fake-outs, he was going to be pissed. And yet, his joints seemed to thaw. Those sclerotic acorns that joined his pitiable lengths of fingerbone softened, and Hill’s gnarled paw, which had previously only offered a crude rap on the table, started to unfurl. He looked down in wonder. They were only fingers. Just hands. Nothing really, if you thought about it, which you shouldn’t because it was a goddamn bummer. Hill could see that John was somewhere else. The sax held up high, and then dropped down, plunging ahead, the reflection of light off of the brass and the audience as dazzled as children at a fair.
Hill jerked to. He must have been lulled into dozing, escaped for once from a caustic present. The piece was over. It was Gene Czernak who first allowed himself to be frantic.
“Who…who…are you?” Gene said in a desperate gurgle.
Hill snapped upright. It was even worse than he imagined. The cat could have been an embarrassment, a joke, yanked and booed off stage. Instead, the room swiveled as one, eyes on Hill, all asking him to explain. John unclipped from the sax slowly, as if backing away from a cobra. Hill heaved his belly into motion, pushing towards the stage, pulling on John’s hand, bringing him down from the stage. “We’re getting out of here,” he huffed. John yanked backwards. But Hill pulled even harder and John went with him. Les and Peony fell in behind. Mavis waved her arms. Attention made Hill hot with anxiety.
On the street, the four panted in unison, the steam of their breath signaling the effort it had taken to hoist themselves from the cellar. The cold brush of winter still shading the city, chilling the night air. John paced.
“We have to go back down there. Someone may know me.”
“No one down there knows you.”
“Really? Because it looked to me like everyone down there knew me.”
“Come on Dr. Hill,” said Les. “We have to see what they say. Maybe someone can help.”
Peony crossed her arms.
“The Prof is right. Those people don’t know him. But they sure did love him.”
The door to the Vanguard flew open and the crowd from below spilled onto the sidewalk, knocking the bouncer off his stool.” Mavis grabbed Hill by the sleeve, “You can’t leave. Czernak’s losing his shit and this set is far from over.”
“Wrong. It’s over,” said Hill, sticking out his arm for a cab. One stopped rather than knock Hill down, and he pulled John into it. Les and Peony followed, sliding onto the bench seat and slamming the door with a tight smack. The cab driver set the meter and pulled into traffic.
Where, though, to go?
“I know a guy,” said Peony. “Cliff Riff. He’ll know what comes next.” Hill did not want anything to “come next,” but he let the kids call it. The night was no longer clear. Peony put her lips up to the window separating the private world of the driver and the public zone of the passenger. “Orchard Street,” she said.
The Half-and-Half had once been an Italian social club, but like so much of the land below Canal Street, had raised its sights along with the rents. The dirt on the floor was flown in from Portugal and the rust on the doorway painted by Julian Schnabel himself. Lighting the storefront was a murky, single rod of sickly green neon.
There was still plenty of time to run if the scene that lay behind the door offered what Hill thought of as “difficulties.” This Cliff Riff person was surely as ridiculous as his name. And then there was Peony Jones, an utter mystery to Hill. She’d been in his jazz history class, sitting in the center and contributing only sighs. A few times he’d caught sight of her practicing her drums. But once, he’d heard a voice that sounded like opals—bright, but not transparent—absorbing light, rather than refracting it. Milky and blue and changeable. He followed it right to the door of a rehearsal room. There, Peony sat behind the kick drum, her eyes closed, arms caressing each other, and she sang “How High the Moon?” Hill moved away noiselessly, vowing to ask her about vocal training, but she was no longer in his class, and he didn’t need the hassle.
The door led to a tiny vestibule bordered by red velvet curtains. Midnight was no longer a thrilling time to be abroad in the city. Midnight was just another way to look bad in the morning.
“Can’t you hear the music?” said Les. Hill put one ear up to the curtain and listened. John joined him, their heads resting side-by-side against the folds. Beats pounded low and deep, and the velvet felt soft and warm against Hill’s cheek.
“Well, of course there’s music,” said Peony, parting the long panels and stepping into a long hallway. As the four walked slowly through the club’s thorax, they felt the throb of the music grow stronger. Hill thought about the word ‘beat’ and felt a constriction of longing for the 1950s. The world had felt young then, and he’d been young in it. To him, the fifties were the beginning of all experience, but someone else must have felt saddened by its blaze and speed. There must have been an entire invisible population who had been old during his period of discovery, and maybe they’d felt as outrun then as he did now.
Around a corner at the end of the hallway, Hill and Les stepped into the belly of the club, Peony and John behind them. Small lamps on a few scattered tables gave the explorers handholds to guide them through the room. The sparse crowd was young, or so they appeared in the rosy light, and all sleeker than absolutely required. Hill surmised that the young no longer ate, and they certainly didn’t eat American candy. No Necco wafers for this crowd. The bar burned white. In fact, it was hard to tell what the bar was made of, if not light turned to matter. Beams shot from distant galaxies appeared to bear the weight of a vast assortment of Scandinavian vodkas.
Hill was so distracted by a surging anxiety about his age, the place, and the world he no longer understood, that he forgot why they’d come.
Hill feared he was going to be expected to know the names of the latest cocktails. “The Photon” and “Trans-Siberian Magma Stream.” Hill was so distracted by a surging anxiety about his age, the place, and the world he no longer understood, that he forgot why they’d come. He had gone with the idea, climbed aboard a possibility and sailed down here on a boat captained by a boy and girl he ought to have told to go home.
Looking out at the small, exquisitely hip crowd, Hill saw only young faces. These kids probably drink liquid alien intelligence. They take vitamins through their eyes, vitamins spiked with microchips that tell them which shoes to buy. Oh, man, he really wanted a handful of Raisinettes.
“There’s Cliff” “said Peony. She shot away from the group and towards the DJ booth.
Hill was afraid of this very thing. Cliff Riff? Come on. John stared with a frank expression and his face lit by the tutti frutti lights. A smile burst there.
Standing behind the spinning turntables was a young, lean, black hipster dude wearing a Mr. Bubble T-shirt. Peony was pointing, and then, crooking her finger to gesture John over. Hill was suddenly superfluous, succeeded by someone a lot cooler than he and demonstrably more comfortable leaving his home after dinnertime.
Hill opened his mouth to ask Les why Cliff Riff was the guy who’d “know what comes next.” Instead of his voice he heard an eruption from the sound system throwing out an audible puzzle. The pieces were from different patterns, but they formed a whole. Even he could identify the origins of some of the fragments. There were the Sex Pistols and Madonna tied in a smooth Windsor knot of high-polymer disco and hulking, crude guitars. But then, he wasn’t sure. He thought he heard Glen Campbell and Blue Oyster Cult. Hard rock had come to him through his best friend, another aging jazzbo with the even more preposterous name of Boy Wonder, who’d kept it by sleeping with a generation of groupies. The girls’ stories were never exactly credible. Didn’t matter. At heart, Boy was perennially a sixteen-year-old cheerleader on the day the yearbooks are handed out. His appetite for romantic detail was almost exhilarating in its pettiness.
“What do you call this?” Hill shouted to the bartender, a serene girl wearing a ruff. He pointed at the ceiling.
“Mashups!” she bellowed back. Hill leaned across the bar, soaking his shirtfront in sloshed cranberry juice. He did not understand her. “Mashups!” the bartender screamed more loudly. “Mash-UPs!”
Hill turned back to the dance floor, blotting his shirt with a cocktail napkin and feeling like someone’s maiden aunt. Boy Wonder would be at home right now watching “Walker, Texas Ranger.” That sounded so good right now.
Across the room, Les and Peony shouted into the one ear not covered by Cliff’s headphones, Peony striking at the air with her articulate fingers. Hill struggled against the crowd to reach them. The crowd was gaining mass, maybe a hundred people—more!—filled the cube of the club. Hill watched the crowd expand onto the floor, bulging out from the bar in a molluscan surge, the body of the animal moving on a single foot. Lemon-colored lights blinked from somewhere. He saw the kids begin to sway.
Suddenly, their youth became the least interesting thing about them. Youth is a transitory state, not a personality trait.
Beyond Hill, John looked outward over the young heads. Feet, legs, arms, faces, and sinewy torsos bobbed in unison to the record on the turntable, and as the people in the club danced, he felt the connection between his body and theirs. Gravity pinned him to the floor, to the wall, and to the common ground of those around him. There was, he thought, nothing common about ground. The closeness to other humans had not told him much. The throngs on Fifth Avenue had oppressed him. The riders on the subway eyed him with dull curiosity, but they returned nothing useful. Now, watching these kids in this grooving mass, he became aware of a different kind of body, the one created by shared desire. Suddenly, their youth became the least interesting thing about them. Youth is a transitory state, not a personality trait. They were people—people on their way. Being young, they did not know this, and he recalled the sensation of feeling stopped at the point in life when it seemed the only things worth having were happening right then. He could not tell what was moving: the crowd or the room. Surely, he thought, he was not the first to look into a crowd at a disco and think of the theory of relativity.
As the record shifted into a higher plane, so did the crowd, and it struck him that music is not an external wave, but rather an internal spark. He did not know the song. Perhaps it was popular, familiar, and carried pleasant associations. Perhaps he ought to know it. Whatever was important here, it seemed to be rising up from the floor, like warm air filling a hot air balloon. And as the balloon filled, the loneliness of the past week began to leave him. The collective ringing of some kind of bell made him want to join in, but he was still spooked by the scenes at the Smokehouse and the Vanguard. Here, though, he did not feel exposed. Perhaps that was why the crowd had come.
Hill wanted to go. The music was getting louder, and the noise and jostling and airlessness of the club had worn him down. He’d better pull Les and Peony away from this Cliff dude, while thinking that if he did not get a piece of pie right then and there, he was going to fall into a dead faint.
Instead, Peony leaned into Hill. “Cliff has an idea. We need to hang out while he finishes his set, and then take him uptown with us.” Uptown with us? No. This was not going to be “what comes next.” What comes next is that they would all give up, and this nice but troublesome stranger would go back to where he came from, and if he couldn’t recall where that was, there were databases for that kind of thing, and Hill was not a database.
Except that he was a very particular form of catalogue, and if anyone knew it, it was Peony Jones.
“Let’s go. I’ll take us to a place we can chill while we wait for Cliff,” she said.
“Uh, no. I don’t need another hip parade tonight. I’ll take us to a place where you can tell me what’s going on.”