“Dr. Bernard is a sad-assed idiot,” Johnny said, licking his glass. “He’s going to give me aspirin and then he’ll tell me how very much he digs jazz, for example Ray Noble. Got the idea, Bruno? If I had the horn I’d give him some music that’d send him back down the four flights with his ass bumping on every step.”
“It won’t do you any harm to take some aspirin in any case,” I said, looking out of the corner of my eye at Dédée. “If you want, I’ll telephone when I leave so Dédée won’t have to go down. But look, this contract … If you have to start day after tomorrow, I think something can be done. Also I can try to get a sax from Rory Friend. And at worst … The whole thing is you have to take it easier, Johnny.”
“Not today,” Johnny said, looking at the rum bottle. “Tomorrow, when I have the horn. So don’t you talk about that now. Bruno, every time I notice that time … I think the music always helps me understand this business a little better. Well, not understand, because the truth of the matter is, I don’t understand anything. The only thing I do is notice that there is something. Like those dreams, I’m not sure, where you begin to figure that everything is going to smash up now, and you’re a little afraid just to be ready for it; but at the same time nothing’s certain, and maybe it’ll flip over like a pancake and all of a sudden, there you are, sleeping with a beautiful chick and everything’s cool.”
Dédée’s washing the cups and glasses in one corner of the room. I noticed they don’t even have running water in the place; I see a stand with pink flowers, and a wash-basin which makes me think of an embalmed animal. And Johnny goes on talking with his mouth half stopped up by the bottle, and he looks stuffed too, with his knees up under his chin and his black smooth face which the rum and the fever are beginning to sweat up a little.
“I read some things about all that, Bruno. It’s weird, and really awful complicated … I think the music helps, you know. Not to understand, because the truth is I don’t understand anything.” He knocks on his head with a closed fist. His head sounds like a coconut.
“Got nothing inside here, Bruno, what they call, nothing. It doesn’t think and don’t understand nothing. I’ve never missed it, tell you the truth. I begin to understand from the eyes down, and the lower it goes the better I understand. But that’s not really understanding, oh, I’m with you there.”
“You’re going to get your fever up,” Dédée muttered from the back of the place.
“Oh, shut up. It’s true, Bruno. I never thought of nothing, only all at once I realize what I thought of, but that’s not funny, right? How’s it funny to realize that you’ve thought of something? Because it’s all the same thing whether you think, or someone else. I am not I, me. I just use what I think, but always afterwards, and that’s what I can’t stand. Oh it’s hard, it’s so hard … Not even a slug left?”
I’d poured him the last drops of rum just as Dédée came back to turn on the light; you could hardly see in the place. Johnny’s sweating, but keeps wrapped up in the blanket, and from time to time he starts shaking and the chair legs chatter on the floor.
“I remember when I was just a kid, almost as soon as I’d learned to play sax. There was always a helluva fight going on at home, and all they ever talked about was debts and mortgages. You know what a mortgage is? It must be something terrible, because the old lady blew her wig every time the old man mentioned mortgage, and they’d end up in a fistfight. I was thirteen then … but you already heard all that.”
Damned right I’d heard it; and damned right I’d tried to write it well and truly in my biography of Johnny.
“Because of the way things were at home, time never stopped, dig? From one fistfight to the next, almost not stopping for meals. And to top it all off, religion, aw, you can’t imagine. When the boss got me a sax, you’d have laughed yourself to death if you’d seen it, then I think I noticed the thing right off. Music got me out of time, but that’s only a way of putting it. If you want to know what I think, really, I believe that music put me into time. But then you have to believe that this time had nothing to do with … well, with us, as they say.”
For some time now I’ve recognized Johnny’s hallucinations, all those that constitute his own life, I listen to him attentively, but without bothering too much about what he’s saying. On the other hand, I was wondering where he’d made a connection in Paris. I’d have to ask Dédée, ignoring her possible complicity. Johnny isn’t going to be able to stand this much longer. Heroin and poverty just don’t get along very well together. I’m thinking of the music being lost, the dozens of sides Johnny would be able to cut, leaving that presence, that astonishing step forward where he had it over any other musician. “I’m playing that tomorrow” suddenly fills me with a very clear sense of it, because Johnny is always blowing tomorrow, and the rest of them are chasing his tail, in this today he just jumps over, effortlessly, with the first notes of his music.
I’m sensitive enough a jazz critic when it comes to understanding my limitations, and I realize that what I’m thinking is on a lower level than where poor Johnny is trying to move forward with his decapitated sentences, his sighs, his impatient angers and his tears. He gives a damn where I think everything ought to go easy, and he’s never come on smug that his music is much farther out than his contemporaries are playing. It drags me to think that he’s at the beginning of his sax-work, and I’m going along and have to stick it out to the end. He’s the mouth and I’m the ear, so as not to say that he’s the mouth and I’m the … Every critic, yeah, is the sad-assed end of something that starts as taste, like the pleasure of biting into something and chewing on it. And the mouth moves again, relishing it, Johnny’s big tongue sucks back a little string of saliva from the lips. The hands make a little picture in the air.
“Bruno, maybe someday you’ll write … Not for me, dig, what the hell does it matter to me. But it has to be beautiful, I feel it’s gotta be beautiful. I was telling you how when I was a kid learning to play, I noticed that time changed. I told that to Jim once and he said that everybody in the world feels the same way and when he gets lost in it … He said that, when somebody gets lost in it … Hell no, I don’t get lost when I’m playing. Only the place changes. It’s like in an elevator, you’re in an elevator talking with people, you don’t feel anything strange, meanwhile you’ve passed the first floor, the tenth, the twenty-first, and the city’s down there below you, and you’re finishing the sentence you began when you stepped into it, and between the first words and the last ones, there’re fifty-two floors. I realized that when I started to play I was stepping into an elevator, but the elevator was time, if I can put it that way. Now realize that I haven’t forgotten the mortgage or the religion. Like it’s the mortgage and the religion are a suit I’m not wearing at the moment; I know that the suit’s in the closet, but at that moment you can’t tell me that that suit exists. The suit exists when I put it on, and the mortgage and religion existed when I got finished playing and the old lady came in with her hair, dangling big hunks of hair all over me and complaining I’m busting her ears with that goddamned music.”
Dédée had brought another cup of nescafé, but Johnny was looking with misery at his empty glass.
“This time business is complicated, it grabs me. I’m beginning to notice, little by little, that time is not like a bag that keeps filling up. What I mean is, even though the contents change, in the bag there’s never more than a certain amount, and that’s it. You see my suitcase, Bruno? It holds two suits and two pairs of shoes. Now, imagine that you empty it, okay? And afterwards you’re going to put back the two suits and the two pairs of shoes, and then you realize that only one suit and one pair of shoes fit in there. But that’s not the best of it. The best is when you realize you can put a whole store full of suits and shoes in there, in that suitcase, hundreds and hundreds of suits, like I get into the music when I’m blowing sometimes. Music, and what I’m thinking about when I ride the metro.”
“When you ride the m
etro.”
“Oh yeah, that, now there’s the thing,” Johnny said, getting crafty. “The metro is a great invention, Bruno. Riding the metro you notice everything that might end up in the suitcase. Maybe I didn’t lose the horn in the metro, maybe …”
He breaks into laughter, coughs, and Dédée looks at him uneasily. But he’s making gestures, laughing and coughing at the same time, shivering away under the blanket like a chimpanzee. His eyes are running and he’s drinking the tears, laughing the whole time.
“Don’t confuse the two things,” he says after a spell. “I lost it and that’s it. But the metro was helpful, it made me notice the suitcase bit. Look, this bit of things being elastic is very weird, I feel it everyplace I go. It’s all elastic, baby. Things that look solid have an elasticity …”
He’s thinking, concentrating.
“… a sort of delayed stretch,” he concludes surprisingly. I make a gesture of admiring approval. Bravo, Johnny. The man who claims he’s not capable of thinking. Wow. And now I’m really interested in what he’s going to say, and he notices that and looks at me more cunning than ever.
“You think I’ll be able to come by another horn so I can play day after tomorrow, Bruno?”
“Sure, but you’ll have to take care of it.”
“Sure, I’ll have to take care of it.”
“A month’s contract,” explains poor Dédée. “Two weeks in Rémy’s club, two concerts and the record dates. We could clean up.”
“A month’s contract,” Johnny imitates her with broad gestures. “Rémy’s club, two concerts, and the record dates. Be-bata-bop bop bop, chrrr. What I got is a thirst, a thirst, a thirst. And I feel like smoking, like smoking. More’n anything else, I feel like a smoke.”
I offer him my pack of Gauloises, though I know perfectly well that he’s thinking of pot. It’s already dark out, people are beginning to come and go in the hallway, conversations in Arabic, singing. Dédée’s left, probably to buy something to eat for that night. I feel Johnny’s hand on my knee.
“She’s a good chick, you know? But I’ve had enough. It’s some time now I’m not in love with her, and I can’t stand her. She still excites me, she knows how to make love like …” he brought his forefinger and middle finger together, Italian-fashion. “But I gotta split, go back to New York. Everything else aside, I gotta get back to New York, Bruno.”
“What for? There you were worse off than you are here. I’m not talking about work but about your own life. Here, it looks like you have more friends.”
“Sure, there’s you, and the marquesa, and the guys at the club … Did you ever make love with the marquesa, Bruno?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s something that … But I was talking about the metro, and I don’t know, how did we change the subject? The metro is a great invention, Bruno. One day I began to feel something in the metro, then I forgot … Then it happened again, two or three days later. And finally I realized. It’s easy to explain, you dig, but it’s easy because it’s not the right answer. The right answer simply can’t be explained. You have to take the metro and wait until it happens to you, though it seems to me that that only would happen to me. It’s a little like that, see. But honestly, you never made love with the marquesa? You have to ask her to get up on that gilt footstool that she has in the corner of her bedroom, next to that pretty lamp and then … Oh shit, she’s back already.”
Dédée comes in with a package and looks at Johnny.
“Your fever’s higher. I telephoned the doctor already, he’s going to come at ten. He says you should stay quiet.”
“Okay, okay, but first I’m going to tell Bruno about the subway. The other day I noticed what was happening. I started to think about my old lady, then about Lan and the guys, an’ whup, it was me walking through my old neighborhood again, and I saw the kids’ faces, the ones from then. It wasn’t thinking, it seems to me I told you a lot of times, I never think; I’m like standing on a corner watching what I think go by, but I’m not thinking what I see. You dig? Jim says that we’re all the same, that in general (as they say) one doesn’t think on his own. Let’s say that’s so, the thing is I’d took the metro at Saint-Michel, and right away I began to think about Lan and the guys, and to see the old neighborhood. I’d hardly sat down and I began to think about them. But at the same time I realized that I was in the metro, and I saw that in a minute or two we had got to Odéon, and that people were getting on and off. Then I went on thinking about Lan, and I saw my old lady when she was coming back from doing the shopping, and I began to see them all around, to be with them in a very beautiful way, I hadn’t felt that way in a long time. Memories are always a drag, but this time I liked thinking about the guys and seeing them. If I start telling you everything I saw you’re not going to believe it because I would take a long time doing it. And that would be if I economized on details. For example, just to tell you one thing, I saw Lan in a green suit that she wore when she came to Club 33 where I was playing with Hamp. I was seeing the suit with some ribbons, a loop, a sort of trim down the side and a collar … Not at the same time, though, really, I was walking around Lan’s suit and looking at it pretty slow. Then I looked at Lan’s face and at the boys’ faces, and then I remembered Mike who lived in the next room, and how Mike had told me a story about some wild horses in Colorado, once he worked on a ranch, and talked about the balls it took for cowboys to break wild horses …”
“Johnny,” Dédée said from her far corner.
“Now figure I’ve told you only a little piece of everything that I was thinking and seeing. How much’ll that take, what I’m telling you, this little piece?”
“I don’t know, let’s say about two minutes.”
“Let’s say about two minutes,” Johnny mimicked. “Two minutes and I’ve told you just a little bitty piece, no more. If I were to tell you everything I saw the boys doing, and how Hamp played Save it, pretty mama, and listened to every note, you dig, every note, and Hamp’s not one of them who gets tired, if I told you I heard an endless harangue of my old lady’s, she was saying something about cabbages, if I remember, she was asking pardon for my old man and for me, and was saying something about some heads of cabbage … Okay, if I told you all that in detail, that’d take more than two minutes, huh, Bruno?”
“If you really heard and saw all that, it’d take a good quarter-hour,” I said, laughing to myself.
“It’d take a good quarter-hour, huh, Bruno. Then tell me how it can be that I feel suddenly the metro stop and I come away from my old lady and Lan and all that, and I see that we’re at Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which is just a minute and a half from Odéon.”
I never pay too much attention to the things Johnny says, but now, with his way of staring at me, I felt cold.
“Hardly a minute and a half in your time, in her time,” Johnny said nastily. “And also the metro’s time and my watch’s, damn them both. Then how could I have been thinking a quarter of an hour, huh, Bruno? How can you think a quarter of an hour in a minute and a half? That day I swear I hadn’t smoked even a roach, not a crumb,” he finished like a boy excusing himself. “And then it happened to me again, now it’s beginning to happen to me everyplace. But,” he added astutely, “I can only notice in the metro, because to ride the metro is like being put in a clock. The stations are minutes, dig, it’s that time of yours, now’s time; but I know there’s another, and I’ve been thinking, thinking …”
He covers his face with his hands and shakes. I wish I’d gone already, and I don’t know how to get out now without Johnny resenting it, he’s terribly touchy with his friends. If he goes on this way he’s going to make a mess of himself, at least with Dédée he’s not going to talk about things like that.
“Bruno, if I could only live all the time like in those moments, or like when I’m playing and the time changes then too … Now you know what can happen in a minute and a half … Then a man, not just me but her and you and all the boys, they could live
hundreds of years, if we could find the way we could live a thousand times faster than we’re living because of the damned clocks, that mania for minutes and for the day after tomorrow …”
I smile the best I can, understanding fuzzily that he’s right, but what he suspects and the hunch I have about what he suspects is going to be deleted as soon as I’m in the street and’ve gotten back into my everyday life. At that moment I’m sure that what Johnny’s saying doesn’t just come from his being half-crazy, that he’s escaping from reality; I’m sure that, in the exchange, what he thinks leaves him with a kind of parody which he changes into a hope. Everything Johnny says to me at such moments (and it’s been five years now Johnny’s been saying things like this to me and to people) you can’t just listen and promise yourself to think about it later. You hardly get down into the street, the memory of it barely exists and no Johnny repeating the words, everything turns into a pot-dream, a monotonous gesticulating (because there’re others who say things like that, every minute you hear similar testimony) and after the wonder of it’s gone you get an irritation, and for me at least it feels as though Johnny’s been pulling my leg. But this always happens the next day, not when Johnny’s talking to me about it, because then I feel that there’s something that I’d like to admit at some point, a light that’s looking to be lit, or better yet, as though it were necessary to break something, split it from top to bottom like a log, setting a wedge in and hammering it until the job’s done. And Johnny hasn’t got the strength to hammer anything in, and me, I don’t know where the hammer is to tap in the wedge, which I can’t imagine either.
So finally I left the place, but before I left one of those things that have to happen happened—if not that, then something else—and it was when I was saying goodbye to Dédée and had my back turned to Johnny that I felt something was happening, I saw it in Dédée’s eyes and swung around quickly (because maybe I’m a little afraid of Johnny, this angel who’s like my brother, this brother who’s like my angel) and I saw Johnny had thrown off the blanket around him in one motion, and I saw him sitting in the easy-chair completely nude, his legs pulled up and the knees underneath his chin, shivering but laughing to himself, naked from top to bottom in that grimy chair.