Sam Kates' Aspie Sax Song
Sam Kates was a sax player.
He was an aspie, which means he was afflicted with the mental disability known as Asperger's Syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism. A lot of people know about it now, but not so many when Sam was growing up. Nobody could put a finger on what was REALLY wrong with Sam; everybody concluded that he was just basically an asshole, because he didn't even try to play touch football, or "save the castle," or baseball, or even hopscotch; and, although he hardly talked at all, when he did open his mouth and respond to teachers, or waitresses, or secretaries, it was always something dumb; it was dumber than dumb, it was so off-the-wall weird it gave you the creeps. His parents thought he was retarded, but not stupid enough to be committed, so, all the way up through 3rd grade, they let him sit in his room on his bunk bed looking at pictures in National Geographic and Dr. Seuss, it didn't matter which. It didn't matter because he couldn't read, and they were pretty sure he didn't get anything he was looking at, so whether it was the cat in the hat, or naked African virgins with great brown-drooping tits, he was safe from moral corruption because in order to be corrupted you first had to have tasted of the fruit of good and evil, of Reason, in other words, to have any moral sensibility one way or another.
The only other thing Sam ever did that could be remotely called "engaging in an activity" was watching TV. He couldn't actually work the TV, and did not automatically enter its tabernacle merely because it glows and makes noise. In fact, he avoided the run of cowboy shows and cartoons with which his brothers filled up their evenings and Saturday mornings; nobody was sure why, but sometimes, his mother noticed, when he was lured into the room by a catchy theme song or final credit music, he would immediately eject himself at the first appearance of gunshots, or exploding road runners. Sam didn't like noise, that was certain. What he did like no one could quite figure out until, one Saturday, the brothers abandoned the TV's phosphorescent gunplay for real exploding cap guns outside with screaming neighborhood children--and left the TV on. After some time, Lawrence Welk a-wonna anna toowahed his way into the box, playing 5:00 dinner music for old people, and Sam drifted into the room; he sat transfixed for an hour without moving a muscle. Sam's mother took note, and, next Saturday, remembered, just in time, to experimentally switch on the polka master's anachronistic broadcast and wait, Polonius-like, behind a curtained bedroom door to see if Sam would come. He did. Thereafter, whenever the rowdy brothers were not sopping up westerns, Sam got to watch Lawrence Welk; then Singalong With Mitch; then Roger Miller followed by Jimmy Dean. She even tried some PBS symphony orchestra broadcasts, and observed the same result. Sam came. Sam watched. Sam went away; but the dull cast that normally veiled the light in his eyes was brighter by milli-amps for minutes after the shows ended, and Mrs. Kates' sense of matriarchal duty felt somewhat, ever so slightly, fulfilled. It was the least she could do to tear her idiot son away from the National Geographics.
Sam's parents couldn't decide if he were going to Hell or not; they asked their minister, and he said it was too soon to tell--the age of responsibility was 13. They breathed a sigh of relief about that; 5 more years to wait and see. Maybe Sam would awaken like Lazarus. Maybe he would get run over by a truck and relieve them of THEIR moral responsibility to this subhuman entity whom they had living with them, sharing a room with their two other quite normal sons, Josh and Abner, who misbehaved like real kids, and repented like incipient Christians. Maybe, maybe. . . But, bottom line, they basically didn't like Sam. Nobody did.
Then one day, when he was nine, his family went to visit friends from the church. Sunday dinner was a weekly festival that perambulated criss-crossways through the subdivision from one house to another on a regular bi-monthly schedule, and here, today the Lord hath made, they were. Obligatory admiring comments were made about the new glass light fixtures illuminating the still-unfinished-dry-walled entryway: [It was the "entryway", or, as the boys called it, "the shoe room," because that was where they left most of their mud (not all of it). No self-respecting working man of middle America would stoop to call it some fancy-pants name like "foyer", although Mrs. Friend-from-church considered it (only once) before the thought was psychically guffawed out of her brain by Mr. Friend-from-church.] After coats and scarves were neatly hung on hooks, and Mr. Friend-from-church briefly outlined his plans for finishing the entryway, Sam's parents dumped him off in the boys' room, so the grown-ups could enjoy each others' company and cokes in peace.
Josh and Abner were already buddies with Jeremy (short for Jeremiah) and Abe (short for Abraham), so they quite naturally paired off (the J's with the J's and the A's with the A's) in enthusiastic examination of lego castles and air rifles, respectively. Jeremy (short for Jeremiah) was the oldest of the four, just having entered junior high that September; everybody had to take music or shop, and he was (tragically) allergic to sawdust, so there he was in band learning (or not learning) arpeggios, and embouchre, and all that other French stuff, when he would much rather be hammering nails at the top of his lungs.
He had casually cast his new alto saxophone into the corner. It was out of the case, so he could pretend he was going to practice it soon, but it was partially covered up by a pair of muddy denim blue jeans and a tee-shirt, so it was easier to forget--out of sight out of mind. The tiny corner of brass glinting in the efficiently fluorescent-lit room caught Sam's attention, and he sat dumb, but not immobile, for half an hour, gradually inching his way along the hardwood floor toward it, minute by slow minute (like a cat creeping up on a canary) until he was facing directly into the corner, his face a breath away from the golden glint.
At this point, Jeremy noticed Sam's dangerous proximity to his new toy, and, although he cared not two shits in hell about it when they were alone together, the possibility that Sam might touch something that was HIS, filled him with righteous indignation, and he cried, "Hey you, boogerhead, get away from my saxophone."
Sam flinched violently at the attack, and tipped over on his side in a pathetic defensive fetal position. Jeremy (short for Jeremiah) snatched up the horn and slung the neck strap over his head. "Hey guys, looka ME!" And he gave a great blast into the mouthpiece, screeching horrifically, then threw his head back in an equally horrific ejaculation of hilarity. There must be something in the long history of the world that was at least as funny as that splintery honk, but, lacking documented proof, Jeremy would never believe. He tried again to seduce humor out of the horn, this time by sucking on the mouthpiece, and the results were less satisfying, and certainly less loud. The bedroom was awash with giggles, and Jeremy had just leaped up onto his bed and begun executing more explicitly lascivious moves with his mouth and his hips, when dinner time was announced, and Jeremy narrowly escaped being caught by his father doing "Elvis Presley's Cunnilingus Cracks His New $2 Reed." Daddy looked in to repeat his announcement, and the saxophone was thrown roughly back into its corner, and the merry band of brothers swarmed out of the room in a tumble--all except Sam.
Gathered solemnly around the long table, (the youngest, Abe (short for Abraham), Josh, and 4-year-old Sarah, smirking under the adjoining card table), all heads were bowed in humble thanks to Jesus for this good food amen, and nobody noticed that the fourth place at the card table was empty. Nobody noticed the absence of Sam, since his absence was typically hard to notice, until a sound came sweetly issuing around the corner from the "boys'" room. A saxophone was playing "Some Enchanted Evening."
"Jeremy, I think you left your radio on," observed Mr. Friend-from-church, never a one to waste electricity.
"I dint leave no radio on!" Jeremy (short for Jeremiah) eloquently exclaimed.
"Jeremiah, you get up this instant and go turn off that-"
"Wait," interrupted Mrs. Kates. All eyes instantly turned toward her, and just as instantly turned inward as all began to suspect what she had begun to suspect. The room was silently attentive, as "Some Enchanted Evening" purred against every table leg at once. In a single fluid movement they rose together and surged toward the bedroom, Mrs. Kates holding Jeremy back with a commanding though wordless reprimand. Nine pairs of eyes crept around the corner and peeked through the half-open door. There sat Sam, on the edge of the bed, his back to his audience, coaxing languid, clinging notes out of that cheap beginner saxophone with the almost-cracked reed. It was not that he did not miss a note here and there, (fingers that had never touched a saxophone before took a moment to penetrate the mystery of accidental sharps and flats), but even then, as his mind saw through the logic of the keys, his heart laced together strings of grace notes that disguised the mistakes like the most accomplished jazz musicians do as they make expressive virtue out of error. His tone was wonderful, warm and vibrant, and filled with the sort of harmonic density, a confidence that usually comes with maturity, but came on the instant for Sam; it sounded as though Sam had been playing the saxophone throughout Eternity.
"He's got MY God-damned saxophone!" hissed Jeremiah (long for Jeremy), and all eyes snapped away from Sam, as the accidental swear words dripped like a dark pool of puppy piss onto the floor. Daddy's eyes narrowed. Punishment for THAT would come later; for now his and everybody else's attention was drawn away from the puppy piss and back into the room where Parsifal winded his golden horn. There was a whispering among the children. The parents said nothing with their mouths, but raised eyebrows from Mr. Friend-from-church were answered by shrugs of "Beats me," from Mr. Kates.
"Has he ever--?" pointing with his eyes.
"No." Head shake, slowly.
"How does he--?" eyebrows again.
"Beats me," shrug again.
Once again heads turn, the wonder of the music turning to suspicion of Satan's work in our midst.
"Sam, honey," crooned Mrs. Kates, deflating the burgeoning moment, "it's time for dinner now."
The beautiful, radiant high note Sam was just then leaning on, shattered in a pool of piss, as he became aware of the crowd behind him. Jeremy glared daggers and Sam blushed with shame, returning the saxophone to the corner from whence it came. "Okay, Mama," he mumbled, and ever-so-gently placed the saxophone on its couch of denim. He slunk to the edge of the dispersing crowd, ducking Jeremy's hateful glance, and his mother touched his shoulder. Sam joined the group and ate in silence--more silent than ever, because, moments before, the unexpected eloquence of his reedy voice raised to Bali-Hai, had left a depression in the air that even the chattering Mrs. Friend-from-church could not elevate. Dinner conversation progressed in a subdued, falsely pleasant tonality, but nobody commented on the miracle they had just witnessed, as though, if they ignored it, it would go away; but, after the dessert was finished, the dishes stacked, and the Kates clan had taken their leave, Jeremiah Friend-from-church did not escape getting his mouth washed out with soap.
On the way home, the silence of the dinner table persisted, hovered above the hum of the 1956 Studebaker's tires on the asphalt street. It was a short drive, but the pressure of the miracle weighed oppressively on the family, each of whom could think of nothing but getting out of that car as fast as they could. Law-abiding Mr. Kates was even speeding a little. Sam knew he had done something really wrong, and sat forlornly in the front seat, between Mama and Papa, worrying and waiting for something really bad to happen.
As the Studebaker turned into the last block before home, Mrs. Kates leaned over and whispered in Sam's ear, "Sam, honey. . . how could you--how did you know how to play that music--in Jeremiah's room--the saxophone?"
"I seen it," was Sam's whispered reply.
"You saw it?"
"On TV. I seen em play."
"You mean Lawrence Welk? You saw them play saxophones on Lawrence Welk?"
"I seen em. 'And now, a medley of your favorite tunes from South Pacific. Anna wonna anna twowa. . .'"
At that moment the car pulled into the driveway and Sam scrambled over his mother's lap and out the door in a combination of moves so sudden that the sight of him blurred with speed and disbelief together. He was running hysterically toward the house and the safety of his bunk bed, when something stopped him in his tracks and he lurched to a stop and slowly slowly turned back toward the car as Josh and Abner raced past him. That graceful measured turn was like a ballet, the slow-motion of which was accentuated by the rush of brothers brushing up against, but not defracting the aurora of that rarefied suspended moment. His mother was extracting the fullness of her Sunday petticoats out of the crowded embrace of the Studebaker as Sam cautiously, cat-like, approached her. She looked down at him, over the car door, as his mouth moved.
"What?" she whispered again, leaning down.
He placed his lips against her ear. "Want one."
"What, honey?"
"Want one. Wanna sassapone."
"You want a saxophone?"
"Anna wonna anna twowa. . ."
It was now 1985 and Sam was thirty-something. It may be of interest, when the movie comes out, how he grew up, but, for the purposes of this narrative, only a few details of back story are required:
1.) The introduction of the saxophone into Sam's life constituted the Lazarus-like awakening that his parents had so looked forward to, and so dreaded. To make a long story short, he became a trained monkey who periodically performed Abide With Me at funerals, and O Holy Night at Christmas services. He never learned to read music worth a damn, but he could play anything he had heard once, in any key. He did eventually learn to read street signs and bus route maps, and he could recognize his name on the business cards his mother had printed up for him, before she was taken by breast cancer when he was twenty.
2.) It was thought that he might become a dazzling prodigy after he performed the Ibert Concierto da Camera, with a music-minus-one recording of the orchestral back-up, at the State Solo and Ensemble Competition in Springfield. He played the 3rd movement of that difficult piece effortlessly and flawlessly, turning many heads of important members of the state-wide cultural community. After that brilliant premiere, several distinguished music professors from the university had tried to take him in hand and develop his talent into something like that of a professional soloist, but all in vain. Sam was a phenomenon, to be sure, but he was unteachable. What he could do, he either already knew from hearing a piece, or would never know. He was like a human tape recorder who could hear something once, then play it back with every nuance and refinement recreated just as he had heard it. He could not read, he could not count, (in anything like the normal sense of the word), and could not follow the hand motions of a conductor to save his life. Everything was by ear with him, and although his ear was infallible, it seemed disconnected from his eye, from his brain. When he played, he entered a dream world that hovered just near enough to the material plane that he could play with other people, but not so near that he could adjust to anything new or unexpected. The recordings in his head could not be modified on the fly, and he performed every piece in his repertoire with perfect, but indelible precision, every time exactly the same. The so-called "human" element remained hopelessly unaccounted for. Nevertheless, Sam's performances were such perfect representations of the original, that one wonders if the human energy of the music's source were not truly made manifest, after all; perhaps Sam's personal humanity consisted of merging his with somebody else's.
When he was only twenty, directly after his mother's interment, he got on a bus to Chicago; his father stuffed three hundred bucks into his pocket, and a detailed sheet of instructions on how to get to Aunt Maxine's house on the north side. He paid the bus driver an extra $20 to see that Sam got on the El at the right spot, which the guy cheerfully pocketed and forgot about when they arrived at the Greyhound Station at 5:00 in the afternoon. Sam wandered out of the station and across the street to the giant Picasso smiling complexly at the poor lost boy. He sat beneath the sculpture for awhile, then took out his saxophone and played Someone to Watch Over Me over and over for about an hour, until a cop came up to him and ordered him to stop busking (even though Sam's case was closed and had received no quarters)--"No street musicians in downtown Chicago, this isn't fucking San Francisco for Chrissakes, whassa matta wit choo anyway?" Eventually, the cop got the idea when Sam stood mute before the confronting tirade of hostile authority, and took out the instructions to Aunt Maxine's, offering it to the cop with the pathos of a Josquin miserere.
Sam made it to Aunt Maxine's place on the predominantly Jewish north side, and then to the restaurant, where he was consigned to a small corner to play unaccompanied broadway standards and an occasional hora, three hours a night. They tacked up carpeting at right angles in the corner to keep Sam's sound from vibrating too much with the customers' spaghetti and meat loaf; it lent a comfortable, unobtrusive background quality to Sam's sound, that mysteriously made the spaghetti more exotic, and the meat loaf warmer. And there he sat every night for over ten years, until Benny Goldstein, Yiddish theatrical agent and music contractor accidentally discovered him and moved him over to the Hyatt downtown, to front Morty Friedkin's "Mellow Four." Sam was really a find for the ailing trio of middle-aged burn-outs, who had just lost their lead player to a touring band on the Winnebago circuit, and were glumly facing the imminent prospect of finding day jobs. Sam's note-perfect readings of Charlie Parker alto solos, in addition to the more nightclub-friendly Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young tenor solos, (transposed to the proper key, of course), gave the band a vast repertoire of standards to choose from, and the Hyatt management was pleased to see a large and faithful following develop almost immediately. Every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night, the liquor would flow in the ever-more-crowded hotel barroom, and quite often extra chairs had to be set up as Sam's eager fans spilled over into the adjoining restaurant; good music meant good business, and the "Mellow Four" kept their gig.
Every once in awhile a music student or another pro player, on his night off, would come to check out the rumor that there was a jazz genius playing for peanuts at the Hyatt; sometimes they would notice that Sam's playing sounded just like something they had heard before, and sometimes they could even name the album; but Red Taylor, the piano player, always minimized the implied absence of originality by extolling Sam's respect for tradition and his penchant for "occasionally" playing an homage to whatever jazz great he happened to be copying. And Sam's repertoire was so extensive, that they could sometimes go weeks without repeating a tune; that was long enough so that nobody noticed, sometimes not even the band members, that, when that same tune came around again, Sam played exactly the same notes he had played weeks before. If Red got a request from one of the regulars for a favorite tune that Sam had recently played, it was not a problem to whisper in Sam's ear to play an alternate version, somebody else's else's version.
So here was aspie saxophonist Sam, gigging three nights a week and living alone at the St. George, not far from where Aunt Maxine had first put him up (one long bus ride from Lake Shore Drive--no transfers, which, experience had shown, might land Sam in the Projects not at the Hyatt Twin Towers). And here was Morty Friedkin, bass player, Red Taylor, piano player, and Joe "Sticks" Jones, drummer, playing for the past two and a half years at the Hyatt Moonrise Room to a growing audience. So what would you do if your career as a musician had just about peaked out, and was suddenly revitalized by an idiot saxophonist who could play like fucking Charlie Parker? No, who WAS Charlie Parker, AND Lester Young, AND fucking Kenny G if you wanted him to be? You would get greedy.
Morty started looking around for other venues for the band, specialty venues, concert venues. There was one slightly more upscale nightclub than the Hyatt a few blocks away on Michigan Avenue called "Al's Place" (don't ask, but one of the items on the menu was "Capone's Capon."). Rudy, the manager, (not Al) was interested in trying out the group on their dinner theater stage, and he was even willing to book them for a Wednesday, (so as not to endanger the group's Thursday through Saturday commitment), but he felt that the purely instrumental constitution of the band would not hold a paying audience for a whole evening's entertainment without a featured vocalist.
"Work a singer into your act, and we'll talk again," he told Morty, over the phone.
"But listen, man, our saxophonist is a motherfucker, man," objected Mr. Let's-exploit-the-idiot-for-all-he's-worth. "Our guys plays all the--"
"Yeah, I get it. I've heard your demo, and he really wails, but my people need the words to keep them interested. Also tits. You can feature the sax player all you want, but you need a singer, to play here. Whynchoo call up Goldstein? He's got a list."
Morty hated that asshole Benny Goldstein, even though Benny was directly responsible for prolonging the professional life of the "Mellow Four" by bringing them Sam. The paltry 10% he was still taking out of Sam's cut every week, (after two and a half years, as per the contract Sam had signed in his child-like scrawl), was no skin off Morty's nose, since he wasn't paying anything, but the idea of beholding to that Jew bastard was a piss-off, and getting into him with another obligation offended his stingy scruples. After a half-hour of conflicted indecision, he called up Benny, anyway, not because he was the best or most connected union contractor in town, but because Morty preferred to bear the afflictions he already had than fly to others he knew not of; anyway, he had Benny's phone number in his book. Also, Benny's understanding of the "Sam Situation" would probably color his suggestions. "Okay, okay," he bitches at himself, "call up god-damned, motherfuckin' Benny god-damn Goldstein."
They held auditions at the Moonrise Room in the afternoon, in half-hour slots, before the bar opened. Benny sent over a selection of middle-aged broads, figuring the older generation would relate better to the middle-aged rhythm section and the predominantly 30's and 40's repertoire. The women he knew were mostly not regular nightclub singers, they were more like wedding/bat mitzva singers, occasional performers with day gigs, and teen-age children. There was a black lady who showed promise, with a sultry version of Stormy Weather, but it turned out she only knew a few songs, she couldn't read any better than Sam could, and, anyway, everything she sang sounded like the blues. She also made the mistake of trying to give Sam some direction: she suggested he put in some fills during a few of her long notes in the chorus before taking his solo. Sam was not used to any kind of personal interaction with the people he made music with, and her comments not only didn't compute, they freaked him out. He got that frozen look on his face, just like the first time Jeremy (short for Jeremiah) shouted, "Hey you, boogerhead, get away from my saxophone." He stood stock still for minutes, with his eyes wide. Red made some hasty excuse to the consternated singer, and ushered her out before Sam started drooling.
Benny had taken a chance sending over a young girl, fresh out of the Roosevelt University Music School. She had soloed with the college jazz band, and had worked with the opera group for a few semesters; since graduation she had been doing some church cantata soloing, Messiah, and so on, but mostly she was keeping it together with a waitressing gig, and a few private students. Benny didn't hold out much hope for her as a fifth wheel with the "Mellow Four," but he liked her voice, and would be pleased if he could manage to help her break into the business. Her name was Susan Wright. Suzy Wright. Miss Wright.
Red led her to the bandstand and shoved a pile lead sheets onto the music stand in front of her. He asked her if she wanted to do something prepared, or could they just jump right into the band's material? Sure, fine. Okay, how about Lover Man? Great. D minor? Whatever.
The night before, Red had given Sam several recordings to listen to, including the Rosemary Clooney Lover Man. "Learn the guitar part," he had said, which was good, because the guitar part included not only a nice solo in the middle, but a rhythm accompaniment part, which would give Sam something to do while the girl was singing. They launched into the intro, Red tickling the ivories in much the same manner as the truncated opening of the Clooney version. "What was the name of that guitar player? Joe Pass? Was it Joe Pass?"
"Ya got me. Was it one o' them Spics?"
"Joe Pass, I think."
"I doe no wwhyyy, but I'm feelin' so sad. . ." she was singing now.
And she got their attention in a hurry. The voice, young still, to be sure, was leaning into the lonely, resonant, siren sound of Rosemary Clooney with a depth of expression you don't usually get at 4:00 in the afternoon on Lakeshore Drive. She was captivating from the first note, and followed through with uninterrupted fascination to the very end. She kind of reminded them of Sam, in the way she disappeared into the music and became the music; the difference was that she kept one toenail of consciousness on the ground, and you could see that grounded spark of intelligence willing the intuitive detritus to flow into defined channels. In Sam's eyes you could see nothing until the tune was over and he returned to us here on Earth.
But that's not the cool part: when Sam went into his solo--and that was already pretty cool, because guitar licks don't always lie well on the saxophone, but Sam made it work--when he started reciting his Joe Pass catechism for the night, Suzy kept on going: she gave him just enough space to dominate the stage, but also took back the spotlight momentarily, here and there, filling between phrases, and joining into some of the passage work with her own improvised counterpoints. She was a real talented improviser for sure, and she added a complexity and substance to the saxophone (guitar) solo that not only didn't interfere with it, but, rather brightened its effect. And when she took back the head, there was not only discernible a tenderness of character (the theatrical part), but an authority (the art part)--a confidence, again, not unlike the confidence that came on the instant for Sam in that boys' bedroom long ago; she sounded like she had been singing Lover Man throughout Eternity.
But that's still not the coolest, coolest part: when Sam noticed Suzy's background fills, his first reaction was to repeat the same attack of panic he had just experienced with the black lady, ("Oh no," scream Red, Morty, and Sticks together, in their heads.); but after only a moment, Sam's frowning eyebrows turned up into a beaming grin, and the usual dreamland quality washed off his face; he actually seemed mentally alert in a way, and to a degree they had never seen in him before. He was playing like a motherfucker, and he and Suzy were sounding GREAT together, not only in the way their lines crisscrossed in ravishing duet, but in how the SOUNDS went together. She was doing something to her voice to make it go with Sam's saxophone, and they couldn't tell what, but it was GREAT!
But that's still not the coolest, coolest, coolest part. At a certain point in the duet, as it was winding its way to the climax, Sam did something he had never done before: he changed a note. The counterpoint Suzy was making up was working really well, but as the peak of the phrase approached, she was into a line which, if taken to its natural conclusion, would have clashed with the Joe Pass guitar solo. Only Sam knew this because only Sam knew where the Joe Pass solo was going, and, by some miracle of psychic divination, only Sam knew where Suzy's counterpoint was going.
So he changed a note. In fact, he changed a whole phrase to fit with Suzy's line, and THAT was the miracle. He had never done that before. Red noticed right away, because he had reviewed that recording himself last night, and had the guitar solo fresh in his memory. It was not an insignificant change, it was noticeable. The other guys were oblivious, of course, but Red raised a, "Listen to that," eyebrow, and they all then rallied around the music with renewed creative attention. Now, Suzy didn't get this either, because she was just having fun with music like she always did with jazz; she didn't know she had opened a door in Sam that the "Mellow Four" had been hoping would open for two and a half years. The sonorities were wonderful, she could hear that, but she didn't know, yet, that Sam was a tape recorder that never faltered and never ever varied--until there was her. She didn't know that, for the first time in his life, Sam had fallen deeply in love.
Sam Kates' Aspie Sax Song-part 2
The mistake was in having the tryouts at the Moonrise Room, because, just as they were finishing up, and were about to offer Suzy the Wednesday gig, Jim Meyer, the manager of the Hyatt strode in and, in two words, booked her for his lounge on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays.
"Morty, I love this new band member. She's on for an extra hundred a night. That okay with you, sweetheart?" A hundred bucks was a little better than the going rate for a side man in Chicago at that time; it was good money. He was gone before the chins all round had ceased to nod.
"Well," said Red.
"Well," said Suzy.
"Well," said Morty, "I guess you're hired. You see that Gershwin set in there? Yeah the second folder. You know any o' them songs? You feel like doin' them off the cuff tonight?"
"No rehearsal?"
"Nah, you sound great, we been here since noon, gotta be back and play at 8:00. Okay?"
"Su-sure."
"Okay. Hey Sammy, time for lunch.
"Lunch," said Sam turning to his case.
Sam took his break over at the Art Institute, across Lakeshore Drive and two blocks through Grant Park. He spent a lot of time there on afternoons when he arrived at the gig hours early; when, if he stayed home, he felt restless and pointless, and anxious to be close to where he would be making music pretty soon. He also went there on days when he wasn't playing at the Hyatt at all; he liked being near his haven of musical release, and eventually the Art Institute became a second haven, a kind of pony express relay haven.
On rainy days, he went inside to the cafeteria, smuggled in his bag of egg salad sandwiches, bought a coke, and found a table as close to the far corner as possible. On clear days, winter or summer, he sat outside under the bronze lions. The bite of Lake Michigan wind never deterred him; maybe the lions secretly breathed their implicit fiery power into him; who knew? If there was time, whether he ate outside or at table, he wandered into the museum, but he often got no further than the Rodin in the lobby, the Lovers rising on wings of passion out of the white rock; the first time he attempted to walk past it, he had spent two hours standing in front of it, sort of blocking the walkway, until a guard rousted the vagrant out. He also spent a lot of time in front of the Jackson Pollock upstairs. Something about the Picassos down the corridor always reminded him of Someone to Watch Over Me, but he didn't know why. All the guards knew him by now, and let him loiter harmlessly in front of whatever painting he became transfixed in front of. He wasn't no trouble, just a poor dumb kid. Always carries that case into the museum, although we know he's not sposed to, we let him, quiet kid, no problem. We tried to make him check it once--threw a fit. He's okay. Good kid.
Tonight Sam was sitting on the steps under the south lion, a morsel of egg salad clinging to his lips. His lips were moving in that slow ballet tempo of his. It was hard to say, but he felt as though a thought were forming in his head, and he was trying to grasp it. Words were not hard for him, he knew a lot of them, but thinking, like talking, required the same improvisatory faculty that would have enabled him to improvise music if he wanted to. Putting words together in a different order than he had learned them was a Herculean task for him, and he was unpracticed at it. Still, he remembered the miracle at the Hyatt--he remembered the exact notes he had changed the guitar solo to, just as he remembered the exact notes of the guitar solo he didn't play. In whatever syntax Sam used to think his translucent thoughts in, he wondered what the hell had gotten into him. Then he remembered Suzy. "Name Suzy," he thought. "Name Suzy," he whispered. "Suzy singer. Suzy singer?" The lion wasn't telling.
Thursday night was borderline funky--it had been quite awhile since Suzy had sung a lot of the songs in the folder, and, in the dim light of the bar, it was more of a problem to see the words than to remember the tunes. Plus, Sam was a little bit shy with her, and, more than once, dropped out for whole sections at a time, leaving a hole for the instrumental solo that Red had to fill; now, Red was okay as a rhythm player, he had good chords, played all the time-honored substitutions, and, most importantly, he had a good formal sense--he could feel when a climax was coming, and could support the soloist dynamically. The thing is, he wasn't a very good soloist himself; his solos were always pretty basic, pretty reserved, spare, understated, somewhat clumsy, okay let's face it, they were pretty dumb. They were so dumb that Suzy couldn't even harmonize with them, because the melodic logic was so erratic she couldn't get into the flow; all jazz solos are chains of stylistic cliches strung together in something like an original order, but the elisions between Red's melodic utterances were so random it was impossible to intuit what the next melodicle was likely to be--it was like trying to sing along with somebody who keeps switching tunes every two bars.
Fortunately, that only happened a few times, and only in the early sets. Toward the end of the night, Suzy had been able to review the songs thoroughly enough during breaks to get free of the page, and Sam started getting used to the new ensemble experience. He mostly adhered to his prepared solos, and Suzy mostly gave professional, but fairly conservative readings of the old standards. But then, two miracles took place, bringing the total for the day up to three:
The second miracle happened during, you guessed it, Someone to Watch Over Me. Red had trained Sam on the popular Nelson Riddle arrangement of this song recorded by Linda Ronstadt. This was a solid, no-bullshit arrangement, with some good countermelodies for Sam to play during the head; but it was kind of glitzy, kind of Las-Vegas-meets-Ethel-Merman, and Suzy was going for a more intimate, a more felt-from-within resonance. The potential clash between these two interpretive perspectives was softened immediately by the way Sam altered his tone quality--it was just like that thing he did with Lover Man, earlier in the day--he met Suzy on some middle ground, and set off her too-pathetic-for-words whispering sighs, with a tender, ineffable tremble in the vibrato that sent Nelson Riddle's extroverted cleverness to the cleaners, to the confessional, as it were. She searched for the lost shepherd in the low shadows while Sam raised the cry to the heights of a windy hill. The two parts merged in the solemnity of a pristine perfection, as though they had made love a dozen times before, right there in the crook of the piano. And when the solo came, Sam switched versions and went into an old Lester Young solo he had learned years before he had come to rest under the Picasso across from the bus station. The little lost lamb peered out from that corner of Chicago, from behind the striated breast of the Picasso, with a wide-eyed innocence and longing that made the listener both comfortable and desperately sad at the same time--it was a self-pitying, nostalgia for that which is invisible not because it doesn't exist but because it has just turned a down distant side street, blown by the cruel breath of the windy city's last and final farewell.
Suzy was tempted to try some of those counterpoints she likes to do, but changed her mind and let Sam have the spotlight. She marveled at the subtle sophistication of his nuanced asides, and felt how perfectly the lead lines matched the sentiment she had attached to the song during the head. Then, when it came time for the final reprise, she leaned over and whispered in Sam's ear, "Take it." And he switched over to the main theme without the tiniest hesitation, while she sang the words to the last phrase in a poised and plaintive obligato. The room was hushed as Red's concluding arpeggio hung in the smoky air. The quintessence of the moment could be read in the shapes of dissipating cloud, like an Akashic record written on astral walls, or hung about the lacy white collar of Kilimanjaro. The silence was the ultimate stab of lonely desire as lamb lay herself down to weep and sleep. Then the room erupted in an ovation the like of which had never before rattled the wine glasses of the Hyatt Moonrise Room. It was like fucking Carnegie Hall, like the fucking Metropolitan Opera, they clapped so loud and long.
Jim Meyer, manager, now impressario extraordinaire, was standing at the end of the bar congratulating himself as he watched his $100 extra overhead turn into an easy $600-700 in extra revenue--the wine was flowing like a waterfall. He didn't mind that there was also a river of twenty-dollar bills flowing into the tip cup, because he knew that his up-scale clientele had plenty of money for both booze and gratuities. Enthusiasm was a difficult state of mind to inspire in the blase riche, but, once it was so inspired, it had a tendency to spill over into all available corners of the context, and he knew that if they were stuffing money into the short-stemmed cognac glass, they were also stuffing money into his pocket. But that wasn't the third miracle.
The third miracle was Elliott Stokes, music critic for the Chicago Sun Times, walking into the Moonlight Room at precisely the right moment--just as Suzy and Sam had eased into Someone to Watch Over Me. Stokes was not on the job, he had heard the Mellow Four lots of times, and, although he had a lukewarm appreciation for Sam, he was underwhelmed. He was not a jazz man, after all--he reviewed symphony concerts, and Orchestra Hall recitals, and the Lyric Opera, and the like; he had not come to hear the band, (low-brow 2nd stringers, playing low-brow pop pablum), he was just dropping by for a nightcap before retiring to his apartment nearby, up in Lake Point Tower. He pushed his way up to the crowded bar, ordered his drink, and then forgot about it as the music gradually insinuated itself into his consciousness. He was not struck by the quality of Suzy's voice, nor the tenderness of the interpretation, but he did notice a tonal sonority coming from the two of them, Sam and Suzy, that radiated an undulating attraction that grew on him with each successive phrase. He was captivated by the sound world of the duet--he saw the melodic lines as shapes in air, intertwining spires of energy emanating from the stage, exerting a magnetic pull that drew him in, that enraptured and entangled him in its smoky coils.
He applauded along with the crowd adding his, "Bravi!" to the shouts of "Yeah!" and "Smokin'!" When the band began to pack up for the night, he went over to Morty and got the correct spelling of everybody's name, and, luckily, got wind of the future performance scheduled for next Wednesday at "Al's Place." His rave review of the band appeared as a short but glittering sidebar in the Friday "Chicago Nightlife" section of the Sun Times.
Sam didn't know from newspaper reviews. He didn't really understand when Red showed him the Stokes' column before the Friday night gig:
"The sophisticated vocal stylings of Susan Wright, reminiscent in sound quality of a young Ella Fitzgerald, and in improvisational quality of the best of Sarah Vaughan, merged with the wonderfully understated undertones of saxophonist Sam Kates, in moment after moment of ecstatic contrapuntal epiphanies. They brought a fresh depth and emotional intensity to old jazz warhorses [he had only heard the one, mind you, but never mind--bless his heart] which made them live again in the Chicago Hyatt Moonrise Room."
Sam didn't even know what to do with the extra $200 Morty stuffed into his case that night after the gig; he didn't appreciate it as a good thing. Sam lived down the street toward the North Side at the dilapidated St. George Hotel, but good old Aunt Maxine was still paying his bills for him, and even making a lot of his egg salad sandwiches. He knew about money, (he had to pay the bus driver on his way back and forth to the Hyatt, and he knew how to buy cokes at the Art Institute), but he wasn't very good at arithmetic, and reading a calendar, a week at a time, stretched the limits of his ability to see into the future. Each week, Sam went to Aunt Maxine's place for Sunday dinner, handed over the weeks earnings in cash, and she took care of the banking and rent paying. Over ten years, Sam had accumulated over $30,000 in savings, but he wouldn't have had any idea what to do with that money if somebody had given him a list. He was always paid under the table, so he had, so far, never ponied up any income tax for the Big Uncle. Sitting there under the lions, a passerby could have just as easily mistaken him for a homeless bum, rather than a somewhat famous local saxophonist with a sizable bank account, so nondescript and lethargic was his listless presence.
It was not that Sam was retarded: Asperger's is not like that. It may be that the portrait painted of him so far gives the impression of a village idiot, incapable of understanding language structure, abstract concepts, or even the simplest of social interactions; he may appear to be an autistic savant, gifted in one thing, and debilitatingly handicapped in all other things: and this would not be quite accurate. Sam had as much mental capacity as any other average, (or maybe slightly above average), man on the street, but the rub came when he was put in a situation where he had to ACT like an average man on the street: he basically knew what he was supposed to say and do in any particular social situation, passing by the hotel night man, ordering a coke, even reading a bus schedule, but it was MAKING himself execute these social formulae that was his undoing.
Asperger's Syndrome manifests in various degrees of intensity, distributed on a continuum, some closer to outright clinical autism, some further away; but all aspies' cognitive functioning is defined by one qualitatively common psychological weakness: they have to work a lot harder than normal people to make their personal inner world connect with the outer world. Normal people think, feel, and decide in a mental environment of psychological approximations--assumptions about what is true, which are made viable and reliable by virtue of a circular thinking process that allows them to access ideas from a scattered array of literally conscious and vaguely intuitive impressions. Aspies can't do that--they have to have all their ducks in a row, each thought leading, with impeccable logic, from one to the next, like stages of an algebraic equation; and if one step in a mental process is even slightly out of order, the whole construct falls to the ground. Normal people can get from point A to point B through any number of roundabout routes, but aspies can only get there in a straight line. Stepping outside the straight line CAN be done, aspies can learn, especially with patient and understanding help, but it is a tremendous effort, and costs the aspie much in terms of the emotional pain that is always associated with any momentary mental disorientation.
And remember too, that these social catch-phrases are almost always linked to some characteristic body language, or facial expression, or subtle tone of voice, all of which that are totally invisible, undetectable, and incomprehensible to an aspie. The true meaning of most social communication is embedded in a complex mixture of words and looks and signals that the aspie just can't see. Sam couldn't count the times he was taken by surprise when some emotional outburst of frustration or rage was visited on him by his father, or his brothers, or his teachers, or his classmates, over some misunderstanding, the precise nature of which he never actually became aware of. He NEVER saw these events coming; he would be standing there calmly talking with somebody about something, it could be anything, and suddenly that somebody was screaming at him, or (in the case of his brothers) hitting him--and he had no idea why. And the inability to see these social cues is much more difficult, if not impossible, to train out of an aspie: you can describe the sky to Stevie Wonder with all the lyric persuasions of Shakespeare, but he still won't see it.
To be sure, Sam was more incapacitated by these disabilities than many high-functioning aspies, especially in the area of language; but it must be remembered that it was not the lack of understanding that separated him from the norm, it was the lack of motivation. The will to learn, the will to reach out, the will to try and make sense of the bewildering plethora of nonsensical social emanations, had been lost in him; and he suffered from this lack, but he was also protected by it. He snuggled in his cozy cocoon, isolated but safe, lonely but safe, disconnected but safe. If Sam had known there was anything for him in the outer world, he might have considered coming out of hiding, but he didn't have a clue, and had learned not to want to. Let's come right out and say it: Sam was fucked up by his father.
When Sam first started talking, he put sentences together fluently, almost poetically, but always with a slightly skewed sense of syntax and definition; also, he often could not separate what was on his mind, at that inner moment, from what he was asked to respond to in the outer reality. This abnormal penchant was pounced on by his too-conventional father, and was ridiculed and berated as unacceptable. Mr. Kates soon came to attribute Sam's eccentric mode of expression to a deeply rooted and sinful character flaw. What kind of an asshole won't even answer a simple question? For instance, four-year-old Sam might be sitting on the living room floor looking out the front window, when his father would come up and pronounce:
"Good morning, Sam."
"Daddy says."
"How are you this morning?"
Silence. How am I?
"I said, how are you this morning, Sam?"
"The curtains wiggle."
"What?"
"The window. The curtains wiggle."
"What kind of stupid thing is that to say!"
"How am I. The window curtains are wiggling."
"Lord help us. The curtains are wiggling."
This conversation might protract itself into a five-minute meditation on wind and windows, as Mr. Kates tried to get to the bottom of Sam's off-the-wall remark, but, short or long, it would invariably descend into a cascade of insults deploring Sam's inability to answer a goddamn simple question. It never occurred to anybody that there was no such thing a s simple question to Sam. The family prayers at table and bedside never lacked heaps of heartfelt entreaties to Jesus to heal Sam's willful and stubborn dedication to the devil's work.
At a very early age, this abusive insensitivity drove deep down inside him Sam's will to respond to ANYBODY in words. To an aspie, reaching out into the world of men is not a natural process, but a calculated act of logic and will; and Sam was bitch-slapped down by his own father so many times, in his formative years, that he lost the power to rise to the occasion; and, without the PRACTICE it would have taken to perform this difficult task, he not only lost the will, he lost the capacity for normal response. For years, the words would percolate in his mind, striving for verbal expression, but eventually he even gave up trying to formulate what he thought MIGHT be the proper countersigns to passwords such as, "How are you?" "What'll it be?" "Hello." "Name?"
It hurts any aspie's heart to fill in the blanks of a socially interactive stock formula--the phoniness, the one-size-fits-all fuzziness of it, frustrates the propensity, of inbred sequential linear thinking, toward pristine clarity and honesty, which is the aspie's defining mental stock-in-trade; but most of them, generally speaking learn how to do it, somewhat. Sam didn't even try--what was the point? Why suffer the pain of drawing the false and impersonal response out of himself, just to suffer more when his father found fault, no matter how close the answer was to the right one? So, you see, it wasn't that Sam was retarded, or even clueless, he was just hopelessly neurotic. He was blocked--blocked by his own deep-seated fear of his father's caustic abuse, and, by inference, the abuse of the entire rest of society. Autistic and neurotic, what a losing combination! Thank God for the saxophone. The saxophone gave Sam a way to reach out into the world to a place where there were no wrong answers, no recrimination, and no pain.
It might be said that Sam loved the saxophone, insofar as love may be defined as a high-vibratory CONNECTION between separate entities; but the emotional parameter of love, the bovine, visceral physicality of love, the pulsing, human, red-blooded heart of love, was just as foreign to him as most other emotional conditions. Such feelings as rage, or jealousy, or sadness--even affections, like attachment, dependence, or sympathy, were unknown to him, or, at the most, occupied so diminutive a presence in his psychic make-up as to constitute tiny kernels of meaning in a much vaster cognitive system of operative relationships--familiar acts to familiar consequences. The one emotion that he knew well was fear. It was fear that kept him incarcerated in his self-made prison of denial and disconnection; and it was the saxophone that offered him momentary flights of freedom from this prison. With the saxophone he didn't have to give up the safety of his cell in order to experience sympathetic resonance with the outer world. The saxophone made sense, and it was the sense of the saxophone that became his self-expression, the expression of learned sequences of meaning with which he could identify and into which he could embed some aspect of himself, an aspect labeled for affirmation and release. With the saxophone he could send out little carrier pigeons of sound that carried the message, "I am, I am," to any who cared to hear. Mostly it was Sam himself who heard this message, bouncing back to him off the ceiling of his cell at the Moonrise Room, or out on the street underneath the Picasso, it didn't matter which. And until the advent of Susan Wright, this had been enough.
The gig on Friday night went even better than Thursday, and the bar was packed to capacity, thanks to Elliot Stokes. On Saturday, it was ridiculous--there were people lined up out in the lobby, creating a fire hazard, and spilling booze on the carpets in front of the elevator. Red programmed a tour of a bunch of the old classics they had been performing with Sam for a couple of years, and Suzy managed to fit right in, as Sam learned to make way for her lead solos. He was still performing, by rote, the music that Red had taught him through recordings, in those first few months, but he was also learning how to transpose different learned chunks, taken from various classic versions, into the form of vocal arrangements improvised on the fly.
Most of the time, right before they started to play, Red would whisper little hints to Sam, ad hoc, about the source possibilities for each tune, and Sam would resurrect musical treasures buried deep in his phenomenal photographic memory by giving perfect renderings of melodies quoted alternately from, sometimes, three or four different recordings, taking into account the key and tempo of the live version they were doing at the moment. But sometimes Red would call up a tune and, before anybody could say anything else, Sam would launch into it without preparation, forcing Suzy to find her way into the mix, crowding Sam out of the way at the appropriate moment. The mellow three got nervous whenever Sam did this, because they feared that Sam might not make way for Suzy, but he always did. Sam was learning at an exponential rate.
Altogether, including Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, four hours a night, from 8:00 till midnight, (that's twelve hours, counting breaks), they had gone through a long set of more than twenty Gershwin standards, as many by Cole Porter, and as many by Rodgers and Hart, in addition to an assortment of odds and ends by Jerome Kern, Fred Lowe, and Harold Arlen: songs that comprised the cornerstone of the Baby Boomer collective consciousness. In every case, Sam had found a way to make his part fit with Suzy's, and, on the rare occasion when he proved rigid in reciting his Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins version, Suzy would find a way to complement him.
It was a happy situation musically; and, financially speaking, the tip cup was adding an average of $200-$250, per night, to each band member's pay, a figure which represented a phenomenal display of generosity from a crowd of casual drinkers. Jim Meyer had to put out cognac glasses in three different locations in the bar, because people kept tripping over each other trying to get up to the bandstand to stuff their twenty-dollar bills into the pot; and still, the waiters had to resist the temptation to rip off the band, because the money kept spilling out onto the floor and they had to keep picking it up and wadding it back in. Jim was contemplating instituting a cover charge.
Then, there was next Wednesday to think about. Suzy was a real trooper, and didn't complain about having to jam through all this music without rehearsal, as long as it was a casual performance; and it must be said that the crowd at the Moonrise Room was remarkably attentive, given the context--there were moments every night when the room would become breathlessly hushed, like that first night during Someone to Watch Over Me; but it was, after all, still a bar, and most of the time the music was accompanied by all the random chatter and glass-tinkling that comes with that particular territory. The level of noise would sometimes rise in direct proportion to the intensity of the music, and that was okay with Suzy because it covered subtle glitches in the changes, or the endings, or all those words she was still struggling to memorize. But she was a perfectionist at heart, and her understanding was that this performance at Al's Place was to be more of a concert situation; she needed to feel prepared for a formal occasion like that. She wanted to know the complete repertoire list ahead of time, and she wanted to practice. And she wanted time alone with Sam.
Morty was the leader of the band, in name only: he handled all the booking and money matters, which, considering they hadn't played anywhere but the Moonrise Room in three years, was a decidedly uncomplicated responsibility. It was Red who was, what you might call, the music director. It was Red who had taken Sam in hand when he first joined up with the Mellow Four; it was Red who had played Sam all those dozens of classic recordings and watched in awe as Sam had parroted back each tune note-for-note. It was Red who basically programmed every set, and took care of getting copies of the lead sheets to Morty when they tried out something new. Red had bought the tape player that lived in Sam's room at the St. George, and he had even left one of his old electronic keyboards up there for when he worked out his chord changes with Sam. Red was curious as to why Suzy was so insistent about working with Sam alone, but he already recognized that Suzy outclassed him by a yard, and wasn't going to let pride get in the way of keeping the talent happy.
The reason the tape player and the keyboard lived at the St. George was that Sam did not do well in unfamiliar surroundings, especially if those surroundings were cluttered and crowded as they always were at Red's place. Sam was easily distracted by visual noise, and this problem almost ended his gig at the Moonrise Room before it really began: when Sam first started playing there, every time somebody came in or out the door, every time a waiter passed in front of the bandstand, every time the cash register popped open, Sam would lurch and hesitate; it almost cost him his job. But he was so totally hot, all the rest of the time, that Red committed to working with him on the problem. They even tried putting Sam in dark glasses for awhile, (do the Miles Davis jazz druggie schtick, see?), but the glasses kept falling down his nose, giving him one more visual cue to be distracted by, not to mention creating an inappropriately comical scene; there was nothing like watching Sam play When I Fall in Love with sunglasses slipping over his face onto his mouthpiece. They finally figured out that all they had to do was point Sam to the right, toward Red, and tell him to focus his eyes on the short stick of the piano.
After that, Sam got used to the other petty distractions that come with playing music in a public place, and he never faltered again. The bandstand at the Moonrise Room became his second home, and he pulled its borders in around him like a blanket and snuggled up into its private corners, with his music, only dimly aware that there were other people in the place, only marginally aware that he was playing with three other guys. When he played, he was like an infant in the cradle, who can't tell where his body ends and the world begins--he didn't distinguish between himself and the other members of the band; he drove them, carried them, and discarded them like extensions of himself, appendages which served his purpose for the one moment, became non-existent in the next. When he entered his trance zone, he actually stopped seeing anything but the notes of his saxophone dancing before his mind's eye, like bubbles out of a soap pipe. The ceiling could have caved in during one of these moments and he wouldn't have noticed.
But he still didn't like practicing at Red's place--there were papers and dirty plates all over the place, and the El ran right by the window every fifteen minutes, so the noise and the movement simply did not permit him to concentrate. Red was happy to rehearse quietly at the St. George in Sam's 15x20-foot room with its single bed, plain brown dresser, peeling paisley wallpaper (just the one spot, up in the far left corner BEHIND the bed, so Sam couldn't see it and worry about it), and its cracked window looking out on an alley. The starkness of the place was unrelieved except for one ray of personality--sitting on the night table, under an imitation ivory Chinese lamp, was a photograph of Sam's mother. Red was happy to give Susan Wright directions to the place, and warned her not to carry very much money into that neighborhood, and for God's sake don't park your car anywhere near there--take the bus.
Suzy was coming on Monday. Sam's calendar was marked. Red had come over and marked it for him and told him Suzy wanted to play with him alone. Now his calendar was marked, and he knew Suzy singer was coming over, and would be in his room at the St. George, without Red, without anybody else--just him--just Sam. Red and Aunt Maxine were the only two other people who had ever set foot in Sam's room in all the time he had lived there, but now, his calendar was marked. It would be Monday. Today was Monday. Sam's calendar was marked. He checked it three times an hour. Monday. Suzy. Three o-clock. 3:00. Three P.M. Central Standard Time. Monday. 3:00. Suzy. Suzy singer. He checked the time three times a minute. Suzy singer. He took out his saxophone. He put it away. He took it out again, he tested his reed. He put it away again. He took it out again. Suzy singer. Three P.M. Central Standard Time. What will happen? He blew a note and put it away.
He looked at the play list Red had xeroxed in the Hyatt office. Suzy had a copy. Sam read the names of the songs. He could read them easy, and every title represented a memory of sounds and fingerings he experienced in their totality in a flash. He had all the tapes of all the songs--there were an even dozen. Red was figuring an average of eight minutes per song for a two hour show. Sam arranged the tapes in the order of the play list, stacking them one on top of the other. Several of the cassettes didn't have those flat plastic cases, so the stack fell over. He restacked them. They fell over. He set them side by side, left to right on top of his dresser, then he took out several pairs of underpants and stacked the tapes between piles of underwear. The stack clattered to the floor and Sam picked them up and set them side by side on top of the dresser. He checked each one to see if they were all properly cued. They were. And as he listened to each opening, rewound the tape, played it again, and rewound it again, the entire piece flashed through his memory again. He looked at the clock. There was underwear all over the top of the dresser. How did these get here? Put those things away. There. Three P.M. Central Standard Time. Suzy singer. What will happen?
Like any pro, Suzy was there early. Sam was looking at the second hand of the clock lurching toward the 12. 2:48:56, 2:48:57, 2:48:58, 2:48:59, 2:49:00. KNOCK KNOCK. Sam almost screamed. He went to the door. He stepped away from the door toward his saxophone. He went back to the door and touched the handle. KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK. He almost screamed again.
"Sam?" queried a voice on the other side.
"SAM," He said.
"Sam, it's Suzy Wright."
"Sam."
"Sam, are you there?"
"Yeah, okay. Suzy. (Suzy singer)."
He opened the door and retreated to the middle of the room like a shy pony. Suzy leaned her head forward and quizzically peered into the room through the door. Satisfied, she breezed in. "Hi Sam."
"Sam."
She went straight to the electric piano, and placed her stack of lead sheets on the night table; she removed her coat and scarf and laid them on the bed; she sat down on the metal folding chair and placed the first tune of their set on the music stand. Sam stood watching these simple activities with the opaque wonder of a dog watching his master solve a problem in advanced calculus. She turned and smiled at him. "Wanna play?"
She had been warned that Sam had problems communicating with people, and Red had outlined the way he taught Sam music by rote, listening to tape recordings; but Suzy was not perturbed or intimidated by the possibility of difficulties--she had her own agenda for this rehearsal, and it didn't involve learning other people's arrangements by rote--she had another idea. Suzy was a very remarkable musician, but she was also possessed of all the motherly (and fatherly) instincts of a born teacher, and she wanted to try something with Sam that might open him up and extend his range. She knew Sam had some kind of mental disability, that he was entrenched in a mind set from which he could not reach out, and which most people could not reach into; but she had also felt a connection with him on the bandstand Thursday, Friday, and Saturday--a musical connection that enthralled her, and gave her the confidence that there was something more to Sam than people were giving him credit for. She felt she understood Sam as well as she needed to, after three nights of performing, and she had a strategy in mind that might enable her to get more music out of him.
She was so young. Young, and fearless, and driven by that open-hearted sincerity that bestows, on all innocents, the keys to the kingdom. She felt that she had in hand the key necessary to unlock the inner kingdom of Sam; she wasn't sure (she wasn't that young) but she was by God going to find out. She knew she might be rushing onto ground where angels feared to tread, but, Sweet Jesus, that was what MUSIC was FOR. "Wanna play?" she said again.
Without replying, Sam went over to his saxophone case in the corner with careful steps avoiding certain lines in the carpet like land mines. He opened the case. He was inept at putting it together. Suddenly a project that he had performed thousands of times seemed like completely foreign and unpracticed territory. He fumbled with the mouthpiece, he fumbled with the reed, he got so tangled in his neck strap, Suzy had to reach out and straighten it for him. At last he got his reed moistened and he was ready. After blowing a long arpeggio up and down the range of the horn, he went to the tape recorder and pushed the button on Benny Goodman's All of Me, the first tune on the list. Suzy reached out and flipped it off. Sam flinched with surprise, eyes wide, as though he had been shocked by 120 volts.
"Let's not begin with the tape," she said; and, without any more ado, she touched the keys and played a simple intro. Just then Sam's alarm clock belted out a deafening high-pitched whistle. Suzy started, and Sam leaped on the clock like a leopard, struggling to shut it off. After three obnoxious blasts his stumbling fingers managed to flip the switch.
"Three P.M. Central Standard Time."
"Ah."
She began again, this time with the ending tag in a slow tempo, "You took the part that once was my heart, so why not take all of me?" Then she started into a moderate swing vamp, plunking out a walking bass. Sam stared at her with the puzzlement of a calf looking in awed revelation at a new gate in the corral. He had been prepared to play Benny Goodman's famous version, but this didn't jive with what Suzy was doing. He blanked. Ten different jazz solos buzzed through his head and none of them fit.
"Don't know it," he said, the most tragically pathetic words in all of Shakespeare, or the Bible. Sam thought about crying, but Suzy's smile stopped him.
"Play the tune Sam," she encouraged. He took a breath and balked again. "Play a little piece of the tune, come on." Suzy continued to vamp, arching her eyebrows in anticipation. Sam played, "All of me," and stopped. "Good, now do it again, here," in the minor vi. "All of me." "Good. Now here," in minor ii. "All of me." "Good. Now put it together." Sam had never played a musical fragment so short, and he had never put the pieces together by himself before. He had never CHOSEN what to play, he had always just played the other guy's tune. "Come on, Sam, put it together." She vamped a silk cushion, an altar where he could lay his trophies down before her. After a few moments of frozen silence, she leaned toward Sam and whispered the magic words that had brought forth the miracle of Someone to Watch Over Me four nights ago: "Take it."
And suddenly there he was, playing All of Me, little threads of All of Me, like tendrils of tune reaching out to her bass line and twisting themselves into the chords. For a moment, he was playing a sophisticated, compressed intro for All of Me, tossing around sequentially transposed versions of the opening motive, to link up with Suzy's simple Heart and Soul circle of fifths vamp; then something weird happened: the excitement of the moment triggered something in his mind, a safety valve shut off, and he started rattling off fragments of fifteen different versions of All of Me in quick succession, with no continuity between them, like that movie of all the world's great artworks flashing by in 60 seconds, like a computer searching for a fingerprint match in an FBI database; four notes of Charlie Parker here, five or six of Coleman Hawkins there, Louis Armstrong here, Billie Holiday there; and the fragments rolled over on themselves and collided with each other in a hideous hysterical cacophony. It was magnificent and horrible and desperate. Sam's tempo accelerated to a furious whirl, and it seemed like he was going to careen off a cliff any second, that his mad flurry of notes were signaling a time bomb about to explode. Taken aback, Suzy witnessed the scene with the same awe with which Sam had watched her take off her coat. Then there was a flash of melodic construction that caught her attention and she literally screamed, "STOP!"
Sam choked on his reed and took a step back. He was lost and afraid and insane.
"There! Play that again."
"Suzy?"
"Play that again, right there." She remembered enough of the fragment to quote it on the piano. "This."
Sam parroted back the melodicle, with a question mark in his eyes.
"There. Not Benny Goodman's tune, not Charlie Parker's tune, Sam's tune."
"Sam's tune?"
"Yes, Sam's tune. Your tune."
"Mine."
Sam used music to make sense out of the random mess of conceptual objects that cluttered the bomb-shelled, barb-wired no-man's-land of his mind; he used it to draw into his personal sphere, material from the outer reality that he could identify with, from which he could derive a sense of order, and, by inference, safety. But his talent had ever and always been his ability to mimic what he heard. His identification with the music was always expressed in the second person. When his mind reached up into the astral plane, he would coax his personal identity to merge with the collective identities he found there; he would choose any one of the surfeit of iconic templates that abounded in that abstract field of discarnate musical ideas, and allow it to imprint itself onto his own sense of self; he bonded with the expressions he found in the Akashic record like a co-dependent parasite, and sucked the life out of the resident collective archetypes and into himself--and it was their collective identity that became, momentarily, his personal identity.
But, alas, with collective identity comes diffusion of ego definition, something that most people need--but not Sam; Sam's ego definition was already so diffuse, he barely knew the meaning of the word "I". And, although his flights into the realm of higher mind connected him to dimensions of self that most other people crave as an antidote for the claustrophobic strangulation of ego that constricts most normal existence into a suffocating knot of self-absorption and sin, Sam was just the opposite--he experienced so little of himself as a material being, that he wandered the streets of the world a lonesome stranger, an alien who never heard a single human voice, but always a chorus, voices, voices, jostling in his ear a contrapuntal refrain, glorious and never-ending, with never a quiet interval for rest or sleep. Thus, Sam was never Sam alone, but always Sam in others, an elevated symbolic, archetypal other. He knew himself only as an expression of abstract love, a paranormal identity that projected outward from itself a radiant reflection of the face of God, to be sure, but which lacked the heat necessary to warm him into the world of the flesh. So, bereft of a particular, implicate, elected invention of divine intelligence, Sam spoke daily with the angels, but never with the cashier at the Art Institute, never the bus driver who drove him to the gig, and, lackaday, never with Susan Wright.
And this was how it was, and this was how it had always been. Never before had anyone asked him to create something of his own. The idea of ownership had never occurred to him. He took refuge in his music to escape the cruelty of his father, never to affirm the existence of himself. His entire strategy for living had been defensive--until now. Also, until now, he had never played a wrong note. As he labored with Suzy over his own version of All of Me, he honked and squawked false phrase after false phrase, and this almost drove him to tears again, until Suzy stopped him and comforted him with the famous Miles Davis quote, "You're never more than a half-step away from a right note." With this, Sam dove into his improvisations with renewed vigor and learned how to snatch victory from the very jaws of defeat. By the end of their session, Sam was playing with the same energy and authority with which he had quoted all the great recorded jazz solos of the 20th century. Yes, he stumbled, and yes, he painted himself into many musical corners and had to start over again and again, (like every other musician in the world), but he had the idea now, and practiced on after Suzy went home--so much so that the night man at the St.George had to come up and remind him it was after 11:00, and people were trying to sleep.
Wednesday night at Al's Place was a triumph. The place was packed and when the band launched into All of Me, there was a new saxophone player onstage. After the head, upbeat and perky, (a little Ella Fitzgeraldish, but still with some eccentric inflections Suzy liked to throw in), Sam took his first solo of the evening. He began with an attenuated, ever-so-slightly decorated version of the tune, but as the solo built and built, through two complete choruses, his virtuosity became more and more brilliant and commanding until the second time through the bridge, when he stopped on a high note and held it for three measures modulating the tone through the changes, bending it up to an ecstatic ultimate note.
It might be said that this note was a love song to Suzy. It might be said that Sam's glorious "I AM!" resounded in almost articulate verbosity. It might be said that words formed in Sam's mind, complete sentences reflecting on the music, attaching his high note, with literal resonance to some real, worldly thing, some specific act of self-realization. It might be said that Sam's penis erected itself in that rarefied moment of visceral focus, and he found his humanity in the applause clattering through the audience at Al's Place, Chicago, Illinois, Planet Earth, 8:35 Post Meridian, Central Standard Time. Then again, it might have been just a really good musical idea, imagined and brought forth into the material plane by an aspie saxophone player.
Then he looked over at Suzy, handed it back, and let her take it out. The crowd went wild.
Sam smiled at Suzy, maybe for the first time in his life, and as he took his bow, he took her hand and raised it over their heads, together. There was a moment between them that could never be duplicated, and whose tenderness could never be surpassed. He felt himself congeal into a knot of self-absortion and sin, and he sighed for so much clarity. He felt himself arriving, felt himself taking something from Suzy that was hers and his together, mostly his. And he wept. This time she did not hold him back, but embraced him onstage, wiping his tears on her shoulder. The audience redoubled their applause, conscious that they had witnessed something important, something historic, and something plainly, quintessentially human. When Red prodded them into their next number, Sam leaned over and whispered, "I'll take it." And he did.
After that, the band went on to larger, ever more respectable venues. They toured the midwest, and, one time, got as far as San Francisco. Jazz musicians have never enjoyed the same level of monetary gain that rock musicians do, but they did pretty well. They recorded on Atlantic, and, between three separate albums, sold several hundred thousand copies.
It would be nice to say that the relationship between Sam and Suzy blossomed into a romantic/erotic item, but that didn't happen. When their heyday had spent itself, Sam settled back into a regular routine playing at the Moonrise Room, with a different back-up band, and Suzy went to New York where she still sings jazz all over town, and has got into light opera: her Mabel in Pirates of Penzance has received favorable reviews, and she has a large studio of private students on the side.
Sam started making an effort to connect with the world in more ways than one, he is speaking in complete sentences now, and he has bought himself a house in a quiet neighborhood on the lower north side. He still sees Aunt Maxine every Sunday, (she's in her 80s, now), and he has started dating one of the waitresses at the Moonrise Room: but that's another story; a good one, but not this one.
Richard Freeman-Toole
richardfreemantoole@yahoo.com
freemantlemusic.com
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