I didn’t have time for the guilt.
I only had time to blow air kisses and whispered witticisms.
“Where’s Stone?”
Lars lifted his chin toward the back. There, perched above us, on the thickest branch of the banana tree, was the God of Improvisation. The sight and twisted symbolism of a black genius in a banana tree unnerved me, but I understood why he was up there — the mental Lebensraum. Sometimes you have to elevate yourself above the fray; bananas, monkey inferences, and misappropriated Nazi terminology be damned.
He was talking to a reporter, shyly fiddling with his cuff links and addressing his shoes. I couldn’t hear the conversation over the murmur and the Rahsaan Roland Kirk blaring from the jukebox.
“What do you think they’re talking about?”
Lars dubbed the dialogue in the affected pitchy drawl particular to the black thinking man. “Rothko. . harmonic translucency. . Gerhard Richter, right, right, chromatic color fields. . exactly. .”
Stone looked ashen, shell-shocked. There was even more of a paranoid bulge to his eyes than usual. Between questions he blinked at me with the deliberateness of a POW trying to convey some coded message to the boys back at the command center. Not sure if he was looking at me or past me, I wavered between soul-brother salutations — a light thump of my fist to my heart or the chin-up nod — finally settling on a discreet peace sign.
“. . Leibniz. . an alphabet of thought…”
I imagined that Stone, like any guest of honor, wanted to arrive fashionably late, avoid the hoopla, but the pro forma punctuality of the German transportation system wouldn’t let him. That’s one of the drawbacks of German reliability: There are no excuses, and that’s half the fun of being black, the excuses. The negative attention.
“Pollock…linear harmony. . visceral pointillism. .” Lars was on a roll. “I’ve interviewed a hundred jazz musicians, and every time I ask them, ‘What are your influences, Mr. Blackman?’ they come back with the same impress-the-white-boy-with-white-boys shit — Rothko, Bartók, Pollock, John Cage.”
Lars looked at me expecting an answer, but I couldn’t tell him the other half of the fun in being black is name-dropping Rothko and Liebniz in an interview. Crediting abstract impressionism and the stoics as the biggest influences on your avant-garde art, and not your two tours as a machine gunner in the army, Muhammad Ali, or the white ingenue (aren’t they all) who broke your heart by choosing economic stability over eight and three-quarter inches of dick.
“What’s he talking about now?”
“Heidegger.”
“Heidegger?”
“Heidegger, nigger!” Lars shouted, jokingly snapping out a fascist salute that guilt lowered almost immediately.
“Wow, that’s the first time I ever did that.”
“Yeah, the first time out of uniform.”
“We start after the song’s over, okay?” With that Lars withdrew to the bar, leaving me to my thoughts and the Roland Kirk.
At the moment, I needed Rahsaan Roland Kirk more than Ronald Reagan and Eazy-E had needed their ghostwriters. Kirk, as is his recalcitrant wont, was blindly misbehaving like a country cousin at the Thanksgiving dinner table, chewing with his mouth full. I shut my eyes and concentrated on his blowing. Stritch, tenor, and manzello, he played three saxophones at once, somehow braiding each instrument’s distinct timbre into one tensile melody. Rather than playing his notes, he played with his notes; chewing and gnawing on them until they were sweetened bubblegum chaws that he pulled pink and sticky from his horns, then reeled back in just to chomp on it and start the process all over again. Rahsaan Roland Kirk was telling me to relax. Letting me know that it’s okay to misbehave. Perfectly fine to once in a while play with your food, your blackness, and your craft. It was a message I needed to hear, especially since when the song ended I was going to have to introduce the Schwa, in all his musical rudeness, to the world.
Introductions are a serious matter, the import of which I think only the Mafia truly understands. In the criminal underworld there are consequences to expanding the sewing circle. You introduce somebody to the family and your goombah from the neighborhood turns out to be a fuck-up or an undercover cop, you’re held responsible, and the person who vouched for you is held responsible for your transgression, and so on down the line. I feel the same way about music: Problem is, there are no repercussions. Some irresponsible uncle drags you to a GBH concert at the Roxy before you’re ready and it’s like going on a bad acid trip. You’re never quite the same. Yet given all my misgivings about making an introduction, I insisted on being the one to introduce the Schwa to the world and I was willing to assume full responsibility for what ensued.
I had prepared by studying all the great emcees. Brave toast-masters like Symphony Sid, whose houndstooth-sport-jacketed “Oh, man, daddy-o” afternoon-radio equipoise ushered in the swing era. I sat up nights staring at album covers and lip-syncing Pee-Wee Marquette’s slurring, whiskey-breathed “Welcome to the Birdland” castrato. I thought that these masters of ceremonies would inspire me, but when I sat down to write my intro, nothing past the mundane came to mind; lots of words that start with in- and ended in — able: in-domit-able, in-defatig-able, indubit-able, and I swear I took my hand off the pen and, like a player piano mechanically reproducing a hokey Bourbon Street rag, it scribbled out, “Ladies and gentlemen, a man who needs no introduction. .” If anybody ever needed an introduction, it was the Schwa.
I had half a notion to reverse protocol and introduce the audience to the band. Clear my throat and say, “Over-rehearsed and underpaid musicians, allow me to present your fawning fan base. Charles Stone and members of the band, I give you the last group of people on earth with an attention span — the free-jazz audience.”
I finally phoned the Schwa and asked him how he wanted to be introduced.
He simply said, “In German.”
His answer surprised me because I’d never heard him speak a lick of German. He was the stereotypical lazy expatriate for whom German is a dour, unnecessarily serious language. He feels life is morose enough without the mooing umlauts and throat-irritating diphthongs. Even though I knew better, I asked him politely if he spoke German.
“Thirty-some-odd years,” he said proudly, “thirty-some-odd years I’ve lived in this country, and all I can say in German is, ‘Kann ich reinspritzen?’ Can I come inside you? What can I say, man? The language just don’t taste right in my mouth.”
He had managed to offend what few sensibilities I have, and I was about to hang up the phone when his voice sputtered through the receiver. “Wait, I can say something else,” he said in an excited pant, “‘Kann ich in Ihnen kommen?’ May I come inside you, woman whom I don’t know well enough to address in the informal variant of you?”
“If you don’t speak German, why do you want me to introduce you in German?”
“So I don’t understand the fucking lies.”
“Lies?”
“Are you going to say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to introduce Charles Stone, an old, persnickety, impotent everyday-except-Thursday, muscatel-in-a-plastic-cup-at-four-in-the-afternoon-drinking motherfucker. Let’s give him a warm welcome and hope this jazz dinosaur completes the set before he dies’? No, you’re not. So whatever you say, say it in German. Bullshit sounds good in German.”