MOTHER (instantly contentious): What’s not good enough?
SON (as if reluctantly): I was going to say the bust of Don Juan, but—
MOTHER: I think that’s a very fine piece of work— and an excellent choice in this instance.
SON: Perhaps you’re right about that, Mother. In any case, I bow to your judgment.
MOTHER: Thank you, Francis. I’ve never given any of the statues away before, but I think I should begin to. I’ll write Merrivale Young Ladies’ Academy they may have the bust of Don Juan. (Starts out.)
SON: I think you’ll feel happier when you’ve done this, Mother. And I think Father will feel happier too.
MOTHER (pausing in doorway): What’s happened to you, Francis? You’re usually so cynical about these matters.
SON (shrugs): I don’t know. Maybe I’m growing. (As his mother leaves, he begins to smile. Suddenly he whirls toward the portrait of Peer Gynt. It had seemed to wink, but now it presents only its fixed painted expression. Francis Legrande Il continues to smile as he hears someone in the studio begin faintly to hum an air from Don Giovanni.)
Some aliens are born. Some are made. Some attain alienness. Some are neither alien in form, nor place of origin, nor status of reality. They are the estranged and excluded; the exotic and unbeliever; the outcast of culture or creed or society.
* * * *
THE JAZZ MACHINE
Richard Matheson
I had the weight that night
I mean I had the blues and no one hides the blues away
You got to wash them out
Or you end up riding a slow drag to nowhere
You got to let them fly
I mean you got to
I play trumpet in this barrelhouse off Main Street
Never mind the name of it
It’s like scumpteen other cellar drink dens
Where the downtown ofays bring their loot and jive talk
And listen to us try to blow out notes
As white and pure as we can never be
Like I told you, I was gully low that night
Brassing at the great White way
Lipping back a sass in jazz that Rone got off in words
And died for
Hitting at the jug and loaded
Spiking gin and rage with shaking miseries
I had no food in me and wanted none
I broke myself to pieces in a hungry night
This white I’m getting off on showed at ten
Collared him a table near the stand
And sat there nursing at a glass of wine
Just casing us
All the way into the late watch he was there
He never budged or spoke a word
But I could see that he was picking up
On what was going down
He got into my mouth, man
He bothered me
At four I crawled down off the stand
And that was when this ofay stood and put his grabber on my arm
“May I speak to you?” he asked
The way I felt I took no shine
To pink hands wrinkling up my gabardine
“Broom off, stud,” I let him know
“Please,” he said, “I have to speak to you.”
Call me blowtop, call me Uncle Tom
Man, you’re not far wrong
Maybe my brain was nowhere
But I sat down with Mister Pink
and told him—lay his racket
“You’ve lost someone,” he said.
It hit me like a belly chord
“What do you know about it, white man?”
I felt that hating pick up tempo in my guts again
“I don’t know anything about it,” he replied
“I only know you’ve lost someone
“You’ve told it to me with your horn a hundred times.”
I felt evil crawling in my belly
“Let’s get this straight,” I said
“Don’t hype me, man; don’t give me stuff”
“Listen to me then,” he said.
“Jazz isn’t only music
“It’s a language too
“A language born of protest
“Torn in bloody ragtime from the womb of anger and despair
“A secret tongue with which the legions of abused
“Cry out their misery and their troubled hates.”
“This language has a million dialects and accents
“It may be a tone of bitter-sweetness whispered in a brass-lined throat
“Or rush of frenzy screaming out of reed mouths
“Or hammering at strings in vibrant piano hearts
“Or pulsing, savage, under taut-drawn hides
“In dark-peaked stridencies it can reveal the aching core of sorrow
“Or cry out the new millennium
“Its voices are without number
“Its forms beyond statistic
“It is, in very fact, an endless tonal revolution
“The pleading furies of the damned
“Against the cruelty of their damnation
“I know this language, friend,” he said.
“What about my—?” I began and cut off quick
“Your—what, friend?” he inquired
“Someone near to you; I know that much
“Not a woman though; your trumpet wasn’t grieving for a woman loss
“Someone in your family; your father maybe
“Or your brother.”
I gave him words that tiger prowled behind my teeth
“You’re hanging over trouble, man
“Don’t break the thread
“Give it to me straight.”
So Mister Pink leaned in and laid it down
“I have a sound machine,” he said
“Which can convert the forms of jazz
“Into the sympathies which made them
“If, into my machine, I play a sorrowing blues
“From out the speaker comes the human sentiment
“Which felt those blues
“And fashioned them into the secret tongue of jazz.”
He dug the same old question stashed behind my eyes
“How do I know you’ve lost someone?” he asked
“I’ve heard so many blues and stomps and strutting jazzes
“Changed, in my machine, to sounds of anger, hopelessness and joy
“That I can understand the language now
“The story that you told was not a new one
“Did you think you were inviolate behind your tapestry of woven brass?”
“Don’t hype me, man,” I said
I let my fingers rigor mortis on his arm
He didn’t ruffle up a hair
“If you don’t believe me, come and see,” he said
“Listen to my machine
“Play your trumpet into it
“You’ll see that everything I’ve said is true.’’
I felt shivers like a walking bass inside my skin
“Well, will you come?” he asked.
Rain was pressing drum rolls on the roof
As Mister Pink turned tires onto Main Street
I sat dummied in his coupe
My sacked-up trumpet on my lap
Listening while he rolled off words
Like Stacy runnings on a tinkle box
“Consider your top artists in the genre
“Armstrong, Bechet, Waller, Hines
“Goodman, Mezzrow, Spanier, dozens more both male and female
“Jew and Negroes all and why?
“Why are the greatest jazz interpreters
“Those who live beneath the constant gravity of prejudice?
“I think because the scaldings of external bias
“Focus all their vehemence and suffering