Blow-Up (22 page)

“When do you start, Johnny?”

“I dunno. Today, I think, huh De?”

“No, day after tomorrow.”

“Everybody knows the dates except me,” Johnny grumbled, covering himself up to the ears in his blanket. “I’d’ve sworn it was tonight, and this afternoon we had to go in to rehearse.”

“It amounts to the same thing,” Dédée said. “The thing is that you haven’t got a horn.”

“What do you mean, the same thing? It isn’t the same thing. Day after tomorrow is the day after tomorrow, and tomorrow is much later than today. And today is later than right now, because here we are yakking with our old buddy Bruno, and I’d feel a lot better if I could forget about time and have something hot to drink.”

“I’ll boil some water, hold on for a little.”

“I was not referring to boiling water,” Johnny said. So I pulled out the bottle of rum, and it was as though we’d turned the light on; Johnny opened his mouth wide, astonished, and his teeth shone, until even Dédée had to smile at seeing him, so surprised and happy. Rum and nescafé isn’t really terrible, and all three of us felt a lot better after the second swallow and a cigarette. Then I noticed that Johnny was withdrawing little by little and kept on referring to time, a subject which is a preoccupation of his ever since I’ve known him. I’ve seen very few men as occupied as he is with everything having to do with time. It’s a mania of his, the worst of his manias, of which he has plenty. But he explains and develops it with a charm hard to resist. I remember a rehearsal before a recording session in Cincinnati, long before he came to Paris, in forty-nine or fifty. Johnny was in great shape in those days and I’d gone
to the rehearsal just to talk to him and also to Miles Davis. Everybody wanted to play, they were happy, and well-dressed (this occurs to me maybe by contrast with how Johnny goes around now, dirty and messed up), they were playing for the pleasure of it, without the slightest impatience, and the sound technician was making happy signs from behind his glass window, like a satisfied baboon. And just at that moment when Johnny was like gone in his joy, suddenly he stopped playing and threw a punch at I don’t know who and said, “I’m playing this tomorrow,” and the boys stopped short, two or three of them went on for a few measures, like a train slowly coming to a halt, and Johnny was hitting himself in the forehead and repeating, “I already played this tomorrow, it’s horrible, Miles, I already played this tomorrow,” and they couldn’t get him out of that, and everything was lousy from then on, Johnny was playing without any spirit and wanted to leave (to shoot up again, the sound technician said, mad as hell), and when I saw him go out, reeling and his face like ashes, I wondered how much longer that business could go on.

“I think I’ll call Dr. Bernard,” Dédée said, looking at Johnny out of the corner of her eye, he was taking his rum in small sips. “You’ve got a fever and you’re not eating anything.”

“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 metro.”

“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.”