Nine Fingers (18 page)
Authors: Thom August
To Milwaukee
Saturday, January 18
It is nine o’clock when Powell comes bouncing down the stairs. He sits. We wait for Landreau. His bag is sitting there but
he’s not around. Ten minutes later he shows up, coming in from outside. Has on a hat and gloves, and steam is coming off him.
I put my coffee cup down on the table, and it makes a little clink.
Landreau turns to Powell, mutters something. Powell grins.
“What?” I ask. “What is it?”
Powell looks at Landreau, who shrugs. Powell turns to me and speaks.
“He was telling me it was a G,” he says.
“A G?” I repeat. “What’s a G? What do you mean?”
Powell reaches past me and picks up the coffee cup, flicks his finger nail against it. “G,” he sings, “G, G, G.”
I turn to Landreau. “You one of those people with perfect pitch?” I ask him.
He looks at me. Squints. “Nothing’s perfect,” he says.
I’m not sure what to say to this. I reach over and pick up my cases.
“Should we wait for the others?” he asks.
“Sidney has already left,” Powell says. “He took off with Akiko at dawn.”
“We might as well head out, if you’re ready to go.”
I look at Landreau. He shrugs, picks up his case.
The trip to Milwaukee is uneventful. Mostly back roads, four lanes, forty miles an hour. No traffic. The weather is cold.
The roads are clear. Nice scenery, trees hanging low under a cloak of snow. No one talks, we just look out the windows.
We get to the club way too early. Jones has already been there, setting up her kit. There’s a string-bass case, locked to
a radiator with a cable and a padlock. All present and accounted for.
The place is called The Joint, and could be called The Cave. Under street level, just a little light filtering in from the
half-windows. Strong smell of beer and cigarettes. Music posters on the walls—Clapton, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Guns
N’ Roses, Beck. Beck? What the hell?
The gig is just OK. Not like last night, which I can’t even find the words to talk about. We’re playing OK, but not great.
The crowd is into it. They applaud for every little thing, even the parts that don’t really work. The piano is flat. Powell
and I have to adjust all the way open to get close to it. Throws everybody’s intonation off. The crowd doesn’t notice. Landreau
notices. He has a look on his face like he’s got bugs stuck in his teeth.
The crowd is couples in their thirties, forties, and fifties. No singles to speak of. There seems to be a pitcher of beer
on every table, no mixed drinks. The food is bratwurst, knackwurst, weisswurst, and hot dogs, and they all come with sauerkraut
and french fries. I look a little closer. There’s not a soul in here less than fifty pounds overweight, men and women both.
Powell tries to do what he can, but the rest of us are stuck with our feet in the mud. Landreau? He plays beautifully, he
can’t help it. The crowd doesn’t really notice. He gets less applause after his solos than even I do. That’s just wrong.
After the first song, whenever someone else solos I’m scanning the crowd. No Laura.
We play a set. Take a break. Play another set. More applause. The worse we play the more they like it. It’s Saturday night—they
want to feel like they’re getting their money’s worth. And they’re getting beer-drunk, happy and sentimental. I look at all
the bottles lined up so pretty behind the bar. Sparkling in the light. Singing their songs in color. I look at the glass of
flat ginger ale on the floor next to me.
The last set, I lean over to Powell, “Let’s play some blues, just jam.” He nods. Powell calls out “C-Jam Blues,” an old Lester
Young sax classic. I start with the tenor and Powell comes in on the trumpet. I take it back, on the alto, hand it to Landreau.
Take it back again on the soprano. A chorus, another chorus, another chorus. I have stopped thinking about my fingers. Jones
is working the drums, Worrell is slapping the bass. Another chorus. We go on and on and on. I swing my sax in a circle. They
all join in, pushing to the finish.
Wild applause. Almost deserved.
Powell vamps into the band’s theme song. Introduces the band. We each play a half a chorus, then we’re done.
Manager comes up and gives Powell a fat envelope. He opens it. Counts it. They shake hands. Powell turns to the band, divvies
up the cash. Except for me. Which is right. We pack up.
Coats on. Handshakes all around. We’re all in a better mood than a few hours ago. It’s the music is what it is. And then we’re
into the cars and into the night. Back to Chicago.
No Laura. Not a glimpse. But there was the music, and that will have to carry me for now.
Back to Chicago
Saturday, January 18
After the gig, we’re ready to go. Last second, Landreau jumps up, says he’s going with Worrell and Jones.
I have the thought: is he going to skip? Back to Detroit? Iowa? Slip away?
No. It comes to me immediately—it’s just a definite No. He’s staying, for now. The fact that I know this but don’t know how
I know it gnaws at me.
We watch him walk away; then we’re gone.
We wind through the city streets. The wind is howling. Everything is shades of gray. It’s quiet, cold, dark. I let Powell
drive for a while, get settled in. Then I interrupt.
“What can you tell me about Amatucci?” I ask.
“I could tell you a lot, but we’re only going to Chicago, not Los Angeles. What do you want to know?”
“Whatever,” I say. “Background.”
He pauses, gathers his thoughts. I remind myself: he does this.
“Born in New York, got his BS at Columbia—”
“That where he gets his BS?” I say. “He sure has plenty of it.”
He pauses again, tightens his mouth.
“I mean,” I say, backing up. “The guy can sure talk, and about the craziest things. Night I saw him at the hospital, he is
going on and on about the thermometer, the battery thing they use now, on that rolling stand, and how it figures out the temperature
with electricity. I mean, details like you wouldn’t believe—”
“Ohm’s law?” he asks.
That stops me. I turn to him.
“He give you the same rant?” I ask.
“Did he say more than two sentences?” he asks.
“You kidding? He goes on for three, four minutes—”
“Then it’s the truth,” he says. “When Vinnie just says something brief, it may be a fact, it may be that he’s bullshitting
you, it may be that’s he’s testing you, it may be that he’s just trying some idea on for size.”
He pauses, lets this sink in.
“But when he goes on for more than two sentences, he knows exactly what he’s talking about; he’s researched it, he can cite
references.”
“Really?” I ask.
He nods.
“He got his BS at Columbia, Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, with two majors and a 3.9 GPA. And he got all A’s here in graduate
school and I never saw him study for a single minute.”
“Two majors?”
“Mechanical engineering and psychology,” he says. “A somewhat unusual combination.”
“I’d say,” I said. “How’d that happen?”
He’s one of these people who drives sitting straight up.
He shifts in his seat, sits straighter.
“He was always interested in the way things worked; gadgets, gizmos, appliances, machines of all kinds. He won a number of
engineering contests in high school. He got accepted at MIT, Purdue, Rensselaer, all the big engineering schools, but he got
a scholarship at Columbia, and his folks pushed him to stay close to home. He took a class, sophomore year, called ‘Invention
and Inventors,’ and what interested him was not just the machines but the fact that they had all been invented by people,
most of them very curious people. He started to get interested in those people: How did they do what they did? What separated
Thomas Edison from his siblings? Ben Franklin from his brothers? Cyrus McCormick from his peers? One Intro Psych course and
he was hooked. He couldn’t get enough—child development, sensation and perception, physiology, cognitive, disorders. He kept
up the mechanical engineering all the while, and ended up with credits enough for both. Next, graduate school at the U. of
C., strictly cognitive psychology. That’s where we met.”
“So what happened?”
“What happened?”
“What happened that he hasn’t finished?”
“Epistemology,” he says. There is no pause this time.
“E-what?” I ask. I have heard this word before, but can’t place where, or what it means.
“Epistemology. The study of how we know what we know.”
I look at him. He must be able to read my blank look.
“How do you know I’m driving this car?” he asks. “You have what you think is the objective sensory evidence of your eyes and
your ears and your kinesthetic sense. You can see the world moving outside the window. But it could be a dream, a hallucination.
Take it further: how do you know I don’t have a dead body stuffed in the trunk, or two kilos of heroin under the seat?” He
pauses. “Assumption, interpretation, implication, deduction. No direct evidence.”
“Yeah…” I say.
“Epistemology looks at the sources of our knowledge, and our beliefs, and the deeper you look at the former, the more you
see the latter. We don’t experience the world, we create it. The field Vinnie was in was cognitive psychology, and epistemology
messed him up. He got to the point where he saw that most of what we know about ourselves is just metaphor, simile, analogy.
Emotions are ‘like a teakettle.’ The mind is ‘like a computer.’ Even the whole notion that there is something called a ‘mind’
and not just an actual physical brain, three pounds of hamburger between your ears. He had ended up studying and testing the
metaphor, not the brain itself, so there was no ‘there’ there. All the research he was working on was all assumption, interpretation,
implication, deduction. No direct evidence. No sensory data. Just abstract theory.”
I nod.
“It stalled him. Here he was, studying how we process information, how we interpret the world, and he’s seeing that the basic
data we all start with is not data at all, but a chimera, a dream, a shadow on the wall of a cave.”
“Plato,” I say.
He looks at me, cocks an eyebrow.
“Cook County Community College,” I say. “They’ve heard of him, even there.”
He nods. Pauses.
“Meanwhile, we had started the band, and epistemology does not apply. With music, you know going in that it’s all opinion,
you know there’s never going to be any direct objective evidence of whether something you play is good or not. You’ve got
the sensory evidence of your ears, and the social evidence of your peers, and sometimes they’re just wrong. Vinnie was good
enough that he saw he could get better, and he has. And he doesn’t have to know how he knows he’s getting better, he can hear
it. So he got deeper into the music, and backed off on his thesis.”
I think about this.
“I can kind of see what you’re saying,” I say. “It’s like he’s doing something he thinks is important, is true, and it gets
pulled out from under him.”
There is a pause. There’s not much traffic, but he’s keeping it at the speed limit.
“So why the cab? Even without the degree, must be something better he could do,” I say. “The Merchandise Mart, finance, teaching,
whatever?”
He looks straight ahead. Then glances over at me.
“What he’s trying to do is to see how far he can go with his music. Driving a cab gives him the flexibility to work on that.
It’s his way of not letting himself get interested in anything else. You mentioned teaching; he’s done that. This sounds like
heresy, but he put a ridiculous amount of thought into it; three or four versions of a one-hour class outline were the norm.
It was taking him twelve hours a day to prepare for one hour; he had no time for anything else. It seems to be part of his
nature to be prone to sudden enthusiasms, and to immerse himself completely in them.”
“Well.” I say, “This city, learning it so you can go out and drive a cab and make money, is more of a lifetime thing than
some ‘sudden enthusiasm.’ ”
“ ‘A couple of hours with a map, then two days of driving around, systematically,’ that’s what he told me,” he says. “Vinnie
studied a map one night, then drove around to associate visual landmarks with the street names, and after that he had it all.
I believe him. I’ve been in that cab. He doesn’t keep a map in there; he has a better one in his head.”
We’re both alone with our thoughts. The miles pass.
“On the way up,” I say, “you said that Landreau must be running from something.”
He nods.
“Any idea what he’s running from?” I ask.
He turns to me, shakes his head, once. “We’re all running, in our own way. Running from something, running toward something.”
“Everybody?” I ask. “You think?”
“Well, some people aren’t running. They’re standing still.”
“Standing still? They’re not running from anything?”
“They’re hiding,” he says.
I look at him.
“ ‘Fight or flight,’ ” he says. “It’s been in the gene pool since before the beginning.”
I think about this. “So, if you’re running you may be running away from something or running toward something, but if you’re
standing still you’re hiding. Is that it? Is everybody who is standing still hiding?”
“Well, not everybody,” he says.
“The rest of them, what are they doing?” I ask.
“They’re not doing anything,” he says, “not a damned thing.”
I look over at him. Waiting for the rest of it.
“The ones who are standing still and aren’t hiding, they’re dead.”
Yeah, I think. I ask myself the question: Which one are you?
I answer my own question: Which one am I
not?
Hyde Park
Sunday, January 19
I’ve been staying up ridiculously late the last few nights, doing absolutely nothing but staring at the TV, flipping through
some old magazines, smoking some weed. My real agenda was to get more depressed. The hand still ached, but it was steady,
with not as much throbbing as before, not as many sharp pains when I bumped the cast into something. It was almost worse like
this, because for long stretches of time I almost forget about it, and then when I crashed it into something I would get surprised
and pissed off all over again.
I had a little breakfast and a lot of coffee and laid around reading the Sunday
Tribune,
the words going into my eyes and out of my head, with no traction at all. At around two o’clock I caught myself reading an
article in the Sunday magazine that I had already read at ten o’clock in the morning, and threw the paper down in disgust,
accompanied by a fit of wild fucking cursing.
I was pissed at myself, because this was all I had been able to make of my stupid life. I was a first-rate cabdriver and a
second-rate piano player. In other words, nobody. I was about to turn thirty, far away from home, with no friends but the
guys in the band, still without the goddamned dissertation done. I had nowhere to go and no big shiny degree to fall back
on.
I was pissed at Landreau for showing me just how second-rate I was. I was pissed at Paul for believing in how good I might
be.
I was even pissed at Akiko because she was madly in love. Not that I envied her Laura—Laura was the most beautiful, sexy,
exotic woman I had even met, and she scared the shit out of me. I was pissed at Akiko because she faced it, straight ahead,
and she held on.
I was pissed at the thought that the guy that got away would come back, or that they’d send someone else. I was hunkered down,
dug in, making time pass.
There’s a time to be constructive, and a time to lay back and lick your wounds. I was licking my wounds.
And the rest of the day passed that way, in a blur. I took the pipe back out of the drawer, even turned on a football game
on the tube, the play-offs. I got a little buzzed, I lay on the couch, I watched the hours roll by.
Waiting it out, whatever
it
was.
That night, in my sleep, she came to me.
I was in my apartment, in bed, knocked out on Percocet—I had been saving them for sleep, to quiet the throbbing that started
in my hand and migrated to my chest. It was two in the morning, maybe three, when the covers were slowly pulled back and she
slid into my bed. Her body was warm and she smelled like vanilla. The lights were out and the shades were drawn. I couldn’t
see a thing, but I could picture her perfectly.
I was lying on my left side, with my mangled left hand stretched out in front of me, and when she slid under the covers, she
backed up against me, in a spoon position. She pulled the covers up over the both of us, and backed in closer, fitting my
forearm into the curve of her neck.
She sighed a long sigh, and wiggled her perfect ass against me. Her skin felt like heated silk, smooth and pure and perfect.
I was hard almost instantly but didn’t dare move an inch; I just lay there, breathing her scent, feeling the warmth at her
core spread through me.
She breathed deeply once, twice, and backed against me tighter. I was dying to push toward her, that primordial hump reflex
pounding in my temples, but I lay as still as death, afraid to lose the moment. My right hand, my good hand, was resting on
her hip, and I fought my desire to reach out and stroke her, to rub along her flank, to trace my fingertips down her leg.
I could feel her calves slide against my shins, feel the hollows of her knees rub against my kneecaps, feel the arch of her
spine tickling the hairs on my chest.
It was pleasure, absolute pleasure; it was torture, sheer torture.
Oh, God, Laura, I thought, Oh God.
And with that the covers were flung back, she sat up in the bed, turned on the light, swung her legs over the side, and reached
for her clothes.
It wasn’t a dream at all. And it wasn’t Laura.
“Akiko?” I asked. “Akiko? What are you doing here?”
She was holding a black T-shirt in her hands, wrestling with it. She had it half inside-out, half outside-in. She twisted
it twice more, then threw it down in disgust. She leaned forward, put her head in her hands, squeezed her short hair in her
fists.
“I don’t know, Vince, I wish I fucking knew, you know?”
“I mean, how’d you get in here? I mean, I thought I—wasn’t the door locked?”
She held her chin in her hands, her head down. “Cheap locks, Vince. Took me no more than twenty seconds, didn’t even leave
a mark. You ought to get them replaced. Really.”
“What happened? What is it? I was asleep,” I said.
“Well,” she said. “You called out her name—‘Oh, God, Laura. Oh God’—like that.”
She was turned away from me, her shoulders bouncing up and down in a slow rhythm. I reached a hand out, my right one, and
touched her back. Her skin was tight against her spine.
“I was asleep, I was having a dream.”
She half-turned, half-faced me. I caught a trace of a smirk; then she turned back away. “It’s cool, Vince. You’re right, you
were only having a dream.” She muttered. “Maybe so was I. I have, like, no fucking idea what I was thinking…”
I sat up and wrapped my arms around her, tried to quiet her. She began to shake and I kept my arms tight and my mouth shut.
Sometimes there’s nothing you can say, and anything you could say would just make it worse. She kept rocking, but she wouldn’t
let the tears come out, couldn’t give voice to the pain. So I held her until the quaking stopped and her shoulders relaxed
and her breathing slowed to a regular rhythm. We slowly settled back into the spoon position we had started in.
After a few minutes she half-turned toward me and said, “I’m sorry, Vince. I’m freaking out. I haven’t seen her since, well,
since that night you were at my place, and I’m scared she’s dumped me. Run off. Gone back to men. Gone on to someone else,
whatever.”
“Let me see if I’m following this. You came here, broke in, to see if she had ‘gone on’ to
me?
”
She shrugged. “Well, yeah, I guess. Sort of.”
“And you had to get naked and get into my bed to look
really really closely?
”
She pulled her arm back and smacked me—right on my cast. She shook her hand back and forth. I shook my cast back and forth.
We both howled. It took us a while to settle down.
“So, does this mean there’s a side of you that I haven’t seen?” She didn’t even shrug this time. “I mean, do you have some
kind of dark and sordid heterosexual past I don’t know about?”
She looked up at me. “My feelings are all jumbled up. I wasn’t thinking, like, at all.”
I hadn’t been thinking too clearly myself lately, so I was in no position to push the point. Some time passed. We let the
implications trail out.
“And besides,” she said, “I’ve been with men…a couple of times.”
“You have? Really?”
“When I was like, younger.”
“And…?” I asked.
She shrugged.
“So,” I said, trying to lighten the mood, “how do you want it?”
“What?”
“Well, how do you want it? Straight-up missionary style, woman on top, doggy style? Should we start with a little foreplay,
some oral perhaps—”
She smacked me again, reached around and backhanded me in the head. Unfortunately, my head is at least as hard as the cast.
We both howled again.
“Does this mean you really don’t want me for myself?”
She started to protest, but I cut her off.
“No, I mean, here I thought you wanted
me,
and now I discover I was just supposed to be some transitional sex object, some
tool
…”
“Come on, Vince,” she giggled. “Cut it out.”
“God, I feel so, I don’t know, so
used
…”
She chuckled again, but then she turned around, put her hand gently on my face. “Vince, you know I really love you. You’re
a friend.”
“Oh, that’s right. I keep forgetting, you’re only supposed to fuck people you really despise—”
“Stop being sarcastic,” she said. “You know I love you like a brother.”
“Geez,” I said, “you really know how to make a guy’s dick go soft.”
She rolled her eyes, then moved her leg up against me. “Liar,” she said.
I started to protest, but she cut me off. Then she rolled over onto her back, spread her legs, turned to me and said, “OK,
go ahead. Let’s do it. Fuck me.”
“Always the romantic,” I said.
“No, really, go ahead. I can do this, really. I thought about it, kind of, on the way over. Might even be, uh, you know, interesting.”
“Flattery will get you everywhere. But that wasn’t flattery.”
I pushed her right leg closed and leaned up on my elbow. I leaned down and kissed her gently on the lips. Her eyelids fluttered
three times. She tasted like vanilla, and honey. I leaned back, took a breath.
“Look, Akiko, the one you really want is Laura, and, as you can tell, I’m not Laura. You and I, we could have a great time
together, but at the end you’d still want Laura, and you’d feel bad for having me instead. Am I right?”
She looked into my eyes, and saw I was telling the truth, at least the truth as I saw it. She squinted.
“I mean,” I said, “don’t get me wrong. You’re a beautiful woman, plus of course smart and charming and intelligent and a great
percussionist and ‘gee, that really looks great on you’ and all that…But you’re right, you’re my friend. Another time,
different circumstances, I would make love to you as well as I know how, fuck you like I meant it, and I would mean it. And
you’re right, it might be interesting. Very interesting. But right now?”
There was that shrug again.
“I do love you, Vince. Sorry I doubted you, suspected you, whatever.” She twisted toward me, her black eyes searching mine.
And we had a moment there, a genuine moment.
She smiled, rolled onto her knees, reached over, turned out the light, and curled back up against me. The room was cold, and
she was warm, and I tucked the covers in around us. We sighed, and started to sink down in together. Mr. Dick was still standing
at attention, and I shifted to try to get him out of the way. She reached behind herself, grabbed it, gave it one squeeze.
“Hey. Don’t be embarrassed. Don’t forget, I’ve seen it up close and, like, personal.”
I nodded against the back of her neck.
“Besides,” she said, “it’s kind of, like, flattering, you know?”
And she giggled.
Yeah, I guess, I thought. And with that we drifted off to a restless but gentle sleep. Still friends. More than ever. Even
if one of us had a hard-on.
