Beginners

 

My father was never happy in work. His one great glory came when I was 14, about the time I started playing jazz seriously. He was a shift manager at the Interlaken Resort, a fancy hotel on the lake. He wore a mustache then, dyed and combed, and a pressed pale yellow polo, and he wandered the carpeted halls of the complex with great purpose, straightening pictures, freshening up the continental breakfast, and playing grab-ass with the Mexican maids. He’d charmed his way into the job; he didn’t know a thing about hospitality. Somehow he lasted almost three years. They hated to let him go. Without being able to say what he actually did around the place, everyone seemed to love him.

A decade later, I had my first respectable gig, with the Charles Rigby Quintet. I was starting to play all around the city, starting to figure out how to make it pay. My father was living out in Florence, Oregon, where he worked in the loading bay of a Sam’s Club, heaving around cases of frozen fish sticks, throwing himself into it like one of the boys. His essential directionlessness had stranded him in cold storage at the age of 52. In this regard—direction, unswerving direction—our two separate lives had become nothing if not counterpoint.

Florence was the town where they had famously tried to unbeach the carcass of a beached whale using dynamite. When he went for walks by himself along the dunes, Dad swore he could still smell the charred blubber. He joked about it often. But I couldn’t help thinking of him as the guy who would’ve cooked up the idea, the guy who, assuming a sensible and civic-minded expression, would’ve gleefully lit the fuse.

---

“So, tell me, how’s the musician’s life?”

We talked every two weeks, noon on a Sunday, faithful to a schedule if nothing else.

“I’ve been sitting in with Chévere.” I tried to keep my description simple. “It’s this Afro-Cuban-fusion hit. Lots of mixed meter, clave in 7/8, kind of a late-’70s thing. Weather Report, Return to Forever, that kind of bag. But Latin flavored.”

“Uh-huh,” Dad said. “Uh-huh, uh-huh.” I could almost see him nodding along, as if stirring up the brainpan would help him understand.

“The Charles Rigby group is gearing up to tour. I’ve been sheddin’ like hell. Charles is finalizing the dates for Europe.”

“Europe? The grand tour, huh? That’s fantastic, really fantastic. Jesus, the kid is going to Europe! Mom would be over the moon, Timmy. You know she would.”

Why couldn’t he just say he was proud of me? Why did he have to summon up the specter of a woman I barely remembered?

“How’s the deep freeze treating you?”

He hesitated. He didn’t love talking about his work; the idea that one occupation defined a person never seemed to adhere to him. “Just think warm, that’s what I tell myself. Just think: Bermuda, Hawaii. Can’t daydream too much, though, all the activity flying around that warehouse. Actually,” he said, taking on a more hopeful tone, “I’ve been hunting up new opportunities. They say things are really happening with this day-trading thing.”

“Well, that’s great, Dad. Good luck with that.” I tried to sound like I meant it, and then, failing, tried a joke. “You always seem to have beginner’s luck.”

---

The life of a jazz musician: heroically stupid. The music was dead, embalmed, entombed; you could visit it now and then in the necropolis—the universities, the performing arts centers, Tuesday nights in subterranean coffees shops presided over by bald old dudes in caftans and berets.

My father was among the last of the boomers. He trusted in a world where a good man, a well-meaning man, could luck into a good, well-paying job. He still believed in being in the right place at the right time. But for me, a hundred, a thousand people were already lined up for the right time—though we all knew it had passed years ago. A little opportunity and a lot of education got us exactly nowhere. It seemed impossible that you might ever succeed. The boomers got it all—the big cars, the big houses, the big gigs—and in their golden retirement (Jesus, if they ever bothered to retire), they’d still be pitying us for not living up to their youthful rebellion, for despising their middle-aged greed.

It’s true that I was full of rage. My father never shared in the grand prosperity, and I blamed him for the meager circumstances in which I was beginning my own life. He was a man who never found any traction. When I was auditioning at North Texas, at Indiana, Berklee, and Oberlin, Dad was driving a delivery van for an old folks’ home. When I was studying the sacred rhythms of the Yoruba and the jealously guarded chants and dances of Santería, he was busy speculating on domain names in the great stampede of the late ’90s. He had a winner with beaniebabies.com, but softmicro.com and theunitedstatesofamerica.net never brought in the lucre. By the time I was old enough to make my pilgrimages to the Blue Note, the Vanguard, and Smalls Club, he was driving his Econoline around the Pacific Northwest, selling artisanal memorials and headstones—he argued that the catalog stuff was too impersonal. Just after I graduated North Texas, he started recruiting college kids to be exterminators. (I think he considered this his low point. He would go lower.) He traded the van for a VW custom-painted with a termite on the hood and the words “High-paying summer jobs!”

I came to Chicago just before the Towers fell in New York. Chicago was where the cutting-edge stuff, the truly out shit was happening, where they were mixing up free jazz with indie rock, Middle Eastern rhythms, chamber music, and whatever thumping chaos a computer could emit. New York felt like a closed shop, and I couldn’t stomach the rent anyway. On the morning of the attacks, Dad called me, sick with fear. He needed reassurance: “You’re not living near any tall buildings?” At the time, I was living out of my practice space in the West Loop but was loath to confess it to him. Dad was convinced the Sears Tower and Hancock Center were next. “Better get out of there for a few weeks, Tim. Come out here and stay with me.”

I didn’t bite. When the smoke cleared, he would realize the idea of my escaping to the rainy Northwest was ludicrous. And even if it wasn’t, I also blamed him for leaving me without a home to go back to, for unmooring us both, for trying to start a new life for himself, and failing. Just before I went off to school, he sold the house I grew up in and followed a girlfriend (who left him soon enough) out there, seduced by the notion of sucking himself to the sleek and ravenous computer industry like a remora to a shark.

“You could set yourself up in no time,” he said that September morning. Hearing that he wouldn’t even get a couple weeks out of me, he gallantly tried for more: a permanent reunion. “I hear they got a great music scene up in Seattle.” He was a few years behind the times, but I didn’t correct him. On the TV, the second tower was falling.

“I know, Dad,” I said. “It’s really happening out there.”

---

“What’s the latest from the bandstand?”

“Not much. SOS—same old shit.”

For once, I didn’t want to talk music. Charles Rigby had fucked me over. He’d hired a bunch of German cats as sidemen—cheaper for him—for the European tour. I wanted to lick my wounds, but I had to spend my Sunday teaching lessons, showing suburban brats how to bash along to Corrosion of Conformity and Godsmack. That night, I was playing with a country-rock band I had hoped to make pay. But this was a benefit show, meaning we worked free.

“What’s the weather on your end?” I said.

“You get more sunny days than you’d think.”

“Who needs a vacation, right?”

“Exactly.” My father laughed, though I wouldn’t have said it was funny. “You’re right though. Most days it’s gray as the afterlife out here. Still seeing that pretty girl you told me about?”

It had been a month and a half since I’d mentioned her, and I’d only said I was going on a date. Still, it was something for him to grab on to.

“I might see her tonight.”

“A little romance maybe?” he said.

“Dad, enough already.”

“All right, guy, all right. I’m hearing you. I get it—the life of a musician.” On the other end, he no doubt winked knowingly. “Anyway, gotta go. Gotta catch a quick catnap. They put me on second shift. You know, it’s not so bad once the blood gets moving. The team spirit kind of takes over.”

“Well, stay warm,” I said, the phrase that back home in the frozen North passed for both goodwill and goodbye.

---

I was teaching Brandan, my best student—a little 13-year-old grandee from Kenilworth— four-way independence and coordination. All that North Shore money had yet to refine his tastes. “This is jazz stuff,” he said, throwing down his sticks in frustration. “What’s the point of any of this?” I asked him if he’d heard Black Sabbath. “Yeah, bro,” he said, “they’re, like, the source for everything heavy.”

“Well, all those cats came up on jazz: Django, Count Basie, Gene Krupa. Hell, the first Sabbath lineup had a guy playing tenor sax. Here,” I said, sitting down behind the kit and playing the first fill from “War Pigs.” “That’s Bill Ward. And this”—the intro to the first cut on Caravan—“is Art Blakey. What’s the difference? The difference is Bill Ward tippy-tapped the drums, and Blakey hit them.”

Brandan scowled, telling me this was all deeply uncool. But I knew that in a few months I’d put a Jazz Messengers record—Free for All, maybe—in this kid’s hands, and it would blow him away.

On my way to the gig, my phone vibrated in my pocket—“Dad”—and I let it go to voice mail. I stopped by Azarello’s for sticks. I walked into the drum department, and there it was: a 1958 three-ply Gretsch Round Badge kit in Starlight Sparkle. I slipped into some kind of trance—I could see my future; this would be my instrument, my tubs, the sound that would define the rest of my performing life. “Old Drms + Cym $500,” the price tag read. I picked up the cymbal, an original Turkish K, recognizing it by the beautiful shimmer of its hammered surface. I glanced around jealously, thinking there must be 10 other cats coming through the door going to beat me to it. There was only a guy sitting in guitars playing “Sweet Child of Mine” over and over. My cell phone’s buzzing again finally brought me back. Behind the counter, a skinny white dude was playing with the end of one of his dreadlocks. I went up to him, pointed, and said, “I’ll take it.”

Then something told me to check my messages. It wasn’t my father, but an unfamiliar, official-sounding voice explaining that my name was at the top of Dad’s call history, saying there’d been an accident at the warehouse. Part of me was already calculating the cost of a flight to Oregon. Part of me was already mourning my lost Starlight Sparkle.

---

From the hospital window, I looked out and saw the seaside dunes and the mist that couldn’t quite decide to be rain. I’d arrived just at the end of visiting hours, and they’d set me up on a cot in Dad’s room. He’d grown his mustache back out—gray now, of course—along with a beard. I’d never seen him with one. His hair was shaggy, and it sat on his head strangely, like a wig.

“You look like you’re in disguise, Dad,” I said when the night nurse woke him to tell him I was there. “Getting ready to set out for the Arctic?”

He smiled distantly, like someone searching for a memory.

“What?” I said. “You thought I wouldn’t come?”

They’d laid him out with some serious pain medication, and he was delirious. “Limeade,” he said, wetting his lips to push the words out, “goddamn frozen limeade.”

What happened, I learned, was that the shift manager at the loading bay had sent him deep into the high stacks of an arriving load to pluck out a 40-pound case of juice concentrate. Someone had stacked the pallet badly, and half the Minute Maid order toppled. A younger man with swifter reactions would’ve dodged; my father took it between his shoulders. Right place, right time.

I slept deeply next to him. Bless the silence of that hospital wing—I didn’t get much silence in my life. But in the middle of the night I woke, aware of someone watching me. Dad sat on the edge of his bed in a gown that came to mid-thigh. His hands clutched the edge of the bed, his knuckles chapped and bruised—all that work in the freezer—like he’d just gone a few rounds.

“Beginner’s luck, huh?” he said, looking so directly and intensely at me that I thought he must be seeing something else. “Tell me, what the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Pop,” I said, having never called him Pop in my life. “You’re high out of your mind.”

“What’s it mean?”

“Well, you got a lot of enthusiasm. You make friends easy. People like you, I guess.”

“How do you live?” He strained forward like he was going to grab me, then suddenly sprang upright, seized by his spasming back, the cords of his neck popping out. “How do you live without any constants?” he said again when I’d settled him down.

“Any what?”

“I can’t start from scratch again. I can’t do it. What are we doing here? No time to waste. Come on, let’s get out of this place.”

He started up again, but I gently pushed him back down. “All right, Dad, lie down. Lie down now.” I got him tucked in. “You want another shot? I can call them for another little shot of the good stuff.”

“Mom’s here,” he said matter-of-factly. “Can’t you feel her? She just came in a minute ago.”

“I know, Dad, she’s right here. Right here beside me.”

I thought to get the night nurse, but then I just sat there sort of rubbing and petting his hand. Finally, I held his hand. I don’t know how long. Long enough for the world to shrink to just that one room, the fog curling past the window one horizon, the dark hallway with its faint green glow the other. My mother. I suppose if she was anywhere that night, except under the ground, she was there with us, dancing somewhere between the vapor of my father’s breath and my own, borne up again if only for a last few minutes.

---

In the morning, Dad was more himself again, flirting with the nurses, play-acting the stoic but enfeebled old man giving himself into their tender care. They knew the routine but didn’t seem to mind him. A doctor wearing Converse All Stars blew in and described some beautiful things: physical therapy, deep tissue massage, acupuncture. “You’ll have discomfort from here on,” he said, “so I want us all to think about ways we can manage your discomfort.” Dad just grunted. I could already see the big tub of Icy Hot coming out to live again on his bedside table. A pair of hairy knees slathered in mentholated ointment: the image of masculinity I carried all through childhood. When I was little, Dad liked to dab it on the tip of my nose. “Icy, then hot,” he’d say, “icy, then hot,” while I giggled uncontrollably.

When visiting hours started, his coworkers began filing in. Lots of joking around. Lots of “rest up now, old man.” He had plenty of work buddies. Four months on the job, and he was already like a mascot to them. The shift manager showed around noon. “We hate seeing these kinds of accidents,” he kept saying, “we just hate them.” This man, I understood, was the company’s messenger. You could smell the Freon coming off him. He asked Dad a hundred little questions: How’s the food? You got enough pillows? What do you think you’ll do? Why don’t you take a few weeks? Take your time, rest up, don’t go pushing yourself too hard.

Dad turned to me, a helpless look on his face. “Have you met my son?” he said. “He’s one of the best jazz drummers in the country.”

“Come on now, Dad,” I protested in my modesty.

“You like jazz?” Dad asked his boss.

“Sure, yeah,” the shift manager said uneasily, “all that jazz.”

My phone vibrated in my pocket. The display listed a long, strangely formatted number: Europe. I hesitated. “Oops,” I said on the fourth ring, “gotta take this.” I went out in the hall. It was Charles Rigby telling me that Ernst, the Bavarian drummer he’d hired to replace me, couldn’t swing for shit. “Mr. Tim,” Charles said in that legendary raspy voice, “get your white ass over here.”

“All right, Charles,” I said, “sounds good, sounds good. Listen, I’ll talk to you soon.” I snapped the phone shut on him midsentence.

“They’ve been in meetings all morning,” the shift manager was telling Dad when I came back in. “They’re taking this thing seriously. I mean, you’ve really got them on the ropes.” Dad hardly seemed to be listening. He was staring out the window, at what little he could see of the dunes. “You’ll have discomfort, sure, but this is the kind of thing—well, you’ll never have to work another day in your life.”

Dad set his jaw, trying to harden himself. But I was there to see, the instant it began, the waste setting in. Over the two years he had left, he must have started 20 or 30 different armchair hobbies. Seagram’s whiskey and Winston cigarettes were two of them, but they were not the things that killed him.

The nurses came in and kicked both me and the shift manager out so they could change the sheets and get Dad cleaned up. “I’ll be right back, Pop,” I called out. “I’m going to pick up some of your stuff.” In the hallway, the shift manager shook my hand. “I’ll look out for your name,” he told me.

I got directions to Dad’s apartment on the outskirts of town. I was charged with picking up a change of clothes, some books and magazines, and a few other things to keep him distracted. As I drove through the misty streets of Florence, I couldn’t help it—I did the math: if I got a flight out of PDX by early evening, I’d make it in time to meet Charles at the Düsseldorf Jazz Rally. It wouldn’t even be a question of asking Dad’s forgiveness. He of all people would understand.

The apartment was tidy and small, exceptionally small. Dad had built shelves on almost every wall, and his rooms were filled with the fresh, astringent scent of bare pine. I went into the bedroom and picked out a couple of plaid shirts. There weren’t more than a few to choose from; he didn’t have anything other than work clothes. In the dresser, his underwear was ironed and perfectly folded—the man had time on his hands. I threw together an overnight bag as quickly as I could. I was rushing now; it was going to be a matter of minutes, not hours.

I dropped the bag at the door and used the toilet. But then, hurrying out, I stopped. Amid a small library of sci-fi paperbacks, framed by them as it were, were photos, certificates, ribbons, a little trophy of a tiny man wailing away on saxophone. “Outstanding Soloist,” the attached plaque read.

He’d built a shrine to me, like the one he’d built to my dead mother in the house I grew up in: a photo of me sitting at a club, up close to the stage, watching Elvin Jones play, leaning over intently, studying his every move. Another of me unpacking my first drum set. A dumb teenage drawing of a concert, flames shooting up from the stage, and all the spotlights turned on me.

What can be said about it? There was no time to linger. I felt embarrassed and shy to see that here, in this obscure corner of nowhere, I’d already made it.