Dancing in the Dark (9 page)

“I could have a nice tight,” he reflected, “little quartet of my own.” He said this to Tom out of the blue, and it was a very blue day outside, golden, they were going through Kansas, on the tour bus one afternoon. “Cool,” said Tom, and Hayden smiled sideways at him, scrunched a little
in the expanded seat. “But then we’d be playing small clubs and I wouldn’t be changing the conventions of large music.” So that was Hayden’s dream.

“My man,” Tom said, and Hayden leaned over in the cramped quarters of the seat and slapped him gently on his dimpled chin.

Satie was often one of his main concerns, but most of his jazz friends in New York thought he took Satie too seriously. So after a few sessions together, Hayden helped to form the Desperados, about a year before Tom came along, and apart from the occasional disagreement with Stash, for example, the results were really powerful. He played a major role on keyboards, but more importantly, he wrote everything they played. There were some furrowed brows from time to time, Stash would shake his head, but he would get into it, Stash could play a wicked Stratocaster, Mason would shrug once in a while and say, “I can’t play this.” But, then he would. They were all very good musicians, and they came through for him.

“Go, white boy, go,” he said under his breath, at the keyboards, in the middle of a concert one night as Stash was lunging out at the very girders of the place with some really impassioned improvisation. And Stash, even though he was lost to the world, black leather pants and a t-shirt that said
SAVE THE SOUTH
, not the usual blue denim garb favoured by the Desperados, and was in the middle of this deep solo, heard him, even though he said it under his breath. Impossible of course, men are supposed to believe in miracles, because they both wore earplugs. Most of the time, they did. Stash caught his eye a few chords later, and he smiled.

When Hayden was 15, which was a turning point, he was at a neighbourhood basement one day after school. There were some friends, older, and a couple of girls. One of the boys, Jaime, had a small envelope of white powder. Shit, there wasn’t even very much in the envelope, just a little corner.

Four or five of them took a small snort each, and they wanted Hayden to try it. Hayden was younger, he was 15, but he had big status partly because he was such a good high school football player.

“No way, man,” he said, “no way.”

“Chicken, the football player’s a chicken,” one of the older boys said, and a couple of the others picked up the word, repeating it or changing it to sissy or baby.

“It won’t bust your gut,” said Jaime, “you don’t want to do it because of your sport.”

And Hayden had said, “No, it’s not because I’m an athlete, it’s because of my music.” He associated getting high with not being able to play as well as he wanted to play.

Later that day, in the evening, he was at home sitting in the kitchen doing some math homework. His mother was out at a public school meeting. He had the big radio in the living room turned up loud, listening to it on and off as he worked.

He was about half-way through his work when he heard some German soprano, he didn’t catch her name, sing Mozart’s amazing aria where the young knight, a sacrificial figure, goes off to meet his death, but first says goodbye to three different people.

After the aria was over, he sat staring at the table. The radio was still on, it was loud, but he couldn’t hear a thing. When he looked at the sheets of paper in front of him on the table, the sheets seemed to be blank. Then he lit a cigarette, he hardly ever smoked, but his mother had left a package sitting on the table. And when he looked back down at the table, the blank sheets seemed to be alive with muscular and lazy musical notes.

There was his friendship with Tom, for example, how they complemented each other in different ways, how these two guys, one 27, one 31, one white, Italian, the other black, from Brooklyn, both into music, Hayden much more so, but both into music, the two of them were wildly different in certain ways as individuals. But they complemented each other and were at many times, without being sentimental about this kind of thing in life between people, a bulwark for each other and a sounding board. Hayden with his street smart attitudes was very much alive and open to the world. But this openness was often closed behind a cool polite exterior as far as easy perception might be concerned. Hayden often spoke from a weight of academic courses, his exact reaching for the perfect note, speaking French, speaking, basic vocabulary, a little German, switching in
his speaking of American English from Sam Adams to southern drawl, from Boston to a New York downtown accent to a voice that was a little gruffer, perhaps, but delicately, unpredictably shaded with a French phrase.

There was also the fact that Hayden never really got along with Stash, the player, a southern senator’s son, for Christ’s sake, he had first helped to form the Desperados, after meeting him at a party uptown somewhere; and Henner, the older guy, and ex-con, some people said, they had taken on as manager, sharp, very sharp. He didn’t like Henner very much but didn’t have anything specifically against him. And Whitney, of course, Whitney became a sort of garden of hanging flowers of Ur for Hayden, something to admire gruffly and almost indifferently from a distance, and close up, be outwardly very calm and avuncular. Like Tom’s girlfriend, Whitney, Hayden was better-educated than the other guys, although Hayden, tight end, 6’5”, solid, black, had obviously not gone to Vassar; he had however gone to Yale and Juilliard, so he was like a professor, a fellow player, a distant often humorous musical genius and a friend.

His friendship with Tom was more general and full of huge open spaces where they would talk, with only a few tokes of a single joint perhaps, and only a drink or two of bourbon, although the other Desperados drank like fish, maybe some coffee and they would talk long into the night after a concert that had gone well but left them with a variety of ideas to shuffle.

One of the things they talked about, naturally, Tom and Hayden sitting up late maybe in Hayden’s room or maybe in Tom’s, Whitney off drinking with someone, Mason off to sleep early, Swift, in Sacramento at least, out at the old town Reservoir with two redheads, he hadn’t believed his good luck, he loved redheads and he loved two women at once, “Two redheads is two many women,” said Hayden, but whatever, sitting up late, a few tokes each on one joint, maybe just two drinks each with tons of ice, that sort of thing, one of the things that Tom and Hayden talked about sometimes was how Tom wrote songs, which Tom did naturally, unconsciously, almost spontaneously, in an easy way that he could never possibly, despite however much frustration, duplicate when he wrote stories, fiction, what the class writers wrote, literature, you know, lit terr atchoore, this pain,
that was important: and how Hayden wrote music, arranged music, knew where to put the horns, knew how to start off in one time signature and develop a certain kind of rhythm turning into melody and guitar dominated back-beat, and then suddenly turn the whole thing over to keyboards and sonic percussion.

Tom’s songs, brilliant scribbles really, were nothing without Hayden’s arrangements, without Hayden’s use of the French Horn on “Summer Cottage & Skunks,” a new Tom song, then where would Tom be? Tom made his respect and admiration very evident; but what wasn’t evident, not always at least, was Hayden’s intense interest in how Tom wrote songs like “Summer Cottage & Skunks,” or any other song for that matter. Because Hayden, who could have become a greater composer than the original Haydn, really longed at times to write songs as well, not that it was his main longing, his main longing was obviously music, music, pure music, pure music of a certain kind, what would later be called a “new American avant-garde.”

But these were subjects Hayden had to lay aside more than he had planned after he began to tour with the Desperados. And it wasn’t because of Whitney, by any means, or, as in Tom’s case, because of the influence of his father. It was simply that he didn’t have enough time. That big word that, after what happened in Texas, came to mean a lot to Hayden.

Music, time, and various things Hayden associated with his mother, who loved Hayden’s work, not just because she was his mother, but who always preferred, just to be honest, certain Gospel songs, like “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” and “We Shall Gather at the River,” and “Swing Low,” and “Joshua at the Battle of Jericho.” And certain Broadway musical songs, even that somewhat broad comic song from
South Pacific
, “There Ain’t Nothing Like a Dame,” or “Porgy’s Song,” from
Porgy and Bess
. Songs she had grown up with, sung in church in some cases, that she preferred to the brilliant and explosive music that her most talented and oldest son wrote while he was with the Desperados.

And afterwards, after, for example, they put Hayden in prison for three years for somewhat brutally murdering, killing, it wasn’t premeditated, old redcheeks ratshit Henner, their fallible and mendacious manager, then
there was time, to think about the angularity of unexpected chords. And to reflect on the fact that Satie is a great composer, but “Will the Circle …” is also a great song.

But that’s another story, and of a somewhat different colour, or, as the French say,
couleur. Couleur, couleur
, the bitter fruit of my vengeance is mercy, saith the Lord, or maybe that’s what the road and freight trains have to say.