Sweeter Life (46 page)

And so he has risen in the middle of the night. He has packed his bag, his provisions and tent. Turning his back on the house and trailer, he weaves his way west by the light of the moon. The only sound is that of his own scuffling feet, his own laboured breathing. He feels no wind. He senses no water. He follows no tracks or signs, guided by the unseen, the unfelt, the insubstantial, along a ridge and then down a wide, rocky arroyo as it slopes toward the west. A few miles farther on, the gully widens and forms a desolate plain dotted with coarse grass and weed. There is a profound stillness here, away from the hum and thrum of the family compound, an almost frightening hush. He stops to rest and thinks that this might be what he has been searching for, the kind of emptiness from which all things are possible. He sets up camp. He sits in his tent and sips his water, nibbles his food. The silence around him rivals his own.

When the sun is up the next morning, he peers out at the heat, watching as the desert sends its many inhabitants to pay their respects—lizards and scorpions, small dusty birds and, around sunset, a female coyote. He tosses her bits of cheese and salami and crusts of bread but only succeeds in driving her away. Later he is visited by a small owl. Above him he senses, but does not see, bats fluttering. As he grows accustomed to the surroundings, he notices, too, that the silence is not nearly so complete as he had imagined. No human sounds, of course, no household sounds, no sounds of modern life, but as he settles into this new place, he hears something very old and very much like music, the soft lament of sand and wind and empty spaces.

The next day unfolds in much the same way, a similar progression of creatures from day to night. The female coyote shows up again but keeps her distance, skulking off when it is clear he means to stay put. As darkness falls, the night grows cool, and the desert score swells with importance. The wind sounds different here, with scant greenery to soften its tone. The sky seems to hum with static. The soil is alive with the ticks and clicks of insects and reptiles. And what binds it all together, gives it sense, is the silent flow of time. The rise and fall of the sun and moon, the passing of clouds across the
sky—these are the gods of this secret world, their key and signature.

He wakes occasionally to listen to the night, to breathe deeply the desert wind. Long before dawn, he crawls out of his tent to lie directly on the ground. There is a hint of dew, or maybe just the longing for it. The air is cool and clean. He feels intimately connected to this desert world of drab-looking creatures and coarse vegetation, to the heat of the day and the cool of the night. And as he lies there, he feels something stir inside him. He touches his stomach. He brings his hand to his chest. He holds his head in both hands. Finally he closes his eyes and sees it shimmering before him, a picture, or rather a series of moving pictures like a grainy Super 8, moving forward from start to finish, beginning at the beginning with a shot of the house in Erie—junky tarpaper shack, screen door bangin’ something awful in the wind. And as the jerky handheld camera moves in on a close-up of the front door, the credits roll, and then the title,
The Ages of Jim
.

The camera catches it all: The Fall, the tumble down the stairs into chaos and not knowing, his father there in shadows and high contrast, pushing into the darkness with a radio in his arms, knocking his poor wife to the floor. Jim rises without a whimper and touches the mark on the wall, The Door.

Cut to a tidy little house in Little Rock where he lives with his Aunt Corina Phillips, sweet Corina, who teaches him about the piano and then some, while his mother works her fingers to the bone down at Anderson’s Dry Goods. A year is all, a year of lessons and illness and books before his father sends word he’s got his life back together and wants them to come home. Has himself a job as the manager of a motel down in Port Swaggart. The Waters Inn, he says. An omen, he says. Which means they have an apartment overlooking Lake Erie. Jim’s mother isn’t happy with the arrangement, all those strangers around, no front porch, no back garden. But to Jim it’s pretty darn good, living there by the lake. He helps out in the office. He has his own rowboat, and most days of the summer he goes out early and catches his fill of perch and silver bass. The sun shines every day.

Fade to black. Cue the music, party sounds. Lights rise on his fourteenth birthday, a simple celebration with just the three of them. His father’s present is a big old Seabreeze he’d taken from a lady who couldn’t pay her bill, and a stack of 78s—Sarah Vaughan and Mahalia Jackson, those voices, those
rhythms, as silky and seductive as Aunt Corina’s swelling bosom. They dance together, the three of them. They laugh. It feels brand new but nothing has changed. His father is still the same man. A couple of years after he gives Jim the Seabreeze, he leaves on a breeze of his own. The camera watches him walk away. They never see him again.

Reaction shots, mother and son talking, arguing, crying, packing suitcases. His mother catches a bus back to Little Rock and her sister. Jim hitches a ride to New York with the idea he will join the navy and see the world. He’s just a kid with a few ideas and no prospects, but he believes things will work out. They always do.

Scenes of the city. The Statue of Liberty. The Empire State Building. The crowds on Fifth Avenue. Scenes of a working life. Lifting crates. Filling shelves. Pushing brooms. And look, a shot of the Glebemount Hotel, where he lived on cigarettes and bruised fruit. And there’s a close-up of Elysse, who worked at Gimbel’s and thought Jim was the bee’s knees. A whirlwind romance, dizzy and breathless. Weeks of dance and chat. Sex in unlikely places. One night they’re out on the town and run into Gil Gannon, a buddy of Jim’s from way back. Gil says he’s putting together a band and needs a piano player. The camera rises to treetop level as the three walk arm-in-arm down the street. In the distance, tugboats work the East River.

Publicity photos, hundreds of them, of Gil Gannon and the Cannons. The suits. The greasy hair. The white socks. The look of pure joy that spills from those glossy black-and-whites.

The good times: the travel, the appearances, the red carpet everywhere, what it’s like to be in a band and making records the whole world loves to sing, and not a blessed thing in your head but making music and seeing the world and doing whatever you please. And the bad times, too: the way some get stupid and throw it away, abusing themselves, abusing others.

Scene in Chicago, lobby of the Drake Hotel.

Jim: I feel real grateful is what it is. For everythin’. And The Solo I guess is a kind of reward. There are a thousand musicians who can bust my chops. So why me?

Reporter (nodding): A reward …

Jim: I’ll tell you what I think. I think the Solo was lookin’ for me, the
way lightnin’ looks for somethin’ to strike. And I was there. It passed through me like a current, and that’s all I know about it.

Flashback to that poky little recording studio just off Woodward Avenue in Detroit. There’s Morton DePew, Gil’s producer—sour breath from sucking on a pipe all day, but a classy guy. Then Gil bursts into the control room, pumping his arm like a piston. “A fucking hit. A fucking hit. A fucking hit.”

Jim doesn’t say it, but he figures the song is not one of Gil’s best. It’s all there on paper, kind of cute and catchy but missing something, he thinks. Can’t all be gems. So he settles down at his keyboard and slips on his headphones, all set to overdub his solo, not really thinking or excited, just letting it happen. At the end of the second chorus, he sits up straighter, takes a deep breath and exhales. And that’s it. Like breathing. He just exhales and the music comes out in a perfect shape, the thing that was missing. The missing link. And all he did was exhale and his fingers did the rest. It passed through him. The Solo passed through him like a charge.

The reaction shots, the confusion. Gil gets on the intercom and says, “What the fuck you been smoking, you play a solo like that?” So Jim records a few more tracks for the hell of it, but nothing else feels as good. And each time they go back to the original it sounds a bit better. Still pretty weird, but better. They decide to sleep on it. Next morning it’s like a veil has lifted. Everyone nods yeahyeahyeah. Took some getting used to, they all agreed.

But the fans, they’re crazy about the record the minute it’s released. Number one in its first week. Stays there most of the summer. Tune into any station that year and you hear it, and you hear DJs talking up The Solo. There’s Chick Camino at WNBC in New York playing “Don’t Look Back” forty-eight hours straight. Camera pans the kids lined up around the corner for the
Ed Sullivan Show
.

People call Jim a genius. He’s voted the best keyboard player in America that year when even he doesn’t know what he’s done. Not that he’s going to argue. He’s having a ball. Womenfolk, in particular, are terribly kind, and none kinder than the lovely Elysse, from Taos, New Mexico, who works at the fragrance counter at Gimbel’s and loves him, who stays with him longer than he ever expected she would, and who bears him a son, a little angel they call Daniel.

The family snapshots: Jim in scrubs, Jim with cigar, Jim leaving the hospital with bundle of joy in his arms. Changing the diapers. Feeding the Pablum. Playing the lullaby. But there’s a growing concern on his face. The words are coming, those five painful words that tear worlds apart: The show must go on.

No surprise, the years become a line of days—buses, planes, trains, cars, spotlights, flashbulbs, autographs, screaming fans. And then a funny thing happens, but not so funny when you think about it. Every day is another town, every night another concert, and even though Gil has a pretty long string of hits by then, you can’t help but feel the audience has come to hear one song, and in fact one part of one song: The Solo. Jim isn’t about to disappoint. He’s a professional; he’s grateful. But after a while he gets a little antsy about the whole thing, the way you might if someone holds you down too long. He starts messing around in rehearsals and sound checks, looking for a way he can change that solo, liven it up. But nothing he tries is ever as good, and that makes him more determined. Yet here’s the thing: The Solo is too perfect to change, like gospel or something. Soon he’s fiddling with his other solos, trying to nudge
them
closer to perfection. In the end, it’s like he isn’t expressing himself anymore, he’s expressing The Solo. Like a millstone, a dead weight, it’s starting to make him nutty, until that day on
American-Bandstand
something snaps, talking there with Dick Clark and trying to keep it together, when something snaps and he pushes through the curtains and disappears into thin air. Elysse and the kid, tired of waiting, had already gone to New Mexico without him, so he heads for the only true home he’s ever known: Port Swaggart.

Talk about your before and after. Look at the difference a few years makes. The happy family, Little Rock behind them, are back together again. They’re standing in front of the Waters Inn. A new beginning. And then look, the broken man, the runaway, lying on a mucky mattress in a broken world. And he’s so messed up it’s easy enough to think it’s all his fault, as if in tearing down his career he has torn down everything.

Scenes of a frantic sleeper. Ronnie Conger shows up out of the blue. Two weeks later they’re in New York, and Jim’s already looking more himself, more together. And it strikes him that maybe Ronnie is
his
solo, the exact shape that had been missing from his life.

So he doesn’t complain too much when Ronnie brings those people around, those musicians. He’s not interested in the piano anymore, but he’s trying to be polite for Ronnie’s sake. And then one night, lying on his bed, he hears music, lovely stuff that sounds to his ear like the kind of thing his daddy used to listen to on the radio, that preacher down in West Helena, Arkansas. And he walks over to the door, you know, to check it out, and sure enough a fellow is sitting at the piano and rolling out a lazy gospel groove, and it pulls him in as sure as a magnet pulls steel, right into the middle of the room, except it’s the living room in Erie that he sees, with his father’s radio and his hardback chair and his plate of food, and all these things, you know, the wallpaper and his mother hugging herself in the kitchen, all these pictures and memories and feelings gather in his throat like a pressure and he just starts talking.

It takes them all a few goes at it to really figure out how the damn thing is supposed to work, but once they tune in, it isn’t long before they have themselves something special. Jim is happy then. The sparkle is back in his eyes. And he thanks the Lord for Sonny Redmond and Ronnie Conger and all the generous souls who help him move backwards and forwards through time. Then one night after a rehearsal, the day before they are to appear on
Saturday Night Live
, he looks up at the stars and feels empty. He has nothing left to say, and that nothing of how he feels is maybe all his fault, he thinks, because of how selfish he’s been. All his life. More than anything, he wants to be like Ronnie, the missing piece, the perfect shape in someone’s life. And that means one thing: he has to find Elysse and their son.

Even though that, too, is a kind of selfishness, another kind of self-fulfillment, it seems logical in a way. In music he had uncovered his feelings; in his feelings he had found his stories; in his stories he had found his understanding; and from understanding he had hoped to reach out to his family with whom, he believed, he would find happiness …

Jim opens his eyes and sits up. The sun is painting the desert landscape in battlefield colours. A warm soft wind polishes the sand. He can see it now from start to finish, clear as day. The ranch, the family—these are not options. Whatever comes next will not be found here; whatever he needs is somewhere beyond the horizon. He will know what to do when the time comes.

Somewhere behind him the coyote sends up a single arching note, a sound as old as the hills but so full of life and meaning and purpose that it makes him shiver. By comparison, all the music he’s made, all the stories he’s told, are a pale imitation. Without turning, he can sense the animal watching. Jim knows he’s been an inconvenience, a disruption in the natural order, but he also knows he can do better. The spirit is moving again. It will lead him, he’s sure, to a greener place. He feels the flow and knows it’s some kind of revival.