Baby won’t you please come home?
I have tried in vain
Nevermore to call your name.
When you left you broke my heart,
That will never make us part.
Every hour in the day you will hear me say,
Baby won’t you please come home?
I mean baby, won’t you please come home?”
--transcribed from vocals by Bessie Smith, recorded April 11, 1923
I awoke that morning as I had each of the four mornings before it;
for the first few seconds of consciousness I felt nothing - that
delicious absence of pain – didn't even realise the pain I would
feel again coming on as slowly the fog in my head lifted and memory
returned. But then in one millisecond I would remember where I was
as I stared up at the browning stains of the ceiling, the cobwebs
gathering in the corner directly to the left of the sofa upon whose
arm my feet were resting and in that millisecond every would return
like a cramping abdominal pain in a mid-spasm episode of irritable
bowel syndrome. Well, not everything. Just the realisation that
Anastasia was not here followed quickly like a right hook follows a
series of penetrating and exploratory jabs looking for the opening,
that I didn't know when she would be back when I would see here
again, here or elsewhere, if ever.
And then a psychosomatic pain would rub it's way through my joints
individually until I could feel myself involuntarily curling into a
foetal position, inch by inch until my knees reached my elbows and
the blankets were pulled not over a recognisable human form, but a
cruel and tiny, curled char of a human being's soul.
I could already smell Albert's Winston burning away in the room as
he sat in the kitchen having his first coffee and vainly attempting
to focus on the words of a biography on Descartes.
He had been reading the same book for three weeks, always at the same
time of the morning, getting no further than the first dozen pages,
reading, then rereading passages until eventually the caffeine would
kick in and a few of the words began to focus. By then it was time to
stand and face the day.
As I had every morning since Anastasia had left with her unbearable
little note, I contemplated a series of actions to ease the pain. I could
sit up and reach for whatever dregs of the evening's beer were left
over in the bottle on the coffee table beside the sofa. I could
continue lying on the sofa and practice squeezing my abdominal
muscles until I could distract the pain out of me in yoga like
fashion, or pretend to feel it leaving. I could try and imagine
myself in a nightclub somewhere, imagine the inhale and exhale, the
fingers along the saxophone, the people in front who were but blurs,
passengers on a distant imagination train stuck forever in the same
terminal. Any number of tricks employed to forget, none of which
would work, leaving me with the uncomfortable conclusion that whilst
lying forever on the sofa was perhaps the act of a man stricken with
inertia, it was not the act of forgetting, nor easing and thus,
inevitably, I would swing my feet off of the arm of the sofa and
place them on the floor simultaneously pushing myself to an upright
position.
You're up! Albert chirped with annoying alacrity. For a man who himself
greeting the onset of each new day like a new pain discovered, Albert had
been disgustingly enthusiastic ever since we'd discovered Anastasia's letter.
Not because he was happy to see her go but that he believed, in his own misguided but well-intentioned way that somehow, by exposing this new, nearly criminal zeal for existence he could also influence me to embrace
a like-minded approach to the impending disasters of the day, as though
his sugar-coating misdirection of the pain I could not help but embrace
and wallow in like a man infatuated with his own disgust would somehow similarly afflict me and remotely ease my burden.
I gave him high marks for the effort. It was not easy for Albert to feign
enthusiasm when his entire being, as long as I had known it anyway, had
been constructed for precisely the opposite, an appalling aversion to cheerleading, a sterile blanket of immunity and apathy that covered him
and his flesh like a thin, ratty overcoat. I admired him for the effort –
the first time I could recollect any such effort streaming out of him solely
for the benefit of another.
As I scratched my head and focused my eyes on first the coffee table,
then the overflowing ashtray and the empty bottles in front of me, I felt vaguely appreciative for such efforts. But they were all for naught. The
feigned enthusiasm merely underscored the severity of my situation as
though he had come with a cheery countenance to my death bed to tell me what a beautiful day it was and how many more beautiful days there
would be to follow.
I cleared my throat severely several times until I worked up a healthy
wad of phlegm into my mouth, spitting it reluctantly into the ashtray.
The day gives birth. I stood finally with aches and pains that one becomes aware of only in an ultra sensitised state of low esteem and made my way
to the kitchen table where Albert sat, staring at me expectantly.
Gradually, I regretted to note, the scent of domesticity was ebbing
from what had become a sort of breakfast nook during Anastasia's
stay and in its place reappeared the gruesome dishevelment of two
miserable and sloppy men living in a miserable flat looking out over
a busy street of passer-by strangers and impatient traffic. The few
dishes we had were again piled unwashed from the residue of
Indonesian and Somalian late-night take away meals, bottles were
everywhere, ashes dumped in any convenient container, a general haze
of smoke, a hue of greyish ambivalence pervaded and outside, another
cloudy day to greet us.
Seeing he was getting nowhere with his Good Morning Life chat show
persona, he reverted back to familiar Albert, grumbling in his beard,
falling silent while considering how long he might hold out before the
first beer of the day. You couldn’t say precisely that it was his battle,
because he wasn’t really concerned about his drinking. He’d always
waved me off when I asked him about it. A nihilist doesn’t bother
himself with such things, he’d mutter.
I was bothered by it. I was bothered by it about myself. I wasn’t
a nihilist as far as I could tell. But this wretched stretch since
Anastasia left had consisted of little more than working and drinking.
sleeping, waking, working, drinking. A routine which wasn’t
entirely unfamiliar, but which now had taken on an extraordinary
zeal to the extent that I began considering perhaps I was now an
apprentice nihilist and Albert my venerated teacher.
I know, I know. The letter.
And the gig.
I’d have burnt the letter if it wasn’t the last remaining artefact of
Anastasia. I had in fact crumpled it into a ball and thrown it against
the wall on many occasions. But inevitably, I smoothed it out to
read it again, like a sacred scroll.
My dear Witold, it had begun, ironically enough. I never failed
to stop at that point to laugh bitterly. My dear? A bad translation
from the French, perhaps? Dear Witold would have sufficed, clinically speaking. I’d have been satisfied with something as simple and
complete as that, not overblown with the unnecessary, flowery
accompaniment of my dear, personalising the greeting as though this
Were some inescapable reality, that she had pulled herself away only
with the greatest of reluctance…
My dear Witold,
Please forgive me that I am writing this to you instead of telling you to
your face.
Sure, why tell me you’re leaving when you can just escape with a simple
note, I laugh bitterly to myself each time I read it. Deep down we are all cowards and writing a note then disappearing is infinitely easier than
saying it face to face, actually allowing for a rebuttal rather than
proceeding on a decision via a one way road, a one way conversation.
(Or, I thought to myself in more truthful hindsight on occasion, perhaps
it was precisely the type of acerbity I found myself adding parenthetically
at each reading and re-reading that she had been trying to avoid.)
It is difficult for me. It will be difficult for you. But I am
afraid if I try to talk about it to you about it we will discuss and discuss
and in the end we will go nowhere. So I write it to you and perhaps it
will be easiest for both of us this way.
Aha, now we are getting somewhere, even in revealing her opinion
that talking it through would have gotten us nowhere. Here we
discover the implication that it was somehow my own predictable
resistance to her leaving that forced her to write her explanation out
in a sneaky note rather than speaking to me about it. I might have
protested. I might have dared ask that we discuss her departure or our
future together before she actually went through with it rather than to
read about it, like reading my own obituary in the newspaper.
To me, this was skewed logic. What kind of person would expect that
they could simply show up in someone’s life, entangle themselves in it
and then disappear again as though it had all been some collective
figment of imagination? But never mind. It was a fait accompli and
she’s escaped bloodlessly.
I must leave. You know about the tour, which is beginning again soon.
Of course I knew about the tour, I‘d maunder to myself (or sometimes
to Albert) at each reading, the point where I often crumpled the letter
into a ball and tried to bin it or flick it into oblivion. It’s only because
you never wanted to talk about it that we didn’t, I practically howl to
myself (or sometimes to Albert, if he was still listening).
I’d have been happy to discuss it, to make plans around it. But it was
you (again, as if I were still capable of holding the discussion with her
instead of to shadows,) it was you who insisted on pretending it wasn’t looming in the future, the tour. So yeah, over time, maybe I began to
believe it wasn’t going to happen. Maybe I allowed myself the
superstition that maybe if I didn’t talk about it, it wouldn’t happen. But certainly I didn’t expect it was just going to pop up. I’d always thought
when you were closer to the date, you’d let me know, let me AND Albert know. And certainly I wouldn’t have expected you to arrange a gig for us
that you didn’t intend on performing. What kind of person does that?
I am sorry that I will miss the gig in Amsterdam but you do not need me to
do it. You only needed me to get you to believe that you could do it.
I know you and Albert will be just fine without me in the way, taking
all the attention away from you. You don’t need me to make your
magical music.
I didn’t believe this part at all, would you? Clearly the truth that she’s
politely attempting to talk around is precisely the opposite; that we
weren’t good enough to perform that gig by ourselves at all and worse
still, that she didn’t want to be seen lowering herself, her standards, to
perform a gig like that with us. “Magical music”. This is clearly
sarcasm. Or perhaps some weird French irony, I don’t know but if ever
there was a paragraph which was not written in truth, this was the one.
No matter how badly I wanted to believe this explanation, that she’d be
taking the focus off ourselves, (as if that wouldn’t have been the
intention all along given the quality of our playing,) it simply sounded
hollow, unbelievable. Instead, those words seemed to scream out at
our inadequacy as musicians and in realising this, somehow it became
clearer, her motivations. It became clear that she’d actually had the
best intentions all along but in the end, had simply gotten cold feet
knowing we were terrible and that we’d only have ended up
embarrassing her. It was the only explanation that made any sense.
Albert, who was infinitely less inclined to take a conciliatory stance
on the poor quality of our playing, thought Anastasia’s explanation
was entirely plausible. Noble, even. But I couldn’t hear that dog
whistle blown. To me, after the third or fourth reading she was clearly
saying we sucked and in the end, that reality had been too much for
her to digest and instead of telling us to our faces that we were
terrible and the idea of the gig horrified her, she simply slunk off
to avoid it in the end. Her tour probably wasn’t even starting for
months. That’s why she hadn’t mentioned it. Oh, with enough
re-readings, believe me, it all became crystal clear.
In time I hope we will see each other again but right now I must focus
only on this tour, on my career.
I never came up with any snappy comebacks to this one. By then my
mind was usually focusing in on what shitty musicians we were and
how futile the entirety of this absurd mission of playing from city
to city was becoming. By this point in the letter I was usually only
barely able to read on. Once I’d cast the divinatory sticks there was
little point in reading further. I knew my future and it was grim.
The only thing I want you to know is that you are dear to me.
I will miss you greatly and I will think about you every day. I hope
you will do the same.
And this of course, was the proverbial kick to the balls. I’d already
be down by this point in the re-reading and this unnecessary, perhaps
even cruel admission, whether it were true or just another, final
twist of the knife, was unbearable. Sometimes I’d pick up the letter,
wadded and thrown against the wall, just to read that line and feel
even worse all over again. And then I’d crumple it up all over again
and fling it again against the wall, con forza, knowing the final,
ebbing lines by heart.
But in this moment, I must leave. I am trying to think with my head
instead of my heart to save us both. I hope you will understand.
Love always,
A
That first morning, when I’d read it aloud to Albert, without the
editorialising and running commentary, we’d both just sat there in
that kitchen, exhaling smoke silently.
What about the gig then, Albert finally asked, reaching down to the
crate for the breakfast bottle of beer and passing one for me as well.
We popped open the swing-tip bottles of Grolsch, momentarily
distracted by the satisfaction of that familiar sound before putting
them to our lips and sucking down like a baby on a tit.
The gig? We can’t play the gig without her. She was the only thing
that gave us any credibility. Without her we’re just two bad
musicians making horrible noise together.
Albert puffed on his Winston silently for a few seconds. You know,
being two bad musicians making horrible noise together was
never an impediment before, Witold. I mean sure, having Anastasia
singing in front of us lent a certain credibility I’d say but not having her
here doesn’t render us entirely incapable. We haven’t gotten worse just
because she’s not here. If anything, rehearsing as we have, we’ve
probably gotten better. I think you’re misdirecting your feelings of
abandonment towards your playing. Think about it. We’ve already
done gigs before, Witold. This one is no different.
No different? This is a famous club. This isn’t some dodgy second-
rate place with somnambulist punters whose heads we’re barely
keeping up. This is a proper club and we’d be opening for a proper
Dutch jazz legend. This isn’t some kick any more. People would
actually be listening to us. People who know jazz. You and I would
never have attempted playing there, hell, they’d have never even
given us a gig there if it hadn’t been for Anastasia.
Albert took a long swig of beer. True enough. Still, it’s an opportunity
we shouldn’t give up on so easily. It’s already there in front of us.
All we have to do is play. I mean you’re the one who is always banging
on about how we’re accomplishing nothing. Here’s our chance. If it
goes well, who knows? This could be our chance.
Our chance? Our chance at what? Humiliating ourselves like never
before? The gig is less than a week away. We’ve rehearsed with a singer
in front of us. How are we going to suddenly compensate for not having
that crutch?
We aren’t going to compensate. We’ll just play.
And with that, Albert stood up, smiling to himself at the madness and
walked over to his bass standing up in the corner. C’mon, he said,
waving me over. Let’s rehearse for a change. Reasonably sober.
*****
On Thursday night, we showed up at the jazz café Alto for our big
Amsterdam debut. The singer has fallen ill, we explained on arrival,
lugging our instruments behind us. But we’re prepared to play on.
Surprisingly, this revelation caused no hysteria. It was all very informal
anyway. There were other musicians as well. We could open, perform
a brief set without our singer, we could even invite others to come up
on stage and play with us. Nobody was bothered. So we set up, like
any other gig and took our positions, shortly after 10 that night, and
played.
Sure, before we started, I made a little preamble about our fabulous
singer falling ill and how we’d come all the way from Utrecht, by way
of New York City, (which caused a short burst of applause from some
of the many tourists in the crowd,) and that we would attempt to let
the show go on anyway, despite her absence. We invited anyone in the
crowd with an instrument, if compelled, to join us whenever the mood
struck them but by god, singer or no singer, we were going to
perform.
That sort of strength in the face of adversity attracted a few more scattered applause and then I launched into the recital of a brief splice of a few
poems by the Dutch poet Simon Vinkenoog that I’d been committing to memory for the last few weeks, an entrée into the Dutch heart while
Albert plucked a few notes on the E string in accompaniment . Before
I knew it, I’d put the horn to my lips and away we went.
I can’t say we’d entirely fooled everyone. There were tourists, certainly,
who were beguiled, mesmerised even. I was certain that the true jazz
musicians in the crowd could see right through us but in all, after our
excuses, without our singer, no one stood up in disgust, as I’d often
imagined, and called us frauds before walking out. We played three
Brief originals that we’d rehearsed and then, for the finale, a long
Impromptu piece I told the crowd before beginning was dedicated to our
fallen singer.
When we were finished, polite applause. A few people even congratulated
us as we removed ourselves from the stage and hunted down a beer with
the usual post-gig zeal. The bartender nodded to us as he handed out our
beer. You ended too soon, he advised us. You almost had them.
******
On the train ride back to Utrecht that night, armed with a few small cans
of Heineken, Albert began to talk about the next move. The next move,
I wondered to myself, staring out the window. We’d only just had our
biggest accomplishment to date. Was there no time to wallow in the
light of it?
Look, he said finally. I did get something out of all this in the end. Not
what you might expect of course. You see, I’ve been thinking, in the
wake of all this shit, watching you wallow in misery, seeing that
whatever vague momentum we’ve established at playing here in
Holland has probably reached its zenith, I mean realistically, we aren’t
going to be playing gigs all over the country now, we should be
satisfied with this performance and let it serve as a marker.
This made me think perhaps we’ve spent enough time here by now.
Maybe it’s time to forget about this ridiculous plan of staying here,
Playing here, establishing a foothold in Utrecht.
What are you suggesting? That we should go back to New York?
Hardly. I mean, I’ve developed a taste for this now, this vagabond
sort of unfamiliarity and yes, the delusion of being travelling musicians
but part of the problem is that we haven’t been travelling at all, we’ve
just been stopped here in Utrecht, the first place, setting down roots
without considering that this was only meant to be the beginning, not
the final destination.
What’s left for us here? Do you really think Anastasia is going to come
back again if you wait long enough? She isn’t. I’ll save you the trouble
of finding out on your own. I won’t say your idea was a stupid one
borne of naiveté however, it is one you and even I should learn from.
It’s time to move on.
I ignored the dispassionate dismissal of my potential future with
Anastasia. Well, ok, I urged reluctantly. If not New York, then
where?
Well, believe it or not, I’ve been giving the matter considerable thought. I
can’t say that I fully expected this weird departure by Anastasia but
before she arrived I’d already been thinking about this anyway. I mean
if you recall, back then, before she arrived, you’d been similarly
miserable, wallowing as you do in this girl. I figured then, as I do now,
that a change of scenery would do us both good. We’re stagnating here.
We’ve allowed ourselves to fall into a pattern similar to the one we’d
been trying to escape originally in New York. We know this place,
we’ve met sufficient numbers of people, we feel welcomed, but this
isn’t our home. Not that finding our home is the goal here but if you
consider that none of these places is ever bound to be our home
anyway, you might conclude, as I have, that the only solution is
more movement. We aren’t in Europe to make roots. We’re here
for the adventure of the unknown. And Utrecht, you’ll agree is no
longer an unknown place. Worse still, it’s a place you know and a
place you’ve now developed a pattern of misery in. There’s no doubt
it’s time to move on.
Ok Albert, I’m not disagreeing. In fact I’d welcome the distraction
of movement. Any distraction in fact. I just want to know where.
Well for one, I've been thinking a lot about Prague. I’ve been reading a
lot about Prague lately. More and more. It seems to inundate the media
at times, this obsession with Prague, the cheap, hedonist’s life, the
attractiveness of it for artists, writers, musicians, drunks. The more I
read about it, the more I hear others talking about it, the more I've
begun to believe that it'd be a better place for us – it's a lot cheaper for
one – the beers are so cheap they’re virtually free, the culture is bursting,
and well, as I said, now that we’ve had a little sniff of success, the time is
ripe to move on.
Besides, let's face it, there aren't that many jazz locales here, not enough
gigs, and frankly not enough inspiration. We're pissing away tons of
money chasing an empty dream every day we remain here – we've got to
find something cheaper, somewhat western yet with a hint of mystery –
An old communist stronghold, an historical nugget, a place, I’d point out,
that used music, albeit rock, not jazz, to form part of their revolution,
the velvet revolution, a place that used to be part of the execrable past,
our past. Didn’t you ever think about what went on behind that old Iron
curtain when you were younger?
I did, yes, of course, I wondered quite often what it was like behind that
wall, especially, as you know, as part of my family came from behind
that wall, well escaped it beforehand but nonetheless…Well what would
we do there? We don't speak the language, for example and that's not a problem here but it could be a big hurdle there.
Listen to you, worrying like an old woman about unnecessary things.
Look, I've read there's some 20,000 expats living there – we should be able
to straddle the border between expats and locals, find jazz venues, drink
cheap beer and meet exotic beautiful women.
What more could be expected? I'm tired of whores, I'm tired of getting
stoned to oblivion in coffee shops filled with weird Middle Easterners
listening to shitty pop music. I'm tired of drinking these little
glasses of lager, tired of living above this hideous Somalian
takeaway, the weather sucks and most of all, here you are moping
around most waking hours, thinking about that girl. It's not just
for me, but for you as well. The change of venue will do you good.
Alright then, Albert. For lack of a better solution and in the interests
of moving, forgetting and distraction, Prague it is.
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