Confessions Of An
Honest Man
A Novel by Art Rosch
Copyright 2010
All characters in this book are either fictional or in the
public domain.
September, 1967. Detroit, Michigan
Aaron
Kantro followed his colleagues through the labyrinth of the nightclub's kitchen
and out the back door. A waft of cool
air hit his face as he stepped onto the concrete platform next to the loading
dock. His sweat instantly began to dry and he could see steam misting from the
other musicians' tuxedos. It was the
band's third break. They would play one
more set of forty five minutes. Then
their work for the night was done.
There
were nine or ten people gathered around the rear entrance to the club. They were either jazz fans who wanted to
hang out or they were so loaded they didn't know how they'd gotten there.
A
man with his shirtails dangling from his suit stumbled into Aaron. "I wan' shake your hand," he
announced. He extended his unkempt
digits and then pulled his hand away if to recalibrate his arm's
trajectory. Aaron, when he put his hand
out to respond, felt like an idiot. He
put his hands in his pockets and hoped the man would go away.
"I
tell you somethin'", the man said.
"You play some drums for a white boy. Some fuckin' drums. I
close my eyes, can't tell the diff'rence.
Sound jus' like a real drummer."
He tried again to extend his hand and stumbled across his own feet.
"Excuse
me", a young lady said, as she passed between Aaron and the drunk. She wanted an autograph from the legendary
saxophonist, Zoot Prestige. Aaron's
boss transferred a cheroot from his hand to his mouth. He leaned down to inscribe his signature
into the lady's little book, while trying to keep his eyes averted from the
cleavage that was so conspicuously thrust into his face. Aaron noted this little drama and lost his
anger. Zoot Prestige was just too
funny. Aaron quietly moved behind the imposing figure of his boss. The drunk rambled away, talking to himself.
Aaron
was the only white person beneath the scalloped awning. There were perhaps ten white people in the
club. It bothered him more than he
would like to admit that he longed to see other white faces. It had been his decision to play jazz, and
his brand of jazz carried him to black clubs in black neighborhoods. Sometimes, the moment he walked into a
place, he felt the air freeze with racial tension. Sometimes he was scared.
The only way through it was to play the music.
As
the little throng dispersed, Zoot butted his smoke in the sand of an
ashtray. He stepped off the concrete
pad and walked across the lot towards his car.
After
waiting about thirty seconds, the group's organist, Tyrone Terry, followed the
lanky figure of his boss. Aaron waited
another thirty seconds and followed his colleagues to the cream-colored
Continental. This precaution seemed a
little silly but there were probably narcs in the club and Aaron had to admit
that it was pretty obvious what was happening when three jazz musicians got
into a car and didn't go anywhere.
Soon
the men were engrossed in the ritual of the pipe: lighting, inhaling, holding
breath, exhaling. It was cozy in the
Continental’s plush interior. Air came
sighing through the upholstery’s leather seams as the musicians' weight
compressed the seat cushions. Zoot and
his side-men were settling down, recharging their nerves for the next set, the
last set. It was one o’clock in the
morning.
"She
wanted you to look at 'em," Tyrone said to his employer.
"I
know," responded Zoot, "but it seems so...I don't
know...un-chivalrous to put my nose right into a lady's cleavage. Besides, it's redundant. I seen titties before. Wan't nothin' special about hers...they's
just...."
BANG! There was a huge sound, an explosion. The men's bodies reacted instinctively. They ducked, and their arms rose to cover their heads.
The car lurched as a man dove across
the hood, holding a pistol in his right hand.
His legs swam wildly as he fought to stop his momentum. Whatever tactic he had in mind, it wasn’t
working. The car’s sheen and finish
turned the hood into a sliding board.
"Jesus fucking Christ!” In the back seat Aaron cursed loudly without
thinking. He had never before heard a
gun shot. In spite of this fact, he recognized
the sound. It was rounder, weightier,
and more final than the sound of a firecracker.
The man on the car's hood waved the
pistol frantically. Slithering to get
his balance, he clutched at the windshield wipers and missed. Gravity and car wax slid him across the
polished metal until he landed on the ground.
The pistol fired as he hit the gravel.
The bullet penetrated a tire with a loud hiss.
The man sprang up and disappeared
among the ordered rows of vehicles in the parking lot.
Zoot Prestige held a finger to his
mouth, slid from under the steering wheel and dropped quietly to the floor of
the passenger seat. Zoot didn't want to
get shot. Zoot didn’t want to be a
witness if somebody got shot. Zoot
didn’t want questions. Zoot didn’t want
any dealings with the Poe-Leece!
Aaron scrunched onto the floor of the
back seat until his arm rested on the hump of the drive shaft. Tyrone, on the other side, was hoping to
disappear via the flawed logic of an ostrich.
He was pulling his little pork-pie hat over his eyes.
A voice shouted, "I'LL KILL YOU
MOTHERFUCKER!”
Two more shots were fired from the
opposite corner of the lot. Two
sparking ovals of muzzle flash lit up the windshields of Cadillacs and
Thunderbirds. A man’s face appeared, pressed
to the window of Zoot’s car. His cheek
was distorted against the glass, with an eye like a panicked horse. His quick breath steamed the window only
inches from Zoot's face. With a slight
turn to the right, Zoot became a virtual nose-to-nose mirror image of the man
with the gun.
The enraged shooter didn’t see the
human being an inch from his face. He
raised his snubby revolver over the top of the vehicle, fired twice without
aiming, and ran to cover behind a black Eldorado. The wind had changed. The
shots were barely audible.
"Sheee-it!” Zoot grumbled, “I
hope nobody messes up my short. I paid
three hundred bucks for this custom paint job.” The immaculately polished car was long and sleek as a submarine.
A voice shouted, "HEY LOOK HE'S
OVER THERE!"
Bang bang bang! Flashes lit up the
musicians’ faces. Guns were all over
the place. Aaron looked at Tyrone. The keyboard player had twitched and spilled
a pipe full of burning marijuana into his lap.
He brushed and patted frantically to prevent embers from smoldering
through the pants of his tux. Thrusting
his hands into his pockets he made a basket to prevent sparks from spreading
onto the seat or the carpet. Aaron produced a handkerchief and helped contain
the disaster. Tyrone was feeling little
stings of fire burning their way into his palms. He was tossing the embers back and forth as he jumped and
wriggled all over the tiny floor space behind the driver’s seat. When the young musicians’ eyes met they
realized that they had entered the realm of the completely absurd.
They began to giggle, as quietly as
possible. Tyrone managed to empty his
lungs without breaking into a hacking cough.
The bodies of both men were convulsed with terrified hilarity.
Aaron's legs were crossed on the floor
of the back seat. Zoot gestured with
his fingers for the pipe. Tyrone handed
it to Aaron as he muffled his cough and put out the fire in his lap. Aaron gave the pipe to Zoot through the
space between the seats.
The parking lot was a bedlam of running,
screaming people.
Two men, fingers snarled in each
other’s sport coats, rolled across the hood of Zoot’s car. The metal on the Continental went ‘scroich!
bunk!’. Zoot winced and hid his face behind
his hands. The men vanished somewhere
in the gravel of the lot, grunting and cursing. A grey fedora with a black band lay on the hood for a moment
before a stiff breeze carried it away.
Zoot elevated his head a few inches and tried to inspect his hood for
damage. It was impossible. The windows were now opaque with steam.
Zoot relaxed. He sat with his face level with the knobs on
the dashboard. His wrists were on his
knees and his hands hung loose in the shadow beneath the glove box. He loaded the pipe and handed it to Aaron
through the crack.
“Don’t strike no match!” he said. “Use that thing.” He pointed to the black knob of the cigarette lighter. Each door had an ashtray and each ashtray
had its own lighter.
Zoot sniffed the air inside the
car. “I smell somethin’ burning,” he
said. “You cats makin’ barbecue back
there?” His voice was good natured and
mocking.
Observing Zoot's total poise, Aaron
and Tyrone hissed through their lips with suppressed giggles. It was impossible to tell which part of the
moment was funny and which part was terrifying. The giggles and spluttering had equal components of panic and the
hysterical disbelief of pot heads in a bizarre situation.
Big cars roared to life and raced from
the lot in clouds of gravel and fumes.
Sirens dopplered past, right on their tails, red lights whizzing through
the intersection. Crimson slashes of
reflection lit up the Continental’s glass.
Then there was silence. People stealthily emerged from cover,
crunch-crunching across the gravel.
They ran for shelter inside the club.
The musicians straightened their bodies with the slowness of clock hands
moving. Soon they were sitting normally
on the seats. Zoot loaded the pipe, lit
and inhaled. He held his breath for a
long time, and then exhaled an almost transparent cloud. He replaced the pipe in a leather pouch,
concealed the stash under the seat, and twisted his head from left to right and
back again, loosening his neck muscles.
He was sixty-two, and a tenor saxophone had hung from his shoulders for
more than fifty years.
"Should we go back in and
play?" There was a squeak in
Aaron's voice. He made a few mock rolls
with invisible drumsticks.
Zoot looked at Aaron with a bare vapor
of a smile, tolerant of his drummer’s naïveté.
"Why would we NOT go
back in and play?" The marquee
lights of the street's clubs and bars glowed on half of Zoot's face, shadowing
the other half. This gave his eye a
demonic glitter. He wet his thumb and
forefinger with his tongue and smoothed the hairs of his moustache.
"Let me point out something to
you, babe,” said Zoot. “We're
professional jazz musicians. We play
music, and we get paid. Rather nicely,
I might add, thanks to my modest fame and the fact that I placed at number
eight in Downbeat’s Tenor Saxophone category." He paused for a moment and said with a trace of gloating, “AHEAD
of Dexter Gordon, Stan Getz and Gene Ammons.”
He laughed a ripe and disdainful laugh.
The magazine polls had such appalling power to determine a musician’s
pay level.
Opening the door, Zoot brushed a tiny
flake of ash from his tuxedo pants with a dapper gesture, and corkscrewed his
six foot three inch frame upright. The
saxophonist made a quick but careful scrutiny of his vehicle. He circled it, running the flat of his hand
along its sculpted façade. There were no bullet holes that he could detect, no
scratches. The hood had resumed its
normal shape.
Tyrone and Aaron squeezed themselves
out of the car. Aaron closed the door
delicately, with the barest of clicks, as if he feared the automobile would
fall to pieces if he so much as breathed wrong.
The world flickered. The young
musicians’ hearts raced, their nerves tingled.
They were playing a jazz gig with a famous saxophone player! Zoot Prestige had apprenticed with Duke
Ellington, he’d played with Charlie Parker.
He was a legend.
Zoot straightened his lapels and moved
his shoulders inside his jacket so the garment settled more squarely on his
body.
"That's
right,” he added. “We're hipsters,
babe, we stay cool. We got a paying
gig, we play until the club owner asks us to stop or it’s two a.m." Zoot's voice was like velvet and sand,
Scotch whisky and smoke. “Long as the drummer doesn’t get shot. Gotta draw the line somewhere. Last drummer I lost was Bobby Beffords, in
’65. And before that I had a good run,
only lost two drummers in six years.
Course, I never had a white drummer before. Everybody upset about that.”
He aimed a gentle look at Aaron, to
check that he wasn’t being taken seriously.
His smile was full of irony and play.
He brushed a bit of ash from Aaron’s tuxedo jacket. It was a tender, paternal gesture.
Fourteen drummers had come to audition
when Zoot was putting together the band for this tour. Thirteen of them were black. Aaron was the third drummer to play. As soon as he finished the tune, Zoot sent
the other drummers home.
He knew he would take a lot of heat
for hiring a white drummer. Fuck
‘em. The kid was worth it.
“Ain’t nothin’ unusual happening
here, babe”, said Zoot. “It’s just
another gig, somebody’s old lady got too friendly with somebody else’s old man
and things got ugly.” The tall man
shepherded his young friends toward the door of the nightclub. “It’s human nature. Why don’t we go inside and play some music
to soothe the savage breast? We’ll lay
down some Recalcitrant Funk-itis."
Zoot had just coined another of his
classic nonsense terms. Recalcitrant
Funk-itis now joined the lexicon along with Groove-matic Ubiquity, Heliocentric
Hot Sauce and other such crazy combinations from Zoot’s fertile mind.
Tyrone pulled at his cummberbund to
conceal the holes in the crotch of his pants.
The young men followed the urbane figure of their mentor back into the
humid noise of Mickey Tucker's Jazz Corner.
