But Beautiful. Geoff Dyer
the red taillights ghosted slowly to the east. Except for the steady drone of the car there was no noise. The blackness was so uniform that the driver found himself thinking that no road existed until the headlights scythed a path through the wheat writhing stiffly in the shock of light. The car was like a snowplow, shoving darkness to one side, clearing a path of light . . . Feeling his thoughts slipping away and his eyelids becoming heavy, he blinked hard and rubbed one leg to keep himself awake. He kept to a steady fifty but the landscape was so huge and unchanging that the car hardly seemed to move at all, a spacecraft inching its way to the moon . . . His thoughts drifted dreamily over the fields again, he thought maybe he could risk shutting his eyes for just one lovely second –
Abruptly the car was filled with the roar of the road and the chill of the night and he was startled to realize that he had been on the verge of nodding out. Within seconds the car was full of chisel-cold air.
—Hey, Duke, close the window, I ain’t sleepy no more, said the driver, glancing at the man in the passenger seat.
—Sure you’re OK, Harry?
—Yeah, yeah . . .
Duke hated the cold as much as he did and needed only this assurance to wind up the window. As quickly as it had cooled down the car began to warm up again. The dry toasty warmth you got in a car with the windows shut tight, that was his favourite kind of heat in the world. Duke had said many times that the road was his home and if that was true then this car was his hearth. Sitting up front with the heater on high and the cold landscape slipping by – to both of them that was like sitting in armchairs in an old cottage and reading books around an open fire, snow falling outside.
How many miles had they travelled together like this? Harry wondered. A million? Put that together with trains and planes and you probably had a distance three or four times the length of the earth. Probably no other people in the world had spent as much time together, or travelled so far, thousands of millions of miles possibly. He’d bought the car in ’49, intending just to hop around New York, but soon he was driving Duke all over the country. Several times he’d had an impulse to keep a notebook record of how far they’d travelled but always he came to thinking how he wished he’d done it right from the start and so, each time he thought of it, he gave up the idea and fell to calculating vaguely cumulative distances, remembering the countries and towns they had passed through. That was it – they didn’t really visit anywhere, they passed through the whole world, sometimes arriving at a gig twenty minutes before it started and hitting the road again half an hour after it ended.
Not keeping that notebook was just about his only regret. He’d joined the band in ’27, April 1927, when he was seventeen and Duke had to persuade his mom to let him go out on the road instead of returning to school, charming her and pressing her hand, smiling and saying, ‘Yes, of course, Mrs Carney’ to everything she said, knowing he would get his own way in the end. Course, if Duke had mentioned that it would mean spending the rest of his life on the road things might not have been as simple. Even so, looking back on it all, there was hardly a moment or a mile he regretted – especially in the years he and Duke had been driving to gigs like this. The whole world loved Duke but hardly anyone really knew him; over the years he’d got to know Duke better than anyone and that would have been payment enough – the money was a bonus practically . . .
—How we doing, Harry?
—We’re OK, Duke. Hungry?
—My stomach’s been growling since Rockford. How about you?
—I’m OK. I’ve been saving that fried chicken I picked up yesterday morning.
—That’s gonna be real tasty by now, Harry.
—Soon be time to stop for breakfast anyhow.
—Soon?
—About two hundred miles from now.
Duke laughed. They counted time in miles, not hours, and had gotten so used to huge distances that a hundred miles often elapsed between needing a leak and stopping to take one. Two hundred regularly lay between the first pangs of hunger and actually stopping to eat – and even when they came across the only place in fifty miles they often drove on anyway. Stopping was something you looked forward to so much that you could barely bring yourself to do it: a treat that had to be indefinitely postponed.
—Wake me up when we get there, said Duke, arranging his hat as a pillow between the edge of the seat and the door.
It was the quiet time of the evening, between the day people heading home from work and the night people arriving at Birdland. From his hotel window he watched Broadway grow dark and greasy with halfhearted rain. He poured a drink, piled a stack of Sinatra records on the turntable . . . touched the unringing phone and drifted back to the window. Soon the view fogged over with his breath. Touching the hazy reflection like it was a painting, his finger traced wet lines around his eyes, mouth, and head until he saw it turning into a drippy skull-shaped thing that he wiped clear with the heel of his hand.
He lay down on the bed, making only a slight dip in the soft mattress, convinced he could feel himself shrinking, fading to nothing. Scattered over the floor were plates of food he had pecked at and left. He’d take a bite of this, a little of that and then head back to the window. He ate almost nothing but he still had his preferences when it came to food: Chinese was his favourite, that was the food he didn’t eat most of. For a long time he’d lived on buttermilk and Cracker Jack but he’d even lost his taste for these. As he ate less he drank more: gin with a sherry chaser, Courvoisier and beer. He drank to dilute himself, to thin himself down even more. A few days ago he’d cut his finger on an edge of paper and was surprised how red and rich his blood was, expecting it to be silver as gin, flecked with red, or pale, pinkish. That same day he’d been fired from a gig in Harlem because he hadn’t had the strength to stand. Now even lifting the horn exhausted him; it felt like it weighed more than him. Even his clothes did probably.
Hawk went the same way eventually. It was Hawk who made the tenor into a jazz instrument, defined the way it had to sound: big-bellied, full-throated, huge. Either you sounded like him or you sounded like nothing – which is exactly how folks thought Lester sounded with his wispy skating-on-air tone. Everybody bullied him to sound like Hawk or swap over to alto but he just tapped his head and said,
—There’s things going on up here, man. Some of you guys are all belly.
When they jammed together Hawk tried everything he knew to cut him but he never managed it. In Kansas in ’34 they played right through the morning, Hawk stripped down to his singlet, trying to blow him down with that big hurricane tenor, and Lester slumped in a chair with that faraway look in his eyes, his tone still light as a breeze after eight hours’ playing. The pair of them wore out pianists until there was no one left and Hawk walked off the stand, threw his horn in the back of his car, and gunned it all the way to St Louis for that night’s gig.
Lester’s sound was soft and lazy but there was always an edge in it somewhere. Sounding like he was always about to cut loose, knowing he never would: that was where the tension came from. He played with the sax tilted off to one side and as he got deeper into his solo the horn moved a few degrees further from the vertical until he was playing it horizontally, like a flute. You never got the impression he was lifting it up; it was more like the horn was getting lighter and lighter, floating away from him – and if that was what it wanted to do he wouldn’t try to hold it down.
Soon it was a straight choice: Pres or Hawk, Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins – two approaches. They couldn’t have sounded or looked more different but they ended up the same way: swilled out and fading away. Hawk lived on lentils, booze, and Chinese food and wasted away, just like Pres was doing now.
He was disappearing, fading into the tradition before he was even dead. So many other players had taken from him that he had nothing left. When he played now cats said he limped along after himself, a pale imitation of those who played like him. At a gig where he’d played badly a guy came up to him and said, ‘You’re