Sam Kates' Aspie Sax Song-part 2

Sam Kates' Aspie Sax Song-part 2

         The mistake was in having the tryouts at the Moonrise Room, because, just as they were finishing up, and were about to offer Suzy the Wednesday gig, Jim Meyer, the manager of the Hyatt strode in and, in two words, booked her for his lounge on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays.
         "Morty, I love this new band member. She's on for an extra hundred a night. That okay with you, sweetheart?" A hundred bucks was a little better than the going rate for a side man in Chicago at that time; it was good money. He was gone before the chins all round had ceased to nod.
         "Well," said Red.
         "Well," said Suzy.
         "Well," said Morty, "I guess you're hired. You see that Gershwin set in there? Yeah the second folder. You know any o' them songs? You feel like doin' them off the cuff tonight?"
         "No rehearsal?"
         "Nah, you sound great, we been here since noon, gotta be back and play at 8:00. Okay?"
         "Su-sure."
         "Okay. Hey Sammy, time for lunch.
         "Lunch," said Sam turning to his case.

         Sam took his break over at the Art Institute, across Lakeshore Drive and two blocks through Grant Park. He spent a lot of time there on afternoons when he arrived at the gig hours early; when, if he stayed home, he felt restless and pointless, and anxious to be close to where he would be making music pretty soon. He also went there on days when he wasn't playing at the Hyatt at all; he liked being near his haven of musical release, and eventually the Art Institute became a second haven, a kind of pony express relay haven.
         On rainy days, he went inside to the cafeteria, smuggled in his bag of egg salad sandwiches, bought a coke, and found a table as close to the far corner as possible. On clear days, winter or summer, he sat outside under the bronze lions. The bite of Lake Michigan wind never deterred him; maybe the lions secretly breathed their implicit fiery power into him; who knew? If there was time, whether he ate outside or at table, he wandered into the museum, but he often got no further than the Rodin in the lobby, the Lovers rising on wings of passion out of the white rock; the first time he attempted to walk past it, he had spent two hours standing in front of it, sort of blocking the walkway, until a guard rousted the vagrant out. He also spent a lot of time in front of the Jackson Pollock upstairs. Something about the Picassos down the corridor always reminded him of Someone to Watch Over Me, but he didn't know why. All the guards knew him by now, and let him loiter harmlessly in front of whatever painting he became transfixed in front of. He wasn't no trouble, just a poor dumb kid. Always carries that case into the museum, although we know he's not sposed to, we let him, quiet kid, no problem. We tried to make him check it once--threw a fit. He's okay. Good kid.
         Tonight Sam was sitting on the steps under the south lion, a morsel of egg salad clinging to his lips. His lips were moving in that slow ballet tempo of his. It was hard to say, but he felt as though a thought were forming in his head, and he was trying to grasp it. Words were not hard for him, he knew a lot of them, but thinking, like talking, required the same improvisatory faculty that would have enabled him to improvise music if he wanted to. Putting words together in a different order than he had learned them was a Herculean task for him, and he was unpracticed at it. Still, he remembered the miracle at the Hyatt--he remembered the exact notes he had changed the guitar solo to, just as he remembered the exact notes of the guitar solo he didn't play. In whatever syntax Sam used to think his translucent thoughts in, he wondered what the hell had gotten into him. Then he remembered Suzy. "Name Suzy," he thought. "Name Suzy," he whispered. "Suzy singer. Suzy singer?" The lion wasn't telling.

         Thursday night was borderline funky--it had been quite awhile since Suzy had sung a lot of the songs in the folder, and, in the dim light of the bar, it was more of a problem to see the words than to remember the tunes. Plus, Sam was a little bit shy with her, and, more than once, dropped out for whole sections at a time, leaving a hole for the instrumental solo that Red had to fill; now, Red was okay as a rhythm player, he had good chords, played all the time-honored substitutions, and, most importantly, he had a good formal sense--he could feel when a climax was coming, and could support the soloist dynamically. The thing is, he wasn't a very good soloist himself; his solos were always pretty basic, pretty reserved, spare, understated, somewhat clumsy, okay let's face it, they were pretty dumb. They were so dumb that Suzy couldn't even harmonize with them, because the melodic logic was so erratic she couldn't get into the flow; all jazz solos are chains of stylistic cliches strung together in something like an original order, but the elisions between Red's melodic utterances were so random it was impossible to intuit what the next melodicle was likely to be--it was like trying to sing along with somebody who keeps switching tunes every two bars.
         Fortunately, that only happened a few times, and only in the early sets. Toward the end of the night, Suzy had been able to review the songs thoroughly enough during breaks to get free of the page, and Sam started getting used to the new ensemble experience. He mostly adhered to his prepared solos, and Suzy mostly gave professional, but fairly conservative readings of the old standards. But then, two miracles took place, bringing the total for the day up to three:
         The second miracle happened during, you guessed it, Someone to Watch Over Me. Red had trained Sam on the popular Nelson Riddle arrangement of this song recorded by Linda Ronstadt. This was a solid, no-bullshit arrangement, with some good countermelodies for Sam to play during the head; but it was kind of glitzy, kind of Las-Vegas-meets-Ethel-Merman, and Suzy was going for a more intimate, a more felt-from-within resonance. The potential clash between these two interpretive perspectives was softened immediately by the way Sam altered his tone quality--it was just like that thing he did with Lover Man, earlier in the day--he met Suzy on some middle ground, and set off her too-pathetic-for-words whispering sighs, with a tender, ineffable tremble in the vibrato that sent Nelson Riddle's extroverted cleverness to the cleaners, to the confessional, as it were. She searched for the lost shepherd in the low shadows while Sam raised the cry to the heights of a windy hill. The two parts merged in the solemnity of a pristine perfection, as though they had made love a dozen times before, right there in the crook of the piano. And when the solo came, Sam switched versions and went into an old Lester Young solo he had learned years before he had come to rest under the Picasso across from the bus station. The little lost lamb peered out from that corner of Chicago, from behind the striated breast of the Picasso, with a wide-eyed innocence and longing that made the listener both comfortable and desperately sad at the same time--it was a self-pitying, nostalgia for that which is invisible not because it doesn't exist but because it has just turned a down distant side street, blown by the cruel breath of the windy city's last and final farewell.
         Suzy was tempted to try some of those counterpoints she likes to do, but changed her mind and let Sam have the spotlight. She marveled at the subtle sophistication of his nuanced asides, and felt how perfectly the lead lines matched the sentiment she had attached to the song during the head. Then, when it came time for the final reprise, she leaned over and whispered in Sam's ear, "Take it." And he switched over to the main theme without the tiniest hesitation, while she sang the words to the last phrase in a poised and plaintive obligato. The room was hushed as Red's concluding arpeggio hung in the smoky air. The quintessence of the moment could be read in the shapes of dissipating cloud, like an Akashic record written on astral walls, or hung about the lacy white collar of Kilimanjaro. The silence was the ultimate stab of lonely desire as lamb lay herself down to weep and sleep. Then the room erupted in an ovation the like of which had never before rattled the wine glasses of the Hyatt Moonrise Room. It was like fucking Carnegie Hall, like the fucking Metropolitan Opera, they clapped so loud and long.
         Jim Meyer, manager, now impressario extraordinaire, was standing at the end of the bar congratulating himself as he watched his $100 extra overhead turn into an easy $600-700 in extra revenue--the wine was flowing like a waterfall. He didn't mind that there was also a river of twenty-dollar bills flowing into the tip cup, because he knew that his up-scale clientele had plenty of money for both booze and gratuities. Enthusiasm was a difficult state of mind to inspire in the blase riche, but, once it was so inspired, it had a tendency to spill over into all available corners of the context, and he knew that if they were stuffing money into the short-stemmed cognac glass, they were also stuffing money into his pocket. But that wasn't the third miracle.
         The third miracle was Elliott Stokes, music critic for the Chicago Sun Times, walking into the Moonlight Room at precisely the right moment--just as Suzy and Sam had eased into Someone to Watch Over Me. Stokes was not on the job, he had heard the Mellow Four lots of times, and, although he had a lukewarm appreciation for Sam, he was underwhelmed. He was not a jazz man, after all--he reviewed symphony concerts, and Orchestra Hall recitals, and the Lyric Opera, and the like; he had not come to hear the band, (low-brow 2nd stringers, playing low-brow pop pablum), he was just dropping by for a nightcap before retiring to his apartment nearby, up in Lake Point Tower. He pushed his way up to the crowded bar, ordered his drink, and then forgot about it as the music gradually insinuated itself into his consciousness. He was not struck by the quality of Suzy's voice, nor the tenderness of the interpretation, but he did notice a tonal sonority coming from the two of them, Sam and Suzy, that radiated an undulating attraction that grew on him with each successive phrase. He was captivated by the sound world of the duet--he saw the melodic lines as shapes in air, intertwining spires of energy emanating from the stage, exerting a magnetic pull that drew him in, that enraptured and entangled him in its smoky coils.
         He applauded along with the crowd adding his, "Bravi!" to the shouts of "Yeah!" and "Smokin'!" When the band began to pack up for the night, he went over to Morty and got the correct spelling of everybody's name, and, luckily, got wind of the future performance scheduled for next Wednesday at "Al's Place." His rave review of the band appeared as a short but glittering sidebar in the Friday "Chicago Nightlife" section of the Sun Times.

         Sam didn't know from newspaper reviews. He didn't really understand when Red showed him the Stokes' column before the Friday night gig:

"The sophisticated vocal stylings of Susan Wright, reminiscent in sound quality of a young Ella Fitzgerald, and in improvisational quality of the best of Sarah Vaughan, merged with the wonderfully understated undertones of saxophonist Sam Kates, in moment after moment of ecstatic contrapuntal epiphanies. They brought a fresh depth and emotional intensity to old jazz warhorses [he had only heard the one, mind you, but never mind--bless his heart] which made them live again in the Chicago Hyatt Moonrise Room."

         Sam didn't even know what to do with the extra $200 Morty stuffed into his case that night after the gig; he didn't appreciate it as a good thing. Sam lived down the street toward the North Side at the dilapidated St. George Hotel, but good old Aunt Maxine was still paying his bills for him, and even making a lot of his egg salad sandwiches. He knew about money, (he had to pay the bus driver on his way back and forth to the Hyatt, and he knew how to buy cokes at the Art Institute), but he wasn't very good at arithmetic, and reading a calendar, a week at a time, stretched the limits of his ability to see into the future. Each week, Sam went to Aunt Maxine's place for Sunday dinner, handed over the weeks earnings in cash, and she took care of the banking and rent paying. Over ten years, Sam had accumulated over $30,000 in savings, but he wouldn't have had any idea what to do with that money if somebody had given him a list. He was always paid under the table, so he had, so far, never ponied up any income tax for the Big Uncle. Sitting there under the lions, a passerby could have just as easily mistaken him for a homeless bum, rather than a somewhat famous local saxophonist with a sizable bank account, so nondescript and lethargic was his listless presence.
         It was not that Sam was retarded: Asperger's is not like that. It may be that the portrait painted of him so far gives the impression of a village idiot, incapable of understanding language structure, abstract concepts, or even the simplest of social interactions; he may appear to be an autistic savant, gifted in one thing, and debilitatingly handicapped in all other things: and this would not be quite accurate. Sam had as much mental capacity as any other average, (or maybe slightly above average), man on the street, but the rub came when he was put in a situation where he had to ACT like an average man on the street: he basically knew what he was supposed to say and do in any particular social situation, passing by the hotel night man, ordering a coke, even reading a bus schedule, but it was MAKING himself execute these social formulae that was his undoing.
         Asperger's Syndrome manifests in various degrees of intensity, distributed on a continuum, some closer to outright clinical autism, some further away; but all aspies' cognitive functioning is defined by one qualitatively common psychological weakness: they have to work a lot harder than normal people to make their personal inner world connect with the outer world. Normal people think, feel, and decide in a mental environment of psychological approximations--assumptions about what is true, which are made viable and reliable by virtue of a circular thinking process that allows them to access ideas from a scattered array of literally conscious and vaguely intuitive impressions. Aspies can't do that--they have to have all their ducks in a row, each thought leading, with impeccable logic, from one to the next, like stages of an algebraic equation; and if one step in a mental process is even slightly out of order, the whole construct falls to the ground. Normal people can get from point A to point B through any number of roundabout routes, but aspies can only get there in a straight line. Stepping outside the straight line CAN be done, aspies can learn, especially with patient and understanding help, but it is a tremendous effort, and costs the aspie much in terms of the emotional pain that is always associated with any momentary mental disorientation.
         And remember too, that these social catch-phrases are almost always linked to some characteristic body language, or facial expression, or subtle tone of voice, all of which that are totally invisible, undetectable, and incomprehensible to an aspie. The true meaning of most social communication is embedded in a complex mixture of words and looks and signals that the aspie just can't see. Sam couldn't count the times he was taken by surprise when some emotional outburst of frustration or rage was visited on him by his father, or his brothers, or his teachers, or his classmates, over some misunderstanding, the precise nature of which he never actually became aware of. He NEVER saw these events coming; he would be standing there calmly talking with somebody about something, it could be anything, and suddenly that somebody was screaming at him, or (in the case of his brothers) hitting him--and he had no idea why. And the inability to see these social cues is much more difficult, if not impossible, to train out of an aspie: you can describe the sky to Stevie Wonder with all the lyric persuasions of Shakespeare, but he still won't see it.
         To be sure, Sam was more incapacitated by these disabilities than many high-functioning aspies, especially in the area of language; but it must be remembered that it was not the lack of understanding that separated him from the norm, it was the lack of motivation. The will to learn, the will to reach out, the will to try and make sense of the bewildering plethora of nonsensical social emanations, had been lost in him; and he suffered from this lack, but he was also protected by it. He snuggled in his cozy cocoon, isolated but safe, lonely but safe, disconnected but safe. If Sam had known there was anything for him in the outer world, he might have considered coming out of hiding, but he didn't have a clue, and had learned not to want to. Let's come right out and say it: Sam was fucked up by his father.
         When Sam first started talking, he put sentences together fluently, almost poetically, but always with a slightly skewed sense of syntax and definition; also, he often could not separate what was on his mind, at that inner moment, from what he was asked to respond to in the outer reality. This abnormal penchant was pounced on by his too-conventional father, and was ridiculed and berated as unacceptable. Mr. Kates soon came to attribute Sam's eccentric mode of expression to a deeply rooted and sinful character flaw. What kind of an asshole won't even answer a simple question? For instance, four-year-old Sam might be sitting on the living room floor looking out the front window, when his father would come up and pronounce:
         "Good morning, Sam."
         "Daddy says."
         "How are you this morning?"
         Silence. How am I?
         "I said, how are you this morning, Sam?"
         "The curtains wiggle."
         "What?"
         "The window. The curtains wiggle."
         "What kind of stupid thing is that to say!"
         "How am I. The window curtains are wiggling."
         "Lord help us. The curtains are wiggling."
         This conversation might protract itself into a five-minute meditation on wind and windows, as Mr. Kates tried to get to the bottom of Sam's off-the-wall remark, but, short or long, it would invariably descend into a cascade of insults deploring Sam's inability to answer a goddamn simple question. It never occurred to anybody that there was no such thing a s simple question to Sam. The family prayers at table and bedside never lacked heaps of heartfelt entreaties to Jesus to heal Sam's willful and stubborn dedication to the devil's work.
         At a very early age, this abusive insensitivity drove deep down inside him Sam's will to respond to ANYBODY in words. To an aspie, reaching out into the world of men is not a natural process, but a calculated act of logic and will; and Sam was bitch-slapped down by his own father so many times, in his formative years, that he lost the power to rise to the occasion; and, without the PRACTICE it would have taken to perform this difficult task, he not only lost the will, he lost the capacity for normal response. For years, the words would percolate in his mind, striving for verbal expression, but eventually he even gave up trying to formulate what he thought MIGHT be the proper countersigns to passwords such as, "How are you?" "What'll it be?" "Hello." "Name?"
         It hurts any aspie's heart to fill in the blanks of a socially interactive stock formula--the phoniness, the one-size-fits-all fuzziness of it, frustrates the propensity, of inbred sequential linear thinking, toward pristine clarity and honesty, which is the aspie's defining mental stock-in-trade; but most of them, generally speaking learn how to do it, somewhat. Sam didn't even try--what was the point? Why suffer the pain of drawing the false and impersonal response out of himself, just to suffer more when his father found fault, no matter how close the answer was to the right one? So, you see, it wasn't that Sam was retarded, or even clueless, he was just hopelessly neurotic. He was blocked--blocked by his own deep-seated fear of his father's caustic abuse, and, by inference, the abuse of the entire rest of society. Autistic and neurotic, what a losing combination! Thank God for the saxophone. The saxophone gave Sam a way to reach out into the world to a place where there were no wrong answers, no recrimination, and no pain.
         It might be said that Sam loved the saxophone, insofar as love may be defined as a high-vibratory CONNECTION between separate entities; but the emotional parameter of love, the bovine, visceral physicality of love, the pulsing, human, red-blooded heart of love, was just as foreign to him as most other emotional conditions. Such feelings as rage, or jealousy, or sadness--even affections, like attachment, dependence, or sympathy, were unknown to him, or, at the most, occupied so diminutive a presence in his psychic make-up as to constitute tiny kernels of meaning in a much vaster cognitive system of operative relationships--familiar acts to familiar consequences. The one emotion that he knew well was fear. It was fear that kept him incarcerated in his self-made prison of denial and disconnection; and it was the saxophone that offered him momentary flights of freedom from this prison. With the saxophone he didn't have to give up the safety of his cell in order to experience sympathetic resonance with the outer world. The saxophone made sense, and it was the sense of the saxophone that became his self-expression, the expression of learned sequences of meaning with which he could identify and into which he could embed some aspect of himself, an aspect labeled for affirmation and release. With the saxophone he could send out little carrier pigeons of sound that carried the message, "I am, I am," to any who cared to hear. Mostly it was Sam himself who heard this message, bouncing back to him off the ceiling of his cell at the Moonrise Room, or out on the street underneath the Picasso, it didn't matter which. And until the advent of Susan Wright, this had been enough.

         The gig on Friday night went even better than Thursday, and the bar was packed to capacity, thanks to Elliot Stokes. On Saturday, it was ridiculous--there were people lined up out in the lobby, creating a fire hazard, and spilling booze on the carpets in front of the elevator. Red programmed a tour of a bunch of the old classics they had been performing with Sam for a couple of years, and Suzy managed to fit right in, as Sam learned to make way for her lead solos. He was still performing, by rote, the music that Red had taught him through recordings, in those first few months, but he was also learning how to transpose different learned chunks, taken from various classic versions, into the form of vocal arrangements improvised on the fly.
         Most of the time, right before they started to play, Red would whisper little hints to Sam, ad hoc, about the source possibilities for each tune, and Sam would resurrect musical treasures buried deep in his phenomenal photographic memory by giving perfect renderings of melodies quoted alternately from, sometimes, three or four different recordings, taking into account the key and tempo of the live version they were doing at the moment. But sometimes Red would call up a tune and, before anybody could say anything else, Sam would launch into it without preparation, forcing Suzy to find her way into the mix, crowding Sam out of the way at the appropriate moment. The mellow three got nervous whenever Sam did this, because they feared that Sam might not make way for Suzy, but he always did. Sam was learning at an exponential rate.
         Altogether, including Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, four hours a night, from 8:00 till midnight, (that's twelve hours, counting breaks), they had gone through a long set of more than twenty Gershwin standards, as many by Cole Porter, and as many by Rodgers and Hart, in addition to an assortment of odds and ends by Jerome Kern, Fred Lowe, and Harold Arlen: songs that comprised the cornerstone of the Baby Boomer collective consciousness. In every case, Sam had found a way to make his part fit with Suzy's, and, on the rare occasion when he proved rigid in reciting his Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins version, Suzy would find a way to complement him.
         It was a happy situation musically; and, financially speaking, the tip cup was adding an average of $200-$250, per night, to each band member's pay, a figure which represented a phenomenal display of generosity from a crowd of casual drinkers. Jim Meyer had to put out cognac glasses in three different locations in the bar, because people kept tripping over each other trying to get up to the bandstand to stuff their twenty-dollar bills into the pot; and still, the waiters had to resist the temptation to rip off the band, because the money kept spilling out onto the floor and they had to keep picking it up and wadding it back in. Jim was contemplating instituting a cover charge.
         Then, there was next Wednesday to think about. Suzy was a real trooper, and didn't complain about having to jam through all this music without rehearsal, as long as it was a casual performance; and it must be said that the crowd at the Moonrise Room was remarkably attentive, given the context--there were moments every night when the room would become breathlessly hushed, like that first night during Someone to Watch Over Me; but it was, after all, still a bar, and most of the time the music was accompanied by all the random chatter and glass-tinkling that comes with that particular territory. The level of noise would sometimes rise in direct proportion to the intensity of the music, and that was okay with Suzy because it covered subtle glitches in the changes, or the endings, or all those words she was still struggling to memorize. But she was a perfectionist at heart, and her understanding was that this performance at Al's Place was to be more of a concert situation; she needed to feel prepared for a formal occasion like that. She wanted to know the complete repertoire list ahead of time, and she wanted to practice. And she wanted time alone with Sam.

         Morty was the leader of the band, in name only: he handled all the booking and money matters, which, considering they hadn't played anywhere but the Moonrise Room in three years, was a decidedly uncomplicated responsibility. It was Red who was, what you might call, the music director. It was Red who had taken Sam in hand when he first joined up with the Mellow Four; it was Red who had played Sam all those dozens of classic recordings and watched in awe as Sam had parroted back each tune note-for-note. It was Red who basically programmed every set, and took care of getting copies of the lead sheets to Morty when they tried out something new. Red had bought the tape player that lived in Sam's room at the St. George, and he had even left one of his old electronic keyboards up there for when he worked out his chord changes with Sam. Red was curious as to why Suzy was so insistent about working with Sam alone, but he already recognized that Suzy outclassed him by a yard, and wasn't going to let pride get in the way of keeping the talent happy.
         The reason the tape player and the keyboard lived at the St. George was that Sam did not do well in unfamiliar surroundings, especially if those surroundings were cluttered and crowded as they always were at Red's place. Sam was easily distracted by visual noise, and this problem almost ended his gig at the Moonrise Room before it really began: when Sam first started playing there, every time somebody came in or out the door, every time a waiter passed in front of the bandstand, every time the cash register popped open, Sam would lurch and hesitate; it almost cost him his job. But he was so totally hot, all the rest of the time, that Red committed to working with him on the problem. They even tried putting Sam in dark glasses for awhile, (do the Miles Davis jazz druggie schtick, see?), but the glasses kept falling down his nose, giving him one more visual cue to be distracted by, not to mention creating an inappropriately comical scene; there was nothing like watching Sam play When I Fall in Love with sunglasses slipping over his face onto his mouthpiece. They finally figured out that all they had to do was point Sam to the right, toward Red, and tell him to focus his eyes on the short stick of the piano.
         After that, Sam got used to the other petty distractions that come with playing music in a public place, and he never faltered again. The bandstand at the Moonrise Room became his second home, and he pulled its borders in around him like a blanket and snuggled up into its private corners, with his music, only dimly aware that there were other people in the place, only marginally aware that he was playing with three other guys. When he played, he was like an infant in the cradle, who can't tell where his body ends and the world begins--he didn't distinguish between himself and the other members of the band; he drove them, carried them, and discarded them like extensions of himself, appendages which served his purpose for the one moment, became non-existent in the next. When he entered his trance zone, he actually stopped seeing anything but the notes of his saxophone dancing before his mind's eye, like bubbles out of a soap pipe. The ceiling could have caved in during one of these moments and he wouldn't have noticed.
         But he still didn't like practicing at Red's place--there were papers and dirty plates all over the place, and the El ran right by the window every fifteen minutes, so the noise and the movement simply did not permit him to concentrate. Red was happy to rehearse quietly at the St. George in Sam's 15x20-foot room with its single bed, plain brown dresser, peeling paisley wallpaper (just the one spot, up in the far left corner BEHIND the bed, so Sam couldn't see it and worry about it), and its cracked window looking out on an alley. The starkness of the place was unrelieved except for one ray of personality--sitting on the night table, under an imitation ivory Chinese lamp, was a photograph of Sam's mother. Red was happy to give Susan Wright directions to the place, and warned her not to carry very much money into that neighborhood, and for God's sake don't park your car anywhere near there--take the bus.

         Suzy was coming on Monday. Sam's calendar was marked. Red had come over and marked it for him and told him Suzy wanted to play with him alone. Now his calendar was marked, and he knew Suzy singer was coming over, and would be in his room at the St. George, without Red, without anybody else--just him--just Sam. Red and Aunt Maxine were the only two other people who had ever set foot in Sam's room in all the time he had lived there, but now, his calendar was marked. It would be Monday. Today was Monday. Sam's calendar was marked. He checked it three times an hour. Monday. Suzy. Three o-clock. 3:00. Three P.M. Central Standard Time. Monday. 3:00. Suzy. Suzy singer. He checked the time three times a minute. Suzy singer. He took out his saxophone. He put it away. He took it out again, he tested his reed. He put it away again. He took it out again. Suzy singer. Three P.M. Central Standard Time. What will happen? He blew a note and put it away.
         He looked at the play list Red had xeroxed in the Hyatt office. Suzy had a copy. Sam read the names of the songs. He could read them easy, and every title represented a memory of sounds and fingerings he experienced in their totality in a flash. He had all the tapes of all the songs--there were an even dozen. Red was figuring an average of eight minutes per song for a two hour show. Sam arranged the tapes in the order of the play list, stacking them one on top of the other. Several of the cassettes didn't have those flat plastic cases, so the stack fell over. He restacked them. They fell over. He set them side by side, left to right on top of his dresser, then he took out several pairs of underpants and stacked the tapes between piles of underwear. The stack clattered to the floor and Sam picked them up and set them side by side on top of the dresser. He checked each one to see if they were all properly cued. They were. And as he listened to each opening, rewound the tape, played it again, and rewound it again, the entire piece flashed through his memory again. He looked at the clock. There was underwear all over the top of the dresser. How did these get here? Put those things away. There. Three P.M. Central Standard Time. Suzy singer. What will happen?
         Like any pro, Suzy was there early. Sam was looking at the second hand of the clock lurching toward the 12. 2:48:56, 2:48:57, 2:48:58, 2:48:59, 2:49:00. KNOCK KNOCK. Sam almost screamed. He went to the door. He stepped away from the door toward his saxophone. He went back to the door and touched the handle. KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK. He almost screamed again.
         "Sam?" queried a voice on the other side.
         "SAM," He said.
         "Sam, it's Suzy Wright."
         "Sam."
         "Sam, are you there?"
         "Yeah, okay. Suzy. (Suzy singer)."
         He opened the door and retreated to the middle of the room like a shy pony.  Suzy leaned her head forward and quizzically peered into the room through the door. Satisfied, she breezed in. "Hi Sam."
         "Sam."
         She went straight to the electric piano, and placed her stack of lead sheets on the night table; she removed her coat and scarf and laid them on the bed; she sat down on the metal folding chair and placed the first tune of their set on the music stand. Sam stood watching these simple activities with the opaque wonder of a dog watching his master solve a problem in advanced calculus. She turned and smiled at him. "Wanna play?"
         She had been warned that Sam had problems communicating with people, and Red had outlined the way he taught Sam music by rote, listening to tape recordings; but Suzy was not perturbed or intimidated by the possibility of difficulties--she had her own agenda for this rehearsal, and it didn't involve learning other people's arrangements by rote--she had another idea. Suzy was a very remarkable musician, but she was also possessed of all the motherly (and fatherly) instincts of a born teacher, and she wanted to try something with Sam that might open him up and extend his range. She knew Sam had some kind of mental disability, that he was entrenched in a mind set from which he could not reach out, and which most people could not reach into; but she had also felt a connection with him on the bandstand Thursday, Friday, and Saturday--a musical connection that enthralled her, and gave her the confidence that there was something more to Sam than people were giving him credit for. She felt she understood Sam as well as she needed to, after three nights of performing, and she had a strategy in mind that might enable her to get more music out of him.
         She was so young. Young, and fearless, and driven by that open-hearted sincerity that bestows, on all innocents, the keys to the kingdom. She felt that she had in hand the key necessary to unlock the inner kingdom of Sam; she wasn't sure (she wasn't that young) but she was by God going to find out. She knew she might be rushing onto ground where angels feared to tread, but, Sweet Jesus, that was what MUSIC was FOR. "Wanna play?" she said again.
         Without replying, Sam went over to his saxophone case in the corner with careful steps avoiding certain lines in the carpet like land mines. He opened the case. He was inept at putting it together. Suddenly a project that he had performed thousands of times seemed like completely foreign and unpracticed territory. He fumbled with the mouthpiece, he fumbled with the reed, he got so tangled in his neck strap, Suzy had to reach out and straighten it for him. At last he got his reed moistened and he was ready. After blowing a long arpeggio up and down the range of the horn, he went to the tape recorder and pushed the button on Benny Goodman's All of Me, the first tune on the list. Suzy reached out and flipped it off. Sam flinched with surprise, eyes wide, as though he had been shocked by 120 volts.
         "Let's not begin with the tape," she said; and, without any more ado, she touched the keys and played a simple intro. Just then Sam's alarm clock belted out a deafening high-pitched whistle. Suzy started, and Sam leaped on the clock like a leopard, struggling to shut it off. After three obnoxious blasts his stumbling fingers managed to flip the switch.
         "Three P.M. Central Standard Time."
         "Ah."
         She began again, this time with the ending tag in a slow tempo, "You took the part that once was my heart, so why not take all of me?" Then she started into a moderate swing vamp, plunking out a walking bass. Sam stared at her with the puzzlement of a calf looking in awed revelation at a new gate in the corral. He had been prepared to play Benny Goodman's famous version, but this didn't jive with what Suzy was doing. He blanked. Ten different jazz solos buzzed through his head and none of them fit.
         "Don't know it," he said, the most tragically pathetic words in all of Shakespeare, or the Bible. Sam thought about crying, but Suzy's smile stopped him.
         "Play the tune Sam," she encouraged. He took a breath and balked again. "Play a little piece of the tune, come on." Suzy continued to vamp, arching her eyebrows in anticipation. Sam played, "All of me," and stopped. "Good, now do it again, here," in the minor vi. "All of me." "Good. Now here," in minor ii. "All of me." "Good. Now put it together." Sam had never played a musical fragment so short, and he had never put the pieces together by himself before. He had never CHOSEN what to play, he had always just played the other guy's tune. "Come on, Sam, put it together." She vamped a silk cushion, an altar where he could lay his trophies down before her. After a few moments of frozen silence, she leaned toward Sam and whispered the magic words that had brought forth the miracle of Someone to Watch Over Me four nights ago: "Take it."
         And suddenly there he was, playing All of Me, little threads of All of Me, like tendrils of tune reaching out to her bass line and twisting themselves into the chords. For a moment, he was playing a sophisticated, compressed intro for All of Me, tossing around sequentially transposed versions of the opening motive, to link up with Suzy's simple Heart and Soul circle of fifths vamp; then something weird happened: the excitement of the moment triggered something in his mind, a safety valve shut off, and he started rattling off fragments of fifteen different versions of All of Me in quick succession, with no continuity between them, like that movie of all the world's great artworks flashing by in 60 seconds, like a computer searching for a fingerprint match in an FBI database; four notes of Charlie Parker here, five or six of Coleman Hawkins there, Louis Armstrong here, Billie Holiday there; and the fragments rolled over on themselves and collided with each other in a hideous hysterical cacophony. It was magnificent and horrible and desperate. Sam's tempo accelerated to a furious whirl, and it seemed like he was going to careen off a cliff any second, that his mad flurry of notes were signaling a time bomb about to explode. Taken aback, Suzy witnessed the scene with the same awe with which Sam had watched her take off her coat. Then there was a flash of melodic construction that caught her attention and she literally screamed, "STOP!"
         Sam choked on his reed and took a step back. He was lost and afraid and insane.
         "There! Play that again."
         "Suzy?"
         "Play that again, right there." She remembered enough of the fragment to quote it on the piano. "This."
         Sam parroted back the melodicle, with a question mark in his eyes.
         "There. Not Benny Goodman's tune, not Charlie Parker's tune, Sam's tune."
         "Sam's tune?"
         "Yes, Sam's tune. Your tune."
         "Mine."

         Sam used music to make sense out of the random mess of conceptual objects that cluttered the bomb-shelled, barb-wired no-man's-land of his mind; he used it to draw into his personal sphere, material from the outer reality that he could identify with, from which he could derive a sense of order, and, by inference, safety. But his talent had ever and always been his ability to mimic what he heard. His identification with the music was always expressed in the second person. When his mind reached up into the astral plane, he would coax his personal identity to merge with the collective identities he found there; he would choose any one of the surfeit of iconic templates that abounded in that abstract field of discarnate musical ideas, and allow it to imprint itself onto his own sense of self; he bonded with the expressions he found in the Akashic record like a co-dependent parasite, and sucked the life out of the resident collective archetypes and into himself--and it was their collective identity that became, momentarily, his personal identity.
         But, alas, with collective identity comes diffusion of ego definition, something that most people need--but not Sam; Sam's ego definition was already so diffuse, he barely knew the meaning of the word "I". And, although his flights into the realm of higher mind connected him to dimensions of self that most other people crave as an antidote for the claustrophobic strangulation of ego that constricts most normal existence into a suffocating knot of self-absorption and sin, Sam was just the opposite--he experienced so little of himself as a material being, that he wandered the streets of the world a lonesome stranger, an alien who never heard a single human voice, but always a chorus, voices, voices, jostling in his ear a contrapuntal refrain, glorious and never-ending, with never a quiet interval for rest or sleep. Thus, Sam was never Sam alone, but always Sam in others, an elevated symbolic, archetypal other. He knew himself only as an expression of abstract love, a paranormal identity that projected outward from itself a radiant reflection of the face of God, to be sure, but which lacked the heat necessary to warm him into the world of the flesh. So, bereft of a particular, implicate, elected invention of divine intelligence, Sam spoke daily with the angels, but never with the cashier at the Art Institute, never the bus driver who drove him to the gig, and, lackaday, never with Susan Wright.
         And this was how it was, and this was how it had always been. Never before had anyone asked him to create something of his own. The idea of ownership had never occurred to him. He took refuge in his music to escape the cruelty of his father, never to affirm the existence of himself. His entire strategy for living had been defensive--until now. Also, until now, he had never played a wrong note. As he labored with Suzy over his own version of All of Me, he honked and squawked false phrase after false phrase, and this almost drove him to tears again, until Suzy stopped him and comforted him with the famous Miles Davis quote, "You're never more than a half-step away from a right note." With this, Sam dove into his improvisations with renewed vigor and learned how to snatch victory from the very jaws of defeat. By the end of their session, Sam was playing with the same energy and authority with which he had quoted all the great recorded jazz solos of the 20th century. Yes, he stumbled, and yes, he painted himself into many musical corners and had to start over again and again, (like every other musician in the world), but he had the idea now, and practiced on after Suzy went home--so much so that the night man at the St.George had to come up and remind him it was after 11:00, and people were trying to sleep.

         Wednesday night at Al's Place was a triumph. The place was packed and when the band launched into All of Me, there was a new saxophone player onstage. After the head, upbeat and perky, (a little Ella Fitzgeraldish, but still with some eccentric inflections Suzy liked to throw in), Sam took his first solo of the evening. He began with an attenuated, ever-so-slightly decorated version of the tune, but as the solo built and built, through two complete choruses, his virtuosity became more and more brilliant and commanding until the second time through the bridge, when he stopped on a high note and held it for three measures modulating the tone through the changes, bending it up to an ecstatic ultimate note.

It might be said that this note was a love song to Suzy. It might be said that Sam's glorious "I AM!" resounded in almost articulate verbosity. It might be said that words formed in Sam's mind, complete sentences reflecting on the music, attaching his high note, with literal resonance to some real, worldly thing, some specific act of self-realization. It might be said that Sam's penis erected itself in that rarefied moment of visceral focus, and he found his humanity in the applause clattering through the audience at Al's Place, Chicago, Illinois, Planet Earth, 8:35 Post Meridian, Central Standard Time. Then again, it might have been just a really good musical idea, imagined and brought forth into the material plane by an aspie saxophone player.

Then he looked over at Suzy, handed it back, and let her take it out. The crowd went wild.
         Sam smiled at Suzy, maybe for the first time in his life, and as he took his bow, he took her hand and raised it over their heads, together. There was a moment between them that could never be duplicated, and whose tenderness could never be surpassed. He felt himself congeal into a knot of self-absortion and sin, and he sighed for so much clarity. He felt himself arriving, felt himself taking something from Suzy that was hers and his together, mostly his. And he wept. This time she did not hold him back, but embraced him onstage, wiping his tears on her shoulder. The audience redoubled their applause, conscious that they had witnessed something important, something historic, and something plainly, quintessentially human. When Red prodded them into their next number, Sam leaned over and whispered, "I'll take it." And he did.

         After that, the band went on to larger, ever more respectable venues. They toured the midwest, and, one time, got as far as San Francisco. Jazz musicians have never enjoyed the same level of monetary gain that rock musicians do, but they did pretty well. They recorded on Atlantic, and, between three separate albums, sold several hundred thousand copies.
         It would be nice to say that the relationship between Sam and Suzy blossomed into a romantic/erotic item, but that didn't happen. When their heyday had spent itself, Sam settled back into a regular routine playing at the Moonrise Room, with a different back-up band, and Suzy went to New York where she still sings jazz all over town, and has got into light opera: her Mabel in Pirates of Penzance has received favorable reviews, and she has a large studio of private students on the side.
         Sam started making an effort to connect with the world in more ways than one, he is speaking in complete sentences now, and he has bought himself a house in a quiet neighborhood on the lower north side. He still sees Aunt Maxine every Sunday, (she's in her 80s, now), and he has started dating one of the waitresses at the Moonrise Room: but that's another story; a good one, but not this one.

Richard Freeman-Toole
[e-mail]
freemantlemusic.com