Sam Kates II: Chanson Iconique-Part 1

Sam Kates Aspie Sax Player II: Chanson Iconique

I.
Sam Kates suddenly felt alone. He had never felt this before because in order to feel alone you have to already have some sense of separateness from the world--you have to be able to tell where you end and the world begins. Infant Baby Sam, age 38, who was not typically able to tell the difference between the experience of his inner life from the experience of his outer life, suddenly felt alone, disjointed, cut off from his context. This moment glared an unexpected clash of dissonance into his mind as he suddenly (and possibly for the first time) felt alone, and, just as suddenly, felt a subtle but distinctly articulate intimation of who he was. Maybe we should backtrack a little.

In a previous story, we learned about how Sam Kates had a miraculous talent for music. We saw him, a pitiful autistic child cut off from the world by Asperger mental blindness and twisted neurosis, reaching out with the only meaningful gift he had--a photographic (audiographic? audiosonic?) memory. He could remember, and parrot back, on the saxophone, anything he heard--anything. Every pitch nuance, every tempo fluctuation, every grace note, every articulation. He could also transpose these memories to any key, gliding over octave displacements with transparent ease, and making the memorized version fit with any small jazz combo he played with.

He had made a brief splash on the steps of the jazz temple of fame with his Chicago-based group, the Mellow 4, (later 5, when vocalist Susan Wright joined the group and taught Sam how to make up his own tunes); he made a fair amount of money touring, playing some pretty big metropolitan halls, enough to buy a small house on the north side, and he had sold a lot of records (all this is relative to the basic fact that jazz audiences have always been and will ever be smaller than teen-age rock audiences); but, although his four albums of standards made with Suzy, and a rotating continuum of sidemen, were now often to be found in the music libraries of  jazz connoisseurs in Chicago, New York, and even San Francisco, the fickle public had cooled over time in its enthusiasm for him, just as it cools for most flashes in the pan of music history. He had brought a new voice to the world of swing at a time when swing was still hip (and it was hip for a good long time); he had played with a level of virtuosity and motivic invention not heard since the Bird smacked his way through heaven's gates; but so many jazz innovators had moved so far away from the old forms, the old tunes, that Sam was considered classic before his 20 years were up, and he had, consequently, to accept a lesser place in the pantheon of stars, and a lower income tax bracket as well. He moved back to his old Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night residency at the Moonlight Room on Lakeshore Drive, playing for union scale plus tips, with a new rhythm section (no singer). He might have eked out a little longer career if he had had some creative management, but there was no one willing to handle his business affairs, he was certainly helpless to do so himself, and when Suzy went on to bigger (not better) things in New York, that was pretty much that.

Now, all during the years that Sam played the Moonlight Room with the Mellow 4, and even afterwards, when he started making it big, he still remained essentially clueless as to what was physically happening to him; somebody brought him to the gig (until he learned how to get there himself--not too long, a couple of months), he played, he went home. The music was the central substance, the periphery, and the all-encompassing motive for the experience--the audience, the sidemen, and the money might as well have existed on another planet for all the regard Sam gave them. He had no relationship, personal or otherwise with anything but the music. Through Suzy's positive influence he had slowly begun to break out of his introverted shell; he was getting to be able to carry on short, shallow conversations with Suzy and the guys, he could count his own tips, he could order his own egg salad sandwiches, and he was starting to read more of the signs in airport terminals and hotel lobbies; but he still had a long way to go before he could be considered anything even approximately approaching "normal." He took a long time getting to understand that he was making more (a lot more) money, and he had to be shown his picture in scores of newspapers and magazines before he began to get the idea of "reputation." Yes, he liked playing in the big halls because he liked the reverberant sound of the big stages, and he liked playing for attentive audiences, not the casual barroom drinkers on Lakeshore Drive, who only occasionally had ever given him their full attention; but as to the touring, the traveling, the airport, bus, and hotel room service part, he was only able to tolerate it because he knew he was going to get to play soon, and because he was constantly attended (babysat) by Suzy and the guys in the Mellow 4. So, when the touring and recording and radio broadcasting ended, it could be said that he was right back where he started.

Right back where he started was fine with Sam, because the music was still his only way of making sense out of the swirling madness of impressions, sounds, sights, and distractions the legion of shopkeepers call the "world." Indeed, the relative quiet of concert performance, as opposed to barroom playing, was its chief attraction: he barely noticed the larger and larger audiences, in terms of the PEOPLE he was playing for, so when he found himself back at the Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night gig, he once again learned to filter out the tinkling glass, the laughter, and the smoke, and, once again lost himself (or found himself) in the fantastic astral landscapes that had been his private domain for so long, before the madding crowd had taken him into their brief embrace. He had always played for himself, later for himself and Suzy, but mostly for himself.

This brings us back to our opening statement: Sam Kates suddenly felt alone. He was standing on the bandstand, his gaze fixed, as always, on the short stick of the piano. The tune was, you guessed it, Someone to Watch Over Me. He was kind of missing Suzy, in the vague sort of way a dog misses its master after long separation, not really knowing what the feeling is, but sensing an absence, ephemeral in the mind but tangible in the chest; it made him slightly short-winded. But this wasn't the loneliness. Suzy's expert tutelage had brought his creativity along such that he had been able, for longer and longer stretches of time, to create intricate lead lines of his own devising; derivative, to be sure, but what jazz playing isn't? And fast! The guy was a speed demon when he got worked up. And, although he was not always original or inspired, he NEVER played a wrong note. Never. Anyway, Someone to Watch over Me had sort of been Suzy's and his special song, and the missing her had left in him a longing for something that he could not put his finger on, and, suddenly, so suddenly, his fingering faltered and, for a brief moment, he had no idea where he was in the tune. (This, as was just mentioned, was an unheard-of anomaly, and all three sidemen looked up.) But that wasn't the loneliness either: it was that he knew that HE was supposed to come up with something to play, and, out of the blue he flashed on the fact that he had no idea who he was, and had no idea where his notes came from. Suzy had taught him to improvise, instead of quoting ver batim one classic recording after another, but until this moment it had never actually occurred to him that HE was the origin of these notes, not some resonant Akashic record vibrating in the collective Omega Point. He was a babe lost in the woods, and no Virgil, no Charlie, no Coleman was there to point the way. The lapse lasted for a moment only, before he substituted the end of a Lester Young solo he knew, to conclude the phrase. He got back on track, but for the rest of the night that moment of emptiness haunted him, and he slouched out of the hotel distracted and depressed.

II.
Sam walked home that night. He didn't usually do this; he was a veteran bus-taker, but he knew the route, had hoofed it several times before, and, although he had been fore-warned that if he did this he took a chance on losing his expensive saxophone to any random carload of low-riding punks who happened to drive by, he could not face the confining dull glare of the bus at 1:00 AM.

It is no mystery why Chicago is the legitimate birthplace of the blues. There is no loneliness, no emptiness, no archetypal iconicized pain like the groan of human misery that writhes along the streets of downtown Chicago at 1:00 AM. A mild, half-hearted rain had sprinkled little mirrors of light across broken stretches of sidewalk, and the wind, that relentless Lake Michigan wind, rippled over their faces, lending a silent voice to their hysterical groans and guffaws. Sam watched his own downcast face merge periodically with the fantastic images of water and wind, to disappear and reappear in a grotesque rhythm; and, in time to the music, he began to hear the dull internal repetition of a forlorn litany: "Sam. Sam. Sam. Sam."

The walk home took hours, but when the concentrated rows of little Jewish lox and bagel shops and carpet stores at last began to thin and give way to the first vestiges of residential neighborhood, he walked on, past his own little 50s house with its 20x30 fenced yard, and slouched deeper into the night: "Sam. Sam. Sam." It was dawn by the time he finally wended his way back, stumbled up the stoop, and collapsed onto the living room floor in a heap. He breathed a final "Sam," into the carpet, and fell asleep.

He awoke around noon. Exhaustion creased his face like a tired scar. It was Friday. In eight hours he would have to be back at the Moonlight Room playing standards for rich drunks--again. And suddenly, like the suddenness of the loneliness of the night before, he felt something new, something he had not truly felt since he had laid eyes on his abusive father for the last time, waving him good-bye and good riddance onto the bus to Chicago and Aunt Maxine: real, physical, rooted-deep-in-your-nerves TERROR. He lay frozen on the shag carpet and moaned. How could he ever go back there? How could he face that yawning mystery of Sam ever, ever, ever again? The specter of that short stick on the piano, by turns, threatened and taunted him. He could not imagine himself standing there, he could only imagine himself NOT standing there; and this thought, alone, was his only respite, his only retreat from that binding, panic-stricken fear that held him in its suffocating grip. 

Finally, a new sensation seized his gut and he knew he was hungry. It was not a ravenous, desperate hunger, but a kind of dull memory in the back of his head that sort of squeezed its way in between him and the fear, not clamoring, but sort of whining for attention like a spaniel left alone in the house for too long. Sam managed to haul himself up off the floor. He threw a Swanson chicken dinner into the microwave. Waiting, he stripped down and took a bath. As he lay, chin-deep in the warm-lapping comfort, he nursed the hunger, substituting it for the terror whenever it peeked again over the verge of his consciousness. He floated lightly, the water rippling up to his mouth then undulating down his chest. The hunger whispered its name in the gentle laps, and the terror shrank like a diminished chord, dripping onto the floor as he rose to meet eddies of chicken and stuffing. By the time he scraped his way to the bottom of the little pocket of jubilant cherries he was calmed down. The mantric drone of "Sam" had not completely stilled itself in his internal ear, but it was muted to the point that competing pictures were now allowed to form in his mind.

For a brief instant, he thought of taking his saxophone (formerly, so formerly, his sole source of comfort and defense against the cruelties of life), out of its case, and realized that the terror, the rushing black, overpowering TERROR dwelt therein. He couldn't even touch it. He actually KICKED it into a corner and threw a blanket over its rectangular protuberance. He then thought about watching TV, but that thought was almost as stifling as the idea of playing music, so he sat on the couch and let other images meander across the proscenium of his inner vision. It was quiet now, and Schumann's Traumerei led him down paths of elves and periwigs to a place of stillness and comfortable fixity.

It is difficult to describe the thoughts that go through an aspie's mind, but you can get the idea if you combine algebra with dreaming. The algebraic aspect is subsumed in a characteristically rigid sense of logical sequence; successions of mental pictures progress, step by step, in seamless promenade, from shape to shape, like any other slide show of imminent nostalgia, one picture following another, each linked to the next in perfect symmetry and sympathy. But it is like a dream because the pictures have not only widely varying depths and aspect ratios, but also widely varying weights, densities, and inertias as well; and these variations may appear, to the mind's eye, so extreme, so far beyond the "normal" range of motion, as to imply distortion and irrationality. Of course they are not in the least irrational to the aspie himself-- aspies are nothing if not totally logical-- but the logic occurs in a cognitive environment of heightened limits, atmospheres of exaggerated dimensions. This is what generates in the aspie an emotional life of super-normal intensity.

The verbal content is lacking because aspies attach names to things only in the most eccentric and seemingly random ways, but an objective observer (preferably a poet) COULD assign symbolic referential values to them--the pictures. Like dreams, the pictures DO correlate with objective realities, but the inner resonance of the images cannot be contained by literal constraints. You might say that an aspie's cognitive experience oscillates between the mundane and the mythological, constantly, rhythmically, transposing values, transferring the one dimension over to the other and back again; his thoughts might be perceived as delicate Japanese bridges spanning the gap between the physical world and astral gardens. This is not to say that the astral gardens are ALWAYS peopled by sweet Tinker Bells and bonsai trees--sometimes flaming dragons and ravening trolls lurk under the bridges. Thus, an aspie's inner world is consistently more vivid than the one typically available to the circular-thinking "normal" person; it can be exponentially more ecstatic, but it can also be more terrifyingly dangerous. Sam had chosen, early in life, to repress his experience of the dark shores on the far side of these mental canyons (it was the only way he could deal with his father and a whole buttload of other bewildering exigencies he didn't understand), but, it would seem, today, last night, rather, that his expanding world view, catalyzed by Miss Susan Wright, had snaked across the moat to bite him in the ass in a big way. It had taken seven years, but Sam's foray into the world of personal creativity, had finally conjured up, before his mind's eye, a picture of himself; and he didn't recognize it worth shit.

III.
The Art Institute. The words shaped themselves on his lips with a eureka of inspiration. You may recall that, long ago, Sam's home away from home had become the Chicago Art Institute; he had spent so much time there the security guards let him carry his saxophone inside, and never hassled him no matter how long he stood transfixed in front of this painting or that. They all knew him by name, and had followed his career with interest--many articles about "The Musical Savant of the Moonlight Room" had decorated the pages of the Chicago Sun Times over the years--two or three of the guards even owned some of his albums. The Art Institute had provided Sam with a safe avenue of retreat on more than one occasion, and it was to that lion-studded haven that he fled today. He threw off the blanket and hesitantly grabbed the handle of his saxophone case, heading for the bus stop in a single bound.

On the bus, across from him, a six-year-old boy was riding with his mother, or possibly a middle-aged aunt. The boy had those big eyes, full of the city, that spoke wonderingly of the newness of life that is the exclusive province of six-year-olds. He dangled his short legs over the edge of the seat into the aisle and pointed with his finger to the back of the bus.

"Why are the seats all lined up like this?" he asked his matronly companion, as if this were a mystery, of cosmic import. Those big eyes.

"What? What you say?" (Maybe a little German accent, maybe Russian.)

"The seats. Why are the seats -- like that?" His finger is as full of question marks as his eyes.

"Shtupid kyid," she explained. (Definitely Russian.) "They're thet way because thet's the way they yar."

"Oh." Simple minds appreciate simple truths. His inquiring glance strayed to Sam's face. Sam didn't know to look away. (There's a myth that aspies don't look you in the eye. The fact is that they are just as likely to inappropriately look you in the eye as they are to inappropriately not look you in the eye.) Sam didn't look away, thereby inviting the following awkward exchange:

"Hey mister. Hey mister, what's in the box?"

Still stuck in those big eyes, Sam clutched his horn to his breast like a baby. "Sassapone." Gravelly voice unclear, guttural,  unaccustomed speech comes slow. "Saxophone. My saxophone."

"Like a trumpet?" Interest ignited, the boy leans forward.

"No, a saxophone. Has a reed."

"What's a reed?"

"Little piece of wood." In two deft motions he flips up the snaps and pops open the case. "See?" He holds out the mouthpiece indicating the thin reed ligatured to its black plastic cone.

The saxophone glitters in the boy's eyes like yellow diamonds. "Wow! You play it?"

"Yeah. Sam plays it. Sam." He playfully gives a little honk on the thing, discrete but audible.

Ruptured with hilarity the boy squeals, "Sounds like a duck. Ha, ha, ha!"

Sam laughs back, "A duck reed! Ha, ha, ha."

Instantly, Aunt Koschlova, turns, and, with a ferocious scowl, hisses, "Shtop talking to thet--myan!" With an unaccounted-for violence she jerks the boy to his feet and drags him down the aisle to a seat further back. "Pyervyert!" She hisses again from a foot above Sam's head.

This is why Sam doesn't talk much.

IV.
Sam got off the bus across the street from the Art Institute and raced up the stone steps, two at a time. With a nod of recognition to the lion on his right, he breezed through the spinning door. Not running, but walking very fast, he made his way up the stairs to his favorite section, the abstract expressionists. Sweating and breathing heavily, he stood before the Jackson Pollock--the Pollock dominating its own solitary outer wall, gateway to the moderns. He put down his case and allowed himself to be absorbed by the tiny black squiggles crusted onto the lap of virgin white. It was minutes before he was able to breathe normally.

He didn't know how long he had been standing there when a voice from behind roused him from his meditations. "Hi Sam."

It was Sharon, one of the waitresses at the Moonlight Room. She dispelled the fog surrounding Sam's outer perception with a wave, and glided into his field of vision like a unicorn on a merry-go-round, stopping in front of him. She stepped off a nameless streetcar coming to the end of the line, and illuminated the spot with a veiled smile, brilliant behind its mask. She walked through a curtain of enchanted evening and crowded out the Jackson Pollock with a gentle nudge and a giggle. Oh, how that giggle reverberated cooly along the hardwood floors, somehow ivory white, the color of chessmen, somehow liquid like the streets of Venice!

Short, blonde, young but not too young, she had been working nights at the hotel for about as long as Sam had been there since his return to Chicago. As you know, aspies have trouble recognizing faces, but Sharon's was familiar to him because it was not like other faces; it had a longish shape to it, deep, twisted dimples at the corners of the small nervous mouth, and there was the faintest hint of a scar right at the hairline above her left eye—her brilliantly blue left eye. It was the scar (and the eyes) that told him who she was. That he knew who she was, was not alone remarkable. That she kept his attention was. Perhaps it was his momentary vulnerability that opened him to her, perhaps it was the feeling of missing Suzy that welcomed this thinly approximate substitution. The point is that, ordinarily, Sam would have bolted whenever a familiar person approached him in public--a March Hare with an important date SOMEWHERE ELSE would have disappeared down a dark hole with no less haste than Sam would have retreated into distant anonymity at the sound of his name. Sam didn't do that. He stood and waited. She approached and he waited. Perhaps he was a deer frozen in Sharon's headlights--we'll never know.

One of Sharon's jobs at the Moonlight Room was to watch over the several brandy glass tip cups distributed around the bar; sometimes people were careless and let the dollars spill out onto the floor, sometimes the nouveau drunk would knock one completely over, and Sharon would have to stuff all the bills back in, meanwhile resisting the temptation to slip a buck or two into her own pocket. This she did admirably well. Understand, the musicians depended on the tip cup for that extra under-the-table income that made the difference; the tip cup alone was capable, on a good night, of handling cab fare for a month, even rent; so, when Sharon came around at closing with the night's take, she was always a welcome sight. Sam had progressed so far in his dealings with money as to recognize when they had had a good night and when the clientele was being cheap. It still didn't mean that much to him, but it made him feel good when the guys felt good, so he always felt good about Sharon as the bringer and giver of goodness.

"Hi Sam," she said again, and waited. Everybody at the Moonlight Room, (indeed, practically everybody in Chicago), knew that Sam was autistic, and they had been instructed to be especially gentle with him. She waited.

"Sam," he said.

"It's Sharon," she said.

"Sharon," he repeated. "Sharon. I know. The glass girl."

[Yes, don't ask why the brandy glass is called a tip cup. Especially don't ask Sam.]

"That's right. Sharon. Watcha doin' here?"

"Pictures. Sam--I like the pictures."

"Me too. You come here often?"

"Sam--I come here--a lot. I look at this picture a lot."

"This is my very first time."

"I come here a lot. I look at this picture a lot."

"This one?" She looks down at the far right corner--the placard with the title and painter on it. She looks down at the book she is holding open in her hands. "Jackson Pollock? Greyed Rainbow. I don't know--looks like a bunch of scribbles to me. You like it, huh?"

Here, we need a sidebar on Sharon, Sharon the heroine:

She's not much to look at. She might be somewhat pretty if you fixed her up--put on makeup, swooped the tangle of bright hair into some pretense of obedience, evened out the shoulders of her blouse, you know, the normal maintenance stuff that most women live for, some women die for, and some women (damn their negligent mothers) never happen to notice. She is almost 30, give or take, but you could mistake her for 40 if you caught her thinking about the past, and for 20 if you momentarily caught in her eye the effervescent exuberance of any of a dozen enthusiasms she hoarded in her bosom against the cold of winter.

We have to talk about the scar. She married for love, too young, and, after five years, her incipient, sarcastic asshole of a husband blossomed into a full-fledged, abusive asshole. We don't need a detailed profile of him, the sacrifices she made for him, nor the disappointments that soured him on life; he wasn’t a bad guy at heart, but, over those five years, the pent-up anger of failure after failure began to back up on him, and found its only viable expression in more and more frequent acts of pointless violence; he wasn't that much of drinker either, which is kind of too bad, because if he had had a little more experience with the effects of alcohol, he might have been able to pull his punches the night he put her in the hospital for a week.

As you might have guessed, the first fruits of that night’s labor were a suspended sentence, a quick divorce, and, of course, the scar. Starting over at age 25 was hard for Sharon, entering college, part-time, as a freshman when most of the students her age already had masters' degrees. But she had never felt the world owed her a living—she understood the ramifications of her humble origins in low-brow, white trash squalor, accepted the difficulties inherent in any attempt to rise above them, and was proud of her distinction not only as the only member of her extended family who had ever attempted an advanced degree, but as one of a select two or three who had even graduated high school. She wasn't quite sure what she wanted out of life, but she knew there was something more than the trailer park in Kankakee, grimy kids, and blue collar Friday night beer and sex.

In short, Sharon was intelligent but ignorant. Ignorant but growing. She had lived on the south side her whole life, in one of the biggest and most cultured cities in the world, and had, so far, never attended a Chicago Symphony concert, never seen a Shakespeare play, never visited the Museum of Science and Industry, and had NEVER set foot inside the Art Institute until today. She was taking an art appreciation class as a 100 level Humanities elective, and she wanted to see firsthand some of the pictures discussed in the book. She was also taking Introduction to Computer Applications 101, but we'll get to that.

When she saw Sam standing there, she was instantly drawn to him, not as a compadre or a prop, but merely as anyone, in strange forbidding surroundings, is drawn to anything or anybody familiar. Actually, in her excitement at running into someone she knew, somebody who might help her understand what she was seeing, she momentarily forgot he was autistic, or she might not have gone up to him. It was more or less a reflex, she realized almost instantly, but having committed herself to the interaction, she couldn’t back off. Sharon wasn't a snob; coming from a large family of dumb people, she did not hold it against Sam that he was kind of dumb. She thought—well, she didn't think, she just reached out to him. Thus doth fate ring in the new with startled song. Who knew?

"This one? Jackson Pollock? I don't know--looks like a bunch of scribbles to me. You like it, huh?"

"I look at it a lot. Long time."

"You come here often?"

"Many times."

"You know the museum pretty well, then, huh? I'm taking a class--want to see some of the pictures in my art appreciation book. Can you show me around?"

Sam froze. Four years ago he might have broken down into a blubbering mess, at this suggestion; but today he just froze. Of course he could show her around--here's this painting, here's that painting, the green one, the red one, the old lady one. He knew the whole museum, and had every picture was labeled in his mind in Samspeak. It had never occurred to him to look at the titles on the little placards to see what everybody else called them—it is not absolutely clear that he understood that the paintings HAD names, nor that they were the work of actual real live painters--people. But he put that together, right quick enough, when she said the name Jackson Pollock, and sort of inclined her head toward the sign. Maybe he thought the name of the painting was Jackson Pollock, maybe not, but the idea of naming things started up a chain of epiphanies that would blossom into a major enlightenment experience in the next few minutes.

"I don't get this one. Looks like a bunch of scribbles to me. You like it, huh?"

Sam nodded. He was good at nodding.

"You say you look at it a lot?"

"I look at it many--times. Many time."

"But what IS it? What do you see?" All she could see was a crowd of black swirls dancing across the field of white like crazy, sludgy sleet.

"It makes music in me." The words just slipped out--he had not known they were coming. It was the first time that Sam had ever had that thought, EXPRESSED that thought, but, on the instant, he flashed on the fact that it was true--he did hear music in the picture; the mode of thought, the world he entered into when he looked at the picture was music. The black swirls careened 16th notes in his mind and arpeggios splashed the virgin white with skittering tunes. Maybe that was why he had stood in front of it for hours, for years. For years, indeed, this picture had been making music in Sam, and he had never noticed.

Music and thought were inseparable in Sam's mind, so he had never before stopped to distinguish between the WORDS of thought and the SOUNDS of thought--for him they were, and pretty much always had been, the same. Remember, Sam had only recently committed any of his attention whatsoever to the world of verbal communication, and he was still unpracticed at it; moreover, although he was learning how to communicate with other people in words, his sole language of mental communication with HIMSELF was still music, music, only music. He made no inner monologues to himself like the rest of us. He thought in sounds, repeating motives, harmonic sequences, crescendi and decrescendi--hardly any articulate verbal expressions ever violated that abstract cognitive canvas with an intruding, corporeal, referential entity. Music defined the subjective world that was Sam’s safe haven and his prison, while WORDS evoked the outer objective world, separate from Sam, overwhelming, terrifying, and aweful.

Words created a schism in Sam, divided his perceptions into ME and THEM, MINE and THEIRS. The tang of Suzy Wright telling him to “Play Sam’s tune,” was fresh in his mouth, exciting, and new, ever after so many years; but the effort involved in creating original musical constructions was still so weighty that, at times, he could simply not bear it, especially without Suzy to cheer him on. The effort of constructing sentences was even worse. Hence, out of laziness, (willful or conditioned, what’s the difference?) Sam’s verbal inner monologue, when such as rarely made their unwelcome appearance, consisted of 99.9999% quotations of things he has heard other people say—inventing his own anomalous literal expressions was still so difficult he needed intense motivation to urge him into the breach. Therefore, imagine his shocked surprise when he realized that the Pollock not only made music in him, but that the music was not Someone to Watch Over Me, or Lover Man, or Georgia, or Foggy Day. This was an astounding thought--he struggled to hold onto it.

"I guess the scribbles kind of look like notes. I guess." (Little did she know that Sam couldn’t read music.)

"They SOUND like notes. In here." He tapped his head.

"Huh." That was deep. Of course it makes music in him, he plays the saxophone. "Let's go look at the Miro."

V.
Before they knew it, they were strolling through the museum together. Sharon was chatting idly as women do, about this and that, this landscape, that portrait, her job, her part-time college classes, and occasionally Sam's playing. She was leading him away from the moderns toward the Renaissance (she wanted to get it all in). At first, Sam wasn't doing her much good, but she felt kind of comfortable with him. He said practically nothing, a word here and there, and his blank face hardly registered a thing she was saying; but, as they perambulated arm in arm, (surprise, eh what?), she felt a kind of authority in his presence that gave her confidence. There were subtle little tensions and relaxations that quivered through his arm when they came upon some work with which Sam obviously held a deep sympathetic connection, and Sharon actually learned through his touch where the really great masterpieces were. By God, he WAS showing her around!

Sam had heard hints of melody when she dragged him past the Miro and the Picasso, but it was a lot of trouble for him to keep up his side of the conversation in his halting pidgin English and hear his internal thoughts at the same time, so he sort of turned that part of his brain off and concentrated on her--until they came to the dark black Rembrandt.

Here, he was overwhelmed by a rolling sea of sound. He had seen this self-portrait before (he had seen them all), but, somehow, being with Sharon had awakened an objective self-consciousness in him--her presence motivated him to translate his experience into her language--and he was suddenly AWARE that he was thinking about the painting, reacting to the painting in sound. He said to himself, "Sam--I am HEARING the painting." He meant that the painting was not inherently Sam, but Sam was making it his. The painting and Sam were NOT ONE, but that he was making it so, creating the link in himself between himself and IT. IT was outside coming in. HE WAS DOING THIS. HE WAS WATCHING HIMSELF DO THIS. HE WAS REMEMBERING WATCHING HIMSELF DO THIS.

She continued to quote from her art appreciation book, but her voice was lost to him, fading into the ocean boiling up underneath that lightning-struck face. He actually swayed on his  feet like a sailor in a storm. His entranced mouth moved in time to some inner rhythm, and his eyes shot lasers into the sounding dark. Sharon shut up and watched. She said nothing. Good girl.

Sam wasn't just reacting to the painting, he was reacting to his reacting to the painting, and this was the new thing, and this made all the difference. We have noted that Sam had a perfect memory for sequences of sounds, but it had never before occurred to him to remember his own thoughts. It occurred to him now, and a perfect four-minute composition churned out of him into his mind, start to finish, and was photographed there in the same medium that all the hundreds of jazz performances he had memorized were photographed. After four minutes, he snapped out of it like a medium at a seance, and Sharon said, "Where did you go?" She didn't say, "Are you okay?" or "What happened to you?" or "That was weird," she said, "Where did you go?"

"Where did you go?"

"In the painting. Sam was--I was in the painting. The painting was --the painting was-- singing me."

"You looked lost. Were you lost?"

"At first. In the dark. Then the face. Then I was okay. The face sang and I was okay."

"Wow." She felt somehow honored. She felt somehow close to him like somebody feels close to a great idea, or--a great piece of music. But his music had a face, a smile that she had not seen before, and an arm, which she took without further ado. "Let's go find Whistler."

"The old lady. I know where."

And thus began a beautiful friendship.

VI.
Sam almost had a good night at the Moonlight Room.

The epiphany in front of the Rembrandt was like a purge, a paroxysm, an ejaculation. Afterwards, the peaceful tour of the Art Institute, with Sharon on his arm, (or him on her arm, they couldn't tell), was like a long cigarette break. He floated, balloon-like, down the corridors, dragging Sharon like ballast. He beamed contentment, moseyed peace. It was like Seurat's Sunday Afternoon in the Park, which they enjoyed together on the way to the Whistler. Sam shut off his music-making mind again, occasionally supplying occasional monosyllabic responses to Sharon’s remarks, and they walked together, uneventfully, until closing. They had a quick pizza across the street, then leisurely strolled through the trees in Grant Park, arms still linked in a comfortable fixity, on their way to the Hyatt. They both had to work.

Sam felt tired after the exertions of the night before, and the afternoon at the museum. He was drained, blank, expired. He didn't feel strong enough to make anything up, so he spent most of the night recycling old Coleman Hawkins and Charlie Parker solos. He could do this whenever he wanted; indeed, on many occasions he would go back and forth between personal solos and plagiarized solos, weaving them together like strings of lacy paper dolls; he did this so seamlessly that only the most erudite of jazz aficionados could tell. He played at his usual consistent, competent, sometimes technically brilliant level for three sets.

While he was playing, his eyes remained fixed on the short stick, but during breaks they (his eyes) sought out Sharon; he watched her clear tables, take orders, ring up customers, and attend the tip cup. He watched her with interest, as though he had never seen a young woman at work before (maybe he hadn't). He felt there was something important, some mystery, lurking there behind the cash register; and it was with difficulty that he returned to his job cranking out standards for the folks' listening (or non-listening, or sort-of-listening) pleasure. She made eye contact with him, too, confirming the relationship that had been established that afternoon. She smiled at him through the chatter and smoke. She realized she liked him, and, listening, really for the first time, she realized he was a really great saxophonist--she was proud of him.

Then the fourth set came. Somebody in the crowd shouted out a request for Someone to Watch Over Me, and Fred the piano player started up on an intro. Reliving last night’s primal scene in a flash, Sam stiffened; the six-note opening motive was like six knives in his heart. With a look of hysterical terror in his eyes, Sam shook off the song like a baseball pitcher shaking off a pitch, and plowed into Paper Moon. But even that didn't dispel the panic that suffused his whole body. He got halfway through the head before falling to his knees, perspiring and wheezing. The people in the front row gave out a unison gasp. The people in the back hardly noticed anything was happening, but Sharon was right there with a tray full of empty glasses, which she promptly dropped back onto the table. She leapt up onto the bandstand and knelt beside Sam.

His lungs were heaving, there were tears on his cheeks, and he was doing that rocking back and forth thing that autistic kids and Hassidic Jews do. His mouth was contorted in a grimace of pain, and he looked at Sharon, or through her, rather. "Sam," he moaned. "Sam," he cried. "Sam!" he screamed, and then they were carrying him out through the kitchen.

VII.
Sam woke up at 8:00 in the morning, on his couch at home. After they got a doctor, (“Seizure,” he said), they had called Aunt Maxine, who insisted it would be worse for him to wake up in a strange hospital room than in familiar surroundings, so they ferried him over to his house on Sullivan Place, left him with a bottle of sedatives, and that's where he came to, with Aunt Maxine and Sharon by his side.

Sharon didn't quite know what she was doing there; one afternoon strolling the Art Institute with Sam hardly made him her close friend, much less her responsibility (or did it?), but since she had been the first to come to his aid, the one to take charge, and the one to insist on seeing him home, there she still was, waiting with 80-year-old Aunt Maxine.

Aunt Maxine had been Sam’s surrogate mother for nearly eighteen years. He had lived with her when he first came to Chicago, she had set him up in his first gig, his first hotel room, had managed all his money matters, and had made him more egg salad sandwiches than Ronald had Big Macs. She loved him as only blood can love blood, and she worried that after she was gone, he would be helpless. She hated that schmuck of a brother-in-law for dumping Sam on her, but she accepted the responsibility with impunity, indeed with joy, for her own children were grown, and gone, and Sam’s childish ways were like to her a new-born babe she could hold to her shriveled breast, protecting and nurturing; through him, she might revisit the youthful days of motherhood.

Make no mistake, there were no flies on Aunt Maxine; she was not one of these pathetic old people—lonely, feeble, clinging, with nothing to do but live vicariously through their children. True, she missed her dead husband once in a while, in the lonesome midnight hours, but, oh no, she had plenty to do, what with volunteering at the homeless shelter, her bridge club, Great Books meetings once a month, recycling center twice a month, even Senior Bowling; she had many friends and many activities that filled her days, and she would not go gentle into that dusty concavity of senility; she refused to limit her activities, she renewed her driver’s license every five years, and WOULD NOT HAVE A CAT. In fact, Sam was the only project she maintained that smacked of anything like old age; and she took care of him aggressively, responsibly, and punctually, just like her commitment at the shelter. And yet she wasn’t blocking reality: she knew she couldn’t keep this up forever, and she worried not about the 40-year-old Sam, but the 50-year-old Sam.

“Auntie,” said Sam, raising his head. “Sharon,” he said, falling back.