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 not you, I’m you.’ Everywhere he went he heard people sounding like him. He called everyone else Pres because he saw himself everywhere. He’d been thrown out of the Fletcher Henderson band for not sounding enough like Hawk. Now he was being thrown out of his own life for not sounding enough like himself.
Nobody could sing a song or tell a story on the horn the way he could. Except there was only one story he played now and that was the story of how he couldn’t play anymore, how everyone else was telling his story for him, the story of how he’d ended up here in the Alvin, looking out the window at Birdland, wondering when he was going to die. It was a story he didn’t quite understand and one he wasn’t even that motherfuckin interested in anymore except to say it began with the army. Either it began with the army or it began with Basie and ended with the army. Same either way. He’d ignored his draft papers for years, relying on the band’s zigzagging itinerary to keep him five or six steps ahead of the military. Then, as he was walking off the stand one night, an army official with a sharkskin face and aviator shades came up to him like a fan asking for his autograph and handed him his call-up papers.
He’d turned up to his induction board so wasted the walls of the room shivered with fever. He sat opposite three grim military officials, one of whom never raised his eyes from the files in front of him. Knuckle-faced men who each day subjected their jaws to shaving as though they were boots to be polished. Smelling sweetly of cologne, Pres stretched out his long legs, assuming a position as close to horizontal as the hard chair permitted, looking as though he might at any moment rest his dainty shoes on the desk facing him. His answers danced around their questions, nimble and slurred at the same time. He took a pint of gin from an inside pocket of his double-breasted jacket and one of the officers snatched it from him, blaring angrily as Pres, serene and bewildered, waved slowly:
—Hey, lady, take it easy, there’s plenty for everyone.
Tests showed he had syphilis; he was drunk, stoned, so wired on amphetamines his heart was ticking like a watch – and yet somehow he passed the medical. It seemed they were determined to waive everything in order to get him into the army.
Jazz was about making your own sound, finding a way to be different from everybody else, never playing the same thing two nights running. The army wanted everyone to be the same, identical, indistinguishable, looking alike, thinking alike, everything remaining the same day after day, nothing changing. Everything had to form right angles and sharp edges. The sheets of his bed were folded hard as the metal angles of his locker. They shaved your head like a carpenter planing a block of wood, trying to make it absolutely square. Even the uniforms were designed to remold the body, to make square people. Nothing curved or soft, no colours, no silence. It seemed almost unbelievable that in the space of a fortnight the same person could suddenly find himself in so totally different a world.
He had a slack, drawling walk and here he was expected to march, to tramp up and down the parade ground in boots heavy as a ball and chain. Marching until his head felt brittle as glass.
—Swing those arms, Young. Swing those arms.
Telling him to swing.
He hated everything hard, even shoes with leather soles. He had eyes for pretty things, flowers and the smell they left in a room, soft cotton and silk next to his skin, shoes that hugged his feet: slippers, moccasins. If he’d been born thirty years later he’d have been camp, thirty years earlier he’d have been an aesthete. In nineteenth-century Paris he could have been an effete fin de siècle character but here he was, landlocked in the middle of a century, forced to be a soldier.
When he woke the room was filled with the green haze of a neon sign outside that had blinked to life while he slept. He slept so lightly it hardly even merited the name of sleep, just a change in the pace of things, everything floating away from everything else. When he was awake he sometimes wondered if he was just dozing, dreaming he was here, dying in a hotel room . . .
His horn lay next to him on the bed. On a bedside cabinet were a picture of his parents, bottles of cologne, and his porkpie hat. He’d seen a photograph of Victorian girls wearing hats like that, ribbons hanging down. Nice, pretty, he thought, and had worn one ever since. Herman Leonard had come to photograph him once but ended up leaving him out of the picture altogether, preferring a still life of the hat, his sax case, and cigarette smoke ascending to heaven. That was years ago but the photo was like a premonition that came closer to being fulfilled with each day that passed as he dissolved into the bits and pieces people remembered him by.
He cracked the seal of a new bottle and walked back to the window, one side of his face dyed green in the neon glow. It had stopped raining, the sky had cleared. A cold moon hung low over the street. Cats were turning up at Birdland, shaking hands and carrying instrument cases. Sometimes they looked up toward his window and he wondered if they saw him there, one hand waving condensation from the pane.
He went over to the wardrobe, empty except for a few suits and shirts and the jangle of hangers. He took off his trousers, hung them up carefully, and lay back on the bed in his shorts, green-tinged walls crawling with the shadow angles of passing cars.
—Inspection!
Lieutenant Ryan flung open his locker, peered inside, jabbed with his swagger stick – his wand, Pres always called it – at the picture taped to the inside of the door: a woman’s face smiling out.
—Is this your locker, Young?
—Yes, sir.
—And did you pin this picture up, Young?
—Yes, sir.
—Notice anything about that woman, Young?
—Sir?
—Does anything strike you about that woman, Young?
—She has a flower in her hair, sir, yes.
—Nothing else?
—Sir?
—She looks to me like a white woman, Young, a young white woman, Young. Is that how she looks to you?
—Yes, sir.
—And you think it’s right for a nigger private to have a picture of a white woman in his locker like
