But Beautiful. Geoff Dyer
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—What’s your name?
—Monk.
—You got ID?
Monk’s hand moved toward his pocket—
—Steady, motioned the cop, loving the threat of saying it slow like that.
Handed him a wallet with the cabaret card, the photo on it so dark he could have been anyone. He glanced at Bud in the car, his eyes full of rain and lights.
—Thelonious Sphere Monk. That you?
—Yeah. The word came clear of his mouth like a tooth.
—Big name.
Rain falling into pools of blood neon.
—And who’s that in the car?
—Bud Powell.
Taking his time, the cop bent down, picked up the stash of heroin, peered into it, dabbed a little on his tongue.
—This yours?
He looked at Bud, shivering in the car, looked back at the cop.
—This yours or his?
Monk stood there, rain falling around him. Sniffed.
—Then I guess it’s yours. The cop took another look at the cabaret card, tossed it like a cigarette into a puddle.
—And I guess you won’t be needing that for a while, Thelonious.
Monk looked down at the rain pattering his photo, a raft in a crimson lake.
Was Monk got busted but he never said nothin. Something like that, wouldn’t even occur to him to rat on Bud. He knew what kind of a state Bud was in. Monk was weird, coming and going out of himself like he did, but Bud was a wreck, a junkie, an alcoholic, half the time so crazy he was like a jacket with no one inside it – no way could he have survived prison.
Monk did ninety days, never talked about prison. Nellie visited him, told him she was doing everything she could to get him out but mostly just sat there waiting for him to say something back to her, reading his eyes. After he got out he couldn’t play in New York. The idea of ordinary work never entered his mind and by then he’d just about made himself unemployable anyway, so Nellie worked. He made a few records, played out of town a few times but New York was his city and he didn’t see why he should have to leave it. Mainly he just stayed at home. Laying dead, he called it.
The un-years was what Nellie called them. They came to an end when he was offered a residency at the 5-Spot for as long as he wanted, as long as people wanted to see him. Nellie came most nights. When she wasn’t there he got restless, tense, pausing for an extra-long time between numbers. Sometimes, in the middle of a song, he called home to see how she was, grunting, making noises into the phone that she understood as a tender melody of affection. He’d leave the phone off the hook and go back to the piano so she could hear what he was playing for her, getting up again at the end of the song, putting another coin in.
—Still there, Nellie?
—It’s beautiful, Thelonious.
—Yeuh, yeuh. Staring at the phone like he was holding something very ordinary in his hand.
He didn’t like to leave his apartment and his words didn’t want to leave his mouth. Instead of coming out of his lips the words rolled back into his throat, like a wave rolling back into the sea instead of crashing onto the beach. Swallowed as he spoke, forming words reluctantly as if language were a foreign language. He made no concessions in his music, just waited for the world to understand what he was doing, and it was the same with his speech, he just waited for people to learn to decipher his modulated grunts and whines. A lot of the time he relied on a few words – shit, motherfucker, yah, nawh – but he also liked saying stuff that nobody understood. He loved big words as names for his songs – crepuscule, epistrophy, panonica, misterioso – big words that were joky too, words as difficult to get your tongue around as his music was to get your fingers around.
Some nights he’d give a little speech from the stand, the words lost in brambles of saliva.
—Hey! Butterflies faster than birds? Must be, ’cause with all the birds on the scene in my neighbourhood there’s this butterfly and he flies any way he wanna. Yeah. Black-and-yellow butterfly.
He’d started the bebop look of berets and shades but that had become a uniform like the music. When he was playing now he liked to dress in suits as sober as possible, or sports jackets, setting these off with hats that defied logic but which he made look completely ordinary – as though a ‘mollusk’ hat worn by Asian peasants were as essential an accessory to a suit as a collar and tie.
—Did his hats have any effect on his playing?
His face filled with a huge grin:
—Nawh, haha. Well, I dunno. Maybe they do . . .
When someone else was soloing he got up and did his dance. He started quietly, tapping a foot, clicking his fingers, then he raised his knees and elbows, rotating, shaking his head, meandering everywhere with his arms outstretched. Always looking like he was about to fall over. He spun around and around on the spot and then lurched back to the piano, giddy with purpose. People laughed when he was dancing and that was the most appropriate reaction as he shuffled around like a bear after its first taste of strong alcohol. He was a funny man, his music was funny, and most of what he said was a joke except he didn’t say much. His dancing was a way of conducting, finding a way into the music. He had to get inside a piece, till it was a part of him, internalize it, work himself into it like a drill biting into wood. Once he had buried himself in the song, knew it inside out, then he would play all around it, never inside it – but it always had that intimacy, that directness, because he was at the heart of it, he was in it. He didn’t play around the tune, he played around himself.
—What is the purpose of your dancing, Mr Monk? Why do you do it?
—Get tired of sitting at the piano.
You had to see Monk to hear his music properly. The most important instrument in the group – whatever the format – was his body. He didn’t play the piano really. His body was his instrument and the piano was just a means of getting the sound out of his body at the rate and in the quantities he wanted. If you blotted out everything except his body you would think he was playing the drums, foot going up and down on the hi-hat, arms reaching over each other. His body fills in all the gaps in the music; without seeing him it always sounds like something’s missing but when you see him even piano solos acquire a sound as full as a quartet’s. The eye hears what the ear misses.
He could do anything and it seemed right. He’d reach into his pocket for a handkerchief, grab it, and play with just that hand, holding the handkerchief, mopping up notes that had spilled from the keyboard, wipe his face while keeping the melody with the other hand as though playing the piano came as easy to him as blowing his nose.
—Mr Monk, how do you feel about the eighty-eight keys of the piano. Are they too many or too few?
—Hard enough playing those eighty-eight.
Part of jazz