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16.8.05
Before you even open the door, you can hear the strains of music leaking out and it's a promise, a contract, unspoken, like that between friends, of more good times to come.
As we descended the short stairway into the main room, the stage was immediately to the left, crammed with musicians like a rush hour subway though each was respectful of space, both physical and the internal space of creativity.
To the right, a row of booths, all flanked with black and white photos at crooked angles and dust-collected frames; the club's highlights through the years, spellt out in haunting images as the past so often is.
In seeking out accomodation for the four of us, we spoke in respectful whispers. A tenor sax, which had been giving birth as we approached the entrance, had hushed, its holder's head bowed as the pianist went into a solo.
There was little conversation at other tables. The pianist was the only regular at this once-weekly jam and he was not unlike a reverend speaking psalms through the keys he touched with expertise. And jazz, at its most mournful is not unlike a place of worship.
The outing had been conceived by Ernesto, sat across from me, whom I'd met a few weeks after after blurting out on stage in the middle of a set at the Oblong Club that there was the scent of Ducados in the air and if the guilty party would step forward and kindly surrender a sample...
So easily friendships are forged in the vertigo of intoxication. Ernesto and his girlfriend Alfonsina were both on long-expired student visas from Spain and had found the appropriate anonymity clothed somewhere in the Bronx. Ernesto was a photographer and guitarist although not necessarily in that order, both of which earned him a careless living and yet both of which he'd seemingly perfected in a non chalant way whilst Alfonsina was a poet still struggling with the English language, still struggling with shaping phrases like bashing the dents out of a Mercury's body.
The fourth of our group, Rita, was a Puerto Rican guitar player with a penchant for tattoos.
I'd met Rita many months before, rebounding from a bout of post-infatuation blues who had grown upon me like a second skin to protect myself from revealing who or what I thought I was.
The pianist's solo sutured seamlessly with a trumpet player who'd suddenly stood from a chair on the stage having previously sat motionless, head bowed, a mannequin springing to life, a flower's petals opening.
Our rapture was broken by the subtle arrival of beers and even though we seemed entranced by the trumpeteer, gradually the humble sense of our silence began to give way, the music a background rather than the speck of sound the spotlight sprayed upon.
Two weeks was just enough time to feel almost comfortable together, two couples feeling their way through each other, trepid syncopation as we fumbled through the notes of conversation attempting to find a mutual note.
"I could die in this place," Rita mentioned half hazardly although she was prone to such pronouncements as though the sheer pleasure of living were too much to withstand at times and the end of it in death were the only solution. The right time to go.
Rita also had a habit of confusing the regurgitation of the obvious with poignant remarks as though the silence weren't enough and needed augmentation, a woman's touch, the bland and rootlessness needing the commonality to place itself.
It wasn't that I didn't like Rita. My friends appreciated her because she was uncompetetive and didn't seem to possess the ruthlessness they had cultivated so desperately over the years.
In short, she was harmless and could be charming when given the right stage. More often than not however, a lack of confidence caused her to melt into the scenery, uttering occasional banalities as if to prove she existed, even if it sometimes seems comparatively, in the company of the wolves I often found myself in the company of, that existence was merely a dream we had summoned to keep our balance.
The brand of altruistic infatuation had long since faded, quickly and imperceptively as though we had been living together for years and had only just now realised it.
The purpose of our afternoon out was multiple. On the one hand, there was the mutual obsession with drinking. Drinking needed a background excuse, something we could hear sounding like an echo of justification but which did not deafen. The perfect excuse: let's go listen to jazz at this club I want to show you was just a subterranean pathway to let's go on the roll, blur our afternoon into a semblance of acceptability.
It was also a scouting mission. How good was the talent? Would Ernesto or I think ourselves capable of standing up on our own on that stage, somewhere in the future or would we simply talk about it endlessly over cigarettes and beer until the chairs were turned upside down on their tables and the waistresses began their nightly sweeping?
Of course initially, the cowardice of sobriety was sufficient to keep our lips and fingers cooled to the idea. Ernesto, at least, was talented yet his forte was classical, not jazz and so rarily had he attempted to suffuse the two together, he preferred, as he'd explained before inviting me, to simply enjoy the musicians who'd gathered. But his blood spilled for performing, and I knew instinctively that the invitation had been more of an audition for my ears, an evaluation of whether I would dare go up, this time, or perhaps the next, an accomplice to help him overcome his own insecurities.
"But you, Vladimir, may be the inspiration, the push forward for me to perform my own pieces," Ernesto had explained one night after we'd all four had too much sangria and now were working on the tapas. "You are not afraid to perform before others, unconcerned about whatever distaste may form like saliva at the corners of their mouths..."
I had no strong convictions about my talent and nor did anyone else. In some ways, I was to music like homelessness was to mortgages. But I was what they called a gamer, willing to make a fool of myself if need be just for the chance that there might be just one in the crowd to step forward later and launch an appreciative bluster.
There are people like that, you see. People who need to cling to any semblance of talent or public display of the attempt at talent because it affirms their good taste and thus their lives, miserable as they may be. There will always be one in the crowd to say that they understood if only for the vicarious thrill of speaking with someone just leaving the stage - look at me, they seemed to bleet, I am speaking with the man who has just exited the stage, an important figure which unblemishes me from the rest of you...this sort of admiration was no admiration at all, just another oily human rubbing the soil of their failings all over your skin.
But the stage was too professional, the musicians too accomplished. I knew my limitations. It was one thing to play an open mic somewhere where people expected nothing and so few crumbs or talent they would appreciate - evaluations are simply comparisons and to many, the comparisons were more grandiose the rarer the talent.
Here not only the musicians knew what they were doing but the audience knew what they were listening to. No fraud could be perpetrated here. No avant garde or experimentational music excusing my lack of talent could be feigned in this venue. I could not pass counterfeit denominations created in my kitchen sink to a bank teller who would not instantly recognise the fake.
So regardless of the beers we took in, limited in some fashion by the irregular visits by the waitress, there was no kidding ourselves. Had we'd already polished off a bottle of Tequila and were just working our way down the ladder to the beer, the thought might have leapt out at us to try our hand and play anyway but not then. The talent was too sobering and the intoxication too fleeting.
*****
A few days later, I give myself a subconscious poke in the ribs with an inner elbow because it is half past seven and there are three of us, the bartender, myself and a woman. Yeah, and right away, you crave the punchline.
Nah. I simply couldn’t recall when the last time was I’d been sitting in a bar and there was no one else but myself, a bartender and a woman. So now that we’ve said “woman” we have to ask ourselves, yeah, but what KIND of a woman?
And maybe the question would be better asked of a woman than a man as a man’s perceptions at the age I was at that moment, might have a very limiting paradigm of judgement: “hot” or “not” as though the imperical question was not what kind of a woman she was at all, but which of society’s narrow categories of physical appeal she fell under.
But if a woman’s judgement of what KIND of a woman I was looking at were to be turned back on herself, if I were to be able to loiter and meander through a woman’s subconscious, as one is forced to do when dating on anything other than a casual basis, I might reap a crop of self-critical analysis and insecurities sufficient to properly judge what kind of woman she truly was.
You cannot get away with judging a book by its cover no matter how hard publishers attempt to make us do just that nor would it be sufficient to judge this woman by her looks and her clothing, even if they were rather generous because that too is in the eye of the beholder as we’ve been told through the ages. Well, the beauty, not necessarily the clothing. But what passes muster for attractiveness in the eye of one is irrelevant to the eye of another unless that eye of one is the eye of one creating an ad campaign centering around the relevance of tits and ass to selling beer or automobiles.
No, what KIND of woman could have only been answered by friends or peers and as I said, by hearing her inner thoughts and measuring the intensity and body of her insecurities.
So the best that could be done with such limited resources to judge by and lacking the discerning eye of a painter or sculpture who might render seemingly innocent details into striking characteristics of penultimate importance, I could only think to myself, “hot” or “not” and then allow my imagination to carry the body away from the altar of narrowmindedness and consider what flaws or positive traits she might possess which had nothing to do with the body and the clothing that housed the body.
And here we come across another daily paradigm of wishful thinking, that it is the clothes that make the person, not the other way around.
One thing that’s quickly forgotten is that only people who care about clothes notice clothes. The typical fashion assessment for a person like myself regarding a woman’s clothing would not be the name on the tag, the price of the handbag, the style of the shoes. The best that could be gathered from a quick glance at the outfit would be the colour and more importantly, whether or not the style was sexy.
And for some reason, it was only in imagining the undergarments; the cut of the brassiere, the colour of the panties, whether or not the hose were dark or transparent, that the outfit could have been presented as sexy anyway. What was she wearing? If I’d had stared at her for hours, I couldn’t have told you for the life of me. But if she’d been wearing a very low cut top or a skirt that stopped at fleshy mid-thigh, well, those would be memorable traits.
And here the inner gears and gadgets were clicking in my primordial little brain assessing all the possible bits of information and with great skill, being able to pare them down to the essence, was she hot or not and of her clothing, how much of the secrets of her body it revealed.
If you walk through the Red Light district of Amsterdam, for example, you go through a much similar thought process when judging the women who have not only put themselves on display but are offering themselves, for a price, to assist you in indulging your needs. And the primary difference between whores and women are that the women who are putting themselves on display for you are not offering themselves to you for anything, at a price or otherwise. They are putting themselves on display for themselves, so that they can gauge your reactions and help themselves assess themselves, shutting out all the little neurotic voices in their head, even if only a fleeting moment.
And of course, any woman, including the woman sat several stools from me at the bar, would take offence at being compared to a whore because whilst the sex might be the necessary selling point of the woman on display on your average city street or in your average city bar, it is a selling point she believes is the only selling point you will pay attention to. Unlike the whore, whose sexuality is not only on display but for sale, most women are merely selling their sex as a method of gaining your attention, just like the advertisers of beer and automobiles are doing during televised sporting events. They may have the intention, at some point, be it later that evening, or weeks later, of allowing you trespass into the fruits and gardens of their sex but it is never an assumed goal, never a destination to be taken for granted.
So that subconscious poke in the ribs with an inner elbow was a call to pull my head out of the habit in my glass for a closer inspection and whilst that call could have been just as readily ignored out of courtesy, as in, why must every sitting woman not fully engaged in some other conversation automatically become invested in as a sitting target for the curiosity of other men, it is the kind of call you make when flipping a coin: one guess is going to be right and the other wrong but until the coin is flipped, the guess would be irrelevant.
As neither of us had addressed the other’s presence to that point, (I had been here first, memorising the bottled spirits collection on the glass shelves in front of me whilst casually peering at my reflection in the mirror behind them and had barely allowed myself the registration in my glance of her entry), it was probably up to me to break the ice, if not the barman, who seemed as utterly uninterested in her as I seemed fascinated by her.
From that evolves the inner debate about how to address the necessity of addressing her presence. Oh, what’s needed is a clever line that completely disguises the transparency of need. It must be clear from the beginning that I do not need to begin a conversation with her. In fact, perhaps I should yawn and stretch and then casually notice her presence for the first time. Or maybe I should just hang a big sign around my neck that reads “Idiot” lest there be any doubt about one who would spend so much time plotting and evaluating every nuance of every gesture and paralising thought. Should this provoke some elaborate conversational dance? Should I merely cough loudly or clear my throat?
If she were a body of water, I might dip a bare foot or hand in her to test her temperature. Is she receptive? Is she waiting for someone? Does she just want to be alone without the feeling of being entirely alone?
Or I might just take a running start and leap right into her, temperature be damned, and see what kind of splash I can make.
I'll start up a perfectly innocent conversation with her, perhaps without bothering to think of the sequence our dialogue should go down in or perhaps scripting the exchange mentally to hear how it sounded raw in the ears.
And yet I continued sitting there, staring at the shelved bottles of spirits, wondering if being friendly be enough, or at least pretending to be friendly, and if being in a bar with only the two of us and the bartender as each others company was excuse enough for being friendly with a complete stranger of the opposite sex was sufficient.
I continued being exactly what I despised, cowardly aware of every possible negative outcome because this calculus of circumventing the warping of the soul through failure was almost too complicated for the brain to register and so infinite so as to provoke a sort of paralysis.
Certain characters can withstand the beatings of failure better than others. In every salesman, every optimistic enterpriser, there must live a smaller form of masochist delighting in the delectable tension between dreaming of success and realising the potential for failure and the euphoria or misery that might result. How else could they put themselves in the position of failure so often? It’s not for all of us. Many of us become alarmed at the potential of failure. Another gash in the flesh of self confidence. Another brick in the wall of stoicism brought on by fear of failing.
But in the end, because I'm in a bar and I hate it when people just sit there like drunks stewing over some clownish inner turmoil which they make up in their own minds to appear artistic and tortured, I decided that there was sufficient boredom, sufficient curiosity, sufficient apathy to risk on this early evening, to overcome myself and reach out.
I prefer to address these introductions with a neat foreplay of the absurd. Why? I’ve been told this is like an artificial injection – absurdity is all around us and all the while we attempt these constructs of an alternative reality that better fits the fiction of our lives and these injections are needed to confirm that what we are busy ignoring all around us does indeed exist. There are times absurd, disjunctive questions or statements are necessary. Wondering how to address an attractive woman innocently having a drink on her own is an absurd situation. We are strangers. What’s in it for either of us to speak to one another? If either of us are open wounds does that necessarily mean the other does the bandaging?
"What do you think about the sea swells on the north coast of Madeira this time of year?" I finally ask haphazardly, generally of course, to neither of them in particular. The bartender is reading a paper and measuring the social tension subliminally. The attractive woman notices from the corner of her eye that I’ve turned, almost imperceptibly, towards her, shifting the balance of air in the room ever so slightly.
The intention is that the statement is left hanging there, like the interruption of obnoxious commercial air time in the middle of a radio show of classical music, it can be plucked from the vine or ignored and left to rot. I’m asking one of them to take the responsibility of bailing me out and if either of them are humanists, they cannot allow my question to be left hanging.
If she says something, I’m expecting it will be something studiously unwitty in reply. Something concise, like
“Can’t you see I’m waiting for an attractive man, not you?” or, “Leave me alone you conspicuous freak.”
Instead, she acknowledges the game, perhaps out of boredom or perhaps out of curiosity:
"Why do you smoke filterless cigarettes? Don't you know how unhealthy they are?" she responds because sometimes you have no idea why a counterpart is asking you a specific question, in which case it might be wise to ask your counterpart a question.
Yes, now there is a chessboard between us and whereas I’ve made an unusual entrée, like the Battambang Opening or the King’s Head Variation, she’s an unruffled opponent and appears to know her way around the pieces, so I am free to explore the range of that opening.
“I'll tell you what someone once told me and perhaps you will understand: I don't smoke cigarettes with filters for the same reason I don't drink my whiskey through a dish rag."
The bartender has glanced up from his newspaper by then. Over the years, he’s perfected a feigned disinterest. City life has worn a cynical path through his soul and the grounds surrounding that path have become littered with weeds and broken glass. Even if he’s noticed I’ve left her no clear follow up question, like why don’t I drink my whiskey through a dish rag, he wouldn’t betray it.
Her reply is wordlessly clever and the silence ratchets up the tension. Was that an official move? Am I on the clock? I repress a bead of sweat dying to break out on my forehead. A soft widening of the corners of her mouth, so subtle you’d barely notice if you weren’t staring intently for a sign, is enough encouragement. Or perhaps it is a smirk of condescension.
I don't like women who talk too much. I'll say that straight out because it doesn't take much. I'll start up a perfectly innocent conversation with someone, perhaps in a bar, and the next thing I know, I’ll be listening to an earful of unfocused nattering. Ironically, in the effort to avoid them, I invariably become the source of the unfocused nattering instead. If you have to be either on the giving or receiving end of unfocused nattering, honestly, which side do you prefer?
So, I try another tact because this match was exhausted from its onset if only because it wasn’t meant as an actual conversation, merely an aperitif to the actual conversation. How many courses we go through conversational before the main course is served is anyone’s guess.
I take a stab at the other end of it, as though walking all the way around her in a perfect circle to find out where the vulnerable opening lies.
“I’ll be playing a recital of Rembetika music in my flat later on this evening which you should consider yourself invited to.”
Is it incidental to signal the bartender at that point to join in on the fun, grandly order a round for all of us as though the bar were packed with customers instead of suffocating in its own air as one or all of us attempt to infuse the atmosphere with a predatory scent? Or it is a queue that we can all rest easy knowing it’s part of an unspoken joke, this conversation, my suggestion, the drinks, the Rembetika music? With a wave of the hand it no longer matters, the ice is broken, we are all in on the same conspiracy or not yet the conspiracy will overwhelm us nonetheless because if I continue forcing the plotlines we will all busy ourselves with attempting to ignore that anything had happened at all in the space of the last two minutes.
Of course, she doesn't want to come to my apartment to listen to anything. I don't even want to and so none of us even have to address it.
With the conversation going no where we’re safe but my grandiose invitation to a round of drinks for all of us is ignored. Unnoticed in those few seconds of inner turmoil is the fact that the bartender has disappeared to take stock of his disappearing wine cellar or stand in front of the bathroom mirror rubbing his face and staring into his tired eyes asking himself where he went wrong.
*****
"Is that what you do for a living?" she probes unexpectedly, several drinks later and we have, through the necessity of the bar getting more crowded, moved closer to one another. Her index finger slowly tracing an invisible line towards the tag embroidered across the right chest of my shirt which reads “Janus Janitorial Services" in fancy Cyrillic-looking lettering. “Are you a janitor or is it your own business?”
You see, just as I’d been hoping to avoid, this is the kind of conversation you can get with some people when you aren't busy keeping them off guard and keeping them from their natural predatory and nesting tendancies to categorise, rate and file you.
Men do the same thing with women but its based on a much simpler aesthetic, like the curve of a chin, the width of cheekbones, the eye colour and radiance, the inevitable the rack and ass comparatives of course; some men are unavoidably tit and/or ass men just like some women are inveterate lovers of shopping and seek men who can provide them unlimited resources to go forth and shop. My measure, in the scheme of men who can provide women with unlimited resources, is of course, nil and this measure is of course, as valid as wondering how efficient a baseball player is at hitting toasters thrown from moving vehicles because out of necessity or choice, depending on timing and your perspective, I long ago rendered the delusion of vast wealth a quick and painful death, pulled its plugs and tubes, let it die naturally by never pursuing it.
And oftentimes, just as it’s appeared to have been vanquished from the horizon of your daily life, when the questions cease to arise and you feel quite comfortable in your own dirty skin without the makeup, without the expensive and exclusive outer garments and appropriate symbols of wealth and success surrounding you like a horde of groupies, you’ll happen into a bar and happen across a conversation with a female which will inevitably require the bonding in conversation, of income and esteem.
Normally you become quite good at picking the right puppies out of the litter, the types who don’t care what you earn but value your ability to give emotionally. It’s like a silent civil war between women to determine which is the more important factor in a man, his character, his wealth or his ability to love. All mutually exclusive traits never found linked together on the same train of manhood.
Nevertheless, she’d crossed the goal line with the question. “Is that what I do?”
I repeated to myself, shifting weight from foot to foot. What indeed do I do? What is work if it is love in the labour? A pay check? An excuse for socialising? How many fantasies have I held in step with the idea of an indeterminate yet vast wealth which would allow me to avoid the uncomfortable and perhaps unbearable reality of working for a living and living instead, a life of leisure, book reading, gardening, long walks to nowhere in particular, afternoons wasted in a pub drinking and contemplating the view outdoors from an eternal tomb of alcoholism?
"I bought this shirt at the Salvation Army because I have dependency imbalances and all sorts of emotional diseases and I thought this shirt would bring it all to an instinctive and subconscious conclusion. Sort of the opposite of feigning wealth and intelligence while mocking bystanders in an unemployment line,” I explained finally having paused for enough breath to allow myself to speak and carry on the wealthy for life fantasy in my head simultaneously like unborn twins.
"I don't think you're clever.” She retracted as though the thought had crossed her mind at one point but now, having seen the light, she knew better. “ I know you think you're clever and that making fun of my judgemental line of questioning is some strange way you have of pretending you are clever, but I think between you and I, standing here alone at this bar, we can speak in black and white. You are not clever. My manicurist is cleverer than you in fact and she doesn't even speak English. The only reason I continue standing here is because I'm waiting for a friend of mine and it amuses me to watch you try and amuse yourself with your own delusional sense of intelligence."
*****
2:52 PM
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