How To Make Money Writing About Writing..or..my buck is faster than yours

           I get these emails: "How To Format Your Manuscript".  "How To Write The Perfect Query Letter."  "How To Make Six Figures Writing Copy".

          "How To" books are always a bonanza.  They work mostly on illusion.  Writer's buy WRITERS MARKET or WRITERS GUIDE TO SCREAMING SUCCESS and believe they will sell so many books about writing that they'll make a nice comfy living.

            I cannot disprove this assertion without hours of boring research, sending out questionnaires to writers who have bitten this hook and come up empty.  I wish I could return to the past, pursue that college degree in psychology, acquire a profession to backstop my creative work and structure my life according to common sense rather than unconscious rage and a relentless conviction that my talent is special. 

            I've been a fool.  BUT.  Being a fool is what life is about.  If you're not a fool for, oh, sixty or seventy percent of your life, you won't know anything about the human condition and your literary insights will be pallid. 

            These emails won't stop coming!  From Writer's Digest: GET PAID TO WRITE. THE 12 STEPS OF QUERYERS ANONYMOUS. (Querying is that essential skill at writing letters to agents and editors). WD ANNUAL WRITER'S COMPETITION ($30 entrance fee, maximum three entries permitted.  Ooohh $$$$$$).

            I am not accusing these writing entrepreneurs of bad faith.  On the contrary, I'm envying them their astute timing.  The instructional writing field is always the most lucrative when a demographic stampede is in progress, and there is right now just such a stampede in the community of writers, be they good, bad or brilliant.

            I've been a lousy internetrepreneur.  Sound it out.  I just made it up.

            Pain is any experience you would rather not be having.  I would rather not be having this experience of poverty.  It's time to go back to what I know: story telling.  I've got some beautiful stories and I hope you will download a copy and become a fan of my work.  I'm almost ready.  Be patient.

           

David Foster Wallace: A review of D.T.Max's biography, EVERY LOVE STORY IS A GHOST STORY

David Foster Wallace was a writer who wrote for other writers.  In this way his fiction is analogous to jazz.  It's been said by the musicians themselves that jazz is a concert-level music played by virtuosi for other virtuosi.  It isn't, however, necessary to be a jazz musician to appreciate jazz.  Nor is it necessary to be a writer to appreciate David Foster Wallace.

            But it helps.  Critical writing about Wallace's work is laced with academic terms like Post-Modernism and Post-Post Modernism.  Professors of literature struggle to place  Wallace in a "school" of writing, as if that will make them more comfortable with a literature that breaks every rule of writing yet succeeds in communicating with anyone willing to put a little effort into reading his work.

            I suspect that some writers read Wallace without enjoying the experience.  They read him just to have read him.  To enjoy Wallace is pure delight. Wallace observed human and societal behavior with the skill of a world-class brain surgeon.  He was then able to translate his observations into a prose that was fiendishly complex but thoroughly entertaining.  The fact that his vocabulary was gargantuan, that his ideas were informed by deep studies in philosophy, mathematics, linguistics and semiotics does not make his prose incomprehensible.  It just makes it challenging, and ultimately rewarding. 

            In my opinion, biographer D.T. Max got it right.  He gave us a view of DFW as a human being.  He didn't psychoanalyze, he didn't build up the suicide to promote a spurious climax.  David Foster Wallace's suicide came at the end, that's all.  He was a haunted man and there is no story of childhood abuse upon which to build the scaffolding of his pathology.  He had a normal, stable and reasonably happy childhood.  He had an illness.  It emerged in adolescence and it caused him untold suffering.  It eventually proved fatal.

            Biographer D.T. Max gives us the impression that if Wallace was haunted by one thing more than anything else it was the failure of a novel to emerge after the hit of INFINITE JEST.  Wallace put a lot of pressure on himself; he felt he was expected to produce another masterpiece.  He was writing a lot of non-fiction, taking plum assignments from The New Yorker, Esquire and Rolling Stone.  His novel in progress, THE PALE KING, accumulated in boxes of manuscript paper and on floppies and computer drives.  Hundreds of sheets of paper piled up but never gelled into the novel with which Wallace struggled.  It was finally published posthumously, and generally well received.

            It is so sad.  His suicide seems a matter of bad timing.  His psychiatrist  had taken him off the medication Nardil and was preparing to prescribe a more 'modern' anti-depressant.  This procedure, the flushing of the old medicine from the body, the incremental build-up of the new medication, can take several months.  During that time, a patient suffering clinical depression can face a period of intense vulnerability.  It seems that David Foster Wallace got caught 

in a pharmacological bear trap.  He couldn't find a better way out.  People who suffer serious depression know this aspect of its manifestation: while it's happening it seems as though it is permanent.  And, while it's happening, they will do anything to avoid another five minutes of feeling the way they feel.

            The suicide notes are everywhere in Wallace's fiction.  One of INFINITE JEST's protagonists, Hal Incandenza, said it best (and here I paraphrase, being without a copy of the book): "If I knew I had to feel this bad some time in the future for even a week, I would kill myself right now."

            He was describing a plummet down the slippery walls of a deep dark well, a mood of total despair and emptiness. 

            D.T. Max  wrote a beautiful biography.  He enjoyed access to Wallace's family, friends, papers and letters.   He was not worshipful.  He describes Wallace's life as one in which not much happened outside the events of his literary world.  He taught MFA classes in a handful of universities.  He got the McArthur Grant, won other  lucrative prizes and did not have to worry about money.  He was too shy and reclusive to enjoy fame or publicity.  He didn't like parties and dreaded interviews and television appearances.  He was a private man who was very careful about establishing deep bonds of friendship and devotion.  His best friends, it seems, were his dogs.  At the time of his death he was recently married.  He was only forty six years old.  He was just beginning what may have been the best time of his life.

             I repeat...it is so sad.   

12 Years A Slave: A Review

Twelve Years A Slave: A Review

          The making of this film, TWELVE YEARS  A SLAVE, must have been more like a mission than like a job. It brings us a new perception of pre-Civil War slavery and gives us a look into the psychology of both slaves and slave owners.  The tragic face and  huge eyes of Chiwetel Ejiofor dominate the screen as Solomon Northup. His characerization rings true and brings us to believe in his dignity and his suffering. 

          The human mind is capable of rationalizing absolutely anything.     If an activity or institution is profitable, people will accept grotesque intellectual distortions in order to make that activity seem moral and desirable.  People believed ardently in Adolph Hitler.  Pol Pot's gunmen cleaned up Kampuchea (Cambodia) in the name of Year Zero ideology.  Slavery, genocide, mass rape have repeatedly been rationalized into sweetly benign activities, ostensibly for the benefit of society.      American racism is a rationalization.  Slavery was a product of that rationalization.  The fuel for this rationalization was the staggering profitability of purchasing human beings and working them without mercy for the rest of their lives. Slaves were the wealth of the South.  The Civil War was fought to protect that wealth.  This film examines the brutality of slavery but it also reveals important aspects of slavery's impact not just on slaves but on those who did the enslaving.

          The film TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE intends to shock the audience but carefully weighs the degree of shock to keep the audience from recoiling.  It's brutal but tolerable within the story's context.

          Solomon Northup was an upper middle class freedman in Saratoga, New York.  When he accepted an offer of a lucrative short term job away from home he made a fateful error in judgment.  He put himself in the hands of white men that he didn't know.  After dinner and drinks at a restaurant, Solomon awoke in chains, stripped of papers, identity, rights, stripped of his humanity.  He was shipped south into 1840s plantation slavery.  It took him twelve years to find an opportunity to get a message to his friends and family.  Twelve years of the most brutal slavery passed before a brave  man risked his life to carry Solomon's message.

          The ability to read and write was illegal in Solomon's slave world.  Any tendency towards intelligence was viewed as insolence.  A slave who was too smart risked severe punishment: whipping, torture, even lynching.  In order to survive, Solomon had to conceal himself.  He was forced to play the dumb "nigger". 

          The film touches upon the corrosive effect that slavery brought to the owners of slaves.  Plantation owner Edwin Eppes and his wife lived in a twilight world of marital loathing.  Actor Michael Fassbender plays Eppes with a convincing edge.  He's a dangerous man not just because he's the Master but because he's haunted by temptation, guilt and the shadowy confusions of his own  hypocrisy.

          "Massa" Eppes was obsessed with the slave girl Patsey (played with incredible passion by Lupita N'yongo).  He raped her again and again, yet Patsey would rise from her shame and pick twice as much cotton as any of the other slaves. During a clandestine meeting  Patsey offers Solomon her life savings if Solomon will take her to the bayou and drown her.  Shocked, Solomon refuses.  After this exchange Patsey begins to take more risks until she's caught in a minor transgression and is tied to the whipping post.  Massa Eppes forces Solomon to whip her savagely, then takes the whip himself and nearly kills the woman.  He stops before he beats her to death, saying "Don't push me any further because I like what I'm feeling right now."

          This film deftly illuminates the corrosive effects of owning other human beings.  In the American South of the 19th century it was a common belief that slavery was good for both white and black, that slave owning was sanctioned by the Bible and was in harmony with the natural order of the world.  No one believes that any more but the emotional legacy of such a mindset lingers in the musty attics of our national consciousness. 

          TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE is more than a good film.  It's a necessary film.  It won't change anything.  Slavery still exists in many parts of the world. The film vividly demonstrates how atrocity can only exist when one group of human beings decides that another group is less than human. 

          I didn't know what to expect from this film but I was surprised (and relieved) by its pragmatism.  Director Steve McQueen admirably got out of his own way and let the story tell itself.  Sometimes the transitions were abrupt but I didn't care.  The story was told.  The performances were beautiful.  Lupita N'yongo as Patsey deserved her Oscar as Best Supporting Actor.  She was gut-wrenching. When Patsey begged Solomon to commit an act of euthanasia upon herself the film stopped time and delivered its consummate message: a life of slavery is not worth living.  I will never forget the crushing disappointment in Patsey's face when she accepted that Solomon would not put her out of her misery like an injured dog.

       

The Patience Stone: a film review

          You may view this film with an almost salacious glee if you have been in an abusive marriage where your thoughts and your voice were throttled by fear. 

         THE PATIENCE STONE will be your cinematic wet dream.

          The setting for the action is a nameless city in a nameless land.  There is a civil war between various militias.  Crazed men armed with assault rifles and rocket launchers careen through the blasted city in pickup trucks.  At night the tracers whizz and ricochet.

          The character called The Woman lives in a ruin of a house with her wounded, paralyzed husband.  She has sent her two children to her aunt's house.  Her husband can't talk, he can't even blink, but he is alive. The "doctors" say that the he might recover in two weeks, but the bullet hole in his neck isn't healing.  All The Woman can do is refill his IV drip, keep him hydrated, wash him and talk to him.  The Woman realizes, while talking, that she can say anything she wants.  She can speak the unspeakable.  She can speak truth.  She can tell her husband what an asshole he's been, treating her like dirt.  "The night we were married you were on me like an animal.  Then you were finished, just like that."  She mocks him, and by extension the males who share his culture.  They're all premature ejaculators.  "You've been excited so long you can't even get it out of your pants."

          Her husband becomes her Patience Stone, a legendary object into which you can pour all your pain.  When the stone has taken all of your suffering it falls to pieces and you are at last free of everything that has afflicted your spirit.  The Woman protects her husband, hides him from enemy militia fighters and builds a place of concealment in a closet.  Every time she leaves the house she says "Go to Hell!" or "Fuck You!"  If she had said these things in the old days her husband would have killed her instantly, without legal consequences.  

          As she drains her contempt and hostility into her personal Patience Stone a militia commander breaks into her house, searching for his enemies.  He is accompanied by a young soldier with a pronounced stutter. The Husband is hidden.  The commander is thinking about rape until The Woman tells him

she's a prostitute.  He thinks about killing her on the spot but he's busy with war.  He leaves after spitting on The Woman.

          Later the young man with the stutter returns and offers The Woman money for sex.  He can't be put off, his excitement is too great.  He topples on her prone body and ejaculates before he can get his pants off.  The Woman is upset but she's also amused.  There's something touching about this handsome orphan who can barely speak.  "Was this your first time?" she asks.  He nods.

          The Woman continues her one sided conversation with her staring husband.  Her pain, her rage, her bitterness come pouring forth.  "Fuck you," she tells him each time she leaves to fetch supplies.  "Go to Hell!"

          At this point I can say no more lest I enter spoiler territory.  This film is a profound indictment of patriarchal cultures everywhere.  I was privileged to see THE PATIENCE STONE with a friend who had suffered under such a system.  I could feel the release of her breath whenever The Woman said something that my friend would have said if she had been able to voice her feelings.

          The actress playing The Woman, Golshifteh Farahani, should walk on roads paved with Oscars.  But whether or not her performance is recognized is beside the point.  This is a great film, that, for all its message content, avoids the puerile and tendentious.  It doesn't preach and it never bores.  It is a suspense tale.  Will The Husband return to consciousness?  Does he hear his wife?  Will he kill her before she kills him?
          As The Woman's aunt says, "Those who don't know how to make love make war."

          A full five muskrats for this film, THE PATIENCE STONE.

Don't wait patiently.  Get it now!

I Quit Smoking...Again!

          The last time I quit smoking I stashed a pound of tobacco in a high shelf.  I put my Supermatic cigarette making machine next to the tobacco, and a box of filtered tubes next to the machine.  I wasn't fooling myself.  I planned on smoking again.  It was simply a matter of how long I could remain smoke-free before stress and sadness pushed me back to the bag of tobacco, the tubes and the machine.  Any time I wanted, I could make one cigarette or twenty.

          That box of goods sat on the shelf for about six months before I took it down and eased myself back into the habits of a regular smoker.  There is NO up-side to smoking.  In America people treat smokers like scum.  How can I exude self confidence in society when the reek of my clothing gives me away?  How can I teach classes and exude authority?  The social stigma is bad enough but the health risks are so astronomical that one must be utterly insane to smoke.  Yet there I was...again!  Smoking.

          It was the wheeze in my chest that did it: pushed me to the point where the stash of 'baccy and the fancy rolling machine went into a foul dumpster, never to be seen again.

          I wheezed so badly that I kept myself awake.  My god!  It was as if I had John Philip Sousa and a brass band in my upper chest and they were tuning up before a concert.   Tootle tootle whooo whoo!

Shut up, f'god's sake, I'm trying to sleep!  Realizing that I couldn't escape, that the wheeze and I were one and the same shook me deeply.

          Ending addiction is tough.  Addiction isn't about the substance, it's about the emotions that lead to the substance.  I'm going through a time in which I am frightened and very sad. It's all about aging.  This crisis kicks the mid-life crisis all to hell.  My immediate problem will be to survive the onslaught of suppressed emotion.  Ending an addiction is like opening a Pandora's Box of hidden feelings.

          It is now March and I've been without tobacco since December.  I spent most of January in a state of terror and despair.  These are visceral emotions, they roil the guts and drain the energy from every day life.  I could recognize the intensity of these emotions as the product of release from addiction.  They had been stored in my psyche, but my smoking rituals had kept them at bay.  Now I had no comforting coffee n' smokes, no drive to work n' smokes, no smokes, period.  I had nothing but nicotine patches.  There was no avoiding these excruciating feelings.  Every day I woke up with a blue wave of terror emanating from my stomach.   After four or five weeks of this emotional sledge hammer I felt a slight easing of the weight. 

          Another month has passed and though I'm still frightened and sad, these feelings exist as bearable phenomena, like bad weather. 

         
          I can handle bad weather.

When Did Artists Drop To The Bottom Rung Of The Social Order?

When I'm at a social gathering, talking to an attractive young lady, I am better prepared conversationally than I was in my naive younger years.  Such encounters depend upon time-honored gambits: you exchange names, express musical preferences, and soon it's time for the inevitable question: so, what do you do?

          To think; To THINK! that once upon a time I would blithely answer with some honesty.  Oh, I said smoothly, I'm a writer.

          I might as well have said "I carry herpes samples in petri dishes to labs where they test for new medicines in the ongoing struggle against the Herpes Simplex virus and, yes, I have been exposed, it's an occupational hazard."

          I'm a writer, I used to say, thinking that was the cool thing.  I kept my other vocation in reserve.  I was already embarrassed about being a musician and seldom confessed that I was one of THOSE.  My tattoos had been removed and I never..ever..wore any kind of hat but if we trace further back into the days of my youth we would find that time, yes...THAT time...when I would tell a girl I was chatting up at a party that I am a musician.  Well, I play drums among other instruments, uhhuh uhhuh..a little keyboard, and I do some songwriting.

          It is testament to my burgeoning maturity that I am no longer such a moron as to tell the truth in early- stage flirting conversation.  A writer!  What was I thinking?  Does anything sound more like simpering self-delusion?  Should I reveal that I sit around for most of the day tapping at a keyboard and sending query emails into that immense yet oh so tiny void that existed before the Big Bang, that place where nothing exists, not even intention and certainly not rejection slips of digital brevity?  I make less money than a janitor.  In fact, janitor is my day job, the one I can't quit lest I starve.  I will be asked politely what I have written and I must respond either cutely or sorrowfully.  I haven't published anything important, no best sellers I'm afraid.  Or I'm the guy that wrote ECHOES OF BOILING LOBSTER SCREAMS or YOUR TITS ALMOST SHOW COMPLETELY BUT YOU ALREADY KNOW THAT.  Or I'm the guy who's gotten filthy rich on the Young Adult wizard series YOUR MOUTH IS OPEN YOUR MOUTH IS OPEN YOUR MOUTH IS ALWAYS OPEN.  When I get around to writing the last of the series, YOUR MOUTH IS FINALLY CLOSED AND NOW WE KNOW WHY BECAUSE ITS REALLY AN UGLY THIN-LIPPED LITTLE MOUTH I will sweep my winnings into a tidy pile and depart for casinos run by The Sultan Of Brunei.  When I've lost all my money I will open a little business sharpening vampires' teeth.  I took that six month course at the online University Of East Oakland,"Sharpening Vampire Teeth: a growing lucrative field of dental specialization."

          I have two questions.  Did the calling of Artist take a precipitous drop in prestige or has it always been this way and perceptive artists are only now realizing that the world could give a shit if they're artists (THE WORLD DOESN'T CARE)?!!  I think it's a little of both but when I was last indeed put on the spot for "what do I do?" I experienced icy fingers of apathy creeping along the paths of my nerves and it hit me forcefully: artists are at the bottom of the pecking order artists are laughable poseurs artists are as honored as public masturbators.  I'm talking about REAL artists with real talent, those with soul-crushing passion and experience of the lethal dangers of the psyche. They don't count they never have counted. If there has ever been a time when they counted less it's right now.  Creative people no longer have even the shelter of those little camps they set up for creative people, camps called Mental Hospitals::::there are no more mental hospitals there's no place you can go if you're creative or even if you think you're creative.

          Things are really bad for a society when this happens.  It's like when they decide to kick out all the Jews.  An empire suddenly takes a nose dive when it kicks out its Jews. It happens every time. Jews are like that healthy intestinal bacteria, Jews are the Acidophilus of a society and when the Jews go so does the digestion. The Spanish Armada was drowned shortly after Spain expelled the Jews.  Without Jews there sets in intellectual and moral diarrhea..HEY!  I'M A JEW. I CAN SAY THIS!

          Yow.  I got carried away there.  I'm just so upset.  I don't tell people I'm a writer any more.   I hide my creativity.  That's really scary, when I'm embarrassed to be like one of those people who are psychic but don't admit it because they don't want to be seen as some kind of nut.  I'm not a nut5 bllleeeeh bllleeeehhhh I'm not I'm not I see dead people.  Okay, I'm an artist, I've said it.  I'm the guy at the health club who makes the wrong adjustment and gets thrown backwards off the treadmill, thrown sprawling on top of a weight bench that is currently occupied by a red haired red bearded three  hundred pound Judo instructor. I'm that guy.  Yeah, I'm that guy. 

Notes On Jazz, Writing and Other Matters

    

            The following excerpt is from my book CONFESSIONS OF AN HONEST MAN.  It is one of those creative moments when my passion for jazz and my passion for writing merge.  I hope that I can spread some light on the value of jazz so that it need not be a form of music that is virtually ignored..  It isn't the stuff of giant boom boxes that get worn on your head so you look like you've just survived an altercation with an assistant manager at Costco.
          Question: are there still Boom Boxes or have those morphed into Boom Automobiles so you can sit inside your sonic vengeance rather than wearing it on your head?

1967: The Zoot Prestige Trio At The Esquire Lounge

                

    

The Esquire Lounge is an archetypal venue: a pure urban jazz club, on the ‘circuit’, right down on Euclid Avenue between the steel mills to the west and Western Reserve University to the east.  The club’s sign has martini glasses jiggling in neon pink and green.  Every time Aaron sees it, he senses that some day it will be a priceless artifact in a museum, “Esquire Lounge” and its dancing long-stemmed martini glasses being studied by serious observers of semiotics and folk art.  

          Zoot and the boys have f inished a week’s engagement at the Jazzland Grill in Columbus.  The drive to Cleveland is a little over two hours.  It is a perfect example of Zoot's genius for scheduling gigs in different cities yet avoiding the road fatigue that can turn a musician's life into a nightmare.

          Before checking into the hotel, before doing anything, Zoot wants to see old friends and examine the new soundboard at the Esquire. The gig is going to be recorded for Blue Note Records.  Rumors are flying in the jazz world that the new band is something special, that Zoot has found a pair of "monsters", as they are called, to back him up as he plays his distinctive bop'n'blues style.  For Aaron and Tyrone, it is their debut.  Downbeat Magazine is going to review the record, it will be written up by critics like Leonard Feather and Nat Hentoff. 

          It's big.  It's important.  The album is going to be called “Hot Sax”.

          Zoot enters the club majestically, placing his feet on the carpet as if he is dancing, doing his lanky walk, all his joints subtly undulating.

          “What’s up, buttercup?,” he inqures of the man sitting on a stool behind the bar.  There are five or six people in the club, nursing drinks and chatting quietly.  Two women spread white cotton tablecloths below the bandstand.

          “Zoot motherfucking Prestige!” says the club’s proprietor,  “What is happenin’?” He puts out his cigarette and comes sailing from behind the bar, a tall fat man with a medium afro. He does a series of finger snaps and arcane handshakes with Zoot, then embraces him with a huge laugh.

          Aaron knows these sounds and gestures; they are the greeting rituals of adult black males.  They are tunes of loose laughter, arms and hands swinging wide and making noisy contact.  The words mean little.  The tones of understanding and recognition are everything. He tried, for a while, to imitate this hip black language.  He felt ridiculous.  What kind of spectacle must he be?  A “white Negro”.  What’s that nasty term?  A “Wigger”?  Does he want to be a slang term?  Wait, let’s not forget the Jew.  What is he?  A Nigyid?  A Yidgro?  Oh God, he’s a Yigger!  No, he will speak the way he speaks, act the way he acts, just as he is.

          Zoot does quick introductions.   The club’s owner is Hilton Stubbs.  When Aaron is introduced, Stubbs looks at him coldly.  Then, as if Aaron doesn’t exist, Stubbs points to him and inquires of Zoot, “What is this?”

          Zoot bristles.  “What do you mean, ‘what is this?’, motherfucker.  This is my drummer.”

          “This is a white kid from Shaker Heights, man, this won’t go down.”

          “Hilton, you don’t know shit.”  Zoot extends a protective arm around Aaron’s shoulders.  “You wanna cancel the gig?”  Zoot picks up his saxophone case.  “I can tell Blue Note we ain’t playin’ here.  I’ll go talk to Alvin at Loose End and I’ll have my ass another gig.”

          “Naw, shit man, I won’t do that; but I don’t believe no white kid can play drums with Zoot Prestige and sound like the real deal.”

          “Why don’t you talk to him like he’s here in front of you, fool?”

          Stubbs looks at Aaron.  “Hmmmph.” He lights a cigarette languidly, sizing Aaron up. “Zoot is legendary for being able to find monstrous drummers but I'm havin' a hard time taking you seriously.  You can’t be more than fucking twenty years old, kid.  What do you know about soul?”

          Aaron shrugs.  “Gig starts at nine. You’ll find out.”

          At that moment, several other people come from the back of the club, see Zoot and the greeting rituals are repeated.  Aaron is ignored or treated to a cold stare, a lingering gaze of contempt and then a dismissive de-focusing of the eyes, as if he has simply vanished.  Traveling with Zoot on the circuit, he has gotten a lot of racist attitude. He lets it bounce off him.  He knows that later things will be different.

          The equipment has to be unloaded and set up.  There is already a Hammond organ and a Leslie speaker on the stage. Tyrone helps Aaron with the drums.  At half past five, the recording crew arrives, hauling in a big Ampex eight track recorder in a wheeled case.  Aaron is miked just above his head and in front of his bass drum.  Zoot gets a single mike, Tyrone gets two, and two mikes are placed at strategic points on the stage.   By six thirty the instruments are assembled and a sound check completed.  The band and the recording crew order a few slabs of the Esquire’s legendary barbecue and drink a few beers.

          Zoot leads his band to the Hotel Onyx, next door, where they check in.  Zoot has a room.  Tyrone and Aaron share a room.  They shower, shave, lay on their respective beds and relax. 

          Aaron falls asleep.  At eight o clock, Tyrone shakes him awake.  He has a familiar, crazed look on his face, as if he's about to do something naughty.

          “Hey man, check this out.”  Tyrone holds two sugar cubes in his palm.  They resemble pistils at the center of the long mocha petals of his fingers.  Tyrone’s digits are like the tentacles of a carnivorous plant. 

          Aaron sits up.  Outside the window of the room, a neon sign is going bing! bop! bing! bop!  Rooms!  Hotel Onyx!  Rooms!  Hotel Onyx!

          “Aw shit, what is that?’’  Aaron rubs his face, yawns.

          “Hee hee.  Owsley acid.  The purest.”  Tyrone is full of mad mischief.  His eyes seem to melt and harden like molten glass.  Aaron loves him, loves his playing, loves his daring.  He is virtually illiterate, dropped out of school in the fourth grade, but he is a thinker, a philosopher, a musical intellect.

          “Owsley acid.  It’s always Owsley acid.  How do you know it isn’t bathtub PCP?  With all the shit I just went through being white, you want me to take a psychedelic and play a gig?”

          “I am Tyrone Terry, man, THE Tyrone Terry.  Nobody twacks bullshit dope on me.  I will kill them with my lethal B flat.  What the fuck, man, it’s not like you aint done it before.  Here.”  He hands a cube to Aaron, then sucks the remaining cube into his mouth.  His cheeks dent inward so that the goatee on his chin goes down like a sword blade.  Behind his glasses his eyes are like the fires of a kiln.  Aaron eats the cube with a tiny twist of fear.  He knows taking a psychedelic is like going for a ride on a tiger’s back.  It ccan connect him to the primal power; or it can turn on him and eat him alive.  He will risk it.

          Having made this commitment, Aaron now has other preparations to make. He wishes he hadn’t eaten the barbecue.  It sits in his guts like a greasy snake.  No matter, he will sweat it off.  He sits in a quiet corner of the room, putting himself into lotus position.  There is a terror of annihilation in him, residue from other psychedelic experiences.  He has learned to let go of himself, has even learned to function, to play music, to walk around in the ‘ordinary’ world of people.  It is the initial phases of the drug rush that are the most difficult.  Suddenly, one finds oneself….utterly….without significance, lost in a vastness beyond vastness, so that the personality of Aaron Kantro is some kind of silly joke.  It is this silly joke that Aaron has learned to dismiss with a figurative wave of his hand.  What does it matter if I matter?  Move forward into the risk, take the grotesque with the beautiful, take it all.  Inhale and exhale universes with each breath.

          Aaron hears Tyrone settle down beside him.  Yoga is something Aaron has imparted to his friend, only to discover that Tyrone has a natural ability to settle into a deep silence.  He is, perhaps, less intellectually encumbered.  Whatever the reason, Tyrone is a natural yogi, he meditates and conjures mind exercises of stunning imagination.

          Zoot will come to fetch them at quarter to nine.  The young men must don their tuxedoes.  The drug is working, beginning as they meditate, stretching their imagery into an immense hall in which they can hear one another’s thoughts like echoes from walls of a cave. 

          “We got a gig,” Aaron reminds Tyrone as he uncurls his legs.  Tyrone opens his eyes slowly, and they are like search lights being uncovered, a mighty glow emits from their orbs.  Pulling themselves into the mundane world, the musical brothers dress and look at their reflections in the mirror, giggling.  “Be cool, be cool, “ Tyrone admonishes, sinking his head between his shoulders as if to mimic stealth.  “The Zoot will be wise to this, and he won’t be happy if we’re melting.”

          “Promise I won’t melt,” Aaron confirms.  He is serious, he knows he has a responsibility to his mentor to behave and play like a professional jazz musician. 

          Zoot enters the room, sits in the one easy chair and lets both legs splay over the chair’s arm rest..  He brings out his little pouch and crumples some weed into the corncob pipe.  He examines his compatriots with an air of suspicion, but he has seen this before and has a measure of faith in his sidemen.

          “Dudes look good,” he sayes.  “Feelin alright? Tight?  Outtasight?”

          “Just fine, Zoot.  Lookin’ forward to it, “ Tyrone replies.  Aaron nods agreement.

          Zoot eyes his sidemen speculatively.  “Gonna get cosmological on me?  Gonna do Coltrane riffs?”  This is one of Zoot’s cautionary admonitions.  He loves John Coltrane but knows his bread and butter, knows what the patrons of the Esquire Club have come to hear:  stompin’ blues shoutin bop-till-you-drop tenor saxophone organ trio music. 

          “Don’t you trust us, Zoot?  We know the gig.”  Aaron’s hands are rattling complex drum patterns on his kneecap.  Warming up. 

          “There’s something about you two, tonight.  You’re glittering a little bit.”  It is impossible to tell whether or not he winks, because when he wants to, Zoot can wink but not wink.  Aaron suspects he has winked.  The saxophonist lights the pipe and inhales.  Then he loads it again and passes it to Aaron.  “I will righteously appreciate some discipline from you young monsters.  Don’t think I don’t know what’s going on here.  This ain’t speculative fiction.  This is the Kingdom of Funktonics.  Aaron, you gotta stay inside the groove and let these Black Nationalist motherfuckers know you can play some shit.” 

          “We will play some shit,” Tyrone affirms, making it sound like a solemn oath. Aaron repeats it.  “We will play some shit.”

          Each of them has the requisite two hits of weed, enacting the pre-set ritual that is as much a part of their working life as their instruments and their PA system.  They head down the long stairs with its purple carpeting, into the foyer with its thousands of tiny hexagonal tiles and green trim.  Euclid avenue is a parade of horsepower vanity.  Caddies, Continentals and Grand Prix convertibles gurgle toward the traffic lights.  A bit of rain has fallen and the smell of wet pavement and gasoline fumes mingle in the air.  Reflections from neon lights bounce up from the sidewalks.  Aaron inhales and marvels at the wild beauty of the world.

          They walk around to the kitchen entrance of the club.  Zoot gives a signal to Hilton Stubbs.  The proprietor nods and goes to the bandstand.  It is a good house.  The tables are taken.  The bar is already two rows deep.  The recording engineers are perched at their boards like alchemists over tables of potions and unguents

          “Ladies and gentlemen,” Stubbs says into the microphone.  “The Club Esquire is honored to present the reigning Master of Funk, the Prestigious One, The Zoot with the roots and his smokin’ recruits,  the one and only…… Zoot….. Pres…..tige!”

          They come through the swinging door and make their procession to the bandstand. When the applause and whistles die down, Zoot looks at Tyrone and Aaron, snaps his fingers and counts off a blistering tempo for “All the Things You Are”.  They are off! Tyrone’s organ vamps behind Zoot’s solo like butter rolling down a split yam.  Aaron is crisp as a new hundred dollar bill.  The stick in his right hand comes down on the ride cymbal almost lazily; just enough behind the beat to give it tension, to make that indefinable suspense that is the elusive quality of swing.  He pop pops with his left hand on the snare, talking to Zoot’s cadences.  It is a glory.  It is jazz. 

          They play Monk’s tune, “Well You Needn”t.  Then, to slow things down, Zoot calls for “Angel Eyes”.   That’s when the LSD begins working at its full intensity.  Tyrone plays the dark moody chords of the song.  Its story is that of an urban barroom drama, of souls sliding toward damnation but gripping their humanity with ferocious desperation.  When Tyrone’s solo comes, he lands on one of those blue tones that the organ can sustain forever, while his right hand trills and trills pure funkiness.  It is musical laughter.  Aaron’s smile grows larger than his face, a Cheshire Cat grin where the rest of him disappears into the curling lips and glowing teeth.  Zoot rocks his horn and arches his back.  The audience is screaming approval.  The walls start to melt.  Hilton Stubbs looks like a goat or a devil, behind the bar, smiling so that his gold tooth flashes across the room.  Tyrone glances at Aaron, wicked sly wit oozing from his eyes.

          Stay inside, Aaron mentally signala.  Don’t get crazy.  Tyrone nods.  Don’t worry; I can get crazy and still stay inside.  They are IT.  They are tradition.  They are milking all the conventions, all the known things of jazz.  Tyrone arpeggioes to get to the head of the tune.  It is like ocean waves, surf rolling in perfect cylinders toward the shore.  Zoot hears the cue and they restate the brooding melodrama of Angel Eyes.  The tune ends in a splash of cymbals, organ and saxophone.  Perfect. 

          Zoot knows what's  happening but says nothing.  As long as they play well he will let it slide.  He can’t sit on these two young horses.  He can go with them, out to the boundary.  If he feels them slipping off, he will give them the infamous Zoot Stare.  If he can keep them right there, right at the boundary but still within the vocabulary, the vocabulary itself will become the realm of exploration. 

          It works.  It works all night.  At one moment, Aaron takes a drum solo and feels his arms multiply, feels as if four right hands and four left hands are striking and bouncing off the drums with incredible speed.  He is a Hindu God, he is eight-armed Ganesh, the elephant god, the lord of Jupiter.  He rolls and crackles and flames but keeps it together, never gets abstract, hits the One, the downbeat, right where he is supposed to. 

          There isn’t anyone in the room who is wondering if Aaron can play drums. There isn’t anyone in the room who is thinking about black or white, soul or without soul, paid dues, ain’t paid dues, hipness or squareness. 

          There is only the miracle of music.