The Ivory and the Horn

Saxophone Joe And The Woman in Black

I love this city.

Even now, with things getting worse the way they do: Too many people hungry, or cold, or got nowhere to sleep, and here's winter creeping up on us, earlier each year, and staying later. The warm grate doesn't do much when the sleet's coming down, giving everything the picture-perfect prettiness of a fairy tale— just saying you've got the wherewithal to admire a thing like that, instead of always worrying how the ends are going to meet.

But you've got to take the time, once in a while, or what've you got? Don't be waiting for the lotto to come in when you can't even afford the price of a ticket.

It's like all those stories that quilt the streets, untidy little threads of yarn that get pulled together into gossiping skeins, one from here, one from there, until what you've got in your hand isn't a book, maybe, doesn't have a real beginning or end, but it tells you something. You can read the big splashes that make their way onto the front page, headlines standing out one inch tall, just screaming for your attention. Sure, they're interesting, but what interests me more-is the little stories. Nothing so exciting, maybe, about losing a job, or looking for one. Falling in or out of love. New baby coming. Old grandad passed away. Unless the story belongs to you. Then it fills your world, and you don't have time even to glance at those headlines.

What gets me is how everybody's looking to make sense of things. Sometimes you don't want sense. Sometimes, the last thing in the world you need is sense. Work a thing through till it makes sense and you lose all the possibilities.

That's what runs this city. All those possibilities. It's like the heart of the city is this old coal furnace, just smoking away under the streets, stoked with all those might-yet-bes and who'd-a-thoughts. The rich man waking up broke and he never saw it coming. The girl who figures she's so ugly she won't look in a mirror, and she finds she's got two boys fighting over her. The father who surprises himself when he finds he likes his son better, now that he knows the boy's gay.

And the thing is, the account doesn't end there. One possibility just leads straight up to the next, with handfuls of story lying in between. Stoking the furnace. Keeping the city interesting.

You just got to know where to look. You just got to know how to look.

Got no time?

Maybe the measurement's different from me to you to that girl who gives you your ticket at the bus depot, but the one thing we've all got is time. You can use it or lose it, your choice. That's how come we've got that old saying about how it's not having a thing that's important, but how we went about getting it. Our time's the most precious thing we've got to offer folks, and the worst thing a body can do is to take it away from us.

So don't you go wasting it.

But I was talking about possibilities and little stories, things, that maybe don't even make it into the paper. Like what happened to Saxophone Joe.

I guess everybody knows how a cat's got nine lives, and I'm thinking a few more of you know how those lives are divided up: three to play, three to stray, and the last three to stay. Maybe that's a likeness for our own lives, a what-do-you-call-it, metaphor. I don't know.

But grannies used to tell their children's children how if a cat came to live with you of its own accord during one of its straying lives, why you couldn't ask for better luck in that household. And that cat'd stay, too, unless you called it by name. Not the name you gave it, or maybe the one it gave you— it comes wandering in off the fire escape with its little white paws, so you call it Boots, or maybe it's that deep orange like you'd spread on your toast, so you call it Marmalade.

I'm talking about its secret name, the one only it knows.

Anyway, Joe's playing six nights a week with a combo in the Rhatigan, a little jazz club over on Palm Street; him on sax, Tommy Morrison on skins, Rex Small bellied up to that big double bass, and Johnny Fingers tickling the ivories. The Rhatigan doesn't look like much, but it's the kind of place you never know who's going to be sitting in with the band, playing that long cool music.

Used to be people said jazz was the soul of the city, the rhythm that made it tick. A music made up of slick streets and neon lights, smoky clubs and lips that taste like whiskey. Now we've got hip hop and rap and thrash, and I hear people saying it's not music at all, but they're plain wrong. All these sounds are still true to the soul of the city; it's just changed to suit the times is all.

One night Joe's up there on the Rhatigan's stage, half-sitting on his stool, one long leg bent up, foot supported on a rung, the other, pointing straight out across the stage to where Johnny's hunched over his piano, fingers dancing on the keyboard as they trade off riffs. There's something in the air that night, and they're seriously connected to it.

Joe takes a breath, head cocked as he listens to what Johnny's playing. Then, just as he tightens his lips around the reeds, he sees the woman sitting there off in a dark corner, alone at her table, black hair, black dress, skin the same midnight tone as Joe's own so hat she's almost invisible, except for the whites of her eyes and her teeth, because she's looking right at him and she's smiling.

Dark eye, she's got, like there's no pupils, watching him and not blinking, and Joe watches her back. He's got one eye that's blue and one eye that's brown; and the gaze of the two of them just about swallows her whole.

But Joe doesn't lose the music, doesn't hesitate a moment; his sax wails, coming in right when it should, only he's watching the woman now, Johnny's forgotten, and the music changes, turns slinky, like an old tomcat on the prowl. The woman smiles and lifts her glass to him.

She comes home with him that night, just moves in like she's always been there. She doesn't talk, she doesn't ever say a word, but things must be working out between them because she's there, isn't she, sharing that troy room Joe's had in the Walker Hotel for sixteen years. Live together in a small space like that, and you soon find out if you can get along or not.

After a while, Joe starts calling her Mona because that's the name of the tune they were playing when he first saw her in the Rhatigan and, musicians being the way they are, nobody thinks it strange that she doesn't talk, that she's got no ID, that she answers to that name. It's like she's always been there, always been called Mona, always lived with Saxophone Joe and been his woman.

But if he doesn't talk to anyone else about it, Joe's still thinking about her, always thinking about her, if he's on stage or walking down a street or back in their room, who she is and where she came from, and he finds himself trying out names on her, to see which one she might've worn before he called her Mona, which one her momma and poppa called her by when she was just a little girl.

Then one day he gets it right, and the next morning she's gone, walked out of his life like the straying cat in the story the grannies tell, once someone's called her by her true, secret name. What was her name, this woman Joe started out calling Mona? I never learned. But Joe knows the story, too, cats and names, and he gets to thinking some more, he can't stop thinking about Mona and cats, and then he gets this crazy idea that maybe she really was a cat, that she could change, cat to woman, woman to cat, slipped into his life during her straying years, and now she's gone.

And then he gets an even crazier idea: The only way to get her back is if he gets himself his own cat skin.

So he goes to see the priest— not the man with the white collar, but the hoodoo man— except Papa Jo-el's dead, got himself mixed up with some kind of juju that even he couldn't handle, so when Joe goes knocking soft on Papa Jo-el's door, it's the gris-gris woman Ti Beau that answers and lets him in.

Friday night Joe's back in the club, and he's playing a dark music now, the tone of his sax's got an undercurrent in it, like skinheaded drums played with the palm of your hand and a tap-tap of a drumstick on a bar of iron, like midnight at a crossroads and the mist's coming in from the swamp, like seven-day candles burning the wind, but those candies don't flicker because the gateways are open and les invisibles are there, holding the flames still.

Saturday night, he's back again, and he's still playing music like no one's heard before— not displeasing, just unfamiliar. Tommy and Rex, they're having trouble keeping the rhythm, but Johnny's following, note for note. After the last set that Saturday night, he walks up to where Joe's putting his sax away in its case.

"You been to see the mambo?" Johnny asks, "playing music like that?"

Joe doesn't answer except to put his sax case in Johnny's hands.

"Hold on to this for me, would you?" he asks.

When he leaves the club that night, it's the last time anybody sees him. Sees the man. But Heber Brown, he's been working at the Walker Hotel for thirty years. When he's cleaning out Joe's room because the rent's two months due and nobody's seen him for most of that time, Heber sees an old tomcat on the fire escape, scratching at the window, trying to get in. Heber says this cat's so dark a brown it's almost black, like midnight settled in the corner of an alleyway, and it's got one blue eye, so you tell me.

You think Ti Beau's got the kind of gris-gris potion to turn a man into a cat, or maybe just an old cat skin lying about that'll work the same magic, someone says the right words over it? Or was it maybe that Joe just up and left town, nursing a broken heart?

Somebody taped that last set Joe played at the Rhatigan, and I'll tell you, when Johnny plays it for me, I hear hurting in it, but I hear something else, too, something that doesn't quite belong to this world, or maybe belonged here first but we kind of eased it out of the way once we got ourselves civilized enough. It's like one of the loa stepped into Joe that night, maybe freed him up, loosened his skin enough so that he could make the change, but first that spirit talked to us through Joe's sax, reminding us that we weren't here first, and maybe we won't be here the last either.

It's all part and parcel of the mystery that sits there, right under all the things we know for sure. And the thing I like about that mystery is that it doesn't show us more than a little piece at a time; but you touch it and you've just got to pass it on. So if Joe's not with Mona now, you can bet he's slipped into someone else's life and he's making them think. Sitting there on a windowsill, maybe looking lazy, but maybe looking like he knows something we don't, something important, and that person he's with, who took him in, well she stops the tumbling rush of her life for a moment to take the time to think about what lies under the stories that make up this city.

Things may be getting worse in some ways, but you can't deny that they're interesting, too, if you just stop to look at them a little closer.

Like that old man playing the clarinet in the subway station that you pass by every day. He's bent and old and his clothes are shabby and you can't figure out how he makes a living from the few coins that get tossed into the hat sitting on the pavement in front of him. So maybe he's just an old man, down on his luck, making do. Or maybe he's got a piece of magic he wants to pass on with that music he's playing.

Next time you go by, stop and give him a listen. But don't go looking for a tag to put on what you hear or, like that cat that runs off when you name her, it'll all just go away.