Episode 13: Jazz Man
Music at the Mini-Mart
Arnold quietly laments that he is not named something other than Arnold. Something like Thelonious or Dizzy or maybe even Miles.
Arnold plays The Sax. He always has at least one (bari, tenor, alto, or soprano), and often more than one, behind the counter at the Mini-Mart where he works. The instruments are a little battered, and a little tarnished, except right after he polishes them. The pure, painfully beautiful strains can be heard wafting across the small, graveled parking area in the early mornings, and more than one tourist has been surprised, when stopping in for a cup of bad coffee or a package of Donettes, to find the lovely sounds aren’t coming from a Muzak system but from the heart and soul of a smallish older man standing stoop-shouldered and closed-faced behind the counter.
Mostly he plays the old standbys that casual jazz aficionados will recognize: Stella by Starlight, Take Five, Pennies from Heaven, God Bless the Child. If he’s feeling particularly melancholy—he is a musician, after all—it’s They Can’t Take That Away From Me, or Flying Home. The be-pimpled adolescent whose shifts follow Arnold’s (he can never remember the kid’s name, but it might be one of those Looser Island names like Dandelion or Sea Star) sometimes gives Arnold an inscrutable look when arriving at the store, but Arnold ignores the look. Arnold is old enough to understand the phrase Kids these days in his bones and in his gut.
Like most of the other island residents, Arnold is accompanied wherever he goes―even to work―by his canine companion. Gus is an aging Basset Hound, a gentle foil to his human’s curmudgeonliness who, as is good and right and proper for a jazz man’s dog, is a music-lover and an enthusiastic audience. Luckily for Arnold and the Mini-Mart customers, Gus shows his appreciation by smiling and wagging his tail rather than howling along.
Arnold is not Black―another misfortune for a jazz musician, in his mind, another injury to his muse. He is plainly white, with a narrow face framed by long yellow-white hair that he wears in a single braid reaching almost to his skinny behind. He has wild white eyebrows but no other facial hair to speak of, having decided long ago to give up on the dream of a ZZ-Top-style beard to match his braid. In spite of his oh-so-ordinary name and the decidedly pale cast of his skin, Arnold was moderately famous in his youth and even into middle age, a fact none of the other islanders knows or would have guessed.
Every day, rain or shine, Arnold gets up at five-thirty in the morning and walks Gus along the quiet country lane that runs in front of their small house, until they get to the bit of sand on the spit embracing Gull Bay. You can stand on the spit facing the Salish Sea, where the water looks like it goes on forever, interrupted only by the green humps of other islands that look, in just the right light, like the visible parts of a sea monster undulating by, or you can turn and face the Bay, which is small enough that you can make out Retha’s Bar and Grill on the other side and the beginning of the narrow road that winds up the hill to Larry and Ruth’s house and the other homes with a grander view.
Gus likes the feel of the sand on his tired old toes, and Arnold likes the feel of the cold wind washing over his tired old everything, blasting away particles of guilt and regret and compromise and mediocrity, while the quiet forgiving waters of the Bay hold him up from behind.
“It’s kind of funny,” Arnold sometimes says to Gus. “Used to be I’d be up playing until dawn, jammin’ with the boys, smoking cigarettes and whatnot and drinking whiskey sours. Now you give me that look if I stay up after ten o’clock, and I haven’t been at the hooch in years. Not since Doc Johnson said I was dying of liver failure. You remember that, Gus? Eight years ago, he said I didn’t got more than a few months to live. And here I am. Hoo boy, we sure showed him, didn’t we?”
Gus grins toothily whenever Arnold takes that particular wander down memory lane. He knows as well as Arnold that the good doctor said nothing of the sort, only suggested Arnold would be in danger of liver failure or something similar if he didn’t straighten up and fly right, as the song goes. But Arnold tries to make out like the doctor was wrong and he, Arnold, pulled a fast one on him by quitting drinking and smoking and living on.
It had been a glorious time, though. Making beautiful music with beautiful people. Or rather, people made beautiful by the communion of chords and rhythms and melodies that bypassed all the regular barriers of glamor, money, education, and politics, no perfect skin versus pock-marked and lined, no youthful vigor stacked up against sagging bellies and joints riddled with disease, no rich or poor or democrat or republican, no PhD or barely made it through high school, only speaking without words, soul to soul to soul.
Arnold’s career as a jazz man had flared and fizzled, as such things will. Over sixteen years ago, Arnold joined a friend and fellow musician for a gig on Looser island. The next day he got word he was being evicted from his apartment back in New Orleans, saw a Help Wanted sign in the window of the Looser Island Gas and Mini-Mart (known to all and sundry simply as the Mini-Mart), applied and was hired, found a place to stay, and never went back.
No one would guess his history, since he never played publicly after that. Except at the Mini-Mart.
Oh there was that time Retha stopped by and heard him playing and said gruffly, “You should come down to the Bar and Grill and play.”
And once one of the island’s other musicians came in and said Man those are some tunes! You gotta come play with us.
Each time someone said something like that, Arnold just shrugged. His long-ago gig with his friend had been a sparsely-attended bust, his friend had gone home afterward and never returned, and his own time in the spotlight had been over before he’d landed here on the island. He told himself he preferred to play at the Mini-Mart, the odd early-morning customer his only audience. He told himself he had everything he needed, right here.
“Time to go home, Gus,” Arnold says now, and then―
“Aw, Gus, did you have to do that here? I didn’t bring no bags with me.”
Surreptitiously he digs a hole in the sand with a piece of driftwood, knocks the steaming pile into the hole, and kicks the sand around until there’s no evidence of his crime.
When he’s not thinking about music or how he beat death, Arnold likes to think about God. Or, as he calls him, that rotten son-of-a-bitch in the sky that gets his kicks out of seeing us suffer and won’t lift a finger to help.
It makes Gus nervous when Arnold descends into nihilism, and he tries to remind Arnold, gently, that God is dog spelled backward, and vice versa, but Arnold, while otherwise quite sensitive to the non-human language of instruments and canines, is willfully deaf to these messages.
Maybe he prefers to be angry.
Maybe that’s easier than imagining we’re all alone in this vast universe, no rhyme or reason for our pain and wickedness, no ulterior motive or lessons to be learned, no one to blame.
And maybe he refuses to hear a contrary message from his dog because some kinds of truth can only be heard after the pain subsides.
Luckily these moments are few and far between. Mostly, Arnold has convinced himself the walking/working/playing music in the Mini-Mart is enough, and the existence or non-existence and compassion or sadism of the divine doesn’t factor into his life.
Until one day, one rare October day when the air is golden and russet with unspoken promise, when a man calling himself the Preacher shows up in the Mini-Mart.
He isn’t really a preacher. Not a priest, a pastor, or any other kind of clergy. He is a large middle-aged man wearing a black tee shirt that says PREACHER in white letters, with an enormous cross hanging from a gold-tone chain around his neck. He’s from N’awleans, he says, and Arnold’s heart leaps a little to hear that tiny hesitation at the beginning of the word that is somewhat but not quite accurately represented by an apostrophe. He’d got hisself into a little trouble, the Preacher tells Arnold, and he needed to find a place to lay low, and somebody said he should head to Canada but then he realized he’d be stopped at the border so he got on a ferry and jumped off at the prettiest island he come to. It’s a real drag, he says, to be stuck here with the rain and the sheep and all, no offense intended, none taken, Arnold interjects. He only came into the Mini-Mart, the Preacher says, because he saw the Help Wanted sign and he needed to make some dough.
Normally, Arnold doesn’t talk much with his customers. Like a bartender, he listens, nods in a way that can be taken as sympathy or empathy or understanding, occasionally makes a brief comment, takes their money, and then goes back to playing music. But the cadence of his old home shakes something loose inside.
“Aw, man, I’m sorry,” he says. “That sign’s been there forever. There ain’t no job here, far as I know. But why’nt you rest a while, I’ll get you some coffee, on the house, and you can tell me ‘bout my old beat.”
“Don’t mind if I do,” the Preacher says. “You sound like you been there.”
“Surely, surely,” Arnold says, falling back with easy grace into the lingo of his past. He pours a large cup of coffee and grabs a paper napkin and a glazed donut and hands them to his visitor. “Used to play with some bands down there,” he says.
“You don’t say!” There is a gleam in the Preacher’s eye that might be respect or might be greed, or it might just be happiness at the sight of the coffee and donut. “Well, the Lord do work in mysterious ways. As soon as my trouble has passed, I plan to get on back home and get back to my calling. I’m a agent for some of the biggest baddest bands around. Why’nt you play me something while I enjoy this refreshment you so kindly give me?”
In that moment, time stands still. Wave after keening wave of memories crash upon the shores of Arnold’s mind, from every time he’d heard Why’nt you play me something? The smell of cigarette smoke exhaled by carpet that has absorbed it so long the smoke is now part of the genetic strands of the fabric. The tinny sound of someone’s watch or ring or belt buckle accidentally hitting the cymbals as the drums are set up on stage. The feeling that defies description when all parts of a tune come together so perfectly it makes you want to weep, and then you look around and see that there are tears in everyone else’s eyes, as if the band was one body, one heart beating together in 4/4 time.
“Can do,” he says, and he pulls out his bari sax, and Gus looks up in happy anticipation. He considers something complex, something that will really showcase his talent, but settles instead on “Georgia On My Mind.”
“Damn,” the Preacher says, and then, “Let us have a moment of silence, brothers and sisters, for what the Lord hath wrought.”
The Preacher leaves then, but not before promising to return when he gets back on his feet. “I got me a couple a bands of olds,” he says, “because lots of folks like to hear the music they know, not some newfangled sound. You goin’ to audition for us, I give you my solemn word on that.”
The “bands of olds” doesn’t rankle, Arnold tells Gus afterward.
“I mean, I am old,” he says.
Just like that, the rhythm and tempo of Arnold’s life is changed, disrupted, disturbed. Gus objects, as best he can, but Arnold ignores him, or argues in response that no jazz man has a right to expect a normal life, and his dog doesn’t, neither. “It’s just how it’s s’posed to be,” he tells Gus, when Gus gives him a look that is, by turns, resentful or worried.
About those looks: it’s not that there are fewer walks or treats from the Jerky Jar in the store, and it isn’t that Arnold suddenly starts eating less Kraft Mac ‘n Cheese (Gus’s favorite); it’s just that now, playing is less prayer and more grinding practice, less like communing with the harmonies of the universe, and more like flossing one’s teeth so the dentist will say your gums look marvelous, no need for a filling today.
Arnold takes to muttering obscenities at himself if a tune won’t come out the way he wants it to, and he stops in the middle of the song if he is dissatisfied with a note or a phrase.
And Gus notices.
Fluffy Cloud or Daisy Pants or whatever-his-name-is also notices. “Th-th-that’s a new one,” he says shyly, one morning after arriving for his shift.
Arnold is surprised the young man has been paying attention enough to recognize a change in Arnold’s playlist. “Modern crap ‘s hard to play,” he says, and immediately worries that will be his epitaph and his obituary.
Markus comes in one Sunday morning in November to buy goat’s milk for Ella, who is lactose-intolerant. (No one who has spent any time on Looser Island should be surprised that the Mini-Mart carries local pasture-raised goat’s milk.) Gus and Molly greet each other in traditional dogly fashion and then ignore each other, having assured themselves that each one’s nether region smells as it should.
While Markus is surveying the dairy case, Arnold embarks on a particularly difficult riff in “Ask Me Now.”
“Sounding good, Arnold,” Markus says, and then when Arnold doesn’t respond, he quotes: “‘I don't give a monkey’s what you can hear, all right? Shut it! Just shut it, all right?’” He smiles, to make it clear he’s quoting, not commenting on Arnold’s playing.
Arnold just glares.
“’The Jazz Singer,’” Markus says. “The movie? You know?”
Arnold doesn’t know. “What do you want?” he says, around the mouthpiece.
“Goat’s milk,” Markus says, quavering a little under Arnold’s withering eye.
Arnold goes back to playing, and doesn’t stop even when Markus puts money on the counter, just nods his head and his bari sax and keeps right on cajoling music out of his instrument.
Later, Markus tells Ella he couldn’t quite figure out which part of that interaction bothered him most, and then it hit him: Arnold was scowling while he played.
Next Time
Episode 14: Jazz Man―Homecoming
One of my all-time favorites, Shari!