Automatically Hip

Author’s note: In August 1951, police arrested jazz pianist Thelonious Monk for possession of heroin that wasn’t his. He spent sixty days in prison and lost his New York cabaret card, forcing him to play in obscurity for the next several years.

If you play jazz with cats, whether they’re finger zingers or rusty gates, no matter if they have balloon lungs or freak lips, if the rhythm is gut bucket or smoking, you’re bound to throw out a clunker or have one passed your way now and again. It’s a lot like life: everyone hits or gets a bad note from time-to-time, a moment when you put something negative onto someone else or they, as the Bible says, do the same onto you. Well, maybe that’s not how it exactly goes in the Good Book. But when you’re on a stage in front of folks who dropped more than a few hard-earned dimes to hear a sugar band, and you’re the lead, the star, the one they all came to see, and you get blown a change from a licorice stick or a rat-a-tat from a tub that makes you wish you hadn’t turned down before that puff of muggle, that cool shot of M., when all of a sudden the air leaves the room and there is no conceivable way to make sense, much less music, from the hand you’ve been dealt … that, I tell you, is the moment when genius is not forged, but revealed; when you can turn death into breath, restart the heart and reorder the world, so that everything sounds just like it should, a balance of smooth and static, up and down, back and forth, mute to murmur, a pleasing-to-the-ear disconnect that bothers your nerves and makes you wonder why you’re so plain and wooden in the presence of such greatness. And none of it would be possible, this creation of pristine artistry, this prurient display of unfettered brilliance, this “thank the dear Lord I decided to come tonight” moment, without that bad note, that clunker.

If you think by my language I’m a Jazz fan, you’re right. But if you think I’m part of that world, part of the swarm, part of a humming hive of men and women who move to a beat that doesn’t always follow a beat, then you’re wrong. I’m just not welcome inside the circle, and not because of race (I’m white Irish) or anything cliché like that, and not because I can’t play a lick on any instrument made by man or forged through God’s good graces, and not because I don’t understand what Jazz truly is, the essence of it, the soul of it, because I think I do. I don’t even think it’s because I’m a cop, or a retired cop, which is what I am now. But because I was a cop, back in 1951, working for the narcotics division, creeping around in a cruiser one night, in a Harlem neighborhood where we were told to creep around, and we saw two guys sitting in a parked car, minding their own business, and we decided to make it our business. I wish now I had recognized the man at the wheel; I should have. I’d seen him play a few times, or should I say I’d heard him play a few times because that was what hit you first and hardest, the sound of his piano; you never heard anyone play like that, I assure you. He did something to your ears, made them happy and sad and wishing they were bigger the moment he put his fingers to the keys. But I didn’t recognize him, and when we spotted the heroin it was all too late; soon the two men were at Rikers, and I sealed my place in history: I had arrested Thelonious Monk.

You might think me a coward for not telling the cops it was my heroin, for letting my best friend take the fall, the long-term pinch. But you have to know Monk wouldn’t let me admit that it was my bag, wouldn’t let me take responsibility for the junk. He actually forbade me to speak up, something made clear to me that night in the car, and every day for the next seven years he was exiled from the stage. Even when I begged him to let me come clean, he’d say, in that warm and weary voice, “No, Buddy, the beat stops with me.”

It’s quite a thing to feel guilty about for such a long time. It’s like having a low-grade fever; not bad enough to stay in bed all day, but you wish you could. You just never feel good, even when you think you’ve forgotten what troubles you, when the moment you’re in is sweet and fine and you think you have found heaven here on earth. That’s when it jumps up and lets you know you’re not free to have such pleasure, the thought pulling you down so fast from the perch you were on it’s like you have vertigo, like you jumped out of a window on the way to meet your maker. But you never land, you never die, and you never get over the bad feeling. Like a low-grade fever, I tell you. Just like it.

Maybe the first year was the best, only because I was around Monk a lot and riding the injustice of the whole thing. I felt like we were still in it together, that the cops were the enemies, and that I wasn’t a snitch. Monk was in my corner, assuring me I had not done wrong by keeping my mouth shut. He wouldn’t let anyone talk dirty about me either, at least not around his sharp ears. But they did, friends and foes alike put me down as yellow and spineless, a weak person, a bad seed. It started to get to me, and when it did, the itch for drugs was strong. I was done though, with heroin. I couldn’t even say the word without feeling repulsed after what it had done to me and to Monk. So I did other things, and there were always other things to do. But nothing gave me that same glaze, that feeling of being dead to the world. Heroin made my mind drift like a balloon tied to a body stuck in cement. The funny thing was that even smoked to the gills, I could make my fingers dance. Maybe my feet felt like lead, but my hands never had trouble until that night I tried to toss the baggie out the window and missed, dropping the damn thing right at Monk’s feet for the cops to find. Some people said that if I only had been straight I would have tossed the thing right and we’d be cleared, but I never had problems with my hands before, gassed or not. This, you see, was really about aim.

Once the fire burned down, once people got used to the idea that I was no good, that I was scared to take what was owed to me, that I gave the time I couldn’t do to my friend to do, then I burned down too. I lost my spark. I simmered in my own juices. I shuffled around with head down, like a beaten man not allowed to admit he’s beaten. I blame Monk for that. Yes, I do. I got him into a jam and he wouldn’t let me get him out of it, which kept me in it. The way I see it, Monk took a bullet for me, and after that I took a bomb for him. I let him take and hold the high ground while I rolled downhill those seven years they forcibly exiled him from the stage.

Now, those that know about Monk, fans who have followed his history, will shout out that either they saw him play when he was banned from doing such, at least in New York, or heard that he had taken some stage in disguise, under an alias, with his fellow musicians sworn to secrecy. The word was he did this to keep his jazz muscle honed, to get a few dollars, even to lift his spirits. Well, it’s true. Monk did play to audiences those years, but not for the reasons most felt. He did it because it was the right note to play next, the right way to take the clunker he got from me and extend it so it would become, one day, part of a perfect, pristine, gorgeous set. You see, most people don’t realize that Monk saw everything in life as a piece of music; everything to him was jazz. That was his true genius. There was no separation to his art: he was jazz, jazz was him. So when that bag of H landed at his feet, he reacted the same way as when sitting at the piano and the skins missed a beat: he took in the information, made a decision on how to get the joint jumping again, and then did it. In this case it meant taking responsibility for the junk, sending me into a guilty spiral, and waiting out seven years until it cleared. Ah, you say, but he played for the public during that time. Yes, and no. He played, but not as Monk; what I’m saying is he held back his talent, suppressing all the magic that made his sound so unique, so impactful. This was part of the set, keeping a blanket on the beauty, manifesting, if you will, a seven-year flu. When I would listen to a set he played during that time, and I was always there when he slipped on a stage, it reminded me of a basketball player I knew, a cat named Jack Molinas who lit it up at Columbia right around the time Monk and I got busted. Jack was a Jewish kid with a handsome face and a jones for gambling. He threw games, dumped them, shaved points, and made a bundle from bookies. If you watched Jack play straight up, he would dismantle all and everyone, pros and asphalt legends. But when you watched him when he “worked,” when he played for the illegal buck, you winced in pain, your soul longing to see that athletic machine performing at one hundred percent. That’s how it was when I watched Monk play during that time. I could not help but wince as well, to run out of the place screaming and howling, for I knew I was the reason this was going on, and I knew he wanted it to go on.

Finally, my anguish stopped. New York State, one day, cleared him. Gave him back his name, and his game. And like a crocus that rises overnight from a thawing soil, Monk appeared on stage: walked right out, sat at the piano, and without introduction, without looking at the audience, without even a nod of the head, began to play all the way.

My father was a man who spoke just loud enough to make you lean forward to hear what he said. It wasn’t as if he was holding back volume intentionally, for impact or effect, and I wouldn’t call him soft-spoken, because his words, whatever the decibel level, had a unique bite to them, a sting even, like getting a shot from the doctor, a fast prick letting you know you’ve been connected with the medicine, and then the pain is gone—just like that—and it’s in your veins doing the work. I was young when it happened: when he got in trouble with my Uncle Buddy and couldn’t play. You have to know I didn’t really understand much of what happened, and I didn’t really care as long as he wasn’t in jail and taken away from me. On that end, those seven years he was silent, as I like to call it now, were probably the best seven years of my life, only because he was home an awful lot, and being at home he was with me an awful lot, which was not awful at all.

What I liked about my father was his inability to treat me as anything but a level-headed person. No matter the inane things that came from my child’s mouth, the petty rages that befall all boys when they try to flex intellectual and emotional muscles not yet developed, the constant tug at his sleeve to include me in all and everything in his life, no matter what I did or didn’t do, when he talked to me, when he leveled that amazing gaze and took me in, I believe he saw me as an equal, and as an equal, he would not suffer me as a fool.

I know he didn’t like being around the house sometimes; my mother and he would fight. Not terrible arguments, no screaming and throwing of items in grasping distance, which is something I heard in other apartments in our building, but little scraps, which is the best way I could describe, quick-hitting barbs toward each other and an occasional shaken fist or pantomimed slap to the face. Money was an issue: my mom was always worried about meeting household expenses, and my father was always indifferent to her worry, which made her even madder. But I don’t remember ever missing a meal those seven years, or the lights going off, or not getting a coat when I needed one, or some change to run out and buy ice cream. I’d like to think my father was a hustler—would figure out ways to make bread when he couldn’t really do what he was put on Earth to do, what, I believe, God wanted him to do, to play music that no one played before. I knew he hauled furniture now and again, helped people move, cleaned out homes and basements, even drove trucks. I also know he played a few gigs: I’d see him leave home and know right away; not his clothes, but his gait, the carry of his head, the bounce, told me at least he was heading toward the music. One time I followed him, snuck out and trailed him all the way to Harlem, to a little place he ducked in. I remember seeing Uncle Buddy outside, and another guy, a white man with a big, red, sad face. He struck me because I’d seen him hanging around outside our apartment a few times over the years, with the same hangdog expression. I overheard my mother once say he was a cop.

When I started to get older and began to realize what had happened, and with my growing sense of self, I became more concerned about myself. Basically, I worried that whatever happened to my father would pass on to me; that no one would take me seriously as a musician, which is what I had decided to become. I remember when I leveled that at my father, he smiled, and then, with a flutter of fingers in the air, as if he was about to lay them on the keys, said, “Don’t worry, you’re my son. You’re automatically hip.” It made me feel better, and then it made me feel nervous because I didn’t know what hip really was, didn’t know what it really felt like. But he did, and he knew it could carry through to another generation; just to be sure, when those seven years were up, when they welcomed him back, he made sure to transform into the real Thelonious Monk the hippest way possible: quietly.

If you really want to know the real story, what I felt, why I did what I did, why I didn’t do what I could, listen. Listen close. It’s the only way.