Lester Young and the Jupiter’s Moons’ Blues

GORD SELLAR

 

 

New writer Gord Sellar was born in Malawi, grew up in Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan, and currently lives in South Korea, where he teaches at a university. The year 2008 was a big one for him, as he published highly visible stories in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Interzone, Fantasy, and Tesseracts Twelve, one of the splashier debuts in recent years. (He had two previous sales last year, to Nature and to Flurb, but they went largely unnoticed.) He graduated from Clarion West in 2006. His Web site is at gordsellar.com.

In addition to writing, Sellar is a jazz buff and plays jazz saxophone, a background he obviously drew upon in writing the clever story that follows, in which a down-and-out jazzman gets a chance to play some literally out of-this-world music, and hopes that his luck has changed. Which it has, but the question is, which way?

 

His first night back on Earth after his gig on the Frogships, Bird showed up at Minton’s cleaner than a broke-dick dog, with a brand new horn and a head full of crazy-people music. He’d got himself a nice suit somewhere, and a fine new Conn alto. Now, this was back in ’48, when everyone—me included—was crazy about Conn and King and only a few younger cats were playing on Selmer horns.

But it wasn’t just that big-shouldered suit and the horn; the cat was clean. I mean clean, no more dope, no more liquor, no more fried chicken. Hell, he was always called Bird—short for Yardbird—on account of how much fried chicken he liked to eat. This was like a whole different Charlie Parker. He was living clean as a monk. He was walking straight and talking clear. His eyes weren’t all fucked-up and scary anymore, either.

To be honest, I didn’t recognize him when he walked into Minton’s. It was about three a.m., and the regular jam session had been going for a long time, and all these cats from Philly had shown up, you know, dressed up like country negroes on Sunday morning and playing all that Philadelphia grandpa-swing they liked used to like to play. Smooth and all, but old-fashioned, especially for 1948. Even in New York City, the hotbed of bebop and the only place where the Frogs were taking jazz musicians on tour, there was still a lotta old guys dressed up in Zoot suits cut for them five years before, trying to play like Coleman Hawkins and Johnny Hodges and Lester Young used to in the old days, before they all disappeared. Bebop was huge, but a lot of ignorant cats, they were trying to resist it, still disrespecting us, calling what we played “Chinese music” and shit.

But Bird, he was clean like I said, but he played some shit like I never heard before, like nobody never heard before. I’m telling you, when he went up on the bandstand and brought that horn up to his mouth, the music that came out of it was . . . well, it made us crazy. Back in those days, we were like mad scientists when it came to sounds. We’d be taking a leak at the same time and one of us would break wind and we all knew what note it was. We’d call it together, turn to one another laughing and shit, and say, “E-flat, Jack, you just farted an E-flat.” And that night we’d play every third tune in E-flat.

But them tunes Bird was playing, man, I ain’t never heard nobody put notes together like that. The rhythms were so tangled up that even I had to listen close to catch them all. He was playing 37 notes evenly spaced across a four-beat bar in fast swing, crazy licks like that, and he was playing all these halfway tunings, quarter tones and multiphonics and all kinds of craziness. And even so, he was swinging.

Everyone went crazy, it was just too much. And Bird just grinned like a goddamn king and said, in that snooty British gentleman accent he used to like to put on sometimes, “Ladies and gents, this music is the wave of the future. It received its dé-but off the rings of Saturn, and if you don’t like it, you can come right on up here and kiss my royal black ass.”

Them old guys, the Zoot suit cats, they didn’t like that, but they didn’t say nothing. Everyone remembered how Bird never took no shit off nobody back before he went off touring the solar system.

Man, all that scared me a little, but I still wanted to get onto one of them Frogships and hear what kind of music everyone was playing up there. They were hiring cats, everyone knew that, but that was all I knew about it. Now, I hadn’t never met Bird before, and I knew he wasn’t going to talk to me, but Max Roach, Max was drumming there that night, and I’d met Max one time before there at Minton’s, so I figured I could talk to him.

Max, he’d gone up onto the Frogships a year or two back. Well, he looked at me like he knew what I wanted, what I was gonna ask about, but he sat down to talk to me anyway. I told him I wanted onto the ships, wanted to know how to get in.

“You audition, same as for anything else,” he said, shrugging. “Who knows what they like? Don’t ask me.”

“But you been on the ships . . .”

“Uh-huh,” Max said, nodded, but didn’t say no more.

“What kind of music they hire you to play?”

“Oh, man, you just need to play whatever,” he said in that quiet, calm voice of his. He was a really cool, soulful cat most of the time. “Some of the time, they take cats who swing the old way, real old-fashioned; like what Duke’s band used to play in the old days, or Billy Eckstine’s. Hell, sometimes they want New Orleans funeral songs, or some cat who plays like Jelly Roll Morton. Other times they only take cats who play real hard bebop, man. You can’t never know what they want. But anyway, you don’t need to go on up to the ships. It messes a cat up, man.” He tapped the tablecloth with his drumsticks, hit my glass of bourbon with one of them. Ting.

I know better now, but then I just thought he was stonewalling me. Figured maybe there were only limited spaces, and he was bullshitting me, trying to keep gigs open for cats he knew better.

“What do you mean?” I said. “Look at Bird! Remember when he left? Cat went up there looking like death on a soda cracker, and look at him now!” I glanced over and saw him sitting at a table with Diz and Miles and Monk and Art Blakey and Fat Girl Navarro and a couple of them white women who used to hang around at Minton’s. They were laughing like a bunch of old women, like someone had just told a joke a second before. Bird, he wasn’t fat no more, he was lean, and real clear-headed and healthy-looking, nothing like when they let his ass out of Camarillo. He looked like a cat with a long life ahead of him.

“Bird’s been different, always, man,” Max said. “He’s just that kind of cat. Plus, they fixed him up. They wanted him bad, so they took him apart and then put him back together out there. A lot of cats, they just . . .” Then he stopped, like he didn’t know what to say, and his eyes went a little scary, the way Bird’s used to be, and he looked at me like he could see through my skin or something, and said, “Look, cats almost never come back like he did. The things that go on . . . you can’t even imagine,” he said.

The room went quiet sometime while we were talking, and I could tell Max was relieved. He didn’t like talking about the Frogships, didn’t want to recommend them to nobody. We both looked around and saw other people were all staring at the back of the club, at the entrance, and what do you know but this big tall-assed Frog had come on in the back and was standing there watching us all.

These days there ain’t a lot of cats who remember what the Frogs looked like, really. It’s been so long since they moved on, and let me tell you, the pictures don’t show not even the half of it. They were like these big frogs who stretched their skin over a real tall man, but they had more eyes and weird-assed hands. No fingers, just some tentacles on the ends of their goddamned arms, man, and they walked on two legs. Now, this Frog, he was fat, and he wore a Zoot suit tailored specially for him, hat and all, which just made him look totally out, man, just crazy. He came in with three or four guys, white hipsters, and they sat themselves down at a table in the front of the club that was set out for them in a hurry.

That Frog, he was smoking long, black cigarettes, four or five of them at once, on these long jade cigarette holders. He was looking around, too, with all these eyes on his face, as if to say, Where’s the goddamn music? I looked at him closely, and noticed that his skin, his face and hands, even his suit, it was all a little blurry, like a badly-shot photograph. He puffed on his cigarettes and looked around.

Nobody said nothing.

But all these cats, especially them sad Philly boys, they all thought it was their big chance. They hurried on up onto the bandstand, and they started to play their jumped-up jive-ass swing. That old Frog just leaned on back in its chair and kept on smoking those slow-burning black cigarettes, sticking its long blue tongue up into the smoke as it puffed it out. There were little black eyes all over its tongue, too, and they swiveled toward the bandstand.

I couldn’t tell if it was bored or enjoying the show, but I do know that finally, after they finished a few tunes, Bird had finally had enough. He tapped Thelonious Monk on the shoulder, and Monk nodded, and stood up, and went up to the bandstand. Everyone had heard about what had happened that night at the Three Deuces back in January in 1946; everyone knew how these Frog cats felt about Monk’s music.

Man, Thelonious, he just went on up to the piano and sat down, and everyone else on the bandstand just watched him, every one of them quiet and thinking, Oh shit. Monk, he lifted up his hands, all dramatic like he was about to play a Beethoven sonata or whatever, like that, you know what I mean, and when everyone shut up he started playing.

“Straight, No Chaser.” That was a fine tune, just a little jagged and twisted up. He played the head real simple, melody with his right hand, old-fashioned blues stride with the left. The alien leaned forward. Everyone knew how much they liked Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, granddaddy music like that.

But when Monk finished out the head the second time, and started improvising on the changes, man, you could see him sitting with this big-assed grin on his face up there at the piano. He started playing some of his really Monkish shit, all that weird, tangled up melody, banging out tone clusters over and over and plunking out his crooked little comping rhythms.

The Frog, when it heard Monk start up with all that, it stood itself up, dropped its cigarettes on the ground and slapped one hand over its huge front face-eyes and the other behind the back of its head. It was moaning—with three or four voices at once—and this blue stuff starting leaking out of its nose. Then it decided it was time to get the hell out.

It wobbled but finally made it out the door, shaky like a junkie dying to shoot himself up. All them hipster cats it came in with, they all followed it out, making out like they were all nervous and worried. Teddy Hill, who was running Minton’s Play house back then, he followed them all out with a scared face on, too. Bird, he laughed like a fucking maniac when he saw all that.

“Damn Frogs never could handle Monk,” Max said, laughing. “Man, that was beautiful!”

 

A few weeks later, my buddy J.J. came by with this poster he’d found on some lamp-post nearby. He read it out to me while I brushed my teeth one morning.

“Now hiring jazz musicians of all instrumental specialties . . . the intergalactic society of entertainers and artists’ guild . . . Colored Americans only please, special preference currently given to aspiring bebop players. No re-hires from previous tours please. One-year (possibly renewable) contracts available. See the solar system! Play blues on the moons of Jupiter! Go someplace where The Man won’t be breathing down your neck! Press HERE for more information!”

I spat out the foam from my toothpaste, put down my electrobrush, and asked, “So? Where’s the audition?”

He pressed his finger on the word HERE and the sheet went blank for a second. Then a map appeared on it. “Over on West 52nd, at the Onyx.”

“What?” I was shocked. Going to the Onyx for an audition, man, that was like going on a tour of Mississippi with a busload of negroes, women and children and all. Over at the Onyx, man, it was all what my father used to call ofays—white men—running the joint, every last one of them motherfuckers so goddamned racist it wasn’t even funny.

“You heard me. The Onyx.”

“Shit. What time?”

“The Onyx?!” That was my woman, Francine. She’d been cooking and she’d come up behind J.J. so quiet we hadn’t heard her till it was too late. She looked at J.J. and man, it was like, No bacon for you this morning, motherfucker—

She pushed past him, put her hands on her hips, and said, “What are you gonna do? Go on up in space, and leave me alone with this baby?” she said, putting her hands under her big belly.

“Francine,” I said.

“No, Robbie, don’t try to sweet talk me,” she said, shaking her head like she was having none of this. “Goddamn! My mama told me I should stay away from you. Said musicians weren’t nothing but trouble.”

I looked up at J.J. and tilted my head in the direction of the door, and he just nodded and left us alone. She didn’t say nothing till the screen door clicked shut.

“Robbie, baby,” she said, looking up at me with those sweet brown eyes of hers. “You are not going to that audition at the Onyx,” she said.

Man, it just about broke my heart, but I knew that I was done, completely done with her. I knew she’d be a good mama, but not to my babies. It was all over right then.

So I looked at her, and I said, “I seen those letters you got all wrapped-up. Up in your sock drawer.”

“What letters?” she said, and it was almost believable, except I could see she was pretending. Lying.

“Francine, come on, girl. I wasn’t born yesterday. Maybe last week, but not yesterday, baby. I know about you and Thornton. And don’t be telling me it’s some one-sided thing, because I seen how you wrapped them letters up in a ribbon and hid them and all. And I seen the dates on them, too.”

She slumped a little, and said, “Baby, I . . .” and then she stopped. She couldn’t lie to me no more, and she knew it. She was tired of lying to me, too, I think. She was a good enough woman, Francine.

“Now listen, baby,” she said, and her voice cracked but she tried to sound strong just the same. “It ain’t like I never heard about you running around with those other women. I know I ain’t the only one of us who been unfaithful.”

“Francine, you and I both know that baby probably ain’t mine, the way you been rationing me around here—which is why I been with other women, since you don’t give me what I need. Did I complain to you? Have I been nagging your ass? No, that’s fine, I understand. But this . . . look, you want that baby to have a daddy, you better go marry the man who done gave it to you.”

“This is bullshit,” she said. “You can run around as much as you want, but you can’t never get pregnant. Me, I do it once or twice behind your back, and look what I get.”

“I know,” I said, and I tried to put my arms around her, but she pushed me away. “Life ain’t fair, is it, girl?” I said, and tried again. This time she let me hug her. It was breaking my heart, those brown-sugar eyes all full of tears, her arms shaking a little as she hugged me back. But I wasn’t gonna have no other man’s baby calling me daddy, and I wasn’t gonna stay with no woman who been going behind my back with no other cat, so it was probably a mistake, me being so nice to her just then like that.

She started crying, saying, “I’m sorry, baby. I’m sorry.” Begging and pleading, and kissing on me. She told me she wouldn’t never do it again.

“That’s good. You learned your lesson. Like you gonna be a good wife to Teddy Thornton,” I said. He was the one who’d written her the letters. Used to play drums around town, though I heard his granddad died and he went into business of the money he inherited.

And I tell you, when I said that, it was like the werewolf in them movies, you know, how he changes shape in a second? That was Francine, man. Bam. “What, you mean you ain’t staying, now, after all that?” Her eyes were full of a kind of fire only a woman can fill up with.

I shook my head. “I’m gonna get this gig, girl. Damn, Bird, and Hawk, and . . . all those cats who gone up there, they come back richer than Rockefeller. You damn right I’m going up there.”

“You son of a bitch!” she yelled, tears still running down her cheeks, and she grabbed a lamp from the hallway just outside the bathroom. “You was gonna run off to space no matter what, wasn’t you? God-damn you!”

Then she threw the lamp at me, but I was quick and jumped sideways, so it hit the floor and broke into a million pieces. Man, that pissed me off. It was my goddamn lamp, I’d bought it with the money I’d made off gigs, and I knew it’d be good as new in a few hours—it was the new foreign kind that was just coming out then, the kind that could fix itself—but this shit was still just a pain in the ass. I never did like being disrespected by no women.

But I just nodded my head. Didn’t matter what she broke, long as it wasn’t my horns. I wouldn’t need no lamp where I was going.

 

The Onyx was a nice place, inside. Fancy, I mean. Every cat I knew was in there, plus a few I wished I knew. Sonny Rollins was in there, Red Dog, and Art Tatum, and Hot Lips Bell, and some other cats I recognized too.

We were all outside the green room, waiting. Green room, that shit was funny: it’d always been called that, but at the Onyx, during these auditions, it was really the green room, with real green Frogs inside. That was where cats went in to play their auditions, and the Frogs would listen and decide whether they wanted them on the ships.

I waited my turn. Everyone was real quiet, more than you’d expect, and through the wall we could hear drums and bass start up every once in a while after guys went in. The bass sounded like one of those expensive self-amplified ones, the kind that looked like a regular bass but got real loud all on its own, except you had to plug it into the wall at night.

Cat after cat went in, played for five or ten minutes, and then left. I sat there with my buddies, Back Pocket and J.J. and Big Jimmy Hunt, and we all just cradled our instruments and watched the TV in the corner of the room, no sound, just color picture, and waited without talking.

Finally, after a few hours of listening and waiting, it was my turn. The door opened, and this skinny white hipster came out and called my name: “Robbie Coolidge?”

“That’s me,” I said, and I followed him into the room.

There were a couple of Frogs sitting on a couch in there, both of them smoking bouquets of the same damned cigarettes on long metal cigarette holders. They were wearing shades and black suits that didn’t hide the bumps they had all over their bodies, and they didn’t say nothing to me at all. On the other side of the room, a couple more of them hipsters sat there at a small table with piles of old-fashioned paper on it. Nobody bothered to stand or shake my hand, but one of them hipsters started talking to me. Didn’t introduce himself or nothing, just started talking.

“Tenor player.” It wasn’t no question.

“Yes sir. I can also play the alto and the flute, a little,” I said, just as cool as I could.

“You got a manager?”

“Uh, no sir. I, uh . . . I manage myself.” I wanted to sound cool, but I felt like a damn country negro right then.

“Well, that’s just fine,” he said, grinning that white hipster grin of his. “Why don’t you play us a song, then?”

So I called the tune, counted it off, and launched into it. The tune I played was one of Bird’s, “Confirmation,” and I guess their machine knew it, because as soon as I started playing it, bass and drums were piped in from nowhere. They wanted bebop, so I played my best bebop tune.

“Not bad,” the hipster said, and the Frogs were agreeing, nodding. “Can you play anything sweet?” he asked, and I played them a chorus of “Misty” as soulful and pretty as I could.

“That was just fine, Mr. Coolidge. Please leave us your phone number and we’ll call you soon. Thanks,” the boss man hipster said when I handed him my name card, and one of his sidekicks showed me out. After that, I waited around while my buddies all auditioned, and they all said it’d gone pretty much the same.

I wondered whether that was a good sign or a bad one, but a few weeks later, I was on the subway when my pocket phone rang. I fished it out of my pants pocket, and dialed in my access number on the rotary dial to open the connection.

Looking at the face on the little screen for a second, I wondered why this slick, pale-assed young hipster was calling me, until I realized that it was that same hipster from the Onyx.

“Mr. Coolidge,” he said, “I have some good news for you.”

And that was how I ended up touring the solar system with Big C.

 

The space elevator, that blew me away. It was a fucking gas, man. I only ever rode up it once, and I swear it was smooth as Ingrid Bergman’s skin, or Lena Home’s smile, even though it was going faster than anything I’d ever been in before.

J.J. Wilson was the only one of my friends who also got a gig up on the Frogships, and he and I sat there side by side with our seat belts around our waists, looking down through the glass floor—it wasn’t really glass but we could see through it—at the Earth and everything we were leaving behind. It seemed so strange to be looking at the whole world like that. I could see South America, the ocean, some of Africa. Clouds, and ice on north pole and south pole. I could see places I’ve never gone in all the years since then, and probably will never go.

Only a few hours before, J.J.’s wife had driven us up into the Catskills where the Frogs’ launchpad had been. She’d cried a little, but soon she was making jokes and small talk. Francine, on the other hand: the first time she called, she was crying, and she pleaded with me on my pocket phone till I hung up on her. Then she called back screaming, and made me listen to her break plates and windows and shit. I’d felt a little lonely on the way up, and a little bad for her, but after that, I was glad she hadn’t come along for the ride, and I was sure I’d done the right thing by leaving her.

It was strange, that trip, because I hadn’t never seen the Catskills before. Right there by New York, but I never went and saw them till I was leaving to go to outer space. Can you believe it?

We caught us a jet up there, one that flew on up almost into space, but then come down again in some mountains up in north Brazil somewhere. I was hoping we might stop by in the city, so we could try out some Brazilian chicks. I heard good things about them, Brazilian girls, I mean. But we didn’t have time for that—it was straight up to the ships for us.

We weren’t the only ones strapped down into chairs in the elevator, though. There were all kinds of interesting people in there. There were a couple of skinny Chinese girls with some kind of weird musical instruments, what you might call zithers; and there were a bunch of Mexican and white guys dressed like cowboys with spurs and lassos and all that shit, just like in the Hollywood westerns. There was also this Russian cat in a suit who tried to talk to us through some kind of translator machine, but we couldn’t understand him at all. He had a satchel of books with him.

And I swear there were about fifteen French girls in there with us, too. Cute, with fine cheekbones and low asses and long-assed legs, dressed up in their can-can outfits. I caught one of them looking at me a few times, and I just smiled and reminded myself to look her up sometime. French women, you know, sometimes they’re less racist than American women. They’re ladies. But you know, women always bring too much shit along with them when they travel. Those can-can girls each had a big stack of suitcases strapped onto the ground beside them, every last one of them.

Me, I just brought my horns, a couple of extra suits, and my music collection, some on vinyl and some on crystal.

When the elevator got to where it was going, we all unstrapped ourselves, got out of our seats, and stepped out into what looked like an airport. I had pulled on my big old herringbone winter coat, thinking it’d be cold in space, but it wasn’t. It was like a train station, and as soon as we were in it, I started hearing a beeping sound. The card they’d given me to hang around my neck was beeping. A glowing red arrow pointed to my left, and same for J.J., too. We went off in that direction, following the can-can girls, full of hope and dreams of long legs.

Turned out we’d all been sent up for the same ship. J.J. and me and the can-can girls arrived together in a small waiting room, and the cowboys came a while later. We figured that once the Russian guy showed up, and the Chinese girlies, maybe someone would come and get us, so we just chatted for a while. Turned out the cowboys were rodeo heroes, you know, the guys who ride bulls and catch cows with lassos and shit like that. They’d been hired as entertainers, just like us, one-year contract. Same pay and everything.

Man, ain’t nobody in the world back then who paid a black man and a white man and a Mexican and a woman the same money for the same gig—not before them Frogs done it.

So finally, when the Russian and them Chinese chicks showed up, it was because this big tall-assed Frog in a white suit and tie brought them to the waiting room. Like the Frogs I’d seen on Earth, this one was smoking a few black cigarettes on long cigarette holders, all of them poking out of one side of its mouth. It stuck its tongue out and looked at us slowly, one by one, with all of its gigantic eyes on its face and the little ones on its tongue, as if it was checking us against a memorized list of faces.

“Welcome aboard the space station. This way, please, to the ship that will be your home for the next year.” It wasn’t the Frog itself speaking; the voice came from a speaker on the collar of the Frog’s suit. It waved its three-tentacled hand at the wall of the waiting room, and the wall slid open. There was a hallway on the other side, and at the far end of the hallway was another door, far away, slowly opening in the same way.

We went down the hall in little groups, staying close to the people we’d come with. Walking down that hallway, we all looked like old dogs, walked with our heads down, bracing for some bad shit to come down onto us.

But at the end of that hallway, when we came through the second door, you know what we found? Can you guess?

The whole place was done up like a big-assed hotel or cruise ship or something. There was this huge-assed lobby and ballroom, and main stairs leading up and down. One whole wall of the lobby was transparent, you could see right through it to the stars. Frogs wandered every which way, a few cats and fine skinny women of every color here and there, all of them dressed bad, real hip.

“Welcome on board The Mmmhumhhunah!” Ship name sounded something like that, like how people would talk if they had socks in their mouth or something. That was what the Frogs’ language sounded like to me, at least at first. He tried to make it sound like we were guests. “Your navigation stubs should guide you to your places of accommodation. Should you have any questions, please feel free to ask any passing staff member, who can be identified by the subordinate rank uniforms they are required to wear, and which have been modeled on uniforms denoting similar positions in your culture. We will begin preparations tomorrow, and the tour will commence a week henceforth.”

“What’s he talking about, man?” J.J. asked. His eyes were wide, like he’d seen his grandmama’s ghost.

“Follow the little arrow thing to your room,” I explained. “If you need help with your bass, ask a bellboy. First rehearsal’s tomorrow.”

“And please give me your instruments,” added the Frog. “They need to be treated specially to withstand both repeated decoherence and space travel.”

“Deco-what?” J.J. was very protective of Big Mama, which was what he liked to call his bass. “Hey, can you put one of them self-amplifiers into her?”

“Yes, of course, that was already planned,” the alien said, and its eyes went round in circles. “Everyone else, also, we must collect your instruments. They will be returned to you tomorrow.”

“Awright,” J.J. said, twisting his head to one aside and the other as he leaned on Big Mama in her carrying case, gave the bass one last hug.

I handed them my tenor sax, but I wasn’t happy about it. I didn’t know what the hell they was going to do to it, but it was a Conn and had cost me an arm and a leg to get. But I handed it over. I already had the serial numbers written on a piece of paper in my shoe, just in case.

 

Now, listen up: I know me some drugs. I seen what heroin does to a cat, how it robs him of his soul, turns him into a pathetic junkie. I even tried it once or twice. And I know how spun-around a cat can get on bennies, ’cause I’ve done lots of them too. I’ve drunk every goddamn thing a man can drink, a lot of drinks at the same time, even. I’ve been so fucked up I didn’t know what planet I was on. But nothing fucks you up like the drugs they gave us on the ships.

I first tried them at that first rehearsal, day after we arrived on the cruise ship, but before we got our own horns back. Me and J.J. showed up at the same time, and met the cat who was running the music program. He was a fat old brother with a trumpet style nobody ever copied right, nobody ever beat, and his name was Carl Thorton, but everyone called him Big C. He gave us these pills to swallow. Three of them, each one a different color.

“Yellow one’s so you can blur, the way they like. Blue one fixes you up with a better memory, so you can call up everything you ever heard. That one takes a while to kick in. Last one, the green one, that one’s for programming memory of all those licks you memorize into your muscles and shit, instant super-chops. That one comes in real quick. You gotta take these sons-a-bitches every day for six months. Don’t forget, or you’ll turn your own ass so inside-out it ain’t even funny. Got it?”

“Uh huh,” me and J.J. said, and took the pills with a big glass of water. Water didn’t taste quite right, wasn’t nice and a little sweet like back in New York.

Big C, he had a bunch of us new guys—enough to play in a big band. He had us all sit down and listen to the old band, outgoing band, who wouldn’t be leaving for a couple of days, so we could listen to them and get the hang of things. He told us big bands only went on tour on the Frogships for a year at a time, most times. Man, I didn’t know they was looking to make a big band. I hadn’t played in one for years, but whatever. I sat and listened. Didn’t figure I could back out then, it was too late.

Well, they started to play—some old Basie tune, I think it was, but they were playing it so fast I couldn’t tell which one. Badass, these cats—they didn’t drop a beat, not a squeak anywhere. They played the head perfectly at what was definitely 300 beats a minute or more.

But when the solo section came, I rubbed my eyes and starting worrying about them drugs Big C had gave us. Big C, I could see him fine and clear, but the lead alto saxman, when he stood up and started playing a solo, he started to blur, and he wasn’t playing one solo, it was two solos at once. And then four solos, and five, all of them going in different directions at the same time. He had his horn all the way up, leaning back and screeching altissimo, and he was hunched forward and honking at the low end of his horn. All of that at the same time, fast lines and slow lines together. He was like a dozen saxophonists in one.

The drummer was slowly going out of sync with himself, blurring into a smear of sticks and flashing cymbals, and when I looked close, I could see the cymbals moving, and staying still, all at the same time. It was one hell of a sight to see, believe me. I tapped J.J. on the shoulder, told him to check that shit out, and he nodded, so I knew I wasn’t crazy. It was like ten drummers all playing at once, almost all the same thing, but a little bit off, each one a little bit different. Different cymbal crashes at different times, the downbeat pushed a little forward and a little back all at the same time. But if you listened, in a way, it all fit together somehow. That blew me away.

The rest of the band started playing backgrounds, but they weren’t blurry, so the shout chorus came in together—a few beats quiet, then, in unison, bop!, then a few bars, then ba-doo-BOP! The alto player was playing three-octave unisons with himself. I swear I could see his right hand on the bottom keys, fingers moving and totally still at the same time.

And then the head of the tune came back, but the whole band was a blur, and everything was craziness, like ten, twenty, a hundred big bands trying to play together and coming close but never lining up the downbeats, pushing them forward and back all at the same time, clashing and smashing—it was something else!

It was a new kind of music, man. Real out. Like hearing bebop again for the first time, but multiplied by all the dope in the world.

“Them pills we took, they gonna let us play like that?”

“I suppose so, J.J.”

“Goddamn!” he hollered, and “Sheeeeeeeeee-it!” and “Check these cats out!” all at once, in three different voices, and he started clapping his hands and not-clapping his hands all at the same time.

 

“Brother, I been living with these Frog-head bastards a long goddamn time, and trust me, shit ain’t right with them. You ever look at one closely?” That was Big C.

“Well, yeah,” I answered, looking around his room. “They’re blurry. Too many eyes.”

“Too many eyes? You ever stop and think that we don’t have enough eyes?” He squinted at me the way Monk used to do to people. “But that blur . . .! Now, that’s what I’m talking about!” he said, waving his hands at me. “They’re all blurred up, it’s like there’s a hundred Frogs inside every one of them cats, walking around, doing things. They can’t squash themselves into just one person, the way we all just do naturally.”

He wiggled his fingers in front of his face like he was showing me what he meant. “And if they’re listening to a band, they need the band to blur too, or they just get bored. That’s why they like jazz so much! Best goddamn music in the world. ’Cause we make shit up—we improvise. Can’t do that with no goddamn Mozart, now can you? Classical music, that just bores these Frogs to death, everything all written out and the same every time, the same even when you blur it.”

I was staring at my hands, watching them blur and unblur. It was kind of like taking a piss, you could control it just by thinking about it. Except I was like a little kid, I didn’t know exactly how to control it yet, just that I could kind of make it happen.

“You’re getting it, Robbie, just relax into it, man. It’ll be like natural soon.”

“So how long you been on these ships, Big C?” I asked.

He scratched under his chin, back up where his beard was shaved off, and made a face at me. “What year’s it now?”

“Nineteen forty-eight.”

“Goddamn,” he said. “God-damn!” And he got real quiet, and turned his head away so I wouldn’t see him cry.

 

Our schedule for those first few weeks was crazy, all day practicing and then all night jamming our asses off and hanging out in one another’s rooms, horns in our hands, LPs going.

One of the craziest things the drugs did was they let us memorize any kind of music we heard. Hearing it was all it took to program it into our heads, well, except it was more like your fingers would remember the tune.

So we would sit there listening to all kinds of LPs, bebop and swing and ragtime and Bach and Stravinsky and Indian music and whatever, and since we all had good ears, and since we could blur ourselves, each blurred self could listen to a different part of the music—the bass line, harmony lines, and the solo on top of it all—so we could come to the end of a record with the whole thing in our heads.

Now, this wasn’t so new: I could listen to a solo a couple of times and hold it in my head, but what was strange was that, after a couple of weeks on them alien drugs, I found I could remember any damn tune I wanted, note-for-note. I could call up any one of Bird’s recorded solos on “Anthropology”; I could call up a big band playing Monk’s arrangement of “Epistrophy” and play the second trombone line on my sax if I wanted. Every line was right there in my head, and in the muscles of my arms and fingers and lips, and if I blurred out and played back that line even once, I could play it again and again, forever, just by deciding to, without even having to think it through.

In other words, them alien drugs made each and every one of us into one-man jazz record machines.

That was why we spent so much time sitting around listening to everyone else’s LPs and crystals, a bunch of us cats blurred out of our minds, laughing and telling ourselves to shut up and soaking that shit up, all of it. There were some bootlegs, too, and man, some of them were amazing: “Bird on Mars,” one of them was labeled, and that was some crazy, hip, bad music. I could listen to that shit all day long.

But you know, eventually, a cat gets tired of just being around musicians, and he starts wanting himself some jelly. Me, I never had no problem getting me some, women like me and I like them, but it had been a couple of weeks since I’d gotten any, so I decided to go look up them can-can girls and get me some.

I took the elevator down a floor at a time, wandered around till I found them. I saw some crazy-assed sights on the way, too: in one room, there was some kind of Russian circus with these huge blurred-up clowns juggling fire-sticks on the backs of blurry elephants who were dancing to the beat of the some scary Russian music. There were all these bears, too, just as blurred as anything, marching around them all. In another room, I saw those rodeo cowboys again, too, riding on blurred-up horses and swinging lassos in a hundred directions at once. But this one guy I saw, he wasn’t just blurred, he split from himselves, ran in ten different directions at once after a bull that blurred and split up in the same damn way. Some of him caught the bull and roped it, and some of him got stomped by it. One of him even got gored in the stomach by its horns, poor bean-eating bastard.

But finally, I got down about ten floors below our floor, which was under the big-assed lobby. All the signs there were in French, so I knew I was in the right place. I went from room to room, saw a bunch of them blurry Frogs in these salons, smoking their cigarettes and talking in their weird voices while skinny East Indian girls in old-fashioned oriental clothing served them dainty little white teacups full of funky tea and whatever else Frogs drank.

But finally, I found the auditorium where the girls danced the cancan. That was the orchestra’s night off, so the girls were practicing to these crazy recordings of blurred-up cancan music. When I walked in, they were dancing, those French cancan girls, and they was fine, all long strong legs going up and down, arms on each other’s shoulders. Ain’t nothing in the world turns a cat on like seeing women touch each other, except seeing their legs up in the air.

So I sat there and watched their legs go up and down, down and up, scissoring blurs, and I blurred myself too so I could see them clearly. I scanned up and down the line of them, until I found the one I remembered from the elevator, and let her faces burn into my mind.

After they finished, I went and found my way backstage. There was a bunch of green rooms. It was crazy—every girl had her own little green room on that floor. But I didn’t know which one she was in, that fine-built woman I picked out from the can can lineup, so I blurred myself and went up to all the green rooms I could, knocked on every one of them at once.

The door where she answered, I unblurred myself over to that one, and smiled at her with that innocent-country-boy smile like I always used to use on women. She was wearing some kind of silk kimono, you know, one of them Japanese-type house coats, and her hair was down, and I could hear jazz wafting out from behind. Heard that jazz and I knew that I was in.

“You’re the one I ’ave seen in the elevator, oui? The one who kept looking at me? But why ’ave you come ’ere?”

“Well, I thought about it, and decided I missed you.”

She mumbled something in French, something that sounded a little like I’d be needing to try some other can-can girl next, but then she opened the door wide and smiled at me. “Come in, Monsieur . . .”

“Coolidge,” I said, and took off my fedora to bow to her all charming, the way women like when you first meet them. “Robbie Coo lidge.” I stepped into the room, and could hear the music clearly: it was Nat King Cole, “Stardust.” Her can-can outfit was draped over the makeup mirror with the light bulbs all around it, huge peacock feathers sticking up above our heads, and I could smell mentholated smoke in the air.

“I am called Monique,” she said. No last name then, just Monique. Then she asked, “You would like some coffee?”

“Mmm, yeah, coffee sounds good.”

She excused herself for a minute, and when she came back, she had two cups of coffee in her hands.

“You ’ave cigarette?” she asked.

I nodded. “Got a whole pack,” I said, and I fished it out of my coat pocket and set it on the table with a pack of matches on top. They were Mercury Barron’s Ultras, the new kind that were supposed to make you live longer if you smoked three a day. “Want one?”

“Non,” she said, and smiled. “Maybe later.”

The coffee was fine, really good French coffee, steaming. Even the goddamn steam smelled good. I held the cup and breathed deep and looked at her sipping from her own cup.

“So where you from?” I asked, and she stared at me for a few minutes. She rubbed an eyelid, and a little of the makeup smudged.

“I don’t t’ink you really care, do you?” she asked, and sipped her coffee.

“Sure, girl, I care,” I lied, and she leaned forward, and blurred herself, and a million breathy whispers of gay Pa-ree tickled in my ear.

 

That ended up being the night the ship took off for Mars, though Monique and I were too busy to notice. We only found out later, when one of the guys in the band ended up wandering into the lobby and noticing the stars were moving, nice and slow, but still moving.

It was a couple of weeks before Monique was in the habit of coming up and listening to the band play, and some of the guys didn’t like it. That was when some of the cats in the band were starting to act all high-and-mighty, turning into what my father used to call “political negroes,” and taking it upon themselves to tell everyone else how a black man oughtta live.

What made me real sad was that J.J. had fallen in with that pack of nuts. He used to be real nice, real cool and thoughtful. He’d always been a soulful kind of cat, but when he was with them space-Muslim gum-flappers, talking all that nonsense about how the black man was supposed to colonize the solar system for Allah’s glory and to show the dev il white man and all that, I couldn’t stand to be around him. I hated it when he talked that bullshit.

So this one day, between sets, I’m sitting there at one of the tables with Monique and having a nice time. She’s drinking wine and I’m having a cigarette and we’re talking, and J.J. comes up with this look on his face. I knew it was trouble, that look, and I stood up before he got close, and said, “J.J., I already got one daddy, and he’s in Philly, so I don’t need you to . . .”

“Robbie, goddamn it, you listen to me,” he said, and glanced at Monique as if she might leave if he glanced at her the right way.

“Who is ’e?” she asked, standing up.

“Sit down, Monique,” I said firmly, and she instantly got that look on her face. You know the look: the one women get when you tell them what to do for their own good.

“Robbie, something’s going on round here! We gotta cut out, brother! Them Frogs, they been in my room, man! They put something inside my stomach. Like a worm. No, a woman. Yeah, a woman worm! She been crawling inside my stomach, screamin’, like, ‘J.J.! J.J.! Gimme some ice cream!’ Help me, Robbie! I’m fuckin’ dying here, man!” he screamed and blurred before my eyes, all his voices screaming at me at once. Poor cat was scared shitless, and he scared the shit out of me, too.

I pushed Monique off to the side and blurred myself, and each of me reached out to one of them blurs of J.J.

“J.J.,” each of me said, all together. “Listen, J.J., you sick or something, man. You need to cool it. Cool it right now.”

He screamed louder, each of him started to shake, and his blurred selves started moving farther and farther apart. I didn’t want him to pull me apart like that too, so I quickly unblurred myself, relaxed back into one, and stepped back from him.

A couple of big old bad-assed Frog bouncers smeared themselves out into an army, and rushed around the room in pairs, grabbing all his blurred selves and hauling them, every last one of J.J.’s selves screaming at the top of its lungs, out one of the exits of the room.

The room went tense and quiet, and many eyes, Frog and human alike, were on me and Monique. Whispering started, and I caught Big C’s eye. Set-break’s over, his look said. Back on the goddamn bandstand. Now.

So I tried to kiss Monique on the cheek—she pulled away a little, but I still got her for a second—and hurried back up with my tenor in hand.

“Apologies, everyone!” Big C said into the microphone with a big fake smile on his face. “Show must go on, like they say. Luckily for us, we got a Mphmnngi in the house who’s proficient at bass.” Mphmnngi, that was what the Frogs called themselves. Then Big C started saying some bizarre sounds, and I thought he was going crazy too, until some stank old Frog in a tight black suit stood up and bowed his big old froggy head at Big C. Then I realized those weird-assed sounds were this Frog’s name.

“Come on up and join us!” Big C said, and the Frog came up on stage, picked up J.J.’s bass with his three-tentacled hands, and strummed the strings to check the tuning.

“Goddamn shame,” said Winslow Jackson, the alto player who sat beside me on the bandstand. He and Big C were almost the only guys who had toured before. “Seen too many many guys end up like that.”

“How’s that?” I asked, wondering if maybe some of outer space had got into the ship, and fucked with J.J.’s head.

“Must’ve forgot to take his pills,” Jackson said, shaking his head. “It’s a damn shame.”

Not taking your pills for one day would make you go crazy like that? I ain’t never heard of no drug like that, and to this day I’m not so sure it was the pills at all. What if I had took my pills every day and ended up the same as him anyway? Poor J.J. I didn’t know whether I’d ever see him again, but I didn’t have any time to worry about that: Big C was talking to the crowd again, and I had to get ready to play.

“Before we dig into the music, I’d like to share some important news with you! We have arrived at Mars orbit!” Big C hollered into the mike, and behind him, a big piece of wall just suddenly went transparent. Everyone turned to look at the red planet out there, except Big C, who kept talking about how exciting it was to be playing at Mars again, how much he enjoyed it every time.

Mars. We were at Mars. That shit blew my mind.

“And now, we have another special guest who’s going to join us,” Big C said into the microphone.

A short, weird-assed looking Frog got up, a long black bassoon under his arm, and started walking toward us. He was wearing a fine brown suit, tight as a motherfucker, and a brown fedora hat that matched his fern-colored Frog skin. He waved his little tail behind him as he went up to the stage.

“Everyone please welcome Heavy Gills Mmmhmhnngn,” Big C said. The names were starting to be more and more pronounceable to me, a fact I didn’t exactly appreciate.

Big C turned from the microphone and faced us, snapping his fingers on two and four, and loudly whispered, “Stardust.” We all got our horns ready, and he nodded and the rhythm section started us off with a mild blur. We usually played it as a tenor lead tune, meaning it was usually my solo, but of course, when you have a guest feature sitting in, the melody gets played by the guest, so I just improvised harmonies with the other saxes.

The bassoon was awful, like a dog being beat down by a drunk master. It wasn’t music. Ain’t no other way to say it. He played the whole time blurred up so bad that not a damn thing fit together. The tunes didn’t line up right, there was no fugue or harmony or counterpoint that I could find. It was just like a bunch of jumbles laid up on top of one another. I swear, I got dizzy just hearing it. He ended the tune by playing a high E and a high F-natural and a high D-sharp all together, this ugly dissonant sustained cluster that went all through the outro and kept going for two minutes after the rest of the band had stopped playing.

At the end of it, all the Frogs in the audience cheered and groaned and waved their tentacled hands in the air, which was their way of clapping, and I hunkered down for a long night of bullshit.

 

So J.J., he came back a week later. I saw him drinking coffee in one of the open bars when I came back from window-shopping with Monique in the station dome on Mars. Not that there was anything for me to buy, or that I had any money—that was all waiting for me back on Earth. But there was a lot to see on the station at Mars in those days, and I even picked myself up a real live Mars rock. Still got it, too, at my house.

“Hi,” I said to J.J.

He looked up at me and blinked, sniffed the air. “Hello. How are you? I’ll see you at rehearsal tomorrow.” And then he turned back to his coffee, as if I’d already walked away.

Still, weird as that was, I didn’t quite believe it when Big C told me he wasn’t J.J. no more. “Might seem like it, might talk like it, but he ain’t J.J.,” Big C said. “They made some kind of living copy of him, fixed it up all wrong—fixed it up to think more like them than like us—and now he just plain ain’t J.J. no more. Just accept it.”

Me, I figured that Big C had been on the ships long enough to have lost his mind too. But thinking back on that conversation, I could see that J.J. was different. He talked like some kind of white lawyer or something, for one, his voice all stiff and polite. And when time came for the next rehearsal, his playing was dead. There wasn’t nothing original in it, no spark. I’d listen along to his bass lines and then go back to my room and listen to my LPs, and I’m telling you, there wasn’t a single line he played after he came back that wasn’t lifted out of some someone else’s playing.

But I really knew it wasn’t him because of the time I finally saw how he got himself off. He’d been dropping hints, every once in a while, but I never figured it out until one night, when I went to get back some Mingus LP I’d loaned him. I banged on his door, I knew he was in there, but he didn’t answer.

So finally I opened the door myself, and there he was on his bed with two Frogs on top of him, tentacles stuck down his throat and wrapped round his legs, slithering their eyed-tongues all over his balls and shit. I slammed the door and just about threw up.

J.J., he had been always as much of a sex-freak as any other cat in any band I played with, and maybe he was so pent-up with all that celibate living that the space Muslims got him thinking he had to do. Maybe his balls got so blue that he lost his mind. But he’d never, ever talked about screwing no Frogs. That was what convinced me, finally, that J.J. was gone.

 

I found Monique in the lobby a few days after that, staring out the window at the stars. I hadn’t seen her around in a week and a half, hadn’t gone down to the French floor, but we were already on our way to Jupiter. It was supposed to take a month or two to get out there, and we’d stay for a week or so, or that was what Big C told us. There was a lot to see and do on all the moons, and some shows not to be missed.

“Where you been, girl?” I asked her.

“Busy,” she said. “Very busy.”

“Doin’ what?” I asked her, as innocently as I could.

“One of our girls, she is sick. She was taken away by les grenouilles,” she said, and made a face.

“Must’ve forgot to take her pills,” I said, almost to myself.

“Euh? Quoi?” Monique said. She surprised me. I looked at her. “Que dis-tu?”

“I said, she must have forgotten to take her pills. Like what happened to J.J.”

“Non,” she said. “One of the alligator . . .”

“Frogs . . .” I corrected her.

“Frog, oui, les grenouilles, one of the ‘frog,’ ’e ask ’er to come to ’is rooms, and she say non, and next day she become very sick.” Suddenly I could see J.J. in my head with those tentacles in his mouth and wrapped around his legs. I couldn’t stand to think about all that again.

“But baby, you’re okay, right?” I took her hand.

She turned and looked at with those eyes of hers, green like Chinese jade. “I want to go ’ome,” she said, and squeezed my hand. “I don’t know ’ow you can t’ink you are falling in love on a Frog ship. I don’t know ’ow anyone can believe in love in a ’orrible place like this.”

“Baby, come with me,” I said to her.

“Oui, I will come with you. But I will not love you, Robbie,” she said, and squeezed my hand a little. “And you must not love me, either,” she said.

And then she turned her head and looked out at all them stars for a little while more.

 

The month we spent traveling out to Jupiter passed so goddamn fast, all blurred awkward sex and blurred awkward music and J.J. all sad and serious up there on his bass, and that dumb, stank-ass Frog Heavy Gills Mmmhmhnngn sitting in on his sadassed bassoon at least once a week. The band still played like a well-oiled machine, still hit every note exactly right, but there was something going wrong, and I think we all could feel it.

And then one day, right in the middle of our show, Big C does that hamming-up thing that he was always so good at, and the wall went all transparent and I swear, Jupiter—fucking Jupiter—was right there in front of us covering the whole window. It looked like a giant bowl of vanilla ice cream and caramel and chocolate sauce all melted together and mixed up, with a big red cherry in the middle of it. It was big, man, biggest thing I ever saw, with these little moons floating around it. I couldn’t breathe for a second. I looked out into the audience for Monique, but she wasn’t at the table I’d left her at. Too bad, she would have loved to see Jupiter like that, right there in front of us.

“Now, as you all know, the orbit of Jupiter is a special place, a place where many people travel and choose to stay because it’s so beautiful. While you’re here, you should all go down to Io and use this opportunity to see some of the greats of jazz, people like Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Cab Calloway, Johnny Hodges . . . don’t miss them.” When I heard that, I couldn’t believe my ears. Bird? How could they have Bird up here, when I’d seen him in New York? Had he come back for another tour? I had no idea how that could be. I didn’t think it through so good, though, then. My mind went right on back to that other name: Lester Young.

“Now,” Big C said, “in honor of the jazz mecca that we’re at, we’re going to play a little tune called ‘The Jupiter’s Moons’ Blues.’”

He counted us in, four, five, four five six seven, and what do you know but that damn Frog’s bassoon started up again with the head. By then I swear I would have broken the thing over Heavy Gills Mmmhmhnngn’s head if I ever got the chance, I’d heard so much of it.

 

There was all kinds of cool shit to do on them moons, submarine trips on Europa and Ganymede, volcano jumps on Io; they even let us humans ride along in these special ships that could drop down into the atmosphere of that badass old Jupiter himself and see the critters that the Frogs had transplanted there from some planet near where they came from.

But none of that interested me. Some of the cats in the band, they told me, “Robbie, man, what you doing missing a chance to see all this fine shit?”

“Man, all I wanna see,” I told them, “is Lester Young. I’m gonna go see the Prez.”

 

The club on Io was small, quiet. The Frogs didn’t get interested in jazz until sometime after they’d checked out everything else that their people had done on Jupiter and the moons, and since ours was the only cruiser to show up for a while, right away was the best time to go in and check out the Prez.

That’s what we called Lester Young, “Prez,” because he used to be—and according to me up till that day, still was—the President of the Tenor Saxophone. Man, that sound. I’d seen him in New York a few times, and a bunch of times in Philly too, and he always had it, that thing, what Monique always called je ne sais quoi, which means who the fuck knows what? Man, before the war, Prez always had that up there in his sweet, sweet sound.

So anyway, Monique and me, we ended up in this little club in a bubble floating over Io. There were these big windows all over where you could look out onto the volcanoes spitting fire and smoke and shit. There was even one of them windows in the club, and Monique kept looking out of it.

Prez wasn’t playing when we got there, it was too early so some other cats were on the bandstand. Trio of cats, didn’t know their names but I was pretty sure I’d met the pianist before. They were alright. Sometimes guys like Prez, man, they did even better with those plain bread-and-butter rhythm sections, playing that kind of old swing style. It was all about his beautiful voice, his sound. Waiting for Prez, I could hear his tenor sound, man, that touch of vibrato, that strong gentle turn in his melody riding his own beat, just a little off of the bass, you know what I mean.

Monique started to get bored. I could tell. She fiddled with her hair, looked out at the volcanoes.

“Baby, Prez should be on soon,” I told her.

She frowned at me, that sexy baby-I’m-pissed-off kind of frown. “I want to go for a walk. See the bubble.” We’d passed some nice shop windows and cafes out there, and I guessed she really just wanted to go shopping. But it also felt a little bit like a test, and I never in my life let no woman test me.

“You go on and go shopping if you want, but me, I ain’t gonna miss Prez for the world. Not a tune, not a single damn note.”

“Fine,” she said, and adjusted her purse. “I’ll be back later. Maybe,” she added with a pout, and turned on her high heel and marched out, adjusting her hair as she went, and wiggling her ass because she knew I was checking it.

I didn’t give a shit, man. French can-can girls you can get any old time if you really want one, but there wasn’t nowhere to see Lester Young except on Io. This was my last chance to see him in my life, unless he came back to Earth, and he’d been in bad shape the last time I’d seen him.

Well, I ended up sitting there through a half hour of mediocre rhythm section ad lib, sipping my Deep Europa Iced Tea—that’s what they called a Long Island Iced Tea in that place, the only drink I could afford—when finally Prez showed up.

Now, seeing Prez that time, hearing him play, it was kind of like the first time you had sex. I don’t mean waking up from a dirty dream and finding your bed’s all sticky, neither. I mean the first time you’re with some girl a year ahead of you in junior high school, and you go on upstairs in her house when her mama’s out and maybe you kiss on her a little and then you put it in her, and a minute or two later you’re wondering what just happened and is that it and why everyone is always making a big deal about that shit?

It was a shame and a huge fucking letdown, is what I’m trying to say.

Prez, he used to be a little fucked-up. Not when he was younger, before the war. Back then, that cat had some kind of magic power, man. People always wanted him to play like Hawk, I mean Coleman Hawkins, but he didn’t listen to nobody, he played his own sound, and it was beautiful. He had this way of making melodies just sing, so sweet it’d break your heart in half.

But then they sent him to war, and seeing as he was black, they never put him in the army band. Just who exactly do you think you are, boy? Glenn Miller? Off to the front line with you, nigger, that’s how it was. Folks said it wasn’t surprising, him not having his head on straight after all that happened to him: being sent to fight in Europe, and what he saw in Berlin after the Russians dropped that bomb they got from the Frogs onto the city. How he got stuck in a barracks in Paris for all that time after, fighting the local reds, and what happened after we pulled out of Europe, where they court-martialed his ass because his wife was a white woman and didn’t take shit off the other soldiers for it. After all that, they said that something inside him was broke, broke in a way that couldn’t never be fixed.

Well, you know, I was hoping that maybe the Frogs had somehow fixed him up, like they’d done with Bird. When I seen him, standing tall, cleanest cat you ever seen, with a big old smile and a fine suit and the same old porkpie hat he always wore, I started to think maybe they’d done the world a service, brought back the President of the tenor saxophone.

So anyway, he lifted that horn of his up to his lips, with the neck screwed in a little sideways, so that the body of the horn was lifted up off to the side the way he always used to do, and as he started to blow “Polka Dots and Moonbeams,” my heart sank.

It didn’t sound like the real Lester Young, not the Prez I knew. It sounded like some kind of King Tut mummy Lester Young sound. Like the outside shape of his sound was still there, but that something important inside it had been took out. I’m sure nobody else there could hear it, but I could. I knew it right away.

I could feel my heart splitting in two as I just sat there and watched the Prez, the man who’d been the Prez, drift his way through tune after tune. It was all right, that floating sound of his, the way he always waltzed loose with the rhythm, the sweet tone, the little bursts forward and then the cool, leaning-back thing he’d do after it. But there was something missing.

Then it hit me what was wrong. I knew every last one of the solos he was playing. Not the tunes, I mean, not just the heads and changes. I mean I knew every goddamn note he played. He wasn’t improvising at all. Everything, every lick, was from his old recordings. “My Funny Valentine” “I Cover the Waterfront” “Afternoon of a Basieite” . . . Every goddamn note was off one of his old pre-war LPs. He was playing it all exactly the way he’d played it in the studio, at live shows, anywhere he’d been recorded. I knew, because I had all them same recordings up in my head, too, every last one of them.

So I just sat there staring at him with tears in my eyes, and waited for it to be over.

But you know, during the first set break, he came over and sat with me. Of all the people he could have sat with, all the people who’d come to Io just to see him, he came and sat with me, probably the only cat in the place who was disappointed with what he’d heard.

“You’re a saxophone player, aren’t you, young man?” he said, suave as ever but a bit too cool. He must’ve seen me eyeing his fingers on the horn.

“Yes sir, I am. I’m from Philadelphia, and my name’s Robbie Coolidge.”

“Might you happen to be a tenor player by any chance?”

“Yes sir,” I said, nodding.

“Mind if I join you here? Seeing as you lost your hat and all,” he said, hand on the back of a chair. By “hat,” he meant Monique. Everyone knew that was the way Prez talked, funny names for everything. “Hat” was a new one, though. “My ‘people’ are in need of a little rest, is all,” he said, and wiggled his fingers. That was what he called his fingers, his “people.”

And of course I told him I didn’t mind, and offered to buy him a drink and he laughed and said now that all the drinks were free for him, he didn’t want no liquor no more. And then he just started talking to me. Asked me how old I was, asked me if I missed my mama’s cooking—I didn’t, my mama was a terrible cook, she used food as a kind of weapon when she was mad at me, but I didn’t tell him that—and then he told me about his own mama’s cooking.

I don’t remember exactly what he said, honestly; what I remember was his careful, quiet smile and his bright big eyes lit by some exploding volcano out the big dome window, and how goddamned happy he seemed to be remembering his mama in the kitchen, the smells and the flavors coming back to him across all those years and all those miles from when he’d sat at the kitchen table waiting for dinner.

And don’t ask me how I knew, but right then, I realized that they’d done to him whatever they’d done to J.J. and to Bird, and that Lester Young, whoever he was, he was gone from the world, same as J.J. and maybe same as Bird, even. All that was left of the Prez was a shell, filled with something that was supposed to be him but wasn’t. That was what I was talking to, and it was all I could do not to cry in his face.

At the end of the set break, when he got up to play again, he told me, “Get off the ships, son. Get yourself on back to the Apple Core,” which was what he’d started calling Harlem after the war. “You’re way too young for this kind of life.”

A little while after he started to play again, Monique came in, and I just took her by the hand and we left.

 

“Listen, you jive-assed negroes, just listen to me for a minute! This shit they got us playing, man, it ain’t jazz! I don’t know what the fuck it is, but it ain’t human music. Jazz is for humans, my brothers!”

Some of them Muslim brothers were nodding their heads as I said this, but I knew one or two of them who wasn’t going to go along with this so easy.

“Boy, you all wet. You signed a god-damned contract.” It was Albert Grubbs, just like I expected. I forget the Muslim name he’d gone and taken for himself, but anyway, I knew him as Albert Grubbs, and sure enough, a few years later, everyone else did too, once he dropped all that religious bullshit. But right then, he was dead against us doing anything to upset relations with the Frogs, because he was still big on the whole space Muslim thing at the time. They figured if we was good enough Uncle Toms, the Frogs might give us some ships of our own, and let us fly around the solar system, so we could brag about beating white people to it. He looked about ready to start quoting the Koran or Mohammed or something like that, so I stood up. I wasn’t gonna rehearse no more till we talked it all out.

“Yeah, I signed a contract. You signed a contract, too. You know who else signed a him a contract? J.J.—and look at him now!”

Everyone turned and looked at him. And he was just polishing his bass, oblivious, and he turned and said, “What?”

“Everyone knows he ain’t the same. Don’t matter if you never met him before he got on this ship. He used to be goofy and funny and clean, man, took care of his ass. Now look at him,” I said, and cleared my throat. “Hey, J.J.,” I called out. “What’s your favorite movie? What’s your favorite kind of ice cream?”

“Shut up, man,” he said. His voice sounded deader than the worst junkie’s. “Leave me alone.”

Grubbs had a sour look on his face, and he was shaking his head, but some of the other space Muslims, they were nodding and mumbling to one another. Wasn’t none of them gonna colonize nothing if they all ended up like J.J.

“See? See that? I’m telling you,” I said. “The longer we stay on . . .”

“. . . the more of us end up like J.J.” It was Big C, nodding his fat bald head. “The kid’s got a point. I done something like six tours of the solar system, and one quick trip out to Alpha Centauri, too, and you know, there’s always one or two guys who get messed up like that, sometimes more. Lately, it’s been more like three or four guys a trip. I’ve been starting to wonder when my time’s gonna come.”

This started the guys murmuring, discussing, disagreeing.

Grubbs and this other older guy, another space Muslim I remember was calling himself Yakub El-Hassan, one of the trombone players, they stood up to start preaching. I knew I had to do something quick.

“Hey, Big C,” I said. “Tell me, you know anything about what happened to Charlie Parker?” Not even Grubbs had the guts to interrupt Big C.

And that was the story that turned the tide. Bird, man, Bird had been right there on that same ship as we were on, at least that was how Big C told it. He’d gone off dope but was still drinking like a fish, whiskey and wine, still eating fried chicken by the five-pound serving, still smoking three packs of cigarettes a day, all of which, especially the liquor, was killing him.

“They took him away, and some of what they done to him, some of it gave him back what he lost back in Camarillo, that’s for sure. But what they did to him was even worse, killed off whatever was left from before Camarillo. Bird, man, he was ruined, all busted up inside. All he could to was play shit off records. Now, he played it crazy and slant. It was beautiful for what it was. But still, that was all he could do anymore. And to tell the truth, I heard they got copies of him. Extras, so they could have him around later. That whatever they took out of him, they kept it for the copies.”

The guys were all scared, then, all confused, and I knew finally I could maybe change their minds. Even Grubbs looked like he was starting to have his doubts, starting to feel like maybe we did have to make a stand.

“Man, you gotta think about it this way. They ain’t gonna copy nobody who don’t play what they like,” I said. “I mean, is this any better than slavery? Having your body copied and the most important part of you carried out into space? Your soul?” I said, hoping space Muslims believed in souls.

“Okay, so what can we do? Stop playing?” asked Yakub, still defiant, and though even Grubbs finally looked like he was ready to do something, he was nodding as if to say, Yeah, what can we do?

“Nuh-uh,” I said. “We stop playing, maybe they leave us on Jupiter or something. So we keep the contract. We play, but we play shit they don’t like. You never know, they might even drop us off at home early. And the only thing I ever promised when I signed up for this was that I’d play jazz, man.”

“I’m liking the sound of this,” Big C said, nodding his head. “Anything in mind?”

“Oh yeah, I got something in mind. Let’s go back to my place,” I said. “I got some LPs for us listen to, some new tunes to learn.”

 

Big C grinned his big old emcee grin and looked out into the crowd of Frogs. “Welcome, ladies, gentlemen, and whatever else you might happen to be. We’re glad to be back on the bandstand after our week off at Jupiter. We’ve got a whole new repertoire lined up for you, which we’ve worked hard to get ready, and we just know it’s gonna make a big splash. Welcome back, and remember: we’re the house band for the rest of this tour.”

Then he turned and faced the band, snapping his fingers one, two, one two three four, and then Jimmy Roscoe started the tune with a solo on the piano. “Straight, No Chaser,” it was, that night, my favorite Monk tune.

The band came in after a couple of bars, and not a goddamned one of us blurred. It wasn’t just that we were playing Monk, but we didn’t even blur when we played it. That made them crazy. The arrangement was lifted right off a Monk piano performance, the brass clanging out the tone clusters, and the saxes singing out his jagged solo in unison.

I never saw a roomful of Frogs clear out so fast, man. Not at first, of course; most of them waited until we segued into “Trinkle Tinkle” and they couldn’t stand it no longer. When aliens got sick off Monk, sometimes they even puked. It wasn’t pretty. Man, one of the most beautiful things I ever saw in my life was old Heavy Gills slipping on some purple alien puke on the way out, falling right on his bassoon and snapping it in half. I still don’t know what it was about Monk that always turned them upside down like that. Even Monk didn’t know. Later, after I got back, I told him—Monk—about that night, and it cracked him up. He said some scientist had come and seen him, with some kind of theory, equations and charts and numbers, but he told me he figured the answer was a whole lot simpler than that. “It’s just a gift,” he said, and he winked.

Anyway, the trip home, man, it was a lot quicker than we expected. We just played a few Monk tunes at the start of every set, and the few Frogs who even bothered to show up left quick and then we had the ballroom to ourselves. For a while, we started playing around with what we could do in music without blurring. We could still make our fingers remember anything, could still remember any music we’d heard since going on board. I’m still that way, all these years later. I got so many goddamn tunes in my head, it’s like a music library, even now.

But of course we didn’t just work all the time. We jammed, and most of us (except the few who were still trying to be space Muslims) drank all night, and started bringing in the can-can girls—I’d talked Monique into stirring them up, and you know, they were French. They love their revolutions. So they was refusing to blur during their can-can dances, and their auditorium was just as empty as our ballroom, and they had all the time in the world to come drink and hang around with us. All those French girls around, tempting our Muslims from their righteous path and fooling around with the rest of us, it was like heaven for a while.

I think the only people who blurred anymore were the cowboys, because most of them were having the times of their lives chasing those blurred-up cows around all blurred up themselves like that. And some of the animals in the Russian circus, because they didn’t know any better. And maybe that Russian guy, too, though him and the Chinese chicks I never did see again.

So anyway, we were supposed to have gone out to Pluto, but a few days off Jupiter, the complaints got so bad that Big C was called up to go see the man—I mean the Frogs running the ship—but when he came back, he said the Frogs agreed we was playing jazz, just like in the contract, and the contract didn’t say nothing about no Monk, so there was nothing they could do. I half expected them to start lynching our asses, but they didn’t. The ship went ahead and turned around, headed for Earth just as fast as it fucking could. Me and Monique, we had a fine old time partying the nights away, night after night, but we knew this trip wasn’t gonna last forever.

“Marry me,” I said to her one night when we were lying in bed, both of us smoking. I wasn’t sure I meant it, wasn’t sure I wanted to marry anyone at all, but it sounded like the thing to say.

“Robbie,” she said, “I know you. You are musicien. You don’t need a wife. You are like a bluebird in the sky.”

I puffed on the cigarette. “I guess you’re right, baby.”

“Let’s enjoy the time we ’ave, and when we get ’ome, we don’t say goodbye, only ‘See you around the later.’”

I laughed a little. “Naw, you mean, ‘See you later.’ Or ‘See you around,’ baby. Not . . .”

“Whatever,” she said, and yanked the sheets off me.

 

You know, when we got to Earth, we landed in Africa.

Africa, man, the motherland, the place where all our music started. I was in Africa and the funny thing was, I didn’t give a shit. I wanted to get back to New York, to the clubs on West 52nd, to Minton’s.

But it took time. We came down an elevator near some city whose name I can’t remember, in what was then still Belgian Congo, which was lousy with wealthy Belgian refugees by then, and we rode down into town in jeeps. Monique sat with me, held my hand, but I couldn’t see her face through the sunglasses she wore. She had this big sun hat on, too, huge thing I’d never seen before, and she kept looking out across the hillsides.

Finally, when we got into the city, that was it. I lifted her suitcase out of the back of the jeep, and there we were, the guys from the band off to one side, waiting for me so we could all catch a flight back to New York, and all them can-can girls off to the other side waiting for her so they could all go back to Paris.

And there we were in the middle.

“What you gonna do?” I said.

“I am not coming to New York,” she said.

“I know. What are you gonna do?”

“I am going to go to Paris,” she said, but the French way, Paree. “I’m going to tell people what I ’ave seen, and ask the everyone to stop cooperating wit’ les grenouilles.” Which was exactly what she did, too, on and on until the Frogs finally just up and left. Not that they left because of her, I don’t think, but she never stopped fighting them.

“That sounds good,” I said, and I looked at her hands.

“ ’Ow about you?” she said, a little more softly.

“Me? I’m a musician, Monique. I’m gonna go home and play me some music.”

I kissed her, and I wanted that kiss to be magic, like in the stories your folks read you when you’re a little kid. When a kiss wakes up a princess or saves the world, that kind of shit. But all that happened was that she kissed me back for a little while, and then she was gone.

 

It was a hell of a thing, getting back to New York like that. Not just all the new buildings, or them new flying cars zipping around like they owned the place, crashing into one another. The goddamned Frogs, they were pissed at all of us from that tour. Those sons of bitches over at the Onyx, they had already tore up all the contracts, and I didn’t ever see more than a few thousand dollars from the whole thing, which was bullshit, really, since I’d signed up for a cool million, and been gone for almost half the time I’d signed up for.

But you know, in the end, I didn’t give a shit. Those pills I took, none of them had worn off yet. (Most of them still haven’t, even now, and it’s been decades.) My mama, she used to say, “Take whatever lemons you get in life, boy, and you go on and make yourself some lemonade.” My mama, she couldn’t cook to save her life, but she knew something, alright.

So I started making lemonade. I got myself one of those new typewriter-phones that everyone was buying, and sent a phone-letter to my buddies from the band, and on Monday nights, we started meeting down under the 145th Street Bridge.

Man, down under that bridge, with them new flying cars buzzing overhead, we invented a new kind of music. It was all about playing together, at the same time, like in old-fashioned Dixieland music, except that we were swinging it hard, real hard, and half of it was made of chunks of music from the libraries in our heads. Everyone who showed up there, we’d been up on the ships, so we all had libraries in our heads. Our fingers were programmed, you know, so we could play anything back that we wanted. You could start with a little Monk, then switch over to Bird, throw in a little Prez, and of course there was room for whatever else you wanted to play up in there, too, and man did we play.

All that memory and all those programmable chops that they gave us to make up for the fact that playing blurred was so hard, we used all of that. After a few months, we found none of us could blur anymore even if we wanted to, but we didn’t even care. We were doing something new, man, and all the music that’s come after, you can hear some of what we did right in there, still!

Time came years later when all of that would start to sound old-fashioned, when people would start talking shit about us for that, criticizing us for ever having gone onto them Frogships and even blaming us for what happened in Russia and Europe, which is just crazy. Man, when we were fighting back, that was the first time ever where anything like that had been done, at least with the Frogs. It was all new. It’s easy to disrespect people making mistakes before you were born, way easier than worrying about not making your own mistakes. That’s just bullshit, trying to fill us up with regret for what’s all long gone now, like the Frogs.

Shit, maybe there are things I regret, like leaving Francine the way I did, or how I totally stopped visiting J.J. in the asylum after we got back. But most my regrets are for things that ain’t my fault. I regret seeing Prez the way he ended up, for instance, and I regret never seeing Big C again, and Monique for that matter. I used to think about all that a lot, after I first got back. Man, I remember lots of times when I used to stand there under the bridge while everyone was playing back all their favorite lines from old records we all knew, and I’d look up into the sky and find Jupiter. It’s easy, you know, just look up. It looks like a star, a bright old star up there. I’d stare on up at Jupiter, back then, and think of Prez, and blow a blues on my horn, the baddest old motherfucker of a blues that anybody anywhere ever heard in the world.