Zonal-Chet’s Habit

I was in Istanbul playing at the jazz festival, and ran into Chet Baker in the hotel lift. It was 1987,

the year before he tipped out the window, but when I met him he was on methadone and blowing great.

He looked like shit, though: like a tiny shrink-wrapped Charles Manson, more or less mummified,

his toenails curling like lemon peel from his Jesus sandals. That was bad enough.

But he was also wholly corrupt, something you could tell with your eyes closed.

Chet was addicted not just to junk but to really terrible ways of conducting his business.

By contrast, Bill Evans – his exact coeval – played it ‘like the world’s slowest suicide’, and kept it to himself.

Chet, not so much. His aura was collateral damage, and you would become implicated in his tragedy

if you passed him in the street. By the time we got to his floor he’d already hit me up for my per diem,

and I just gave it to him, even though I was twenty-three with a broke-ass guitar and signing on back in Brixton.

I related all this to the drummer Gerry Hemingway that evening, over a horrible dinner of lambs’ brains and rice

I’d accidentally ordered – it was the cheapest thing on the menu – but was too afraid to send back.

‘Why would you do that to yourself?’ I’d asked, in my jejune way. ‘Well, two reasons,’ said Gerry, who was wise.

‘Addiction limits the number of things you can think about, and that can be useful for artists.

But did you know that the foods we’re allergic to are often our favourite? People love what kills them,

and because that makes no sense – getting a habit lets us do it anyway. God knows you’re never going to find a reason.’

All this rang true. Even back then, I knew that I should always go in fear

of honeydew melon and psychopathic narcissists, but that nothing was ever going to hold me back.

I have since learned that at the heart of the human condition, almost in a way that defines us,

are things that cause the very pain they alleviate. And something else: addictions are a social construct.

There’s always a pusher to smooth and polish the path: they always see us coming

with our abandonment issues, our tendency to confuse love and refined sugar or minor discomfort and agony.

(A speciality of poets, many of whom are addicted to Solpadeine Max; for which fine product –

the painkiller’s painkiller, breakfast of champions! – I was the poster boy for years.)

But many of them just can’t bear our suffering, or, if they are a parent, their guilt over our suffering;

and just as often it’s a way of showing love. Your mother addicted you to sweetness

because she wanted to share the feeling it gave her, or some punter in the bar after the gig

just wanted to do something nice for Lester Young, and they knew that booze

was the thing Pres loved most in all the world. As if the paradox of our habit wasn’t enough,

we are often conducted into the arms of death by those who love us most.

All this just made Chet’s decision even more economical. So yes, with our help

no more or less selfish, are all temperance and charity, and they are among the worst people I have ever met.

Which is absolutely not to say that they do no good. That’s just another sentimental error.

You have to see the whole picture. Let’s not forget that when his teeth weren’t kicked out

Chet played his horn like a cashiered angel, and his singing was ‘like being sweet-talked by the void’.