Saturday Night III
Madam, take me in
Let me be your friend
Won’t you take me in
Let me be your friend
I’m a lonely boy
I ain’t got a home
–Clarence “Frogman” Henry
Ain’t Got No Home, 1956
by Joel Deutsch
Lights flickered, electronic chimes pealed, and people thronged back to their seats from bathrooms, snack bars and smoking areas. Dusk had settled into full fledged night, and the late-summer evening balminess had chilled. Daniel reached behind him for the jacket hanging from the back of his chair and shrugged it on.
He couldn’t spot Jacqueline, but he didn’t worry. Casual as the woman might seem, a little wild, even, she was dependable as hell, at least at her job. Always turned in assignments on time , never had caused him or any of the other attorneys to blow a filing deadline. She’d be back.
He thought about the blind tenor sax player they’d stopped to listen to on their way up the promenade from the parking lot to the ticket takers and turnstiles, standing in the dry, ragged grass at the pavement’s edge, serenading arriving concertgoers. The man was tall, broad-shouldered, African-American , about 60, wearing a summer weight white suit over a yellow t-shirt, with black athletic shoes on his feet and a tropical-looking straw cowboy hat cocked jauntily on his head. A modest paunch inflated the t-shirt at his waist. He wore no sunglasses, the blind musician’s cliché.
Beside him, in the down position, lay a German shepherd with the leather-wrapped grab handle of a guide dog harness protruding from its shoulders, at his feet his open instrument case with a small collection of pocket change and currency scattered over the worn-looking nap of its purple lining.
He was loping through the jaunty Caribbean-sounding theme of a classic Sonny Rollins number Daniel recognized, ”St. Thomas.” Daniel drew Jacqueline with him out of the pedestrian bustle and paused before the player to listen, just as he screwed his useless eyes tight in concentration and soared off into improvisational overdrive. By the time he returned from his flight to recapitulate the theme and bring it all back home, an enraptured Daniel had his wallet out and was kneeling down to contribute something to the collection.
Summers gone by, Daniel had seen and heard countless other buskers on his way into the Hollywood Bowl. Fresh-faced violinists performing snatches of Bach or vivaldi, burned-out troubadours offering up Civil Rights era folk songs and acoustic guitar covers of rock and roll hits from decades past, wooden Andean flutes, a capella high-lonesome bluegrass singing, the whole eclectic grab bag. Sometimes he stopped and tossed money into the open case or the upturned hat, and Sheila and Melanie, for the three of them had attended Bowl concerts together, at least until Melanie’s musical tastes diverged irreconcilably from theirs in her senior year of high school, would indulge him and wait while he donated his occasional tithe to the Church of Undiscovered and Unfulfilled Talent, his tribute to the vocation he had forsaken a little too willingly, as he had come over the years to regretfully imagine in his bad moments.
Sometimes, of course, when the three of them were too much in a hurry or the music was just plain lousy, he didn’t stop.
But this guy was something else, and the music, for a precious few moments of transport and clarity, had canceled out the monkey chatter in Daniel’s brain, gathered him back into the stable core of himself. So when he opened the wallet and saw that his smallest bill was a five, he thought what the hell and slid it underneath a pile of change, scooping coins together and mounding them on top of it to hold it down.
“I surely do hope you’re putting in, not taking out,” the man said. “It’s a sin to steal from the blind, you know.”
Daniel looked up. “No problem. Just trying to make sure what I put in won’t fly away, that’s all.” He rose to his feet and returned the wallet to his hip pocket. “Anybody who can play Sonny Rollins like that doesn’t deserve to be stolen from.”
there was a long, uncertain beat of silence during which the man’s expressionless face gave nothing away. “I’ll take that as a compliment, my friend,” he finally said, and the warmth and humor in his rich baritone voice more than made up for him looking so blank.
Good enough, thought Daniel, recalling the blind young TV quiz show contestant a few years before. Night after night, question after question, he had smiled continually, pointlessly, like some kind of android, which Daniel had found a lot more unsettling, even creepy.
Jacqueline had edged closer then and touched Daniel’s arm. “We ought to get going,” she coaxed.
“Ah,” said the musician. “So you’ve got a lady with you, too, and a lovely one, by the sound of her voice.” He took a very large hand off the lower keys of his horn and held it out. Jacob Thurston,” he said. “People call me Jake.”
“Daniel,” reciprocated Daniel, taking the proffered hand. “And this is my friend, Jacqueline.”
“charmed,” said Thurston in Jacqueline’s direction, doffing the straw cowboy hat to reveal a bald pate bracketed by close-cropped salt and pepper hair at his temples. Jacqueline only nodded, wordlessly. as if the man could know. Just as well, thought Daniel. He’d seen her dismiss, deflect or simply ignore people before, anyone from friendly male servers at local cafes to the flirtatious Salvadoran all-around office tech support guy Rolando. Except when she had a hard drive crash or lost her network server connection, of course. Jacqueline could put out light without heat, a fluorescent glow, or she could be warmly incandescent, her emanations closer to the color temperature of sunshine. Depending.
Thurston replaced the hat on his head and turned back toward Daniel. “Daniel,” he mused. “That’s a fine name. Daniel in the lion’s den. You got a last name, too, Mr. Daniel?”
“silver,” gave up Daniel, embarrassed to be called on his reticence. But you didn’t just disclose you’re full name to strangers, not these days. “sorry,” he said. “You know, privacy issues. Identity theft. Just a habit.”
The tenor man laughed. “I’m teasing you, brother. I’m not offended. But me, I’ve got nothing to protect. My greatest fear is not about having someone steal my credit card number. Hell, I don’t even have a credit card number to steal. My greatest fear is passing through this life without leaving a trace and no one having any idea I was here. That’s why I say my name straight out. Jacob Thurston. T h u r s t o n. Just to leave a mark on the memory.
“There’s the music,” said Daniel. That’s something to remember.”
“Thing about the music,” said Thurston, “ it’s here and then it’s gone. Vaporizes in the air the second it comes out the bell of my horn, like steam. That’s why I always say who I am, whoever I’m talking to.
Daniel watched the amphitheater’s rising slope of benches fill up. He had never seen a Bowl concert from the box seating area, a few semicircular tiers stepping up from the stage, divided by low partitions, each box with four or five folding chairs and its own small table to hold drinks and food. Not even when his and Sheila’s combined incomes had been at their best. This was where you sat if you were a corporate CEO, a politician with juice, or an entertainment industry big shot. Boxes at the Bowl were passed down from generation to generation in wills along with real estate, racing horses and vintage car collections. He looked around him, scanning the people in the other boxes. Yes, you could tell the money was down here. The hair, the clothes, the small intimate candles glowing on the tables, the comfortable, confident body language of entitled relaxation.
What would it be like, he wondered, playing to an invisible, moving target of an audience without any idea who looked your way to see where the notes were coming from and who didn’t even bother, who smiled knowingly at your dexterity and taste, but moved on without uttering so much as a word. How would it be to know people were there only by the fragments of dialogue fading in and fading out as they passed you by? If you were blind, you could probably stand on the pitcher’s mound at Dodgers Stadium with the place filled to capacity from the dugouts to the bleachers, surrounded and observed by thousands of fellow human beings, yet, if all of them sat perfectly still and no one spoke or farted loudly or dropped something, you might imagine yourself to be completely alone. Was that how it felt? Like living inside a pod of one-way glass, your own private ambulatory Supermax isolation cell?
He watched as an elegant-looking older couple in the next box cleared some leftovers off their table and folded it up against a partition, then turned their chairs around to face front. As the man maneuvered his chair into place, he shot Daniel a curious look, then turned away and replied to something the woman must have said. About him, he wondered? Whose box was this, and who was it the man was accustomed to see sitting here?
His thoughts returned to the blind tenor player. Maybe that isolation was more why Jake Thurston really came out from wherever he sheltered to play in public spaces. To charm, to entice, to draw into his orbit whoever he could, like a sea anemone stuck to the side of a ship’s barnacled hull beneath the waterline, letting its hopeful, hungry tentacles drift in the current.
He remembered a poll he’d come across in some magazine article, where able-bodied people were asked to rate various disabilities in terms of which ones frightened them the most and which ones they could see themselves accepting with at least a modicum of equanimity. Blindness had come out way ahead of all the others on the fear and loathing scale. Do anything, the respondents had indicated by their rankings. Paralyze my legs, stop up my ears, make my hands flutter like spastic birds and my mouth run with drool . But don’t take away my sight.
Daniel closed his eyes and sat very still, trying to understand. He heard the bustle in the aisles, the orchestra coming back onstage and tuning up, the drone of an airplane passing overhead. And for each sound, he had a corresponding picture in his mind, inseparable: Men, women and children in jeans and sneakers and baseball caps hustling back to their seats, a French horn player blowing the spit out of his mouthpiece, a cellist centering his instrument between his knees and laying his bow across a string, a single-engine Beechcraft flying low and showing its running lights. It was impossible to imagine not just not seeing, but, beyond that, not even visualizing, as if he’d never seen anything to begin with. The very idea of such a mental vacancy filled him with a rush of loneliness and dread so intense that his eyes sprang open in self-defense.
To be continued…