John turned to me after a particularly intricate banjo breakdown. “Let’s make it somewhere, man.”

  “Where to?”

  “I dunno, but this stuff’s driving me out of my gourd. Let’s go get some coffee.”

  “The place closes in half an hour. A quarter is a lot to spend just to sit there that long.”

  “Well, hell, don’t buy anything, then.”

  “They’ve got a new policy to discourage customers… You’ve got to buy something to sit there.”

  “Hell, I’ll treat if you’re that down-and-out; let’s make it before I turn into a puddle and stain the furniture.”

  “Sure. Where’s my jacket?”

  “You’re sitting on it.”

  We left the apartment and headed for the coffeehouse. We walked half the way in silence until John suddenly said, “Can you feature some cats spending their lives doing that?” He shook his head and shoved his hands into the pockets of his beat-up leather jacket. I buttoned my shirt at the neck, being ill protected by my ancient zipperless jacket. The air had a clean, cold nip to it. Summer was well over, and the nights were becoming progressively chillier.

  With a squeaking overture of unoiled wheels, Jackson suddenly appeared around a corner, pedaling leisurely. He was wearing his omnipresent green fedora and trumpet, which hung loosely from the handlebars, tied in the pillowcase he generally carried it in (Jackson’s trumpet was an article of clothing more necessary to him than pants).

  “Hiya, Jacks,” John said without great enthusiasm.

  “Salutations. May I ask, ‘Quo vadis?’ or, in a word, whitherfore art thou headed?” Jackson spoke softly and emphatically in the language that was characteristic of the Jackson School, the school of unrequited love and misunderstood music.

  “Coffeehouse. You coming?”

  “M.” (This word he pronounced with a great deal of conviction, emitting it from the depths of his soul like the spiritual-mystic “Om,” but signifying, generally, a complete and utter impotence in the face of universal insanity.) “I find myself in the gutter without butter or, in a word, lacking of due funds with which to procure any dainties at aforementioned establishment. However, should you find it in—”

  “I’m almost busted, man. I’m already taking Bob here on a free ride,” John said, anticipating the forthcoming question.

  “In that case, I shall tear myself away from your delightful companionship and continue my quest for the Holy Grail. Mayhap this very eve I shall chance upon some kindly philanthropist who will deem it consummate joy to accompany mineself to the liquor store to procure for ourselves some peppermint schnapps or like goodies. M.” Jackson pedaled away, his round, dark figure seated proudly upon the bicycle, continuing his lifelong quest for an appreciative audience and good spirits.

  We entered the coffeehouse and sat down near the window. John wrapped his lank frame around a chair and commenced to gaze at the wall after tilting his limp army fatigue cap—he called it his “soul hat”—back on his head. It had been my fatigue cap once, but John had appropriated it, claiming that his soul was intimately related to it and that it would be a sin of nigh Gargantuan proportion to demand its return. What could I do except let the fatigue cap join John’s leather jacket and marvelous car as the outward manifestations of his inner being?

  We sat silently for a while, the monotony of Marty’s replaced by the monotony of the coffeehouse; the monotony of the bluegrass band replaced by the monotony of whatever unremarkable music issued from the FM “good music” station omnipresent in the coffeehouse.

  “So what’s on your mind, John?”

  “I dunno, man, I dunno. I’m just wondering what in hell this is all about.”

  “Nothing like starting out with culminating questions.”

  “Complex, hmm? I don’t know. Maybe it’s just so damned uncomplex I can’t see it. Forest-for-the-trees bit, you know. Anyway, I’m not just ‘starting out’ like you said”—he tapped his fingers nervously on the table—“it’s been on my mind for a hell of a long time. Sometimes I can forget it… that’s what the scene does for me… but then I feel guilty about wasting time later.” He looked over at the waiter, but the waiter seemed to feel like taking his own good time to get around to us and was engaged in folding napkins. “For going on to four years now, it’s been one scene after another, and sometimes I think I’m hooked, man. Every once in a while, I realize that the only thing I’m living for is the scene, and that scares me, so I come up with something like that damned commune idea and kid myself around that I’m accomplishing something. What’s it all for, man? That’s what I have to find out. I’ve got to find it out before I decide that it’s all about nothing… no reason at all… and blow my brains out or hit the needle.”

  “Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger, fella. A lot of people run around and say they know and try to tell you all about it… and maybe it works for them… self-hypnosis or something… but I doubt if they do. They find their cog in the wheel and think it’s God, then go around preaching it and making people who know they don’t know feel like maybe there really is a reason. And when they can’t find it… and everyone else seems to be finding it and being happy about the whole thing, they start feeling like you do. I think if you really did know the score, you could tell God to step aside.

  “The first time you showed your face around here, you asked me what the score was, and I gave you some half-assed answer or other… and maybe it was the right answer. Maybe it’s just something you do until you can’t anymore, and then you don’t.”

  John looked puzzled and pulled his cap down to his forehead. He caught the rhythm of the FM music and nodded his head unconsciously to it. He began to speak very slowly in contrast to his usual rapid-fire conversation. “You know, man, I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t give a good goddamn about why. Seriously, that’s my way of thinking now. I don’t go around asking, ‘Why?’ but that’s the only answer I get. I don’t come up to you or anybody and ask, ‘Why the scene?’ I want to know, ‘What’s the scene?’ Philosophers and psychiatrists are all wrapped up in ‘whys.’ What I want to know is what. What in hell am I supposed to be doing here.” He pushed the cap back to its former position and looked past me at the wall. A humorless smile played unconsciously across the seldom-relaxed features of his sharply angled face. I didn’t answer. A few epigrammatical thoughts flickered through my mind, but none of them answered the question posed, and besides, I wasn’t in the mood to play either Ben Franklin or Oscar Wilde. It didn’t seem quite in character, somehow, for John “the Cool,” as we tagged him, to be questioning the values of being, and I began subconsciously to rearrange my evaluation of him.

  “Jesus, John, I never figured you had things like this going for you.”

  “I don’t broadcast very often; that’s not my scene. Besides”—he laughed without humor—“it doesn’t fit the image. Know what I mean?”

  “I think so.”

  “You know who I am? I’m ‘John the Cool.’ Species Johnus coolus or some such crap. That’s the way it goes around here… you’re not really a person; you’re the label it’s handy to tack on to you. You write sometimes, so you’re ‘Bob the Writer’; Jerry plays guitar, so he’s ‘Jerry the Guitar Player.’ Then there’s ‘Alan the Poet’ and ‘Fred the Pill Head’… I can just picture Jerry coming to a party some night without a guitar: ‘Hey, man, where’s your axe?’ ‘I didn’t bring it. Don’t feel like playing.’ ‘Are you serious, man? What’s wrong with you?’ ‘My mother just died.’ ‘Well, maybe we can dig up a guitar somewhere and you can play funeral dirges.’ Get the scene?”

  “Yeah, I guess I do. I hadn’t thought about it like that… but I guess I do.”

  “You know this organizing bit everyone’s tacked onto me? No one really bothers to dig much deeper… I’m John the Cool, and I organize. Well, hell yes, I organize things; I always feel if I don’t do it, nothing will ever happen. I go overboard sometimes, but I’ve got to keep my hand in something.”

  “Why? It ran more or less the same way before you ever appeared.”

  He seemed taken slightly aback, then nodded. “I’m hip to that. There isn’t any reason for ninety percent of it, but, man… I’ve got to do something.”

  He stared at the fascinating point on the wall again. His face was too taut to wrinkle in a frown, but the haunted look that emanated from his unfocusing eyes was eloquent enough.

  “That’s why you keep hitting the road, John?”

  “Yeah… I guess… I dunno. Maybe. You know how they say your feet get to itch? They do, man. I’ve woken up in the middle of the night at home feeling that way, and before the sun comes up, I’m halfway to LA.”

  He took a packet of cigarette papers from his jacket pocket and poked in the ashtray for butts. Finding a few, he shredded them and rolled the captured remains of tobacco into a cigarette and lit it.

  “I mean to tell you, it gets cold in them boxcars, but at least I feel like I’m heading for something. It’s never there, though, and sometimes I’ll suddenly find myself a thousand miles away from home, and I wonder what in hell I’m doing and if I look any different from the rest of ’bos riding the rattlers.

  “It’s a bad scene, man.” He shook his head. “Never let it get a hold of you. It’s a hard lady to shake, I mean to tell you.”

  “I don’t know… I’d like to give it a try, just so I can say I’ve done it. If I’d had half of your experiences, I’d write two books a day to tell about it.”

  “Be pretty dull after the first one. It’s not that so many things happen… they do, but it’s the anticipation of what you might do that makes you go in the first place. You think you’d learn after the first couple of trips. Uh-uh, you don’t; you just gotta believe what the rest of the bums tell you and jump off that freight while you’ve still got some place to jump to. They found out the hard way, and they’ll tell you, but it doesn’t do them any good to know; they’re stuck with it, and that’s all she wrote.”

  A wistful half smile curled his mouth. “You can always shake a habit the first couple of times, but don’t let it get too far or it’ll shake you. Hey, you got a real cigarette on you?”

  “Yeah, I borrowed a couple at the party.”

  He took one and crushed out his handmade cigarette with a look of distaste. The waiter came to the table and spread out two menus.

  “Well, let’s see,” John said, studying the menu he probably knew by heart. “Can we make it by on one regular coffee?” he queried.

  “Sorry, sir. You’ll both have to order something if you sit here.”

  “All right. Two regular,” he said, waving the waiter away with an aristocratic flick of his hand. When the coffee came, he drank his down quickly.

  “I didn’t want the damned stuff, but I shelled out good money for it, so by God, I’ll drink it… and a couple of refills too.”

  After polishing off the cup and signaling for a refill, he settled back onto the chair. “So”—he shrugged lightly—“what’s a man supposed to do?”

  “Why not take up something? Ever thought of blowing a horn?” I knew that the comment was superfluous as soon as it left my tongue.

  He looked slightly annoyed. “Or maybe stamp collecting? I wouldn’t care if I had the potential to blow like Coltrane; that’s not what I want.”

  “Do you have the vaguest idea of what you do want?”

  “That I know… I want to do something that’ll last. I want power; I want to be able to make things run.” He said this with no trace of excitement in his voice. Undue emotion was, to him, the prime betrayer… not to be called upon except when the situation demanded (and rarely then). To do so would be a loss of “coolness,” and that was unheard of.

  He spread his hands on the table: thin hands, long and tapered as those of an artist should be, but with no desire to stroke a keyboard or guide a brush; impotent hands, but hands that could riff a deck of cards with consummate skill; hands trained in the toss of the percentage dice and the bottom deal in order to fill an empty stomach on a long, foreign road. “And that’s the way the cards fall, man. Five-card no-peek.”

  “Mais la joux ce ne fait pas yet; at least not until you turn the cards over. It’s too bad there’s no art form where a man can stand up and say, ‘I am,’ and it could be appreciated without him having to paint or write about it, but there isn’t. Your big trouble is that you have so much to say and no way to go about saying it. The most directionless person in the world is probably an artist without an art. He just doesn’t…”

  “Hold it. You don’t have to draw me a diagram of my cross; I’ve been carrying it long enough to recognize it.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to expound… I… Well, hell, I did mean to.”

  “All right.” He leaned back, tilting his chair against the wall, and dragged at his cigarette, then pointed a finger at me. “You know what makes this world run? It’s the people who want to make something. Most of the people I know won’t ever amount to anything, and they could give a hell less. They don’t care if there’s a statue of them in the park for the pigeons to drop their loads on or not. All they worry about is getting an old lady to have their kids for them. Hell’s bells, this world doesn’t need any more kids; it needs to do something with the ones it’s got. You ask one of the little ‘mothers’ what in hell it’s all about, and he doesn’t know whether to shit or go blind. All he wants to do is grow up, smoke his goddamned cigarettes, and raise more kids. I’d just as soon stop now if I thought I’d end up like that.”

  “Okay, so you don’t end up like that, and some kid five hundred years from now knows your name and birthday… maybe even gets out of school for it. What’s this going to net you? What in the hell difference does it make?”

  “I already told you I don’t give a damn about why. I’ll worry about that when I find what. Hell, you want to go back to the party? Looks like they’re ready to lock up here.”

  My desire to return was mild, but there was no place else to go.

  The music was still going strong. I sat down on the sofa and concentrated on the banjo player, waiting for him to screw up a break or lose a string, while the “gut-bucket bass” went thump-thump-thump like an abnormal pulse.

  “Can you feature some cats spending their lives doing that?” John had said. Why not? I closed my eyes and tried to doze.

  NO SOONER HAD I CLOSED MY EYES, IT SEEMED, THAN I opened them to find myself again enmeshed in sounds and one night had faded, like a movie shot, into the next. I tried, vainly, to recall what had happened during the day… then realized that it had never existed. As the realization rang through my mind, I sat my wineglass down and tried to get my bearings. They refused to come, and the very idea of assimilating them was insidiously shattered by two blaring saxophones, screaming up and down the chromatic scale in search of jazz. A half dozen people were pounding on conga drums, bongos, and the backs of chairs with varying frantic beats. An electric guitar set the pace, and Jackson, his trumpet in a pawnshop, was working out on an upright E-flat alto horn, completely and blissfully oblivious to whatever beat and tempo the music had. He occasionally took the horn from his lips to wipe the sweat from his forehead and empty his gurgling spit valves, then would launch back into the melee, notes akimbo.

  I sat heavily on a chair and pushed it back against the wall, teetering on two legs. Every few seconds, the music would seem to disappear as stray thoughts tried to force themselves to the surface of my mind. They would almost succeed until a shattering, discordant blast from Jackson’s horn forced them back into the depths and perspective would suddenly blare back into the fore.

  I closed my eyes tightly, but the forms about me refused to vanish and continued stumbling and dancing across the panoramic screen of my eyelids.

  “Hi, Bob; how’s it going?” I snapped open my eyes and perceived an idiotic, drunken grin, nodded with a mechanical smile, and shut them again.

  “Hey, Bob,” the voice persisted. “You sure look bum-kicked. Have a drink and enjoy yourself. C’mon!”

  “No, I’m tired. Go away.” The voice said something incomprehensible and moved on.

  I suddenly realized that I was terrified, but forced the concept back as suddenly as it had manifested itself. It was replaced by apprehension as I began to wonder, somewhat confusedly, what was wrong. A few months ago, I would have enjoyed holy hell out of such a party, but now all I could do was to sit back and feel helpless. I opened my eyes and let them wander haphazardly across the room. A rather ordinarily pretty blond girl was sitting across the room from me. Our eyes met, then slid away. I toyed idly with the idea of going over and striking up a conversation, but ennui held me fast to the chair while my mind drifted to other parts of the room.

  I forced myself up from the chair and walked down the hall, threading my way through congealed clots of people until I found the bathroom. I closed the door and turned off the light, then lit a cigarette. I stared at the burning ember, half hearing the music that drifted in from the other room. It suddenly sounded as though it were miles away and not quite real. Suddenly, someone was pounding on the door, demanding entry. I turned on the light and flushed the toilet, a useless token to explain my presence in the room. The banging on the door grew insistent, but I felt incapable of moving from my momentary haven. I caught my reflection in the mirror above the sink and began to study it, not quite sure that the pale, green-tinged face that stared back was my own. I made a sudden face at it, then opened the door. The person who had been beating had mysteriously disappeared.

  The muffled sound of a guitar issued from behind a closed door across from the bathroom. I opened the door and looked in. Jerry sat there by himself, picking idly at his instrument. I stood there for a moment, not quite sure if I should say anything or just go about my business. He didn’t look up. His eyes were fixed hollowly on a point on the floor, and an inch-long ash had formed on the cigarette that smoldered in the tray at his feet. I closed the door and worked my way back up the hall, bits of unconnected thoughts and emotions running through my mind. It was odd… there was Jerry… the focal point of an almost infinite number of radii around which the “scene” revolved, by himself… unheeded. Strange, and yet it would be strange if he were not there. He was still Jerry, at least physically, and yet something was missing… or something new had been added, and he sat alone in a room.

 

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