Mingus Redux
Charlie Mingus was a fucking genius. That was the title, and the first line, of a short story I wrote for English Comp II in 1995. The assignment was wide open: any topic, as long as it was "creative writing.” I intended to present it as pure fiction, as if writing about someone else's confusing teenage inner-life, but I wore guile like I did that light blue Kangol I'd bought at Thriftko. That is to say, not well.
The story started in a motel room at the beach earlier that year, a weekend trip for me and my friends Nora and Nemesis. One of us brought a portable CD player. Nora and I were sitting on the floor, enthralled by an album I recently bought — Mingus's The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady — when she exclaimed the words that became the title of the story. I replied hell yeah. We were completely sober. I had a crush on Nora. And on Nemesis. The story was saturated with one-sided, understated sexual longing. Aside from the title and first line, Charlie Mingus wasn't in my “fictional” story any more than the Sinner Lady was in Mingus’s “ballet.”
After I handed in the story and the professor and her TA each said, with a sudden, startling focus on me, this is really good!, I knew they’d done the math, and I didn’t understand the variables.
*
I make notes on my phone, a lot of them, throughout the day, especially when I'm out driving. Before smartphones, I kept an IC recorder in the cubby under the car radio. The cloud has some truly contemptible voice memos from the aughts uploaded to it in the subsequent decade, a record of a noxious relationship with Nemesis that began soon after Nora and I savored Black Saint.
Before that, I used a portable cassette recorder. In a shoebox full of tapes buried in my closet there’s one tape that contains, among other confessions and musings, a diary entry from the time I learned a friend of mine had fooled around with Nora and the unsubtle ways that discovery changed my opinion of him. But in my first couple of years driving, I just kept a pen with scrap paper, mostly one-sided printouts like old course syllabi and typed-up assignments, in the passenger seat. I continued this practice into college. Sometimes the papers slipped under the seat where I’d forget about them. That’s what happened with a single, titillating page of “Charlie Mingus was a fucking genius.”
One happy afternoon, driving around town with Nora visiting thrift shops and record stores, a few months after the beach trip, I stopped at a gas station to get snacks. Nora stayed in the car. I came back, practically skipping, with a bag of pizza-flavored Combos and a Yoo-hoo. As I buckled in, Nora nervously, if a bit brusquely, stated that she would like to go home. I looked at her, a little afraid and searching for her reason, but all she offered was I’m just tired and a half-second of intense eye contact. I said Okay and, in a fitful trust, drove her home.
A few days later, Nemesis called me: What the fuck, dude!? She told me that Nora had found the page while nosing around in my car, read a little, and then stuffed it in her purse when I approached with the snacks. Later, safe at home, she read the page from top to bottom, then called up Nemesis, aghast and disoriented by the thought of what might have happened that weekend at the beach while she was sleeping. The page had ended tantalizingly mid-sentence, a sentence that began with me waking up in the night to find Nemesis sleeping, the sheet kicked down, comfortably sprawled and even more comfortably dressed, in bed next to me.
*
Black Saint is an entreaty: see me, it seems to say.
See me. Is that a call for love? Or just lust? Is there a difference, and what is it? As perfect as π and as arbitrary, the odd-small-prime trailing the seemingly random into the distance as far as it has to, the question just gets lost. There is irrational, transcendental anguish. I'm right here. Right there, in flames, in dance, under the seat, under the sheets. It holds a baritone sax and asks to be taken, and seriously. Sing your sights on me. I'm listening, as alone as you: join with me. Whatever intention brought or hidden, whatever rationale developed and applied, I couldn't say which one was the coefficient of the other, or was it simply addition?: love plus lust. The relationship is spurious, like so many other relationships, like the claim form often makes on substance, or meaning on utterance. I tried not to be the most complacent mathematician, subtracting nothing while pulling the sheet up over π, falling asleep beside it, drifting off calculating the absolute value of my blessings.
A lot happened after that night at the beach motel. Nora vanished from my life. For months, she didn't answer her phone. Then, she called me and declared she was ready to hang out again. Months later, I vanished from her life. Just a voice on the answering machine. I was in Europe for all she knew. And in fact I soon was. Eventually she stopped calling. In there, somewhere, were two straight weeks in Chicago with Nemesis, the summer of '96, Kill Yr Idols antagonizing her old Volvo's speakers, as if warning me: your 20s will atrophy you. I spent substantial chunks of time staring at mirrors, trying to convince myself Narcissus stared back. I nearly succeeded. Then I reappeared x years later as an integer, factorized yet salvageable, and chronicled to the teeth.
Nothing happened when I woke up next to Nemesis. Nothing happened, for years.
In Nemesis’s house, I raked the lawn in the dark, in inexplicable dutifulness. In Nemesis’s house, the sun was a lemon and the covenant between us excluded anyone I used to be. In Y2K, I used sarcasm successfully. Just that one time, that evening in the driveway when I razzed her and she laughed. It was a short joy tucked into years that kept falling apart like the shitty car you’re stuck with. In Nemesis’s house, I shredded my diaries, rejoicingly. Shostakovich describes the final movement of his Fifth Symphony as the result of someone like Stalin beating the joy out of you with a stick. You pull yourself up and proclaim I am being joyful, I am being joyful. But it wasn't all bad. She tried many times to tell me — honestly, she did — about doors and how I should knock, even when they’re open, and ask, hey can I come in? But sleeping men don’t hear much besides the invitations they dream. In Nemesis’s house, sleep was my only chance to dream.
*
Notes in hand, I’ve begun to think back, to make sense of what earlier I couldn't understand. I say couldn't as if it were beyond my control. But there is choice in everything. I can't hear Charlie's alto melody in the stereo recording of Black Saint. That track is in the earbud that I'm not using tonight. At the moment I become aware of this and decide to keep the earbud dangling to preserve situational awareness, can't becomes won't. It is not as easy to say why Nemesis's door monologues never birthed a won't in me.
Once, long ago, I contrived the Sinner Lady for a grade. But the arithmetic was sloppy. The angles didn’t add up, leaving would-be triangles spread-eagled, opportune infinities. My really good story was littered with can’ts. The can’ts lined up, resembled a hall of doors.
If I could rewrite that story, I'd focus on Black Saint, its basic sensuality. You can’t miss it. I’d write about that moment when you get it, when you love it, you see it, that moment when you want nothing else. That moment the door appears and you decide to knock, ready to leave, if asked.
I'd write about the basic math, because it doesn't take a fucking genius.