Houston: Encore for Woody Shaw by Stephanie Dickinson

The “I” in the next few pages is age twenty-four and the “I” who I am now is looking back from a distance. Houston is teeming with people imports, not only a wildcatter’s paradise but a city of opera. City of flash floods and barbeque shacks. City of the longest Main Street in the world. City of nightclubs, of Rockefellers where Waugh Drive becomes Heights Boulevard. In this city the I who was me then still lives.

Glass clothes

Jazz is to cool what air conditioning is to cold and Houston is too hot. The rush of air conditioning causes the goose pimples to rise from my skin as I slip into Rockefeller’s past the bouncer. I’m wearing forbidden short shorts and a halter top in this luxury of polished wood. The rest of me dresses in maroon high heels and a taffeta shawl. My tanned legs find the table closest to the industrial air conditioner blowing pieces of tinsel, but not out blowing the musicians on stage. The book I’m reading left open. The Great Leap Forward when rich peasants were buried alive in the snow. They called it The Refrigerator. A peasant soaked in water and sent outside to freeze—A Person Wearing Glass Clothes. I am wearing glass clothes as I watch frost form on my drink like the spotlight on the trumpeter’s face. Woody Shaw headlines tonight’s bill. The sounds he makes are cold white blossoms. I am ignorant that he’s called the last of the great trumpet innovators.

What does a troubled young woman hoping to be picked up really see? From this remove I try to observe not only myself but the trumpet player considered a musical genius. He was born in Laurinburg, North Carolina, a Christmas baby in the earth breath of the South. You can ride through the dusk in the jack pines and black oak, the highway unraveling through the Civil War, heading toward the Mason-Dixon Line and the Emancipation. He’s studying the trumpet, saying the letter m until it vibrates into an mmm; he’s practicing the lip and tongue art, before picking up the golden horn.

Unspeakable speech

Edging between tables I act like I’m searching for someone, glad for the Tom Collins inside me. I like men to look at me; I like the feel of their eyes from a distance. A look makes the roots in my teeth quiver. The people I teach with would be surprised to see me here. In my class are the profound, intellectually disabled autistic. Their tested IQs are less than 20. They do not speak. Some are hitters. Everything about my work is hot: straining students’ limbs to walk when they want to roll or crawl. Fumes from the string mop, plastic bags of soiled Pampers, boys with their terrifying erections and girls with their drool. The incense smokes crayon marks from my arms.

I lean against the stage. The trumpet player is singing through his horn, lips to gold stem. Lush harmonic sounds, pure breath, and lungs, heart, whatever he is inside—rushing out. It’s hard to know what he looks like beyond his starched white shirt and Panama hat. His black frame glasses.  At work I can’t and don’t try to pass. At eighteen a shotgun accident paralyzed my left arm. Leaning forward saved my life. The limb is thinner than my right arm and I’ve draped my shawl over it. You have your mind, they all said afterwards. I hated them saying it. I wanted to be body, too. I am noticed in short shorts. My lucky legs hide my neck with its scar like a meteorite shower. In the cold dark I am hair and eyes only.

He’s blowing higher, harder, improvisation then solo. Another Tom Collins appears in my hand. Floaty water, more limes slices, maraschino cherries. I drink fast; the slush passing over my palate gives me a stabbing pain. Brain freeze. Then the music is over and the players come out to mingle with the crowd. When the trumpet player brushes by me I hold out my hand to be autographed. He stops to talk. The three valves of a trumpet make demands on your muscles. Like weightlifting some say. To make the sound of a lantern winding its way into the dark or the velvety blue shadows of ancient mountains there will be scales and more scales. What if it takes a year of daily practice to play an octave of a single scale?  Caught in the trumpet’s mouthpiece and aperture—the ghosts of grey wolves and cougars.

Back stage

The stage manager seems to be collecting ladies for the back stage. He asks me to follow him behind a black leather curtain into a room dimly lit by candles. Set for the musicians is a circular buffet of black grapes. Kiwi. A sea of bread and cheeses. This room made for after midnight could be a light year from the one I teach in—six trillion miles separates West Dallas and Washington Avenue. The room with the students also contains a buzz-crackle sound. Rosa Perez and Suzie Rodriguez buzz and groan, they bleat and whimper. Such liquid dark eyes. They can’t close their mouths, they drool like silty water fountains. I’ve grown to love them. Even Anthony Beasley who pulls his dirty Pamper from his pants to tease me with. Does that room remember me from day to day Miss Stephanie? The room I’m talking to the trumpeter in speaks few words. A room of jasmine smoldering in a bowl. A room of octaves.

Mexican Heroin

I’ve traveled from the backstage to the nearby Holiday Inn. The trumpet players kiss is much older than mine. While he studies me I flush. Why doesn’t he take off his glasses? His stares are making me afraid. He tells me he is the protégé of Miles Davis, a hard blower. “Who do you like?” he asks, and then rattles off names—Joe Henderson, Horace Silver, Joe Chambers, Dexter Gordon, Slide Hampton, Rufus Reid. I know nothing. Years later I will. The names hurry past me like station stops on a train. I finger the ice in the bucket. He’s not handsome but he has presence. A beard shadow, a full mouth, his trumpeter’s lips. Intelligence. His head reminds me of a prayer when he leans over the bedside table. He shakes brown powder from a glassine packet onto the fake wood. “Would you like some?” he asks, inserting a straw into his nose. “What is it?” He sniffs. “Mexican heroin.”

The words seem no more dangerous than this Holiday Inn room with its bed and brown comforter pulled back to reveal white sheets. The words are as innocent as the picture on the wall of a wooded New England hillside in autumn, a bleed of yellow and red leaves. “Just a taste,” I say. He cakes the tip of his finger in the brown dust and rubs in on my gums. The sconce light winks as I lick what remains on his finger. He sniffs from the pile again then studies me. The thick lenses enlarge his eyes until there may be no escape. What does he see? My arm? His eyes are intense as if iron is being smelted inside them. Is that why he’s stopped kissing me? The exchange of tongues is nothing compared to this looking.

His music is 3:00 a.m. blue, a live oak gnarled by wind, a red oak-civet-smoke odor jazz seeps. Chromatic keys that contort and bite. Later I understand he’s not examining me. He suffers from Retinitis Pigmentosa. Slowly and surely he’s going blind. He takes off his glasses. His face is truly naked, a boy’s. He rolls me onto my back. My breath sticks in my chest as I lift myself to meet him. His weight settles on my pelvis. I float under him, shifting then swimming. His fingers slip from my shoulders and he bends to my neck. Woody recorded In a Capricornian Way live at the Village Vanguard. His astrological sign—the goat. Woody was married to his manager, Maxine Gregg, although his friends suggest “not in a legal sense.” She fell in love with jazz first and then worked as a road manager for jazz musicians in Europe. She gave birth to their child Woody Shaw, III. Even after they parted as lovers she remained his manager.

When he gets out of bed and puts back on his boxer shorts, I notice his long lovely thighs. His knees are ashy like he has knelt in a newspaper fire. The brown powder is upsetting my stomach. Nausea spreads through me like the all-day simmer of meat gravy. “Why do you take heroin?” I ask lazily, feeling weak as the limb of a salt cedar. A crease forms above his nose. “It helps me come down after I play.”

Plantain

He reaches to the plate of black grapes under the bedside lamp, feeds me a grape, then to another plate, picking up some sweetness that is fried, a hot muskiness that could be plantain or spring lamb. “You get so much adrenalin on stage.” His eyebrows rise over the frames of his horn rims. “Are you a Jew?” He likes Jewish women because they understand his music, why he’s not going to go electric or jazz-fusion, why he’s going to stay with bebop, with harmonic. Have I heard any of his recorded music? Little Red’s Fantasy, Stepping Stones? Blackstone Legacy.

What am I leaving out? The darkness thinning and the workday about to begin? When it arrives it will pull me inside it. I fear the swampish heat. The magnolias know first the creeping light and close their petals before the brush fire of the sun. I light a cigarette and inhale filling myself. The dawn doesn’t want to be walked in. The overheated magnolias have taken back their sugar. I picture the shyness of the trumpet player getting off the bed and putting on his boxer shorts. I’ll go to work exhausted. The students and I will form a circle in the gymnasium and they will be helped to sit by the gym teacher and her aides. The students who understand so little will understand sitting, their bodies seek this place where they rock and sit, where they live their awake lives asleep.

Meteorites

We talk about falling stars, about the meteorite showers predicted in the Houston Chronicle. He knows by far the largest number of meteorites is Chondfrite. Later I find his obituary. “One of the truly great trumpet players dead. Huge Loss to Jazz World.” I begin to tremble when I learn that he tumbled down a stairway at DeKalb Avenue subway station in Brooklyn and a train struck him, severing his left arm. Similar in composition to the mantle of Earth. A ton of meteorites enter the atmosphere every day. Probably the fire shower will have formed billions of years, then a billion year journey through space. It is the eternal and infinite. Bits of falling solar systems.

Stephanie Dickinson lives in New York City. Her novels Half Girl and Lust Series are published by Spuyten Duyvil, as is her feminist noir Love Highway. Other books include Heat: An Interview with Jean Seberg, (New Michigan Press), Flashlight Girls Run (New Meridian Arts), The Emily Fables (ELJ Publications) and Girl Behind the Door (RMP). Her work has been reprinted in Best American Nonrequired Reading, New Stories from the South, and 2016 New Stories from the Midwest. She is the editor of Rain Mountain Press.