The Bear Comes Home Read online

The Bear found himself doing a few more unexpected things, although there was precedent for one of them in Dolphy: he began incorporating ideas that had no proper place in the solo, stray thoughts, overheard sounds, freaks of inspiration, arguments played out rapid-fire in the dark theater of the mind. He inserted them when he felt like it or when they obtruded sufficiently—he liked the idea, why shouldn't the solo pick up on what's going on outside it, why shouldn't it interrupt itself to say something irrelevant and inspired?—but then just as suddenly he got sick of the tactic and began playing as many notes as he possibly could, as if to blot them out and obliterate the divided mind in which an argument could take place, even an inspired one, and substitute for it the more whole and harmonious instrument that had been given him from above in the street on his way to the club. He became aware that the illumination he had received, fragmentary and unsatisfying to him now but wholly adequate to the needs of the music, was beginning to inform what he was playing, and his solo had begun to even out, to reflect, in the middle of what was still a tumult, a kind of peace. Yes, he thought, there is my true, eternal self and native song. How did I even begin to get interested in this other shit? He attuned him-

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  self to what was most complete and timeless in him and tried to let its music through.

  Something came through for a couple of choruses and floated above the demands of the time and turned slowly on its axis, but then, even before the Bear was aware of it, he had lowered his saxophone and begun to walk offstage. His solo, apparently, was over. Trouble was, he wanted to go on. He raised his saxophone to his snout again but found himself apprehended by the Law of what he had already done. Ich hahe gemig, his spirit told him, and with uncharacteristic docility he nodded okay and left the stand. Lester Bowie came up past him and began a sputtering and electric trumpet solo. About halfway back to the table he felt the material New York world return to his consciousness with a crash. A sweat of terror broke out under his far. Holy shit, he told himself, we got to get out of here. "Jones?" he said weakly.

  "I'm with you," said the man who was his friend.

  "We gotta split," said the Bear.

  He made his way back across the nightclub through the blur of his mixed emotions and the unanimous recoil of the audience. He did not remember having packed up his instrument, although he had, and swabbed it roughly clean too. When he and Jones left the club through the two sets of doors and turned right, the Bear found himself facing the Avenue: it was a wilderness of human darkness and unnatural light. The Bear began to shake. "I can't deal with it," he told Jones. "I'll never make it home. I can't do it, I'm caving in."

  "There's only one way," said Jones, and although the Bear saw little or nothing, he recognized in all the tumult of the street the sound of Jones unsnaking his length of chain.

  "Right," the Bear agreed, and began to strip. When he had gotten all his clothes off, Jones compressed them into a bundle he secured with the trench-coat strap. The Bear attached the chain to the ring in his nose and got down on all fours. "Ready," he said, and they started uptown.

  The Bear applied all his attention to getting his brainless, rolling, after-work walk down, and was terrified of not being able to get it right. He found himself surprisingly near the verge of tears. Was it the emotion left over from his solo? A sorrow was welling up from deep in his body that had the shape of his whole life to it, the captivity and loss, the quirks and pitfalls of character and fate, everything that had shaped him and he didn't want to know about just now. Oh Lord, he thought, here it comes, the Big Sad, not portioned out but all in one gulp. I am about to disappear. "Be cool," he heard Jones hiss at him severely.

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  "What?" the Bear asked hopelessly, and began to sink to the pavement on his belly, as if ready to vanish into the earth.

  "That's it, play dumb," he heard Jones say. "It's the poHce."

  The Bear was just able to stop himself from saying. The what? He was aware of a red light—ha, the lower worlds, he told himself, whirling in their profitless and eternal cycle on the roof of a car—and then of an officer shining a bright white light into his eyes, which began to water in response.

  He heard an unkind voice asking Jones a question: '^Have you got a license for that animair^ No, he's not evil, the Bear reminded himself, only unfortunate, only bereft of his sustaining principle. How can people live like that? How did they manage to get that way? It's such an illusion.

  "Of course, officer," he heard Jones say, and then the unrustling of a piece of paper. The Bear felt his earlier sorrow change its shape, and sensed himself filling with something like compassion—he was having a busy night—and it came to him that he should stand up and heal the police officer's spirit just by standing up and speaking the truth to him. You must, he told himself, live the unconditioned life. You must adhere to the Real or consent to die piece by piece. If this night has taught you anything it must be that a life lived halfway is the deadliest thing on earth. You must be fully born.

  "You know you're not supposed to be out with him at night," he heard the cop's voice say. "And what's in the suitcase?"

  "His things," said Jones. "I had to take him to the vet in a hurry. Just look at him how sick he is, there wasn't a cab that would pick us up on the way back, it's night out, so we started walking."

  "What was wrong with him?"

  "Distemper."

  "Hey, my dog had that."

  "Bear's just a big dog," said Jones.

  "Whaddaya say. Jack?" said the policeman.

  "I dunno," said a similar voice nearby. The Bear heard a car door open and shut, then shoesteps on concrete. "I dowanna take him in, the animal shelter, the paperwork, it's a drag. Man's got a sick bear. It's not my job, sick bears."

  "We can't just leave 'em out on the street. Jack," the first officer reminded him.

  "You're right about that," the second officer said.

  "We're a working team," he heard Jones tell the policemen in a pleading tone. "A street act. Taxpayers. We just got written up in New York magazine," he lied.

  "Really?"

  "A revival of a great old tradition, it said."

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  "Oh. Hey. Hum."

  "Listen," said Jones, sounding exactly as if he'd had a sudden inspiration. "How about if you guys gave us a Hft home. It's only a coupla blocks and we don't wanna scare any people on the street. He's cool in cars, won't crap on the seat or anything."

  There was a moment of silence, for the sake of deliberation or its imposture, and the scales of justice were raised aloft to balance the possibihties of the moment. The night hung suspended. A cloud covered the moon. A bottle crashed to pavement half a block away and a voice cheered its destruction. "Okay, get him inna car."

  As the Bear shambled obediently into the backseat of the police car he was preparing himself to speak. Because it was time. All the world's compassion, sorrow and love had gathered in his chest—well, maybe—not to tie itself into the usual complicated knot but finally to do its proper work. It was time, thought the Bear, for all that truth and feeling to flow out of him unaltered and change men's lives. It was time to blow the quotidian categories, not out of egocentric glee but because the human world had trudged the circle too many times and it was getting hard for anyone in its ambit to wake up in the morning, sleep lay so heavily on one's eyes.

  He had played his little solo and now it was time for him to have his little say. No big thing. Just another incremental set of recognitions, the strait-jacket worked a Httle looser under the arms. It may be time to do it, nudge the epoch two or three degrees sideways into the light. Now's the time, said Bird. The Bear would pick it up. Why have I been such a coward for so long? He counted off the tempo and got ready for his entrance.

  When the Bear raised his head to speak, his eyes encountered the strong steel mesh that separated the backseat from the front, and he remembered, or foresaw, some more decisive encounter with everything that w
as wrong with the world, and his spirit contracted, dampened, chilled, and resolved into a mire. Thus conscience, he thought. Doth make. Why? Why does this always happen? He had no answer. His big night out was done.

  "Howja get the bear?" he heard a voice ask Jones fi*om an unbridgeable distance. No, check it out: from the front seat. We're back. The clock is ticking.

  "Won him in a poker game," he heard Jones' voice say, correctly.

  "Wadja have in ya hand?"

  "Full house actually."

  "Houseful of bearshit's more hke it."

  "Hey that's a good one," said Jones, and laughter was general in the car. The Bear joined in and Jones shot him a quick elbow in the ribs, but the cops seemed not to have noticed.

  The Bear Comes Home 27

  And then, the Bear observed, the cops forgot about him completely. They punched the siren a burst before pulling into traffic, then hooked the car through a wide U-turn and pointed it uptown.

  The ride took five minutes, the farewell warning another two. - "Yes," said Jones, easing out of the car when the driver popped the backdoor locks by remote. "Yes sir."

  With a farewell blip of siren, the police car pulled away.

  On all fours at the end of his chain, a subdued Bear followed Jones up the stoop of their building, then up the stairs to the apartment. " IVhen you see me coming raise your window high" he sang on the second-floor landing, "Parker's Mood" again.

  ^'IVhen you see me going hang your head and cry," Jones returned.

  In the third-floor hall Jones looked in his pocket for the keys. He opened the locks, they went in. The television was still on but they both sat down and looked at the floor.

  Ihc Bear woke up an hour before his usual time to find that he had clawed the corner of his mattress to shreds again, another night of bad dreams. They had begun to plague his sleep since the jam session at the Tin Palace, peculiarly vivid, with all the weight and authority of waking experience. The remains of last night's feature clung to him now but he didn't want to look. He unwound himself from the ropes and tangles of his sheets and walked hazily into the bathroom, where he turned on the shower and stared at his reflection in the mirror while the water heated up. He seemed lusterless and oppressed. His eyes were sparkless. Is there anything, he asked himself, in this undignified hulk of a body that is capable of being raised up to Beauty? Or was that just another dream. While he was wondering about it, the glass fogged over and his image vanished into mist.

  He pulled open the pink plastic curtains, stepped into the tub and under the hot spray of water. Purify me, he asked it. I am the oblation and the sacrifice. I am the offering and the flame to which it is offered. I am the clarified butter. I am the yak out back behind the lamasery. I am the blue-green thing in the far corner of the fridge behind the bulging month-old milk car-

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  ton. I am that I am and that's all what I am. I'm Popeye the Sailor Man. Ich naiT.

  The Bear shuddered. Cheer up, it'll all be over soon.

  Speaking of dreams, what had last night's been? Recently he had been assassinated—shot between the shoulderblades in his white-gold robe and miter trying to conduct High Mass before a mixed animal and human crowd in an old wooden barn. The night before that, he'd been hunted by the Mafia—seemed he'd pocketed the wrong money or informed on someone—to a ding}' 1950s hotel room in Cincinnati, soiled soup-green carpet, rumpled bed, the sound of a streetcar clanging past outside in slanted sunlight while two men in coats looked up at him from the sidewalk as he parted the curtain. Some fitful half-waking part of himself kept asking. Wait a minute, wait a minute now: this doesn't make sense, how did I get herei But the dream's sense of detail had done him in, and he had plummeted heavily into belief and imminent doom. The night before, as the captain of his submarine, he'd been trying to save the world from a bunch of hideous green ghoulish creatures, but they found a hidden entrance down below and came up at him through a maze of ladders and hatches that he recognized as untended regions of himself; they enveloped him in their unspeakably loathsome presence and calmly, methodically ate him alive.

  Last night's feature, he now remembered, had been less routinely nightmarish but somehow more depressing. He had been walking down a vaguely outlined city street toward evening when, as if a force were driving his head downward, he found himself looking at the backs of his paws: they were changing into pink, worm-fingered human hands, and he felt deeply nauseated and afraid. Then, too quickly, the dream had changed: he began to fly headfirst across the pavement at tremendous speed, and the street was no longer vaguely sketched: despite the fact that his eyes were fixed in shock on his half-paws half-hands, even' stone, every speck, every fleck of hght on ever^ pane of glass and ever}' filament of floating qxx soot was brought home to him in riveting, unnatural detail. He did not recognize the street but it came to him, as he flew through its pretematurally detailed gridwork of matter, Hght and shade, that he would see it one day when he was awake, possibly at the same speed. This reflection made no sense to him and he woke briefly in the dark room, where ladders of carlight coming through the bUnds swept across the ceiUng in a noiseless clash of optics. He lapsed back into vague dreams and partial sleep. He followed a pale, half-familiar woman through a maze of alleyways till dawn.

  The shower hadn't helped much, and the night still had its hands on him. He turned off the water, got down on all fours in the tub and shook himself dr}^. After he pulled the curtain open and climbed out he took a last look at

  The Bear Comes Home 29

  himself in the mirror. What can ail thee, wretched wight? he asked himself. The sedge is withered from the lake and no birds sing? Is that what's troubling you, bucky?

  In the kitchen he made eggs and toast and coffee, sat at the table to eat them, and found the phone company's Final Warning concealed among the napkins, where Jones must have inserted it the day before. Soon, the Bear smelled the day's first cigarette, and in a httle while Jones himself appeared in his bedroom doorway, yawning and rubbing at his eyes. "Gumorning, Bear," he said, and scratched randomly at his underwear.

  "Morning, Jones," said the Bear. "Coffee's up."

  "I need a shower. Keep it hot."

  Ten minutes later they were seated across the table from each other, Jones eating the Breakfast of Champions while his eggs got cold, the Bear having another coffee, black no sugar, in his widemouthed cup.

  "You left the bathtub fall of far again," said Jones. "I wish you'd um . . ." He waved his hand vaguely in the air.

  "I thought I wiped it."

  "You forgot."

  "Sorry," said the Bear, and held up the message from Ma Bell.

  "I was hoping you wouldn't find that. Don't worry. I'll pay."

  The Bear took a puff from Jones' cigarette and replaced it in the ashtray. "How can you smoke these things?"

  "Jesus, look how you lipped it. Look at that thing. You expect me to smoke that?" Savagely Jones mashed it out in the ashtray.

  "Consider me your therapist," said the Bear. "I'm trying to get you to quit. You know my methods, Watson."

  "Up yours," Jones observed, and lit another Lucky.

  "We have the money for the phone bill?"

  Jones shrugged. "I'll pay it. All the calls are mine."

  "I use the phone too." The Bear had acquired the habit of conducting lengthy late-night conversations with long-distance operators in Denver, Idaho City, Des Moines and K.C. He told them he was a businessman, a writer, a son in search of his father, a father in search of his son. After five minutes they'd be swapping stories about their lives, and he'd tell them lies in return, fitting out a human life, working his way into whatever character happened to be emerging that night. They were good people, the operators. He enjoyed talking with them. If you could believe what you heard on the phone, America was fall of blameless, generous folks.

  "Doesn't cost you," said Jones. "I was thinking of finding a job in a restaurant."

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"What about the act?" the Bear asked him. "If we're out of cash I'm ready to go back to work."

  "Aah," said Jones, "take a break. I can wait tables a couple of weeks, it won't kill me."

  "What do I do, sit around the apartment all day? Terrific."

  "Watch TV," Jones suggested. "Read a book."

  "Get sluggish," the Bear counterposed. "Die of boredom."

  "What the hell else am I supposed to do? I can't just drop you upstate anymore. The forestry commission's tightened up its act. You're the wrong breed and you're not banded. They'll fly your ass to Manitoba."

  "The wild's not what it used to be," the Bear allowed.

  Jones stretched his arms above his head and cracked his knuckles back. "Things will have their revenge," he said, "but right now I'm gonna go out for a paper and look at the want ads. Anything 1 can get you?"

  The Bear washed the cigarette taste out of his mouth at the sink, then unpacked his alto and ran through a few rudiments among the breakfast litter. Seeing Blythe up close had made him want to extend his usable range and speed up his fingering. He had been putting in an hour a day on exercises alone. The same genetic crapshoot that had enlarged and detailed his brain had laid a set of opposable thumbs on him, which was cool, but his paws did not have the degree of articulation those nightmare wormy hands would have taken for granted. Was that the point? Was it a saxophone dream? It didn't feel Uke a saxophone dream. The Bear often played saxophones in his dreams. On occasion he had made love to saxophones in his dreams—tell it Uke it is: he had fucked them, with a ruthlessness he'd never have directed at another living being, and then would wake amid sheets of sound or cotton gone sticky thinking. How perverse. He was getting off the subject, and in his distraction the rudiments he was supposed to be working on were losing their contours and turning almost into music. Which at the moment was not the point. He reap-pHed himself to the anatomical machinery and allotted it the necessary focus.

  Practice was a cheerless task but you couldn't deny that it worked: his paws gradually accustomed themselves to working faster, and, tonguing his way through some maniacally intricate turns of phrase, he began to gain a better grasp of the reed, and saw new ways, some time off, of bending this grasp to the purposes of living play. The seed of music needed this husk of persistence and repetition, but it seemed a shame that the whole thing couldn't be done on just the sweet, searing fire of God, music winging down and sweeping you up in some sweet chariot.