Episodes 13 and 14: Jazz Man

Image by MarthaHinz from Pixabay (text added)

Episode 13: Jazz Man - Music at the Mini-Mart

Excerpt

Arnold quietly laments that he is not named something other than Arnold. Something like Thelonious or Dizzy or maybe even Miles.

Arnold plays The Sax. He always has at least one (bari, tenor, alto, or soprano), and often more than one, behind the counter at the Mini-Mart where he works. The instruments are a little battered, and a little tarnished, except right after he polishes them. The pure, painfully beautiful strains can be heard wafting across the small, graveled parking area in the early mornings, and more than one tourist has been surprised, when stopping in for a cup of bad coffee or a package of Donettes, to find the lovely sounds aren’t coming from a Muzak system but from the heart and soul of a smallish older man standing stoop-shouldered and closed-faced behind the counter.

Mostly he plays the old standbys that casual jazz aficionados will recognize: “Stella by Starlight,” “Take Five,” “Pennies from Heaven,” “God Bless the Child.” If he’s feeling particularly melancholy—he is a musician, after all—it’s “They Can’t Take That Away From Me,” or “Flying Home.” The be-pimpled adolescent whose shifts follow Arnold’s (he can never remember the kid’s name, but it might be one of those Looser Island names like Dandelion or Sea Star) sometimes gives Arnold an inscrutable look when arriving at the store, but Arnold ignores the look. Arnold is old enough to understand the phrase Kids these days in his bones and in his gut.

Like most of the other island residents, Arnold is accompanied wherever he goes―even to work―by his canine companion. Gus is an aging Basset Hound, a gentle foil to his human’s curmudgeonliness who, as is good and right and proper for a jazz man’s dog, is a music-lover and an enthusiastic audience. Luckily for Arnold and the Mini-Mart customers, Gus shows his appreciation by smiling and wagging his tail rather than howling along.

Arnold is not Black―another misfortune for a jazz musician, in his mind, another injury to his muse. He is plainly white, with a narrow face framed by long yellow-white hair that he wears in a single braid reaching almost to his skinny behind. He has wild white eyebrows but no other facial hair to speak of, having decided long ago to give up on the dream of a ZZ-Top-style beard to match his braid. In spite of his oh-so-ordinary name and the decidedly pale cast of his skin, Arnold was moderately famous in his youth and even into middle age, a fact none of the other islanders knows or would have guessed.

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Episode 14: Jazz Man - Going Home

Excerpt

When you are young, the body absorbs emotional trauma, and hides it behind smooth skin and clear gray-green eyes and wispy flyaway hair the color of a chestnut nestled in a dimple in the soil, a chestnut that fell from a tree and rolled to rest near the grave marked by the most expensive tombstone Arnold’s parents could afford. It’s not a jazz song per se, and Arnold is generally a purist, but when thinking of his sister’s death the soundtrack is always Peter Gabriel’s “I Grieve.” He can’t remember the words (the tune is stuck in his head on an endless loop), but he knows it’s something about how life goes on and on and on and on.

The body soldiers on as if nothing’s happened, but all those traumas must come out some day. The memory of the elfin body of his sister being lowered into the ground, the job in the warehouse that he didn’t get and didn’t want but really needed, the dog who ran into the street at just the wrong moment, the coffee spilled on the new pants he’d coveted and saved for, the lymphoma that ate up his mother’s stomach from the inside like some voracious Pac Man, the girl he liked who said No when he asked her out, the liver failure that took down his father after rage and despair had hollowed out what was left of his heart . . . each has its own malignance, the petty anxieties and life-wracking tragedies working a dark magic on the exterior. Each moment and string of moments muscles its way, over time, to the surface, and leaves its mark.

And who wants to look at a map of his own grief and disappointment every day?

(Gus always points out making joyful music and laughing with friends in the Louisiana sunshine also have a time-stamp, which Arnold grudgingly concedes. But still.)

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