But not yet, no. Five days later Dédée’s phoned me saying that Johnny is much better and that he wants to see me. I’d rather not reproach her, first of all because I imagine it’d be a waste of time, and secondly because poor Dédée’s voice sounds as though it were coming out of a cracked teakettle. I promised to go immediately, and said that perhaps when Johnny was better, we could organize a tour through the provinces, a lot of cities. I hung up when Dédée started crying into the phone.

Johnny’s sitting up in bed, in a semi-private with two other patients who are sleeping, luckily. Before I can say anything to him, he’s grabbed my head with both paws and kissed me on the forehead and cheeks numerous times. He’s terribly emaciated, although he tells me that he’s got a good appetite and that they give him plenty to eat. For the moment the thing that worries him most is whether the boys are bad-mouthing him, if his crisis has hurt anyone, things like that. It’s almost useless to answer him, he knows well enough that the concerts have been canceled and that that hurt Art and Marcel and the others; but he asks me like he expected that something good had happened meanwhile, anything that would put things together again. And at the same time he isn’t playing me a trick, because back of everything else is his supreme indifference; Johnny doesn’t give a good goddamn if everything goes to hell, and I know him too well to pay any attention to his coming on.

“What do you want me to tell you, Johnny? Things could have worked out better, except you have this talent for fucking up.”

“Okay, I don’t deny that,” Johnny said tiredly. “And all because of the urns.”

I remembered Art’s account of it and stood there looking at him.

“Fields filled with urns, Bruno. Piles of invisible urns buried in an immense field. I was wandering around there and once in a while I’d stumble across something. You’d say that I’d dreamt it, huh? It was just like that, believe it: every once in a while I’d stumble across an urn, until I realized that the whole field was full of urns, that there were miles and miles of them, and there were a dead man’s ashes inside every urn. Then I remember I got down on my knees and began to dig up the ground with my nails until one of the urns appeared. Then I remember thinking, ‘This one’s going to be empty because it’s the one for me.’ But no, it was filled with a grey dust like I knew all the others were I hadn’t seen yet. Then … then that was when we began to record Amorous, if I remember.”

I glanced discreetly at the temperature chart. According to it, reasonably normal. A young intern showed up in the doorway, acknowledging me with a nod, and made a gesture indicating food to Johnny, an almost sporty gesture, a good kid, etc. But when Johnny didn’t answer him, when the intern had left, not even entering the door, I saw Johnny’s hands were clenched tight.

“They’ll never understand,” he said. “They’re like a monkey with a feather duster, like the chicks in the Kansas City Conservatory who think they’re playing Chopin, nothing less. Bruno, in Camarillo they put me in a room with another three people, and in the morning an intern came in all washed up and all rosy, he looked so good. He looked like the son of Tampax out of Kleenex, you believe it. A kind of specimen, an immense idiot that sat down on the edge of the bed and was going to cheer me up, I mean that was when I wanted to kill myself, and I hadn’t thought of Lan or of anyone, I mean, forget it. And the worst was, the poor cat was offended because I wasn’t paying attention to him. He seemed to think I should sit up in bed en-goddamn-chanted with his white skin and beautifully combed hair and his nails all trimmed, and that way I’d get better like the poor bastards who come to Lourdes and throw away the crutches and leave, really jumping …

“Bruno, this cat and all the cats at Camarillo were convinced. You know what I’m saying? What of? I swear I don’t know, but they were convinced. Of what they were, I imagine, of what they were worth, of their having a diploma. No, it’s not that. Some were modest and didn’t think they were infallible. But even the most humble were sure. That made me jumpy, Bruno, that they felt sure of themselves. Sure of what, tell me what now, when a poor devil like me with more plagues than the devil under his skin had enough awareness to feel that everything was like a jelly, that everything was very shaky everywhere, you only had to concentrate a little, feel a little, be quiet for a little bit, to find the holes. In the door, in the bed: holes. In the hand, in the newspaper, in time, in the air: everything full of holes, everything spongy, like a colander straining itself … But they were American science, Bruno, dig? White coats were protecting them from the holes; didn’t see anything, they accepted what had been seen by others, they imagined that they were living. And naturally they couldn’t see the holes, and they were very sure of themselves, completely convinced of their prescriptions, their syringes, their goddamned psychoanalysis, their don’t smoke and don’t drink … Ah, the beautiful day when I was able to move my ass out of that place, get on the train, look out the window how everything was moving backward, I don’t know, have you seen how the landscape breaks up when you see it moving away from you …”

We’re smoking Gauloises. They’ve given Johnny permission to drink a little cognac and smoke eight or ten cigarettes a day. But you can see it’s not him, just his body that’s smoking, and he’s somewhere else almost as if he’d refuse to climb out of the mine shaft. I’m wondering what he’s seen, what he’s felt these last few days. I don’t want to get him excited, if he could speak for himself … We smoke silently, and occasionally he moves his arm and runs his fingers over my face as though he were identifying me. Then he plays with his wristwatch, he looks at it tenderly.

“What happens to them is that they get to think of themselves as wise,” he said sharply. “They think it’s wisdom because they’ve piled up a lot of books and eaten them. It makes me laugh, because really they’re good kids and are really convinced that what they study and what they do are really very difficult and profound things. In the circus, Bruno, it’s all the same, and between us it’s the same. People figure that some things are the height of difficulty, and so they applaud trapeze artists, or me. I don’t know what they’re thinking about, do they imagine that you break yourself up to play well, or that the trapeze artist sprains tendons every time he takes a leap? The really difficult things are something else entirely, everything that people think they can do anytime. To look, for instance, or to understand a dog or a cat. Those are the difficult things, the big difficulties. Last night I happened to look in this little mirror, and I swear, it was so terribly difficult I almost threw myself out of bed. Imagine that you’re looking at yourself; that alone is enough to freeze you up for half an hour. In reality, this guy’s not me, the first second I felt very clearly that he wasn’t me. I took it by surprise, obliquely, and I knew it wasn’t me. I felt that, and when something like that’s felt … But it’s like at Atlantic City, on top of one wave the second one falls on you, and then another … You’ve hardly felt and already another one comes, the words come … No, not words, but what’s in the words, a kind of glue, that slime. And the slime comes and covers you and convinces you that that’s you in the mirror. Sure, but not to realize it. But sure, I am, with my hair, this scar. And people don’t realize that the only thing that they accept is the slime, and that’s why they think it’s easy to look in a mirror. Or cut a hunk of bread with a knife. Have you ever cut a hunk of bread with a knife?”

“I’m in the habit of it,” I said, amused.

“And you’ve stayed all that calm. Not me, Bruno, I can’t. One night I shot all of it so far that the knife almost knocked the eye out of a Japanese at the next table. That was in Los Angeles, and there was such a fantastic brawl … When I explained to them, they dumped me. And it seemed to me so simple to explain it all to them. At that time I knew Dr. Christie. A terrific guy, and you know how I am about doctors …”

One hand waves through the air, touching it on all sides, laying it down as though marking its time. He smiles. I have the feeling that he’s alone, completely alone. I feel hollow beside him. If it had occurred to Johnny to pass his hand through me I would have cut like butter, like smoke. Maybe that’s why once in a while he grazes my face with his fingers, cautiously.

“You have the loaf of bread there, on the tablecloth,” Johnny says looking down into the air. “It’s solid, no denying it, toasted a lovely color, smells beautiful. Something that’s not me, something apart, outside me. But if I touch it, if I move my fingers and grasp it, then something changes, don’t you think so? The bread is outside me, but I touch it with my fingers, I feel it, I feel that that’s the world, but if I can touch it and feel it, then you can’t really say it’s something else, or do you think you can say it’s something else?”

“Oh baby, for thousands of years now, whole armies of greybeards have been beating their heads to solve that problem.”

“There’s some day in the bread,” murmured Johnny, covering his face. “And I dared to touch it, to cut it in two, to put some in my mouth. Nothing happened, I know; that’s what’s terrible. Do you realize it’s terrible that nothing happened? You cut the bread, you stick the knife into it, and everything goes on as before. I don’t understand, Bruno.”

Johnny’s face was beginning to upset me, his excitement. Every time, it was getting more difficult to get him to talk about jazz, about his memories, his plans, to drag him back to reality. (To reality: I barely get that written down and it disgusts me. Johnny’s right, reality can’t be this way, it’s impossible to be a jazz critic if there’s any reality, because then someone’s pulling your leg. But at the same time, as for Johnny, you can’t go on buying it out of his bag or we’ll all end up crazy.)

*  *  *  *  *

Then he fell asleep, or at least he’s closed his eyes and is pretending to be asleep. Again I realize how difficult it is to tell where Johnny is from what he’s doing. If he’s asleep, if he’s pretending to sleep, if he thinks he’s asleep. One is much further away from Johnny than from any other friend. No one can be more vulgar, more common, more strung out by the circumstances of a miserable life; apparently accessible on all sides. Apparently, he’s no exception. Anyone can be like Johnny if he just resigns himself to being a poor devil, sick, hung up on drugs, and without will power—and full of poetry and talent. Apparently. I, who’ve gone through life admiring geniuses, the Picassos, the Einsteins, the whole blessed list anyone could make up in a minute (and Gandhi, and Chaplin, and Stravinsky), like everyone else, I tend to think that these exceptions walk in the clouds somewhere, and there’s no point in being surprised at anything they do. They’re different, there’s no other trip to take. On the other hand, the difference with Johnny is secret, irritating by its mystery, because there’s no explanation for it. Johnny’s no genius, he didn’t discover anything, he plays jazz like several thousand other black and white men, though he’s better than any of them, and you have to recognize that that depends somewhat on public taste, on the styles, in short, the times. Panassié, for example, has decided that Johnny is outright bad, and although we believe that if anyone’s outright bad it’s Panassié, in any case there’s an area open to controversy. All this goes to prove is that Johnny is not from some other world, but the moment I think that, then I wonder if precisely so there is not in Johnny something of another world (he’d be the first to deny it). Likely he’d laugh his ass off if you told him so. I know fairly well what he thinks, which of these things he lives. I say: which of these things he lives, because Johnny … But I’m not going that far, what I would like to explain to myself is the distance between Johnny and ourselves that has no easy answer, is not based in explainable differences. And it seems to me that he’s the first to pay for the consequences of that, that it affects him as much as it does us. I really feel like saying straight off that Johnny is some kind of angel come among men, until some elementary honesty forces me to swallow the sentence, turn it around nicely and realize that maybe what is really happening is that Johnny is a man among angels, one reality among the unrealities that are the rest of us. Maybe that’s why Johnny touches my face with his fingers and makes me feel so unhappy, so transparent, so damned small, in spite of my good health, my house, my wife, my prestige. My prestige above all. Above all, my prestige.

But it turns out the same old way, I leave the hospital and hardly do I hit the street, check the time, remember what all I have to do, the omelet turns smoothly in the air and we’re right side up again. Poor Johnny, he’s so far out of it. (That’s the way it is, the way it is. It’s easier for me to believe that that’s the way it really is, now I’m in the café and the visit to the hospital was two hours ago, with everything that I wrote up there forcing me, like a condemned prisoner, to be at least a little decent with my own self.)

*  *  *  *  *

Luckily, the business about the fire got fixed up okay, or it seemed reasonable to imagine that the marquesa did her best to see that the fire business would be fixed up okay. Dédée and Art Boucaya came looking for me at the paper, and the three of us went over to Vix to listen to the already famous—still secret—recording of Amorous. Dédée told me, not much caring to, in the taxi, how the marquesa had gotten Johnny out of the trouble over the fire, that anyway there was nothing worse than a scorched mattress and a terrible scare thrown into all the Algerians living in the hotel in the rue Lagrange. The fine (already paid), another hotel (already arranged for by Tica), and Johnny is convalescing in an enormous bed, very pretty, drinking milk out of a milk can and reading Paris Match and The New Yorker, once in a while changing off to his famous (and scroungy) pocket notebook with Dylan Thomas poems and penciled notations all through it.

After all this news and a cognac in the corner café, we settled down in the audition room to listen to Amorous and Streptomycin. Art had asked them to put out the lights, and lay down on the floor to hear better. And then Johnny came in and his music moved over our faces, he came in there even though he was back in the hotel propped up in bed, and scuttled us with his music for a quarter of an hour. I understand why the idea that they were going to release Amorous infuriated him, anyone could hear its deficiencies, the breathing perfectly audible at the ends of the phrase, and especially the final savage drop, that short dull note which sounded to me like a heart being broken, a knife biting into the bread (and he was speaking about bread a few days back). But on the other hand, and it would escape Johnny, there was what seemed to us a terrible beauty, the anxiety looking for an outlet in an improvisation full of flights in all directions, of interrogation, of desperate gestures. Johnny can’t understand (because what for him is a calamity, for us looks like a road, at least a road-sign, a direction) that Amorous is going to stand as one of jazz’s great moments. The artist inside him is going to blow his stack every time he hears this mockery of his desire, of everything that he’d wanted to say while he was fighting, the saliva running out of his mouth along with the music, more than ever alone up against that he was pursuing, against what was trying to escape him while he was chasing it. That hard. Curious, it had been indispensable to listen to this, even though already everything was converging into this, this solo in Amorous, so that I realized that Johnny was no victim, not persecuted as everyone thought, as I’d even insisted upon in my biography of him (the English edition has just appeared and is bound to sell like Coca-Cola). I know now that’s not the way it is, that Johnny pursues and is not pursued, that all the things happening in his life are the hunter’s disasters, not the accidents of the harassed animal. No one can know what Johnny’s after, but that’s how it is, it’s there, in Amorous, in the junk, in his absurd conversations on any subject, in his breakdowns, in the Dylan Thomas notebook, in the whole of the poor sonofabitch that Johnny is, which makes him larger than life, and changes him into a living weirdo, into a hunter with no arms and legs, into a rabbit running past a sleeping tiger’s nose. And I find it absolutely necessary to say that, at bottom, Amorous made me want to go vomit, as if that might free me of him, of everything in him that was going up against me and against everybody, that shapeless black mass without feet or hands, that crazy chimp that puts his fingers on my face and looks at me tenderly.

Art and Dédée don’t see (I think they don’t want to see) more than the formal loveliness of Amorous. Dédée even liked Streptomycin better, where Johnny improvises with his usual ease and freedom, which the audience understands perfectly well and which to me sounds more like Johnny’s distracted, he just lets the music run itself out, that he’s on the other side. When we got into the street, I asked Dédée what their plans were, and she said that as soon as Johnny was out of the hotel (for the moment the police had him under surveillance), a new record company wanted to have him record anything he wanted to and it’d pay him very well. Art backed her up, said Johnny was full of terrific ideas, and that he and Marcel Gavoty were going to do this new bit with Johnny, though after the past few weeks you could see that Art wasn’t banking on it, and privately I knew that he’d been having conversations with his agent about going back to New York as soon as possible. Something I more than understood, poor guy.

“Tica’s doing very well,” Dédée said bitterly. “Of course, it’s easy for her. She always arrives at the last minute and all she has to do is open her handbag and it’s all fixed up. On the other hand, I …”

Art and I looked at one another. What in hell could we say? Women spend their whole lives circling around Johnny and people like Johnny. It’s not weird, it’s not necessary to be a woman to feel attracted to Johnny. What’s hard is to circle about him and not lose your distance, like a good satellite, like a good critic. Art wasn’t in Baltimore at that time, but I remember from the times I knew Johnny when he was living with Lan and the kids. To look at Lan really hurt. But after dealing with Johnny for a while, after accepting little by little his music’s influence, his dragged-out terrors, his inconceivable explanations of things that had never happened, his sudden fits of tenderness, then one understood why Lan wore that face and how it was impossible that she live with Johnny and have any other face at all. Tica’s something else, she gets out from under by being promiscuous, by living the dolce vita, and besides she’s got the dollar bill by the short hairs, and that’s a better scene than owning a machine gun, at least if you believe what Art Boucaya says when he gets pissed off at Tica or when he’s got a hangover.

“Come as soon as you can,” Dédée said. “He’d like to talk with you.”

I would have liked to lecture the hell out of him about the first (the cause of the fire, in which he was most certainly involved), but it would have been almost as hopeless to try to convince Johnny that he should become a useful citizen. For the moment everything’s going well (it makes me uneasy) and it’s strange that whenever everything goes well for Johnny, I feel immensely content. I’m not so innocent as to think this is merely a friendly reaction. It’s more like a truce, a breather. I don’t need to look for explanations when I can feel it as clearly as the nose on my face. It makes me sore to be the only person who feels this, who is hung with it the whole time. It makes me sore that Art Boucaya, Tica or Dédée don’t realize that every time Johnny gets hurt, goes to jail, wants to kill himself, sets a mattress on fire or runs naked down the corridors of a hotel, he’s paying off something for them, he’s killing himself for them. Without knowing it, and not like he was making great speeches from the gallows or writing books denouncing the evils of mankind or playing the piano with the air of someone washing away the sins of the world. Without knowing it, poor saxophonist, as ridiculous as that word is, however little a thing it is, just one among so many other poor saxophonists.

What’s terrible is if I go on like that, I’m going to end up writing more about myself than about Johnny. I’m beginning to compare myself to a preacher and that doesn’t give me too big a laugh, I’m telling you. By the time I got home I was thinking cynically enough to restore my confidence, that in my book on Johnny I mention the pathological side of his personality only in passing and very discreetly. It didn’t seem necessary to explain to people that Johnny thinks he’s walking through fields full of urns, or that pictures move when he looks at them; junk-dreams, finally, which stop with the cure. But one could say that Johnny leaves these phantoms with me in pawn, lays them on me like putting a number of handkerchiefs in a pocket until the time comes to take them back. And I think I’m the only one who can stand them, who lives with them and is scared shitless of them; and nobody knows this, not even Johnny. One can’t admit things like that to Johnny, as one might confess them to a really great man, a master before whom we humiliate ourselves so as to obtain some advice in exchange. What is this world I have to cart around like a burden? What kind of preacher am I? There’s not the slightest bit of greatness in Johnny, I’ve known that since I’ve known him, since I began to admire him. And for a while now this hasn’t surprised me, although at the beginning the lack of greatness upset me, perhaps because it’s one quality one is not likely to apply to the first comer, and especially to jazzmen. I don’t know why (I don’t know why) I believed at one time that Johnny had a kind of greatness which he contradicts day after day (or which we contradict, it’s not the same thing really; because, let’s be honest, there is in Johnny the phantom of another who could be, and this other Johnny is very great indeed; one’s attention is drawn to the phantom by the lack of that quality which nevertheless he evokes and contains negatively).

I say this because the tries Johnny has made to change his life, from his unsuccessful suicide to using junk, are ones you finally expect from someone with as little greatness as he. I think I admire him all the more for that, because he really is the chimpanzee who wants to learn to read, a poor guy who looks at all the walls around him, can’t convince himself, and starts all over again.

Ah, but what if one day the chimp does begin to read, what a crack in the dam, what a commotion, every man for himself, head for the hills, and I first of all. It’s terrible to see a man lacking all greatness beat his head against the wall that way. He is the critic of us all with his bones cracking, he tears us to shreds with the opening notes of his music. (Martyrs, heroes, fine, right: one is certain with them. But Johnny!)

*  *  *  *  *

Sequences. I don’t know how better to say it, it’s like an idea of what abruptly brings about terrible or idiotic sequences in a man’s life, without his knowing what law outside the categories labeled “law” decides that a certain telephone call is going to be followed immediately by the arrival of one’s sister who lives in the Auvergne, or that the milk is going to be upset into the fire, or that from a balcony we’re going to see a boy fall under an automobile. As on football teams or boards of directors, it appears that destiny always appoints a few substitutes when those named to the positions fall out as if by themselves. And so it’s this morning, when I’m still happy knowing that things are going better and more cheerfully with Johnny Carter, there’s an urgent telephone call for me at the paper, and it’s Tica calling, and the news is that Bee, Johnny and Lan’s youngest daughter, has just died in Chicago, and that naturally Johnny’s off his head and it would be good of me to drop by and give his friends a hand.

I was back climbing the hotel stairs—and there have been a lot of them during my friendship with Johnny—to find Tica drinking tea, Dédée soaking a towel, and Art, Delaunay, and Pepe Ramírez talking in low voices about the latest news of Lester Young, Johnny very quiet on the bed, a towel on his forehead, and wearing a perfectly tranquil and almost disdainful air. I immediately put my sympathetic face back into my pocket, restricting myself to squeezing Johnny’s hand very hard, lighting a cigarette, and waiting.

“Bruno, I hurt here,” Johnny said after a while, touching his chest in the conventional location. “Bruno, she was like a small white stone in my hand. I’m nothing but a pale horse with granulated eyelids whose eyes’ll run forever.”

All of this said solemnly, almost recited off, and Tica looking at Art, and both of them making gestures of tender forbearance, taking advantage of the fact that Johnny has his face covered with the towel and can’t see them. Personally, I dislike cheap sentimentality and its whole vocabulary, but everything that Johnny had just said, aside from the impression that I’d read it somewhere, felt to me like a mask that he’d put on to speak through, that empty, that useless. Dédée had come over with another towel to replace the one plastered on there, and in the interval I caught a glimpse of Johnny’s face uncovered and I saw an ashy greyness, the mouth twisted, and the eyes shut so tight they made wrinkles on his forehead. As always with Johnny, things had happened in a way other than what one had expected, and Pepe Ramírez who doesn’t know him very well is still flipped out and I think from the scandal, because after a time Johnny sat up in bed and started slowly, chewing every word, and then blew it out like a trumpet solo, insulting everyone connected with recording Amorous, without looking at anyone but nailing us all down like bugs in a box with just the incredible obscenity of his words, and so for two full minutes he continued cursing everyone on Amorous, starting with Art and Delaunay, passing over me (but I …) and ending with Dédée, Christ omnipotent and the whore who without exception gave birth to us all. And this was profoundly, this and the small white stone, the funeral oration for
Bee, dead from pneumonia in Chicago.

*  *  *  *  *

Two empty weeks will pass; piles of work, journalism, magazine articles, visits here and there—a good résumé of a critic’s life, a man who only lives on borrowed time, borrowed everything, on novelties for the news-hungry and decisions not of one’s making. I’m talking about what happened one night Tica, Baby Lennox and I were together in the Café de Flore humming Out of Nowhere very contentedly and talking about a piano solo of Bud Powell’s which sounded particularly good to all three of us, especially to Baby Lennox who, on top of being otherwise spectacular, had done herself up à la Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and you should have seen how great it looked on her. Baby will see Johnny show up with the rapturous admiration of her twenty years, and Johnny look at her without seeing her and continue wide of us and sit alone at another table, dead drunk or asleep. I’ll feel Tica’s hand on my knee.

“You see, he started shoving needles in his arm again last night. Or this afternoon. Damn that woman …”

I answered grudgingly that Dédée was as guilty as anyone else, starting with her, she’d turned on with Johnny dozens of times and would continue to do so whenever she goddamn well felt like it. I’d feel an overwhelming impulse to go out and be by myself, as always when it’s impossible to get close to Johnny, to be with him and beside him. I’ll watch him making designs on the table with his finger, sit staring at the waiter who’s asking him what he would like to drink, and finally Johnny’ll draw a sort of arrow in the air and hold it up with both hands as though it weighed a ton, and people at other tables would begin to be discreetly amused, which is the normal reaction in the Flore. Then Tica will say, “Shit,” and go over to Johnny’s table, and after placing an order with the waiter, she’ll begin to talk into Johnny’s ear. Not to mention that Baby will hasten to confide in me her dearest hopes, but then I’ll tell her vaguely that she has to leave Johnny alone and that nice girls are supposed to be in bed early, and if possible with a jazz critic. Baby will laugh amiably, her hand stroking my hair, and then we’ll sit quietly and watch the chick go by who wears the white-leaded cape up over her face and who has green eyeshadow and green lipstick even. Baby will say it really doesn’t look so bad on her, and I’ll ask her to sing me very quietly one of those blues that have already made her famous in London and Stockholm. And then we’ll go back to Out of Nowhere, which is following us around tonight like a dog which would also be the chick in the cape and green eyes.