"Believe in the Unreal" Excerpt Three -- Jazz

Art was wrapped up in recording his first album, so much that he hardly thought about Deb anymore, his thoughts mainly thinking of the minutae of recording an album, and his thoughts these days drifted towards home, and the once towering figures of Mother and Father.

His upbringing and on a larger scale, his mother and father had been notably absent for years now, ever since he dropped out of college.

The rural Tennesee home came back to him, as he settled into the studio for another evening. He remembered his mothers yellow dress, and thoughts came to him quickly and frantic.

There was, he discovered while tuning his guitar, a certain sadness that crept over him whenever his thoughts drifted back in time long enough to register the time spent apart from looming figures of Mother and Father.

He’d said “Dada” first, before Mama, which was strange now because he barely thought of both of them. They were still in the mountains, stern faces blankly staring into the light of the television, seated on the same couch Art did for years, until he found the secret fantasies that lingered among the fretboard of his first Sears guitar that his father had purchased for him on the occasion of this twelfth birthday.

His father was in the garage prying loose a screw rusted solid to his old bicycle. On a vice the bike frame sat, until a large scream came from the kitchen. The bike slid to the ground, my father jumped to the scene in the kitchen while Art, a million miles away plucked the vinyl strings on his guitar.

A snake had crawled in to the kitchen and had bit Gladys square on the arm. She’d passed out from the fear, and when Art wandered into the room from his bedroom he saw the site of his father cradlind an unconscious mother.

“What the hell were you doing in there?” He demanded, his face a strained expression of rage and desperate recognition.

“Playing guitar. What.” Art stopped dead in his tracks, and let out a yelp, he had seen the two incisions in his mothers arm.

“Don’t be such a sissy, your mother was bitten by a snake.”

Art ran out of the room, tears streaming down his cheeks. He locked his door and cried for an hour before falling asleep. He always slept when he felt this stress. Sleep had a way of comforting him in a way that came on holistically, enveloping the boy right down to his hush puppies.

His father banged on the door, demanding that his son come out. He heard, from a far away dream the insistent demands of his father, but he lay there paralyzed.

When he did wake up the house was empty, and on the floor lay the three drops of blood shed from the snake incident. He sat on the floor, sucked his thumb and cried.

He remembered this moment, sitting on the floor, uncertain of when his parents would return home or if they would. Unsure of when the pain would end, or even the uncertainty of it, for years later. It was a moment that haunted him throughout his life.

At the moment though, the Producer and Drummer stood over Art’s limp reposed torso that squirmed along the edges of the sole loveseat in the green room.

“Time to go boss, we’re done for the night.”

Stumbling to get up, he struggled for comprehension for a location, a reference.

He needed home now, more than when he was desperate. He would make this album, go home to mom and dad (if they would still see him) and fly to Houston to get Deb back. He made up his mind right there, and the producer and drummer stood there speechless, unaware of the vision they had just interrupted.

Meanwhile Deb worked days at the firm, and lunches spent in the record store, browsing through the blues and gospel sections. She would go here, for quite literally inspiration. She would slip on headphones and look past the nine to five existence shed shelled out for herself, beyond the drab hourly desire to hop on a boat across the delta from where she lived and visit the tiny studio.

She wanted to be a DJ. She had begun staying up later and later, to hear the song that reminded her of the man she loved and subsequently left. In the process, she discovered the healing factor of Jazz, how a sly saxophone could cover ones blues like honey, soaking up all that pain and bitterness. In Jazz she found that all of her hollowed-out feelings were really assets from which she could pour the redemption in a litter stouter each time.

Crossing the delta in a large gondola, across the river styx of revelation to the other side, where the transmitter and studio lay.

She would try out for the empty three to six am slot, forgoing her office job, and slipping into something all together more alluring.

In her dreams she would sneak over to the other side of creativity, into the realm of imagination, smoky jazz clubs, guys with all the answers, operating at all angles, stretching out further into the marshes, looking out past the bayou, into the thickets where crocodiles swam wild, freed from the boundaries of civilization.

People spoke differently, from the civil war, hearts bled onto cheap manuscripts, in the back of cars, with candles. She heard country music, the lull of the poplar trees, and gumbo, smoked fishes, meats and craw daddies. She heard Zydeco.

She saw visions of bombed out southern railroads, abandoned images of pretty waifish girls, plum trees sweetly filled with nectar that rolled off of her tongue like the piano works of Mccoy Tyner. She saw all these things that rolled out of Billie Holiday’s voice, silky smooth, hiding the heroin addiction, like we all hid things, like she hid him, and he hid her and there was a larger force responsible for the Jazz but she didn’t know who it was, this grand conductor making things happen pulling strings, making her try out to be a Jazz DJ from three to six when she knew so little of jazz in the first place, learning a little bit more each night, her education in depression, junkie saxophonists, John Coltrane’s mythical withdrawal from drugs and ascension to god. It was all there in her dreams waiting for her to unlock it.

The radio squawked at her in the morning, fresh from three hours of jazz.

It was time to quit her day job.