Saturday, December 21, 2013
audience (which was just people laughing at a dozen tables, the room
thirty by thirty feet and low ceiling) and he never stopped. He was very
simple in his ideas. Ideas meant nothing to him. What he liked was the
surprise of a new simple variation of a chorus. He’d go
from…”ta-tup-tader-rara…ta-tup-tade-rara”…repeating and hopping to it
and kissing and smiling into his horn---and then to
“ta-tup-EE-da-de-dera-RUP! ta-tup-EE-da-de-dera-RUP!” and it was all
great moments of laughter and understanding for him and everyone else
who heard. His tone was clear as a bell, high, pure, and blew straight
in our faces from two feet away. Neal stood in front of him oblivious to
everything else in the world with his head bowed, his hands socking in
together, his whole body jumping on his heels and the sweat, always the
sweat pouring and splashing down his tormented collar to literally lie
in a pool at his feet. Helen and Julie were there and it took us five
minutes to realize it. Whoo, Frisco nights, the end of the continent and
the end of doubt, all dull doubt and tomfoolery, goodbye. Lampshade was
roaring around with his trays of beer: everything he did was in rhythm:
he yelled at the waitress with the beat: “Hey now, babybaby, make a way,
make a way, it’s Lampshade coming your way” and he hurled by her with
the beers in the air and roared through the swinging doors in the
kitchen and dance with the cooks and come sweating back. Connie Jordan
sat absolutely motionless at a corner table with an untouched drink in
front of him, staring gook-eyed into space, his hands hanging at his
sides till they almost touched the floor, his feet outspread like
lolling tongues, his body shriveled into absolute weariness and
entranced sorrow and what-all was on his mind: a man who knocked himself
out every evening and let the others put the quietus to him in the
night. Everything swirled around him like clouds. And that little
grandmother’s alto, that little Allen Ginsberg hopped and monkey danced
with his magic horn and blew two hundred choruses of blues each one more
frantic than the other and no signs of failing energy or willingness to
call anything a day. The whole room shivered. It has since been closed
down, naturally. On the corner of Fifth and Howard an hour later I stood
with Ed Saucier a San
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