Off the Road - 10

a jazz novel on a typewriter

2

I am playing a novel and why instrument is with keys: it is a typewriter with a plume, and I make it sing taking the words spoken to me and prancing out the 12-bar blues. My name is red because I am gone in a flash. That night we were in Benton in the state which is called Kentucky. Last night we were in a hotel and tonight are hostess has another bed for me to sleep in. That’s two nights that I have had a good sleep. And it was worth it because we clocked in over 10 hours with me behind the wheel pacing and shuffling and looking back and forth hesitant that I should get a scratch or a dent. But that is the survivor’s curse: it is only the people who live who tell the tale. And they repeatedly tell the people listening to decide that they must be survivors too even though this is not what they should be concluding after the story reaches an end. But that is often the way people hear a song and think it must be good even if the lyrics are about a stalker finding his prey and proceeds to eat what the knife has given him.

 On the road, we stopped at Denny’s for the midday meal that is blessed for the weary traveler. There is blue in the green if you listen hard enough. Just about that time a strange thing, call it intuition if you want, began to haunt me. Haunt me it was a premonition it haunted and flabbergasted me. The one time I wanted to live someplace other than Boston I set my mind on New York and went to find a new crowd of people that would suit my coloration and perspective. In a few months, I came to hang out with some people who liked the same sorts of things I did, or more precisely, and concisely, the things I wanted to like but did not have the vocabulary to enunciate as clearly as I would like. That is I wanted to know great literature and poetry but only spoke two languages and had not had a chance to accumulate that slice of pages which a real connoisseur would do. Of course, there was a single person who took charge of the gang, and his name was Damion. Damion is a person that is like Hector to Achilles: he was learned but not as learned as Dean, he could spin out long thoughts, but not as eloquently as Dean. And he didn’t have the same taste for drugs that Dean had pitched to a higher level than anyone else I knew. Think of him as olive to Dean’s black and you will begin to have an idea. But the truth is he knew that and that’s why he could take charge of a small group but not a large one or produce novels that others would copy. And then there is silence. What happened in New York was that Dean came in and Damion was furious that his bright light in a small room was collapsed by Dean’s Savoie spare. At first, Dean was melancholy because he was in a depression caused by a kind of calligrapher and poets in an orgy of puns, single entendres, innuendos, metaphors, and games of flattery. But then Dean started to be who he truly is and it shined as a bright light shines beneath the basket. Then one night Damion decided that had had enough and disguised himself as a woman and decided there and then that Dean must die in his sleep in the middle of the night. Because this was a ritual designed to and a man’s life it had to be complex because everything needed to be just so and just right. We were living in an apartment in the Bronx which we could just afford all seven of us. So the first thing is that Damion had to wait for the collection of rent in a figurative style, that way he would have another month to vamoose to another town where he would make up a name and hide for all eternity. Then he had to make up a magnificent story as to why Dean would have to die and set it in calligraphy with ornamentation of an intricate design rather than a straightforward representation that would have a taint of… illicitness that would lead to Dean’s own pride.

But, bein sûr, the plans within plans went awry, and coming down like bombers to the sun it unwrapped the whole plan. That meant that Damion was discovered in his dress with shaved legs calling out for God to make him unsexed and plunge his dagger into Dean’s just. I saw Damion being carted away in a jacket with tales and tux murmuring that they are coming to take him away, they are coming to take him away. That was the last time I saw Damion and I immediately struck up a friendship with Dean, who once he was cured of his poison could infect other people with another poison instead.

 Meanwhile back at Denny’s Dean was deconstructing how a phrase could be made more poetic by enunciating the right syllables in a caesura to make a cynosure. It was as if Dean was dead, and the knowledge came out of nowhere and into my brain. I did not get it completely, I may never get it, completely, I just hope that there is some completeness in what I understand him to be saying.

Miles, please forgive me, but do not forsake me, I have made so many mistakes and still I am just a listener to your horns.

And the colored girls sing: “Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo.”

Now after we stopped at a gas station so that Dean could put on his last suit we came to the driveway where he would dally and spend a night with the day coming and he would be gone and buried.

For the sake of a convincing tune, there is not a lie I would not tell.