Setting Free the Kites by Alex George

Author:Alex George
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-01-31T13:23:01+00:00

NINETEEN

For the rest of that spring, Nathan and I returned to Lewis’s house once a week. Each time I brought another of Liam’s records. Every visit followed the same routine. I would put on the record I’d brought; after the first track, Lewis would stand up and whistle at Dizzy, and the two of them would escape for a walk, leaving Nathan and me to turn up the volume as loud as we liked. When Lewis returned, he would bend down in front of his record collection and trace his fingers along the spines of the cardboard sleeves until he found what he was looking for. Each visit we listened to a different musician. Clifford Brown, Max Roach, Bud Powell, Miles Davis, Sonny Stitt—to my dismay, there were far more than just Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker to contend with.

The music Lewis played made no sense to me, but Nathan was listening carefully. He read the liner notes on the backs of the record sleeves—long, abstruse essays full of strange hipster jive. I scoffed at these. What sort of music, I demanded, needs all those words to explain itself? At least the Ramones could say what they needed to say in three minutes, with no further elaboration necessary.

Even I had to admit that the jazz albums looked more elegant than Liam’s records. They had abstract designs in muted colors, hip winks to those in the know. The photographs of the musicians were monochrome studies of cool. Men with saxophones slung low around their necks stared away from the camera, calm and remote. As the music played, Lewis showed us old programs he had saved from jazz clubs on Fifty-Second Street in Manhattan, from just after the war—Jimmy Ryan’s, the Three Deuces, the Onyx. He had seen many of the legends in their heyday, he said, and he told us stories of those long-ago New York nights. Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot, quitting his post at the piano to dance in front of the audience while the band played on. Dexter Gordon, strung out on heroin, hustling up to the bar between sets and hitting up star-struck customers for drinks. Kenny Clarke, hungrily eyeing the passing waitresses from behind his drum kit. Nathan listened to these tales, rapt. Just as I had sat unnoticed on Liam’s bed for evenings on end, now Lewis and Nathan forgot I was there.

—

IT WAS SOMETIME DURING that spring that Nathan began to smoke. We were walking out of school one afternoon when he produced a pack of Winstons from his pocket. I watched in astonishment as he struck a match.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

“Where did you get those?”

Nathan blew smoke into the air. “My mom buys cigarettes by the crate. She won’t notice if a few disappear.” He took another puff.

“Oh, I get it,” I said. “The jazz musicians.”

Nathan looked at me. “What about them?”

“They all smoke. Those photos.”

“You think I started smoking because of those guys?”

“Well, didn’t you?”

“Robert,” said Nathan, waving his cigarette at me.

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