DOLPHY WAS GOOSING THE LOW END NOTES
Dolphy was goosing the low end notes from his bass clarinet
, a solemn, fluid tone that swam between the other fragments of drums, bass and
teen-dream pianistics, a pulse that made the speaker cones rattle and the juice
in the glass Blue poured form himself to shimmy sensually in the water glass
that held it. Blue needed to go the store for some birthday candles because his
girl friend had the idea that if they burn down the house with a simple
incendiary device, a short candle in a roll of toilet paper in the hall closet
where the hand towels and cleaning products were stored, they could collect the
money from the insurance money she thought Blue had taken out on the four
poster disaster where she slept next to him every night in a room with no
windows, on a mattress with no springs. The sagging in the center of the mattress
meant backaches by the boatload.
Blue, though, didn't
buy any fire insurance for the house, thinking it was silly to do since neither
of them smoked. He was in no mood to be yelled at , though.
He turned up the
Dolphy record, scraping guitars and abbreviated saxophone copulated in every
molecule the room contained, his head was swimming in terms that amounted to
wishful amnesia. He would go to the store and get the birthday candles, they
would set up the incendiary device and the house would burn down, a glorious
blaze that would light up the night air in this criminally inane neighborhood,
and then he would tell her the truth, point blank, blunt and cruel, honey , I
never bought insurance for this house and there are no checks coming our way.
But on the way to the store he stopped by the Velvet Hammer lounge for a quick
snort, maybe two, two that became twelve ; the next thing he knew he woke up
behind the wheel of his car, which was going near 80 miles an hour over the
Mission Bay bridge.
They found his car in the bay later that night, but they
didn't find him. He was never seen again. "All he did was play that atonal
shit" his wife told police when they talked to her. She showed no emotion.
"I said either this shit comes off the stereo our you hit the road. Dumb
fucker."
Gomer noticed that his whippet would act strangely every time he put Albert Ayler's "Truth is Marching In" on the stereo, distending his long jaws and coughing harshly as if to harmonize with the mad saxophonist's raucous yet transcendent solos. The crazed dog would snap at its tail and spin in lugubrious circles as the song reached its climax, whimpering and lolling its tongue with a glazed, rheum-drenched look in its eyes. Gomer became fascinated with the dog's ability to surrender to Ayler's nerve-scraping celestial tootings and would put the record on precisely at 6:15 pm every day until he himself started hacking up imaginary chunks of old food and the dog was rescued by neighbors.
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