Career move

Career Move

I couldn't explain the compulsion which came over me that summer to
start playing the saxophone, the one I had lovingly kept and maintained
since my years in college, in public, more specifically amid the
auspices of the central station I commuted through each day on my way
to work.

A bright, busy place always, it therefore seemed insane that I should
want to practice my limited playing to a gathering of complete
strangers who hitherto before would have vaguely recognised me as just
another office grey suit.

But like the man drawn to throw himself off the side each time he
crosses a bridge the thought wouldn't leave me alone once it had
entered.

It was there each time I entered the station and saw an unoccupied
corner where I should have been, or when I stopped to put change into a
bandanna'd individual playing the guitar, badly it seemed to me for he
couldn't quite make all the chords but I admired him for his bravery
and as churchgoers are wont to do each Sunday morning offered the money
to him out of nothing more than sheer propitiation to a god I had long
admired from afar.

Perhaps it stemmed from a movie I had seen long ago, the memory never
had of smoky sleazy streets and music, soft and light as cigarette
smoke, drifting up from the gutters, out of the drains like invisible
steam to merge and be one with the seductive glow of fizzing neon
lights in shop windows or bars.

It did not seem right that the cosmopolitan city in which I lived did
not have one single person playing a saxophone in its streets and the
more I thought about it the more indignant and almost naively
passionate I became that there was no longer a soundtrack to our
lives.

There was sound and music certainly. Shouting out of record stores when
you passed by them or contained microscopically in the millions of
portable music devices people carry every day but no continuous thread,
nothing that if you were to remove the head-phones in your ears and
listen but traffic and monotonous gadgetry and people talking into
mobile phones.

It was my mission to do this I would think at night on the verge of
sleep, revelling in these dumb and waxy romantic thoughts, but for
weeks on end done nothing, watching with mounting dismay and the idea
that I was powerless to do anything as slowly the needle in the
thermometer climbed into what would be a very hot summer indeed.

Then, in one of those idiotic coincidences of place and motion that
pepper themselves throughout history, something happened that made me
change my mind, or rather confirmed my state of mind and spurred me
on.

A quite small thing really, although it did warrant a mention in that
nights evening news. I was on my way home again, neither glad nor glum,
my musical ideas quite far away from my mind that day, when as I was
buying my paper an enormous roar- a human one -came through the
station.

Turning to look I saw what it was and smiled, as almost all of the
people standing next to me began to smile, as a young man came running
through the crowds of commuters, completely naked and shouting his head
off.

Certainly he had nothing to show off, he was thin and quite pasty, but
from the comical look of glee on his face I could tell that it was some
sort of student prank. Even the boy himself, once he had got over the
shock of his appearing naked before us, couldn't quite stop himself
from laughing as he ran at the absurdity of it all.

Then he was gone and we could all still hear him shouting in the street
where he had exited from the station. Sporadic applause began and
before I knew it we were all clapping. Perhaps, we thought, there was a
camera watching.

A bizarre gameshow that might be on the television that night where we
did not want to appear as anything less than good sports.

"Young 'uns" an older man to my left said to me once the clapping died
away, catching my eye and tipping me a good-natured wink.

Young 'uns the phrase reverberated in my chest and unexpectedly I felt
my heart lift as- when I stopped to think about it -I myself could be
included in this rather peculiar tribe and their wild, unfathomable
ways.

I was not yet thirty and although I wore a tie, paid my taxes, earned
my money I was still within the boundary of inclusion. An older brother
you could say, getting ready for his long exile into the grey lands
that lay outside the perimeter, still loved and respected by his peers
but with an acute awareness also that he did not have long left.

At least these were the nursery-rhyme like thoughts with which I amused
myself staring out the train window on my ride home, a further aid to
convince myself I suppose although not really necessary as I was
already convinced.

The second I felt my heart jump tremulously in my chest when the old
man spoke to us I already knew what to do.

The next day I promised myself but I knew it could not be then, but the
day after, a Friday no less and the end of the working week. There was
too much to prepare for it being tomorrow.

I already had it in my head that it would have to be a secret, rather
like in the manner of some half-baked superhero I would have to
clandestinely carry this out.

"No-one must know my real identity", these half-forgotten lines came to
me and in a sense it was true, if someone knew it was me my confidence
would crumple and I would hardly get a note out.

The saxophone, the actual instrument itself, I could take care of on
the Thursday night, for I had work late to do that night at the office
and could bring it in during the evening to leave there.

I already knew its new home: next to the filing cabinets, partly
obscured by the stand I hung my over-coats on. It was the disguise
itself I fretted over, how should I look?

Mistakenly that night Marie, my girlfriend, was over and I asked her,
in a rather roundabout fashion.

She was a costume designer for one of the larger theatres in town, with
an almost insurmountable knowledge of fashions that had came and went
through the centuries ever since, I suppose, man first picked up his
loin-cloth. This had to be the person to ask I thought.

I caught her in a reflective frame of mind, sitting on the end of the
bed painting her toe-nails a soft violet colour (for some reason this
was her post-coital behaviour, not hugging or kissing but worrying
about which laqueur to use on a tiny part of her body no-one else would
even see).

"Like a what?" she asked not looking back.

I tried to re-phrase, the image itself wasn't clear at all.

"Like something from those old movies, like during the forties, where
every second street you turn around there's a guy leaning against the
wall playing the blues with his sax and some black street-sweeper who
actually turns out to be a tap-dancing sensation".

"That doesn't sound like any movies I know" she said
uninterested.

Neither did it to me. It sounded like most of my ideas about the past
of which I was so fond, a mess of clich?s and inconsistencies, with me
and my colour adjusted eyes trying vainly to remember details about a
black and white world.

"Or like on the continent" I began again, "Gay Paree and Amsterdam and
all that. They have street musicians, guys who played the horn"

At this Marie turned to look at me. She knew all about the continent,
for close to a year moving all around it as part of her post-graduate
employment.

Briefly there was a nostalgia in her eyes I longed to share, for a time
in the world impossible to revisit when neither of us were aware of the
others existence.

"You want to know about those guys?" she asked slowly.

I was surprised by how defensive she sounded.

"Why" I laughed, nearly choking, "Did you have an affair with one of
them?"

The warning lights came on in her eyes and I didn't press it.

"They usually wear black, like great black over-coats and beanie hats
and little perfectly circular sunglasses. And goatees too, if you want
to complete the stereotype. Why do you care David?" she asked, not to
me but to her toenails once again.

Black, I thought lying back on the pillow with my arms folded
comfortably behind my head. Perfect.

Oh, and David. That's my name. David Coines. Appropriate really, when
you think about it.

____

That Friday will live forever in my memory. Kept in that special
drawer tucked faraway in my mind along with all the other special days,
neither of them vying for any more attention than the other- all quite
comfortably sitting next to one another, humming with their own little
significance.

After much deliberation that day I had decided on my appearance,
popping out during my lunch for the small black beanie cap Marie
described for me and- on a whim -settling for purple rather than black
little circular glasses. I already had a black over-coat, one of two,
and tried out the whole ensemble in the mirror once the blinds were
pulled and the office door shut.

I laughed in spite of myself at the person staring back at me and
wondered at how completely different a person could change over
something so small as changing his or her clothes.

The rest of that day I felt agitatedly high, every nerve ending in my
body fresh and clean as if my skin had been sent to the dry-cleaners
and this was me with it back on again, all sparklingly new and crisp
once more.

I touched papers, signed paperwork and talked on the phone as I usually
did but my mind was far away, removed into that lofty space where
everything appears before you as if from a great height, remote and
unconcerning.

At five I was due to finish but hung on an extra half hour, not out of
any need to do any extra work but with the knowledge that old man
Steven's, the security guard, would go for his break at five thirty and
I could slip out the fire exit without setting off the alarm.

Around me I could hear the voices of my co-workers, pitched high in
that familiar excited way that tends to a Friday when the week is over
and the weekend just beginning.

A few of them noticed my presence there still and once I had given them
the obligatory excuse, winced painfully at my pretend work-load and
wished me a good weekend, which I of course wished them right
back.

By twenty past five the place was empty, the entire building in that
peopleless limbo between five and six-thirty when the office workers
finished and the evening cleaners began there shifts.

The entire building felt hollow and briefly I was tempted to get out my
saxophone and start playing there and then, a temptation that never
quite left me and on all the evenings afterwards when I was planning on
playing (even the ones where I wasn't), consistently nagged me as a
good idea to do.

I already had my route in mind, out the fire exit, across the (by then)
largely empty car park- my reflection in any car windshields that were
there greeting me dimly like a rather suspicious burglar, clad in
black, carrying something awkward and heavy in his hand -then left and
right through a few side-streets until I hit the main road that would
take me to the station barely a hundred yards away. Always feeling
self-conscious for the first few seconds as I merged with the crowds of
last minute-shoppers and people on their way home from work, but
quickly melting away as my pace increased and the weight of the case
which I was carrying confirming, if not by gravity then at least in my
mind, that I had a purpose.

It was about a fifteen minute walk and over the next couple of months
as I pursued this peculiar obsession of mine, never changed; it was my
route, as distinctive as how I took my coffee in the morning to what
way I parted my hair, written out purely by the chance of where my feet
went and the vague knowledge I had then of the cities
back-streets.

I grew to love the route, loving it for fifteen minutes almost as fully
as I loved the destination it was taking me to, slowly beginning to
learn all the little histories hidden away in this sun-blocked world of
alleyways and streets that went no-where.

A spot where another man had glassed another to death over a spilt
bottle of beer. All the little tucked away shops, advertising behind
strong reinforced wire unmentionable things from erotic gas-masks to
intricately carved wooden hash bongs.

Then all the malcontents, the drunks in their comfortable gutters, who
some of them I learned by name as they stopped to harass me for
cigarettes I did not have ("a jazz player" one of them asked
incredulously of me, "who doesn't smoke?"). The graffiti on the walls
which gave name to this shared sense of outrage, bitterly black and its
humour cruel.

I suppose I could appreciate it because I only had to walk through it,
fifteen minutes at a time, and of course at the end of my journey, as I
rejoined the high street again, I would shake my head a little- dazzled
by it all - happy to be back in the busy world of clean beautiful shops
and clean beautiful young people all around me.

I never talked of what I saw there, how could I when I wasn't even
supposed to be there. One time nearing the end of it all I thought I
saw something, a young woman lying among trash in an alley who from
where I was watching appeared to be trying to give herself an abortion.
Or she could have just been drunk, I just didn't have the heart to
investigate what my own imagination was telling me.

If anything came out of me about what little I saw or knew in those
dark streets it was when I played later on, during those long slow
notes that seem to span forever and within its sad limitless reach
encompasses all stories and all people, not promising or resolving
anything about these broken lives but at least listening, capturing in
that elegant way music has all the emotions you could ever think
of.

By the time I reached there at near enough six o'clock the crowd in the
station was just starting to thin out. Not so much that you'd normally
notice it but I, a regular commuter and no stranger to the jam which
occurred directly after five, could.

The guitar guy wearing the bandanna was still there (I later learned
his name was Henry) and I chose a corner far enough away from him so
that our two musical styles wouldn't merge and become anything less
than a chaotic mess.

Mine was the east wing of the station you could call it and directly
across from me I could just make a girl sitting against the wall,
selling pictures laid out on the ground before her. As with every night
I played I felt an unexpected thrill pass through me as I set out my
case and saw the bright, gleaming brass-work of the instrument before
me, the actions I was doing not feeling physically at all my own at the
time, as if I were working through a hazy sheet of Novocaine.

A moments hesitation then I was breathing through the instrument
desperately, sounding the notes, but also hanging on with my lips as if
I were under-water and this was an air-pipe. I could not cope with the
idea of seeing people as I played so I shut my eyes (not that anyone
would notice this through my glasses) and concentrated on the music,
one of the earliest pieces I had ever learned, quite low and ambient
which I thought might suit the relaxed atmosphere of the station in the
early evening. Certainly I did not want to start on anything too
dramatic; I was aiming for lift music.

And so my first night (if you could call it night, it was high summer
then and by the time I was leaving not quite even dark yet) and all the
other nights afterwards passed much in this same manner, me with my
eyes shut concentrating on the music, mutating from one piece I knew to
another, not conscious of any people around me but rather the dissonant
invisible shapes which moved randomly through the air into which I
played, like excited atoms bouncing off the glass walls of a charge
chamber; ghostly figures who I sometimes doubted to be there at
all.

Occasionally I would stop and as on my first night, be amazed at the
sight of what change passers-by had thrown into my empty case.

Not surprised as such by the gesture (although it was more than
welcome, believe me) but by the fact that I had failed to hear any of
the coins falling into the case below me. It was rare that I actually
spoke to anyone, a result I suppose of the introverted way I carried
myself from the outset which I later regretted.

The staff who worked in the station slowly grew used to the sight of me
but even then it would just be a nod and a wave from away in the
distance, almost as if they did not want to interrupt.

I had my fans of course, elderly people mostly who slowly began to
remember with their ears music from nearly three or four generations
ago, always waiting patiently with requests and always requests of
pieces I had never heard (my catalogue if you could call it is, and was
then, woefully thin).

Henry, the man who played the acoustic guitar, and I became friends
after that first week when he had thawed slightly to my presence in the
station and once he had wandered over to examine my "haul" as he called
it- the contents of my case -proceeded to inform me that I "quietly
rocked", whatever that meant.

I just nodded in silence, quite content at the image we must have
presented then- the bedraggled guitar playing bum and the black,
spectral figure of the saxophone player with his pale clammy skin and
his otherworldly purple eyeglasses.

We went drinking together sometimes and it was from that I learned he
was nothing more than a poor university student, struggling through his
tuition fees and trying to make a little extra cash on the side.

The length of time I played there varied wildly from evening to evening
but on average it was usually between three or four hours. It was never
exact, rather like the feeling which had prompted me in the first place
all of a sudden the music which had between my ears and blowing from my
lips would just vanish from me completely, as if- both physically and
mentally -I had played myself out right to the end of my very
limits.

Other times I would second-guess myself and after a few minutes playing
in the station from arriving know it just wasn't in me and pack up and
leave as quickly as I got there. Generally that didn't happen very
often, only during those times as Marie called it my "time of the
month" when I was fidgety in general and did not know entirely what I
wanted to do on any given moment, a restless anxious feeling that
persisted for a few days then blew away entirely to be replaced by more
calming winds.

I never played on the weekend either, as far as I was concerned it was
purely an extra-curricular activity from work. Privately I liked to
joke to myself that this was a "career move", a witticism I longed to
share with someone.

Since Marie worked so much these days from the very beginning I
promised that I would not miss a night with her whenever she was off
and managed to stick to my promise pretty much the whole, except I
suppose one night although even then it was a technicality for I
slipped out in the early hours of the morning while she was still
sleeping next to me and the next morning woke late to remember nothing
of me going anywhere except right by her side as she found me lying
next to her.

That was the only night where my obsession, as I still call it,
teetered dangerously close to that knife-edge lip of outright
madness.

It was such an awful night in general anyway that I cannot bear to
think of it, the day those planes crashed into the twin towers of New
York and in the still night-time air after midnight you could almost
feel the unrest in the air, the unstable molecules that sometimes
spawned disasters. None of us could put our finger on it but we could
all feel it, Armageddon, nuclear war, who knew what was coming next; it
was right there, hovering above our hushed lips like a frozen
expletive.

I couldn't sleep and slipped out from 3am until 6am to play to an empty
station, not even the crashed out wino's stirring from their sleep as
the notes gently whispered against their peaceful slumbering
bodies.

When I finished on my first night and looked at the trains in front of
me, their open doors like invitations for an unwanted event, I knew
that I could not go home right away.

Marie wasn't there and besides there seemed little point, even then I
knew my beating heart would only allow me to pace the flat from room to
room until I retired to my bed and a sleep that would not come easily.
I could visualise it anyway, my flat, right down to the expensive rug
lying over the laminated flooring in the living room and the little
Grecian vase full of flowers Marie bought my as a birthday present
sitting next to the phone in the hall, and suddenly in the harsh
artificial light of the stations overhead lamps it seemed such an arid
place to go to that I wondered how I could have possibly spent so many
unadventurous evenings alone there inside of it.

Right then (and it was only ever during "right then", every other time
I was nothing less than abjectly grateful of the comfortable abode I
had found for Marie and I to share in) I was disgusted by just the idea
of it and stepped off angrily to the hot dog stand at one of the exits
to fortify myself with food for what would sometimes prove to be eight
or nine hours since I had last eaten lunch.

Then with my heavy case in tow I would make my way back to the office,
realising pleasantly after a few minutes of walking in the fresh night
time air that I was now accidentally retracing my steps since half past
eight in the morning, another existence by then, one where I walked
straight amid crowds of nearly hundreds. To be walking this trek
virtually alone now was bliss.

I had seen it many times of course but now, five minutes away from the
office, it stood out clearer and sharper in the darkness of the
streets. The West, it was called, an absolutely absurd name I thought
at the time for what appeared to a dim and gritty basement bar, and
just for its absurdity alone, loved it.

The West&;#8230; the West what? The West Wall? The West World? The
West Ern?

It was a sentence that had never finished itself.

Of course I thought, standing outside its sleazy golden light, where
else did someone like me go after a hard nights work, especially in my
profession, my new "career move".

Even as I entered I knew what it would look like, it was as I were
stepping into a fully realised three-dimensional precognition.

The place had a vaguely Irish feel about it, as if maybe the owner was
from there, and on the whole was a rather plain looking bar, functional
at best and had as much a casual air about it as the type of people who
drank there: young people for the most part- with a smattering of the
old -like me just finished work or college and not quite ready to go
home yet, ready to air over a few bottles and a fresh pack of
cigarettes, the views and opinions that had pre-occupied them so far
that day.

As I went up to the formica-topped table of the bar and sat my case at
my feet I already knew what I wanted, the clear image of cool and
sweating green glassed bottles crystallised in my head.

Becks, I said to the girl who served me, and that was all I ever
continued to drink in there all the times after when I came.

Occasionally I had bourbon but only because I loved the name so much,
quintessentially american and evoking a rich past of speakeasy clubs
long after dark, the husky smell of cotton and the sweet, sweaty aroma
of long ago sex mingling in the air. Two or three shots, or "nips" as
some of the old-timers said, to go along with my green-bottled friends
at the bar if it had been a particularly successful night.

I stood at the bar most nights, sometimes talking to those next to me,
but usually just staring into space for an hour or so drinking, feeling
in my necks and shoulders as all the music coiled up inside me slowly
started to unwind.

The television was usually on and sometimes I stared at that also. The
proprietor was clearly an Ice Hockey fan for it was that that was
virtually on all the time and against my better wishes I become
entranced by the sport.

I suppose if it had been the paint-drying Olympics I would have become
absorbed by that also, for this as Marie might have put it, was my
post-coital period, an open relaxed space where new habits or hobbies
are sometimes formed.

One night nearly a month after from going to the bar I was at home and
nearly hit my head on a shelf in the bedroom when I realised I was
missing something.

"What?" Marie screamed at me, mightily amused at the sight of me
scurrying about.

"The Birmingham Wolves are playing tonight" I said searching for the
remote control. Birmingham being Birmingham Alaska.

"I didn't know you liked Ice Hockey" she pointed out as we settled
down on the couch to watch the match once I had found it on the
television.

I grunted in reply, keen on evasion.

There were, as I could have pointed out, a lot she didn't know about
me.

A month had passed since that first Friday when I went out and I was
lying in bed, reflecting on this, Marie at my side as always drowsing
on my flat hairless chest, congratulating myself I suppose on how well
I had "got away with it", if those were the right words to use.

No-one at my work had noticed anything untoward in my behaviour,
believing as they always did that my work-load was increasing when in
fact just the opposite was true. My mind heavily lightened by my
new-found activity seemed to be stream-lined now when it came to work.
During my off moments at work- these sudden gaps that had appeared in
my schedule due to this recent burst of efficiency -I would trim my
nails with a clipper, bare feet on the desk, and hum notes to myself I
knew I could not possibly reach.

It now took me half the time to do what I used to and when I was
working it was in a now familiar mode of dreamy detachment, as if I
weren't really there and this was the actions of a robot- one bearing
an uncanny resemblance to myself -I was observing before me.

I lived in three worlds now. My work, the station and Marie, and the
tenuous link which held on the three in perfect suspension seemingly
sound and not about to break at any minute. For the first time in years
I now realised, I could not remember myself being so perfectly happy
and complete.

I was grinning now at the thought of this and Marie appeared to have
noticed this sudden tightening of skin around my mouth.

She reared up under the duvet to look me in the face. The question was
not what I expected and I felt a sudden downward lurch of my heart as
she spoke it.

"When did you start growing a goatee?" she asked perfectly
serious.

I was too stunned at first to reply and with my hands began to examine
the spot on my face she was talking about.

Sure enough there were hairs there, thick enough and in all the right
quantity to qualify as what she called it. This was strange for I
already had the memory of shaving yesterday, or was it the day before,
in the mirror, my eyes steadily staring back at me as I traced the
contours of my chin with the tip of a disposable razor.

How could I have possibly missed this?

The answer I suppose was in the happy daze with which I walked through
life now generally anyway, a sound-like blur of tapping keyboards, low
notes on the saxophone and the soft murmurs of Marie at night as we
made love. But if I had missed this, the frightening question was, what
else had I missed.

I chuckled in reply, quite happy with the decision my body had made
without me on how I should look and said to her the old joke about how
does anyone decide anything these days.