another story, and continued with stories or fragments of stories till we got to the bank. Although I broke in from time to time and some back and forth resulted, at one point I imagined that he might have told his stories even if I hadn’t been in the car. It occurs to me now that Wade might have made his monistic objections (or whatever objections they were) to my time-bending fantasy not for Karl’s amusement but for his own. Sometimes during his stay in Minneapolis he’d talk without looking at Wanda or me, or without looking at our faces. He’d turn his head from side to side or toward the floor, as if he resented our being in the way of his voice, as if he didn’t really want an audience. But of course he did, and at other times, I recall, he stared at us too intently.
On the drive he told me that his older sister was a decent pianist, that he used to help her push the untunable Salem spinet out from the wall so he could lean against the soundboard and listen to her play show tunes at incongruous tempos: a dirgeful “Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” a sprightly “Ol’ Man River.” He told me about the time he was hit, while jayrunning so as not to arrive even later for a dishwashing shift, by a Dodge Dart “the color of a jaundiced pear,” and how useful it is to know “severe collisional pain.” The restaurant’s manager, who had strange, winged hair like Schopenhauer’s or Bozo’s, Wade said, called the hospital to find out when the accident occurred, then fired Wade for tardiness. He told me about a Grand Forks doctor, a sometime customer, who for a few years offered back-alley vasectomies to the promiscuous and uninsured, either as an act of Malthusian charity or because he was a sadist, Wade wasn’t sure. A Yellow truck passed us going north, and he said he’d often thought about getting a trucker’s license. “Isn’t it disorienting to see these huge orange trucks rolling down the highway with the word yellow painted on them?” he said. “Ceci n’est pas un camion orange.” He told me again about Jaco and the catalpa leaf. Since we were sharing encounters with jazz bassists, I told him my (light-on-action) story about shaking Ron Carter’s hand, and he answered that one of his ex-girlfriends had gotten a splinter from Charlie Mingus’s bass lodged in her ear. Mingus, Wade said, telling his ex-girlfriend’s story, had been plagued at a Chicago nightclub by a pair of incessant chatterers near the stage, loud chatterers and glass-clinkers who wouldn’t shut up even after repeated calls for attentiveness from the bandleader, who finally picked up his double-bass by the neck and brought it down like a hammer on the middle of the chatterers’ table, not more than a ruler’s length from the table occupied by Wade’s girlfriend. “Mingus himself tweezed out the splinter with a pair of dessert chopsticks while Dannie Richmond took a long solo,” Wade said. “Then Mingus brought his totaled bass backstage, grabbed another one—a wasted old thing with just three strings—and finished the gig, playing better than before.”
“Man,” I said.
“Her implication being that something magical happened to the ear as a result of the splinter. But I have my doubts. This gal, she lacked discernment; her ears were too soon made glad.”
“Maybe before the splinter they were—”
“Even sooner gladdened? It’s possible. I don’t even like to think about some of the crap she made us listen to. Mingus and Van Morrison were the only worthwhile musicians she liked, and probably their music sounded especially strange and unprecedented to her ’cause she listened to no other jazz or blues or soul, not even fusion or blues-rock or blue-eyed soul, unless it came on the radio or I put it on at home.”
“You lived together?”
“For a while.”
“What was her name?”
“How’s that?”
“Her name,” I said.
It seemed like he couldn’t remember or was reluctant to report
On the drive he told me that his older sister was a decent pianist, that he used to help her push the untunable Salem spinet out from the wall so he could lean against the soundboard and listen to her play show tunes at incongruous tempos: a dirgeful “Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” a sprightly “Ol’ Man River.” He told me about the time he was hit, while jayrunning so as not to arrive even later for a dishwashing shift, by a Dodge Dart “the color of a jaundiced pear,” and how useful it is to know “severe collisional pain.” The restaurant’s manager, who had strange, winged hair like Schopenhauer’s or Bozo’s, Wade said, called the hospital to find out when the accident occurred, then fired Wade for tardiness. He told me about a Grand Forks doctor, a sometime customer, who for a few years offered back-alley vasectomies to the promiscuous and uninsured, either as an act of Malthusian charity or because he was a sadist, Wade wasn’t sure. A Yellow truck passed us going north, and he said he’d often thought about getting a trucker’s license. “Isn’t it disorienting to see these huge orange trucks rolling down the highway with the word yellow painted on them?” he said. “Ceci n’est pas un camion orange.” He told me again about Jaco and the catalpa leaf. Since we were sharing encounters with jazz bassists, I told him my (light-on-action) story about shaking Ron Carter’s hand, and he answered that one of his ex-girlfriends had gotten a splinter from Charlie Mingus’s bass lodged in her ear. Mingus, Wade said, telling his ex-girlfriend’s story, had been plagued at a Chicago nightclub by a pair of incessant chatterers near the stage, loud chatterers and glass-clinkers who wouldn’t shut up even after repeated calls for attentiveness from the bandleader, who finally picked up his double-bass by the neck and brought it down like a hammer on the middle of the chatterers’ table, not more than a ruler’s length from the table occupied by Wade’s girlfriend. “Mingus himself tweezed out the splinter with a pair of dessert chopsticks while Dannie Richmond took a long solo,” Wade said. “Then Mingus brought his totaled bass backstage, grabbed another one—a wasted old thing with just three strings—and finished the gig, playing better than before.”
“Man,” I said.
“Her implication being that something magical happened to the ear as a result of the splinter. But I have my doubts. This gal, she lacked discernment; her ears were too soon made glad.”
“Maybe before the splinter they were—”
“Even sooner gladdened? It’s possible. I don’t even like to think about some of the crap she made us listen to. Mingus and Van Morrison were the only worthwhile musicians she liked, and probably their music sounded especially strange and unprecedented to her ’cause she listened to no other jazz or blues or soul, not even fusion or blues-rock or blue-eyed soul, unless it came on the radio or I put it on at home.”
“You lived together?”
“For a while.”
“What was her name?”
“How’s that?”
“Her name,” I said.
It seemed like he couldn’t remember or was reluctant to report
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