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It was one of those sweltering DC nights, late in July, when you could see the mist condense under the florescent decorative brass streetlamps along the tony P Street section of Dupont Circle. Don was walking - staggering - up the street with one of the bow-legged hookers he often found at the Waffle Shop at Tenley Circle on Wisconsin Avenue across from the decaying Sears store a bit northwest of the P Street Beach. It was about 11 and the sidewalks were crowded with night clubbing white collar men and their willing secretaries. Cars rushed by in the street as radios blared, impatient drivers honked their horns mercilously. The close humid air seemed to amplify the noise. Fresh-faced midwestern graduate students, new to Washington's power culture, exercised their hubris. Bands of block-cut Oxford shirted, and Weejuned drunken frat boys of the leisure class hooped war cries reminiscent of so many John Wayne Westerns. The air was a-buzz, particularly with the accidental semi-dissonance of the mix of various night club orchestras' musics entwining in the humid air. Don was a music man. He had liked the bass viol ever since his days working as a cub reporter stringing for the St. Paul Pioneer Press; back then Don fancied he might play one, and when he heard the deep booming sound emanating from the kitchen exhaust fans of the local jazz bistro Harold's Rogue and Jar, his ears perked up. Perhaps it was also because the sound of the bass was carried aloft by the pungent aroma of Italian Spaghetti, which he had always found irresistible. Lorretta, the cook at Harold's was big, real big. Her tits hung like gigantic ripe tomatoes straining the clinging vines of some ancient Umbrian ruin. She was usually drunk. Tonight was no exception. She stood at the entrance to the night club smoking a joint and chatting occasionally with customers. Don glanced at the hooker and then at Lorretta's tits, and the meatballs decided the matter. Our Casanova, it seems, had a fetish for macaroni. Don and the hooker staggered down the narrow steps that led to the listening room. Don and the somewhat haggard hooker took their seats in the back of the Jar, and settled in for a meal of Lorretta's spaghetti and meatballs. The hooker was not particularly interested in Don, though she pretended to be, since she was about be served a free meal. Moreover, Don was not terribly impressed by her, either. The lines on her face, her dirty blond hair, and bad teeth, portrayed a woman who didn't take care of herself. And she was not particularly interesting. Don was a bit of an ideas man, and this chick had few. Suddenly, the drummer struck the skins thunderously with a flim-flam double stroke paradiddle, and jived into a ferociously-paced jog through Parisian Thoroughfare. The then young alto player, Nickie Cole, his face completely overgrown with acne, cheeks puffed and eyes squinted, fingered lithely over the tune's changes. Midway in the musical scuffle the sound of the bass, which had been partly the event that lured Don and the hooker into the spaghetti parlor, emerged from the texture. The bass player, a thin black man and somewhat older than his looks, waved the band off. Dylan Hawkins was now alone on the bandstand. He stood erect, looking off somewhere in the distance, holding his scratched upright bass like a child by a lion cage. He was playing solo now. What had had a fast rhythmic thrust gave way to his morose drone, as he explored the blubbery sonority of his open strings. His cadenza lasted a long while as he searched through the musty corners of an often emptied musical cellar for something to play. Don and the slut tore into the bread, slurped their salads, and gulped their wine. They were into their third plate of spaghetti by the time Hawkins found a lick to pursue. But the bevy of stoned patrons sucked the solo up like so many strands of vermacelli. Hawkins kept at it. He played as a house painter stirring the first can of sludge-like latex at five in the morning on a cold grey day in April. Don enjoyed the lull. He talked with the slut and Lorretta about his villa in Naxos, and they pretended to be quite impressed. It was typical, ironically, that Don, who was convinced of his superiority, would be patronized by the all too ordinary and common tag-alongs who tolerated his foolish exaggerations. Then, Ronnie Taylor and Peter Gamble strolled in. The two were some of the biggest jazz cats in DC at the time. Taylor took one look at Don, calibrating his measure. Taylor, an imposing and unhappy black man, saw Don as a dilettante, a stilted hipster, a jiving bureaucrat on his unredeemed descent into the underworld. Don invited Taylor and Gamble to sit at his table with the rest of his stoned guests, but Taylor stood over him glaring, statuesque, hands rigidly chiseled to his hips, his face ashen and grey with obvious contempt. Gamble, meanwhile, was eyeing the bass and strategizing how to entice Hawkins to invite him to sit in. Hawkins leered back at Gamble, cursing at him under his breath, and waved to the bar tender for a Cognac. Taylor took the hooker by the arm and pulled her up from Don's table. It was Taylor's chick. Lorretta was pleased. Don was disinterested. He was already pretty stoned and drooling over a fourth helping of Lorretta's spaghetti. Just then, Don's friend Larry came up to the table. He opened his phone book looking for names of people to visit. |
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