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Life is Holy By Kirk Barrett Holy flowers floating in the air, —Sal Paradise I grew up on the road one summer. That was me, standing on the asphalt watching the Packards, Vedettes, and Delrays fly past. All the world moving fast and here I am standing still. Just a kid in Mobile, Alabama, with an all-too-heavy pack on the ground next to me and a typewriter case in my hand, penny loafers on my feet, and I wore Montgomery Wards polyester pants, and a pastel Mohawk shirt. But James Dean is who I wanted to be and swing dreams be-bopped through my head with blue note riffs rising and falling, calling me out from my drab square-as-a-cornflakes-box life. It was to the north I needed to go, heeding the melody dreams bouncing around inside my head. Twelve years old I was then, and brimming to the edge with steam and fury and the urge to move, so off I went one day in July, away from my uptight home and starched shirts and Cisco Kid on the television, and in less time than I could have complained, a car pulled over—a two-tone convertible all sleek and smooth beneath the miles of road dust on it—gravel crunching beneath its tires as it slowed. I hefted my rucksack in the back and clutched my typewriter case close to me as I sat. “Nice car,” I said as it pulled back out onto Highway 31, imagining it was a Speedster. “Hudson Hornet,” the driver said, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel and bobbing his head like the sweetest horn was blowing a furious melody, yet no music played. There was only the rush of wind in my ears and the sound of miles passing under the wheels. “Where’re you headed?” the other one asked me, and I told them, fully expecting them to tell me I’m crazy, or that I should turn around and go back home—I was too young to be out on the blue highways of America in search of some indefinable, untouchable dream—but they didn’t say any of that. They just went on ahead, driving down the road, the driver tapping his fingers and bobbing his head to some unheard Charles Mingus mad beat or maybe something from the Duke himself, and the other smiling at this and that and every now and then scribbling some comment in his little notebook about the this and that he saw. They were headed that way and since I was going, maybe they would drop in, too. Sal and Dean, they said they were called, and somewhere north of Atlanta, Dean looked in the rearview mirror at me and smiled, “Newport, you say,” and started moving his body around like he was squirming because he had to go to the bathroom, but no, he was just twisting his body around the music he was hearing in his head, “I think we’ll have to drop in there and see who’s blowing bebop to the Jazz world.” I watched the two of them with awe, driving this fine automobile through the deep night, headlights on the narrow road showing the only thing we needed to know—ignoring the five-part serial messages of Burma-Shave billboards and Royal Crown Cola ads—wanting the road go on forever and to never have a destination. The acrid smell of Sal’s Lucky Strikes bit at my nose but tasted like the freedom of the highway and pulled me out of sleep. Somewhere in the horse-drawn cart hills I wake up half-way between the slow-water swamp of my past and the stars exploding above my future, the morning fog like ghosts in the road waving as we pass. I was a child when I climbed into the back seat of this Hudson convertible, but I’m aging with every mile, every cool-jazz horn riff and syncopated rhythm of my heart be-bop beating away to lead me on to someplace else—the next place—going—on—ahead— I wake up and see stars exploding in the blue-black sky and, for a moment, I don’t remember who I am. In that glorious exalted feeling and ecstatic instant, I know exactly who I’m supposed to be right now. Unknown. Like the rest of that highway just beyond the rise in front of us. I can’t see it yet—can’t describe it—but it’s there, waiting for me to reach it. The morning we pulled into Newport, the fingers of fog were still wrapped around the treetops before letting them go and slinking back into the cold Atlantic. There was a chill in the air, but it came more from my unbridled excitement than from the temperature. There were more folks here than I had ever seen in one place before! Looking around at the gathering of people going this way and that and sounds from automobile AM radios with a dozen different jazz greats playing, their riffs mingling, clashing, syncopating, and here I was, at the Newport Jazz Festival! Only the second time so many Jazzmen came together to play all weekend long and I was a small part of it. I was here! Sal and Dean had picked up a friend of theirs along the way named Carlo, and when I pulled my pack out of the trunk and had my little aged portable Underwood typewriter in hand, Carlo walked with me until I found a place to drop my bag and perch myself to hear and see the masters take the stage. “I want to be a writer,” I told them repeatedly in the past few days. Sal told me that I should start taking notes about what i see and hear and think, and Dean just smiled at me and shook his head and body to that music that only he was able to hear. “No ideas but in things,” Carlo told me when I grabbed my typewriter case. And I nodded, not fully understanding, but knowing it must mean something. He told me it was a favorite quote of his, but I immediately forgot who he told me said it. I found a spot against a tree to drop my things and just sat down to try typing out some ideas I had left over from my dreams on the road. That was when I noticed the commotion over in a tight knot of six or seven people dressed in their glad rags—Jazzmen all; Thelonius Monk, Max Roach, Chet Baker—and one younger scruffy guy took off running from where they stood, speeding past me. I watched him run past, and saw where he ducked down between parked cars, and then looked back at the Jazzmen where they were bunched, voices raised. One of them sounded louder than the others and the words from his mouth were not unknown to me, but I had never heard so many curses and profanities strung together in a row. Carlo moseyed over and got the dope on what was happening. I tagged along to find out, too. Apparently the guy who took off running stole something from one of the musicians. Not just something, really, but an instrument. The Jazzman’s horn! A player cursing about his lost trumpet an hour before he was supposed to take the stage, and here I was, a little kid standing around waist-high to some of the greatest names in the be-bop world. One of them leaned over to me and did his best to smile, “Keep from underfoot, little-man. Miles ain’t too happy right now, losin’ his horn like that. He and Monk are s’pposed to go on soon, but now—” the man laughed, but it didn’t sound too funny. The wide black face staring into mine was unmistakable. It was the Duke—Ellington himself. The living legend. My heart was racing a double-bass rhythm threatening to burst out of my chest. I looked away from the Duke to where I saw the thief go, and thought to myself that I was going to do something about this. No longer caring about my own meager things, I left my typewriter and bag of dirty clothes where they were and Carlo stared after me as I took off as quick as my short legs would go. I remembered the dirty blue windbreaker the thief was wearing, and looked everywhere for it. When I saw it again, the person wearing it was hunkered down between a Ford pickup truck and a brand new DeSoto Fireflite. He had the case open, pulled out the horn and was taking a good look at the trumpet. His stolen treasure. I looked back across the parked cars and people heading towards the stage and heard the jazz playing in the distance and wondered what I should do. I knew that I couldn’t fight this man—I was only twelve!—but I knew as well that I was quick, even for my age. I crawled underneath the DeSoto and wiggle-wormed my way to the edge. A sharp line of sunlight cut the border between where I hid beneath the car and where the thief crouched with the jazzman’s horn. I could reach the small black case. It was mere inches from me. I waited, shivering in the shade, until the thief put the trumpet back in the case and dropped the lid closed. Then I reached out and grabbed it. I never wiggled so fast in all my life. I rolled out from under the car and ran, zigzagging my way through the packed cars until I found myself with no more cars to race around and then just headed in whatever direction I was facing. The thief in the dirty blue windbreaker was on my tail. The direction I ran just happened to be where Carlo was standing with three other men, all sharing a funny-smelling cigarette. I did my best to blurt out what I just did, but the words didn’t sound like mine. Trumpet case tight in my grip, he saw what I was trying to say. The thief saw that his stolen prize had been taken away and thought better of challenging me for it when I stood in the midst of four men. Carlo smiled and told his friends that he had to get me down to the stage before Thelonius Monk began his set. Half an hour later, I stood on the grass at the foot of the stage surrounded by faces all staring in wonder, and watched this black man with a horn step up to the microphone as Monk was laying down on piano the harmony line of “Round Midnight.” This man whose mouth had spewed out a pile of steaming profanities put the muted trumpet to his lips and began blowing the most beautiful, laid-back, wild bouncing jazz notes that had ever been played, and there I was beaming up at the men on stage, drinking in the sound from these sorcerers of swing, these mystical musicians, these smokin’ hepcats ... these Jazzmen! I was in a mothswarm heaven fluttering around the music, spread across a sunrise geography running with rivers of highways stretching out in front of me, a roar in my head and a beat in my heart. I was a child of the American be-bop night. Back again, on the downside end of this journey, on the outskirts of Mobile, I’m dropped off at the same-but-not-the-same spot I’d been a little more than two weeks ago. My clothes are the same, but the person wearing them is different. Sal gave me a stack of paper and I must’ve typed all the way back from Newport, twisting my body and bobbing my head—hearing the same silent music Dean had been driving to all the way there. Carlo told me to keep at my writing, no matter what anyone told me, keep at it, and tell my stories in my own way. Then Sal and Dean and Carlo, all whooping and hollering as they sped off into the distance on another adventure, receded until they became a little speck that dispersed at the line where the mystic hills to the west met the clouded red-streaked sky and then I knew I’m something more than I was then—before they picked me up—that life is holy and every moment precious and here I am, my own highway ready to open before me brightened by the sunlight shaft fingers of God pointing me towards my own heaven. I’m older now, only by two weeks but more than a few thousand miles, and I stare a little longer behind me at the horizon of my youth and say good-bye, then look up into the vaulting sky and smile as the clouds break and the spreading blue future beckons. I’m home, for now, and this is me: beat, but ready to keep going ... further.
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