Part 1: Fuji

We step out into the evening he & I. We do not get very far before the need to get in the car assails our common sense. We duly check the evening sky for comets & falling brunettes & such before jumping aboard. In honor of rare privileges I spark up a cigarette closing the silver automobile door behind me.This ok?I inquire with the minimum required concern having suitably preempted his reply. Our minds are locked in. As is my habit, I also preempt the T junction mere seconds or so away. My friend is liable to make the turn before asking the way to the restaurant which even at the mouth of the Void remains a 50/50 proposition. Left here & then right at the first corner, I offer rolling down the window to add some smoke to the billowing exhaust. Of course he says. For a moment I wonder whether he said that to give me permission to smoke or to say Listen man its only a restaurant down the goddam street how lost do you think we can get? But he pulls his own tobacco from a silver blue box in his black Steve Mcqueen type jacket & knifes a hand into the standard right pocket for a lighter. When seated every pocket tightens up like a cat before a tub of water. We are discussing pants here. Every smoker knows this but its still the easiest place to stash a spark. I bring a flame up for him, mine being still in hand & we roll the windows down exhaling in tandem & join the headlights on the parade.

The Japanese restaurant is small, out of the way. A light blue outline of the volcano & the word Fuji is boxed into neon just above the door. The white outside wall & glass frontispiece showing the gold hued dangling of plain paper lanterns falls like a wayward cut onto the beginning of a series of darkened caryards. If this night were celluloid fable this is the border of light where the elven kind make their last stand against the beautiful machines. But we are not elven kind. We do stand a while upon entering, every table being taken or reserved as usual, but it does not last. The lady proprietor glances up from her calculator, mutters efficiently into the air & a waitress fetches us from the doorway & bustles us through scattered groups of shoes to a table, taking the reserved marker away. The lady who by now is familiar with my guess who the wind blew in habits, smiles back from behind her watchtower which is the till. It is a calm, acknowledging smile but she is the fabled hawkdeer, the one who will decimate a good portion of the beautiful machine army in a glittering wind when the elven retreat, before herself dropping to the shiny wooden floor in an ashen cocoon. But let us not unravel.

We take tuna steak,some gingery type bacon called buta something, tempura vegetables & two miso & step outside for a conversation with god whilst it is being prepared. This is what my friend from Nagano calls smoking: a conversation with god, god in lower case too written down as he prescribed. His attention to detail is disturbing. When the beautiful machine army arrive at his door they will find nothing except a note stating: gone to find my true love, at which the machines will experience their very first sensation, one most probably akin to regret. A thousand years hence its consequent purged form as peculiar audio static in the machine mind will be the fateful spur in the overhaul of their final design, - a reconsideration of what perfections were previously omitted due to mechanical type prejudice which will see them rebuilt into the new elven kind. Then will my friend from Nagano return with his true love & say: the details are in the bottom drawer in what appears to be an empty chopsticks box.

Meanwhile my older, more present friend has taken two cigarettes out of his silver blue box. We light up under the neon, our mood in turns Brucknerian & Lullyesque, Lully being the first to introduce the sideblown flute into the orchestra in the mid 18th century. This is of course unimportant but an example had to be made. And the mere mention of a flute maintains the elven undercurrent. We are off to a place named after a bird, where a saxophonist from the days of the glittering wind, who had sought out his fortune in the better known cities of the world for the last 10 years was making an appearance for an 80 dollar fee. The 80 dollars being the cost of having him onstage & no charge at the door. Neither of us understood this sum in the slightest & were curious if we would perhaps hear some explanation in the playing. Perhaps he accidentally sheared off his lower lip in a duel with the Nordic avant-garde & was limited to Ornette Coleman impersonations. Perhaps it was a truly experimental night where with no practice he would attempt to play Sorcerer without a reed. What is 80 dollars? It is a baffling abstraction with what things are involved here. It is not that far from a hundred so why not throw in the other twenty & give the man another little peck at some dignity. It was what I would have liked to ask Mr Bird the club owner, a wise enough character by all accounts. 80 dollars when you are the saxophonist I speak about is a little worse than playing for free.

There is another detail here. The man is an important fragment of our personal history having played in the days of our glittering wind & for all his quiet asideness, we remembered him well. He once compared my friends brief sojourn into saxophone to that of Johnny Griffin's. I cast a lightly sardonic smile over at my friend, a very able thinker & musician, which he returns. Everything flows in code. The machines do not feel beautiful enough yet. Yes we will be dining in agreeable mirth & melancholy. In the days of the glittering wind there were only two in the modern jazz scene who seemed to understand what valid mysticisms we had stumbled upon in the world, in the dirt & light filled whirl of the earth, around that time & reiterated it in their music & the returning saxophonist was one of them. It is a small city I talk about & still we may have missed much but in the days of the glittering wind we may once have imagined ourselves ( in the delightful loneliness of our gleanings) to be without peer.

You may understand this to be a matter of vanity & pride. It is more plainly so a matter of youth & an unsettled sense of things. We imagined our bets were on very long odds and that we had inside information, dependable to a fault & how that source would never be short sold or abandoned in our lifetime. Some of it holds true to the day, although we have come to see more of our peers dodder out of trains, the rain, lamplit rooms with coins & bills on the floor pushed off by musical artifacts, old books & cups on the kitchen table, - all bearing that self same look of jaded embattlement. I do know we had a respectable amount of reliable enchantment for a while then & a dozen or so jesters thrown in for luck. Some days now that old glittering wind seems to have blown right over our heads & the only retainable thing is the vividness of its recollection.

Lets go in, my friend says, handing me the camera. He has already taken two pictures of me smoking in front of a no smoking sign stuck on the door. I take no pride in it & would edit it out later. There is a tear in the metal of the roof where light gleams through. The beautiful machines are aware of us & have decided to hold still. We go in to chow. The old hawkdeer smiles at our return. Our timing has often been good.