In the blur of a quirky finger the old hawkdeer evaluates our meal on half a palm sized calculator. I have not seen anyone so quick since my days as a child in the Pacific, dragging my heels along some clamorous section of Chinatown behind my father who was always ready to negotiate his way to hell & back for the sake of an amazing bargain. I have a sense of seeing another small mathematical device savant on the sidewalks of Molo plaza streaking through the digits but then it my memory as a child & everything in childhood seems mostly an exaggeration. Though I myself am not tall, standing on the other side of the wooden till, all I see is her hair below me like an auspicious black clod. I do not mean cloud. A cloud being lofty & a clod being a lump of earth. She is more of the earth & I mean this with admiration, - the earth out of all things, being closest to my sentiments. I think to myself: this will be her battle posture confronting the beautiful machines, here by the golden light of the lamps, right under the calendar to make the occassion unforgettable to the surviving remainder of the machine vanguard. Or perhaps she will wait, quietly meditating herself into a metal cutting wind in that blue shadowed corner just beside the entrance. Then suddenly I imagine I am hearing the weird rippling echo of breaking koto string. She is looking up at me, informing me of the total. I pay, nod a small goodbye, her smile keeping, even as I turn my back. My friend has his feet stretched out under the table. He looks like he needs a toothpick. I need smokes , he says, as if reading my mind.
At the gas station I wait while my friend picks up some tobacco. I feel an easy indifference towards the rest of the evening & believe my friend likewise indisposed. It seems to be enough that we have supped together, it seems to suffice that we have chewed the cud over unprofound matters such as our common memory of an extraordinary lady who ran a 24 hour hamburger joint, a long time ago at the edge of the city. She had employed us separately in our youth before we were friends, beautifully assuring us with free coffee & pancakes of our inevitable success as artists in our fields: my friend in experimental music & me, as I'd like to say just to confound - as a self employed electric fan connoisseur. It seemed to suffice, the general pleasantness of sitting down in that place discussing the return of the saxophonist unclouded by more absurd & mysterious business concerning the event & noticing the neat, plain elegance of the small calendar under the clock while putting away our meal with delinquent speed. The only uneventfulness was slight. My friend had mentioned a pair of missing chopsticks. But the waitress having considered the old hawkdeer's tutelage, glanced back mid step & pointed to the paper wrapped sticks we had knocked to the floor & fetched a new pair to maintain grace. And I recall the old hawkdeers smile at the till & her eyes scanning the place like an invisible searchlight.
We drive to the venue like old men, no music in the car unlike the days of the glittering wind when music was relentless . We had it for breakfast & drove it through the taut gut of noon into the nectarine pit of twilight, right through to the frosted glass edges of December night. How many conversations in windblown rooms or staring at eternal things astir in the sparks of the hearth? How many times absurdly obscure, how many times embattled or sincere? how many times very sadly mistaken? Through an open window to the weather we watched sleeplessly as the earth returned the moon knowing our songs & believed those hours engraved on the chalice of an eternal spring. And what few parts were true in that fated rite of passage trickled down the back of our minds to make us see the world in newness: opening our minds with compelling quickness, then like sputtering flames sustained only by ambrosia, which later we shunned as monks of an inevitable night. It made us better creatures, despite the price, our time with that old glittering wind obvious to those who had sensed even its coolest light. Do not be mistaken. I am not trying to bowl you over with the vigour of wordings. I am sharing the hash of a favorite time. Do not be mistaken. I am not talking only about music. Though it is in the blood of the fruit - I am talking about a time.
It was a different time. We were chasing down the difference then.,my friend says as we overshoot the turn & drive further down for the U-turn at the intersection past the white painted horse shoe bridge. Yes, I think, like an old man, but in always wanting the difference it was at times like a slow motion pressure cooker & the day came when I wanted to escape with the steam. My friend blows smoke thoughtfully. Darn., he says. Then something else occurs to him & he grins. Then for some reason or another, all by himself, he laughs.
Being good acquaintances of the owner Mr. Bird, we take the privilege of parking in the back alley behind the bar. We get out & walk through the back gate onto a ramp edged by two dwarfish maples & a rusted ornamental gate mounted on a brick wall. We are early. The live music crawls & bounces down a narrow passage way glowing with the dim light behind, a quartet & now someone is on the saxophone splitting the reed but we know, listening, it is not yet the man we've come to see. I annoy my friend with requests for my portrait to be taken in front of the ornamental gate which looks agreeably decadent & symbolic. I am not a cynic. A beautiful gate that opens up to a brick wall does not sum up the eccentric temperament of our yesterdays. It takes me back in an immediate & graspable way. I know the magic words start with a perceptible distant glaze in the eye. My friend knows it too & we are behind the brick in a manner of speaking, moving further & further still, quite fluently.
Neither the night nor the event takes on a preponderance that sifts cool moonlight through the nerves. We are there of our own accord, expecting little,happily anchored on the minor details. We drift in & out of the bar, taking our free coffee from Mr. Bird & passing conversation from jovial & eccentric strangers. We have seen the evolution of the place from an idea across a bottle stained kitchen table to the place we are sitting tonight waiting to witness one of our old favorite front men returning with his horn with all the fine he surely would have learned in his exile . Gone is the rush of the glittering wind. We are no longer the dandy heralds of an alternate ideal but the hardened vagrants of an indifferent truth. My friend is talking to Mr. Bird. They are appraising some aspect of the place or evening. Perhaps my friend is sharing notes about the saxophonist, who is not some pissant charging dignitary in his book but a noteworthy memory & an equal. From the bar I can see the street. Passersby stop & look in, a handful sauntering through to hover undecidedly at the bar. Some stay, most go. There are approximately 30 people maximum, at any one time in the bar but it does not necessarily create an intimate air.
The place is long & narrow. Walking through the door the rectangle vacuums optically to the immediate far end, falling in a heap before the gargantuan, brown velvet curtains of the stage. The patchily lacquered wooden seats look disjointed, inexact in their arrangement, the closest seat about 10 meters from the stage. There is an encouraging length of bare floor between & I point this out. That is where the girls dance ,states Mr. Bird. His manner is sound, eerily priestly. But there are no girls dancing on the floor. Its as if my friend reads my mind: What days are those Mr. Bird? he says, just like that. On Wednesdays, they fill up the place. Mr. Bird says. But its not Wednesday, the place is too stiff, unable to fold out & make more laps if need be. From the back of the room I see the rest of the back of the room including the second back section past the stage where the ornamental gate is bolted to the wall. My friend & I comment similarly this while smoking out the back,by this I mean the second back section. The place is back heavy. The front is a bad illusion. It does not exist. The light & space from outside is of no recompense, - the passersby are walking through the clouded glass at opposing angles, neither approaching the rectangular vacuum or leaving it. Only at the middle of the cross; at the door, do they take on a tangible relevance & only momentarily or as people with other places to go. It would be much better to leave one pane as a partial window, a reverse peephole to goad some mystique into the bargain & seal off the rest with some good paint or an interesting panel in the tradition of Milo or Ogata Korin. Something alluring yet quiet enough for the eye to move through at its own behooving.
It is not bad for a place to attempt simplicity but for it to fall halfway & feign being settled tempts even sadder conclusions. Neither is there anything wrong with the small bar but the seats in front of it inconvenience the quick exchange of money for liquor, especially on Wednesdays, as Mr. Bird declared, when the girls fill up the place. The dimmed lights are another thing. There is a dimness which pleases in aesthetic zones or streams of radiance. But the way the lights work against the walls make the white look murky. It effects a denseness as if the light were made of yolk, as if the air were weighted with some lazy, ancient sediment. Like candlelight moving through a bottle of cloudy vinegar...but perhaps I'm being hasty. Its my only visit after wandering about the place with half a kebab some months ago when it looked very much like a sealed off alleyway with a perfectly scratched beautiful blue door. For to what it is now is still a feat in itself , squeezed right off the sweat of Mr. Birds back,. As the light now wraps shadows like coal stains around the bags of his eyes I withhold further judgement. But as my friend, who had the other half of the kebab says: But why the heck stop now? My friend from Nagano wrote to me last November: I am painting a bluebird & since I have no blue paint I will be paying close attention to the detail of its wings. From this point it is no longer my business. I can see the shadowed back of the saxophonist looking over the stage. I only wish for willful sense within any enchantment but time will tell what I meant to say.
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