Koko

Koko removes the orange boarding pass from the man’s pocket and replaces it with his own. Then he reaches into the man’s jacket and tweezes out his wallet. His fingers open the wallet, he is curious to know who he is now, who it is that he has eaten and now lives within him; he reads his new name. Finally he places over the dead man’s face a magazine from the pouch before him and folds his hands in his lap. Now the dead man is sleeping, and the stewardess will not bother to shake him until everyone else is off the plane.

And then the plane begins to make its descent toward the tiny airport at La Cieba—

In a little while we will get to La Cieba.

Imagine that we are not in Central America, but in Vietnam. It is the rainy season, and inside the tents at Camp Crandall the green metal lockers shine with condensation. Sweet marijuana smoke hangs in the air, along with the music we are listening to. Spanky Burrage, now a drug rehabilitation counselor in California, is playing tapes on his big Sony reel-to-reel recorder, purchased in Saigon, the city not the restaurant, at a very good cost. In a large green holdall at the foot of Spanky’s cot are thirty or forty reels of music recorded by friends of his in Little Rock, Arkansas. These are nearly all jazz tapes, and hand-lettered labels on the cardboard boxes identify who is on each tape: Ellington, Basie, Parker, Rollins, Coltrane, Clifford Brown, Peterson, Tatum, Hodges, Webster …

This is the brothers’ tent, and in here music is always playing. M.O. Dengler and I are admitted here because we love jazz, but in truth Dengler, who is more or less loved by every soldier in camp, would be welcome here even if he thought that Lawrence Welk led a great jazz band.

The music sounds different here than it would back in the world: it has different things to say here, and so we must listen to it very carefully.

Spanky Burrage knows his tapes very well. He has the exact location of the beginning of virtually every song memorized, so that he can find any selection just by running the tape backwards or forwards. Therefore his memory allows him to play long sequences of the same song performed by different musicians. Spanky enjoys doing this. He will play an Art Tatum version of “The Sunny Side of the Street,” then one by Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Rollins; “Indiana” by Stan Getz, then a version with the same chords but another melody by Charlie Parker called “Donna Lee”; “April in Paris” by Count Basie, then by Thelonious Monk; sometimes five versions of “Stardust” in a row, six of “How High the Moon,” a dozen blues, everybody going to the same well but returning with different water.

Spanky always came back to Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker. And I sat in front of the speakers of the Sony beside M.O. Dengler maybe twenty times while Spanky followed Duke Ellington’s “Koko” with the Charlie Parker song that had the same name. Same name—

“—but oh so different,” Spanky says. And he whips the tape through the reels until the desired number comes up on the counter without his bothering to look at it, and drawing on a long cigarette rolled from Si Van Vo’s finest, he pushes STOP and then PLAY.

In Vietnam, this is what we hear. The Ellington “Koko” first.

It is a music of threat, and it is world-music, meaning that a world is held within it. Long ominous notes on a baritone saxophone counterpoint blasts from trombones. A lurching, swaying, uneasy melody begins in the saxophone section. From the darkness two trombones whoop and shake, going wa waaa wa waa like human voices on the perimeter of speech. These are noises that jump right out of the speakers and come toward you like a crazy father in the middle of the night. The piano utters nightmarish chords which are half-submerged in the cacophony of the band, and at the end Jimmy Blanton’s bass pads through the band like a burglar, like a sapper crawling toward our perimeter. It did not occur to us that there might be something deliberately theatrical, even comic, in all this menace.

“Okay,” Spanky says, “the Bird.” He snaps off the Ellington reel, snaps on the Parker. Spanky Burrage reveres the Bird, Charlie Parker. He threads the tape, advances to the correct number, but again he hardly has to look at the counter. Spanky knows when “Koko” has been reached. STOP. PLAY.

We are instantly in another world, one as threatening but far newer—a world that is still being mapped. This “Koko” was recorded in 1945, five years after the Ellington, and Modernism has finally come to jazz. The Parker “Koko” is based on the song “Cherokee,” written by the English bandleader Ray Noble, though you would never know this unless you happen to recognize the harmonic pattern.

It begins with improvised passages of great complexity and urgency, and finally comes to a theme fragment, which is a brusque abstraction of “Cherokee,” as unsentimental as a Picasso portrait of Dora Maar or a paragraph by Gertrude Stein. This is not the music of collective statement like the Ellington piece, but fiercely individual. After the abstraction of the theme is played, Parker begins. All through the first chorus has been a sense of impendingness, and it is for this that we have been prepared so efficiently.

For Charlie Parker begins singing at once, almost magically at one with his instrument, the harmonies of the song, and his imagination. He is overflowing, and he deliberately stutters at the beginning of a phrase, and the phrase says I have work to do. He immediately says it again, but more passionately, so that this time it is I have WORK to do. All through the long first section of his solo, he plays with absolute fluency over a tense and unrelenting rhythm.

Then an astonishing thing happens. When Parker reaches the bridge of the song, all that open-throated singing against threat is resolved in a dazzle of imaginative glory. Parker changes the beat around so that he actually seems to accelerate, and all the urgency is engulfed in the grace of his thoughts, which have become Mozartean and are filled with great calm and beauty.

What Charlie Parker does on the bridge of “Cherokee” reminds me of Henry James’s dream—the one I told Michael about in the hospital. A figure battered at his bedroom door. Terrified, James held the door closed against the figure. Impendingness, threat. In his dream, James does an extraordinary thing. He turns on his attacker and forces open the door in a burst of daring. The figure has already fled, is only a diminishing spot in the distance. It is a dream of elation and triumph, of glory.

That was what we listened to in the dripping tent in the year 1968 in Vietnam, M.O. Dengler and Spanky Burrage and I. You could say … we heard fear dissolved by mastery.

You see, I remember the old M.O. Dengler. I remember the man we loved. In the basement of the tenement on Elizabeth Street, if I had been faced with the choice of killing him or letting him go, unless killing him was the only way I could save my own life, I would have let him go. He wanted to give himself up. He wanted to give himself up, and if Harry Beevers had not betrayed him, he would have come in closer to our moral world. I believe this because I must believe it, and because I know that Koko could easily have killed all three of us down in his basement room. He chose not to. He had come close enough to our world to let us live. That is why Michael and I have matching scars that have turned us into brothers—the scars are the sign that Koko chose to let us live. He had work to do, work to do, and maybe that work was to—

I cannot say it yet.

Six months to the day after our release from the basement, Harry Beevers checked into a grand new hotel that had just opened in Times Square: one of those new hotels with an atrium lobby and a waterfall. He was given the suite he requested, rode up in the glass bubble of the elevator, tipped the bellman who had carried his suitcase with a ten-dollar bill, locked his door, opened the suitcase and drank from the quart of vodka that was one of the two objects inside it, undressed, lay down on his bed, masturbated, removed from the suitcase the .38 Police Special which was the other object he had carried from his apartment, put its barrel against his temple, and pulled the trigger. He died four hours later. A playing card was found on the sheet beside his head; I think the force of the bullet knocked the card out of his mouth. His life had become useless to him, and he threw it away.

Harry opened the door and stepped back to let the dark figure enter. He had no job, little money, and his imagination had failed him. His illusions were all the imagination he had—a ferocious poverty.

Perhaps in despair like Harry’s, Koko once opened the door, stepped back, and let the figure enter.

Michael Poole commutes to the Bronx every day, where he practices what he calls “front-line medicine” in a storefront. Maggie is taking courses at NYU, but although she has the unmistakable air of a person with a goal, she will not speak about what she plans to do. Michael and Maggie seem very happy. Last year we built a new loft for them on the floor above Tina’s old loft, where Vinh and Helen and I now live. I lead a regular, moderate life in the midst of these people, and sometimes at six o’clock I walk downstairs to have a single drink with Jimmy, Maggie’s brother, who works behind Saigon’s bar. Jimmy is a wicked character, and now that I know so few wicked characters and am no longer one myself, I rather cherish him.

I think Koko wanted to go to Honduras—I think Central America called to him, perhaps because of Rosita Orosco, perhaps because he imagined that there he could find his death. It would not be difficult to find a way to