What the fuck, Uncle Jack? Where had you gone? You stopped shaking me awake at midnight when I was fourteen, that year, did you know I would find your piece of plastic that year? I was drinking cold beer and listening to you from the time I could walk, practically, and you made it look like it was only for me, maybe for Martha the lady bartender, or whatever her name was—and my mother will tell you she thought it was for her, too, and if Jack had had a woman she would have wanted his music for herself. But the difference between me and them is I looked at it and I said, what a waste! What do I want it for! He should take it out into the world! Women are happy to keep the music of musicians in their beds. Write me a song and all that shit. Not me. I don’t want to be Jack’s little boy.

And I found that record when I was too old to forgive him, when I was too old to want his life for myself or his life for him. So I sat in my room, fifteen years old, I played that cut over and over again, the track with Jack playing jazz on his own body, he couldn’t keep it on the kit, and Al Way following him on the piano like a journalist, recording every little thing, asking him about his experience, with the piano. You remember—do dodo DO? dada, dada, dahhh, do dodo DO? The saxophone was just there, she was like a woman crying to Jack, and he won’t shut up, he won’t let her stop crying.

Always, that title, what a joke. Always what, Jack? Always on the street? Always spooked by the kids on the block?

 I want to make you famous, because you never could do it for yourself. Not because I love you. Because I don’t want you playing for me. Turn around and play for somebody you need to get back at, not somebody you want to take care of you. Get mad, Jack. Get up out of your lazy grave and fuck somebody up.

 When I was four or five, I was always so excited when my dad came home from work, because he worked a night shift and I could see him first thing in the morning when I got up. He must have been so tired, but he would always make me sing a little song he had taught me, daisy, daisy, give me your answer do.  

I didn’t hear jazz until I was ten years old. In school, we had music class, but we didn’t listen to music there. It’s a funny way that it happened—my father forgot my birthday, and the first thing he could lay his hands on at five in the morning was Always.

There was a fight—my mother knew he had found it at the last minute, and she was tired. She wanted him to have a job with regular hours and no dirt, but she knew there wasn’t any other. Pittsburgh.  

I listened to the record and to me it was like hearing the woman play the cello through the ceiling—it wasn’t a record, it was live music being played for me, two inches away from my face. I’ve never heard anything so live, sometimes not even concerts, and at this point in my life I’ve been to thousands of concerts. I was ten years old and I knew then, as you sometimes know, that I only wanted to listen to this kind of music for the rest of my life.

And so now it’s my career, listening, and one gets older, and one gets disappointed. There are so many people trying to make live less live—they are trying to prepare for everything, prevent every downfall—the performer, in many cases, isn’t prepared for his own mistakes. I think that’s a shame. Jazz is one of the only musics left where that isn’t as true. In jazz a fumble can still be one of the great mistakes, penicillin, America, chocolate chip cookies! something like that. It’s not that suddenly I was unafraid to make mistakes—I’m still terrified—it’s that suddenly I was awed by them.

I didn’t even know he had made a record. I suppose I knew he had to have, by then. I don’t think he needed to. But I don’t know what went on in his head, I can only guess, I was only a girl when he came home.

He never played it for me. The record. Oh, he did play for me. He showed me his teaspoons, you know, his fist, his fistful of pokerchips on the cement floor, the water in the storm drain, all the sounds he found. He showed me.

Well I remember Shawn bringing home the record when he was fifteen, angry that he had never heard of it. Where have you been hiding this he said, and he locked himself in his room and played it to himself. He looked up to Jack. I don’t know where he found the record—Jack didn’t give it to him.  

When I heard it, I was sweeping the floor. The walls in our house were thin. It broke my heart. I could never listen to it after that.

You want to know why. That record was like someone coming into my bedroom when I was home sick, taping me coughing. Or coming into our kitchen while Jack made soft music under the table with paint brushes and the lids of pots. Even though he had real drums on the record, and lots of times when he performed.

I felt, I felt—every time Jack played music for me, or when he took Shawn to the clubs as a little boy—oh, I knew he did it—every time he did he was trying to get better. His sickness was like a commercial jingle, repeating over and over, weakening him. He was trying to get out of his head, do you see? And that record wouldn’t let him. It said, Here is the head, the cracked head of Jack Morrison—Jack Smart. Did you ever wonder why they called him that? I wondered, it didn’t make sense to me.

The record, it said here is his head, we’ve brought it to you. He doesn’t have it anymore.

Connor Harding came home from work every morning at six a.m., Tuesday through Sunday. He got a blessed Sunday night off, and when he finished work early on Saturday morning, around three a.m., he made it to the middle of the 2:30 mass at Epiphany Church. The mass had originally been set up for Catholic newspaper printers who wanted to be able to attend a service after they finished at the press Saturday nights. Harding wasn’t Catholic anymore, but he kept after those early morning services. There hadn’t been a Catholic newspaper in Pittsburgh then for probably thirty years, so the mass was usually filled up with men and women like him, just off their mill shifts, streaked with grease and perfumed with the stale air of the mills. Trickling in from a Saturday night uptown were also the streetwalkers and their pimps, the women’s tired faces half hidden by lavish, netted hats.

They would all rub their hands together vigorously at the holy water station, in Harding’s case not any particularly ardent expression of faith so much as an attempt to rinse the black off his otherwise delicate hands. His hands were unusual for those of a steelworker, especially one who’s been at the job for as long as he had. His mother, when he was a boy, had him soak his hands in buttermilk at the end of an afternoon playing in the street near their home in Lawrenceville. She had watched his father’s hands change from the hands that were the first to touch her soft shoulders, at seventeen when they were married, to a steelworker’s splintered, chapped, machine parts. His mother had been fond of saying that young Connor should run away and learn the piano, since his fingers were so long and his nails shapely.

Now, in the front hallway of the church, when he rubbed his hands with holy water beside a young black woman, he could see the where his clean blue veins were hidden, and he could savor a small dose of almost feminine vanity admiring his nimble fingers, which were used most creatively those days at the extruding machine.

The mass was solemn, reflective of the weariness of its congregants, and in Latin, although the revolutionary days of guitars and an English liturgy had come and transformed most Catholic churches, even in Pittsburgh. When it ended, Connor Harding walked in the first stains of light toward his home two miles away in Oakland.

In South Oakland in those days it was hard to pass an alley that wasn’t piled with discarded junk, the students from Pitt having taken up permanent residence in the tenement-like apartments there, and if you looked long enough you could find someone, absurdly, selling it. Harding’s neighborhood was great for small mobile enterprises like these—he had bought his coffeepot for twenty-five cents from a haggard Pakistani man with a Shop n Save cart, and his wife never failed to uncover a yard sale that yielded longer pants and skirts for Geena, whose legs got longer every time the Dow-Jones fell.

This morning he passed the 24-hour yard sale. The woman who owned the stuff set her daughters up in shifts to hide behind the gate and show themselves only when a stranger took an ancient baby bottle or fondue pot in his hands, as if they were the proctors at an ongoing test of integrity. Harding leafed through a beer box full of old 45s. Among them was a brand new jazz record, still in its plastic.  

“What’s this doing here?” he asked. A skinny girl in a long t-shirt and magenta leggings stood up, maybe surprised that he knew anyone was behind the gate. She shrugged. “You want it,” she said, or asked.

“I dunno,” said Harding, feeling in his pockets. He never listened to jazz, except for George Benson, mostly out of local pride. “What are you doing up so late?” he said suddenly. It was five in the morning.

“Gettin the paper.” She sat down to extract the comics from the Pittsburgh Press.

“What day is it,” said Harding, mostly to himself. Shit. He had forgotten something.

“August twenfourth,” mumbled the girl.

It was Geena’s birthday, that was what he had forgotten, and on the day he would be awake to see her, too. He had never been very good at knowing what to buy little girls, and Geena had never played with dolls very enthusiastically. She was big on the idea of the birthday outing, which was exactly the most inconvenient preference she could have had, given how often Harding was around.

Harding fingered the record. “Yeah, I guess I’ll take this,” he said, peeling a dollar from around the pile of junk in his jeans pocket.

“K,” said the girl, and took his dollar without looking up from Andy Capp.

 Harding took the record and shuffled the few blocks home, looking forward to a cup of coffee and a nap. It would be clear he had forgotten a real gift. There was no wrapping paper and there was an orange, handwritten price sticker on the sleeve that he couldn’t scrape off with his stub of a thumbnail. Geena probably wouldn’t know the difference? There were hardly any records in their house? If she didn’t like it, hell, they could use another dinner plate. Ha, ha.

Once inside, Shawn’s strict instructions were to affix himself to the lady bartender, whose name might have been Martha. She was straight-necked and tan, with her dyed, but un-tacky, blond hair pulled up in a nest of frizz behind her head. She didn’t speak to Shawn much, but she give him a tight-lipped, genuine smile every once in a while. She mixed him a Safe Sex on the Beach (cranberry, grapefruit, peach nectar, and a maraschino cherry) when she had liked Jack’s solo particularly well, and had a habit of winking down at Shawn whenever her shuffling clientele tried, in vain, to come on to her. After every show, though, she cracked open a Beck’s for Jack and propped one foot up on the stage, leaning with her nervous, horselike calf muscles into his kit as he packed it back up.

One night she said to Shawn, after Jack had let up after a long, meditative solo which almost seemed to quiet the traffic outside the open door: “Honey, I haven’t heard music like that since before I was born, have you?”

You stretch out your bare legs in your hotel room and wish you were meeting him in New Orleans, where you could watch the thick air, infused with the coarse dust of so much music, settling around him as he drank a beer in a nothing bar. Did he do that sort of thing? You are relieved to be away from New York and the scene of “discovery”–here in Lake Charles you are in a place where they have known just a few things for a long, long time, and have no reservations about repeating them into a tape recorder.

my head isn’t the same. hasn’t been like it was since the blast toward the end of tour. Mother called the hospitals, and they won’t take me, they’re full of legs and stomachs and shit. “psychological problems are serious, but we’re up to our necks in limbs, that can’t be our priority” they said something like that. but here we’re talking physical, this is stuff snapping inside my head, my brain breaking down, who knows what. psychological. it’s not like the cases I’m reading about, though, what happens is my face twitches, really it moves like it’s dancing. it gets started like there’s a fly in my mouth and it goes for however long. one thing that helps settle the electricity (that’s what I’m calling it, electricity in my brain) is taking whatever I’m holding banging it on a table or wall or window. can hold a spoon steady better than I can hold a pen even. Mother helped with that. how did I ever hold a gun I wonder sometimes.              when I take something like a spoon and bang it on something else here’s what happens: there’s a lightning-like in my brain, not quite so violent or poetic but more like what happens when you turn the radio dial and the signal’s not quite strong enough, you get a big whirr of static and you have to keep spinning the dial till it comes to a strong signal. when I bang something, real steady rhythm, I come to a strong signal, you see. it’s like it clears the static out of my brain, like dust. house-cleaning. it’s good. sometimes I can even hear what I’m playing and make something nice out of it.

Walked all the way to the 7-11 today and picked up a box of cigarettes. Some milk for Alice and mother. put them on the counter and put my hand in my pocket to pay, but the kid behind the register couldn’t look me in the eye, kept looking over my shoulder like there was someone behind me, like the twinkies on the shelves were going to pay. look at me I said I’m giving you money. sir, the kid said, and cast his eyes down at the cash register as he counted out bills and coins. fucking look at me, I said quietly, and then my face I could feel starting to move, and the radio changing channels in my head. The cash register went ca-ching, ca-ching, and wouldn’t stop, a fever dream. I put the cigs and milk down and ran all the way home, but my face wouldn’t stop shaking even then. Mother was out again and Alice still in the house, sick. I took a ladle hanging from above the stove, the first thing I saw, and cracked it hard against whatever was closest, the refrigerator maybe. I went through the house cracking the ladle against shit, breaking vases, glass over pictures. finally I got hold of myself long enough to know I wasn’t doing anybody any good, so I locked myself in my room and cracked the ladle against the wall a while. made a good hole in the wall. and then you know what happened. I’d crack the ladle hard, then soft a little, then there was a little music coming up off the street through the open window from somebody’s car maybe, and I was trying to hear it better, and each time I’d hit the spoon on the wall I could hear the music a little better, and I started following the music with the spoon. Then it disappeared as the car moved on, but I kept it going, and I could hear better than I think I have since I got home. It was like a really good song that you have in your head you can dance to without it actually playing. I don’t know how long that went on. When I finally stopped, I lay on the floor could hardly move. Downstairs I heard the key in the door, the door unstuck and Mother come in. Across the hall I heard something I hadn’t heard before, real soft and in a pattern kind of like the song I heard, Alice breathing in and letting breath out through her mouth, making a high little sound.

Alice is ten.