Flirt: The Interviews by Lorna Jackson
Authors: Lorna Jackson
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, Short Stories, Language Arts & Disciplines, Short Stories (Single Author), Communication Studies
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artist strives for originality â innovation â and meaningful work in a society that values formulaic coversinging,
embellishment-heavy American Idols chosen over the phone by the screen-loving masses.
âWhatever happened to a simple melody? Just sing it straight , my Lithuanian boyfriend used to gripe. More hot licks than a teenage nymphomaniac , heâd say.
âHow does a musician like Bolden, a man like him and with his appetites and the radical conversation he has with his mouth and music, with his hands and body, how does a player like Bolden survive in a time and place and landscape that rejects chaos and the improvisation that is its antidote. Artâs consumers are all about plot, you see, and Bolden was not able to connect the dots. Fame has a high cost.
âImprov is anecdote?
âAnt. i. Dote.
âTell me about Buddy Bolden. Describe his body, for example.
âYouâve read the book.
âMany times, and Iâve looked often at the band photo on the cover. So long and narrow, his hands fastidious on the horn even when posed. The smile: is that arrogance or flirting? He looks so great, so lean in those clothes.
âI . . .
âHe is so erotic in the book, so unable to control passions. Both in love with women and contemptuous of them. In love with jazz and scornful of others who love it but want control. Wild about the street and also its victim. Able to disappear into sex and music but so powerless that both swallow him and refuse to spit him out. He is digested. So willing to be naked. So silent yet in love with words. Iâd like to run my tongue over his abs, then his wrist.
âI . . .
âHis conflict between form and shapelessness. His fragility and yet sinewy strength, like cat gut, or baling twine. He played the devilâs music and hymns at the same time, he didnât choose: he merged them because, well, of course. And his falls into madness are erotic, linked to women and musicâs siren, a pushing of the body and mind past their frontiers and finally a long, high note of surrender and a crossing over into the dark, the silence forever.
âI . . .
âYou?
âI . . . Listen. You shouldnât see the book as a prototype for your own relationships to art or to men or to the street. Cos itâs not wise to have a crush on Buddy Bolden. Surely you deserve better, more tenderness, kinder men less concerned with their own reputation. A woman who loves the smell of a wet spaniel is entitled to romance that is not superficial or self-serving.
âActually . . . here: my notes say itâs you who loves the smell of a wet spaniel. My next suicide was landscape-induced. I left the city and headed up to a watery world and a long shoreline, to a husband, to musicians on the lam and living on boats at the breakwater. Thurber came, too, but would not venture to the beach across the road, would not slip her paws into the cold and whale-rich Johnstone Strait. The homesteading otters frightened her. When my new and short-term husband was home, she would quaver in her basket by the door. When he wasnât, she would climb onto my lap, though she was too large to do so. I was nineteen and when new husband sailed to fish up north, I again fell for an older, more married man.
âWell, the seventies allowed for this.
âYou think? I donât. Betrayal is always about contravention, sadism, adolescence, carelessness. Itâs always ugly and cowardly. The misery of others is never fine.
âYou were a teenager.
âThis time it was James Taylor on the turntable.
âWhich?
ââYour Smiling Face.â
âIrony?
âYup. And then the pills, champagne, turpentine and the scalpel on my wrists, the back of my hands, any visible vein but never quite deep enough. See?
âStill, you have lovely hands. Working hands. Those are old scars now and the story they tell has moved aside for other, more unpredictable
embellishment-heavy American Idols chosen over the phone by the screen-loving masses.
âWhatever happened to a simple melody? Just sing it straight , my Lithuanian boyfriend used to gripe. More hot licks than a teenage nymphomaniac , heâd say.
âHow does a musician like Bolden, a man like him and with his appetites and the radical conversation he has with his mouth and music, with his hands and body, how does a player like Bolden survive in a time and place and landscape that rejects chaos and the improvisation that is its antidote. Artâs consumers are all about plot, you see, and Bolden was not able to connect the dots. Fame has a high cost.
âImprov is anecdote?
âAnt. i. Dote.
âTell me about Buddy Bolden. Describe his body, for example.
âYouâve read the book.
âMany times, and Iâve looked often at the band photo on the cover. So long and narrow, his hands fastidious on the horn even when posed. The smile: is that arrogance or flirting? He looks so great, so lean in those clothes.
âI . . .
âHe is so erotic in the book, so unable to control passions. Both in love with women and contemptuous of them. In love with jazz and scornful of others who love it but want control. Wild about the street and also its victim. Able to disappear into sex and music but so powerless that both swallow him and refuse to spit him out. He is digested. So willing to be naked. So silent yet in love with words. Iâd like to run my tongue over his abs, then his wrist.
âI . . .
âHis conflict between form and shapelessness. His fragility and yet sinewy strength, like cat gut, or baling twine. He played the devilâs music and hymns at the same time, he didnât choose: he merged them because, well, of course. And his falls into madness are erotic, linked to women and musicâs siren, a pushing of the body and mind past their frontiers and finally a long, high note of surrender and a crossing over into the dark, the silence forever.
âI . . .
âYou?
âI . . . Listen. You shouldnât see the book as a prototype for your own relationships to art or to men or to the street. Cos itâs not wise to have a crush on Buddy Bolden. Surely you deserve better, more tenderness, kinder men less concerned with their own reputation. A woman who loves the smell of a wet spaniel is entitled to romance that is not superficial or self-serving.
âActually . . . here: my notes say itâs you who loves the smell of a wet spaniel. My next suicide was landscape-induced. I left the city and headed up to a watery world and a long shoreline, to a husband, to musicians on the lam and living on boats at the breakwater. Thurber came, too, but would not venture to the beach across the road, would not slip her paws into the cold and whale-rich Johnstone Strait. The homesteading otters frightened her. When my new and short-term husband was home, she would quaver in her basket by the door. When he wasnât, she would climb onto my lap, though she was too large to do so. I was nineteen and when new husband sailed to fish up north, I again fell for an older, more married man.
âWell, the seventies allowed for this.
âYou think? I donât. Betrayal is always about contravention, sadism, adolescence, carelessness. Itâs always ugly and cowardly. The misery of others is never fine.
âYou were a teenager.
âThis time it was James Taylor on the turntable.
âWhich?
ââYour Smiling Face.â
âIrony?
âYup. And then the pills, champagne, turpentine and the scalpel on my wrists, the back of my hands, any visible vein but never quite deep enough. See?
âStill, you have lovely hands. Working hands. Those are old scars now and the story they tell has moved aside for other, more unpredictable
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