Kerrigan in Copenhagen by Thomas E. Kennedy

across the lake, whirlpooling on the dirt walkway, smacking Kerrigan’s face as he walks forward at a slant through it. At the far end of the lake, he takes a table outside Det Franske Café , the French Café, across the boulevard from where Kierkegaard’s 1850 residence might still have been standing had it not been torn down to let Willemoesgade , Willemoes Street, run past between the twin towers erected there in 1892.
    His table is behind the concrete planters, where he hunches against the wind to get a small Sumatra lit, then waits, smoking, with the sunlight in his face, for the tall young white-aproned waitress to bring his food—a platter of herring, crab salad, a wedge of Brie that he plans topepper liberally. When he opened his mouth to say, “And a club soda,” it said instead, “And a large draft Tuborg.” Startled by these unanticipated words, he paused, and then his mouth called after her, “And a double Red Ålborg snaps if you have it!”
    She smiled over her shoulder at him, one eye squinted shut against the sun, her white-swathed rump nothing short of magnificent, her breasts in a white T-shirt truly mighty, and she said, “We have it.”
    And there it is again: Kerrigan, a fool for love. You would be duped all over again by Licia. She was right: You
are
blind. So he just smiles politely to the cute-faced waitress’s polite smile as she places the fish and drink before him. And as he eats, he watches swans and ducks, joggers, and then a single heron walking slow and precise as a tai chi chuan master along the bank of the lake, while the wind stipples the water into glittering spires of silver and black, and Kerrigan feels the beer chasing the snaps through his blood; the snaps makes a clean dash for the shelter of the brain where it does its optimistic work, and the beer plows right on after it.
    He likes it here so very much, relishing with his eyes the whipping branches of the chestnuts, the potted yellow lilies framing the path line, the multi-spiring water, and the imperturbable heron. He takes out his little pad and his Montblanc, swallows more beer, and thinks of Stan Getz’s three years in Copenhagen at the end of the fifties, when he came here to find serenity, freedom from drugs and drink, and played his beautiful tenor four days a week on Store Regnegade in the old Montmartre, owned by Anders Dyrup, the jazz-loving son of a wealthy paint manufacturer whose name is everywhere on Danish paint shops.
    Getz played with bassist Oscar Pettiford, one of the great early beboppers—half Choctaw, part Cherokee, part black, married to a white woman—who came to Denmark to find a more tolerant social climate for his children. And he jammed at Montmartre with the musicians who came through—Art Blakey, Lee Konitz, Kenny Clarke, Gerry Mulligan. Picture Stan on baritone and Mulligan on tenor, switch-hitting, with Jim Hall on guitar playing for four or five hours in the dark morning hours on Great Rain Street.
    But within two years, Pettiford was dead, at thirty-seven, of a fluke disease, and one night after dinner Getz went outside the beautiful house where he lived with his wife and children and threw a brick through every window. Then he came back in and with a poker from the fireplace smashed every plate in a collection of priceless Royal Copenhagen porcelain that the landlord owned.
    The doctor put him on Antabus—an anti-alcoholic medication that causes violent illness if combined with drink—but Getz didn’t take it because, he reasoned, he was not an alcoholic. On another occasion he kicked his dog unmercifully, then beat his daughter, cursing her for trying to stop him. He even put a loaded gun to his wife’s head.
    Too tortured to live with peace of mind, he returned to the states after not quite three years—Kerrigan heard him, saw him in Carnegie Hall in ’64 and in the Rainbow Room in ’70 and twice here in