Milt Jackson’s Mallet

Irony is unstoppable. A swish. A whack. Chop goes the axe. A needle drops into a vinyl groove, and like a Japanese flower unfolding in water, the simple magic of paper and dye, I am thirty years younger in the New York apartment of a friend. We are four. Finishing our drinks. Donning our coats. About to go out to listen to some jazz. My friend and his lady. Me and my wife. And one of us—me, it has to be—noticing Dizzy Gillespie in that silver-framed photograph on the wall holding a straight trumpet, huh? what’s that? what’s happened to his singular signature identifying bent-up horn? Newport, says my friend, who was there, who took the picture. Someone stole it. Great souvenir. A fan. Really? I say. What sort of bastard would you need to be to do a thing like that?

And out we went.

A Milt Jackson Quartet was the music.

Teddy Edwards on tenor.

Who was the bass player?

Shadow Wilson on drums.

We had a table right at the front.

Sensational music.

Beyond class or category.

In exquisite distillation.

The very meat and marrow of the blues.

Where, two steps into the street from the door we have just come out, my wife to hand me Milt Jackson’s mallet, well, one of them, swiped on her way past where he left them lying on the keys of his vibraharp at the end of the set, here, got it for you, quick, stick it in your coat.

What kind of bastard?

Let’s cut it open, see what’s inside, a vibes-playing musician acquaintance back home eagerly suggests.

Envy, of course.

Naked and obvious.

No way, I tell him.

Slamming it into a drawer, a lockable cupboard.

Keep your bastard fingers to yourself, you’re not touching it.

Thank you very much.

Safe.

And why and how that should open, the flower in further unfolding, the petal beyond petal within, to the immediate memory of the house-bound old mother of a long-known and loved friend falling in her shower, eighty-two years of age, seven in the morning, alone in her house, a witty woman, well read, fiercely independent, her husband gone now twenty-two years and never missed for a minute, never liked him, she made no secret, men in general, goodbye and good-riddance, or such anyway her proud pose, oh some cruelty in that tongue, watch your step there, not without bite, fallen, fainted, slipped, who knows, unable to rise, to raise, to crawl, to creep, to turn off the water gone from hot to now unstoppable crashing cold, this one morning in a million her habitual checking-up son without his never-without key, and of course no, don’t even bother to ask, he didn’t smash a window, break down the door, or even, for that matter, hang around, ask a neighbour, loiter, wait, somehow imagined—

What?

Imagined what exactly?

Well, it was a shock.

This was afterwards.

Four hours afterwards.

Four hours of not knowing what to do and phoning and no answer and finally thinking to better go home and get the key and—

Yes, he looked terrible.

Awful.

His face.

I can see it now.

You have no idea.

The beloved son.

And what to do then, of course, the problem, no, she wouldn’t allow a stranger in the house, a lodger, a nurse, thank you very much, whatever arrangement suggested her answer always the same.

Now you may say, and let me be the last person to argue, to contradict, to stand in your way, to cut open Milt Jackson’s mallet exhibited genuine curiosity, the working of a questing mind, useful understanding, scientific research, as the son’s love for his mother was unmistakably evident in his forbidding her, banning from the house, in iron resolution never to be broken, should have done it years ago, little wonder you fell over, God only knows it could have been worse, those damn cigarettes, pure poison, puffing like a chimney, look at you, two, sometimes even three in a single day.