Saxon's Abstractions

Hail Django, Gypsy of Jazz

2010-01-30T07:42:00.000-08:00

I'm dreaming of my trip to Paris in a few weeks and this essay, which fellow blogger Paul Anater was kind enough to let me post on his blog in December, is the perfect Abstraction for my frame of mind. I'd like to leave you with the question, "Have you ever fantasized that someone famous was a relative?" If so, who and why?

Strolling along Main Street in Sag Harbor one luscious summer day, I spied a rosary made of onyx beads in the window of Terry Bagley’s shop. I always make a point of stopping by when I’m in town because her taste is so exquisite. She gathers together aromatic candles that infuse the shop’s interiors with scents of lavender and rose, vessels made of watery-hued Portuguese glass, creamy hand-milled European soaps, and hand-woven French linens.

The rosary’s beads, which reminded me of the coffee-colored seeds of some exotic fruit, were wound around the frozen reach of a large, crude cross that had once been painted teal and then a flaking layer of white. Noticing my interest, Terry’s assistant Hérmes lifted the rosary from the weathered plank and slowly curled it into the palm of my hand as soon as I entered the shop. I was of half a mind to buy it even before she told me it was an 18th-century antiquity from France.

The country of origin mattered because I’ve charted the genealogy on my father’s side of our family to discover that I am eight generations removed from the French countryside of Normandy near St. Sauveur. My ancestors there had fled to Jersey Island off the British coast in the 17th century, long before this rosary felt the nimble caress of anyone’s fingers. It was Jean Gosset—the most remote name penned on my family tree—who had first turned away from the rosary to become a Huguenot, essentially making vagabonds of most of his descendents.

As the rosary spilled into my lap on the train back to Manhattan that day, I listened to what had become my greatest Francophile obsession, the plunky rhythms of jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. The first time I heard his music, I concocted a fantasy that he could have been my grandfather. It was early fall and the windows were open. A buoyant breeze ruffled the leaves on the trees in the garden behind the bricked brownstone I called home, creating dancing patterns on the ceiling that mimicked his rhythmic strumming.

Why did I surmise that Django could have been a relative? It was nonsense, of course, but I reasoned that my father had similar dark good looks, which could have been handed down to him from this mysterious man, a smoldering cigarette protruding from his pursed lips on the cover of the CD case I was holding. Django and my father’s father were born only five years apart—John Thomas Gossett in 1905 and Django in 1910. By then, my relatives had embraced the Southern Baptist religion, which is about as far from the Catholic faith as one can turn. The Reinhardts had never embraced an organized religion, though their superstitions as fetish worshipers influenced them to adopt Catholic symbolism as a safeguard against evil spirits.

As I watched the beads imitate the train’s vibrations on the taut surface of my denim skirt, I wondered if Django had ever run the knobby length of a rosary through his sensitive fingers “just in case.” I imagined that he would have known how to handle each bead with effortless dexterity given his talent with his instruments. He had received his first banjo-guitar at the age of twelve. He learned how to play it by mimicking the fingerings of the musicians he watched, astounding everyone with his nimbleness and his sense of rhythm. Before he was thirteen, he began his thirty-year musical career, which brought him a precarious run of fame and fortune.

The fact that he was born into a band of wandering comedians, who had traveled from Germany through Belgium and into France after the war of 1870, was part of Reinhardt’s charisma. He remained a gypsy to the core throughout his boisterous career. Even when he was wealthy enough to afford a mansion, which he bought, he gathered his Romanies around him, setting up camp in the home’s large salon and on the lawn surrounding the house. Django turned away from his music only once. It was during the last day of his life when he died of a stroke at the age of 43. Just before he passed, he told his wife that something was wrong with his fingers but he wouldn’t allow her to call a doctor. He hated their needles, felt superstitious of medicine and science. These beliefs did not serve him well in the end, but what convictions formed in unruly childhoods ever do?

Like Django’s rowdy life of traipsing from place to place, my early years were spent on the move. I never trundled along in a horse-drawn caravan with pots clanking and beads swaying, but I was traveling by the time I was six months old—a standard issue Air Force brat. I have black-and-white photographs of my mother and father taken during a five-year stretch that found us living in places as diverse as Texas and Great Britain. My parents were twenty-something’s in the photos. Dad was trim in his skimpy nylon swimsuit, tanned skin gleaming as he lounged on a beach in Africa with the ocean stretching out behind him. Mom poses on a small divan in our tiny house in England—a glam shot à la 50’s pinup girl, her long legs gracefully crossed at the ankles and a mischievous look in her eyes. I have always loved these photographs: my parents when they were young and beautiful, not the tyrants I had made them out to be from puberty into young adulthood nor the aging, fragile beings they have now become.

As the train lumbered toward Manhattan that day, I thought about how the rosary and the photos are proof that the emotional import of a thing is not inherent in the thing itself, but in the association it evokes. When we entered the weak light of the tunnel that would shunt us into Penn Station, I studied Jesus’ limp form draped on the crucifix in that terribly graceful death pose. I can let it rest in the palm of my hand with no reaction other than the pure enjoyment of the craftsmanship that produced its delicate beauty. But as I study the photographs of my young mother and father, I feel emotions that no one else would feel when looking at these nostalgic figures from another time—my parents when I was a precocious toddler.

As the train loped to a stop, Django’s snappy rendition of “Minor Swing,” a song he co-wrote with Stéphane Grappelly, was playing. I applauded that he never settled down, even as I think I know what it must have cost him. I didn’t realize until after I had become a fan of his music that he played with a handicap. He saw his infirmity as a challenge that he was obligated to overcome. One of the ways he did this was to redesign the harmonic system of his instruments so that the weakness of the fingers on his left hand, which had been maimed in a fire, would not be noticeable in his music.

Fire is such an important element in a gypsy’s life. Sometimes it burns for good, sometimes for ill. I closed my eyes as the doors of the train whooshed open, imagining Django’s clan preparing to dismantle their camp nearly a century before, their urge to burn some other ground heeded once again. There would have been sizzle when they doused the fire, the splatter of water reducing flame to char. There would have been the stamp of restless hooves on clotted dirt—the acrid air all the horses needed to know of moving on.

An astrologist once told me that I am a phoenix; that I burn down lives and arise from the ashes, born anew. I have come to see this as my own form of gypsy-like sabotage, which keeps me on the move far too much. Since that weekend in the Hamptons, which brought the rosary into my life, I have traveled far in many ways, still corrupted by wanderlust and a desire to burn down all that is not working, which often takes with it all that is. I take Django with me when I’m on the move. It’s as if his lively cadences create the perfect score for a life lived in constant motion, even after so many years and so many miles have gone by the wayside. The rosary travels with me, too—tucked away in a soft silk pouch in my purse, “just in case.”

Karaoke Laughter

2010-01-10T08:07:00.000-08:00

Between Columbus Circle and 86^th Street, the last car of the one train is rarely crowded in the middle of the day during the week. The last several cars also happen to empty out close to the exit at my stop, so I always try to walk the platform to the back before entering the train. One day, I took a seat opposite a black man who looked at me as if I’d invaded his bedroom, treating me to a piercing perusal that quickly grew uncomfortable. In order to diffuse the situation, I exaggeratedly lifted my gaze to the signs that ran along the top of the car like a festive datum of mixed media, spying him as clearly as I could through my peripheral vision.

My first impression was that he was well dressed, even though his jeans were quite frayed. He wore a skidlid, which is what my Dad used to call a beret, confidently cocked to one side in a deep camel color; a crewneck sweater of a similar color over a button-down collar shirt and leather loafers in rich caramel. His gaze stayed on me until he felt sure I’d lost interest. Within a few seconds of believing he was no longer being watched, he broke into karaoke laughter—I call it this because no sound emitted from his wide open mouth as he tossed his head back with an almost ecstatic expression on his face. His teeth were large, straight and white against his dark skin, and his lips remained a mime of amusement for a long while.

It wasn’t until the train approached 72^nd Street that his face grew serious. His hands shot forward, gesturing as if making a point during an argument with some imagined someone. These emphatic movements, which included splaying fingers and pivoting wrists for emphasis, lasted until the train sped away from 79^th Street. Then, as if the rocking motion thrilled him, he threw his head back once again, overcome with silent glee.

Taking advantage of the fact that I was nearing my stop at 86^th Street, I lifted my backpack and pretended to adjust my glasses so I could sweep my gaze across him a few times to cement details in my mind. He had grown relaxed enough that he was lounging in the two seats adjacent to the conductor’s compartment, his long legs crossed at the ankle, shoulders wedged into the corner made by the train’s skin and the metal bar marking the entrance/exit. His hands, which rested in his lap most of the time would flutter to life every so often, teasing from him his outrage at the perpetrator locked inside his head.

Author Jerry Cleaver declares that the active ingredient in good fiction is emotion. In his book Immediate Fiction, he states: “Emotion is the trickiest part of life and the trickiest part of fiction. Emotion is the payoff, the ultimate connection, where identification occurs, where the reader becomes the character and feels what the character feels.” Though I couldn’t relate to this man’s life, per se, I did feel as if I “got” his range of emotions. I’ve had plenty of fights with others in my head and I’ve felt joy within myself in public; I just usually show these emotions in appropriate ways if I show them in front of others at all. Cleaver goes on to say, “The first thing to realize is that the world is emotionally determined. Passion, not reason, makes things happen. We love, help, hate, and destroy each other not because of logic, but because of passion.”

If you were to write a story in which this guy on the train was a character, how would you define his emotional determination? Who would you say he was arguing with and what would that person’s emotional determination be?

Delux Stroller

2010-01-04T07:49:00.000-08:00

The tufted silhouette of a sailboat, its flag slack in the humid air, bobbed just offshore on a glassine sea the color of twilight. The sun pummeled the cracked planks in the boardwalk, sending beachgoers scurrying across as they headed for the sand, flip flops in hand. The twenty five-block stretch of raised promenade is an exercise Mecca 365 days a year. Joggers, power-walkers and rollerbladers (in spite of the signs that tell them to keep off) careen toward vacationers ambling along as they check out the flora and fauna, which amounts to South Beach’s out-of-control population of wild cats.

I was trying to walk faster to stir up the least bit of breeze but none would come, and the sweat trickled from top to bottom, soaking every piece of clothing including my shoes. A slack-shouldered man, ambling toward me, seemed impervious to the heat. His stare was catatonic as he walked beside his wife, who was pushing a new baby in a deluxe stroller. His pale skin was untouched by the slightest bit of moisture, as if he was being cooled from the inside out.

The word that came to mind was “frozen.” Was it his marriage that had turned him into a walking piece of marble; lack of sleep from having a new baby, perhaps; or was the stroller the culprit—pricier than he could afford? He raised his face skyward as pelicans glided past, skirting the tall buildings that hem the shoreline. He watched closely as they dipped and rolled like pinballs falling back toward the flipper, catching the ocean breeze that refused to lower itself to our elevation. The wife stopped, fussing over the baby while he continued to plod along, completely unaware that she was no longer by his side.

In Your First Novel, Ann Rittenberg and Laura Whitcomb explain that settings can either mirror plot, characters and/or theme, or can contrast them. They describe a setting that mirrors the plot as a doctor who is going blind living in Alaska where night can last for months; and a setting that contrasts the plot as a woman who has amnesia working in a scrapbooking store crammed with ways to celebrate and display memories.

What struck me about this man on the boardwalk is that he seemed incongruently cool compared to the rest of humanity milling around on the scorching wood surface. He was, to me, an example of a character in contrast to his setting. Do you find he’d make an interesting persona for a story? If so, what tale would you build around him?

Bird of a Woman

2009-12-29T09:50:00.001-08:00

I was making my way into midtown Manhattan from Brooklyn one morning, where I was to interview the notoriously testy architect Robert A. M. Stern, when a tiny bird of a woman clattered onto the F train at Jay Street. She was wearing a dark green garbage bag into which she’d jabbed holes for her head and arms, choosing to drape her scuffed leather jacket over the wire-mesh cart she was pushing, which in truth seemed to be holding her erect, instead of wearing it.

Beneath the jacket were plastic bags in assorted colors that held a cacophony of logos from shops, and just as ubiquitous as in shoppers’ hands on the New York streets, nearly every other one bulging through the cart read “I (Heart) New York” in bold black and red. The woman held two cups. One was Styrofoam and fairly intact. The other had become so misshapen from being squeezed that it had been reduced to a half-round wad of dirty paper.

As soon as the train lurched away from the platform, she began to sing in a quavering voice, “The Lord smiles on me; the Lord smiles on me,” the a-cappella melody poignant given her thin voice that petered off to faintness at the end of each ostinato. Just as haphazardly as she’d started her song, she stopped, in mid sentence, and declared that it would be fine with her if anyone wanted to give her money. I fished six cents from my pocket and tossed it into the outstretched cup, the sound of the coins muffled by the Styrofoam. The guy next to me dropped a clatter of change on top of mine.

She was leaning forward to make her way through the rest of the car when the train left the next station. The velocity of its movement jammed her spine against the metal pole at her back. She hesitated; then made several weak false starts before gaining her forward momentum as the train settled into its loping rhythm. Her shuffling gait gaining little ground, she started to sing again: “The Lord smiles on me; Yes, He does. The Lord smiles on me.”

I still can’t fathom why she backtracked and stopped in front of me, but she did. After a few uncomfortable seconds of being treated to her intense scrutiny, I was relieved when she took a long, slow breath; looked at the ceiling of the subway car, then back at me and sang, “The Lord smiles on you, too,” a staccato rise in her voice accentuating the word “too.” Suddenly, as if awaking from a trance, a wide smile split her plum-colored lips to reveal only two yellowed teeth on the right side of her lower jaw. As she repeated, “The Lord smiles on you, too,” seeming to enjoy the fact that I was smiling back at her, she reached up and adjusted the dirty gray bandana tied around her forehead, which read almost white against her coffee-colored skin. Then, as erratically as her smile had appeared, it left her face and the trance took hold once more.

After a last furtive glance in my direction, she continued on, trudging through the train. Her chorus, “The Lord smiles on me,” ebbed and flowed as the wheeled cart held her bent frame as close to erect as it would stand. I had to stop myself from typecasting this frail woman who appeared to be homeless. If she were a character in a story, there are so many obvious traits that could be pressed upon her, but I wanted to avoid being predictable so I asked myself what aspects of character could I give her that would transcend assumption? What are those unique details that would explain this woman’s complexity and how had her past shaped them? I’d like to know what you think.

They Want Something

2009-12-29T09:48:00.000-08:00

There was a statuesque couple on the subway last week. Their icy blue eyes glinted behind stylish rimless glasses, even in the feeble light of the train. Both had fair skin that seemed bisque-like against tawny fur and amber leather. They were so magnificently tall that they could have descended from Norse gods with powerful names like Thor, the god of thunder, and Radgrid, one of the female Valkyries.

The pair seemed even more extraordinarily out of place since the car was filled with the slumped, weary passengers who were regular fixtures on the red line at the end of any given New York workday. It was a fresh out-of-placeness that conjured chill breezes and snow-bound tundras, and it had something to do with how incredibly chic they were—their fur boots, laced up to their knees, crimping their pale blue jeans in a furry flourish.

When their gazes flitted around the car, they mastered the unengaged stare adopted by most subway riders, but their expressions softened intimately when their eyes met. A slight curl would just barely touch the corners of his lips and she would tighten her hand on his sleeve ever so slightly, her manicured nails impressing the spongy leather. I wanted them to speak so I could hear their voices—would their utterances have been staccato sentences or fluid phrases? If they had spoken, what would she have asked of him; he of her?

In Ann Hood’s book Creating Character Emotions, she writes, “Description, no matter how brilliantly crafted, cannot carry a reader forward.” A character, quite simply, should want something. “Desire is the driving force of human nature and, applied to characters, it creates a steam of momentum to drive a story forward.” As I recorded my fascination with this Nordic couple in my writer’s notebook that day, I asked myself, “What would Thor and Radgrid want?” I’ll tell you the story I concocted if you’ll share with me the tale you would tell to illustrate what it is they would passionately desire?

Alphabet Man

2009-10-12T14:58:00.000-07:00

As I stood on the shuttle bus that would shunt us from the da Vinci airport terminal to a plane bound for Bologna, the man standing next to me gave me the impression that he might have been a featherweight boxer when he was young. It wasn’t his face, which showed no signs of the abuse a boxer would have endured, but a lanky grace that seemed to be natural but hard-won. The sunlight was glowing on his facial hair, making the tips of the stubble seem as if they were wired with tiny points of light.

His ears were especially remarkable. The interiors, which should have concaved within the outer curling rims, actually protruded forward like pillows of taut flesh. He had a sour expression that made his thicker-than-normal lips seem perpetually pursed in disapproval and his eyes were squinty with crow’s feet fanning out from the edges. His expression reminded me of Clint Eastwood's during his “Dirty Harry” days when he’d peer at his intended targets just before he blew them away, that famous scowl growing more petulant as the minutes ticked by.

The man on the shuttle was a walking dictionary—on his right hand between his thumb and forefinger, the word BLOW was tattooed, and on his left BASE, both in Baskerville, all caps. His steely blue baseball cap, which was pulled down tight around his shaved skull, read POLO just above the adjustable leather strap that held the cap tight on his head. On a band that ran along the edge of the knee-height pocket of his army-green cargo pants, “Think Pink” was embroidered, and his navy blue jacket that looked as if it were made of a lightweight parachute fabric had Stone Gap embroidered in a white circle sewn to his chest just above his heart.

The jacket, which fitted him snugly, was clean but aged as if he’d snapped it from a rack at a thrift shop. He received several calls as we stood there waiting for the other passengers to file onto the people mover at a snail’s pace. Each time the fuchsia cell phone rang, his expression went from sour to bitter. He’d flip it open, impatiently speak in Italian, snap it closed and slip it back into his pocket, shaking his head like whomever had just called him had a mountain of nerve.

The last time alphabet man stowed the phone, which looked more like a teenager’s than a man’s, a precocious toddler let out a series of howls that made him wince. His mouth drew in so tight and his eyes grew so thin that I thought he would unfurl a right jab and blast his fist through the window, shattering the girl’s noise and the glass. Instead, he turned and shot a disapproving glance toward the mother, who was wearing a cacophony of bright colors and carrying a garishly bright mustard-colored faux-crocodile purse that was so large and so covered with bling that it looked comical on her arm. In contrast, the child, who was obviously tired and getting louder by the nanosecond, was dressed in white from head to toe as if she’d spent Sunday in Rome being carried from Lauds to Terce to Vespers.

The driver finally boarded and we swayed our way through corridors of baggage depots dotting the underbelly of the main terminal. When we reached the tarmac where we’d board the plane, Alphabet Man slung his carry-on bag over the right shoulder of his articulate body. It was then that I noticed there was no insignia on it. Not one word marked the pale gray multi-zippered duffle with its white strap and piping. What a paradox! The one place most people carry letters and words with them, he had none.

I wondered about his story: did his strange ears make him a target for bullies as a boy; is that why he'd seemed so scrappy? What had made this graceful man so bitter? Who kept calling him? The words "BASE" and "BLOW" could obviously be construed as drug-related, so why not tattoo them in an edgy font rather than in one of the most traditional typefaces there is? I want to know what you think. How would you answer these questions? If you're in the mood to take it even further, what backstory would you create to explain this man?

When in Rome...

2009-10-12T13:58:00.000-07:00

As we flew out of Rome, the plane tipped a wing toward the western horizon as if saluting the levitating sun, which was draped in a mantle of vaporous spun silver. The orb glowed in a burnished explosion at its core and was dragging a tail of bronzed light along the Tyrrhenian Sea. The coppery swath of water could have been a luminous carpet leading to a radiant throne. This is the entrance I would have expected God to make were he coming to visit the Pope.