Oxford American

Image courtesy Insight Editions from Miles Davis: The Collected Artwork

Issue 120, Spring 2023

March 28, 2023

"Please give my reflection a break from the face it's seeing now."

– Rihanna ft. SZA

My sister is trying to get me to put my grandnephew in my band.

I tell her, I already got a guitarist.

Yeah, she says, but it ain't him.

And it ain't gon be him. Ain't he sick?

Sugar. Just sugar.

Sugar? I’m thinking, First I heard about it. Shit, I was talking about his crutches. The nigger walks on crutches. Didn't even know about the sugar. Cannonball had sugar. Dolphy had sugar. Plenty of niggers dead from sugar. But I don't tell her that.

Yeah, sugar. Just hear him play.

Cicely keeps giving me advice where it's not wanted. I’m open to her words as long as they don't involve the music, my music.

Hearsay, she says. People calling him out of his name.

Is it? I say.

Problem is, I don't know what to believe. Got to keep an open mind. Rumor is just that. In this world full of haters and the self-righteous, evil tongues will say anything.

Cicely says she don't want to hear all that who-did-what, that who-shot-John. So what if Herbie likes men? Why do you care? He's your pianist. You ain't got to fuck him.

I look at her sideways. You got some lip on you, I say.

You should have thought about that before we got married.

I wasn't thinking about it then and I ain't thinking about it now.

So go ahead and fire him, she says.

Now you telling me who to fire?

The air in the room moves from the corners.

No, she says. I’m just trying to help you tell yourself, seeing that this is such a cause of concern. What will the world think if it turns out you got a—

You got a lot to say today.

The room listens. She hums back into resolution. As it should be. She should know by now, you’re either for me or against me. No in between. Like music. Only two kinds. Good or bad. No in between. We are stable: me, Cicely, the furniture and other objects, stability everywhere on the earth.

You want to hear a joke? she says.

Shoot.

How many New Yorkers does it take to change a light bulb?

What?

It's a knock-knock joke. Knock knock.

What?

How many New Yorkers does it take to change a light bulb?

How many?

What the fuck do you care?

Wait for the right moment. Then catch into it with everything you have. One bar may hide another bar in the same way that one complaint usually holds another. (Why an argument once it gets started can never end.) Be in there somewhere. When you think too much you get something you don't mean.

Begin with yourself underfoot. The beat is laid on your shoulders. Get up on the one.

The point between here and there is where you are your best. In coming to find a note you may find another. The call, the response. The sweet science of improvisation.

I came naked out of the mother. My daddy, a dentist, bought me the best garments for my body. (Got that from him, the clothing bug.) I never had to elbow my way up.

Music? I took it from where it came from.

As for anything good, you play it for me and I’ll listen to it.

Music recalls its steps. Ahead. And that feeling of coming after, late, behind the beat. When soloing, when you come to a passage, breathe and be patient so you can hear all that is there.

Let it lift and steady you.

Get up on the one. Get up as high as you can get.

The elevator opens. It's full of white people, ofays. I don't step on. Too white for me, I say. The doors close.

Unknown dust near me. Darkness in the trees. The white buildings leaning into the ground. The sky spread out. My ears penetrated by the noise of frogs and crickets. My body. And mosquitos flying about. The grass wrapped in clouds of red and white. The streetlamp casts tiny globes of light, little planets. The curb kneels so I may cross. Breathing on all sides. All things on all sides in motion. Darkness running on all fours.

I am the Prince of Darkness. My shadow lengthens at night. Night extends me.

Cicely, I have lost you. Have I lost you? How could I let that happen? You left me. I forced you to leave me.

You’re still in my heart. I can feel you go through there. Jigsaw fragments. Returning always.

Take this as it settles, then: Why should we mean nothing to each other when we’re really nothing?

I’m making no gestures. You’re two years older than me. The wiser one. More experienced. More mature. You are always the wiser.

Other troubles I can stand. Money. Ofays. Family. Music. But my woman?

My form takes up with you best.

Who took the message? Who lost the keys? Who left the door unlatched? Who forgot the dry cleaning? I left the sprinkler on? The heart going out over everything.

Out walking. Trying to clear my head. Thawed afternoon. Dust in the shallow air, green notes. Fog rising from my mouth. The light breeze can't sway the branches. Black buildings thicken around me. Instead of going home, I walk some more, walk until I can't walk anymore and just stay put, remain standing, my shadow growing inch by inch, a giant.

There is a certainty that makes us love each other. So how then did this separation come about?

Shaped by whatever breath I draw, whatever I finger. Lungs and hands. Valves and stops. The trumpet convinces the hand, the mouth that what you have you hold to practice with to play with to pose with. Back-breaking leisure. The stalled tightening of a run. The buzzing in the beehive of the mute. A language takes hold. What calls me is that sound that announces, insists at each moment that I am individual. Dark dazzle. Blowing fresh.

The music teacher loans me some sheet music ("St. Louis Blues"). He asks me to let him hold my clarinet (my second instrument, something to cut my musical teeth on). Weeks pass but he never returns my reed. I ask for it back.

Sure, Miles. After you return my sheet music.

I gave that back to you weeks ago.

He looks at me. Young man, let me tell you one thing. I have a PhD in Niggerology. Don't try to run games on me.

I gave it back to you.

When you come clean, you can have your clarinet.

I thought about it. Where do you keep your sheet music?

He pointed to the place.

Motherfucker, go look.

Death, get all the way away. I will concede to anything stronger than I am. Give up. But even Death the butcher can't cut me down. Only memory dies. When I was a kid I saw a little girl get hit by a truck. She lay in the middle of the street. The blood was thick like one big red note dropping from her body, the sound all the other notes wrap themselves around. Over the years I have lost so much of the day, how the recollections thin and disappear. I am no more certain than you are of the details. In her bright colorful dress she resembled a pink silhouette against the black tarmac. One foot propped behind her. This apparent precision of gesture. The shoe off. The layers clear now in the slant light of remembrance.

I ran home, the world tilting this way and that.

For days after, for weeks, for months, perhaps for years, I was spooked. Something would startle me, a voice in a room I thought was empty, pushing a door open and catching sight of a blurred shape fleeing from the room, an echo in a room that shouldn't be there, my body making an extra shadow. Some slight fear of the dark even now. Spooked.

My grandnephew Tony wears his hair slicked back, a wing over each shoulder. He's chilling with his knucklehead friend, some nigger whose name I didn't catch, whose name ain't worth remembering.

A week later I hear his crutches thump rubber feet against the floor. No easy matter to both walk on crutches and carry an instrument. He carries his axe the right way, like a fragile mummy.

He sees me and breaks out into a great grin. Uncle Miles.

Hobbles into the room, his right leg bent back away from the floor flamingo-like. He's got his own style, dressed in vintage clothes, ruffled sleeves, checkered pants, all of him sunk into a motorcycle boot on his left foot.

He looks at the bowl of blow sitting on my counter, his big gaze opening by the minute. What has he gotten himself into?

Nigger, I say, that ain't popcorn.

I point to a chair, and like a construction worker making his way down from a scaffold, he maneuvers his crutches then flops down into the chair.

I hold him in a long gaze, but he doesn't seem to be intimidated. Only perks up his ears to take in what I’m listening to. He grabs one crutch and uses his ringed finger to tap out a little polyrhythm, Philly Joe Jones, then laughs out loud, taken with himself.

He's handsome, a pretty boy, smooth skin, Roman features, smiling an animated smile, but balding prematurely (thirty-three years old), his receding hairline like a body of water at low tide. Our chairs closely approaching, he rushes into talk, a mouthful, selling himself. How good he is. How he's ambidextrous. And how he owns both left-handed and right-handed axes. How he has perfect pitch. How he can read. How he knows all my songs and thousands more à la Sonny Rollins. Everything he will bring to my band.

I’m thinking, A damaged boy with an instrument.

I ask him about his leg. He rolls up his pants leg, unwraps the brown bandage, shows me his calf black with the missing flesh as if bitten by a dirty-toothed shark, the whole muscle eaten away.

How did that happen?

Two years ago.

Two years ago?

Yeah, he says. At the end of the semester during final exams. I took my last exam, knew I had aced it. I was so happy, so proud, so relieved after all the stress. So I found me an empty classroom, took a seat over by the radiator and figured I’d take a nap. I touched the radiator. It was cold to the touch, the heat off, the room nice and cool, so I propped my legs up on the radiator to get comfortable. Fell asleep. When I woke up I smelled a funny smell. This is the leg that was actually touching the radiator.

Your leg was burning and you couldn't feel that shit?

No. I guess because of the diabetes.

I shake my head. Ain't that a bitch.

Yeah. Surgeries and skin grafts and more surgeries. Antibiotics. All because of one nap. The doctors don't think it will heal and want to amputate. Fuck that shit.

I keep looking at him. Let them take your leg. If they cut off my dick I’d find a way to get it back. As long as I have my mind.

He just looks at me.

Anyway, fuck all the talking, motherfucker. Just play something.

He picks up his axe and plays me something, blows my mind. Sounds like Jimi.

I see myself rising to give him a spoonful of cocaine.

At least once a week someone rings my bell thinking my house is still a place of worship. I open the door and find a living breathing person on my doorstep. I only let in the ones I know I can fuck. (The evil of living.) The pretense of amazement when I open the door—How did you find me? You’ve come to the right place. God must have sent you to me—letting sunlight and a body into the granite airy space. The basilica remains untouched: confessionals—a priest's haunted face behind the grille of one booth for all eternity—side altars, baptismal fountains, stained-glass windows, the holy pictures and crucifixes, oval prints and paintings of ordained faces, and the reliquary housing the flesh from a saint (lips, I’m told).

Through my body I see, feel, all the other bodies I have had.

They come. And I await them. Summoned. In the depths of one face I can see all the faces I’ve had.

I’ll take them into me, the ones that come here, my house, this old basilica, a listening post.

A perfect set. The band takes bows. I look at Al Foster. Played his ass off tonight. Solid shifts of drumming charged with invented changes. Fat time. I go over and kiss him on the mouth. Fat Time.

I

t took a black cat to make two white cats play their asses off. Jimi.

The sense that she was trying too hard. The flowers perfectly arranged. Lemon-scented soap. A gondola. In the middle of her fucking living room. Framed watercolors of every variety (storms, landscapes, still lifes, portraits) cheapen the sight of a Steinway with lid raised up. Chimes out on the balcony, banking in and out of view. The view of the city in the windows muted through the glass. Pastel walls. Painted birds. Light seems to come from everywhere. Her crib more like a supposition than the real. Suppose I place this here.

I had accepted her invitation. Is this what I’d been waiting all week for? Too eager to visit, now too eager to leave. Not the first or last time a rich white person will invite me to their home because I’m Miles Davis.

She enters the room with a bulky mobile phone pushed to her ear, her appearance a mixture of formal and casual. Wearing flip-flops. (That crunch sound like a shoe pressing into snow.) Her face makeup-less, shining with power. (What difference does it make how you look close-up?) A long tangle of fat pearls. A silk scarf. Rich white bitch.

She wipes back her dark hair and greets me joyfully. It doesn't feel good to touch her hand.

She's edging in, bringing me a cup of tea. The charms on her bracelet jingle. I take a few sips then set the cup back onto the silver serving tray.

The curtains sway softly.

She asks me some question about my music. What can I say? I say what's on the tip of my tongue. Too late in the day to think anything through.

I find myself in her garden. The hedges have grown past the height of the windows like stacks of children's blocks. Several grasses grow raggedly together. A branch bends burdened with six-winged birds spying on our conversation. She speaks very little, sensing that I have things on my mind. We go a little way into the greenish, almost submarine grotto of a cluster of tall trees, where we hear wind lashing and rain splashing on the top branches. Sunshine in the rain.

The sound of the afternoon starting to part. About us the environment crumbles in red light, bits of darkness gathering around us, the darkness that appears as patches of black gauze, banners.

Stained with sunset, she moves through the dark garden, her heavy funnel of skirt bearing her down like a bell, an anchor.

She says I should learn to ride horses. The talking authority of she who knows, passed on with a look of hard-ass wisdom. I could tell her that my daddy was rich, a dentist, and owned his own farm where I learned to ride horses.

Fireflies spark on and off around us.

Okay, I say. But only if you’ll teach me.

Saying these words because we should play white people, play them for what we can get, even if we don't need what they give, gift. Listen, don't get on the elevator with them. Instead, wait for them to invite you into their home. Then take them for everything you can.

A train hurtling through lonely night. Finding my way home.

The look I see on my father's face. For days I walk my father's farm sick, living on the nerve. Pulsing at the cold borders of a world borne down by smack like a black iceberg frozen in place. Heart high sorrowful, burning forehead, parched tongue. Heat making me. The wind making my body ruffle. The wind pummels a tree, and the branches rise and fall like a conductor's baton, thick leaves spilling to the ground. That same wind rolls the earth over, waves.

I rotate inside the black silo of my body, burrowing into the tunnel of the past. The hours given and taken in school. The scuffles in the coatrooms, the arguments with my mother and pissing contests with my father (strong-willed and stubborn like me; he gets it from me, Father of Darkness). The scrapples in the Apple, the time I’d sat beside the sick and dying holding their hands, feeling their last days, the light going out in the body, the cells going dark. (I will never die.) And the cats like Navarro, Clifford, Cannonball, Dolphy (bean eater), Chambers, Bird (grimy motherfucker), Trane, Jimi (horny motherfucker), and Rhoades who died before their time like leaves that drop from trees too early.

I hurry back up the river of time until I splash into the sea where present past and future exist all at once. Fat time. My brain passes me pictures of the future. See myself. Older now. So much still inside me. Prowling the streets in the shook heart of New York. Full of energy. Saddled. A horse. Looking to fuck, get high. The city dragging strays about it. Down and out in New York City. Sirens reddening the air. What can be remembered and can never be forgotten. (What is the word for a future foretold and remembered?)

Memory stops. So much still beyond the reach of my eyes.

The sun sinks toward the darkening hills. Dark bodies pass by far out at the horizon, a countryside of black plants. Gobble up. Strong horse circling for me alone. I circle with it until I can catch up, hop on, ride. Raking my fingers through the horse's mane. Blood galloping inside my body. Thousands of years go by. Wheezes of air. Past the gate post stained with goat's blood. Along the edge of the woods that echo a rustling junction. Through the cemetery, the gravestones rising and falling in sleep. Following riding/walking trails through bent grasses that go over long fields, including a stubble field with water standing in it. Small in the passed-through air, I dismount. Move through that swinging soil. Drink water with my hands, my cupped fingers ladling silt.

On the damp steps of the Mississippi River I lose my footing. A half-me of water, a half-me of air.

I must fall no farther. Breathe in rectangular solitude. Listen. Uncontested spasms. Listen. All the way back into life. My ear in each stone. Hearing everything the world has made this day.

Flocks of birds moving in their great element turn their eyes down and see me, turn back in the air. Fuck you too, motherfuckers.

The house is winding way across the fields.

Tembling. Particles of skin flaking away. Coughing bits of flesh. I use pipe cleaners to poke the sludge clogging my veins but no luck at getting them open, clear. I move along the ground near the fallen twigs.

The sun stands out in black on a reddish background like a funeral chariot on a piece of terra-cotta. The doctor arrives, rattling with green bottles full with the light of the sky. He speaks to me in even tones. Brain-ready, he plans to inject me, thinks I will let him. No. Only one way beyond this pain, addiction. Cold turkey.

He can't believe what he's hearing. Starting to humor me.

Listening upward, two shapes inside me rise and move away. I say, Leave, motherfucker. Carry your doctoring ass off this farm.

He does.

I hear far in and far out from me.

I rise and walk. Going to show the bats and the birds and the rockets and satellites that I can fly too. Prince of Darkness. Rise above the high trees surrounding the house, far into the piney tops. Beaming distances. Idling in space. The moon rolls on in shadow. At this elevation, I feel deprived of weight. How uncommon the light when clouds clear. I lean back from the glow of the moon. I can always come back to earth.

Frances the dancer: her slim legs like a tuning fork. Wife number one.

We were the same height, the same size. I make an accidental discovery. I can fit into her clothes, into her shoes. Wearing her around the house becomes habit. Like an extension of myself, another me, Miles plus.

Betty: wife number two.

Everyone wants to know: will Jimi and I record? I want to. Then I catch them together, Betty and Jimi, tangled in six strings.

I can't stand a pianist with busy hands. All that thumping around. Making all the right motions but one. So I tell him, Play like you don't know how to play piano.

P

lay a little more of that.

Set list: E.S.P. Spring. Cicely. Paraphernalia. Dolores. Masqualero. Ice Nine. Freedom Jazz Dance. Riot. Hand Jive. Nefertiti. Prince of Darkness.

What is it like to be a musician? I hear music all the time, even now. I heard my father's deep voice rumbling from the body of his layers of tailored clothing. I hear the cry of small animals in the furs I wear. Fuck them.

The world tells me what it wants to tell me. Can't turn it off. Tell me, freight train. Tell me in the voice of the sea, deep structured roar, or in the light chirping of a bird. Train. Whistle. Trumpet.

Now and then I wish I had the option of taking my chances with silence.

You’re supposed to like your "listeners," be grateful for these ordinary motherfuckers because they buy your records and come to your shows. Fans. Fan clubs. No, I wish I could club all these motherfuckers. Clobber them. They take up all the space in the world, suck up all the air, crowd you into corners. No, motherfucker, I don't care if you like my music. No, I don't want to meet your girlfriend or your wife. Take that bitch and get out of my face. Give me some room. Some quiet time to myself. Can't you see I’m here drinking at the bar. I don't want to see no fucking body.

The one good thing about being on stage, the chance to be alone with motherfuckers you want to spend time with. That's why I turn my back to those ordinary motherfuckers sitting out there looking at me, admiring me, wishing they could be me.

Give me your money. I don't owe you shit. You should be eating crumbs out of my hand.

Motherfucker, you want to do something for me. Here's what you can do. Cut off your arm. Cut off your leg. Better yet, just slice your throat from ear to ear and die. Give me some room to breathe.

Before I can reach her, Cicely senses me like an owl, flies up to the ceiling, wings spread, claws out, beak at the ready. I leave the herd of four-legged furniture, three-legged stools, and one-legged lamps for the garden. Cicadas cover the ground like carpet bombs dropped from a fleet of war planes. They don't relent. I think about Cicely, her features glazed. Color and velocity.

I sit down on a low two-armed swing and study the garden sexual with ferns, butterflies, banana trees, flaring branches, twittering birds, droning bees.

Cicely, why are you still with me? Don't you know by now who I am?

Miles, she would say, I know where you been and who with. She would reel off facts: name, place, positions, the number of strokes it took for me to come.

Still, she doesn't know me.

I’ve said all I have to say. If the thing hasn't been said this way, then the Devil can't say it.

She keeps a compact inside her antelope purse. She fills the sink with water, removes the compact, stares into her reflection. Puts her mirror at the bottom. Every day her face becomes clearer. Can't she see me there? Mirror mirror on the wall, who's the meanest son-of-a-bitch of them all? Me, the Prince of Darkness.

Darkness feeds me, sustains me, provides longevity, eternity. I cannot die. Be that as it may, Cicely saved me, more than once. Like the time I snorted the longest line of blow ever, around the four corners of a room inside the apartment of an abandoned building, snorted from one corner to the next then out the door, into the hallway, along the floor to the next corner, then around the corner, through the door, and onto the stoop where Cicely waited.

Motherfuckers think they want religion. They don't want no religion. Every angel is terrifying, not just me. Religion is a bitch.

Dazzling with drink, Jimi glides forward to take the joint.

I dig Jimi. So much is not spoken. We compare notes. Which bitches are fuckin and which bitches are not. Who among our friends believes in free love—I fucking don't—and who does not. The best characteristics of Band-Aids.

I toss off the wine. Jimi tips the last drops of the bottle onto his tongue.

My fingers crack. Hands. I paint my daybreak. Folded in faint light. The snot and blow clotted inside my nostrils. Trudge. No words as well. The skin touches glow. I smell the odor emanating from the canvas. A few random straws from the brush sticking to the trapped canvas like whiskers or trapped rays of sunlight. I breathe. The air getting raw between me and the canvas. Blue and red squares. Fragile yellows, rich greens. White nailed there. What these colors are growing through. I extend my figures, laying out in circles. The thing itself before it is made into anything.

In the looking glass it's you I see, time after time. Wobbly with dimensions.

The phone rings.

Why the fuck you calling me?

Your nephew here in the studio.

I said why the fuck you calling me? What's my nephew got to do with me?

He's here at the studio.

Nigger, I ain't deaf. I heard. He's there and I’m here. I’m painting today.

...

Is there anything else?

He really thought you was going to be here since you told him to come.

Did I say I was going to be there?

...

Just let him play his part. I’ll listen over the phone. And then pay him.

I don't think he needs the money. His father—

I don't give a fuck who his father is or was or what he did or how much money he got. I already told you. I’m painting today.

I take out my phone to show my nephew and his friend a holograph of me when I was young, just starting out like them.

How old are you?

How old do I look?

Hard to tell.

Uncle Miles, you been around forever.

Longevity, I say.

Forever.

Since Bible days.

You got jokes. I can still open a can of whoop ass.

Damn, bruh. The O.G.'s always come quick with the violence. I thought you was a professional man, whatever profession they had back in biblical times.

They got a good laugh.

The window with the measure of its own light. Light seeps under the door, through the walls.

Sound of suitcases snapping shut. Time is a canvas. Said she was leaving. So go ahead and leave. I brought her some boxes.

Her shades on the table. Nothing but air where she had been moments before.

Three wives. I’ll never get married again. At least to a woman.

The trance of driving. I steer my whip up a light beam to the stars. And I return to earth just as fast, a drop of sweat falling from a chin.

The cop signals me over.

I pull over but don't kill the engine. The doors lift like two wings and I step out of the whip. Exposed. Like a turtle out of its shell. How do I look? My hair brushed back, shellacked in a windblown manner like the speed of my whip. The day is all sun. I don't remove my shades. They blaze with darkness. My whip idling in its nest of smoke.

You want to remove the sunglasses.

I would prefer not to.

Remove the sunglasses.

...

Whose car is this?

Nigger, it's your mamma's car.

I stand wobble-rooted. Human faces swim through the fog inside my head. I remember the way the cop's face popped on, glowing with anger.

They stagger me with their lights, their questions, the room pitching and rolling. I have to hold on to Frances.

How many times did the cop hit you?

Do you think I was counting?

Did you say something smart to him?

I am smart. I always say something smart.

Will you sue them? The police department? The city?

I’m going to do more than that.

What can we do to help?

I take off my red-stained blazer and flip it to the reporter. Here, take that to the dry cleaners and see if they can get the blood out.

You’re either for me or against me.

I tell everyone that.

Don't try to change me.

I told her, Cicely, you can't change me. Just help me get clean.

I can't get rid of myself enough to just be with one woman.

Cicely, you are my sunshine. Raying in and out of my body. My sunshine.

I’m listening.

I attended the awards ceremony in an outfit of my own design, studded with creatures.

The shape of sound. The shape of light. The shape of sense. The shape of years. The shape of dreams. The shape of the blues. The shape of listening.

The microphone buzzed at first, more common than you might think. I stand under the overhead lights, at the edges of the darkness.

I raise my trumpet up vertical in front of me, antennae pulling a million sounds through the air, all the frequencies. My consciousness hovers like a cloud above my head.

I fly into the lines. Shoots of joy.

Sound winds into the ear, far back into the head. The mud brightens under my feet. I can feel the music through all distances and time. The notes fall off the sheet like rotting worms.

I change my body into time. Fat time. Incredible to myself, music all up in my body.

The producer touches a button on his computer. He touches another button. Everything seems purposeful. I’m not about to set the time right, get up on the one. His beat. His groove. So be it. Wait and make the sound surrounding "No."

Now a soft option, a few light thumps. Some sound comes jangling along. Jimi. Sampled. And Herbie too. Sampled. I play my riff. Quotations start to rise.

Now a slow plunge and lift. I play my riff although I don't feel equal to the track. I’m already sensing a new shift, the anticipation for what is to come already giving way to some other feeling I cannot name.

It comes. A new sound. Me. Sampled. Musical hand-me-downs. Another Miles.

I play my riff, the day with its usual tangle. Wait for the loop to come back around. What will I find when I return?

Swirling sentences. So many words for the dead.

All of us stand round in silence looking at the casket. The pull of six strings of grief toward the grave.

Throat-sick, I can utter no words about Jimi.

Jimi. How shall I mark his departure? In the grave he will not rot. Maybe he will bring himself back alive. What is the hardest part about coming back alive?

The host asks the rapper about his religious beliefs.

Speaking in a southern twang—did they say he's from New Orleans? Houston? Atlanta?—he gives a rambling monologue filled with long passages of obscenity (he has a fixation on shit), oaths, aphorisms, curses, and his Five Percenter beliefs—he keeps calling the host God—that makes the air buzz violently around his head bee-like, a beehive of thoughts about his head.

Then the question is put to me.

I say, The question is too hard to answer.

During the commercial break, I whisper, We should record together.

Old-timer, he says, I would like nothing more. This time, speech bubbles pop up above his head.

The hosts ask him about his significant other and his children.

He turns the rage of his monologue against himself, saying he wishes he was a better husband and a better father, but he's nothing more than a pimp player hustler pussy-harasser.

The question is put to me.

I never talk publicly about my wives and kids. No family shit.

Back to the rapper: and what about his influences?

He speaks another block paragraph, reciting his pride in all he knows, going all the way back to the origins of hip-hop, an archive.

My answer to the question: Everything.

The host asks still another question.

The rapper thinks hard. The thought has completely exhausted me, he says.

I say, Such youth, such gaiety, such free and easy ways.

The rapper responds in a spill of syllables.

Do you like touring?

I bend my frown into the camera's light. Say, Who can prove one place more than another? The man who finds his homeland sweet is a tender beginner. He to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. Let the place talk.

What makes you such a good bandleader decade after decade?

Since they rely on me, the judgment I form is important. They are stronger with me than against me. Reach the heights together. The rise of any bird is larger the larger the bird is. A leader. Not some ordinary motherfucker like ninety-five percent of the world. What it means to be a leader. Support and surpass.

The hosts asks me, How do you keep young? You don't seem to grow old. You have outlived all your peers. You’re almost one hundred years old and still going strong. What's the secret?

I can't tell him that I owe my longevity to darkness. Instead, I answer him with questions of my own. Why must I never repeat myself? Why do I grow into something new, invent new styles? Where will I go? Who will I meet? What will I do? What am I after?

I look at the score, hand-steadying brightness. That note is not saying what you think.

When I step out my door, the trees go motionless, holding their leaves back. Darkness massing behind me.

Like Dracula, I come in and out of being with a ghostly drift of wings. Silence and slow time. Release blackness onto whiteness.

I move unevenly across the room, hitting joyfully against objects in the dark. I starfish onto the floor, into the pool, onto the bed.

My nightmares rise and fall. Now crossing the body, in and out and around. Now under the body, up and down.

Nothing for the mouth.

I dream. I play a note and my trumpet grows an inch. Another note another inch. And so on, notes and inches. By the time I awaken, my trumpet stretches from coast to coast.

Traveled too much. Screwed too much. Drank too much. Spent too much. Scored too much. Too much love. All the postcards sent. The gifts bought. The places I never got to.

Where haven't I been? What haven't I done? Who is there left to meet? Just one life. The old cliché. Life is short, so they say.

It all hangs together. What they call a career. The designs of time. What they call a body of work, your oeuvre. You made it. You made it. And you changed music five times. How many people can say that? Fifty years of fingers, of mouth. Five times. Move among stars. Keep the ground turning with the earth. Set the heavens moving around us. Five times. I know. And I ain't dead yet.

One day my doctor says, Miles, eventually the wheels will fall off.

Thanks, motherfucker.

He says, Once you turn fifty the warranty runs out on everything.

He wants to replace my hip with metal from a newly discovered planet. Why not? I had three trumpets made from the material. Good shit.

Other things also need to be replaced. All my body bolted together with rare metal.

Filled with fluid, his body is wide as a tree trunk. His right arm is swollen the size of a tree, too heavy for him to lift. He's lying on his right side, his right arm extended, his defeated body like a black horizon along the white bed.

He tries to lift his head to greet me. Uncle Miles, I’m sorry you have to see me this way.

I grab a chair and pull it in full view of the bed and sit where he can see me without straining himself. You’re all fucked up, I say. A sight for sore eyes. Just try to get well.

He mumbles a response.

I want to touch him but I can't. I’m sure he now regrets not letting them amputate his blackened leg, infection coursing all through his body.

I sit with him for as long as I can, sit until I can no longer tolerate the smell of sickness, of death.

I say, Call me if you need anything.

Taking the last look. I watch him, alone in my body, alone in my sweat.

Just wait, Uncle Miles, he says. The next time you see me I’ll be up out of this bed and walking around the room.