The Story of Don

The Story of Don

“Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.”—Miles Davis

Here’s what’s not there:

The rest of your umbrage, jettisoned in a peak fury, fueled by legustrum worry, the last time you saw her was on a street that bore your name though none of your resemblance. She’d abandoned you in a crescent dream, that dream that rounded your last corner, your last ration, your last nerve. Siggy granted you amnesty from your war crimes, your lassitude, your ambiguity, your adolescent fervor as an undisciplined disciple of the Disciples of Christos. Christos Gallivosi, folks, so don’t get your inflated carping hackles up.

Christos Gallivosi was your road, tolled your road, hacked into your road with a pickaxe vengeance that bore no resemblance to any bane you’d previously endured. She called to you in your dark nights, completely off-road, sardonic calculus distilled through a past life’s worth of diligent asphyxiation. Tij is finished cooking the chickens, his fez firmly in place, hair coiffed in a fine variegated display, Ahmad Jamal banging on his keys in the background. The Blue Village was calling that night, a blue night of blue notes, blue coffee in your mug as the night blued into indigo and on down to the pot of gold at the end of the whole bivvy rainbow.

Ahmad. Still craving, after all these years, still an infinite flame, still beguiled by the bippy gods vaulting in his vaunted mind, diamond swordmind, flamestruck musemilk. His fingers are the keys at his disposal, his eyes the nightmind at his beck and call—beckoning, beguiling, bedeviled, befriended, beclouded, bedecked, besmirched. I cry into all my nights, until the cooing starts, the diamond coos, the virgin coos, the last of the damsel coos in her darkest darkest tower.

Galliovosi Moses’d himself out of a job, his Red Sea gig a fading memory: he stood on his own little dunghill, this side of the milk and honey lands all the fools fa-la-la’d into, poor boy on this side salivating and calling down hell fury for what in his heart of hearts he knew was a clammy attempt at bathysphering him out of what was rightfully his, a note of regret buried somewhere under all that smoldering wrath—I mean, really, can you fault the lad?—call him simply a mourning lad, a grieving lad, an inconsolable, brokenhearted, sad lad. And that was just Gallivosi. God forbid, we go back and claim Miles or Ahmad or Tij or, most especially, that lissome unnamed She.

We tried to name her, desperately tried. Called up the Holy Roller Rolodex, checked the K’s and Q’s especially, hoping beyond hope for a sobriquet worthy of her attention, worthy of those Mother of God qualities, that backstage sensibility that wore out the brighter lights among us and silenced the rhythms of all the rest. “She were what it is,” was T-Bone’s answer at the census office; he’d worn himself out on ginger beer and back-to-back viewings of “There Will Be Blood,” the first time in a transported two days in Junior English, a propos of nothing but an art far surpassing the on printed page leftover oatmeal of Steinbeck and the lunatic fisherman lost at sea. Heartbreak skedaddled through that comely oasis and celebrated twice over.

We were on the hill—the mountain, if you will. Nebo, shining peak of victory and shame, all rolled into one.

“Son, that ain’t for you,” said Bib Yahweh.

“I can see that, Bib,” said Big Mo. “You wanna insult me one more time with the whys and wherefores?”

“It’s on account of you—”

“I got the point, Bib.”

“You just said—”

“I know what I said, Bib. Ole Bloom was right. You ain’t got shit for irony, Bib.”

“Hell you say? Why, you little—”

“Don’t go all Stooges on me, Bib. You got an image to uphold.”

“Come here, porcupine.”

“Exactly.”

She stopped just short of the corner bakery, shouted out a few of the names in her sleep, names that rang through the streets like nighttime delirium. She cod-fished three or four of her new identities, fingers splayed and nibbling, jacked half a dozen of her credit cards into the foggy bloom of day, complete with Ganges ablutions, half a cantaloupe, and a bucket and a half of recidivist lemonade.

You can’t get her out of your mind, can you?

You want to claim immunity. You want to run down to the corner store and beg for asylum, but the denizens of this burgh know nothing of political causes and sno-cone flavors: they’re all about the 28-day lunar cycle of oblivion.

She can’t return.

She voided the sequence.

She ceded the rest.

He fell not once, not twice, but three times: she blended all the flavors of his mind, ate all the muffins fouled in his brain stem, asked the gooey gods for deliverance and shimmied on out—