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AUGUST 28 - THE RIF
In modern times, the most significant ethnic forces of the deep Sahara are the Chaamba, the Moors, the Tuareg, and the Tubu.
I'm at a cafe I like here in the Village. Some call it The Rif and others call it Low Morocco. It has two names. When it's warm or hot, there are white wooden tables and chairs out on the sidewalk, under an olive-drab awning that's become so faded by many summers of sun that it's chalky.
Low Morocco looks more like a bright town square at the edge of the Sahara than a streetside location in Manhattan. People of all ages come here, and most of them are dressed in white or khaki or both. It's kasbah life all day long. Everyone is sunburned or suntanned and they all squint when their sunglasses are off. Some wear thin, colorful robes, and there are the stories you hear. The great-grandson of Abd el-Krim, one of my favorite people here, drinks strong coffee and tells of the war.
Last week, early in the afternoon, I was here reading the Post and drinking iced tea when a woman carrying stinging nettles wrapped in newspaper took a seat two tables away and ordered Campari and soda. Her drink looked so good I ordered one.
The woman had an accent I couldn't identify (this is unusual since I have a finely tuned, world-class ear), and after talking to the waiter she took a long wooden match from a black box and fired up a Gitane filtre.
Soon we began talking about the herbs, roots, and bark that Italians use to make Campari, and eventually her neatly wrapped nettles came up. She said she buys them at her special florist's and that she uses them as an astringent, but I interpreted the look on her face to indicate that this was all probably untrue.
Then we slipped down the street and had some reefer in the alley. Things took on a different look and they took on New York.
Eventually we cut through
Bedouin Alley and sat down again in Low Morocco. We began talking about The Tuareg Express, known to the people who ride it as the night train to Fez. It's her favorite train ride, and I rode it several times when I was in North
Africa during my recovery from the gunshot wounds I took from
the Russians. I always got a compartment, and sometimes the leggy French women came along, sometimes
the nurse, and sometimes I was on my own. One night I remember slipping into the
wrong compartment.
She owns a business, one that's doing well, somewhere in Tribeca, so she's used to bossing people around. But she comes here, she says, to drift off to another place. That's her phrase for it, not mine. She's a dramatic woman who makes dramatic gestures.
NOVEMBER 10
I'll tell more about the woman with the wrapped nettles later. I'm standing at the big window by my table, looking out at the people going by on 52nd St., when a woman pulls up fast in a green Bugatti and parks in front of my place. She gives me the eyelids, the drugged gray eyes, and then motions slowly with two fingers, as if I should put on my trenchcoat, slip through the door, and get into this car. She's only about thirty feet away, if that.
I don't know her, I've never seen her before, but I have to smile at this picture, even though I try not to. She's wearing a thin, silk deco helmet.
I motion for her to come in, but she does the two fingers again, exactly as before.
It's a slow afternoon; there's not much going on in here, so I do it.
I step in, she shoots out into the traffic, and we rocket off. I got a loaded roscoe slipped into my alligator belt.
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 7:15 PM
I'm up here in the office, stretched out on this leather couch, thinking about her offer. Low lamplight and some black opium smoke in the air.
She drove for awhile. She drove at criminally high speeds up the Henry Hudson and out of town. Spanish guitar music. We went for a ride up the river, and she was whipping this Bugatti through the traffic. Then, as it was getting dark, we shot back into town weaving in and out of this traffic as if her Italo car was some crazy low ambulance.
And later, as we watched a meteor shower from her rooftop garden, she told me lie after lie.
Things have been different since Niagara Falls. I'm considering things I never would have considered before.
Yesterday, the hopped-up jazz drummer showed up in my office. He told me he'd heard from
Honeygirl, and she wants to take a road trip. She wants to drive somewhere and she wants the round trip to take weeks, maybe months. Honeygirl, with the Josephine Baker haircut.
NOVEMBER 26
I'm remembering the night after
Suzie Yokohama and I went over the Falls. She's 37, yet she looks about 20, but as everyone knows it's hard to tell with these Asian
women. The four of us had gone to dinner at this old hotel on the Canadian side, and many of those in the dining room had witnessed the previous afternoon's amazing feat of bravado. Champagne. Everyone in our section was buying bottles of champagne.
At the table to our right was an effete swank-man talking to a woman in a man's suit, and with them was
the submissive woman. Seated to our left were two other women, one of whom was getting married the next afternoon.
During dessert, Suzie leaned toward the bride-to-be, they began talking intimately, and soon we had all been invited to the wedding and also to the rehearsal dinner, which was being held in a Turkish restaurant full of
alcoves and steam rooms.
The married couple ended up cancelling their honeymoon in the Rockies or the Caribbean and spending it in Niagara Falls, with us.
DECEMBER 9
More about Niagara Falls later.
The Green Bugatti Woman With The Eyelids just called to invite me over to her place for dinner tonight.
"Come early," she said.
What she doesn't know is, I got her number. She's one of Johnny Nocturne's tomatoes.
DECEMBER 19, AROUND MIDNIGHT
Johnny Nocturne is a sax man, and he took his name from the great Earle Hagan song, Harlem Nocturne. So the other night I listened to him play it. I listened to Johnny Nocturne play Harlem Nocturne.
I was up in my office, I'd had a drink or two, and I put him on. I listened to it maybe three times, and he does the job. There are inspired moments, but he's nowhere close to Gatortail Jackson -- who owns Harlem Nocturne.
He's a local hero in San Francisco, and he has a band and a Chocolatta on vocal.
So this Johnny Nocturne, whose day name is John Firmin, is planning to take my place by storm. He says he's gonna take it by storm. He's ready to make his move. My ears on the coast heard about his plan; it was floating through the fogs of the bay, and they got the drift.
Johnny Nocturne wants a place in Manhattan, so last year he comes to town, spends a month looking around, and then decides he wants mine. Now he's ready to make his move. He's gonna try to muscle in.
Now I have some thoughts about Johnny Nocturne's plan. One is, he picked a good-lookin' lounge. Another is, I'll be waiting. I'm ready. I'm ready for this chump. Make your move, Johnny Nocturne.
But for the moment I'm playing along. Along to the opera tomorrow night with this Bugatti woman of his, for example. We're going to the Met for a premiere of something. We're steppin' out, Johnny Nocturne's tomato and I. The chix behind the ropes will be squealing and squirming when we pull up, step out into the spotlights, and ease into Lincoln Center.
THE NEXT NIGHT
These two snapshots were on my last roll of film:
Here's the stairway up to my office, and this is what
the bar looks like on a slow afternoon.
An hour ago I was passing the time by working behind the bar, making
drinks. Jefferson and I were serving about 14 or 15 people, and I knew maybe two of them.
A skinny man who looked about 40 was down at the end of the bar talking to a friend of his. He had thick hair sticking out at all angles and he was wearing a starched shirt; his tie was jerked off to one side.
"It all happens at the moment of conception," he was saying to his goofy-looking friend. They were drinking Scotch and water. "We want to know why we're the way we are, it happens at the moment of conception. Your nervous system is fixed at the moment of conception. It's all in your spinal chord and it's determined at the moment of conception." He was waving his hands around and he kept saying "moment of conception."
"Yesterday I was trying to describe the way I felt, to myself," he went on. "I felt diminished in my ability to respond in ways I used to respond. I was realizing that my range of emotional possibility had narrowed, and so had my ability to feel things I once felt, once felt strongly. I felt that whole regions of myself had become numbed-out or gone blank," he was saying to his friend.
"To my surprise, the term that felt right was "loss of innocence," even though it's one I never use. It's always seemed too dramatic to me, and indulgent. It had taken 53 years for me to truly feel this idea."
I threw him out, and his friend too. What a dickhead. They got the street.
JANUARY 20
Johnny Nocturne must have gotten the message. It looks like Johnny Nocturne's gonna be staying on the west coast.
You're not ready for Johnny, Johnny.
Frankie Panorama stopped in last night. Cold winter night. There wasn't much going on, and we talked for a long time. He was drinking whiskey and describing what his life was like more than twenty years ago, eight years after he'd eaten it in a divorce because he was dumb and couldn't play by the
rules. They had children. He was funny.
He'd turned back to crime, and his father was dying, too.
While we were talking, the great classic, "Cool Jerk," came on. He got up and started dancing. He took some space around the bar. Frankie Panorama. After a minute, Wanda began dancing with him.
"I'd strangle my ex-wife, but I'd be the first suspect." he says.
He told me about his friendship with my father and how important it had always been to him.
"Your father was always the truest of friends to me, from the day I met him when we were 17."
Bobby Three-Heads was sitting there beside him, and I was behind the bar. Later Rousseau came in. He was dancing around and talking about some wild animal show he'd seen on the Discovery Channel. This one had been about the margays of Argentina and the ocelots of Guyana and Brazil. "They're faster than monkeys, and the strike of a snake," he was saying.
Rousseau was also playing Edith Piaf and singing along in his version of French. Frankie Panorama was talking. Bobby was smoking and smiling. That's the way it was, dutto.
SUNDAY MORNING, JANUARY 23
I took the last two days off. I haven't done anything but fuck off and I let the lounge run itself. Mainly I've stayed here in my upstairs apartment, enjoying the place, playing music, watching TV, and going out for cigarettes, and nectars maybe. I've allowed only two visitors, and one of them
fell asleep.
Last night I watched a double feature on AMC, Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein. The townspeople with dogs, torches, clubs, farm tools. The Burgomaster on the balcony shouting to the villagers, "Light your torches and go!" Boris Karloff at the pond with the girl floating daisies, Boris Karloff inside the burning windmill, Boris Karloff burning his hand in the gypsy campfire, Boris Karloff in the blind man's cabin.
SUNDAY MORNING, JANUARY 30
Bulletin. Flash. I was wrong. Johnny Nocturne didn't get the message. The chump is here. Not in Manhattan, but he's set up across the ditch, in Brooklyn, and he's calling his place Johnny's Black Note.
I got some problems with this. It sounds way too much like my place. People might get confused.
Look, I'm the Johnny around here, and no west coast jazzman who threatens to take my place by storm is going to operate this close to me. We got a problem to resolve, so maybe I'll have to take a walk down to the parking garage, step into the supercharged Mustang, and cruise across the bridge to reason with this torpedo-head. He'll find out who's the Johnny, and then maybe he'll want to change his name, or maybe disappear. Maybe Frankie Panorama'd like to ride along. Maybe Jefferson.
Maybe Rousseau. Maybe Bobby. Maybe they'd all like to meet this Johnny Nocturne.
Or maybe I'll make the first visit by myself, like say tonight.
LATE THAT NIGHT
When I walked through his door a few hours ago, I got a surprise. It looks exactly like my lounge. It's a xerox copy, in color, down to the yellow shades on the table lamps. Down to the three private booths in the back, the ones with the the lacquered wooden slats in the upper half, the slats you can adjust.
Johnny Nocturne was playing the saxophone and the Chocolatta was singing "Mean to Me." I liked it. I liked Johnny Nocturne's.
So I drifted over to the bar and took a stand-up spot. I smiled at
the Wanda. She made me smile.
The band got my attention back as they were easing into "Under A Blue Jungle Moon."
Before I left, Johnny Nocturne and I went upstairs to his office and had a talk. I was talking to him about territory and he was talking to me about Louis Prima and Gatortail Jackson. He was funny. We worked out a deal. It was easy. I told him the Black Note could stay, I told him that when I had an overflow crowd I'd send some business his way, and I told him he was welcome in my place anytime.
If he honors the deal we got no problems. If he doesn't, Johnny Nocturne will have a choice. He can take the ticket I give him, the one for the night train to the Coast, or he can take the slow drop into the East River, the slow fall.
And I'm cruising back across the bridge, toward the tall buildings and
the bright lights.
Lipstick Traces (On a Cigarette).
Roxanne
Richard
Lee
Rousseau
The Last Neanderthal
Wanda
Johnny Himself
Punch here for
Part Seven here for
Part Eight here for
Johnny's, Part One here for
Part Two here for
Part Three here for
Part Four here for
Part Five or here for the current buncha
Tough Talk or here to Talk Tough Yourself
Sometimes Johnny picks up mail at
FNrJohnny@aol.com
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