Dé Dale and I became fast friends in the months following that first spliff at Bayside Place.
What the man ever saw in me I can’t really say.
I was an unremarkable person in so many ways. I ran a small, but moderately profitable operation out my apartment, teaching English and occasionally French, writing, and translating. Business was, as they say in French, comme ci, comme ça—that is, neither very good, nor very bad. It defied growth the way a young boy resisted maturity. My love life, if you could call it one, was little better: I was four years into an unhappy marriage that I felt locked into and wanted out; and had an unhappy lover, I was locked out of, but wanted in. At thirty-four years of age, I had painted myself into a corner.
However little I could have possibly offered dé Dale, he still found it worth his while to phone me up now and then and ask if I was doing anything.
“At the moment, not much,” I replied. The sad truth was I hadn’t been doing much of anything for ten years.
And so, we would meet, and every time I would be exposed to things and introduced to people and places that would have taken me years of bumbling around on my own to discover.
Take music. Until dé Dale and I had become friends, I was convinced that I had been listening to a wide and eclectic selection of musical styles. It was, I would quickly learn, woefully narrow. At the time, I had been listening to minimalistic composers, such as Harold Budd in whose music I could zone out, let my mind go blank. Dé Dale would pull up in his Mercedes with music like I’d never quite heard before coming out the speaker, an orgy of sound.
“What is this?”
“Acid jazz, man. . . Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of acid jazz?” dé Dale said, shooting me a look of disgust.
I mumbled something about coming across the term in NME[1]and offered apologetically that it wasn’t bad.
“‘Not bad,’ he says! I ought a make you walk!” Taking a CD out of the glovebox and popping it into the tray, he said, “Listen to this.”
“Ronnie Jordan,” I read. “Brighter Day.”
The first warm notes of the double bass expanded in the confined space of dé Dale’s car. The percussions kicked in, cymbals, brushes scraping against a snare drum, rim shots. A bell tolled, like a distant church bell striking seven in a foggy English hamlet. And through the drizzle of the hi-hat a bluesy rift on Jordan’s Gibson rose up through the percussions like the sun breaking through the clouds.
“Wow.” I sat back and let the music wash over me.
Dé Dale stepped on the gas and we cruised down the narrow road, a cocoon of cool sounds, neon lights and red lanterns blurring outside the windows.
Dé Dale said I could borrow the CD if I liked.
“Really?”
“Of course.”
“Just be sure to give it back, okay?”
“Tell you what: I’m going to buy the CD myself,” I said, making a note.
[1] NME, or New Musical Express, is a weekly pop and rock music publication that has been published in the UK since 1952.
The first posting/chapter in this series can be found here.
Rokuban: Too Close to the Sun and other works are available in e-book form and paperback at Amazon.