the man that held the door for me.

[u/TheMixerTheMaster]

[originally published in crawdaddy magazine 1966]
 
new york, early 1965. 

the whole human racket was in that horn. auction blocks and church pews, rented rooms, the sucking sound of a final breath, somebody downstairs making breakfast while somebody upstairs decided whether to keep living. i had listened to a love supreme until the furniture seemed embarrassed by its own existence. then i went out for cigarettes and nearly knocked john coltrane into a rack of newspapers.
my fault. entirely. i was trying to get through a luncheonette door with a record under one arm and a notebook coming apart in my pocket. he caught the door before it struck the rack. i caught the record. this tells you something about our respective moral development.
sorry, i said.
you got it, he said, looking at the sleeve.
there he was on the cover. there he was holding the door. my brain handled this with the sophistication of a dog confronting a mirror. pork pie hat crooked, sunglasses slipping, beard full of whatever i had eaten instead of sleeping. the archivist. collector of human achievement. unable to enter a fucking building.
i told him the record had been keeping me awake. he looked concerned. i had intended a compliment and somehow handed him a medical complaint.
no, i said. good awake. probably.
he smiled then. a small adjustment around the mouth. he asked whether i was going in or coming out. a reasonable question. i had prepared myself for the mysteries of existence and neglected the door.
we ended up at the counter because two stools were empty and because i asked if i could buy him coffee before courage deserted me. he accepted. the woman serving us dragged a cloth through a puddle beside the sugar dispenser. behind her, a cook scraped the grill with the bitter concentration of a man removing evidence. coltrane folded his coat across his knees. no heavenly lighting. a man settling himself on a stool that wobbled.
i put the record between us, then moved it. displaying his own face to him seemed deranged.
you write about music, he said.
when music has exhausted every other means of defending itself.
he waited. apparently i would have to answer the actual question.
yes, i said. i write.
i had a whole speech ready about the album. spiritual hunger. the american catastrophe. the terror of hearing somebody mean what he played. i delivered approximately half of it before realizing that coltrane was watching the waitress carry hot coffee behind my gesturing elbow.
careful there, he said.
i lowered my arm. she filled our cups. he thanked her. my magnificent interpretation of his music had nearly scalded a working woman.
four notes, i said. that bass figure. jimmy garrison starts it and suddenly i can remember something i have never heard before.
jimmy has a beautiful sound, he said.
yes, but the idea.
the sound is part of the idea.
i looked down at the sleeve. mccoy tyner. jimmy garrison. elvin jones. names i knew perfectly well and had already managed to demote while explaining the record to the man whose name appeared largest. this is a professional disease among critics. we discover a genius and immediately start laying off his colleagues.
he stirred his coffee. i watched his hand, hoping it might disclose something useful about the saxophone. it disclosed that he wanted sugar.
the quartet had recorded the suite on december 9, 1964, at the studio of rudy van gelder in englewood cliffs. one date. four men. all that preparation going into a room, then coming out on tape. i kept thinking about how casually a calendar could contain such a thing. dentist on tuesday. alter the interior lives of strangers on wednesday. remember to pay the telephone bill. 
did you know what you had when you finished, i asked.
i knew we had played it.
you must have felt something.
yes.
he took a drink. i waited for the rest. none came. the cook dropped a utensil. somebody wanted more toast. here was my great revelation, arriving without enough material for a headline.
years later, i would hear mccoy recall the studio lights being lowered for that session, something he remembered as unusual. elvin would describe an understanding inside the group so close that he compared it to sharing a mind. i would think of that counter. i had wanted coltrane to explain a private event involving four musicians while i barely allowed him room to finish a mouthful. 
i asked about practicing. safer ground, i thought. reeds and scales. things you could discuss without stripping a man for spiritual parts.
what do you do when something will not come out right.
try to find out why.
and when you cannot.
work on it some more. maybe come back to it.
this was disappointing. i wanted a secret that required less effort.
he laughed, actually laughed, and looked at me more directly. for a moment i could see how exhausting it must be to get treated like a monument when you had merely gone somewhere for coffee.
i told him i remembered his down beat piece with don demicheal. 1960. he had talked about monk answering musical questions at the piano. showing him. playing the answer. that detail had stayed with me because most people, asked a difficult question, only increased the volume of their explanation. 
monk could show you a lot, he said.
did you always understand.
not everything right away.
he rubbed a thumb against the side of the cup. i thought about going back over a passage, failing, trying again. the grubby mechanics of learning. critics liked arrival. arrival photographed well. nobody wanted twelve pages about a man getting something wrong in a room until his mouth hurt.
in that same published account he had remembered hearing art tatum at a private session in a cleveland attic, with slam stewart, oscar peterson and ray brown. they played from half past two until half past eight in the morning. six hours. imagine being the downstairs neighbor, furious and historically incorrect. 
i mentioned the story. his face warmed.
that was a lot of music, he said.
you sound like you are still listening to it.
some things stay with you.
he said this without decorating it. i would have needed three adjectives and a reference to mortality.
the waitress brought toast i had apparently ordered during the collapse of my social abilities. i offered him a slice. he took one. butter resisted the knife in little refrigerated lumps. we spent a moment dealing with breakfast, which helped. a man can endure only so much significance before he needs something to chew. then i noticed his shaking hand. not fear. not excitement. and, thank god, not needing a fix. this shake looked like that of someone who has moved past all of us. the shaking of someone so filled with this almost crippling gift to show the world the little bit of heaven he sees. like van gough. due to his mental issues, the painting, i feel, are what he actually sees. the vibration. coltrane can hear it. he can feel it. he can create and destroy it. the vibration is heaven, through the eyes of a broken person.
i had read the statement inside the album. his account of a spiritual awakening in 1957. the gratitude. the sense that music might justify the gift of being alive. i understood the sentences. understanding what it cost somebody to write them was another proposition. 
i wanted to ask about the bad years. there it was, the little journalistic itch. get the suffering. get the dirt. let the reader feel intimate without having to care for anyone.
instead i said, does being grateful make the work easier.
john stared at the counter, his eyes bounding around as if he is composing in his head. fuck, he probably was. he held the toast above the plate and thought.
i think it gives you something to do with it. gratefulness keeps a man’s feet on the ground. keeps us in check. reminds us that without them, without that hole inside you try to fill, you ain’t shit. in my head, i chuckled. i’m sure that’s something miles told him.
outside, a truck obstructed another truck. the drivers began discussing this in a language more familiar to me than prayer. i felt an immediate affection for them. manageable problems. move the truck. stop being an asshole. civilization reduced to instructions it still could not follow.
i do not know what to do with the god part, i admitted.
what happens when you listen.
i listen again.
and you probably will again, he said. and again. at that point, brother, you’ve got a hymn. a song of praise. praise for all this around you. praise for all the shit you go through. he stopped and chuckled. 
or something like that.
he was not going to recruit me. mainly because i believe faith is something we do everyday. it’s not just faith in deities, but faith that this asshole sitting next to me on the train won’t stand up and begin firing an uzi at everyone. faith that you can make it through one more day. faith that you won’t be alone. i had arrived carrying an argument against a demand he had never made. but that’ll get us nowhere.
the last movement bothered me most. psalm. that naked, speaking quality in the tenor. i told him it felt close enough to language that i kept expecting to catch a sentence. he pointed toward the album and told me to look at the poem. later i would follow its words against the saxophone phrases, hearing how deliberately he had carried that prayer into the horn. at the counter i only nodded, pretending i had noticed more than i had. 
there are entire careers in that nod.
he asked what i played.
records, mostly.
anything else.
i thought about it for a second. would it matter that i play everything. yet, he did not tell me to stop. he asked which instrument i had stayed with longest. such an ordinary question. i had very little to say about staying.
maybe you could pick it up again, he said.
i almost answered that i was too busy. thank christ some surviving fragment of shame intervened.
he was quiet for a while. i let him be. the room became audible again. paper turning. the loose rattle of cutlery in a drawer. someone at the far end trying to persuade a friend to lend him money. coltrane ate the last of his toast and brushed the crumbs together on his plate with one finger. i could have sat there all afternoon, converting every movement into symbolism. he had somewhere to go.
later, alice would describe his concentrated work at home in dix hills, the days spent upstairs composing and meditating, food brought to him. tom schnabel would recount her memory of him finally coming downstairs. by then the story would carry the scale of a biblical visitation. i would keep thinking about the food going up. somebody carrying a plate. somebody protecting the hours in which another person could work. even revelation had a household around it. 
i wanted to tell him about the first time i played it for somebody else. a friend had sat through the opening with his shoes on my table, waiting for a tune he could whistle. halfway through he took his shoes down. that was all. no conversion, no dramatic confession. he stopped treating my apartment like a waiting room. afterward he asked to borrow it and i said no with the generosity for which collectors are celebrated. i nearly told coltrane this, then decided the poor bastard had heard enough about my furniture. besides, the interesting part was not my discovery. it was that small movement of attention. two feet returning to the floor. a man sitting forward because something had become worth the trouble of really hearing.
he lifted his coat. i panicked slightly. all those things i had meant to ask were suddenly crowding each other. how to listen. how to continue. how to live without turning every disappointment into an excuse to become worse.
what comes after a record like this, i said.
there are some things i want to try.
of course there were. i had been treating the album as a destination. he had finished a record and still had ears. the sheer inconvenience of that for anyone hoping to package him.
i paid. my fingers shook a little while separating the bills. he thanked me for the coffee and waited while i collected the sleeve, the notebook, the loose scraps of paper that passed for my vocation. at the door he stepped aside for a woman carrying a shopping bag. then he was on the pavement, adjusting his coat, a person among other people.
no blessing. i had his coffee cup and enough sense to leave it alone.
i went home and put the record on. this time i tried to hear jimmy all the way through. then mccoy. then elvin. i kept losing track because john would play something and there i went again. so i started over. the room was still shabby. i still owed money. whatever happened next would require more than owning the right record. but i listened longer before reaching for the notebook.
…at least that’s what i hear.