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My name is Malcolm Pomerantz, and I’m an axe man, though not like those guys on that reality-TV show about loggers. Had I ever been that kind of axe man, I would long ago have cut off both feet or been crushed by a toppling tree. I’ve been clumsy all my life. I have managed not to stumble into an accidental death only because my profession—I’m a musician—doesn’t require me to deal with power tools or treacherous terrain. Axe is musicians’ slang for instrument, and my axe is a saxophone. I have been playing it since I was seven, when the sax and I were nearly the same size.
I’m fifty-nine now, two years older than Jonah, my best friend of half a century. I’m tall, and Jonah’s not. I’m white; he’s black. When I first met him in the summer of 1967, Jonah was ten and quick and graceful, a piano prodigy, and I was twelve and lumbered around like Lurch, the butler in The Addams Family, which had been big on TV the previous year. When I first heard him playing, he rocked the keyboard with Fats Domino’s “I’m Gonna Be a Wheel Someday.” In both our lives, 1967 proved to be … unforgettable.
At my insistence, Jonah recently talked his life—or at least a strange and tumultuous portion of it—into a tape recorder, and his story became a book titled The City. There isn’t any point in talking my life, because most of the interesting parts are what happened when I was hanging out with Jonah; he’s already covered that territory. I do have one little experience to recount, however, a curious series of events that occurred a few weeks before I met him. Like his more engaging story, mine suggests that the world is a more mysterious place than it seems to be most of the time, when we’re plodding along from breakfast to bedtime in a reassuringly familiar routine.
In those days, my sister, Amalia, was seventeen, five years older than I was, but we were as close as twins. Not that we looked alike. Blond hair in a ponytail, she was lithe and graceful, full of such enthusiasm for life that both in sunshine and in shadow, she had a glow that I swear was not entirely a figment of her adoring little brother’s imagination. On the other hand, I was a loose-limbed twelve-year-old with an Adam’s apple that made me look as if I had swallowed a Granny Smith whole and had gotten it stuck in my throat. Although she didn’t have much of a wardrobe, Amalia always wore the right thing for the occasion and looked as if she’d stepped out of a Sears catalog. With my round shoulders and arms as disproportionately long as those of an orangutan, I tried to disguise my awkward form by dressing as if I were an adult, though, being blind to fashion, I only called greater attention to my gangly nature: black wing tips but with white socks, dress pants hiked a couple of inches north of my navel, my short-sleeved spread-collar white shirt buttoned all the way to the throat.
At twelve, I didn’t yet think much about girls. Considering my long, pale face and hound-dog eyes behind black-rimmed glasses with thick lenses, maybe I already knew that even through adulthood I’d never be a guy who had flocks of pretty girls in flight around him. I had the love of my sister and my saxophone, and that was enough.
It had better be enough, because Amalia and I didn’t have a home life that would be suitable for a TV show like Ozzie and Harriet or Leave It to Beaver. Our old man was a machinist, a foreman for an entire shop of lathe operators, most of the time as silent as a rock, a cold man who by his stare alone could convey his disapproval and his ardent wish that he could hold you to his lathe and shape you into someone more appealing. Chesterfield cigarettes were to him what the Eucharist is to devout Catholics. Amalia insisted he wasn’t cold, but only wounded by life and emotionally isolated. Our mother liked TV around the clock, interludes of neighborhood gossip with Mrs. Janowski, who lived next door, and Lucky Strike cigarettes, which she burned through as if the fate of the Earth depended on her chain-smoking even through meals, which she usually took on a TV tray in the living room. She prided herself on being a fine housekeeper, by which she meant that she efficiently delegated all the work to Amalia and me.
The king and queen of our little lower-middle-class castle spoke to each other so seldom, you might well have assumed they primarily communicated telepathically. If that were the case, then judging by their demeanor, they detested virtually every exchange of their psychic conversations. Amalia said that something profound must have happened between our parents long ago, that they had hurt each other, that they’d said all they had to say about it, and that they couldn’t bring themselves to forgive each other, and that, therefore, they found it painful to talk to each other about anything. Amalia didn’t like to think the worst about anyone until they had proved themselves irredeemably vile.
My sister had played the clarinet since she was eight, when a kid in the next block, having been forced into lessons by his folks, finally rebelled and convincingly threatened to hang himself. She’d been given the instrument for nothing, and she had wanted to learn to play it largely because she knew that it would annoy our parents. She hoped that her playing would get on their nerves so much that they would insist that she practice in the detached one-car garage, where she wouldn’t have to see them so determinedly not talking to each other, where the air smelled of grease and tire rubber and mildew instead of Chesterfields and Lucky Strikes. Her hope was fulfilled, and the remaining years that we lived in the house, the words most often spoken by our mother and father were, “Take it to the garage,” not only when we practiced the clarinet and saxophone, but also when our mere presence became a distraction from their TV shows, their drinking, and their committed smoking.
Amalia became pretty darn good on the clarinet, but I proved to be a prodigy on the saxophone, self-taught and self-polishing, always working to get a little better. Playing the sax was the one thing I could do that was graceful.
With a 4.0 grade-point average and considerable writing talent, Amalia was an amateur musician with bigger things than a dance band in her future. Although our distracted mother and father didn’t consider it much of an achievement, Amalia received a full scholarship to a major