He made notes until there was no room left on the menu, then squeezed a few lines between Appetizers and Entrées before tossing everything back onto the dashboard.
—OK, Harry.
Carney clicked off the light and their faces were lit once again only by the faint flicker of the dials: the speedometer constant at fifty, the fuel gauge half full.
He didn’t like new things. Like a blind man, he preferred stuff he’d used for a long time, even small things like pens or knives, things he’d come to feel at home with.
Walking with him one afternoon, we were waiting for the lights to change at a street corner near his place – we were always near his place. He rested his hand against a lamppost, patting it affectionately:
—My favourite lamppost.
Everyone in the neighbourhood knew him. Walking to the shops, kids called out, Hey, Monk, how ya doin? Where ya bin, Monk? and he mumbled something back, stopping to shake hands or just sway back and forth on the sidewalk. He enjoyed being recognized like this – not a fame thing but a way of enlarging his home.
He and Nellie moved into an apartment in the West Sixties and stayed there, with their children, for thirty years. Twice fires forced them to move out and twice they moved back. Most of the space was taken up with a Baby Steinway, jammed halfway into the cooking area as though it were a piece of kitchen equipment. When he played his back was so close to the stove it looked like he might catch fire. Even if he was composing it made no difference what kind of bedlam was going on around him. He’d be working on some really tricky piece with kids crawling in and out of the piano legs, radio playing loud country music, Nellie cooking dinner while he worked away serene as if he was in the cloisters of some old college.
—Nothing made any difference to him, long as no one messed with him or Nellie; didn’t care if no one heard his music, long as he was playing it. For six years, after he got busted for possession and lost his cabaret card, that room was practically the only place he did play.
He and Bud Powell were in a car, got pulled over by the police. Bud was the only one with anything on him but he froze, sat there clutching the folded paper of heroin. Monk snatched it from him and sent it butterflying out the window, landing in a puddle and floating there like a little origami yacht.
Monk and Bud sat and watched the red and blue lights from the prowl car helicoptering around them, rain sweating down the white glare of the windshield, the metronome flop of wipers. Bud rigid, holding himself barbed-wire tight. You could hear the sweat coming off him. Monk already ahead of everything, just waiting for it to happen, seeing the rain-black shapes of police lurching toward them in the rearview mirror, keeping his breath steady. A flashlight shined into the car, Monk eased himself out, a puddle clutching at his foot and then flattening itself down again like someone shocked briefly out of sleep.
—What’s your name?
—Monk.
—You got ID?
Monk’s hand moved toward his pocket—
—Steady, motioned the cop, loving the threat of saying it slow like that.
Handed him a wallet with the cabaret card, the photo on it so dark he could have been anyone. He glanced at Bud in the car, his eyes full of rain and lights.
—Thelonious Sphere Monk. That you?
—Yeah. The word came clear of his mouth like a tooth.
—Big name.
Rain falling into pools of blood neon.
—And who’s that in the car?
—Bud Powell.
Taking his time, the cop bent down, picked up the stash of heroin, peered into it, dabbed a little on his tongue.
—This yours?
He looked at Bud, shivering in the car, looked back at the cop.
—This yours or his?
Monk stood there, rain falling around him. Sniffed.
—Then I guess it’s yours. The cop took another look at the cabaret card, tossed it like a cigarette into a puddle.
—And I guess you won’t be needing that for a while, Thelonious.
Monk looked down at the rain pattering his photo, a raft in a crimson lake.
Was Monk got busted but he never said nothin. Something like that, wouldn’t even occur to him to rat on Bud. He knew what kind of a state Bud was in. Monk was weird, coming and going out of himself like he did, but Bud was a wreck, a junkie, an alcoholic, half the time so crazy he was like a jacket with no one inside it – no way could he have survived prison.
Monk did ninety days, never talked about prison. Nellie visited him, told him she was doing everything she could to get him out but mostly just sat there waiting for him to say something back to her, reading his eyes. After he got out he couldn’t play in New York. The idea of ordinary work never entered his mind and by then he’d just about made himself unemployable anyway, so Nellie worked. He made a few records, played out of town a few times but New York was his city and he didn’t see why he should have to leave it. Mainly he just stayed at home. Laying dead, he called it.
The un-years was what Nellie called them. They came to an end when he was offered a residency at the 5-Spot for as long as he wanted, as long as people wanted to see him. Nellie came most nights. When she wasn’t there he got restless, tense, pausing for an extra-long time between numbers. Sometimes, in the middle of a song, he called home to see how she was, grunting, making noises into the phone that she understood as a tender melody of affection. He’d leave the phone off the hook and go back to the piano so she could hear what he was playing for her, getting up again at the end of the song, putting another coin in.
—Still there, Nellie?
—It’s beautiful, Thelonious.
—Yeuh, yeuh. Staring at the phone like he was holding something very ordinary in his hand.
He didn’t like to leave his apartment and his words didn’t want to leave his mouth. Instead of coming out of his lips the words rolled back into his throat, like a wave rolling back into the sea instead of crashing onto the beach. Swallowed as he spoke, forming words reluctantly as if language were a foreign language. He made no concessions in his music, just waited for the world to understand what he was doing, and it was the same with his speech, he just waited for people to learn to decipher his modulated grunts and whines. A lot of the time he relied on a few words – shit, motherfucker, yah, nawh – but he also liked saying stuff that nobody understood. He loved big words as names for his songs – crepuscule, epistrophy, panonica, misterioso – big words that were joky too, words as difficult to get your tongue around as his music was to get your fingers around.
Some nights he’d give a little speech from the stand, the words lost in brambles of saliva.
—Hey! Butterflies faster than birds? Must be, ’cause with all the birds on the scene in my neighbourhood there’s this butterfly and he flies any way he wanna. Yeah. Black-and-yellow butterfly.
He’d started the bebop look of berets and shades but that had become a uniform