No Matter How Much You Promise Read online

  “I thought she’d say no,” Vidamía said, gesturing with her chin toward Elsa.

  “Maybe she would’ve, but I think you realize that you have a responsibility.”

  “I know,” she said, her head bowed. And then she looked up proudly. “I’ll pay it back.”

  “Oh, sure,” Elsa said. “Eight thousand …” and she reached for the paper, “ … five hundred and seventy-eight dollars. Fat chance.”

  “I will,” Vidamía said, defiantly. “Wait and see.”

  “I don’t think it’s necessary for you to pay the money back,” Barry said. “You’re absolutely right. It was your credit card to do whatever you wanted and you did. I don’t want to belabor the point of accountability and the need for consultation and advice.”

  “Oh, Barry, stop trying to pacify her. You sound like an accountant.”

  “Basically, that’s what I am,” he said, injured, his words falling with a thud and causing him to rise and leave the room.

  “I’ve got homework, mami,” Vidamía said.

  “I think you know that I’m going to have to curtail your privileges, young lady.”

  “This is a joke, right?” Vidamía said.

  “It’s no joke. You should be grateful that your stepfather is so lenient,” Elsa said.

  “I am.”

  “Well, then, why are you abusing your privileges?”

  “I’m really sorry you want to see it that way, Mom,” Vidamía said, employing the English, instead of the Spanish, mami, which to her way of thinking represented a harsher stand. “I really trusted that the card was a gift, that it wasn’t just for show.”

  “It wasn’t. It was given to help you develop the capacity to manage your life.”

  “Well?”

  “Don’t get snotty with me, sweetie pie.”

  “I’m not, but, coño, mami …”

  “Don’t you talk to me like that …”

  “Fine, try and control me. I said I was going to pay the money back and that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Like I said, I’ve got homework and SATs, Regents, advanced placement tests, essays to write, and a whole bunch of shit that I’m about to say fuck it to. You know, fuck graduating and fuck college. I’m about to tell the whole system to kiss my royal mick-spic ass.”

  “Young lady, I will not have you talk that way in this house.”

  “Fine, I’ll move out. I’ll start packing.”

  “I’m canceling the card.”

  “What is your problem, lady?” Vidamía said. “I’m seventeen years old. You give me a gold card for my sixteenth birthday, I use it, and it pisses you off. Great. Cancel it. See if I care.”

  “‘Lady’? ‘Pisses me off’? Is that the way you’re going to talk to your mother?”

  “Yeah, that’s the way I’m going to talk to my so-called mother,” Vidamía shouted, her hand on her hip and her shoulder thrust out like she’d seen Cookie’s homegirls do.

  Elsa recognized the chip-on-the-shoulder gesture immediately and totally lost it. El palito, they called it, because in Puerto Rico kids put a twig on their shoulder and dared someone to knock it off. In an instant she was back on the Lower East Side again, back when she was fifteen years old, before the whole thing started with Joey’s death and her involvement with Billy.

  “Girl, let me tell you something,” she said in her best Afro-Rican accent, squaring off at her daughter. “Honey, you’re in deep trouble if you start messing with me.”

  “Oh, please,” Vidamía said, turning her face in disdain.

  “Please? Check this little bitch out! What in the fuck is it with you? You think you’re the only one that can act all bad and come up in somebody’s face selling tickets? Well, let me tell you something, homegirl. You better get your shit together big time. I mean, who in the fuck do you think you are? You think you’re some grown-up, big-time Lower East Side homegirl that’s gonna walk all over her mama? Is that what you think, bitch? Yeah? Well, fuck you!”

  Vidamía looked at Elsa and suddenly saw through her act, knowing that she was still like one of Cookie’s friends, putting up a front and inside she was scared stiff. Her parting words tore at her mother’s heart, wounding her at her most vulnerable.

  “Yo, mama, whyntcha chill?” she said. “It’s no big thing. I told you I was gonna pay back the money and that’s what I’ma do. I got shit to do. Bye-bye, Mommie dearest.”

  Elsa stood there glued to the spot as she watched Vidamía heading up the stairs. She finally turned away and went looking for Barry to confront him about his lack of support.

  Vidamía immediately called Cookie to report what had happened with her mother, alerting her that quite possibly she’d be coming down to live with her and the rest of the family permanently. Cookie’s response was that this was the coolest and most encouraging news she’d heard because she and Mario’d had a big argument at his mother’s house and of course she’s a cool lady and took her side and that pissed Mario off even more and he said he was sorry to have such a traitor of a Puerto Rican mother who loved his crazy girlfriend more than him because she spoke Spanish and listened to her stupid stories about the stupid island because that’s all they had down there were stupid coconut-headed people and maybe he’d go and stay with his father in Queens and work for him in his restaurant and the hell with going to college and then he’d called both of them a bunch of stuff in Chinese, including noiy yun, which she knew meant women. And then under his breath as he went out the door, so po, which was said to stupid women. When Vidamía asked what he’d done Cookie said Mario did the same thing that he always did when he got mad.

  “He just walked over to Canal Street real fast and then all the way to the West Side Highway and came back. By the time he got back he was okay, but he wouldn’t talk to me.”

  “What are you gonna do?”

  “Wait till he calls.”

  “You’re not gonna call him.”

  “No way, honey. What am I, some love-starved pendeja that’s gonna chase after this ungrateful-ass Chino-Rican? He don’t know how good he got it. A hundred-percent-passion-and-no-nonsense kind of gal. That’s what he’s got. So I ain’t calling. Not me, mama. And when he calls he better be Super Mario nice.”

  They both laughed and Cookie asked her how her love life was proceeding up in the northern territory. Vidamía said that Wyndell had called and they were supposed to get together.

  “You’re ready to lose it, ain’t you?”

  “Don’t, Cookie,” Vidamía said, feeling weepy.

  “You really like him, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, he’s really nice.”

  “Well, honey, I don’t blame you. The nigger is one fine-looking moreno, girl.”

  “Cookie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Could you please stop using that word.”

  “Word? What word? Oh, right. I’m sorry. Just a habit from being with the homegirls. It doesn’t mean anything. I mean, you seen them. They be talking about me and saying nigger this and nigger that and pointing my way, and I’m whiter than God.”

  “How do you know God is white?”

  “More important, like Mama says, how do you know God is?”

  “Yeah, well …”

  “C’mon, baby. Cheer up. I’ma have to go up there and slap you and whatnot.”

  “Stop joking, Cookie,” she said. “I gotta figure out how I’m gonna pay back this money.”

  “Maybe you could get a job as a go-go dancer in New Jersey,” Cookie said.

  “Be serious, okay?” Vidamía replied.

  “Honey, you got the body.”

  “Cookie!”

  “I’m kidding, mama. Don’t bug, okay, girl?”

  “I’m not, but this is serious shit.”

  “I know, and I’ma think about it. When you coming down?”

  “I better chill for a couple of weeks, but I’ll let you know.”

  They said goodbye with the promise to talk the following day. They spoke every day for
the next three weeks, discussing schemes for Vidamía to make some money. Selling Avon, going to work for McDonald’s, selling magazine subscriptions were all vetoed by Elsa, so that Vidamía began to suspect that her mother would do everything in her power to keep her from having money of her own. Although her card had not been revoked, her purchases, few as they were, were checked and rechecked by Elsa for signs of further abuse of privileges.

  36. Jazz

  All dreams, if they are to benefit the dreamer, must be hopelessly complex and barely retrievable, but most of all they must be incongruous. Upon hearing of a dream, someone other than the dreamer may complain of the implausibility of the psychic concoction or the incongruity of its structure, or else remark that it bears little connection to the exterior reality of the dreamer. Such critiques do not matter, since the dreamer is the person responsible for the genesis of the dream and stands to gain the most from its occurrence. That being understood, it becomes incumbent upon us all to accept that there were times when Charlie Parker or Coleman Hawkins, or Benny Carter or Dexter Gordon, or John Coltrane or Charlie Rouse or Lester Young, smelling of aftershave, a slight aroma of expensive scotch hanging in the air, came and sat on the edge of the bed of little Wyndell Ross with their saxophones and practiced scales for hours; once in a while essaying a tune, folding the melody in inverted fashion and then improvising upon on it so that it sounded lyrically fresh and like something no one had ever heard. There were times, however, when the tempo was so accelerated that, through the somnolence produced by the dream, an observer would attest, with hand resting upon an accumulation of divine scriptures, that Mr. Gordon or Mr. Parker each possessed not ten but twenty, or perhaps thirty, fingers, such was their virtuosity.

  They didn’t come every night, and sometimes they didn’t sit down on the side of the bed, like the time Charlie Rouse came and stood over by the closet so that little Wyndell Ross could see him and his image in the mirror as he played “Darn That Dream,” the tenor at first in the low register and the music hanging in the air like colored clouds so that little Wyndell Ross could see every note clearly. Little Wyndell Ross would listen intently and could then figure out exactly how Bird and Trane were producing their wondrous music—insisting that little Wyndell Ross call them by those names, Trane and Bird and the Hawk; playing and taking one small part of the melody and extending threads of music from the phrase; first one way and then the other, making circles and triangles in the air as if they were drawing with the music.

  There were times when they showed up late at night, their jackets open and their ties pulled down. Some wore porkpie hats and others sported berets. They brought drummers and bassists, and always a pianist, like Monk or Bud Powell. The pianist looked all around the room, pushed at doors, looking for a piano, and they’d look at Bird or one of the others and say, “Man, why’d you bring me all the way here if there’s no piano?”

  And Bird would say, “Man, hold off and don’t get so cantankerous. There’s a piano. My man Wyndell’s going to lead us to the instrument. Do you understand what I am relating to you?” And off they’d go, looking for the piano, which wasn’t difficult to find downstairs in the living room, but so as not to wake up the other members of the family it was necessary to climb down into the basement to his father’s den and there find the other piano on which his father played when his friends came over to jam, but which was just as good.

  Because of his dreams there were times when his parents or an older sister, Garlande or Davina, found Wyndell in the basement of their home at four or five in the morning, reincarnating those days at Minton’s Playhouse when folks like Dizzy Gillespie, Bird, Monk, and Kenny Clarke were busy in the laboratory of the mind, inventing bebop; little Wyndell Ross shivering in his pajamas, his eyes absolutely closed, playing on his own tenor saxophone the most musical and progressive improvisations, at times counting as he traded eight bars with some imagined partner, so that his father, Dr. Barkley Ross, Denver pediatrician and amateur jazz pianist, was reduced to tears of joy though at the same time experienced trepidation when he heard his young and beautiful son, who at the age of ten understood the music instinctively, and although his intellect told him he should encourage his son to study medicine, he had no choice but to let his heart rule and help the boy achieve whatever he chose.

  There were times when Dr. Barkley Ross thought of sitting at the piano and joining his son, but instead opened a linen closet, found a blanket and unfolding it placed it on his son’s shoulders and sat down to listen to Wyndell’s solo, noting, although he couldn’t prove it, but later told his friend Lawrence Stanton, whom he had known at Howard University and who was now a fine surgeon practicing in Atlanta, that he was certain that his son Wyndell had been playing with jazz greats in back of him, such was his feel for time and so precise was his phrasing, perhaps a rhythm section of Philly Joe Jones, Paul Chambers, and Red Garland from the old Miles Davis Quintet.

  And years later, when Wyndell would stand on the stages of jazz clubs and play a tune, his eyes closed and his fingers working the keys of his tenor in rapid-fire sequences, daring a rhythm section to match his virtuosity, he recalled the seance-like feelings of those dream sessions with the great masters and couldn’t truly tell where the music from his horn was emanating; certainly not all of it was his, for it was as if he were simply a conduit and the music was being passed from the others across to him and he was being asked to interpret it.

  There were moments, after he had become a man, that would become unforgettable for Wyndell. Like the time in L.A. when he was with the Sonny Pointer Quintet and they were being recorded live. The club was Catalina’s, and Sonny Pointer was on piano, Mike Arnold on bass, Pete Manfredi on drums, and the Swedish trumpet player, Lars Andriessen, whom his sister Davina had said was a friend of her old man’s and nobody thought the Swede could play until they began rehearsing and Lars had literally blown them away with his virtuosity and his incredible knowledge of the music, playing standards as well as obscure charts back to Fats Waller and forward to some of Charles Mingus’s most complex orchestrations.

  But they were up there in the middle of “Cherokee,” literally in cuisinic rejoicing, when Wyndell, into about his fourth chorus, all of a sudden heard the horses’ hooves and saw the braves galloping in the open plain, the cloud of dust flying behind them and their feathers fluttering in the wind, their lances with their totems carried effortlessly at their side, and all at once he heard a totally different musical language and played it so that later on in the liner notes of the album, Pointer View, the jazz critic Martin Froelich would write:

  While the young quintet’s blend of virtuosity and technical brilliance is unquestionable, particular attention must be paid to the remarkable inventiveness of Wyndell Ross, whose tenor saxophone’s phrasing is nothing short of spectacular. In an impassioned rendition of “Cherokee” Mr. Ross takes us away from the commonality of the well-known standard and into another dimension which evokes in its totality the American Indian at his most noble, punctuating each note with the staccato of hooves and the plaintive cries of exultation of the Plains Indians.

  Wyndell had a big laugh when he read this. When he went home for Thanksgiving that year, his father played the tape and proudly read the liner notes out loud. During dinner his grandmother had informed everyone that the critic was mistaken. Genetic and cultural heir to a rich Afro-Amerindian tradition, the octogenarian Mimi Ross, in regal attendance, her high cheekbones and large eyes watching hawklike the proceedings, her gray hair pulled back and well oiled, noted that the Cherokee Nation, which was native to Georgia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas, had been forced to resettle in Oklahoma when gold was found in Georgia, and that therefore they were not technically Plains Indians.

  “Yeah, Gran,” Wyndell said, “but was it true what the man said about my playing?”

  “I don’t know if it was true,” Mimi Ross, his grandma, replied, “but it was sure pretty.”

  “Yes, it was, son,” his mother s
aid.

  “Yes, thank you,” his father said. “It was truly an outstandingly gifted performance.”

  “Let’s not get melodramatic,” Garlande said, “we still got dessert to serve.”

  After Thanksgiving, Wyndell returned to the West Coast and did some club dates but mostly played rhythm-and-blues gigs, backup work on rock albums, score work on soundtracks for motion pictures, all of which paid the rent, but he found that more and more he was drifting away from the music, playing gigs that paid well but sapped his energies because of the restrictions of what he was being asked to play. He began to feel as if he existed in a cage, as if he were an exotic animal and everyone was watching him; like a male dancer in a cultural striptease joint.

  Women constantly came on to him, and although they were invariably of the gorgeous variety, he was growing jaded by the games he had to play and the persistent worry that in spite of protection he was endangering his life. One night white, the next time black, or Latin, or even Asian. He was left empty and without any sense of being. But the money was good. Good enough for him to purchase a Mercedes and live in a spacious beachfront apartment in Santa Monica. He even went so far as to be swayed by the availability of drugs, experimenting again with cocaine as he had when he was at Berklee and his friend Rebecca Feliciano had scolded him for his folly. She played piano like she was trying to destroy the instrument except that each chord she played opened up like a brilliant musical sunburst and nothing but beautiful sounds came forth.

  She had heard about his using blow and marched into his room one Saturday morning and, indignant as all hell in her invented badass Puerto Rican persona from the ghetto, which wasn’t at all the case since she was very wealthy and her mother had a town house on Riverside Drive, told him sincerely in somewhat affected bebop jive language that he was one crazy mothafucka and that if he was planning to fuck himself up with junk and end up dead by the time he was thirty-five, to inform her so she could disassociate herself from him because talented as he was if he was going to turn into a junkie, then there was no hope for the country.