Red-Dirt Marijuana: And Other Tastes (7 page)

Dr. Ralph Warner was fifty-five, gray and distinguished, a man of remarkable vigor and personality. He was not a physician, but a learned man of music, who had received many public and institutional honors. An established author and critic, past conductor of the San Francisco, Boston and Denver symphony orchestras, he had become, because of his popular, progressive innovations in policy and repertoire, one of the most beloved and respected men in the musical history of the country.

“Something
more?
” said Professor Thomas, stressing his mock surprise with a sickly smile. He loathed strange jargon. “Don’t tell me there’s anything
more
, Ralph, than being a hipster!”

“That’s right,” said the younger George Drew eagerly, “how could anything be more
hip
than a hipster?” He
loved
it. “
En tout cas,
not semantically.” He seemed to repress a spasm of delight, as though the prospect of sprightly argument could give him goose-pimples.

Dr. Warner allowed his own gaze to grow sober and formulative, staring down at the drink in his hand.

“Yes,” he said evenly, “you might say that a
junky
is something more than a hipster.”

Professor Thomas snorted politely. “Good Lord, from where on earth did they dig up that term?”

“From its not too earthy grave in Hong Kong harbor, I dare say,” said George Drew coolly, finishing off his drink with a small effeminate toss of his head.

“Drugs again, I’m afraid, Tom,” put in Dr. Warner, often their genial moderator. “Opiates. Heroin this time.”

At home with every idiom, Dr. Warner gave himself as wholly to Alban Berg as he did to Tschaikovsky, as devotedly to Tanglewood as to the Juilliard String Quartet; and already, at fifty-five, he had been frequently called a “grand old man of music,” and again, in other contexts, perhaps because his scope naturally tended at some points toward erudition, a “musician’s musician.”

Now more and more of his time was given over to writing. His work to date consisted of well-received one-volume studies of Brahms, Mozart and Schubert; hundred-page sections on Bach, Beethoven and Wagner; chapters on almost everyone from Palestrina to Schonberg; and a definitive little brochure on Bartók. Dr. Warner’s writing bristled with information and tight parallels, in a style pleasantly fluid, sprinkled with humor, penetrating insights and anecdotes which lacked neither warmth nor sophistication.

Before the war, and since, he had toured Europe regularly and had guest-conducted every major orchestra from Blackpool to Copenhagen. He was mentioned with frequency and respect in the gossip sections of the weekly news-periodicals.

But now he had gone into hiding, or so it must have seemed to his biographers, though they knew in truth that he was away, working on his book. It was by no means the Doctor’s only project at hand, though it was perhaps his most ambitious. Musicologists, critics, teachers in the colleges and academies, art-appreciation groups, cultured people everywhere looked forward to its release—a book which was to treat “the whole of Western Music, its origin and development to the present day,” again touted by the publishers as being
definitive.
And while this claim was absurd, that the book would have certain value there were no doubts, because Dr. Warner, besides bringing to bear “the breadth of a versatile genius welded to almost unprecedented vitality and an all-embracing devotion to music,” was known, in this world of music at least, to be relatively
fair,
or impartial.

“Heroin,” said George Drew, pouring himself another. “Treacherous, treacherous.”

“Amazing prevalence among them,” joined Professor Thomas, unimpressed. “
Simply
amazing.”

“Prevalent, Tom? Or standard?” asked Dr. Warner with a show of seriousness. “I’m really beginning to wonder.”

“God knows!” wailed the Professor unexpectedly, raising his hands. “The whole thing is beyond me. In the first place, how you propose to—to get
next
to those people is more than I can see.” There was heat and resentment in his voice, and it was only after a moment’s pause that he could reassert a detached and amiable interest in the subject. “For my money, I think I’d stick, primarily at least, to the material already compiled. Lord, there must be a wealth of it.” He exaggerated in a gesture the stack and assortment of books on the study table: popular histories of jazz, exposes and testimonials, confessional stories of reformed drug addicts, whores, and criminals—all of which had been somehow tied to the words “jazz” and “be-bop.”

“Surface, Tom,” said Ralph Warner. “Purely surface material. It’s never been . . . really
lived
by anyone qualified to do it up.”

“Ralph,” began George Drew, “do you actually suppose you can, as Tom says, get next to them?”

“I think I can, George,” said Ralph Warner. “I-think-I-can. After all, it’s simply another viewpoint. A matter of language really. Vernacular.”

“
Do you know,”
said George Drew warming now toward the heart of it, “that you’re
very
liable to be approached on this drug business yourself? I mean, they might ask
you
to take some. What do you do then, Ralph?”

Dr. Warner smiled a little, shyly it seemed. “Then? Why, then I suppose there would be only one thing
to
do—gracefully.” And so saying, he leaned back in his great chair and slowly raised both hands. “The unhappy part of the business is,” he went on, beaming helplessly, “I have an absolute horror of
needles
.”

Before completing the book’s section, “Dixieland and the Blues,” Dr. Warner had meticulously sifted through all the written material on the subject, and had listened to some seven hundred graded recordings, many of them several times, taking copious notes the while. Then he had flown down to New Orleans for an intensive week of firsthand research. When he was not actually listening to music, he ferreted about the Quarter, poking into any narrow opening of whatever half-promise, prowling the blue haze of midnight alleys, tapping carefully on every soundless, dawn-lit cellar door, as though each were his own oak podium.

He spoke to hundreds of people: strangers, drunks, unknown—and, most often, untalented—musicians, bystanders, children, blind men who touched their canes to the earth in some possible connection with the music. And if, in the handstand’s shadow of an afternoon session, a dog lay stretched in refuge from the heat of day, the Doctor might give it a pat on the head in passing. Then, at night, in the
boîtes
of the Quarter, instead of taking a table, he stood with his drink where the brass and the smoke were the bluest, at the left front corner of the bandstand, stood with one foot on the raised platform, tie loosened, an easy smile on his face which worked beneath half closed eyes on the blue, blue offbeat, while his free hand, at rest on his raised knee, raced the fingers in subtle and intricate tattoo. At the end of a number, if there was an empty glass on the bandstand, he had it filled, and when the men took a break, he was with them, the ones that hung together around the bar, to pay for the drinks and listen to the slow and easy talk of those who play the blues.

As soon as one place closed, he went to another, sometimes in the company of one or two musicians, and toward morning they ate together. By seven he was back in his room where he wrote steadily for two hours. Then he would go to bed and sleep until three in the afternoon, get up, dress, and eat again before resuming his tour of the Quarter. He did this for seven days, and during this time he was careful about three things: (1) never to request a number, (a) to talk with no more than one musician at a time about music, and (3) in doing so, to expose his own knowledge, not by dissertation, as the canyon openly yawns its vastness, but by remark, as a mountain will suggest fantastic untold depths through one startling crevasse. And he even had the gall and devotion, one time toward early morning in a booth gone blue-gray with the circling tides of smoke, when a sleepy-faced drummer passed him a sweet cigarette the thinness of two matchsticks, to hold it as he might have been expected, take quick deep drags, wink without smiling, and say in a low voice,
“Crazy, man.”

He never identified himself, but he was usually remembered as “an old guy who knew a goddam hell of a lot about music,” or again, by such as the drummer, as a “pretty stuffy cat.”

“Ralph,” said Professor Thomas, “let me get this straight. Do you mean you’re going to submit to drug injections?”

His hands clasped under his chin, Dr. Warner smiled, even sheepishly, though as one could see, with a certain secure pride.

“What sort of drugs, Ralph?” George Drew came in, having already chosen a side. “Heroin, I imagine,” said Dr. Warner easily. Professor Thomas started to speak, but took a sip from his drink instead and pursed his lips.

“This may strike you as a bit old-fashioned,” he said then, completely ignoring George Drew, “but isn’t there a very real physiological danger in heroin injections—for a man of your age, Ralph?”

Ralph Warner shook his head. “I won’t main-line,” he said soberly. “Just skin-popping. Anyway, on single dosages, cardiac response is negligible. I’ve looked into it, of course.”

George Drew, who was thirty-five years old, was beginning to resemble his undergraduate photographs at Princeton. He sat forward in the chair, spoke carefully and, as usual, seemed to put an emphasis on every other word. “Ralph, as I get it, ‘main-line’ is to take the stuff directly into a blood vein; and the other, ‘skin-pop,’ or ‘skin-popping’ is a muscle or tissue injection, right? But now, what exactly is the difference?”

“Flash,” said Dr. Warner expansively, then paused to smile at Professor Thomas who had audibly scoffed over the question. “You see what I mean by language, eh? Well, the immediacy of effect in main-lining is called the
flash.
Something you don’t get in skin-popping, where the effect is relatively gradual.”

“Just what
is
the effect?” asked Professor Thomas, as though he were already bored with it.

George Drew shifted in his chair, impatient; and Dr. Warner waved his hands, vaguely protesting. “Oh, I’m sure it’s very subjective, of course, Tom. A sort of will-less euphoria, I suppose. Sensations of security and general well-being. Wish-fulfillment. Self-sufficiency, if you like. Followed, I imagine, by depression, or letdown.”

From Bach to Be-bop
was, by publisher’s choice, the title of Dr. Warner’s book. And the Doctor sometimes told the story of how he had indulged them in this, only, of course, after stressing its obvious anomaly.

The book’s opening plate was a diagram of the ear, and its second a sample of cuneiform writing; moreover, it was not until page fifty-one that there was mention even of Gregorian chant. And yet he would often end the story by admitting their point that, after all, three-quarters of the book was so concerned, with Bach and thereafter.

“What I tell them is this: ‘I’ll
write
it. You can
name
it, eh? And you can
sell
it!’ ” A well-received story. A funny story by a famous man, and the way the Doctor would laugh and shake his head gave the impression that he thought publishers like young women, dealings with whom called for, if anything, a slightly amused condescension.

“For one thing,” said Professor Thomas at last, “it’s against the law. Very much so. Against the law,
and dangerous
.”

“Calculated risks, eh Ralph?” said George Drew happily.

“Or, occupational hazards,” replied Ralph Warner, glowing with modesty.

“Good Lord!” Professor Thomas finished his drink. “I’ll stick to Scotch myself.” He poured himself another and stirred in quite a bit of soda. “Drug poisoning. Addiction. An unclean needle and you could die of tetanus during your euphoria.”

“Please,” said Ralph Warner, half jokingly, “let’s not speak of
needles.
”

“Well, there you are,” said Professor Thomas and took another sip, grimacing.

Shortly before the arrival of his two friends, Dr. Warner had begun the first draft of the book’s final section. He had written:

Life has always been a struggle.

It is tedious to say again, that, through modern science and technology, our material horizons have been broadened, our physical burdens lessened. A badly worn phrase, and it is yet another to point up these gains as having not seriously affected the greater struggle . . . the quest for peace of mind and happiness, the search for security. For it is evident today, perhaps as never before, that we have. . . .

Here, he broke off and put in parentheses just below: “(greed, hate, war, moral and spiritual confusion, etc.)” and then a marginal note to himself, “break with humor-philosophic
doldrums
(?)” and to the list, “greed, hate, war, etc.,” he added, “crime,” after which he quickly resumed to write, lower on the page:

Let it stand as living testimony to the fiber of our times that a musical idiom characterized by dissonance and atonality, by unpatterned time-change, and impassive distortion of popular themes, has gained wide favor. . . .

He took a second sheet and started at about the middle of the page:

Be-bop, bop,
or, more currently,
(modern) jazz,
has been defined as “variations on a theme which is never wholly stated,” but which theme, it should be added, occurs (concomitant to the execution) in the mind of the performing artist
(and
the good listener) and which, if expressed at any point, would, in the technical sense, harmonize with the improvization . . .

It is significant that the emotional nihilism, or again, the cold, satiric intent which has come to be identified with these interpretations. . . .

He skipped another space, and wrote:

Yet, beneath this cynical veneer, as beneath the chimera of strife and bitterness in everyday living, pulses a vital substance. . . .