Translated into English by Elizabeta Bakovska
I
It’s three in the afternoon and the phone rings. Instead of approaching it, you turn on the music. This has already become a scary tradition which is crowned with statements that sound something like this: “Just don’t let me become an inventory of dark spaces!”, or “You’d rather open your mind to new kinds of despair giving in until the end.”
And then you disappear, you drown in the smoke of your own cigarettes and let yourself in the hands of the record that turns a new circle. The one for today is Cool Cat, an album which Chet Baker recorded in 1986 in the Netherlands, two years before he ended on the pavement two floors below his hotel room.
His trumpet could always find you easily. You have celebrated sleepy nights together, the walks along broad avenues, small hotels and their balconies, it gives you clear indications that you need to remember and which palm trees are no longer worth memorizing. His trumpet finds you every time you think that a withdrawal has been ordered.
Is it by accident that this room belongs to you now? Wake up. Life is not a song in the improvisation that you keep dreaming about. Improvisations very rarely end well. Especially if you don’t stop them in time. You never knew how to stop anything. You smell of politics and envy. Use the beautiful bathroom. After that, get your act together and pick it up. You used to have a similar phone in one of your houses. An elegant, black one. With a dial that tires. Even its living signal was used for decorative purposes.
II
Speedball baby, it’s clear that without junk there would be no melody. Some people know no different. Your vein has to be happy so that the lips could talk. When you are on it and without teeth setting the trumpet apart to simple factors, but you still van not fly, the concrete under your balcony is the only certainty.
The sound of the phone again. It is covered by the jazz quarter in ecstasy at the time when I recognize alienation as a completely new way of subduing, a scared black bird lands on my thoughts. It cracks: “Blue moon, you saw me standing alone, without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own.“
Moon, have you seen it? If you had a sister, it would look like it. Let me be clear, it’s not about your shining, or her face, or the heroin in his veins. There are bigger issues at stake, force majeure, destiny and fate. Let your despair blue as you are transformed into a red explosion. Anybody’s sorrow dances away with its end, so will yours. Be happy if you are allowed to choose a song.
Chet Baker Quartet Live in france 1978 – Mister B
III
Cool Cat, I knew a man who called everybody like that. He would call: “Hey, tomcat!” and then suddenly turning quiet he would fully take you over, as if discovering something important. He would talk about the nuances of suffering and the therapeutic effects of the passion of the other. He did it so convincingly that the people wanted to strip listening to him, and his words were like melodies that cannot be heard at four in the afternoon any more.
And the phone keeps on ringing. It finds you hidden behind the warmth, in the room where the curtains keep guard and the hands caress each other.
This is how it is: you’ll forget me and I won’t care. The treelines will take care that I find my path when I leave your door. Nod, you don’t have to say anything. Wink. We have talked too much anyway and we didn’t reach any place. Ruffled talents, opposed, at first against the worlds, at the end against themselves. And it’s not that couldn’t have been different. It is the oldest story in which his trumpet finds me to celebrate the sleepy nights of the others together.