Tram 83 Read Free Page A

Lascaux Caves. Men. Women. Children. All with glasses and smokes. At the back, a combo was shamelessly massacring a Coltrane number, “Summertime,” no doubt. They headed toward the bar. Two girls with massive-melon-breasts immediately followed them; it’s called “shadowing .”
    â€œDo you have the time?”
    Nothing. Requiem’s eyes patrolled the brassieres. One of them was the girl who’d accosted him at the station whose metal structure …
    â€œDo you have the time?” hammered the single-mamas, stern and resolute.
    It was a mammoth task to identify all the women who entered Tram 83. They struggled fiercely against aging. Difficult to venture a distinction between the girls under sixteen, called baby-chicks, the single-mamas or those aged between twenty and forty and referred to as single-mamas even when they don’t have children, and the ageless-women whose fixed age begins at forty-one. None of them wanted to gain a single day. They piled on the makeup from morning till night, wore fake breasts, employed strong-armtactics to entice the clients, and used foreign-sounding names, such as Marilyn Monroe, Sylvie Vartan, Romy Schneider, Bessie Smith, Marlene Dietrich, or Simone de Beauvoir, to make their mark on the world.
    â€œGo check your papa’s watch!” Requiem retorted.
    They took the third table on the left, at the corner of the bar, which afforded an unbeatable view over the front doors and the jazzmen continuing to prostitute music and the restrooms and the bar counter and a row of antipathetic, aggressive, and somewhat mature single-mamas. In his moments of madness, Requiem would tell anyone who’d listen that in order to monitor the comings and goings, and the baptism albums, it was preferable to choose a table affording a panorama of the aforementioned areas, to recap: the bar counter, the sanitary facilities, the lone women, the front doors, the musicians, even when they rushed into the dressing rooms to smoke their marijuana, the waitresses, the busgirls, and so on. They remained for several minutes without speaking to each other. It was a feat of courage to attempt a dialogue amid this pandemonium created by a deviant music and the yelling of the tourists and other upstarts who identified with the atmosphere, waxing ecstatic, grooving, whispering, howling, and pulling out money they threw in the direction of the musicians. “Give me a real cuddle.” “Do you have the time?” “I give you my body, chain me up, make me your slave, your property, your private hunting ground.” All of which fueled the fervor of the band, and consequently the lynching of that beautiful melody. In the labyrinths of the City-State, you don’t listen to jazz to get a whiff of sugar cane or reconnect with Negro consciousness or savor the beauty of the notes: you listento jazz because you have to listen jazz when you make your bed on banknotes, when you deliver your merchandise daily, when you manage an extraction plant, when you’re cousin to the dissident General, when you keep a little mistress who pins you to your bed in a dizzy haze. Jazz is a sign of nobility, it’s the music of the rich and the newly rich, of those who build this beautiful broken world. Such people don’t listen to rumba, which they find dirty, primitive, and unfit for the ear. Between rumba and jazz lies an ocean, they say. You don’t listen to jazz the way you’d fling yourself into a Zairian-spiced rumba. Jazz is above all a precipitous slope, a cliff you can only climb if you possess a notion of its origins, its development, its major figures. Jazz is no longer the story of the Negroes. Only tourists and those who master money know the foundations of this music. It’s the only identification for a certain bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie of the eleventh hour. Consequently, when the musicians get jazzing, all of Tram 83 stirs from its sleeping sickness. The