TMB VIII: The Girl, the Drink and the Music

The way we’d first met each other had been nearly as unforeseeable as the apparent ending of our relationship. In fact, it had been a strange thing that we’d entered a relationship at all in the first place.

I had been an avid jazz fan for as long as I could remember. I didn’t play any musical instrument myself, nor did I have a musical taste in any way more sophisticated than the average listener. But one day in my teens I’d stumbled across a club... A friend of mine had taken me there one night. He was a trombone player. I think he’d been pretty good at it. Wondered what he was doing now. Got a job with a firm in the United States and up and away he went. I hadn’t heard of him in years.

Anyway, we went to that club on that night. Some band had been playing, I couldn’t remember where they came from... well, somewhere in Europe it must have been. I couldn’t even properly remember now what it had been they had played that night, but what I still knew was that after the first few minutes, I’d been hooked. We stayed till after hours that night. After the concert, some of the band’s musicians jammed right until dusk, and we were there and listened to all of it.

From that day on, I was hooked on jazz. I spent a fortune on concert tickets, and a second, slightly smaller one on records. I couldn’t forget what I had experienced that night. Sometimes, my subsequent concert visits lived up to my expectations, sometimes they didn’t. I didn’t even really know what it was that I was looking for, but I could tell when I found it. In the end, what had happened was that a completely different world of music, sound and rhythm had been opened up to me. It was like an epiphany of sorts. Up to that night in the club, music to me had been something that was playing along in the background, neither important nor obtrusive. I’d just been not interested, I guess; I hadn’t yet found what I was looking for, nor had I known that I’d been looking for anything at all.

One night, I attended a small club in downtown, in fact just a medium sized room in a blind alley, called The Cat’s Cradle. A band played there that night nobody knew much about. But I’d done my homework and some search on the guys that played in the band, and I was confident that my continuing quest for the perfect experience would pay off another time this evening. I took two hours off from work and arrived early. The club was still as empty as student’s wallet. Nearly empty, that is. The barkeeper still polished away on his glasses, humming along happily and watching his reflection in the finished tumbler. Spread all over the counter was his mixing equipment. It had been used recently. The result of his efforts resided on a small table in the far corner of the room. It was a picture of a drink. It shone like a statue - the product of the finest skills, acquired in long, laborious years; of the finest ingredients, carefully selected and chosen for their unique qualities; and of the most careful planning and considerations and the most sophisticated philosophical underpinnings any drink could possibly receive. It was the drink of drinks.

But I had no eyes for it. I only had eyes for her.