ZEN WARRIOR BASS PLAYER

Zen Warrior Bass Player

     Annie and I were out one night in Capitola, a little beach town near where we lived. We were walking past a small Victorian house when we heard music coming from inside. It had been made into a coffeehouse, and a jazz combo was playing. We went in.

     The space was tiny. There were only three or four tables, with a few extra chairs against the walls. A spinet piano was wedged into one corner. A drummer with a small trap set and an acoustic bass player were crowded close to the piano.

     They were pretty good, and we liked being that close to the musicians. Everyone in the room was listening, keeping voices low, except for one man who obviously had quite a bit of alcohol aboard. He kept talking in a voice loud enough to interfere, in that small space, with hearing the music. Pointed glances bounced right off him. Someone tried to shush him, at which point he made a belligerent retort, and carried on all the louder. 

     Finally the bass fiddle player, a stocky, balding, kindly looking man in his fifties who reminded me of Claude, the barber who had helped me pull the old woman from the canal in Klamath Falls when I was a kid, stopped playing and just looked at the noisemaker. The other two musicians stopped playing. The bass player, with as much civility as he could muster, posed a general question to everyone in the room: Did we want to hear the music? Everyone nodded, saying Yes (some emphatically), except the noisy one. The bass player looked at him, asking him basically How about it, can you go along with the majority?

     The noisemaker took all this as a challenge. He bawled out that they could go ahead and play their fucking music if they wanted to, and he would go ahead and talk if he wanted to. It was a fucking free country. Unless, of course, the bass player wanted to try and shut him up.

     The bass player shrugged, with a combination of resignation and disgust, and said, Well then, would you like to step outside? We were all startled. The loudmouth was big, obviously a violent type, and a good twenty years younger than the musician. 

     He leaped from his chair. You bet, he said. He stepped to the door. The bass player carefully laid aside his instrument, stood up, met him there. The bass player opened the door, bowed in mock chivalry. "After you," he said. We were all agape. He was actually going through with it. 

     The loudmouth puffed up even further and stomped out the door. The bass player calmly closed the door behind the other man, locked it, walked back to his chair, and picked up his fiddle. We all cheered and clapped. The man outside banged on the door and rattled the knob. But he could see through the door's glass the reaction of all of us. Realizing he'd been beaten, he cursed his way down the steps.