Joseph Skibell – Part 1

Joseph Skibell (pronounced SKY-bell) is the author of five previous books, most notably the award-winning and critically-acclaimed novels, A Blessing on the Moon and A Curable Romantic. He has received numerous awards, including the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Sami Rohr Prize in Jewish Literature, and the Turner Prize. 

His work has been described as “confirmation that no subject lies beyond the grasp of a gifted, committed imagination” (New York Times); “witty and profound” (Jerusalem Report); “laugh-outloud humorous” (Forward); “brave … unafraid” (New York Journal of Books); “magical” (New Yorker); “high-energy, wild” (New Republic); and “wholly original” (JM Coetzee). 

Skibell’s stories, essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, LitHub, Tablet, the Utne Reader, Tikkun, Fretboard Journal, and many other publications. The Winship Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities at Emory University, he was, for a decade, the director of the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature. When he’s not teaching, he lives in northern New Mexico. 

Author’s Note – Context for Novel Excerpt

In 1966, Dizzy Gillespie’s manager has signed a magical contract with the Disney Studios. The contract has changed Dizzy’s name to Disney Gillespi, it forces him to play only music from the Disney catalogue, and it has brought his trumpet, Dr. Bopstein, to life as a sidekick. 

(Dr. Bopstein, the narrator, is writing this book from inside his glass exhibition case at the Smithsonian in 2024-ish. The book is intended, improbably, for children, whom Dr. Bopstein often refers to, affectionately, as “little motherfuckers.”)

Unable to deal with these changes to his life, Dizzy has decided to drive from New York to LA in December of 1966 in his Kaiser-Darrin to confront Walt Disney himself. December is no time to be driving a luxury sportscar like a Kaiser-Darrin through the Midwest, and on the night of the story, instead of sleeping in the car, as they’ve done until then, Dizzy decides to stop at a motel, a mysterious, dreamlike place called the Alef Travelers Lodge & Roadside Motel.

Unbeknownst to them and to the reader at this point, the pair are being surveilled by agents from the U.S. Dept. of Dreaming, a government agency so secretive that most Americans have never even heard of it. 

A few other things: though Dr. Bopstein is Jewish – his real name is Isadore Goldberg and he was manufactured in Brooklyn – when Diz asks him earlier why, if he’s Jewish, he speaks in such “a jivey patois,” Bop answers him: “I work in jazz, man. I’m just trying to blend in with the cats.”

Also, Dr. Bopstein in under the impression that instruments are the true musicians and that musicians are mere stagehands. Accordingly, he believes that it is he, along with Belle Saxe, Charlie Parker’s alto, who are the creators of bebop. 

Here’s a self-description of Dr. Bopstein, the first time he emerges animate from his case:

– an excerpt from Dr. Bopstein and the U.S. Dept. of Dreaming a novel by Joseph Skibell

Though we’d only been on the road for a few nights, we both pretty much knew the drill by then. Find a secluded spot. Pull off to the side of the road. Get the blankets out. Hang Diz’s suit jackets where the windows of the Kaiser should have been. Switch seats. Diz would maybe eat a little something, and smoke a cigar or two, we’d call it a night and get up in the morning and drive all day, and do it all over again. 

That night, though, was different. It was already dark when we drove through Cuba, and the town had long been shuttered for the night. The storefronts were all empty and dark, and it was pretty cold out, it had been a grey and sunless day, and so we were pretty much chilled to the bone, or leastways Diz was, and I was chilled to whatever the trumpet equivalent of a bone is. 

A trombone, I guess. 

“Thinking a motel might be preferable for the night,” was all Diz thought to say to me.

The snowstorm had become fairly blinding by then, and you could barely see through the windshield wipers when, with every second beat, they pushed away the snow, and from the little my taciturn stagehand let slip, I’d come to understand that he sort of half-remembered a motel on the western side of town, some place where maybe he and I had stayed some years before, though he was having a little trouble finding it.  

We were just following the beams of our headlights, and I was starting to feel a little downhearted about it all, when what should we see before us, but a snow-frazzled sign on the side of the road that read: 

Alef Travelers Lodge & Roadside Motel
Won’t You Tarry with Us for a Night? 
Turn Right! 

Diz looked down at me, and I suppose I looked up at him, and without a word between us, he pulled the Kaiser to the right, driving off the highway onto an unlighted dirt road, and I mean, you would have thought a place calling itself a roadside motel would have been right there on the side of the road, wouldn’t you? But we drove for what seemed like miles and miles, bumping along on all these snow-filled ruts and occasionally skidding in and out of them. It wasn’t really the kind of road the Kaiser was built for, and I can’t speak for Diz, but I was starting to worry that not only would we never find the place, but that we’d never find our way out of this winding labyrinth and back to civilization or back to as much of civilization as there was out there on that lonesome prairie.

But then, all of a sudden, what should we see before us, but a white brick motel, all lit up like it was Chanukah or Christmas or Kwanza or the Feast of Juul or whatever commemoration of the winter solstice makes you feel acknowledged and included as a reader in this book. 

“No way, hombre!” I said, squinting through the windshield. 

As Diz drove closer, we could see it even more distinctly, although through the 2/4 time of the windshield wipers – clear, obscure; clear, obscure – it was more like a vision that appeared and disappeared over and over again. At the same time, I don’t want to make it seem more mysterious than it was, because on the other hand, it was just your ordinary roadside motel, the kind of thing you might see even today along Route 66. 

There was an office on one side attached to a rambling one-story building with doors for each room facing out onto the parking lot, and there was a part of the building on the other side that looked like it might be a restaurant or a bar, and the whole thing was lit up by lights, concealed in the shrubbery, shining on various parts of all that white brick.

Pulling in, Diz slowed to a stop, and crooking his neck down to see everything through the windshield wipers, he gave out a long and low whistle of astonishment. He ducked his head further, so he could read what was on the large motel sign towering over the parking lot, and like all such signs along Route 66, it was outlined in lights that were flashing on and off at staggered intervals, so that it looked like the lightbulbs were chasing themselves, although, in actuality, they weren’t. 

“Alef Travelers Lodge & Roadside Motel,” Diz read, and squinting to make out the smaller print, “Small World Eatery & Bar,” and then, squinting even more, he read the even smaller print, “Open All Hours!” 

It didn’t occur to me right then, but later on, I realized that the sign itself was in the twisty shape of an Alef, which, is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and which is kind of shaped, leastways in some fonts, like a burning flame, or kind of like this: 

My attention had been drawn instead to another little sign, this one hanging off the big sign on a bar at a 90-degree angle. Its lettering was made out of purple neon, and though Diz read it as “Vacancy,” its V was on the fritz, blinking on but mostly off, in a series of high oscillations, so that it actually read: 

acancy

“Tell you the truth, man, I’m kind of getting a weird vibe,” I said. “There’s something not quite right about this place.”

Diz took down the suit jacket he’d stuck in the Kaiser’s missing window slot and looked through the empty pane. “Looks kind of deserted, in any case.”  

And it’s true, there weren’t even any cars, other than ours, in the parking lot. 

“Still, I could sure go for a hot meal and a shower, though.”   

I looked over his shoulder towards the front office. Its large window was dark, as was the rectangle of glass that made up its door. 

“Don’t look like there’s nobody manning the front office,” I said. 

“Bar looks open, though.” 

I followed Diz’s gaze to the other side of the building, where the windows and the door were all lit up with a lambent orangey light. 

“Yeah, but … how come there ain’t no other cars in the parking lot?” 

“That is odd, isn’t it?” Diz said, taking note of the fact. “Still, a drink wouldn’t kill me.” 

“I’m not so sure about that.” 

“Why not?” he said, turning around and looking down at me. 

“Well, aren’t you in a kind of neurotic state of mind with this whole driving across the country to reclaim your name bidness? I mean, do we really need a day of wine and neurosis.”

Diz kind of laughed to himself. “You know, Bopstein, you’re funny. You know that?” 

“Yeah, I know it. You’re the one who doesn’t know it. You’re the one who, all these years, never paid any attention to me.”

“Come on,” he said, nodding towards the bar, “and I’ll treat you to a little dish soap and valve grease.” 

“Ha! Now, you’re the one being funny. If I’m going in, man, I’m ordering myself a drink.” 

He slid open the Kaiser’s sliding door, and I scootched across the driver’s seat and dropped down from it onto the snowy parking lot. Regaining my balance, I looked at that bar, all lit up in front of us. 

“Ah, my first real drink!” I said. “Now, this is going to be an experience!” 

And I’m afraid the prospect, the adventure, of a drink, children, allowed me to let down my guard, and I stopped listening to my intuition about this place. Innocent as I was, I was hungry for experience, and let that be a lesson to you all. Innocence and experience is a dangerous combination, sort of like gasoline and fire, or manifest and destiny.

Anywho, I remind y’all that it was December out in the middle of that Midwestern nowhere, the wind was howling, the snow was flying slantwise, and it was as cold as Owney Madden’s smile at the Cotton Club on a Saturday night. Diz had gathered his coat around himself, and holding it real tight with his fist, he wrapped his wool scarf around his neck and pulled his beret down around his ears. 

“Here, Bop,” he said, picking me up and cradling me against his chest. “It must be – what? – fifteen below. You don’t want to be walking in cold like this and freezing your brass off.”

(And yeah, I know y’all are probably thinking: How many times is he going to try and get away with that joke in this book?)

I shivered in his arms, and the closer we got to the building, the more light you could see spilling out of the bar’s windows and its glass door, mottling the snow in the parking lot with patches of reds and greens and blues, and I guess the spirit of caution I’d felt earlier had been transferred to Diz, because instead of just entering, he leaned in real close to the glass door and peered in through it. 

“Hunh,” he said, and turning myself around in his arms, I took a look through the door as well. “Hunh,” I said in turn. 

And I got to tell y’all, children, everything inside that bar looked all warm and glowing. There was a big orange and black fire roaring in a firepit in the middle of the room with a bandstand in one corner, all set up with musical instruments on stands, and that was all normal enough. The weird part of it was, there was a bunch of cats inside, and each and every one of them was dressed in a colorful Hawaiian shirt and a straw fedora, and I guess they must lock things down pretty airtight for the hard-driving winters they get around there because neither of us could hear anything through the thick pane of glass they had inside that door. 

“What kind of weird motherfucker of a place is this?” Diz murmured, maybe to me or maybe to himself, and I could feel him hesitating, and I could see why. Listen, kids, it’s not all upside, being as famous as I and, by extension, Dizzy was. I mean, this wasn’t Paris or New York, it wasn’t Kansas City, it wasn’t even downtown Cuba, and jazz was no longer what it had been a decade before, and the chances of anyone recognizing Diz from our album covers, even with a motherfucking trumpet tucked underneath his arm, were probably a gazillion to one. Still, the last thing he wanted was a bunch of Missouri yahoos slapping him on the back and addressing him as “Disney this” or “Disney that,” and asking him things like, “What brings you to our little town, Mr. Gillespi?” 

On the other hand, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to snuggle up inside that warm room and sit by that roaring fire and maybe have a drink or two. 

As I indicated, it’d been a while since Diz had showered or shaved, and even I was starting to feel a little verdigris around the gills, and so, telling himself that probably no one would even notice the two of us slinking in, Diz pushed through the door, and as he did, every motherfucker in that bar immediately stopped talking, the roaring murmur of their collective conversation ceased, as every eye in every head in every man inside that bar turned to drill into us, and the two of us just stopped in Diz’s tracks, what else could we do? We stood in that uncomfortable silence, gazing in wonder at all those Hawaiian-shirted men who were staring straight at us. 

You could hear the second hand clicking on the big clock they had on one wall. 

And then, all of a sudden: “¡Bienvenidos a Cuba!” they all shouted, each man raising his drink high into the air. “¡Buenas noches, amigos! ¿Que tal?”

“Looks like you guys finally made it!” the barman shouted over the uproar. “Everyone, todos! Please welcome musician and artist extraordinaire, Mister Disney Gillespi, and his fabulous sidekick and colleague, the trumpet ‘Dr.’ Isadore ‘Bopstein’ Goldberg, to our very own Small World Eatery & Bar!” 

Another deep-throated whoop went up from the men, and I have to tell you, children, it was such a heartwarming welcome, I nearly forgot to be piqued about receiving second billing. I looked up at Diz to see how he was taking all this madness in, but he couldn’t see anything, as his glasses were all steamed up.

“Honored to have you gentlemen here,” the barman continued. He was a slight Korean dude with a thick pomade gleaming in his hair. “What’ll be?” 

“What’ll be!” another dude-whoop went up, and I guess that’s a feature of male homosocial societies: there tends to be a lot more than your fair share of whooping. 

“First round’s on the house!” the barman told us. 

“First round’s on the house!” the men whooped again, though not quite in unison this time. 

“Well, I don’t know. Now, let me see,” Diz said, sitting down at that long wooden bar, getting all comfortable on a barstool, and by then, of course, his specs had unsteamed. “What do y’all recommend?” 

“Well, the mojito here, sir, is the finest in all of Cuba.” 

“The finest in all of Cuba!” the men roared, lifting their drinks again. All of them, I noticed, had the same exact drink: a lemony punchy-looking thing, all yellow with a green sprig of mint and a slice of lime in it, and this, I told myself, must be a mojito.

And now, another weird thing I noticed about that bar, aside from it being all cats with nary a chick in sight, was that, though we were in the heart of the so-called American Breadbasket, the dudes filling up that place weren’t exactly what you’d call your standard-issue Midwesterners. Instead, every corner of that bar seemed to be filled with Asians, Africans, Indians, Amer-Indians, Latinos, Aboriginals, Europeans and even Romani, although each of them, and I mean to the man, were dressed in one of those kooky flowing Hawaiian shirts with a straw fedora.  

“One mojito coming right up!” the barman said. 

“One mojito!” the men roared happily. 

“And for your diminutive companion here?” 

I’d hopped up onto the bar stool next to Diz’s, and, children, let me tell you, this was a big night for me. No more lonely evenings stashed away inside my case, while the stagehands, those second bananas, are yukking it up over drinks at the bar. I was free, little motherfuckers, unboxed or uncased, and I was going to make the most of it, because, speaking from my current early 21^st-Century vantage point, you never know how long freedoms like these are going to last.  

“Now, that’s a good man. Give me a moment there, won’t you?” I said, rubbing together what, for all practical purposes, were now my hands. “I suppose, being in Cuba and all, a mojito does sound just about right.” 

“A mojito!” the men roared out, and I have to say, I was kind of getting to like this place. 

“Nah, nah, nah,” Diz said, and then he said it once more, “nah, nah, nah, I tell you what. Give this little fella a tall glass of warm dish soap with a chaser of valve oil and maybe a side car of slide grease, if you got it.” 

“Dish soap!” the men roared out jovially. “Valve oil! Slide grease!” 

“Motherfucker!” I said to Diz. “After three motherfucking days and two motherfucking nights on the motherfucking road, I think I deserve a motherfucking drink!” 

The barman looked questioningly at Diz. 

“And don’t look at him, motherfucker, look at me!” I said, and remember, I’m a trumpet. Even without a stagehand, I got cutting power, and that Korean dude did look at me, but then, what did you expect? He looked again at Diz, and Diz just shook his head, and who knows what the issue was? Maybe I looked underaged or something, which is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if, like me, you’re in show business. 

I suppose I could have struck up a ruckus, brought down the walls of that bar with one mighty blast, just like my great-great-however-many-generations-ago-it-was-grandfather did when his stagehand Joshua f’it the battle of Jericho, but here’s another important life lesson for y’all: if you can’t get what you want openly and honestly, if the world refuses to bend to your will, well, there’s nothing preventing you from getting what you want when no one is looking, although I probably don’t need to tell you this, as any small person almost certainly knows that already. 

“One mojito.” The barman placed that lemony-yellow drink down in front of Diz, setting it just so on a little cocktail napkin with the words Small World Eatery & Bar printed across it. “And one dish soap with a valve oil chaser and a sidecar of slide grease.” 

Harrumph! I thought, watching him slide all that stuff from his side of the bar to mine, the soap in a cocktail glass, the oil in a shot glass, and the slide grease in a little bowl they probably otherwise used to serve nuts. I could only shake my head. This was first-thing-in-the-morning-type of fare for a trumpet, like coffee and OJ for a stagehand. 

“Thanks, man,” Diz said, downing his mojito in like two gulps, and “Come on, come on!” he said to me, clicking his fingers. “We ain’t got all night.”   

“Aw, man, I’ll be up all night I drink this shit.” 

But I did it, just to be social, knocking back the dish soap and chasing it with the valve oil and giving out a stunning little burp. “Excuse me,” I said, bringing the back of my hand to the rim of my bell. 

Diz was about to push off his barstool when that Korean dude put another round in front of us. Diz gave him a questioning look, and I did the same. 

“Second round’s all bought and paid for,” the barman said, indicating with a nod an older gentlemen sitting at the short stroke of the bar’s L-bow. 

Naturally, both Diz and I turned to look at the dude. “And people think I’m loud,” I whispered to Diz. “Get a load of that motherfucker’s shirt.” 

Dude was all decked out in a vibrant blue Hawaiian shirt and a short-brimmed straw fedora with a strip of green celluloid on the front of its short brim.

“Least I can do for a gen-u-wine genius,” the dude said, saluting Diz with his drink. 

And Diz’s hand hesitated in accepting that drink. As I say, he’d been driving for days, all he wanted was a drink and a bed for the night, and he’d be goddamned if he was going to let a free drink rope him into a long, dreary conversation about his and Bird’s glory days with a local yokel in a Hawaiian shirt so loud it was screaming bloody murder. I could feel him running the equation through his head. On the one hand, it’d be rude not to accept that drink, rude to a potentially dangerous degree. It can be dangerous not to accept the hospitality of a stranger, especially when you’re a world-famous stagehand, stuck out in the middle of the goddamned nowhere. I mean, members of the listening public can get a little annoyed if you don’t find them quite as interesting as they find you. 

And the other thing was, it wasn’t just mine. The eyes of the entire barroom were on Diz’s hand at that precise moment. I craned my neck around as subtly as I could to take a look at all those men, and I guess because that barroom was filled with Africans and Asians and Europeans and Indians, etc., it felt like the eyes of the entire world were upon us, wondering if Diz was going to accept that drink or not. 

And the longer Diz seemed to hesitate, the quieter it became. 

“Irks-Bay,” I said, leaning into him, “ake-tay at-thay oe-fay’s ink-dray, kay-o-ay?” 

Diz looked at me with a poker face, and then, finally, after what seemed like a thousand lifetimes, he lifted that mojito and tipped its glass and his forehead at the same angle towards the man. 

“Mighty kind of you,” he said to the stranger, and you could feel the sense of relief washing over all those Hawaiian-shirted hombres. 

“Mighty kind of you!” they roared out as one, before returning like bees in a hive to their various buzzing conversations. 

“Pleasure,” the dude said, nodding.  

As for me, children, well, I looked down at that second round of dish soap and bath products the bartender had placed before me, and I must’ve drained the first round a little too quickly, because it had pretty much gone straight to what essentially was now my head, and thanks to the slide grease, I was feeling a little hypoglycemic. 

“Hey, brother,” I said, pushing everything back towards the barman. “I’m all bright and shiny, I don’t need another bath. Go ahead and give me a drink.”

And you know how people do when they’re dealing with a fellow of small stature, the barman just looked again at Diz, who once again shook his head. 

“Doesn’t look over 21 to me,” Diz told him. 

And well, that really got to me. “Goddamn it! I’ve been playing with this cat since at least 1939, and I got the date of my manufacture stamped on me somewheres to prove it!” I said, doing all sorts of yoga asanas trying to find that inscription. 

“Heh-heh-heh,” laughed the dude in the Hawaiian shirt screaming bloody blue murder. “Ain’t he cute? All come to life and everything like that.” 

And all right, I admit it, maybe I was trying a little too hard to fit in. I was just getting the hang of this being-alive thing, and all I wanted was a drink! “Come on, man,” I said to the bartender. “Leastways give me a Cuba Libre.” 

But Diz just shook his head. “Nah, man, he’s sticking with what he’s got.” 

“And where is it you two are heading?” that motherfucker who stood us to drinks said real nice and easy from his end of the bar. He was a trim fellow, both more muscular and more elegant than he currently appeared in his rumpled clothing. He had a little salt-and-pepper mustache and these hexagonal eyeglasses that were all lenses with no rims, and neither of those things really blended in with his current Midwestern accoutrement ensemble.  

I was on the point of saying, To California. To see Walt Disney. Our services are somehow required. But all we want to do is get our contract annulled, when Diz spoke over me. “Nowhere, man. Blizzard got so bad we just had to pull off.” 

Now, I don’t know how, but Diz had figured this guy for a cop. Somehow I guess he could smell the government paycheck in the dude’s wallet.

“Thanks again for the drink, friend,” he told him, lifting his glass and letting it serve as a kind of punctuation mark, signaling that their conversation had come to its end. But what did I know about such things? I was just a horn brought to life by the power of a movie studio contract, I’d seen nothing of life outside the Kaiser, and I didn’t understand the art of small talk and meaningless barroom chatter. 

“Dude,” I said to Diz, “how can you be so rude to that cat after he stood us to this second round of drinks?” 

“Bop, keep your voice down, okay?” 

“‘Bop, keep your voice down?’ I’m a motherfucking trumpet!” 

“Well, try,” Dizzy said through gritted teeth, which, I don’t need to tell y’all, isn’t that good for a cat’s embouchure. 

“Reee-markable,” the dude at the end of the bar said. “Why, it’s like he’s almost real.” 

“Like he’s almost what did you say, motherfucker?” I said. 

The dude shook his head, chuckling. “Amazing. Ventriloquism part of your act now?”

“Calm. Down,” Diz told me. “Why don’t you go a little easy on the dish soap there.” 

“Little hothead, idn’t he?” the dude said, his eyes all merry behind those rimless specs. 

“The little hothead is right here, motherfucker!” I told him. “Maybe you want to step outside and discuss it further.” Or at least that’s what I wanted to say, but overwhelmed by my emotions, all I really did was shout, “What’s a working horn got to do to get a motherfucking drink around here!” 

And then, of course, that skinny Korean barman looked again at Diz. 

“I said don’t look at him! Look at me, motherfucker! I’m the one talking at you!” 

And then, of course, he did look at me, because I was wailing pretty much, you understand, like a trumpet, but then, he looked at Diz again, and Diz once again shook his head no, and then, I just sat there with what, by now, were essentially my arms all crisscrossed against what was essentially my chest, seething in anger.  

The dude at the end of the bar kind of sniff-laughed. “’Nother round for my friend here,” he told the barman. “Though it looks like his friend’s had enough. No offense, little fella, but no one likes to see a drunken brasshole crying in his cups.”

“Ha, ha, ha,” I said, though mostly to myself, “we’ll soon see, says I to me.”

All right, little motherfuckers, now there are two things we probably need to go over, and it probably doesn’t really matter in what order, so I’ll address that explosion of anger on my part first.

To tell y’all the truth, I had no idea where all that heat was coming from, and the bad thing about that was, it created exactly the kind of intimacy with that dude Diz had been trying to avoid. I didn’t know nothing about it back then, but it turns out the U.S. Dept. of Dreaming had been experimenting with all sorts of methods of mind control. 

And this is in the history books, babies, so if you don’t believe me, you can look it up! 

And when I look back on it all now, it occurs to me that my little tantrum, so out of character for me, might have been artificially induced. It was like that Midwestern dude, who, it turns out, wasn’t really a Midwestern dude, but was really Dr. ██████ ████████, the motherfucking director of the U.S.D.o.D., was somehow controlling me. 

Yeah, just like a ventriloquist with his dummy! 

(Oh, how those D-men love to hide everything in plain sight!) 

Okay, so that’s the first thing, and the second thing y’all are probably wondering about is: What’s with all this blacking out of Dr. ██████ ████████’s name, am I right? 

Well, as I said, this whole never-before-been-told story of what happened to Diz and me, is apparently still considered so top-secret by the U.S. government that certain names – like Dr. ██████ ████████’s, for instance – are still redacted in the official documentation, most of which I obtained with a request through the Freedom of Disinformation Act. 

And I know y’all are also probably thinking: Gosh, 1966 was so long ago now, isn’t Dr. ████████ either dead or at least retired, and what harm could ever come to our national interests from setting the historical record straight by unredacting that motherfucker’s name? 

And also, how could a trumpet ever be considered a threat to the U.S. government, right? 

But seeing as how I’m living and working at the Smithsonian Institute, and the U.S. government is therefore basically my employer, I’m not taking any chances. I don’t want to end up hiding out in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, if you get my drift. 

In any case, turning sideways now on his barstool, Dr. ████████ squinted through those hexagonal specs of his into the crowd, the lenses all fizzy with reflected light. “Well, I guess I best be heading out.” Standing, he leaned into Diz’s ear. “Honored to meet you, and you too, little hombre,” he said, reaching across Diz’s drink to offer me his hand, and as he did this, his hand came so close to that last icy mojito Diz had been served that he almost knocked it over. 

“Whoopsie daisy!” he said, and opening his hand over the top of the glass, he grabbed onto its rim with his fingers to steady it. 

He nodded to the barman. “I’ll settle up with you, Carl, at the end of the week,” and as he began winding his big woolen scarf around his neck and pulling a big puffy parka on over his Hawaiian shirt and situating a pair of furry earmuffs under his fedora, I noticed something strange. He made eye-contact across the room with a younger dude who was standing in the doorway of the bar’s storage room. Dr. ████████ nodded his head slightly, almost inconspicuously (except for me, I guess) and the younger dude nodded almost inconspicuously back. 

And that cat, the younger cat, was dressed exactly the same as everybody else in a Hawaiian shirt and a straw hat, but somehow it all looked more natural on him. That dude actually looked Cuban with his black hair all slicked back and a fuzzy, little, post-pubescent mustache, and as he pulled the door to the storage room closed behind him, before positioning himself in front of it, I caught a glimpse of something even stranger: there, on a shelf in that storage room, between the stacked canisters of cocktail onions and olives, was a Nagra tape recorder. 

I looked up at Dr. ████████, and Dr. ████████ looked down at me, his face all innocent and blank. 

“All rightie, little fella,” he said, “you stay out of trouble now, you hear?” and bending forward to finish zipping up his jacket, he squinted, peering at the blizzard through the windows of the bar, looking like he was trying to decipher some ancient script out there, and before you knew it, he was gone. 

“Mr. G.,” the barman said, “the band is returning from its break.”

“Say what, man?” Diz said, turning around to look at him. 

“I said the band, sir, it’s returning from its break.” 

Now, I don’t know about Diz, but I, of course, had noticed all the instruments lying in a state of suspended animation on that little stage in a corner of the room, although you couldn’t really call it a stage, it was just a raised platform with enough room on it for a drum kit, a guitar, some vibes, and a bass.

“And the management was wondering, if you and the good doctor here would do us the favor of sitting in for a number or two?”

I copped a look at Diz, and let me tell you something else, children, there’s not a more intimate relationship than the one between an instrument and his stagehand. You got a cat blowing carbon dioxide up your ass for eight hours a night, you learn things about each other, and I’m not sure if that Korean barman saw the crimped look of annoyance that whizzed across Diz’s phiz, but I sure did. 

“The management?” Diz said, casting a cold eye towards those amateur cats picking up their axes on the bandstand. They were a somewhat motley crew that looked, thanks to their colorful costumery, like their last gig had been at a Purim spiel in the Bronx. They were all looking expectantly over the top of a sea of straw fedoras at us while pretending to be too cool to notice that the two of us were there. 

“Yes, sir,” the barman said, “the management,” and I caught a kind of ominous tone in his voice. 

Diz presented the barman with a look, all smiley and everything, but then, he gave me a franker look, staring me straight in the valves, and oh, children, that wasn’t a very good sign. My instincts told me he was feeling ornery and mean, pushed and pulled around by circumstances, bought and paid for with a couple of free drinks, and don’t forget, this was the cat, who, for all his little-boy charm, had tried to stab Cab Calloway and who nearly brained Mrs. Slim Galliard with a steel chair. There was no telling what he was on the point of doing now, but I sensed, whatever it was, it was going to get us killed or him killed and me mangled beyond repair.

I looked out the windows at that blizzard pounding outside, and I knew there was no way we were going anywhere that night, and no way was an ambulance coming out there to get us, and if I’ve learned anything from American history, it’s that there’s no telling when a crowd of otherwise good, decent, honorable men will murder you, take a picture of it, and send it as a postcard to their friends. 

“Sitting in? Why, of course, we will!” I piped up, although I want to state here emphatically that a trumpet is not and never will be a pipe. “Nah, it’d be an honor to play an entire set for you good gentlemen tonight.” 

And thank Heaven that seemed to knock Diz out of his funk or out of his fugue state. 

“Sure, sure, we’ll play for you,” he said. “Y’all have been so very kind to us, it’s the least we could do.”  

And the crowd of men, who apparently had been listening to this whole exchange, whooped out another one of their big roars, “The least they could do!” 

“Groovy, baby!” the little barman shouted, and “Groovy, baby!” the men roared back, and I’ll be honest with you, that almost ruined the whole thing for me right there, those Midwestern goofballs pretending to be hipsters. 

Not that that’s the most salient detail of the evening, because it wasn’t. No, the most salient detail of the evening is that, with all those men slapping Diz on the back, and everyone looking happily between Diz and the bandstand, and with the members of the band moving their equipment around to make room for us onstage, all of that commotion accompanied by little yelps of feedback and the sonic booms of microphones being rearranged, the whole bar, including the bartender, was looking elsewhere than at Diz’s drink, and that’s when I saw my opportunity, children, and that’s when I took it!  

Goddamn it if no one’s going to be serving me a drink tonight, I thought, and lickety-splitly, I reached over and picked up that mojito and poured it down what was now essentially my throat. 

And with an equal lickety-spliticity, I snapped back onto my own barstool, like nothing had happened, and I was looking around, real casual-like, making sure no one had seen me, when I locked valves with that younger dude, that younger actual-Cuban-looking dude standing in front of the bar’s closed storeroom door. That cat had seen everything I just did, and his eyes got real big, but then when he saw that I had seen that he’d seen me, he let his gaze go slack like he hadn’t seen anything at all. 

And now, I’ve got to tell y’all, kids, although I saw all of this and took it all in, it meant nothing to me at the time, because what I didn’t know in that moment, but what I would come to suspect in the next hour or so, and which would ultimately be confirmed years later by a yellowed report tucked into one of the manilla envelopes comprising Diz’s U.S.D.o.D. file, is that when Dr. ████████ reached over to shake my hand, coming so close to Diz’s drink that he nearly toppled it over, specifically when he caught its rim with his fingers, he had actually dropped something into it. 

That’s right, children. That motherfucker had spiked my drink with a tab of pure lysergic acid diethylamide-25, fresh off the boat from the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland. Back then, though it was a major hallucinogen, LSD wasn’t yet illegal, anybody could get it, and the agents at the U.S.D.o.D. had an especially robust supply, which they employed, without Congressional oversight, I might add, for any number of purposes, most of them – I’m sorry to report – nefarious. 

(Welcome to America, little motherfuckers.)

And so, yes, perhaps you’re ahead of me here, but now thanks, in part, to his own desire to taste the forbidden fruits of human knowledge by scarfing down what he thought was an innocent mojito, our hero Dr. Bopstein had a tab of primo, potent, killer acid starting to percolate through what was now, for all intensive purposes, his circulatory system!

Read Part 2 – Now Available!