Taking Up Bass
- Taking Up Bass
You don't need to know anything about me except for the fact that when I was 20, I was kidnapped by members of the Unification Church. Stop looking at me like that! It was only for ten minutes. Now its true when I tell you that they had me in the van. It felt like we were headed to their hideout. I don't have any bitterness; I know it's because my face is a book people read and think they know what's on the next page. But I'm telling this wrong. What I want to talk about is playing the upright bass. In my next life, bump fooling with nouns and verbs, I'm coming back as a bassist. It will mean I'll be born with longer fingers, but that's just the half of it. When I'm starting school, the first words I'll learn to scrawl on the yellow paper with the green lines are bottom and time. By the time I'm in the seventh grade, at the time in my first life when I was wearing high water pants and pining for the return of outdoor recess, I'll be hearing bass lines, chords running through my head like the Rapid beating East to West across Cleveland. One minute I'll be making the first tottling steps to whispering nasty words into a ninth grader's ear, the next I'll be transfixed, wearing a replica of Paul Chambers' tux, the bass line of "So What" turning over and over. And since it's the 70s again, I'll fiddle around with the electric bass, so to speak. This will mean my family will have to have a phone, so that the agent can call. When the van pulls up to the house to take me on the road for my first tour, my parents and sister will be so proud, they won't touch any of my stuff till I get back—after my last gig, which I'm not ashamed to say will be in Omaha, NE. Of course, this will mean that basketball won't make it into the story. And that will mean that I won't be coming home from a day on the court. I won't meet the woman with the smile that's neither here nor there, she won't ask me who my favorite comedian is, she won't ask me if I'm ever lonely. She won't say, Join me for lunch. There are some peopIe I want you to meet. I'm telling you, everything will be different; as sure as this callous rising on my index finger, believe me when I tell you: nothing will be as it was. [End Page 95]
Herman Beavers (hbeavers@english.upenn.edu) is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has taught since 1989. He is author of the book Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson (1995), as well as over twenty-five articles and book chapters. He either has served or is serving on the editorial boards of American Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Modern Literary Studies, and African American Review. His creative works include the chapbook A Neighborhood of Feeling and poems that have appeared in Black American Literature Forum (now African American Review), Dark Phrases, The Cincinnati Poetry Review, Cross Connect, Peregrine, Callaloo, and the anthology Gathering Voices. He is a 2009-2010 Visiting Fellow at the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University. He is coediting with Fanonne Jeffers the two-volume collection of essays Changing Chords: African American Poets on Poetry and Poetics (forthcoming, University of Michigan Press) and completing work on a scholarly monograph on the cultural politics of Afro-modernist expressive culture.
