Atet A.D.: An Excerpt

___________________ 21.II.82

Dear Angel of Dust,

No doubt by now you’ve heard the news of Monk’s death. What can one say? No doubt there’ll now be outpourings of appreciation, much of it from hitherto silent sources, long overdue. It can never amount to more than too little too late. I’m reminded of how I learned of Duke’s death in 1974. I was living up north at the time, in Oakland, and was in the habit of listening to the Berkeley Pacifica station, KPFA. Every weekday morning they had a program called “The Morning Concert,” two hours of what’s commonly called classical. So exclusively was European and Europe-derived “art music” its regimen that when I turned on the program one morning late in May and heard “Black and Tan Fantasy” I knew it could only mean one thing. Well before the announcer came on and said so I knew Duke was dead.

In any event, the way we heard that Monk had died is that Onaje called Lambert the day the news broke to ask if we’d play in a memorial gig at his club that night. It came as no surprise, Monk having been in a coma for more than a week, though that’s not to say it had no impact. Still, as I’ve already said, what can one say? We agreed with no hesitation to take part in the gig, even though Penguin hadn’t yet come out of hiding and even though we didn’t know when he would. If playing the gig turned out to mean playing without him we were ready to do so.

Penguin’s retreat, of course, had given rise to a good deal of comment, concern and speculation among us. Drennette even ventured to wonder out loud one day what kind of trip it was he was on, did he go off that way often and, if so, why do we put up with it. This struck us as a little harsh and to me at least it suggested she had a deeper emotional investment in Penguin’s doings than she let on. Aunt Nancy wasted no time speaking up. She called Penguin’s “trip” an “occupational hazard,” repeating Baraka’s line that music makes you think of a lot of weird things and that it can even make you become one of them. Clearly, she suggested, Penguin had.

I spoke up as well. Penguin’s retreat, I said, struck me as related to something he once told me about Monk. I recounted his telling me of Monk getting into moods in which he’d answer the phone by grumbling, “Monk’s not here,” then hang up. Penguin’s own telephonically announced retreat, I suggested, amounted to a kind of couvade. It was a case of sympathetic ordeal, him turning away from the world in solidarity with Monk. How it came to me to say this I can’t entirely say. It simply popped into my head as I spoke. I can, however, say that I deliberately downplayed Penguin’s attraction to Drennette, thinking it might be the source of her annoyance. I steered clear of his would-be rap, the aborted recitation I knew was at the root of his retreat. This doesn’t, however, explain the particulars which popped into my head to take its place. Nor does it explain why I persisted along these lines even after I saw that my not mentioning his attraction to her seemed to increase instead of lessen Drennette’s annoyance. I’m tempted to say that I could feel Penguin feeding me my lines, just as with “E Po Pen,” but it wouldn’t be true. All I felt was the pull and the appeal of the Monk angle, the fact that it so perfectly fit. (Indeed, so much so that I wondered, even as I spoke, had I gotten things wrong in “E Po Pen,” thought Mingus when I should’ve thought Monk.)

The impromptu connection I drew between Penguin’s retreat and Monk’s coma seemed to be borne...