The Weekly Screed (#610)

A date with Mom… and Brubeck
By David Benjamin

My mom took me on a date once. Honest! With two men. It took place in 1963, when the Sixties were still the Fifties and the Braves were still in Milwaukee.

My brother Bill and sister Peg came along, too. It was a crowded date. Its purpose, obviously, was not seduction. One of the two men — whose name I’ve long since forgotten, so let’s call him Casanova — was interested in Mom, and this date was his clever effort to get to her by charming her kids.

Mom was a divorced Catholic single mother from a town without pity. But we had moved to the big city — Madison — the year before, and Mom had begun to experiment with the idea of “seeing” men, using just about the only technique available to single women in those days. She hung around in bars. Mom’s mainstays were Leske’s, where she waited on tables, and a joint near home called the Bridge Lounge. I have no idea whether Casanova had sidled up to Mom one night at Leske’s or at the Bridge. I asked Mom. She didn’t remember, either.

Actually, Mom didn’t remember Casanova. Nor would she admit to ever dating Casanova, or anyone like Casanova. And she absolutely did not recall any date with any man that included her three children. Why, she demanded to know, would I make up something like that? “David, what’s wrong with you?”

Anyway… Mom’s amnesia notwithstanding, our date consisted of an swinging evening at Casanova’s place. Being an eligible young professional, Casanova lived fashionably, in a newly-erected building near the Lake Monona shore. In those days, the word “condo” had yet to be coined, and “co-op” was a word, in Wisconsin, that did not suggest lodgings. It had more to do with floating a loan on a new tractor, or getting the best price for a load of manure.

Casanova’s place, therefore, was called an apartment. More accurately, it was the quintessence of what was once known as the “bachelor pad.”

“Wow,” said Bill, as a faintly infectious tune insinuated itself from speakers situated throughout the track-lit vastness of Casanova’s Sputnik-age living room.

For a moment, I could imagine that I had just walked into a two-page lifestyle spread in Playboy. Casanova’s pad was breathtakingly spacious, its furnishings sparse and minimalist — a couch without arms, a few spindly-legged chairs with a matching kidney-shaped glass-top coffee table. The upholstery was smooth and slick, not fluffy or nubbly, in warm primary colors. In an era of linoleum and wall-to-wall shag, Casanova had daringly left his floors bare, save for one area rug.

The rug was white. As kids — accustomed to frequenting houses where dozens of kids like me regularly “traipsed” in and out all over the place, tracking whatever organic matter we had stepped in before barging in — neither Peg, Bill nor I had actually seen, much less ever set foot on, a white rug.

“Wow,” said Peg.

True to Playboy form, there were a few neatly cased books and a rack of record albums (no 45’s), a subtly inset but vastly-stocked wet bar, and a bay window that afforded a scenic vista of Lake Monona. Art on the (white) walls was aggressively modern, simply framed and quietly trite — Paul Klee, Ben Shahn, Roy Lichtenstein, a Miro here, a Mondrian there and, of course, Leroy Nieman.

Casanova, and his wingman (let’s call him Harv) had prepared a spread of snacks —Harv called them hors d’ouevres — including fruit chunks, cheese squares, crackers, chips, dip, cocktail olives and a bounty of soft drinks. These victuals were aimed at winning the hearts and minds of Mom’s kids. They worked. We were ready for Mom to marry both of these guys. We couldn’t wait to move in.

But we never did. Mom purged her memory tapes and banished Casanova from existence. No remnant of the Playboy style ever stuck to me and I never lived anyplace that remotely resembled that white-rug diorama of the Mad Men mythos.

Except, there was that music. I knew it was jazz, but not the Benny Goodman swing or the Peggy Lee fever that came around now and then on AM radio. This was different. At the time, I was a ninth-grade music snob, offended by Top 40 philistinism (but addicted to the jungle joy of dancing in high-school gyms). I was ripe for the sort of music that teased my brain and confused my senses.

The jazz at Casanova’s pad had no singing. Its melodies were both redundant and dissonant, its rhythms relentless and elemental, but interlaced with complexity. It violated every convention of the pop music that was always playing everywhere. It was music that had to be paid attention to. It was Brubeck.

That record, Time Out, was one of the first LPs I ever bought. I’m not sure if I bought it to prove how smart or “offbeat” I could be, or if I did so out of genuine pleasure. But pleasure came, as I played it again and again. It became a lifelong theme, a spiderweb of intricate and interwoven sounds, spun to a heartbeat throb where I could always return for comfort, for stimulus, for remembrance.

Forty-seven years after my date with Mom at a bachelor pad on Lake Monona, I sat near Dave Brubeck as he played, live, at the Blue Note. It was, of course, an anticlimax. The thousand emotions I had felt along with Brubeck’s music over all that time, the women I’d kissed to the tune of “Take Five,” the friends with whom I’d lifted a toast while “Blue Rondo” bounced in the background — all this was way more meaningful than one overpriced night in a crowded Manhattan club.

Last week, when they said that Brubeck had died, I couldn’t help smiling skeptically. If ever a death was more virtual than mortal, this was it. Brubeck had left too much behind — including me — to simply pass away. Keep your ears open. Eventually it’ll work its way up through the white noise… Morello’s whispering drums, their rhythm caught up by Brubeck’s piano and then the sudden clarity of Desmond’s sax dancing on air.

This will outlive all of us.