A few years ago I stumbled upon a brilliant short piece on the McSweeney’s website: “Toto’s ‘Africa'” by Ernest Hemingway, by Anthony Sams. I had always thought about trying to write something similar, but it took awhile for the idea to come together. You won’t get the Toto’s “Africa” thing without knowing the song, just like you won’t get the Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” thing without knowing that song, so I’ve linked them here. Ernest Hemingway’s writing was simple and stripped down. Jack Kerouac was a central figure of the Beat Generation, influenced by the spontaneous nature of jazz music.
“Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’” by Jack Kerouac
“Look,” the old bluesman had said. They’d been sitting on his stoop back in Brooklyn. “If you had one shot, one opportunity, to seize everything you ever wanted.” He’d paused and pulled out a cigarette. “In one moment,” he continued. “Would you capture it?” He lit the cigarette, took a drag, and slowly exhaled. “Or just let it slip?”
“I’d capture it,” Rabbit had said, but now he isn’t so sure. He’s in the bathroom of the jazz joint in Harlem, the place jumping and wailing with bebop thumping against the walls. Rabbit’s palms are sweaty and his knees are weak, his arms heavy from holding his saxophone, and he just threw up his mother’s spaghetti all over his sweater.
It’s an open stage at the jazz joint, the whole house buzzing, and when he gets up there with his sax, he’s still nervous, though he looks calm and ready. He is introduced and the crowd grows loud. He puts his lips to the sax but forgets what to play. The notes won’t come out. He’s choking, and the audience laughs. “Time’s up!” someone yells.
Rabbit snaps back to reality, back at his mother’s cramped tenement, and he’s so mad, but he won’t give up that easily. He buys a pack of cigarettes and brings them to the old bluesman.
“You better lose yourself in the music,” the old man says. “The moment you own it, you better never let it go.” Rabbit nods, waiting for more. “You only get one chance with that saxophone,” the old man says. “Do not miss your chance to blow. Opportunity comes once in a lifetime.”
So Rabbit blows and blows, losing himself in the music, owning it, and he starts to grow hotter. He plays every night, wherever he can. Normal life is boring. The world is his for the taking. Girls love him but can’t catch him. They call him the Globetrotter because he’s always on the road, from one coast to the other, New York to Chicago, Denver to San Francisco.
But life on the road is lonely and hungover from too many jugs of cheap wine and pills popped until dawn. He grows farther from home and barely remembers his own mother. His sax grows cold and the girls don’t want him. They move on to the next hepcat who blows, and he nose-dives, tries to play drunk and high and gets chewed up and spit out and booed off stage.
Rabbit limps back home to Brooklyn and breaks down in front of his mother, who helps him get sober. All the pain inside is amplified by the fact that a nine-to-five won’t make him happy. Too much monotony and not enough money to get him and his mother out of their tenement. But if he keeps living like he was, on the road and out of control, he might end up in jail or shot. Success is his only option. Failure’s not. Music is the only opportunity that he’s got.
So he goes to see the bluesman, but there is a different car in the driveway. The front porch is empty. In the yard there are two dogs, caged, and when they start barking at Rabbit, he feels their rage. He was playing in the beginning, but the mood all changed. The bluesman is gone, and Rabbit won’t be able to talk to him and confess that he did lose himself, but not in the music.
Rabbit walks home and picks up his sax for the first time in weeks. He closes his eyes and imagines the old man saying something about having one shot, one opportunity, and Rabbit wonders if maybe that one shot, that one opportunity, comes every time he picks up his sax. He gets ready to play and smiles when he remembers the last words the old man ever said to him: “You can do anything you set your mind to, man.”
Tom Cantwell 