The Beat and the Bass

The vibration of a bouncing basketball is the core of music, the primal gateway to karmic sound that transcends the universe. For Jimmy Trost, the music was present in every pass, every shot attempt, every rebound, every point scored. It was a choir that might move him to tears if it wouldn’t have made him seem weak in the faces of his varsity players.

            The rhythm of movement by ball and players alike equated to the individual components of an orchestra.

            Victory, then, was a symphony.

            Pre-estrangement, Pops had drilled this notion into Jimmy’s head, leveraging examples like Beethoven and Tchaikovsky and Wagner. He would blare the 1812 Overture or Ride of the Valkyries or Carmina Burana on his ancient portable CD player as high schooler Jimmy did his post-game pushups at center court.

            “Do you feel it?” he would yell above the final crescendo, the organ pipes resounding their ancient tones. “Do you feel the Lord at work in your life, even now, son?”

            The tone and the harmony that inspires you on the court, Pops would say as Jimmy toweled off, is what will win the day, be it practice or a game. The classical greats, in his estimation, were the only music with the capability of melding the Almighty and the game they both loved.

            And yet, Jimmy couldn’t wait to forget about that music, especially at game time.

            “So what happened when…” Kay-Kay chose her words carefully and had no synonym for estrangement. But Jimmy did.

            “You mean the two Cs—cessation of civility?” he said, looking over her head at the glowering portraits of Barton School benefactors lining the hallway that led to the gym. “I put music away, you know?”

            “Oh, come on,” she replied. “You mean you don’t even turn the stereo on in your car?”

            “Nope. I’m too busy listening to whatever’s on SiriusXM. Usually the college basketball channels.”

            That didn’t surprise Kay-Kay. Whereas she imagined Jimmy’s dad poring over his Bible for the leanest strand of insight that would go miles to save souls, she also pegged Jimmy as one who would go to whatever length it took to gain an advantage on the court.

            It was a shame, she thought. Two lives spent doing the same thing but diametrically opposed. There was no common ground, no fertile space for an exchange of ideas, even if it only had to do with basketball.

            “I’ve got a box in the storage unit at my condo that I got after Pops passed, that apparently has all his music in it,” Jimmy said. “Never opened it.”

            “Why?”

            “Bad memories. Never had the inclination to thumb through his classical music CDs.”

            “I’ve got my daddy’s music at home,” she said. “Some CDs, but mostly record albums. Vinyl, you know.”

            Kay-Kay’s dad had been gone about a year now, and the only time Jimmy had seen him was when he went to his wake at a hole in the wall called Tate’s Funeral Parlor and Mortuary, to show respect for the deceased and his friend. Daddy lay in his casket with what appeared to be the last vestiges of a smile on his coffee-black face, a full head of curly hair, a substantial gold ring on his right pinkie. He was a big man, tall, and likely had been a hell of a basketball player himself.

            In the rear of the low-lit room, near to where Kay-Kay’s mama was receiving the bereaved, was a CD player belting out strange rhythms, of deep-throated Black voices mixed equally with guitars and saxophones.

            “It’s called funk,” Kay-Kay had said as Jimmy—rather stupidly, as he reflected later—asked what was playing. “That’s George Clinton and Parliament. Daddy loved funk. He wanted us to play it here, to remember his love for the beat and the bass.”

            Parliament? Jimmy thought. Never heard of them. But he kept that thought to himself.

            That was a year ago. Music came up off and on over the fullness of time, mostly driven by Kay-Kay, who retained her daddy’s love for funk, but also jazz and blues, from Miles Davis to Muddy Waters.

            The best Jimmy could muster was the Beatles because Pops had mentioned them one time when he was a kid. 

            “I bet if you opened that box, you’d find out something about your daddy,” Kay-Kay said.

            “I already know enough about him, more than I care to know,” he said. “Besides, it’s buried somewhere in the storage unit. You could spend an afternoon looking for it.”

            “So why don’t we?”

            Reluctance is a funny thing. Jimmy lightly protested that he didn’t have the time for claptrap like that, but Kay-Kay persisted and finally wore him down. No promises, Jimmy had said.

            That was Thursday. Saturday morning, the pair were in the musty, wood-paneled basement bowels of his condo’s storage unit.

            As always, the red-handled key was stubborn. It wouldn’t turn and it wouldn’t come out of the padlock’s key slot, made all the more difficult to manipulate by the shadows lurking in the ceiling and along the walls.

            Jimmy cursed under his breath, but he knew based on prior experience, though none in the last year-plus, that if he turned the key subtly, almost with tender daring, the lock would give.

            Slow down. Just slow down. Come on…there it is.

            The shackle finally popped open. He removed the lock and slid the blocking bar to the left with a snap, thus allowing him to lift the rolling metal door that sounded a little like tank treads. Contained within was a Tetris-like mish-mash of corrugated cardboard boxes large, small and oblong. The smell was of dirty socks.

            Jimmy whistled.

            “Been a while since I’ve been down here,” he said to Kay-Kay, who stood behind him, examining the cuticle on her right thumb, the nail painted a fluorescent pink but chipped up at the tip.

            “Oh, man,” she said with a tone of flagging confidence, once she laid her eyes on the wall of boxes and a red Schwinn with rusty handlebars along the right wall that had been Jimmy’s mom’s from when she was a teenager. She had died before Jimmy’s old man, of breast cancer.

            “I know there’s something in there,” he said. “I’m sure only a box classical music CDs, though, nothing your dad would have listened to.”

            “Daddy liked some of that,” Kay-Kay replied, “but at the end of his life, he was starting to get into Afro-beat.”

            “Afro-what?”

            “You ever heard of Fela Kuti?” 

            Jimmy’s blank stare was the answer to her question.

            “Come on, let’s see if we can find the box,” she said. “Any idea where you would have put it?”

            “That’s the problem. I had movers put this stuff in here. They could have put it anywhere.”

            One by one, they dethroned the boxes, stacking them in the hallway, but taking care to leave a tiny path to the doorway, just in case. Jimmy suggested a fire down below could be a fatal mistake. He missed the roll of Kay-Kay’s eyes.

            “Don’t put that thought in my head,” she said, as she manipulated mom’s Schwinn into the hallway to get at a stack of three identical 14x14 boxes that each said Clothes in black Sharpie ink. Next to them, sitting on the floor where the bike had been, was another 14x14 box that had B.C. Stuff written in the same black ink on the side with a frowny face.

            “It’d be in a smaller box, I’d guess,” Jimmy said, now beginning to show the first beads of sweat on his face. “He didn’t own a lot of CDs, just what he referred to as the masters.”

            The pair took the better part of an hour to create another slightly larger path through the boxes that made up the center of the storage unit, with zero luck. By now able to touch the smooth, cool back-wall concrete, the underarms of Jimmy’s grey Barton School basketball t-shirt were showing the first signs of sweat marks. There was little room outside the unit for more boxes, and Jimmy remarked once again how a fire could be disastrous for them, and, jokingly, for the Barton School, if its two varsity basketball coaches would somehow die together.

            “This is a total waste of time,” he said, checking his watch, noting that it was pushing 11 a.m. The practice schedule for that day had his boys varsity starting at 2 p.m. in the main gym, with Kay-Kay’s girls varsity taking over at 4 :15 p.m.

            “Sure you don’t want to keep going?” she said.

            “It’s going to take us an hour to get these boxes put away and I’ve got to finish prepping my practice plan, so no.”

            Struck by the finality of Jimmy’s tone, Kay-Kay stepped back, held her hands out as if to defend herself, and with her backside bumped the box labeled B.C. Stuff. It fell to the shark-grey poured-concrete floor with loud, solid thunk that might very well have reverberated to the condo’s upper floors and then outside onto the commons area. 

            “My bad,” she said with a look of embarrassment, then noticed that a corner of the box was torn. There appeared to be something inside consisting of black metal.

            “Don’t worry about it,” Jimmy said, scooting through the trench of boxes and arriving just as Kay-Kay tried to right the box to bottom down.

            “Dang, this one’s heavy,” she said. “C’mon, give me a hand.”

            Jimmy did so and then gave the box a hard stare.

            “What do you suppose B.C. Stuff means?” he said.

            Kay-Kay shrugged and replied, “Open it.”

            Just then, Jimmy put his hands in his pockets, and realized he had forgotten his box cutters upstairs.

            “So what? Use the key, the one for the padlock.”

            “Probably not sharp enough,” Jimmy said, but acquiesced, taking several tries and two curses to get the key out of the padlock, which took nearly a minute.

            The box top was sealed along its seams with several layers of yellowing clear-plastic packing tape, and as surmised, the key wasn’t sharp enough to cut through it. So Jimmy tipped the box bottom up, which caused a rumble within akin to a refrigerator ice maker, as whatever was inside moved around.

            There was packing tape on the bottom of the box, too, but it wasn’t as thick as the top and appeared just as yellowed but more worn by the years. Jimmy tried the key again, and this time, it pulled up a small lip of tape that Kay-Kay grabbed and yanked across the box top. Jimmy parted the flaps and looked inside.

            “Looks like a stereo system of some sort,” he said, reaching in and lifting out a component that had a small blue label in the upper left-hand side that said, AKAI CR-81D, above the stacked words, Stereo 8Track Cartridge Tape Deck Player/Recorder. Below it was s slot with a label that said, Cartridge. 

            “It’s an eight-track player,” Kay-Kay said in a tone that normally would have been reserved for the birth of a child. “Oh wow, look.”

            After remarking how heavy the player was, Jimmy set it down tenuously on one of the boxes marked Clothes. He looked inside and as he did, he and Kay-Kay bumped heads. She said, “Ow!” He cussed in a way that cut through the air like a knife through warm butter.

            But removing the player revealed three stacks of eight-track tapes, some with a white-plastic case, some red, some black, but all labeled with names of artists he either had never heard of or was only vaguely familiar.

            Boston. Led Zeppelin. Pink Floyd. The Rolling Stones. Aerosmith. Queen.

            And the Beatles. The apparent four members of the band, who Jimmy couldn’t name if his testimony depended on it, were walking in perfect unison across a street, including one in a suit but barefoot. 

            “That’s Paul McCartney, I think,” Kay-Kay said. “That one in the white suit is John Lennon.”

            Lennon. McCartney. Jimmy had at least heard of them. But the other two? Nope..

            “This is rock n’roll,” she said, furrowing her brow. “Your dad listened to rock n’roll. The devil’s music.”

            There was silence, then, like heaven’s half hour in the Book of Revelation.

            “Why didn’t he tell me? And why did he keep this stuff?”

            Kay-Kay looked at the box again.

            “I think I know why,” she said. “See that B.C.? I bet that stands for Before Christ. This stuff probably represented good times from his past, something he just couldn’t part with. Any idea when he got right with the Lord?”

            “He was always a holy roller, as far back as I can remember, anyway.”

            “Memory is a potent thing.”

            “I wonder if this player still works,” Jimmy said idly.

            “You’d need to connect it to a stereo and speakers,” Kay-Kay said, and Jimmy’s look indicated he had neither. No surprise there.

            “There’s a workaround,” she said, and she pulled out her phone, tapped the Spotify app and did a search.

            Moments later, the opening strains of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album filled the dank, cramped space.

            Jimmy leaned against another set of boxes, these marked as Books: Kenneth Copeland, and Books: Benny Hinn.

            “This is what he listened to,” he said, not a question, just a remark.

            “For some reason, he wanted to protect you from this, though it seems pretty benign to me, compared to what’s on the radio nowadays,” Kay-Kay said. 

            “But why? It just doesn’t compute with me.”

            Kay-Kay put her hands on her hips.

            “He was committed,” she began.

            “Should have been committed,” Jimmy muttered.

            “Stop,” she said. “He was committed to what he felt was his mission. He just went about it in a way…”

            “…that led to the two Cs.”

            Kay-Kay shook her head and shrugged, as if she had a point, a good point, but Jimmy wasn’t biting.

            “He was using me,” he said. “I wasn’t anything but a means to an end. He was going to send me to the NBA to evangelize the world.”

            “But wait.” Kay-Kay raised her voice an octave.

            “He’s gone,” she said. “There’s nothing you can do about that. But look at his life holistically. He was a normal guy once, just a kid who, apparently, liked rock n’roll. When he was listening to the Beatles, my daddy was listening to Motown. They’re both part of us, you know, warts and all.”

            “The way you make your dad out to be, he was a saint,” Jimmy countered. “Not my dad. He was a religious wacko.”

            “He…was…your…father,” she said. “Besides, my daddy wasn’t perfect. You should have seen him whenever I came home after curfew. That never ended well.”

            More silence, and the Beatles played on.

            “Why don’t you celebrate him?” she said.

            “How?”

            “By listening to what he listened to, before what he became. I’m not saying he was a bad man, just maybe misguided. But if you give it a chance, you’ll find him, who he once was. A guy like you.”

            Jimmy stood up.

            “Turn that off,” he said. “Let’s get this stuff put away. Practice is coming up and like I said, I’ve got a plan to put together.”

            And that’s what they did. It took over an hour to return the boxes to some semblance of their original form, and the box marked B.C. Stuff was left next to the Schwinn, the bottom box top ajar.

            A few hours later, after Kay-Kay had departed to put together her own practice plan, Jimmy climbed into his Camry to head over to school. As he slipped the Camry into gear, he hesitated, but then pressed the button that turned on the car’s sound system. A talk show about college basketball filled the car’s cabin, courtesy of SiriusXM, but Jimmy instead chose the icon for FM Radio.

            “Here’s the Beatles…Abbey Road, on WXRT,” the velvet-throated announcer intoned. 

            He stopped the car in front of the condo’s commons area and took in the sound, and imagined dad as a teen, in his bedroom, replacing the eight-track tapes with new music.

            Probably enjoying himself immensely.

            That brought a tear to Jimmy’s eye. 

            Maybe there was something to all of this.