The Man Who Loved a Double Bass
All artists, they say, are a little mad. This madness is, to a certaient, a self-created myth desigo keep the generality away from the phenomenally close-knit creative unity. Yet, in the world of the artists, the sciously etric are always respectful and admiring of those who have the ce to be genuinely a little mad.
That was how Johnny Jameson, the bass player, came to be treated -- with resped admiration; for there could be no doubt that Jameson was as mad as a hatter.
And the musis looked after him. He was never without work, or a bed, or a packet of cigarettes, or a beer if he wanted ohere was always someoaking care of the things he could never get around to doing himself. It must also be admitted that he was a very fine bass player.
In this, in fact, lay the seed of his trouble. For his bass, his great, gleaming, voluptuous bass, was mother, father, wife, child and mistress to him and he loved it with a deep and steadfast passion.
Jameson was a small, quiet man with rapidly reg hair and a huge pair of heavy spectacles hiding mild, short-sighted eyes. He hardly went anywhere without his bass, which he carried effortlessly, slung on his back, as Red Indian women carry their babies. But it was a big baby for one so frail-looking as he to carry.
They called the bass Lola. Lola was the most beautiful bass in the whole world. Her shape was that of a full-breasted, full-hipped woman, recalliain primitive effigies of the Moddess so gloriously, essentially feminine was she, stripped of irrelevancies of head and limbs.
Jameso hours polishing her red wood, already a warm, chestnut colour, to an ever deeper, ever richer glow. On tour, he sat placidly in the bus while the other musis drank, argued and gambled around him, and he would take Lola from her black case, and un the rags that padded her, with a trembliion. Then he would take out a special, soft silk handkerchief ao work on his polishing, smilily at nothing and blinking his short-sighted eyes like a happy cat.
The bass was always treated like a lady. The band started to buy her coffee and tea in cafés for a joke. Later it ceased to be a joke and became a habit. The extra drink was always ordered and placed before her and they ig when they went away and it was still oable, cold and untouched.
Jameson always took Lola into cafés but never into public bars because, after all, she was a lady. Whoever drank with Jameson did so in the saloon and bought Lola a pineapple juice, although sometimes she could be prevailed upon to take a glass of sherry at festive occasions like Christmas or a birthday or when someones wife had a child.
But Jameson was jealous if she got too much attention and would look daggers at a man who took too many liberties with her, like slapping her case or making facetious remarks.
Jameson had only ever been known to strike a man once when he had broken the nose of a drunken, iive pianist who made a coarse jest about Lola in Jamesons presence. So nobody ever joked about Lola when Jameson was there.
But i young musis were hideously embarrassed if ever it fell out that they had to share a room with Jameson while on tour. So Jameson and Lola usually had a room to themselves. Away from Jameson, the trumpeter, Geoff Clarke, would say that Jameson was truly wedded to his art and perhaps they ought to book the bridal suite for the pair at some hotel, sometime.
But Cl