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“Smoke Rings and Minor Things” was a short-listed entry in our recently concluded 69th Short Fiction Contest, and is published with the consent of the author.

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photo by Simon Webster/Flicker/CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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Smoke Rings and Minor Things

by  Jane McCarthy

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…..When Martin Lanox died in 1964, the Village Voice obituary was only four sentences long. Two were accurate. One was plagiarized from a Horace Silver liner note. The last, I suspect, was written by someone who once heard him play saxophone through the wall of a dry cleaners.

…..“Martin Lanox, a sometime tenor man and longtime presence on the New York jazz scene, passed away in his sleep. He was 42. His tone had a bruised dignity. He could swing a scale like a drunk quoting Yeats.”

…..If I may be so bold, and I usually am, let me offer a version of the man as he actually was, or at least as I remember him, because Martin Lanox was many things, and not a single one of them was ever predictable.

…..Martin played out of tune with such flair it became fashion. Suits from the Eisenhower years, long after the Beatles had landed, were worn by him just to spite fashion.

…..The difference between genius and madness was “who’s got the better lighting,” he told me.

…..For all his bravado, he had a soft spot for Patsy Cline. He’d sneer at the charts on the stand, but if “Crazy” came on the jukebox, he’d hum along under his breath, almost shyly, like no one should catch him.

…..He was, quite possibly, the most unforgettable person I’ve ever watched vanish.

…..I first met Martin in 1959 at a club in the East Village called Tilden’s, which, like many jazz clubs of the time, sounded like a haberdasher’s and smelled like ghosts who’d once dated poets.

…..He was playing behind a curtain. The club owner, one Mr. Teddy Tilden, had recently become enamored with avant-garde theater and insisted that each musician “debut through silhouette.” Most of the players loathed it. Martin didn’t care. The moment he began playing, the curtain disappeared. I’m not talking metaphorically. Someone from the kitchen knocked the rod and it dropped like a punched prizefighter.

…..His tenor had a dent near the bell, a souvenir from a barroom scuffle years before. He called it “Benny,” after some long-lost friend, and insisted it gave the notes character. He’d tweak its pads with a tiny screwdriver, claiming each adjustment was “mood-dependent.”

…..“In a Sentimental Mood” was played so languid, it felt like the room had been lowered into warm bourbon. I was transfixed. That night, Martin hit a note so clean, so impossibly long, that even the bartender paused. For those few seconds, I was witnessing something that would never happen again, a single slice of eternity in a smoke-stained room.

…..It wasn’t just the sound, though Lord knows, that sax had a voice like whiskey whispering through a hangover, it was his presence. Dapper, deep, and damaged. Like a Sinatra tune with a limp.

…..After his set, I found him in the alley behind the club, crouching on a milk crate, blowing smoke rings that somehow managed to look weary.

…..As I approached he nodded, offered me a match from a packet labeled Hotel Pennsylvania, and said, “I only ever play for two things: rent and regret. Tonight’s regret. Definitely regret.”

…..I told him I was a critic, and he laughed like I’d just admitted to a venereal disease.

…..“A critic,” he said, dragging the word out like it owed him money. “Well, hell. Be kind. Or at least funny.”

…..That was Martin.

…..In the months that followed, I saw him play in every venue that would book him, and some that wouldn’t until he’d show up uninvited and start blowing tenor in the coatroom.

…..In a walk-up in Alphabet City, his living room contained a piano missing five keys and a toaster that doubled as an ashtray.

…..Martin had rules. Never rehearse sober. Never trust a drummer with perfect hair. Never, under any circumstance, discuss Coltrane before noon.

…..His past was mostly myth. Depending on who you asked, he’d either studied under Lester Young, roomed with Art Blakey, or punched Norman Mailer at a party in 1954 (a story I’m 60% sure is true, since Mailer was punched at most parties in the 1950s).

…..There was also talk of a pianist named Dolly Reyes. People swore she could play faster than anyone alive and once beat Martin three games in a row at chess while sight-reading “Body and Soul.” He never confirmed it, just smiled in a way that made you wonder if losing to her had been the point.

…..There were rumors of a wife in Chicago. A stint in Paris. A night in jail for urinating on a sculpture at MoMA because it “lacked swing.”

…..Martin neither confirmed nor denied any of it. “The facts are just the chords. I play the changes,” he told me.

…..I can’t quite decide whether the man’s flaws make him tragic or immortal.

…..There was one stretch, in early ’61, when things nearly clicked. Martin landed a week-long residency at a club in Harlem, The Marquee, playing with a new quartet that included Dolly Reyes, whose fingers were so fast they seemed to outrun time. She was twenty-nine, Puerto Rican, a chess prodigy, and she walked out of Martin’s life mid-set on the sixth night of the residency after he tried to “re-harmonize” her solo in C minor with a sustained B natural drone.

…..“You’re not Miles,” she’d hissed, packing up her chart book. “You’re just noise in good shoes.”

…..Martin didn’t argue. He poured himself a whiskey and played “Someone to Watch Over Me” as if the song had betrayed him personally. That was the thing about Martin Lanox. Every note, he played like it owed him an apology.

…..Thing is, Dolly was different. She disarmed Martin in a way I’d never seen before. He would argue with drummers until dawn, walk off stages mid-set if the mood struck him, but with Dolly he listened, really listened. In rehearsal, he’d hover near the piano, to watch her fingers, like he was trying to memorize their choreography. He’d bring her coffee exactly the way she liked it, two sugars, no milk, though he’d grumble about it to the rest of us like it was an imposition.

…..One night after a set, we ended up in a diner on Lenox. Dolly was drawing chess diagrams, showing a famous match. Martin sat diagonally across from her, chin in his palm, a cigarette burning down, looking at her as if she’d just played a note he couldn’t quite figure out.

…..“You ever gonna tell her?” I asked later, outside, under the awning.

…..“Tell her what?” He flicked the cigarette into the gutter without looking at me.

…..“That you think she’s the best thing that ever happened to your music.”

…..He smirked, the quiet kind, without teeth. “And ruin it? Nah. Some things you let breathe.”

…..It struck me then that Martin, for all his chaos, understood something about beauty, that naming it too soon could make it vanish. Maybe that’s why he let her walk away without chasing her. Or maybe, deep down, he knew she was the only one who could leave him mid-song and still be in his melody.

…..By ’62, the scene was shifting. Clubs were closing, or converting into folk dens with names like The Pickled Banjo.

…..Jazz, for a hot minute, had become cool again thanks to Brubeck and Davis, but the tide was turning. The Beatles were recording in Hamburg. Dylan was writing in Morningside Heights.

…..Martin tried to adapt. He even wrote a “topical” jazz poem called Sputnik Blues, which he read at a beatnik lounge in Soho while an alto player from Jersey punctuated each stanza with bird calls. It did not go well.

…..Carrying on was all he knew. He wasn’t built for compromise. He was built for smoke-filled rooms, for slow ballads, for two-drink minimums and one-night stands. He didn’t evolve. He persisted.

…..The last time I saw Martin play was in early ’64, at a tiny dive bar called Mona’s Downstairs. It wasn’t a gig, per se. He just walked in, nodded to the bartender, borrowed an alto from the house band, and started to play.

…..It was rough. The tone had frayed. His embouchure was failing. There were cracks in his sound. Not the good kind. That night, he arrived without his usual jacket. He dropped a reed on the floor and cursed himself, something he never did in years past. The alto’s first notes wobbled; the rhythm flagged, as if the room itself had grown tired. Still, he lingered on particular notes, holding them as if reality might bend to keep them there. Even then, especially then, there was something magical about the way he lingered on a note. Like he was trying to tell it, “Stay. There’s still beauty here.”

…..I remember thinking, in that moment, of Dolly Reyes, how she once told him he was “just noise in good shoes.” But watching him coax that alto into something tender and stubbornly alive, I wondered if, somewhere out there, she’d have recognized the melody.

…..After the set, he sat down next to me and said, “The horn’s got arthritis.” He smiled.

…..Six weeks later he died. No drama. No overdose. An exit.

…..The superintendent found him in his chair by the window, saxophone case open on the floor, a mouthpiece still in his hand. They said it looked as if he’d paused mid-thought. As if, finally, he’d played the note he’d been searching for, lingering long enough to leave it in the world before slipping away.

…..I think sometimes about what I did with those years while Martin was chasing ghosts in smoke-filled rooms. I kept writing, sure, but I took the safer assignments, the ones with deadlines and expense accounts, the ones that looked respectable when my mother clipped them for her scrapbook. There were offers I turned down, an overseas tour with a jazz festival, a chance to profile a young Miles Davis, because they paid in exposure and danger, and I told myself I was too smart for that.

…..Martin never cared about smart. He cared about true. Even when it cost him rent, gigs, dignity. Maybe especially then. I told myself I admired him because I couldn’t be him. But some nights, usually after my second bourbon, I wonder if it wasn’t the other way around, if I was the one taking the easy melody while he was out there wrestling with the changes.

…..Years on, I sit in this apartment with its tasteful furniture and NPR murmuring from the radio, and I think about Martin Lanox. Not because he was famous. He wasn’t. Not because he was always right. He wasn’t. Because he meant it. Every damn note. And sometimes I wonder if I took the safe path because I couldn’t measure up to his kind of fearless honesty.

…..In a world of phonies and posers, of cleverness without depth, Martin was sincere to a fault. He hurt, but he never hid. He obsessively loved music the way gamblers love the turn of a card; recklessly, ruinously, and with a remarkable grin that dared the house to stop him.

…..I raise a glass, bourbon, in his honor, and toast a man who played the minor keys like major events.

…..Martin Lanox, tenor saxophone. Lost and found.

…..Still playing in my mind.

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  Jane McCarthy recently wrapped five years as a co-founder of a deep-tech company, wrangling ideas, words, and the occasional engineer, in her role leading communications and marketing. Originally from the UK and now based in Portugal, she’s pursuing ghostwriting and voice-over work while writing her debut novel. Her storytelling blends speculative curiosity with themes of identity, memory, and the weird ways consciousness misbehaves. Jane loves to listen to emotional jazz while she writes.

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