Heartbreaker

by Dennis Green

Years ago, I read an autobiography by Chet Baker called Let’s Get Lost, named after his favorite ballad. Jazz trumpeter and vocalist, Chet played with Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, Bill Evans, Paul Desmond, Art Pepper, many of the best, and recorded in his lifetime over 900 tunes.

And then the other night, I saw the movie Let’s Get Lost, and saw first hand what the word RAVAGED really means.

He was doing speedballs near the end, a combination of heroin and cocaine, the mixture that killed Jim Belushi. Baker died in 1988, at the age of 58, by “falling out of a hotel window in Amsterdam,” according to newspaper reports. In the last frames of the movie, he says about his life, “Those days in Santa Monica, on the beach, the sunlight…it was all a dream…things like that just don’t happen…”

The film was recorded during the last months of Baker’s life, and revisits his glorious youth. As a young man, Chet was so handsome he didn’t even look like a real human being. By the time we see him at 57, he is so ravaged by too many years, too many gigs, too many women, too many drugs, too many wild and crazy nights that his face looks like the Badlands.

He describes a time when he was playing at the Trident in Sausalito, a big waterfront club where I used to hang out myself back in the early ‘80s, when there was still live jazz being played at this joint. As he tells it, he was jumped by a small gang of black kids who beat him so badly he lost all his teeth, and it took him six months before he even tried to start playing trumpet again with his new dentures.

“What did you do for a living at the time?” he’s asked.

“I worked in a gas station. Pumping gas. From four in the afternoon to midnight. The worst job I ever had in my life…” As someone who worked three summers and a 14-month stretch in gas stations on my way through college, I know the feeling all too well. And I know what it’s like to look for meaning.

I’ve done my share of nasty pharmaceuticals, god knows. Got strung out for two years once on cocaine, and stopped only when I heard that George Carlin had had five heart attacks from the stuff himself. But I had nothing like Baker’s experiences.

Well, I take that back. When he talks about his three wives, the grown son he never knew, his many incarnations, I can certainly relate to all that. And I’m sure the bittersweet feelings I have sometimes are a lot like his own reflections, and recollections. We re-collect ourselves, our memories, our senses of who we really are, who we ever were, to ourselves, to these women who once loved us.

We even see him partying, at Cannes in 1987, at the Film Fest, where he plays that night for a celebrity crowd. He asks for a little respectful quiet when he sings “Kind of Blue.”

I’ve lived a rich and full life, and wouldn’t change a thing, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have any regrets. And I wonder sometimes if telling my stories, some of which are almost as harrowing as Chet Baker’s, I will give my readers pause when it comes to embarking on their own adventures. I sure hope not!

©2010 Dennis Green