My name is Malcolm Pomerantz, and I’m an axe man, though not like those guys on that reality-TV show about loggers. Had I ever been that kind of axe man, I would long ago have cut off both feet or been crushed by a toppling tree. I’ve been clumsy all my life. I have managed not to stumble into an accidental death only because my profession—I’m a musician—doesn’t require me to deal with power tools or treacherous terrain. Axe is musicians’ slang for instrument, and my axe is a saxophone. I have been playing it since I was seven, when the sax and I were nearly the same size.
I’m fifty-nine now, two years older than Jonah, my best friend of half a century. I’m tall, and Jonah’s not. I’m white; he’s black. When I first met him in the summer of 1967, Jonah was ten and quick and graceful, a piano prodigy, and I was twelve and lumbered around like Lurch, the butler in The Addams Family, which had been big on TV the previous year. When I first heard him playing, he rocked the keyboard with Fats Domino’s “I’m Gonna Be a Wheel Someday.” In both our lives, 1967 proved to be … unforgettable.
At my insistence, Jonah recently talked his life—or at least a strange and tumultuous portion of it—into a tape recorder, and his story became a book titled The City. There isn’t any point in talking my life, because most of the interesting parts are what happened when I was hanging out with Jonah; he’s already covered that territory. I do have one little experience to recount, however, a curious series of events that occurred a few weeks before I met him. Like his more engaging story, mine suggests that the world is a more mysterious place than it seems to be most of the time, when we’re plodding along from breakfast to bedtime in a reassuringly familiar routine.
