Jazzy Little Christmas Read online

  He finished up the burrito and was wadding up the paper wrapping when a memory clicked in Paz’s mind about the last time he’d seen a shirt that color on a man. “That’s…no, it can’t be.”

  “Who?”

  “Gerry Benson. He’s a pianist. I haven’t seen him in about three years, since he did a guest artist concert with my band at school. I knew he lived around here, but I haven’t heard anything about him after he won a Grammy.” He remembered the fuss about the Grammy; neither Gerry nor Javier had been there to accept it. Evidently they’d had some sort of a break up and weren’t playing together anymore. Paz never found out the details, but he knew that Gerry hadn’t played anywhere since.

  The man came close enough to see. It was him. Older, scruffier, but definitely Gerry. He looked worn-out and lonely, the way he staggered toward O.B. Pier, not looking at the violent water, not paying any attention to the dirty, raucous gulls fighting the wind. Something was wrong. Very wrong.

  “He drunk or something?” Annie finished off her burrito and reached for a second.

  Gerry staggered, but not like he was drunk. More like he was deep in thought and utterly oblivious to his surroundings. He continued down the pier, heedless of the water splashing around his ankles.

  “Watch my horn, will you?” he told Annie. “And call for help. I’ll be right back.” Since she drove him back and forth to Coronado for work, he kept a stash of lifeguarding gear in her backseat. He grabbed the bright orange rescue tube and headed toward the pier. Hopefully, he wouldn’t need it, but better safe than sorry.

  There was still no one else in sight, everyone probably scared away by the wind and choppy waves. It really wasn’t a smart idea to be out there at all. Instead of going to the path, Paz ran up the stairs on the side of the pier.

  “Gerry?” he called, but the wind carried his voice away. He cupped his hands around his mouth and tried again. “Gerry!”

  No response. Gerry reached the low point and leaned over the railing. A wave of water slammed into his face, but he didn’t seem to notice. If he did, he didn’t care.

  Suicidal, or just out of it? Paz couldn’t tell. He started running, but it was a long, long way down the pier.

  Gerry leaned further over the railing as if mesmerized by the leaping water.

  Paz ran full-out. “Gerry! Don’t!”

  Too late. A huge wave arced over the pier. When it subsided, Gerry was gone. Paz didn’t even think twice; he yanked off his jacket and shirt and kicked off his flip-flops. He looped the rescue tube’s strap over his head and one shoulder, and leapt over the side into the water, praying that he and Gerry wouldn’t be smacked against the concrete pylons.

  Please let me find him. Please. It took less than a minute to drown. The shock of the cold water made him slow, and wasn’t something Paz ever wanted to swim in without a wet suit. With the buoy floating along behind him, he flailed around underwater, searching for the feel of cloth amidst the rough and slimy things that lived beneath the pier. Another quick breath and Paz dove underwater, just barely escaping being slammed into one of the pylons.

  Please, please! He was running out of time. Another breath ‑‑ and there. A lump of fuchsia hovering in the water. Paz surged toward it, ducking under the water to bypass another monster wave, and reached out. His hand brushed cloth, and he grabbed. Instinct from so many lifeguarding drills kicked in; Paz positioned the buoy between his chest and Gerry’s back and wrapped his arms underneath Gerry’s. There. Gerry’s head was above water, but that didn’t mean they were out of danger. On the south side of the pier, closer to the shore, were huge underwater boulders, deadly if a wave smacked them down. If they were swept under the pier, they were goners.

  There was a chance; the waves were high enough to hit the side of the pier. If he could get close enough to grab the chain-link along the railing and hang on…

  They’d have to be damn lucky, but it was either that or risk getting trapped underneath the pier. And even when he went toward the railing, he’d have to do it just right, or they could both be hurt.

  He took a deep breath, prayed, and rode a wave toward the pier.

  There. He felt rough metal and grabbed. The wave receded, but he held on. Gerry’s dead weight hurt until another wave buoyed them up again. Paz had to fight to keep Gerry from getting squashed between him and the lower edge of the pier. “Hang on, Ger. Just hang on,” he said as much for his own comfort. They’d made it this far. Only a little longer.

  He was cold and tired, but damned if he’d let go. Numbly, he looked back at the shore and saw flashing lights and one of the white lifeguard Jeeps. Orange-clad figures raced down the pier just as an ambulance pulled up.

  Paz braced himself against another huge wave, then spat out a mouthful of salt water. “Look at that, Ger. We’re saved.”

  Gerry didn’t answer. He hung, limp, until the lifeguards pulled them both over the railing to safety. The EMS workers, one male, one female, were right behind them with a backboard and gurney. They got Gerry flat onto the backboard and lifted him up onto the gurney. Before anyone could stop him, Paz climbed onto the gurney and straddled Gerry to check his vitals. Not breathing.

  “No,” Paz said. “Dammit, Gerry!” The gurney started rolling back toward the shore and out of danger from the waves.

  Paz positioned his hands over Gerry’s sternum and pressed, keeping his speed at about 100 beats a minute, just slower than a John Philip Sousa march. Water and blood from a half dozen cuts made Gerry’s chest slippery. The female EMS, at the head of the gurney, had a breathing mask over Gerry’s mouth and nose and squeezed it twice after Paz counted to thirty compressions. Again. And again.

  Just after they reached the ambulance, it worked. Gerry coughed and sputtered. “Good boy, Ger. Good boy.”

  “All right. You’ve been the hero. Now get down and let us work.” The female EMS’s voice was stern but not unkind as her partner took one of Paz’s arms and helped him down. One of the lifeguards wrapped a blanket around him, and only then did Paz realize how tired and cold he was.

  Annie waited just off to the side, her face pale with worry. She hugged him, and didn’t let go until the EMS worker gently pulled them apart and helped him into the back of the ambulance.

  * * * * *

  The E.R. doctor pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “You were both very lucky.”

  Paz stood with Annie inside Gerry’s little curtained room and shivered, knowing just how close it had been. He was tired as hell from all the paddling and struggling to hang onto the pier. His muscles would be screaming at him later, but for now, all that mattered was that he and Gerry were safe. Gerry was worse off, having been thrown against the railing by the water. Bruised ribs, along with a few cuts and scrapes from rocks and barnacles, but no internal injuries, and he hadn’t gotten any water in his lungs or been deprived of oxygen long enough for any damage.

  Gerry looked fragile lying there in one of those unflattering hospital gowns. He was asleep, thanks to the painkillers, oblivious to what was going on around him. “Does he have someone…?” the doctor asked.

  “He’s my partner.” Paz ignored Annie’s raised eyebrow. Hard to explain why he’d just said that, except he was afraid that if he left Gerry here or let him go home alone, he’d never see him again. “I’ll take him home and look after him.”

  The doctor wrote out a prescription. “Here. Give him one of these every six hours if he’s in pain. And bring him back if ‑‑”

  “I’m a lifeguard. I know what to look for.” He took the scrip and shoved it into the pocket of the orange lifeguard shorts Annie had brought in for him. His own clothes, and Gerry’s, were sopping wet, full of sand, and had been thoughtfully placed into plastic bags by the hospital staff. While the doctors were taking care of them, Annie had walked out at Paz's request to find Gerry something to wear. She'd come back from one of the nearby novelty stores in Hillcrest with a pair of shiny Christmas tree boxer shorts.

  "The
tamest they had," she'd said, ignoring Paz's objections. Now, she went to get the car, and between Paz and the nurses, they managed to get Gerry dressed and awake enough to get him into a wheelchair for the ride outside.

  With Annie’s help, they got Gerry into the backseat of her Civic. Paz slid in beside him. Gerry’s head drooped against his shoulder. Whatever they’d given him had totally knocked him out.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” Paz asked Gerry as soon as the door closed. “Did you want to kill yourself?”

  He meant it in jest, but as Annie pulled out and started driving, Paz wondered how true it might be. He held Gerry’s limp hand, and remembered the first time they’d met.

  * * * * *

  Paz had a thing for hands. More specifically, musicians’ hands. He loved watching how a bass player would slide his fingers up and down the neck of an upright bass, stroking and plucking the strings. Or a pianist, the way their fingers danced along the keys. Paz couldn’t help wondering what it would feel like to have those same fingers dance along his skin.

  His senior year of college, the school had invited pianist Gerry Benson and vocalist Javier Serrao to play with the jazz band. For the rest of the band, this was just another guest artist concert: learn the music, rehearse with the guests once or twice, and do the concert. But for Paz, it was much, much more important. Not only were they superb musicians playing the kind of music Paz had grown up around, but they were also openly gay in a musical genre that had typically denigrated anything other than straight, manly men. Only recently had a few jazz musicians like vibraphonist Gary Burton and pianist Fred Hersch admitted to being gay. Gerry and Javier were the next step ‑‑ never hiding their sexuality from the beginning and still managing to make a career in jazz.

  Paz had known he was gay since his sophomore year in high school, but hadn’t told his bandmates. It just didn’t seem right, somehow. After all the jokes on the bus going from one concert to another, Paz didn’t have the energy to prove that a gay man could play jazz just as well, and that he wouldn’t be any different once he told them he had a boyfriend instead of a girlfriend. He was the best sax player there, hands down, and had been getting gigs all over town. Still, he felt like he wasn’t playing as well as he should because he was hiding an important part of his life.

  But for now, the band sat out in the auditorium to watch a mini concert by Gerry, Javier, and the conguero they’d brought along. Paz watched Gerry sit down at the piano, hungry for the reassurance that a gay man could play the pants off any number of straight ones. A fuchsia designer shirt was rolled up past his elbows, the top three buttons left open to expose a few wispy tufts of chest hair. His fingers flew across the keyboard and pounded out an intense montuno. The congas sounded in the background. The Latin rhythm made Paz go hard almost immediately.

  Yes, he thought as the music struck him. Yes, yes, yes. It was almost sexual the way the music reached him, an intensity of shared experience that could only be better if Paz was up there alone with Gerry and playing his saxophone.

  Paz crossed his legs, grateful that the darkened theater hid the bulge in his pants. If it weren’t enough to see those long, handsome fingers, they had to be playing the kind of music that hit him deep in his soul. What he wouldn’t give to be up there in Javier’s place, with Gerry playing for him.

  But he was obviously already in love. The moment Gerry looked up at Javier and smiled, Paz could see it. Jealously stabbed his heart. Paz had a boyfriend, a kind, fun, secret one, but Nate was an art major, not a musician. They’d never be able to have the bond that Gerry and Javier had through music.

  He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, and let the music wash over him. If only he were alone. His mind went from Gerry’s hands playing jazz to playing him in the bedroom. Gerry composed such wonderful music and was so responsive to everything Javier did vocally that Paz knew Gerry had to show the same delicacy in bed. Paz smiled in the darkness, imagining Gerry’s hands sliding beneath his shirt to tease his nipples, the sensitive fingers knowing exactly where and how to touch him…

  Bad idea. The ache in his groin grew worse. This was not going to be a fun rehearsal. A trip to the restroom would be an easy fix, but he wasn’t willing to miss a single note.

  After the mini concert, while Javier chatted with some of the other band members as they set up for rehearsal, Paz went to speak to Gerry. The pianist stood with one hand on the piano and the other wiping his perspiring face with a handkerchief. Paz leaned with one arm along the length of the piano, his fingers just an inch from Gerry’s. His tenor, dangling from its neck strap, hung low enough to hide his still-strong erection.

  “Hot up here in the lights, isn’t it?” Gerry said with a smile. He tucked the handkerchief back in his side pants pocket. Stunning blue eyes watched Paz from under a mop of red-brown hair.

  Hot. Oh, yes, you’re hot. “Thank you for coming, and for…” His voice choked. On impulse, he clasped Gerry’s hand, hoping that the other man could sense what he couldn’t say.

  A brief moment of confusion, and Gerry smiled and squeezed Paz’s hand. “It’s hard, isn’t it? Having to hide. The jazz world doesn’t make it easy for people like us.”

  People like us. The words made Paz feel another level of kinship with Gerry. “You and Javier made it.”

  “Not without effort, but it’s been worth it.”

  Gerry’s hand still gripped his. Paz stared at the lovely, long fingers. “It makes a difference, you know. It means a lot. To me.”

  “I’m glad.” Gerry’s warm smile melted the last of Paz’s fears. “Always be yourself, and your music will be the stronger for it. ‘I play the truth of what I am,’” he said, quoting bassist Charles Mingus.

  Paz grinned, and paraphrased Miles Davis. “If you don’t live it, it don’t come out of your horn.”

  “Exactly,” Gerry said, just before the director told the band to get in place.

  Paz floated through the rest of the rehearsal, hardly able to focus on the music because of the feelings flooding through him, both the relief that Gerry understood and encouraged him, and the ache in his groin that intensified every time Gerry had a solo.

  For the concert itself, Paz coaxed his boyfriend Nate to come. The little discussion with Gerry had made all the difference. As lead tenor, Paz had half a dozen solos, and he poured his heart into every one, earning cheers and whistles from the audience as well as his bandmates. Even the director looked surprised. Afterward, while the band was packing up, Paz pulled his boyfriend onstage and kissed him, ignoring the stunned looks from his fellow musicians. He glanced over at Gerry long enough to see a faint smile of approval. Javier hooted, obviously amused.

  Paz’s relationship with Nate didn’t last much longer, not because of Paz’s method of coming out, but because of other differences. It was that moment of stolen intimacy with Gerry that stayed with Paz and colored the rest of his gigs. He kept looking at the hands of every pianist, bassist, and horn player he played with, but none were like Gerry’s.

  * * * * *

  This wasn’t his condo. Gerry could tell that by the multicolored lights strung around the sliding glass door and the mini Christmas tree perched on a wooden TV tray. The walls bore a Mexican flag and a few unframed posters of jazz musicians, including Coltrane and Miles Davis. Some nut had tacked a Santa Claus hat to Coltrane’s head. If the decorations weren’t bad enough, he had to put up with the awful racket of Christmas music played on a tenor sax.

  A live tenor sax. Gerry covered his ears, feeling decidedly less joyous than Joy to the World wanted him to be. Whoever it was must be out on the balcony serenading his neighbors; the sound was close, but slightly muffled.

  It stopped, thank goodness, as soon as Gerry tried to sit up. He let out a groan as pain shot through his chest. There were gauze bandages stuck to his skin in various places ‑‑ those were going to hurt when it came to peel them off, thanks to his chest hair ‑‑ but the pain wasn’t from the cuts. It felt mo
re like his ribs were bruised.

  The door slid open. “Hey. Easy does it.” A young man stepped in and set his tenor on its stand next to a flute. He hurried over to Gerry’s side. Up close he was Hispanic and handsome with black, close-cropped hair. He wore a white tank top and a pair of khaki cargo shorts. He looked familiar, but Gerry couldn’t remember from where.

  “How ‑‑?” Gerry hissed as the sax player helped him sit up. He’d been lying on a couch, some garish orange color, but it was a soft, almost suede fabric. It felt good on his bare ‑‑

  Oh, hell. Gerry dared to peek beneath the old Mexican blanket covering him. Those skanky Christmas tree boxers definitely weren't his. Gerry tucked the blanket tight around himself and tried not to panic. “What the hell is going on?”

  “You’ve been out of it a while because of the drugs they gave you at the hospital. They didn’t want to keep you any longer, and I didn’t want you to be alone.”

  “Hospital? Drugs?” No wonder his head felt fuzzy.

  “You took a short walk off a long pier. Don’t you remember?”

  No. He didn’t. Either the young man was crazy, or he was. “What time is it?” From what he could see outside the sliding glass door, it was dark outside.

  The young man looked at his watch. “There’s about three hours left until Christmas.”

  Nine at night on Christmas Eve. He stared at his host. “And you are?”

  He laughed. “Sorry. I’m Paz. You played at my school about three years ago for a guest artist concert. You and Javier.”

  Javier. The name hit him. Hard. Gerry closed his eyes, desperate to forget. As soon as he did, he remembered going out for a walk down O.B. Pier, and leaning over the side, wondering if there was any peace to be found in the chaotic waves. He thought he would have been afraid, but he wasn’t, not even when a stray column of water took his indecision away and tumbled him over the side.