Falling in Amsterdam with Chet Baker
Chet Baker died in a fall from a window in the Prins Hendrik Hotel in Amsterdam. Like my dad, who died in a fall and played trumpet too. But not like Chet, hollow cheeks, pompadour, and when young, I wanted to emulate cool guys, not dad’s crew-cut optimism, hot, hungry, bouncing on balls of feet, pencil-line moustache carefully trimmed.
But now I see they’d both come to the same place — where dreams of youth aren’t much good – and both died at age 58, free-falling.
Had Baker nodded off and fallen from that open window? Jumped? And when they found my dad on the floor, where he’d apparently fallen, it wasn’t the cancer that had killed him. An accident? A suicide giving up?
Chet understood wages of sin in America, so spent last years in Europe, where admirers supported, never tired of his music, didn’t expect clean and sober.
In Amsterdam, Baker’s fans encouraged legend, as they did with Herman Brood — Amsterdam bad boy musician, painter – who, age 56, stepped off the roof of the Hilton in finale of a story whose end he’d foretold.
Amsterdam invites you, live out fantasies, follow dreams, demons; Amsterdam gives all the rope you need … to hang yourself.
Photos of Chet and Brood show decline — insouciant pretty boys then men slumped, eyes dead. Yet like Chet, Brood maintained defiant bravado, even near the end.
Dad tried to get along, Chet locked jaw in dust bowl defense, but Brood challenged the establishment, disapproving faces like Golden Age portraits of civil guardsmen, wearing armor over silk, small tight mouths, in-drawn lips. His face resembled theirs, but in flip side mockery, contempt like Chet’s, anger out of which music miraculously came. Women loved them.
“Brood Is Dead!!” read headlines when he jumped, as if they’d been waiting, could now confirm, though he had, like Chet, defied them, becoming middle aged. “The only bad thing about drugs is the price,” said Chet, but it climbed as they aged, to Hilton roof, window of Prins Hendrik, edge of dad’s hospital bed.
Every time I pass that hotel, I glance toward the alley where Chet landed on bricks, see them all falling, faces forward, hands at sides, not trying to stop.
“Life is struggle, son,” dad said. So in the end, he gave up, like Brood and Chet; thought it a struggle you could win. From them, I learned you can’t.
And it freed me to turn my inevitable descent into flight, gliding with sleek grace of Brood’s pompadour on currents of Chet’s melancholy songs and dad’s optimistic moustache, pencil-thin, gliding to meet bricks, as if I’d planned to be there … all along myself.