I first heard the song in college, listening to my boyfriend’s copy of The Gentle Side of John Coltrane. While my boyfriend, a jazz and blues aficionado, effused about Coltrane’s genius, I swooned to Johnny Hartman’s sumptuous baritone as he crooned the lyrics Strayhorn had written.
           I used to visit all the very gay places
          Those come what may places
          Where one relaxes on the axis of the wheel of life
          To get the feel of life
          From jazz and cocktails
When Hartman dipped low, I felt his voice resonate in the cavity of my own chest. He sang with an easy intimacy that sounded as if he was sitting on the next barstool over, talking his troubles—how he’d once fallen for someone with a poignant smile who’d tempted him to madness, how he thought this someone might even love him back, but how, in the end, it turned out he was wrong. Life is lonely again, he continued, as if resigning himself to his fate, which would be to swear off romance forever and instead drink his life away in some small dive, rotting with the rest of the lonely, loveless souls just like him. His voice dripped with a multi-shaded melancholy and an entrancing, world-weary sophistication.

I soon got my own copy of The Gentle Side and played it over and over again in the privacy of my own bedroom, singing along. I lived at the time in a dorm a few blocks from Columbia University’s campus and about a mile from Harlem’s Sugar Hill, home to both Strayhorn and Hartman at one time, though I wasn’t aware of that then. My single looked onto a narrow terrace a few floors below, where a couple of spindly trees and a tomato plant or two grew from raised rectangular concrete beds. Once, I watched a security guard surreptitiously pluck a ripe red fruit from one of the vines. Tucked at ground level below the terrace was a small bodega, where I’d browse in my sweats for dinner fixings—packages of cheese pierogies and pints of Ben and Jerry’s, which I’d often scarf up directly from the pot (or the pint) with one of my suitemates or else the aforementioned boyfriend.

Cloistered in my high-priced Manhattan dorm room, I replayed “Lush Life” so often I transcribed it onto memory, singing along until I could mimic every one of Hartman’s agile leaps and silky chromaticisms. I didn’t yet know Strayhorn’s story, the life that music and those lyrics emerged from, so I imagined my own version: my singer-protagonist another Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald, the classic literary drunk, whiling away his lonely, tortured days in a luxuriant alcoholic fog. The longed-for lover I imagined as a woman so glamorous as to be beyond envisioning, let alone having. I fantasized myself into the song’s story, becoming both lover and beloved, the tragically spurned and the gloriously desired. The story fit my overheated ideas about what real love must be like—that it must involve agony, a burning in the brain, that it must end in sorrow and loneliness. It never occurred to me, heterosexually enclaved as I’d been, that the song’s longed-for lover—that you with the beguilingly sad smile—might have been male.

~

According to David Hajdu’s biography, Strayhorn himself described “Lush Life” as “a song most persons have to listen to twice before they understand it, and then lots of them don’t know what it’s about.”⁠ The double-entendre of “gay” in the first line was easy for most Depression-era listeners to miss, as was the exact shade of loneliness Strayhorn had in mind—that of a gay man, coming up in a deeply racist and homophobic culture, facing the prospect of a lifetime alone. Strayhorn wrote “Lush Life” during his own early adulthood, between the ages of nineteen and twenty-one. A recent high school graduate, he lived with his parents in his childhood home, a four-room shack in a mixed-race working-class neighborhood of Pittsburgh. His father worked in construction as a hod carrier; his college-educated mother looked after their five children, making do on next to nothing—what little money his father made, he tended to blow on booze. Strayhorn, a bookish Francophile and musical prodigy, wanted to go to college to study classical piano, but was deemed too poor and too Black. So he jerked sodas and delivered goods for a nearby drugstore, saving his money, and in his free time, he played and composed music. After six years of saving, he enrolled at the Pittsburgh Musical Institute, where he studied under the school’s founder, a beloved instructor who passed away within the year. Bereft, Strayhorn did not return to the school.

By the time he began working on “Lush Life,” he’d already written a whole book’s worth of classical compositions, one of which (“Concerto for Piano and Percussion”) he’d performed at the commencement ceremony of his graduating class. His peers regarded him with awe—they considered him a genius and an anomaly. He had one close friend—a white trumpet player who also loved music and books—but otherwise, he mostly stuck to himself. Except, that is, for his brief association with Ray Wood, a sax player and fellow composer known as Mr. Dignity for his debonaire style. Together, they wrote two songs, unrecorded and unperformed—“You Lovely Little Devil” and “I’m Still Begging You.” The latter tune opened with this line: “Queer how we first met.” Neither man spoke of their relationship or their co-composed songs to anyone else.

Hajdu provides no evidence that Wood and Strayhorn were romantically involved, and even though the lyrics to “Lush Life” imply an experienced author, someone who knows what it’s like to love and lose, they might just as well have been written by someone with a well-developed imagination. Which, of course, Strayhorn had. So exactly how autobiographical the song’s lyrics were will likely remain a mystery. What interests me, though, when I rehearse the lyrics in my mind, is how closely they foreshadow the arc of his own life, the one he hadn’t yet lived.

~

Lush. Feel the tongue press against the hard palate, the sound begin as a closed-in “l” before the tongue drops into the guttural vowel—the same primal sound as in grunt or suck, cunt or fuck. But lush is softer, sweeter; lush ends on the sound of a secret, its abundant pleasures hidden away, deliciously forbidden. It rhymes with plush and gush and flush. The word is wet, like a meadow after a rain, like liquor and its looseness, like a summer plum and the juice it sends down the chin, like sex. Delicious, lickable, luscious, deluxe. Luxuriant, like jungle foliage, like a humid August prairie, like voluminous hair, like velvet, vellum, velouté. Like the gushing rush of fresh rain, of rivers rising at their banks, of thirsty thighs. Like brocade and damask, satin and silk, lapidary lapis lazuli. Like the flush of flesh, the push of blush, of bust, the blush of bloom. A fluttering eyelid drops a lash on a flushed cheek, on its lustrous luster, its plummy plumage. The swish of sheets, of shush, the others will hear, the rustling of clothes or leaves, the secret supping amid grass, moss, dense woods, moving under fluxes of dappling light, plumbing a lover’s core, as if seeking their truest self, hidden within that inner hush—or allowing oneself to be plumbed, relinquishing oneself to the urgency of touch, of taste, of take, of drink, of drunk.

To lush is to drink, to debauch, to be dissolute, which is also to say to dissolve.

~

The story of Strayhorn and Duke Ellington is itself a story of dissolution, beginning with the night they met. A friend of Strayhorn’s had an in with Ellington, who was playing in Pittsburgh, and set Strayhorn up to meet the big man in between shows. Strayhorn wowed Duke first by demonstrating his skill as a mimic, playing “Sophisticated Lady” exactly as Ellington had just finished playing it on stage—dissolving, we might say, his own sound into Ellington’s. “That’s how you played it, Mr. Ellington,” Strayhorn said. “Now this is how I would play it.” And he went again, in a new key and a quicker tempo, prompting Ellington to rise from the divan where he’d been lounging and come to stand behind Strayhorn, watching as he transformed the song, made it his, reversing his own dissolution. It sounds almost magical, the way it happened—disappearing trick as audition. It’s as if he was demonstrating how easily he could don Ellington’s drag, erase his own voice and become the jazz icon that Ellington was. And then, how easily he could push the Ellington sound into new and exciting territory.

While Ellington was in town that week, he tossed Strayhorn assignments: write lyrics, write a chord progression, arrange a tune. Strayhorn sailed through each test of his skill. At the end of the week, Ellington scribbled directions to his Harlem apartment on a piece of paper and handed it to Strayhorn, telling him to look him up, that he’d find a way to work him into the Ellington organization. You must take the “A” train, the directions read—or close to it, to get to Sugar Hill way up in Harlem. I imagine Strayhorn tucking the paper in his breast pocket and heading home, his own future nested against his heart.

Strayhorn became Ellington’s arranger and co-composer, working in tight collaboration with Duke for much of his career, writing and arranging many of the Ellington Orchestra’s most popular hits, including “Take the ‘A’ Train,” based on the words Duke had written on that torn piece of paper. And Ellington repaid Strayhorn by acting as a kind of paterfamilias, putting him up in his Sugar Hill apartment, providing him with meals and a generous salary, treating him as a member of the family. Soon, Strayhorn found his own sweet Sugar Hill place, a basement apartment that he shared with his new partner, Aaron Bridgers, a pianist and Francophile, like him. And he worked long hours for Ellington, sometimes traveling with the band, sometimes staying home and completing assignments long distance, taking a riff or an idea that Ellington threw his way and developing it into a full-fledged piece of music. They had no contract, no terms, no official agreement. Always, the music bore Ellington’s name.

~

But the dissolution “Lush Life” describes is different—not obliteration by a mentor’s marquee, but by liquor as a consolation for lost love.

Strayhorn seems to have found love with Bridgers, for a time, a love interwoven with liquor. It was Manhattan in the 40s, the swing era: Packards and pinstripes, pork pie hats and zoot suits, cocktails and nightcaps, club-hopping and hobnobbing. A cocktail in one hand and a cigarette in the other meant you had savoir faire, that you lived the good life, and Bridgers and Strayhorn aimed to live it. They installed a bar in their Sugar Hill apartment, complete with red-cushioned stools, a couple of cabaret tables, and a piano, and held frequent soirees, entertaining Manhattan sophisticates into the early morning hours. While Bridgers worked his day job as an elevator operator, Strayhorn kept chilled glasses in the fridge, ready to be filled when Bridgers came home. After a homemade cocktail or two, they might head out to the clubs—the Hollywood, Luckey’s Rendezvous, or Café Society, America’s first integrated cabaret, where Billie Holiday first dropped “Strange Fruit” on a stunned crowd, and where Strayhorn’s preferred martini—chilled gin with a “spray” of vermouth—became known as a Billy’s. They liked to blow the minds of those who might prejudge them by speaking Parisian French; Strayhorn called Bridgers “Ah-ron,” undoubtedly forming a perfect French r in the back of the throat. Bridgers dubbed Strayhorn Buddha, for his unshakeable equanimity.

Eventually, Bridgers landed a gig too good to pass up: regular pianist at Paris’s Mars Club. He moved overseas while Strayhorn, tied to his obligations to Ellington, stayed home. But he’d visit Bridgers often and would haunt the Mars Club when he did, drinking alongside the many distingué girls who may or may not have had sad or sullen gray faces, but who undoubtedly delighted in his sparkling company. Frequently, Strayhorn would close out evenings at the Mars Club with a private rendition of “Lush Life.” It was his preferred mode for the song—to be brought out at intimate gatherings toward the end of the night, when everyone was deep into their cups and the mood turned mellow and reflective. It was a time he called “halfway to dawn”—that liminal boundary between days when facades fall away, revealing whatever lies beneath: nakedness, vulnerability, truth.

~

I knew the seductive lushness of “halfway to dawn” myself back in college, having spent plenty of nights in a small dive near campus called The Marlin—a dim, narrow, smoky joint that served cheap pitchers of beer. The Marlin was a far cry from the chic clubs Strayhorn loved, but it did the trick for lushing. You’d order at the bar in the front room, and then carry the sloshing pitcher and hard plastic cups to the back, the soles of your shoes peeling off the sticky floor, where you’d slide your butt into one of the many diner-style booths that flanked the walls. Every so often, after downing a few cups of Miller, you’d get up and peel your way down the narrow aisle to the jukebox in back, where you’d slide in some quarters and select a tune—DeeLite’s “Groove is in the Heart,” maybe, or Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish,” or anything by A Tribe Called Quest. From time to time, a lamppost of a man with yellow-gray skin and a ratty wool cardigan that draped off his bones would march down the aisle, picking up empty pitchers and full ashtrays, his gray mustache drooping like a sodden animal stuck to his face. Never once was anyone carded at The Marlin, even though we were all underage.

I had learned how to drink until I was drunk in high school, so lushness itself wasn’t new to me. The only difference in college was that alcohol was constantly available, whenever you wanted, as much as you wanted. If not at The Marlin, then at the West End, another college bar, or at the Chinese restaurant a few blocks over on 111th and Amsterdam, which gave you unlimited free wine with dinner, or at the Symposium, a Greek restaurant that served pitchers of sangria, or at the regular parties hosted by the frats that lined 114th street, where they’d serve bright blue punch spiked with Everclear—all around me, the lush life was ever-available and ever-abundant. Even the city itself induced a kind of lax looseness, swirling and pulsing with a seductive creative energy that shimmered just beyond my reach, like a fantasy of itself. New York, college life, the possibilities of my own young adulthood—they all sang to me like sirens, confusing me, tempting me, dizzying me. What might happen this weekend? What new experience, what new feeling? Who might I meet? Who might I become next week, next semester, next year? The booze heightened the anticipation, inviting me to submit to its ravishment.

I met the man who turned me on to Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” when I joined an a capella group my first year. After rehearsals or gigs, we’d sometimes go out drinking as a group, until, about halfway to dawn, the man and I would return to his dorm room—a roomy single, replete with care-package snacks mailed to him monthly by his mother and his extensive CD collection—where we’d lose ourselves in the luxury of each other’s limbs. This man sang bass, sported a Shakespearean-style mustache-and-goatee and a head of fine chin-length waves, and possessed a nervous habit of tugging his T-shirt away from his belly, which was soft. Sometimes, when we spoke, he’d fix his eyes to a spot on the wall just behind my head. But he was smart and sweet and attentive, a year ahead of me in school, witty enough to make the college improv comedy troupe, and knowledgeable about campus and college life and New York in a way that quelled my constant sense of overwhelm. And he had great taste in music. We’d spend hours in his room, smoking pot from a white soapstone pipe he kept in a little black case with a golden latch, and then devouring his boxes of Snackwell cookies and Quaker Oats chocolate chip granola bars, and listening to his CDs—Coltrane, Robert Johnson, Etta James, Stevie Ray Vaughan. We feasted on the music as we did the snacks, while remaining ignorant about its creators, their sacrifices, their striving, their fears and failures, their efforts to make a mark, to have their say, to cast their unique voices into the world.

I liked this man, liked talking with him, studying with him, listening to music with him, lushing about with him in bars and in bed, but did not feel tempted to madness by him, nor did I experience any burning inside my brain that I could discern. What I felt seemed to me more akin to friendship, and so, after a winter break away, I let him know as much. He sat on the edge of my dormitory-issued twin bed, elbows on his knees, and shook his head. “No.”

“No?” I stared at him from my end of the bed.

“No,” he repeated. “I’m a good boyfriend, I can show you. I won’t let you throw this away.”

Embarrassing as it is for me to admit, I gave in. I submitted my own inklings to his stronger desire. There was something about his confidence that impressed me, probably because I had so little of it myself. Maybe he was right, I thought. Maybe I’d been hasty to dismiss this thing we had going. Maybe he knew something I didn’t. Maybe with time what we had would start to look more like what I imagined love to be, more like a relationship that someone like me—whoever that was—might have.

I don’t want to impose a strained kinship to Strayhorn here, nor to imply that my life— comparatively privileged and conventional as it has been—has paralleled his in any significant way. I only mean to point to the ways his song, as well as the life it resonates with, has spoken to me, how it’s served as a kind of touchpoint between worlds, a pane of glass I’ve pressed my nose to, trying to make out the shapes that move murkily on the other side. Art is like that: sometimes a window, sometimes a mirror. Or maybe both. Maybe what I think I see on the other side of the song’s glass is just a distorted vision of myself. Maybe that’s all I’ll ever see.

~

Strayhorn and Bridgers eventually split, though they remained friends across the ocean that kept them apart. Strayhorn moved from their Sugar Hill apartment to a place on West 106th, about a half mile from the dorm where I first heard “Lush Life.” He kept working for Ellington in his capacity as the man behind the legend, but eventually, he grew discomfited by what began to feel like a gold-plated raw deal. When he tried, briefly, to distance himself and go solo, Ellington wooed him back with flattery and promises of greater recognition. “From now on your name is right up there next to mine,” Ellington promised. And Ellington did try to deliver on that promise, making sure Strayhorn’s name appeared in album and program credits, and talking him up on stage and in interviews. But Duke’s homophobic publicist hadn’t gotten the memo—or ignored it if he had—and left Strayhorn’s name off every notice he fed the media. Once again, all Strayhorn’s hard work, all his singular brilliance, somehow dissolved into the ubiquitous water of Ellingtonia.

Strayhorn himself seemed conflicted about this state of affairs. He would brush it off when friends made an issue of it, saying it was nothing, that it didn’t matter, skating past it with his signature mordant humor. He’d order another drink. Dissolving himself in the booze, he’d disappear behind that bodhisattvic smile.

~

At the age of 49, Strayhorn began to have trouble breathing and to tire easily. His doctor diagnosed him with esophageal cancer, likely brought on in part by his lifetime of heavy drinking and smoking. Friends encouraged him to use what time he had left to write his own music, do his own thing. “You put yourself second long enough,” his friend Honi Coles said, “Time to put yourself out there.” And Strayhorn began to. At the request of the Duke Ellington Jazz Society, he played a solo concert—his first—to a sold-out house, then recorded the same program a week later for an album Ellington himself produced. He wrote lyrics to a tune called “Imagine My Frustration,” sung by Ella Fitzgerald on Ella at Duke’s Place. He composed part of a suite called A Blue Mural from Two Perspectives, a mirror composition, played in two directions: down the page and then back up. Classically inspired, the piece harked back to Strayhorn’s roots. As Hajdu puts it, “It was Strayhorn-Ellington, rather than Ellington-Strayhorn.” And as Strayhorn put it, to his close friend Marian Logan, “I can’t be Edward anymore, Doll Baby. I hardly have the strength to be me.”

One of Strayhorn’s final compositions, written the year he died, was a suite for piano and French horn, written expressly for pianist Dwike Mitchell and horn player Willie Ruff and later recorded by them as Suite for the Duo. “[The piece is] really Billy’s autobiography,” Ruff commented years later. “It’s really the last words from a great genius shutting down before his time. It’s all about frustration and anger—lost chances, missed opportunities. . . . You know, he could have been the biggest of the big. . . . His genius is right there in the music. But there he was, checking out, and nobody except the musicians and few of the writers in the jazz magazines knew who Billy Strayhorn was. He looked back at his own life and he couldn’t find himself.”

~

What does it mean, this subterranean yearning to dissolve, to disappear? Where does it come from? It’s a yearning that can live in equal tension with the drive to create, to make a mark, to be somebody in the world. I feel that tension myself, the pull in both directions—toward a genuine expression of my own authentic selfhood, whatever that might be, and conversely, toward surrendering myself to the tow of stronger tides. It can feel so burdensome, all this continual becoming, so relentless. And so pointless, too, sometimes, knowing where we’re all ultimately headed. Hence the temptation to obliterate oneself in the promise of drunkenness or the engulfing draw of someone else’s desire, to relinquish oneself, finally, to the soft somnambulance, the sweet whispers, the hidden inner hush, the plummy pleasure and luxuriance of lushness.

Only lushness, like all earthly phenomena, never lasts.

I’m fifty now, a good thirty years older than when I first heard Strayhorn’s signature tune. And as it happens, I, too, received a sobering cancer diagnosis at the age of forty-nine. I’m luckier than Strayhorn: mine, a bone marrow cancer, is less advanced and more treatable than Strayhorn’s cancer was. It’s a disease doctors tell me I should be able to live with for many years. Still, the diagnosis has shaken me, prompted me to look back over my life and ask the kinds of questions people tend to ask when faced with the prospect of their own end. What was all that about, then—all that fuss and worry and busyness, all that heartache, all that striving? What, in the end, will any of it mean? On good days, my answer to that has everything to do with love, in all of its forms: partnered love, filial love, love between friends, love of community, love for students and colleagues, love of the earth and its creatures. I am lucky to have an abundance of these loves, loves that are real, which is also to say they are ordinary, filled with daily giving and taking, with disappointments and surprises, with failures and forgiveness.

But not all days are good days. Some days, my brain burns with existential terror, with the fear of what’s to come, the suffering my illness will surely bring. Some days, I find myself imagining my own erasure. On those days, I can recognize a kind of Dionysian wisdom in the drive to disappear.

I’ll live a lush life in some small dive. . . I think of the pleasure to be found in self-forgetfulness—in dancing, one among many, to a tight funky band in a sweat-humid club, or tangling amid the limbs and limbic intimations of a lover, or lying in a dewy meadow on a summer night, feeling yourself fall into the dark depths of the spangled sky. Sometimes it’s precisely when I feel myself dissolving, when I let the boundaries between me and not-me temporarily fall away, when I let go of the idea of being a “self” altogether and instead allow a merging with the pulse of a larger, undergirding energy, that I feel the least despairing, the most complete.

Sometimes, I can hear that same mystical wisdom when I listen to pianist McCoy Tyner’s lush chord voicings behind Hartman’s sumptuous tone and Coltrane’s lavish phrasing as they savor Strayhorn’s melody. I hear it and then it’s gone, and I want to find it again, to coax it out from wherever it might be hiding. Sometimes that place looks like the bottom of a glass.

~

The other day I heard a recording of Strayhorn himself playing and singing “Lush Life” at a club on Manhattan’s East Side in 1964, three years before his death. He moves the melody along freely, ad-lib style, the bass player striving to keep up with him. Like Hartman, he sings like he’s telling a story, but makes it even more conversational, racing through his own poetic lyrics as if taking care not to over-lard the sentiment. When he gets to the end of the verse—that Ah, yes, I was wrong that Hartman almost whispers—Strayhorn times it comically. You can hear people laugh in the background. He’s smiling in spite of it all, erasing his own pain for the pleasure of his listeners. Enough with the self-pity, kid, he seems to be saying to his younger self, so filled with brilliance and talent and ambition, with deep romantic yearning and regret. It’s a joke, a big joke, all of it, all of what you dreamed. And anyway, it’s just about over now. Why don’t we get ourselves a drink?