Happy to Sing the Blues After Brain Surgery

“You ain’t never had to cry, baby, so don’t start cryin’ now . . . “

Up on the stage at the Elks Lodge in Ventura, Mark Pro is singing the blues, belting out lyrics about good times and bad, lonesome travelers with hearts so blue, babes who don’t stand no midnight creepin’. His band, Dynamo Jump, is playing up-tempo for the 60 or so swing dancers out on the floor and Pro switches frequently from vocals to harmonica, twirling notes in the air like spaghetti on a fork.

The dancers, mostly novices, are tripping around the floor, intent on practicing the moves they learned from an instructor earlier in the evening. What they hear is a 45-year-old guy doing standard blues riffs, now and again shouting out “Yeah!” and “He’s the man!” to acknowledge one of his four fellow players.

What they don’t hear is the music behind the notes, the unsung anthem to second chances.

After brain surgery four months ago, Mark Pro was groping for words. He could barely string a sentence together. He kept trying to unlock the great storehouse of vocabulary and concepts within, but no key quite fit.

“It was so frustrating,” he said. “I knew it was there, but sometimes I just couldn’t get to it.”

On Friday night, Pro, a frequent performer at local clubs, made his first trip back to the mike. His band was invited by Swing Addiction, a nonprofit group that promotes drug awareness as it teaches swing dancing to students in local high schools and colleges.

He sounded fine. Yes, he needed to glance at sheet music for guidance on songs he’d long ago committed to memory. And every now and then, he missed a line and had to improvise. But the blues is a forgiving medium; in the right hands, “Well, my baby, humma humma” can fit right in. The blues is a lot of things, but the blues ain’t brain surgery.

By trade a stevedore, Pro started performing years ago in the holds of ships at Port Hueneme, whipping out his harmonica for entertainment when things were slow.

Soon he became bold enough to sit in with local bands. Eventually he formed his own, which became a fixture at clubs like Nicholby’s and California 66.

One day last fall, the blues suddenly came home.

After a terrifying seizure, Pro was told he had a dime-sized growth deep inside his brain. It turned out not to be the aggressive cancer doctors had feared, but a rare abscess--maybe the work of a parasite or some long-forgotten injury.

That was the good news. However, the growth was located in the region of the brain that governs language, and the operation induced a temporary condition called expressive aphasia--a difficulty retrieving words.

The day after the surgery, a doctor held up an object and asked Pro what it was. Pro knew the answer--but there was no way he could come up with the word, “pen.”

“I wanted to tell the nurse she had pretty green eyes,” he said. “I told her she had pretty green teeth.”

For an intellectual, the condition was especially frustrating. Pro spends his days hauling bananas off ships just in from South America, but he has a master’s degree in counseling and has worked as a therapist. To help himself regain mastery over words, he reads aloud--not from primers but from sophisticated journals of opinion, such as the New Republic.

He still sees a speech therapist. When he gets excited, he still strains for the right words. On Friday night, he felt that the music sometimes passed him by, that he was groping for phrases as the melody rushed past him.

“I know I can kind of fill in the gaps,” he said. “But it’s still frustrating.”

Three weeks ago, Pro went back to work on the docks.

“There are some rough guys out there,” he said, “guys I didn’t think had much of an ability to empathize. But so many of them came up to me and said, ‘Hey, man, I heard about what went down and I’m glad you’re back.’ They really responded in a loving way.”

Even though his anti-seizure medication holds him back a bit, Pro has taken up running again. At his hillside home near Ojai, he also lifts weights.

In the next little while, he and his band will play a swing dance here, a jazz club there. He’s confident the words still lurking amid his neurons and synapses will return. For one who has a right to sing the blues, he is decidedly upbeat.

‘I’m not all the way there--yet,” he said.

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at steve.chawkins@latimes.com or at 653-7561.