The Cool School (15 page)

Harry said, finally, “I don’t blame her. She played it smart and went with the better man.”

“Don’t say that. You’ll begin to believe those things about yourself after a while.”

“I do already, Blake. That’s the crumby part of it.”

“No you don’t, Harry. You’re talking yourself into it. Don’t do that. You’ve got to keep up some sort of a front, even for yourself.”

“Do you believe that?”

“That’s the only way you can make it. That’s the truth.”

“I wish I could do it.”

“If I were Porter I would call it a ‘personal myth.’ But whatever you call it, you have to have it.”

Now the street darkened. I felt the darkness suddenly. I had not remembered this street being so dark. As Harry talked I kept feeling the darkness of the street. Then I saw why. The two street lamps were out. I thought somebody had stoned them out. But this was not so. The glass was not broken. The lamps had just gone out. I could see a bunch of the local hoods standing together way down at the corner we were approaching.

“Maybe I should get analyzed,” Harry said. “I’ve often thought of that.”

“It’s tough. A lot of strange things happen to you.”

“I know it’s tough. You know something? I’m afraid of it.”

“So are a lot of people.”

“I’m afraid it will make me just like everybody else. That it will take some special juice out of me. Then I’ll be a mediocrity. Maybe I am one already and don’t know it.”

“That would sound like a symptom.”

“I guess it does, Blake. And then I’m afraid of a lot of things it might bring up.”

I knew that even before he told me. He had always given me that feeling, as long as I had known him. He was keeping the lid on. Sometimes I thought it was better he did keep it on. It was safer for him that way.

“That’s what makes it tough,” I said. “But you are supposed to feel better after you bring it up.”

“Like puking.”

“Something like that.”

“Blake, do you have bad dreams?”

“Doesn’t everybody?”

“I mean really bad ones.”

“Sometimes. Why?”

“I wondered if you had them like mine. Do you mind if I tell you about a dream?”

“Go ahead.”

“Well, I have this one a lot of times. Someone is after me. I think I know who it is, then I am not sure. He is close behind me. I am scared. Scared stupid. So scared I want to scream. Then I run into a building. A building just going up. This person is getting closer. He is dressed in black. Now I run up a flight of stairs. I hear him jumping up the stairs. I think I might get away up the stairs. Suddenly the stairs end in a blank wall. I could scream. I hear him after me. He is almost on me. Then I find myself running in another part of the building. He’s still after me. I run up another flight of stairs. Just then the stairs end in a blank wall again. And he’s almost on me.”

“Jesus Christ. Then what happens?”

“I keep running up these dead-end stairways. Then I wake up.”

I wanted to say something enlightening about the dream that
would make Harry feel better. But I could not think of anything that would not sound dumb. So I just said the dream sounded horrible. We were getting closer to the group of hoods.

“I wish I knew what the goddamn thing meant,” he said. “Do you have any idea?”

“Nothing that would help.”

Harry had been talking with his head turned toward me or looking down at the ground and apparently he had not seen the hoods at the corner. But now he saw them. I could feel him tighten as he looked at them. They were standing all over the sidewalk. Blocking the way. They were looking our way now. Harry was staring at them. There were eight of them.

I could feel the way Harry was holding himself tight as we came toward the hoods standing there on the sidewalk blocking it. Harry was staring straight ahead at them. I heard them talking now. I could feel Harry’s fear.

They were standing in our way unmoving. Then we walked through them. Brushing against them. They moved slightly. We passed through them and on. We did not say anything.

We crossed Houston Street and walked east on it toward Greene Street. There were no cars in the big cobbled street.

“Those sons of bitches give me the creeps,” Harry said.

I could feel his fear relaxing now.

“There are too many of them for us to start anything,” I said. There were many stories around about the hoods ganging up on people.

“It makes you sick to be so outnumbered,” he said.

“I know it. But what can you do?”

“Nothing, I guess. They don’t have any rules to keep them back. You can’t do anything with people who don’t have any rules.”

“To hell with them, Harry. Forget it.”

“I guess so. I’ll have to.”

I slapped him on the back. “Old Renaissance Man.”

No people were in the streets but us. Harry was walking with his hands in his pockets and his head down looking at the sidewalk. I
watched the street lights blinking red and green in the deserted street, no cars to obey them. They were blinking for blocks down the street. We turned into Greene Street and walked south on it.

“Speaking of Renaissance men, Blake,” Harry said, “what was this Max said about you being the Arrow Collar underground man?”

“That’s what I am,” I said, laughing a little. “Partly underground.”

“Do you think you will ever go all the way?”

“I wish I could tell.”

“It is like a joke become serious,” Harry said. “I don’t know when to take this underground business as a laugh or when to take it as a real thing.”

“Neither do I.”

We came to my building. “Want to come up?” I asked him. I really wanted to go to sleep.

“Thanks, Blake, but I had better be going along. I might start in on some more dreams.”

“Don’t let them get you, Harry.”

“I have one of the best collections in the country. Like a jewel collection. Maybe I could sell it to the American Association of Head Doctors.”

“You might try.”

“Are the busses still running down here? I don’t want to walk back.”

“Yes.”

“Good. Adios, kid.”

“So long.”

I went upstairs. When I got into bed I did not feel so sleepy any more. I lay awake thinking.

Who Walk in Darkness
, 1952

Terry Southern was the most successful of hipster writers, authoring best-selling novels, hit movies, and journalism that paved the way for the new and the gonzo—he even wrote for
Saturday Night Live.
A Texan, Southern moved to Paris in 1948 to study at the Sorbonne, but in the cafés and jazz caves discovered what was really going on. He wrote the hilarious porn parody
Candy
with Mason Hoffenberg, and the novels
Flash and Filigree
and
The Magic Christian.
Peter Sellers, a fan of the latter, gave a copy to Stanley Kubrick who was embarking on a film project about The Bomb. Kubrick decided to make the film a black comedy, hired Southern, and
Dr. Strangelove
was born. In “You’re Too Hip, Baby,” written in the 1950s and collected in
Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes
(1967), the bohemian Paris of Southerns wild youth provides the setting for a witty take on hip wannabes and a survey of the fault-lines of race.

T
HE
SORBONNE
,
where Murray was enrolled for a doctorate, required little of his time; class attendance was not compulsory and there were no scheduled examinations. Having received faculty approval on the subject of his thesis—“The Influence of Mallarmé on the English Novel Since 1940”—Murray was now engaged in research in the libraries, developing his thesis, writing it, and preparing himself to defend it at some future date of his own convenience. Naturally he could attend any lectures at the University which he considered pertinent to his work, and he did attend them from time to time—usually those of illustrious guest speakers, like Cocteau, Camus, and Sartre, or Marcel Raymond, author of
From Baudelaire to Surrealism.
But for the most part, Murray devoted himself to less formal pursuits; he knew every Negro jazz musician in every club in Paris.

At night he made the rounds. If there was someone really great in town he would sit at the same bar all evening and listen to him; otherwise he made the rounds, one club after another, not drinking much, just listening to the music and talking to the musicians. Then, toward morning, he would go with them to eat—down the street to the Brasserie Civet or halfway across Paris to a place in Montmartre that served spareribs and barbecued chicken.

What was best though was to hang around the bar of his own hotel, the Noir et Blanc, in the late afternoon during a rehearsal or a closed session. At these times everyone was very relaxed, telling funny stories, drinking Pernod, and even turning on a bit of hashish or marijuana, passing it around quite openly, commenting on its quality. Murray derived a security from these scenes—the hushed camaraderie and the inside jokes. Later, in the evening, when the place was jumping, Murray kept himself slightly apart from the rest of the crowd—the tourists, the students, the professional beats, and the French
de bonne famille
—who all came to listen to the great new music. And always during the evening there would be at least one incident, like the famous tenor-man’s casually bumming a cigarette from him, which would prove Murray’s intimacy with the group to those who observed. Old acquaintances from Yale, who happened in, found Murray changed; they detected in his attitude toward them, their plans, and their expressed or implied values a sort of bemused tolerance—as though he were in possession of a secret knowledge. And then there would be the inevitable occasion when he was required to introduce them to one of the musicians, and that obvious moment when the musician would look to Murray for his judgment of the stranger as in the question: “Well, man, who
is
this cat? Is he
with
it?” None of this lessened Murray’s attractiveness, nor his mystery, no less to others, presumably, than to himself; but he was never too hard on his old friends—because he was swinging.

W
HEN
THE
Negro pianist Buddy Talbott was hired, along with a French drummer and bass, to play the Noir et Blanc, he and his wife had been in Paris for only three days. It was their first time out of the States, and except for a few band jobs upstate, it was their first time out of New York City.

Toward the end of the evening, during a break, Murray went into the men’s room. Buddy Talbott was there alone, in front of the mirror, straightening his tie. Their eyes fixed for an instant in the glass as Murray entered and walked over to the urinal; the disinfectant did not obscure a thin smell of hashish recently smoked in the room. Murray nodded his head in the direction of the bandstand beyond the wall. “Great sound you got there, man,” he said, his voice flat, almost weary in its objectiveness. Buddy Talbott had a dark and delicate face which turned slowly, reluctantly it seemed, from the glass to Murray, smiling, and he spoke now in soft and precisely measured tones: “Glad you like it.”

And, for the moment, no more was said, Murray knowing better than that.

Although Murray smoked hashish whenever it was offered, he seldom took the trouble to go over to the Arab quarter and buy any himself; but he always knew where to get the best. And the next evening, when Buddy Talbott came into the men’s room, Murray was already there.

They exchanged nods, and Murray wordlessly handed him the smoking stick, scarcely looking at him as he did, walking past to the basin—as though to spare him witness to even the merest glimpse of hesitancy, of apprehension, calculation, and finally, of course, of perfect trust.

“I’ve got a box, man,” Murray said after a minute, by which he meant record player, “and some new Monk—you know, if you ever want to fall by. . . .” He dried his hands carefully, looking at the towel. “Upstairs here,” he said, “in number eight. My name is on the door—‘Murray.’”

The other nodded, savoring the taste, holding it. “I’d like to very much,” he said finally, and added with an unguarded smile, “
Murray.
” At which Murray smiled too, and touching his arm lightly said: “Later, man.” And left.

T
HE
HASH
seemed to have a nice effect on Buddy’s playing. Certainly it did on Murray’s listening—every note and nuance came straight to him, through the clatter of service at the bar and the muttered talk nearby, as though he were wearing earphones wired to the piano. He heard subtleties he had missed before, intricate structures of sound, each supporting the next, first from one side, then from another, and all being skillfully laced together with a dreamlike fabric of comment and insinuation; the runs did not sound either vertical or horizontal, but circular ascensions, darting arabesques and figurines; and it was clear to Murray that the player was constructing something there on the stand . . . something splendid and grandiose, but perfectly scaled to fit inside this room, to sit, in fact, alongside the piano itself. It seemed, in the beginning, that what was being erected before him was a castle, a marvelous castle of sound . . . but then, with one dramatic minor—just as the master builder might at last reveal the nature of his edifice in adding a single stone—Murray saw it was not a castle being built, but a cathedral. “
Yeah, man
,” he said, nodding and smiling. A cathedral—and, at the same time, around it the builder was weaving a strange and beautiful tapestry, covering the entire structure. At first the image was too bizarre, but then Murray smiled again as he saw that the tapestry was, of course, being woven
inside
the cathedral, over its interior surface, only it was so rich and strong that it sometimes seemed to come right through the walls. And then Murray suddenly realized—and this was the greatest of all, because he was absolutely certain that only he and Buddy knew—that the fantastic tapestry was being woven, quite deliberately, face against the wall. And he laughed aloud at this, shaking his head, “
Yeah, man,”
the last magnificent irony, and Buddy looked up at the sound, and laughed too.