The Jazz Kid (17 page)

“Ah, but Tommy, you could buy tailor-made suits if you wanted. You don't entertain the folks enough. All you want to do is play the jazz-a-ma-tazz. You got to sing ‘em a few songs, tell a few jokes, get in the light touch.”

“Well, Calvin, that's your style. It don't suit me.”

Calvin blew a bit of ash off the cigar. “Art don't put the bread on the table, Tommy.”

“Calvin, how many times have we been through it?” Tommy said. “It don't have nothing to do with art. I couldn't get up and tell jokes if my life depended on it.”

“You could learn, Tommy. You can learn anything if the money's right. Nothing wrong with giving the folks a little entertainment for their money.”

Tommy shook his head. “What the hell would be the point of it? All I want to do is play the horn. You can keep the money.”

Calvin blew on the cigar again. “You young yet, Tommy. You change.”

“Maybe. Anyway, the kid wants to hear Oliver. I said I didn't know about it.”

“Hummmmm,” Calvin said around the cigar. “Them knee britches don't exactly recommend themselves.” He took the cigar out of his mouth and blew on the coal.

“Maybe if you was to put in a word,” Tommy said.

He blew on the coal again. “Don't he have any long pants?”

“He's getting some,” Tommy said. “They ain't ready yet. He's all fired up to hear the band and couldn't wait till they was ready”

Calvin stuck the cigar back into his mouth. “Push ‘em down as far as they go. We see.”

I
pulled the cuffs down, and then I loosened my belt, so my pants hung on my hips. My cuffs were down below my calves. Nobody who took a close look would be fooled into thinking they were long pants, but maybe they wouldn't take a close look. In the end, it didn't matter. The guy at the door gave Calvin a big hello the minute he saw him, and hardly paid me and Tommy any attention at all. And in we marched.

There were tables around the wall, and a big cleared space in the middle for dancing. The place was jam-packed. Overhead was stretched chicken wire, with paper leaves tied to it for decoration. A huge lamp revolved round and round, twirling spots of light across the dancers, but the cigarette smoke was thick as fog, so you couldn't see very much, anyway.

The bandstand was down at the other end of the room. We started for it through the crowd, and right away I noticed that people kept looking at us. We were the only whites in the place. It made me pretty uncomfortable, all those staring eyes. Did they hate having white people come into their place? Or were they just curious about who we were? Maybe we shouldn't have come. Were they sore that we could come into their place, but they couldn't come into ours? I mean they'd never let any colored people into a white club, except to work there—waiters, cooks, musicians, singers. How did they feel about that? I'd talked to colored people before. The building next to ours had a colored porter who followed the Cubs, and I used to go into his furnace room and talk about the ball games with him. The iceman's helper was colored, too. Sometimes on a hot day Ma would give him a glass of water and he'd stand around and talk for a few minutes while he drank it. He'd tell us about buildings six stories high, where he'd carry up two hundred pounds of ice at a time. Then there were the colored women who worked at the laundry down the street. In summer they popped out onto the street for a breath of air every chance they got, and you'd hear them laughing and hollering to each other when you went by.

So it wasn't that I never had anything to do with colored people before. It was just that I never had any kind of a serious talk with one, like did it make them sore that white people could go into their places and they couldn't come into ours? Did they act
different
when there weren't any white people around? Were they different from whites, or the same—did they have their favorite kind of food like I did, daydream about being rich, want to kiss a pretty girl like I did?

But I didn't get a chance to think about it anymore, for we had got down to the bandstand. There they were, King Oliver and the Creole Jazz Band— clarinet, trombone, piano, drums, string bass, and a second cornet player. The piano player was a woman, which didn't surprise me, for it was popular to have women piano players in bands. I shivered, and rubbed my hands together. The band had just come in from a break, and was settling down in their seats, shaking water out of spit valves, playing little runs to warm up. Then without any warning Oliver stomped his foot twice on the floor and off they went.

Well it beat the records all hollow. It was just the greatest thing I ever heard. You couldn't describe it, the way they made it rock back and forth. On the records the parts kind of ran together a lot; but in person, each part stood out separate, so you could hear them dart around each other like—I don't know what— like flames in a fire. “What's this number, Tommy?”

“‘Froggie Moore.' Jelly Roll wrote it. Don't you have the record?”

“No.”

“Better get it. You got a surprise in store.”

The band came to the turnaround at the end of a chorus and then suddenly the second cornet stood up—a short, fat young guy. Next to Oliver, who was big all around, he didn't look like much. But then he started to play. Suddenly the music was different. I couldn't figure out how this little guy was doing it, but he had a kind of leap and spring to his music that no jazz player I ever heard had. I stood there with my mouth open, and that chill running up my spine and crossing my scalp. I didn't say a word until he finished, and then I said, “My God, who is that guy? He's better than Oliver.”

“I told you you was in for a surprise.”

“But what's his name?”

“Louie, they call him. Or Dippermouth. I never heard anybody call his last
name
.”

“Isn't he something?”

“I told you, didn't I?” Tommy said.

“There's guys all over Chi trying to figure that one out,” Tommy said.

But Louie didn't play another solo and at the end of the set we had to leave so that Tommy could get something to eat before he went on his job.

T
OMMY
'
S JOB WAS
at a club called the Charleston. It was an ordinary cellar joint, like a lot of after-hours clubs. You went down a short flight of cement steps and knocked on a wooden door with a peephole in the center to get in. A dozen tables covered with dirty blue tablecloths were scattered around, with a small space left in the middle for dancing. That was it—no bar, you ordered your drinks from a waiter, who brought them out from a kitchen behind the main room. That way, if the cops came in, they could get the liquor out the back fast.

By the time we got there a few people were sitting at the tables, and the piano player was banging away at “Ain't We Got Fun,” to keep them happy. Tommy sat me down at a table near the bandstand, and in about ten minutes I found out another thing about my new life: I could hardly keep my eyes open. I was used to going to bed by nine, ten at the latest. Now it was after midnight and I'd had a hard day on top of it. When they finished the number Tommy told me they'd all get fired if a cop came in and noticed a kid in knee pants snoozing by the bandstand. He told me there was a cot in the furnace room next to the kitchen where the porter used to sleep before he disappeared. Tommy said, “Maybe I ought to ask Silva about the porter's job.”

I went on back there. It wasn't very homey, for there was a coal bin full of coal to one side. But because of the furnace it was warm enough. Somebody had left an old brown army blanket on the cot. I curled up inside of it and went to sleep.

When I woke up, a patch of sun was sliding in through a small window high up on the brick back wall of the room, and falling onto the floor in front of the furnace. I sat
up
on the cot, blinking. Now the excitement was gone—no hot jazz bands, no dance halls and after-hours joints. I was all alone on a cot in a dirty furnace room wrapped up in an army blanket full of stains.

Back a few days before, when I was thinking about running away, I figured I'd be homesick. It was one thing to think about it, another thing to feel it. Being as I was hardly away from my family ever since I was born, I didn't have too much experience with being homesick. It felt a whole lot worse than I'd figured on—made me ache inside something awful. Made me want to light out of there and run back home.

But I wasn't going to do it. If d make me feel all hollow inside if I gave up music. Besides, I didn't want to give them the satisfaction. They wouldn't say anything. They wouldn't say that they hoped I learned that being a musician wasn't anywhere near as wonderful as I thought. They'd know better than to say anything. But the words would hang in the air all around them, which would be even worse, because if they didn't say anything, I couldn't argue with it. No matter how rotten I felt, I wasn't going to give them the satisfaction.

I put my shoes on and stood up. Maybe if I had a cup of coffee and a doughnut I'd feel better. Or a piece of custard pie.

Then I heard a lock click out in the club and in a minute the furnace room door swung open. The fella standing there was about thirty-five, short and pudgy, hair slicked back, wearing a camel's hair overcoat, and holding a tan fedora in one hand. I figured he was the owner, Angelo Silva.

He looked at me. “Who the hell are you?”

“They said you needed a porter.”

He scowled at me. “Who told you that?”

“Tommy.” I wondered if I was getting him in trouble for some reason. “The cornet player. I saw him over at one of Herbie Aronowitz's joints and he said you needed a porter.”

“How'd you get in?”

“I spent the night here. I didn't have anywhere else to sleep. My old man got
drunk
and slugged me. That's the last time he's going to do that. I'm not going back there anymore.”

He looked me over. “How old did you say you was?”

“Fifteen?”

“You're sure? You don't look no fifteen.”

“I'm small for my age. That's why everybody calls me kid.”

“I heard that one before. You got working papers?”

“Sure, but they're at home. I left in kind of a hurry.”

He looked me over some more. “Okay,” he said finally. “Ten bucks a week. You can sleep back here and keep an eye on the place. You been a porter before?”

“Sure, for Herbie Aronowitz.” I hoped he'd tell me what I was supposed to do.

But he didn't. Instead he took a key out of his pocket. “Okay. Here's the front door key. Make damn sure you keep the place locked.” He handed me the key, and then he took out a roll of bills and stripped off a couple of singles. “Get me some coffee and a couple of hard rolls.” He turned to leave and then turned back. “Get yourself something while you're at it.”

So that was how my new life started. I'd get up around the middle of the morning, depending on how late I managed to keep myself up the night before. I'd start off feeling rotten—lonely and homesick. But I'd decided that it was worth feeling homesick if it meant I was going to be a musician. I could stand it; and I figured as time went by I'd get over it. So I'd go out for coffee and custard pie—I'd switched to pie instead of doughnuts. That would cheer me up. I'd go back to the Charleston, wash up the glasses from the night before, take out the garbage, swab the tables down, mop the floor, maybe wash out a few of the tablecloths if they were in bad shape. I'd practice for three or four hours until it was time to go out to Tommy's. We'd head off somewhere to hear one of the bands. Sometimes we'd go up to Friar's Inn to hear the Rhythm Kings, but mostly we went to the South Side—things were cheaper there, and Tommy liked Chinese food for his supper. Then we'd go over to the job. I'd bus for the waiters—empty out ashtrays when they got full, clean up the tables after a party left. Busing wasn't
really
part of my job, but it was something to do to keep myself awake, and an excuse to hang around the bandstand. Sometimes, if the crowd was small, Tommy'd let me sit in for a few numbers here and there to rest his lip. Between one thing and another I was getting in a lot of playing time, and hearing a lot of jazz. I was learning tunes, too. I'd sing along to a band under my breath until I got the tune pretty well memorized, and then learn it on my cornet when I was practicing. I ought to be able to play a tune in any key, Tommy told me. “Mostly they play things in standard keys, but you never can tell when you'll run into a situation where you got to play in some key you never played it in before—D-flat, E, something like that.” So I learned every tune in three or four keys, so as to get the hang of different keys. I was improving a lot.

To be honest, a lot of it had to do with keeping myself busy so I didn't have time to feel homesick. It was awful hard to get rid of that feeling. I was usually all right when I was hanging around the South Side with Tommy, or sitting in with his outfit at the Charleston. It was hard to feel bad with that music going in a room full of people having a good time for themselves. And by the time I turned in I could hardly keep my eyes open and didn't have any trouble falling asleep.

But then would come morning. I'd wake up in that cellar with a clear view of the coal bin and the stink of old beer in my nose, and I'd miss home so bad I'd like to bust out crying. I'd remember sitting at our old kitchen table talking with Ma about nothing special while she cooked. I'd remember how Pa went around the table at suppertime asking everybody how things had gone that day—did John get his Shakespeare report in, did I pass my math test, did Ma get over to see Grampa? I knew I shouldn't dwell on old memories, I had a new life now, and none of that mattered anymore. But I couldn't help myself. It comforted me some to remember things like that. I kept looking forward to the time when I'd made a go of it as a musician, had a few bucks in my pocket, and could walk in on them dressed in brand-new clothes—maybe a midnight blue overcoat like the one Calvin Wilson had. That'd be something all right, to come marching in on them togged out like a swell.