The Jazz Palace (15 page)

Hands thrust into his pockets, he went down to those blocks between Thirty-First and Thirty-Fifth, the street of streets, the Black Light District, the Gay White Way. White not because white people went here, but because it was illumined with blazing lights. If he had a dollar or two (or maybe he could get the bouncer to look the other way), he'd go in and listen for an hour, and still be home before midnight. He moved from club to club, standing outside, listening to the bands. If they let whites in, he paid the cover. He snuck into the Pompeii and the Deluxe. He ducked into the Firefly just to see its ball with a million tiny mirrors and little lights under the stage and to hear Senator Sam and his Dixieland band.

Then he cut over to the Rooster. There was a no-name quartet with a pianist, a drummer, and bass player, and the trumpeter with big cheeks and thick pink lips, a towel flung across his neck. The trumpeter gave Benny a glare that let him know that he thought the kid was slumming and maybe stealing. Benny curled up in a booth in the back, sipping his cream soda. He liked the music. It wasn't that wild, frantic beat. They played just to play, dreamy melodies that traveled into space, then came back around fast like a boomerang.

The breaks were long and extended themselves into solos. He listened as the pianist played one melody after another. Benny heard the notes in his head. Then he started to work with them. He roughed out the chords, figured out the changes. Before the second set was finished, he was on the Alley. The next day when his mother went out to run her errands, he fiddled with what he'd heard. He picked up the melody, played a few bars. Once he got it, he let it rip. Before his mother returned, he had a whole number down.

That evening Benny slipped back into the Rooster for a song, and the trumpeter began to taunt him. “That boy's back. We had that white guy Al Jolson here last week. He was stealing. And Sophie
Tucker, she's been stealing, too.” Benny sat, impassive. He knew that whites went to black establishments to lift arrangements, but that's not why he was there. He came to listen. And to learn. That the same as stealing, wasn't it? He kept his eyes on the piano, watching those hands rove the keyboard as the trumpeter came in for the head.

The piano man called out to him. “Hey, white boy, you keep coming around. You learning our licks?” Benny sat still as the man poked fun at him. “You must wanta sit in,” the man said.

Benny pursed his lips, shaking his head slowly. He didn't want to be singled out. “No,” he replied. He had seen other men sit in with these two and if you didn't play it right, the trumpeter would not hesitate to say, “That's not how we do it here.”

“I guess the boy's just slumming and don't know how to play. Or else he's a chicken shit,” the trumpeter said.

At last Benny spoke. “I'm not a chicken shit,” he said. “And I can play.”

“Well, let's hear what you can do.” The trumpeter lowered his horn. “If you've got something to say, come up here and say it.” Actually Benny was a bit of a chicken shit and wasn't at all sure that he wanted to get up to jam with those guys, but they'd called his bluff. He had no choice if he was ever to come back here again. He stood up and walked over to the keyboard, his long arms and fingers flexing as he crossed the room. The piano man slid over to the bar, grabbed a beer, shaking his head, laughing. He couldn't wait to see Benny fall on his face.

“What'll it be?” the trumpeter said. He unhooked his mouthpiece, let the saliva in it drip to the floor. He blew hard until it was clear, then rubbed his lips.

“You start…”

“You're the one who's sitting in here.” Laughter rose from the bar.

“How about…” Benny didn't know the names of all the songs he played, but he knew the melodies. He'd heard something just the other day on the radio so he ran his fingers up and down the keys, roughing out a little refrain, “This in G?”

“That's ‘Wild Boy Stomp'?” The piano player shouted from the
bar, and more laughter rose. “And I don't know what key you're playing in, but that's not what we do around here.”

The trumpeter blew a few notes, then put his horn down. “I want this kid to do my taxes, don't you folks?” he said. Once again laughter filled the room. It was true Benny looked more like an accountant in his jacket and tie than a stride piano player. The trumpeter drummed his valves. “Only ofays play like this.”

“Okay,” Benny said, understanding that he was an ofay. He wouldn't ask what key it was in again. He didn't need anyone to tell him it was E-flat minor. He had been listening for years and playing for almost as long. He had a job at a movie house, but he'd never sat in before, never like this. The trumpeter was just trying to give him a hard time. He ran his fingers up the minor scale, transposing the chords from what he knew until he was sure. “Let's go.”

Benny hunched over the keys as if he were taking a test for which he wasn't prepared. He arched his long fingers and settled into some easy chords. With his left foot he marked the beat. He began quiet as a whisper, the way he always did. He liked to get the feel of the water before he plunged in. His opening was nothing fancy—a progression built around a simple melody. The trumpeter followed, then filled in notes, adding some trills of his own. He waited for the boy to improve on it. It was a contest and Benny knew it.

They played off each other for a few bars. Then the trumpeter put his horn down, and Benny let his fingers run across the keys. The drummer and the bass stayed in right behind him as Benny picked up the tempo. He struggled to keep his tongue in his mouth, though it crept out when he played, then snapped back like a lizard's. Then the music happened to him the way it always did. He forgot that there was an audience listening or anything he had to prove. He started floating off in space, just tuning in to what they were playing. He picked up on a refrain, then went with it. He built on what they gave him until, with a nod, the trumpeter and bass dropped out. The drummer was just marking the beat as Benny took a chorus on his own.

He gave his fingers their full reach and took over the whole keyboard. He riffed on the melody, taking it way up to the treble, then
down again to the bass. Benny altered the changes, liked them, and tried them out. His mind drifted as he let the tune take a sad turn. It made him think of the gulls circling the dump near his house at dusk. Wind blowing through the empty lot, devoid of boys. He saw Harold's dimpled face drifting away. His father, standing in the back of that theater.

He was aware of silence around him. He kept thinking he'd hear glasses clinking, voices, but it was only silence, and he stayed inside his almost-sad song. He didn't want to bring everyone with him there so he didn't stay too long. He warmed it up, brought it back to earth. He heard the crack of bats, bonfires in an open field. He was lying in bed on a spring morning with the windows open. A breeze blowing in. Boys shouting below. Then he started coming out of it, gathering speed. And soon he was flying over rooftops and prairie. If nothing brought him back, he'd be heading out to sea. He soared until he was almost gone.

The trumpeter was slow in picking up his horn. He'd heard white boys play before. Most played cornfield music or New Orleans tunes. Some were good, but not like this one. This boy played like a black man. Negroes had nothing to lose and they knew it. That was how they played the blues. They gave it their body and soul. But white boys always had something that was theirs, and if they played the blues, it was because they'd lost it. They were children who'd had a toy taken away. They never could reach into that place where you'd nothing to begin with. They didn't know that sadness dwelled in the bottom of a deep well. Or that if you dug around, you could bring up something so beautiful.

He'd heard them play from memory or mimic. He'd say, “Oh, look, the mockingbird's gonna play.” A mockingbird is a copycat that takes what it wants from other birds and it sings into the night. They are the tricksters and pranksters, the con artists who come to pilfer arrangements and steal songs. He'd been fooled enough times not to want to be fooled again. He never named his tunes and he played with a handkerchief draped over his fingers. When a white man came by and asked to record him, he said no. And he didn't
want any white boys taking what he'd worked so hard to figure out for himself.

But he'd never heard anyone off the street who could dredge it up like an old wagon in the swamp and bring it back. Bring it up for air from down below. Boys came and went in a joint like this, but this one had something. Maybe it was meanness, maybe it was greed, or maybe he was just a bottom feeder. But he could play the blues.

Then they all came back at the head, not missing a beat, as the trumpeter said to himself,
That boy's no mynah; he's his own thing
.

“I thought we were going to have to gong you,” the trumpeter said when they finished the set. Benny gave him a puzzled look. “Hurl the cymbals to get you off the stage, but the joke was on us.” He held out his hand. “Napoleon Hill. Pleased to meet you.”

And Benny held out his hand in return.

There were clubs where you danced the Slim Betty, the Charleston, or the Black Bottom, like the Lincoln Gardens and the Firefly, and others where you just listened, like at the Red Rooster. In some places you went for the girls and the bootlegged whiskey. In others you went for the band. Kids came to listen and party, driving their flivvers with flasks filled with rotgut. Hipsters, they were called, always sipping from the flasks tucked in their hip pockets. The music was faster now. Social reformers had declared slow dancing immoral. The Juvenile Protection Agency ordered the dance halls to speed things up. Nobody could do the toddle or the shimmy slow. Now everything was played in double time.

The Jazz Palace was more a listening kind of place with a gambling room off to the side, though Pearl had arranged the tables so that the hipsters could get up and swing. Moss made cheese sandwiches with mustard, which were sold for a dollar with a bottle of home-brewed beer. Opal, with her wispy blond hair and wraithlike body, served the beer and sandwiches on plastic red trays, carrying them with a flourish of one hand. Jonah poured the rotgut liquor that they kept under the bar, and Fern, who had opened the small beauty salon on the South Side, managed the household upstairs.

At night Pearl dabbed a touch of Anna's rosewater behind her ears and helped run the saloon. Jonah kept the books and bought
bootlegged liquor. They served whiskey or gin or beer that was thirty percent ginger ale with a little air pumped in. Once in a while a cop came in and yelled at them, but Pearl slipped the cop a shot of the expensive whiskey, not the bathtub booze they usually served. Jonah never discussed with his sisters or with Moss where the beer and whiskey came from. The less people knew the better, but each morning a milkman arrived, dropping off silver canisters of liquid that would be siphoned into bottles, the empties left out on the step the next day.

It was no problem, really, keeping the saloon open in this way. Alcohol was no more difficult to procure than hard candy; it flowed like water. In Italian neighborhoods truckloads of grapes were dropped off daily and wine was picked up the following week. William J. Harding served wine at the White House. And the mayor of Chicago, Big Bill Thompson, owned a boat called the
Fish Fans Club
whose purpose was to support the fish in Lake Michigan. To celebrate Thompson's reelection so many members showed up for a drink that the
Fish Fans Club
sank.

It was rumored that gangs of thugs were driving around Chicago, demanding protection money from the speaks and tonks and illegal clubs. From time to time Pearl wondered why no one ever came to demand protection money from them. Perhaps the Jazz Palace was a forgotten place, neglected by the authorities as a harmless distraction. Or perhaps they were too small to be noticed, though Balaban and Katz, theatrical entrepreneurs, never forgot them. They were no longer the bedraggled boys who had taken free hot dogs when offered. Now they were rich men.

Every Wednesday evening a black limo pulled up in front of the candy store, and the two men in their pinstriped suits got out. Though they now owned theaters throughout the city, they still made their weekly stop. They ate hog dogs and drank sodas as they had since they were boys when Anna had only charged them a penny apiece. They talked to Pearl about the most ordinary things, even the weather or how those White Sox were doing. “Can you believe it?” Balaban said. “They threw the Series.”

Though she didn't follow baseball and this would never have occurred to her, Pearl nodded. “I believe they did.”

As they were leaving, they always asked the same thing. “Is there anything you need?” and Pearl always said no. “We're just keeping our promise to your mother,” they told her. Then they disappeared back inside their limousine and drove away. Pearl was left to finger the envelope she kept in a drawer with the crisp ten- and twenty-dollar bills. She assumed that eventually someone would come in, demanding the money, but no one ever did. “I think we're already protected,” Jonah said.

Napoleon continued to play on Mondays, and he was showing up on his off-nights too. The Red Rooster was his steady gig, but it was closed for repairs. Recently the club had come under new management. The light fixtures were removed and a crystal chandelier that cast amber light was hung. The big, cracked mirror over the bar was being antiqued and new porcelain toilets and sinks were installed. They kept the old cherrywood bar but brought in new stools. Some fancy tables and chairs were brought in, and a dance floor was laid along with a platform for the band. Napoleon was informed that the next time he came back to work he should wear his best suit.

So he was showing up more and more at Pearl's. He wouldn't allow her to pay him, though he'd never say no to free whiskey or tips. He brought musicians with him whenever he could. He told Pearl that there was a kid who'd been jamming with them. “A white boy, if you can imagine that.” Napoleon laughed, shaking his head. Pearl told him that whenever he wanted he could bring the boy around. And Napoleon said that he would.

T
hat summer on a hot August afternoon a man in a white linen suit slammed into a taxicab. He stumbled from his car, pulled a gun from his vest pocket, and threatened the driver. When the police arrived, they arrested the young man for drunk driving, disorderly conduct, and carrying a concealed weapon. He had a slash across his face that he would never explain. The business card he presented to the cops read “Alphonse Capone—secondhand furniture dealer.” He had never dealt in secondhand furniture. He couldn't tell an antique from a ready-made chair. John Torrio, head of the Chicago
syndicates, had hired this bookkeeper from Brooklyn whose real job was running two brothels.

He apologized to the driver for his outburst. He told a joke and made the policemen laugh. He was an affable man. He shook hands. Back in Brooklyn he was known for being a gentle boy. Despite his stocky build, he was a good dancer. He had rhythm and was light as a bird on his feet. He dressed well and was a family man. He sent his mother flowers for no reason. He did not know that he was suffering from tertiary syphilis, which was affecting his brain. This arrest would be the first time Al Capone's name appeared in the news, but not the last. The charges would later be dropped.

That same month a black boy named Louis, with a horn and a Star of David around his neck, bought a one-way ticket from New Orleans to Chicago. He wasn't really a boy. He was twenty-one years old, but people still called him “boy”—though Joe Oliver called him Dippermouth because of his big, wide grin. King Oliver who told Louis that the music was happening up north had sent him the money for the fare. Lately there had been more lynchings in the South. Even worse had been done to young black men.

And now his wife, Daisy, was running around, looking for him, with a razor blade. She'd slashed a man's throat before. Nothing was to stop her from doing it again. He was ready to leave. He wore the Star of David in honor of the Karnofsky family for whom he'd once delivered coal. They treated him like a son. They gave him his first cornet. The ticket was a gift from Joe “King” Oliver who asked him to play second cornet with his Creole Jazz Band. As the train pulled out, this boy knew that everything was about to change.

The cotton fields receded. Cities and farmlands came into view. The farmlands went on and on as if they'd never end. The ride seemed to be taking forever, and it was. The train would be hours late when it finally pulled into Union Station. In the stuffy compartments the young man sweated. His shirt was soaked and he'd brought only one change of clothes. When he reached Chicago, the air was sweltering, and no one was there to greet him. He walked up and down the platform, not knowing what to do. He had no money. He had nowhere to go.

An old black porter was walking toward him on the platform, and the young man stepped out of the way. But the porter kept coming toward him, and the young man wondered if he'd already done something wrong. “Excuse me,” the old man said, tilting his red cap back, “but are you Mr. Armstrong?”

“Yes, sir,” the startled cornet player replied, “I am.”

“Well, King Oliver is sorry he couldn't meet your train, but he's expecting you. He asked me if I saw you to give you this.” And the porter handed Louis two dollars to take a taxi downtown. Armstrong rode, his face pressed against the glass. They reached a street of blazing lights, and he saw the Stroll. He blinked and wiped his forehead. He wasn't sure if this place was real or a dream he was still having on a moving train.

At the Lincoln Gardens, a three-hundred-pound bouncer stood at the door. The music was the sweetest he'd ever heard. Armstrong touched the Star of David, certain that this was all a mistake. He stood in the doorway, sweating even more. His shirt was soaked. He needed a bath and something to eat. In his hand he clutched his cornet. The music paused and a man stepped out the side door of the Gardens. He lit a cigarette.

When he saw the boy, standing there, sweating, clutching his horn, Joe Oliver started to laugh. It had been four years since he'd heard the ragged kid playing at the brothel in Storyville. That horn had stopped Oliver in his tracks. He'd never heard anything like it, and he never forgot it. “What are you waiting for?” Joe Oliver asked. Armstrong looked perplexed. Oliver pressed his tongue to his gums. When he emptied his spit valve now, he saw blood. He looked at this boy with his portly build and bangs. “Get in there and go to work,” King Oliver said. And Armstrong picked up his horn and went in.

An enormous crystal ball dangled from the center of the room, shooting a million rainbows of light. He thought he would be blinded. A thousand people were dancing. He'd never seen so many people in one room. He'd never been inside a room this big that wasn't a barn. White couples danced alongside blacks. Joe Oliver put him up on the bandstand before he had time to wash his face. The band started up and Armstrong followed. The crowds were dancing.
Drinks were clinking. It was at least a hundred degrees in that room. It smelled like a cave. Oliver pointed to Armstrong, and, trembling, he stood up to take a solo. Everyone was moving; then Dippermouth hit a high F sharp. The crowd came to a halt. It was a sound no one had ever heard. The band members stared. For an instant nobody moved. Then the crowd started shouting as if they had gone insane. King motioned for the band to come back in and they were all dancing like crazy again.

Chicago was a swinging town. Every night the clubs were filled. Benny went to the Lincoln Gardens every chance he could. That F sharp rang in his ears. Wherever the music took him, that's where Benny went. He picked up gigs here and there. He worked as a sideman for some bands. He was looking for a more permanent gig. Moe was still talking about putting together a band, and Benny thought maybe he'd join. At dinner he tapped out rhythms on his napkin as platters of chicken were being passed around. He hummed or whistled to himself. He was becoming a nuisance. He seemed to have lost interest in words. At dinner he tended to point rather than say, “Pass the peas.” Hannah gazed at her son with a look of concern that annoyed Leo even more. He wanted the boy to snap out of it. Quit keeping his secrets hidden inside. But his mother forgave him. He was her dreamy child.