‘I know,’ said Rick.
‘But he can’t ever seem to get organized,’ Jeff went on. ‘He’s all the time sticking around home playing ball with the kids on the street, or else just hanging around home talking to his folks, or else just hanging around town. He never stays on a job more than a week.’
He sat there hitting chords and scowling at the keyboard while he talked. ‘I sure do wish something would get him jarred loose. Every time I hear him play it gets me sort of sore he won’t do anything about it. Seems like he won’t grow up and get onto himself.’
This was the first time it had ever been given to Rick to know the pleasure of confidential talk, and it had him glowing. He looked at Jeff and made answer; Smoke, he said, at least had music on his mind all the time; he knew that from working with him.
‘Then he’s working,’ Jeff said. ‘I didn’t know that.’
‘Well, not exactly a regular job,’ Rick said. ‘He helps out at Gandy’s where I work. The pool hall.’
Jeff looked at him again and said: ‘That must be where I’ve seen you, I guess. All night I been trying to think where.’
‘It’s not such a very good job,’ Rick said, ‘but I’m trying to make enough money to get a trumpet, now I haven’t got a piano any more.’
‘I don’t see why you couldn’t use this piano, if you want to,’ Jeff said. ‘I’ve got a key to the hall and there’s never anybody here in the day. I bet nobody’s ever here before five.’
Rick said he couldn’t do that and put everybody to such a lot of trouble and everything. But after that he said a thing that he had no intention of saying. He said, ‘You don’t ever give piano lessons, do you, like a piano teacher?’
The four in front were playing alone, trying things out, and letting Jeff and Rick talk. Ward stood over his drums, watching Smoke play them.
‘No,’ Jeff said. ‘I couldn’t teach piano. I taught my brother a thing or two, but he’d have learned it anyhow.’
He stopped a minute, thinking about it and then he said, ‘But I guess I could show you some things about it, if you’d like me to.’
‘I’d pay whatever you charge,’ Rick said in the big way he had.
‘I wouldn’t want to do that,’ Jeff said. ‘I couldn’t teach you anything, just show you how it goes, if you’d like me to.’
‘Well, I’d sure appreciate it,’ Rick said. It sounded pretty lame; all the social courtesy had got away from him.
Somebody looked around and Jeff said, ‘Play that thing you were just playing again; sounded good.’
And Smoke said a thing that was hard to say; he said, ‘Take your drums,’ and got up from Ward’s chair. ‘Don’t you want to play them any more?’ Ward said, but he said it in a way that cut off all possibility of an affirmative reply. Then Jeff gave them the beat and they played again, and then again and again. Rick stayed right there on the piano bench beside Jeff, but he didn’t limit his ear to Jeff’s piano; he concentrated more and more on the way Hazard was doing the trumpet work. It may have been the gin; something had him fixed up so that he was playing constantly right up to the place where genius and madness grapple before going their separate ways. It was Hazard’s night. Even ten years later, when he knew what he was talking about, Rick said that he’d never afterward heard Hazard himself or anybody else play a horn the way Hazard played that night.
There wasn’t much more talk. They played one tune after another. As soon as they’d pull one through to the end, somebody would call out another and they’d be off again. The bottle went around only once more, a very short one for everybody, and Rick only going through the motions. The gin didn’t really affect them much; they were young and so healthy that no toxin could bite into them. But it gave them the feeling that they could push out farther than usual, and so they did.
They began to weaken a little when the hall started to turn gray with morning light. When Hazard saw it he said ‘My God,’ shook his trumpet, and put it in the case. The rest of them got up, one after another, stiff-legged and bewildered. Jeff, folding down the keyboard cover, said, ‘Looks like it sort of got late on us.’ Rick looked at him and said, ‘It’s been,’ but he didn’t say what it had been. He very evidently needed a word that he didn’t have with him, and so he only shook his head in that wondering way he had, and it turned out to mean the thing he wanted to say.
Hazard and Davis gave the bunch a general good night and left together, the first out. Then Ward and Snowden came up to Rick and said good night, and not only that but come around again some time.
And then there were only the three of them, Smoke, Jeff, and Rick. They walked out together and stood by the back door while Jeff locked up. Rick, who was picking up a feeling for night life faster than you’d think, said: ‘Let’s go someplace and have some breakfast before we go home. I don’t have to go to work until one.’
‘Can’t do it,’ Jeff said; ‘I got to get me some sleep.’
‘How about you?’ Rick said to Smoke. And Smoke tightened his belt with a large, carefree gesture and said, ‘Don’t care if I do.’
So they parted company with Jeff Williams, but not before he and Rick had arranged to meet at the Cotton Club the next Sunday to talk over problems connected with playing the piano.
I
COULD
put it under a thick lens now, the way they show seeds in the very act and petals curling out in those educational movies. It would be a matter of the voice deepening, muscle toughening, and beard sprouting, phenomena which are of little interest in themselves, and serve only to indicate that the whistling-post of childhood has been whistled for and passed up and that the erstwhile child is now in the clear and going, single-track, full steam, to become one kind of an adult, the best kind or the worst kind or any combination in between.
It was inevitable for Rick to become what he became. Jeff Williams taught him to play the piano; Art Hazard helped him pick out a trumpet when he got the money together, and having gone as far as that, showed him how to play it. The rest of it was a compulsion that kept him tirelessly working. To play the piano, to play the trumpet, to make music. It was with him constantly the way fads are with the rest of us. He couldn’t quit playing; it was the way you can feel about solitaire; as soon as you see it won’t come out this time you scoop up the cards, shuffle them, and start laying them out again; try it one more time, and if it doesn’t come out this time you’ll call it off and go to bed. But if you’re an old solitaire player, or a new solitaire player, you don’t go to bed. You try it again, and again, and if it comes out you wonder if maybe it would come out two times hand running, so you lay them out again just to see. And if it does it would be something of a record three times hand running, and if it doesn’t, why it seems sort of a shame to quit when you’re beat, so you keep it up until some outside influence like the telephone or simple exhaustion stops you. So with Rick. The fascination of making music was on him like a leech. He’d sit at the Cotton Club piano and practice until his fingernails ached from being sent the wrong way, and he’d play his trumpet until his lip crumpled up on him and shook miserably in the face of further discipline. But he stopped only when he had to, when it was time for him to go to Gandy’s or get something to eat.
Or go to school. He got away with truancy for almost eight months, and just when he was beginning to feel easy in his mind about it, Lowell High School caught up with him at Gandy’s and raised an awful howl about him and Gandy both. He had stayed with his job even after he got his trumpet, because it gave him two-fifty a week and a chance to see Smoke Jordan daily without appointment. Those afternoons of pin-setting, moreover, gave his life something to turn on, a fair substitute for the routine solidity that family life usually provides. It gave him something to get away from and come back to, the tie that makes freedom valuable. The truancy fellow, I must say, gave him a tie that was a beauty from this angle. He hauled Rick into the Juvenile Court, where they made him wait around for a while to get into a receptive mental state and then put some questions to him, very brusque, enough to scare any kid of Rick’s constitution into piety for a good long time. Then they put him on probation, with twice-a-month reports to make, and gave him police escort back to school.
And there he was with Lowell High School on him like an Oregon boot from eight-thirty until three, Monday through Friday. There were two months to go in what should have been his first year, and of course it was a mistake to make him sit there and say ‘I don’t know’ to every single question they put to him the rest of the term. Very demoralizing, very hard on the pride. But sons of the poor aren’t sent to the seashore with private tutors when they fall behind in their studies. They take their instruction when the State puts it out, and if they fail they fail. Rick Martin illustrated this point perfectly. He got to school tardy by eight months and wholly unprepared, gave out
I don’t know
as the answer to all questions, and beyond that was literally dumb.
The Juvenile Court had such a hold on him that he went back to Lowell the next year too, starting from scratch as a freshman. There should have been nothing to it this time; he had an even chance with the new crop of Japanese, but it didn’t work out. He’d got his one answer so firmly in mind the year before that it seemed a waste of time to get up any new ones. He gangled at his desk thinking about music and making up long fictions in which he and Smoke and Jeff and Hazard were always turning the musical world completely upside down and smashing their way to triumph after triumph. He could make up six or seven of them in one day, each one nicely timed to last out a class period, or he could make up one whopper, divided into chapters and broadened to get him through the whole day. It was always the same story with slight variations in events. The charm of ever retelling such fiction lay in the author’s right, as author, to furnish himself, as hero, with everything he lacked in his non-fictional life. He was rich (at least you ought to see his apartment); he was brilliant (witness his profound critical judgments of music and musicians); he was well thought of by one and all but looked upon as something of a god by his constant friends and colleagues, Jordan, Williams, and Hazard (color deleted, at least not so noticeable); and finally and overwhelmingly, he was what a trumpet player!
He got through the days so, and at three o’clock he was free to dump his books into a locker, get out of the building, and light a cigarette. He might well have been held up to Boy Scouts as an example to support the theory that cigarette smoking dulls the mind and stunts the growth, which was that day’s counterpart of today’s richly advertised notion that cigarette smoking tends to heighten the intellectual stature, steady the nerves, and work wonders for the complexion. And having lighted a cigarette, Rick would go, as fast as he could get there, to the Cotton Club, let himself in with a duplicate key he’d had made from Jeff’s, and get started on the Cotton Club baby grand.
There, his day finally started, he worked with an intensity that you don’t find in every fifteen-year-old boy; that you don’t find, in fact, in anybody but the off-center ones, the ones who have to work whether they like it or not, and not for economic reasons either. Afternoons, vis-à-vis with the Cotton Club baby grand, he shed the husk of indifference that was the protection of Rick Martin, the ten o’clock scholar, and became excited and forceful. He had in his blood the lust to subdue, to force matter to take form. He was more interested in playing the trumpet than the piano, but he would not, for all that, stop playing the piano until he knew he had it where he wanted it. When he had it down, eating out of his hand, he could rest; until that time should come, he practiced.
Jeff gave him pointers on Sunday afternoons. He taught him to play from sheet music, fill in the gaps with proper chord sequences, and elaborate the right hand with more or less conventional breaks—simple things, meant only to give him the feeling. The standard break was not a bad pedagogical idea; if Jeff had reasoned, he doubtless would have said that before you can invent a thing that’s really fresh you have to know what’s conventional. He didn’t reason, but he had a good set of right instincts which accomplished reason’s purpose admirably. His trump in teaching, however, was that each Sunday after he got through showing Rick what to do, he himself took over the piano and ended the lesson with a concert that sent Rick off in an ecstasy of high purpose. Sensitive students of music go one of two ways when they hear a really great performance; young violinists, specifically, come away from a Yehudi concert feeling either that they’d better take up tennis or else get more time somehow to practice. Rick was with the last class; when Jeff Williams polished off the lesson by giving him some gratuitous musicianship, Rick took it like the whip of discipline and went away champing with determination. And determination was with him no empty abstraction.
He kept it up. He’d practice about two hours every afternoon at the Cotton Club, and then go home as fast as he could and get something to eat and put in a couple of hours on the trumpet. Then, around nine, he’d meet Smoke at Gandy’s and they’d go to hear Jeff’s band for a while, inside now, either sitting on the floor at the back of the shell or standing at the back of the hall with the dancers between them and the music. He’d got so used to being with negroes that it no longer bothered him when people gave him funny looks. He’d come to take such glances for granted, as do all those who are stuck with some outward peculiarity. There it is, look at it; everybody else does. The dancers at the Cotton Club didn’t try to figure it out; for them he was one of two things, the all-white result of an unorthodox interracial union, or else a white boy of strange taste. The two possibilities flashed fast into their minds and fast out again, and they went on dancing.
Before the year was out Smoke had a regular job playing drums for Jeff. Ward folded up with a stomachache one night, turned the drums over to Smoke, and went home. Three days later he was dead, killed by the poison of a burst appendix.