A Conversation with the Mann (10 page)

Thing number two I needed was a club where I could perform. Easy. There was one joint in all of New York that was
the
joint: the Copacabana. I'd never once been in it. I'd barely been near its neighborhood—tony Midtown—but I knew it was
the
joint because whenever Sullivan would ask one of his in-from-Hollywood-between-pictures guests where they might be seen around
town, when he asked a name comic or an even bigger name singer where they might be found doing a drop-in, the answer was most
always the same: the Copa.

So one afternoon I took my ignorant self down to Fifty-ninth and Madison, knocked on the locked front door of the club. Waited.
Knocked. Waited. Pounded. Waited. Pretty soon a tired-looking white fellow opened up, tie down, sleeves rolled high, and hair
combed over a bald spot that just made it more noticeable rather than less.

“What?” he wanted to know.

“I'd like to speak with the manager, please.”

“What?”

“Are you the mana—”

“What!”

“I'd like to work here, sir.”

“Doing?” His body held a position that was half out/half in the doorway, like he was just itching to get back to whatever
he'd been doing before I'd come around. If I'd burst into flames I figured there was only a fifty-fifty chance I could hold
his attention.

“I want to perform,” I said, as if it should be obvious. “I want to go onstage.” Adding to it: “I'm a comic.”

The guy with the comb-over made a whole lot of comments regarding my intelligence and the legality of my mother's marriage
at the time of my birth. Then he told me to get lost. He didn't quite tell me that, but the meaning was the same.

What had I expected? Had I really figured to knock on the door, wave hello, and wind up onstage at the Copacabana?

Yeah.

Yeah, I guess I had, my vision limited with blinders of me taking bows before a laughing, clapping, loving crowd of people.
I'd figured the only thing I had to do was show up, and all that would be waiting for me. I'd figured very, very wrong.

But the same arrogance or naiveness, stupidity maybe, that sent me to the Copa kept me from quitting things then and there.
So I wouldn't kick things off at the Copacabana. So what? There were nothing but clubs in the city. If the Copa didn't want
me, I'd take my act elsewhere. I took it to the nightspots strung along Fifty-third Street. Took it to clubs in hotels, their
fancy bars and cocktail joints. I took it to clubs on the East Side, the West Side, coffeehouses and dives on both sides of
the Village. I took it around for nearly a month, and I got turned down for auditions just as fast as I could find new doors
to pound on. Nobody was taking what I was selling. Nobody was hot for a comic—for
one more
comic—coming their way. A realization was catching up to me: A whole lot of people in New York wanted to be in show business,
and a whole lot of clubs and coffeehouses and nightspots were sick of seeing them come around.

I worked my way down to the Fourteenth Street Theater, down other than just locationwise. Down meaning I'd busted through
the bottom of the barrel of respectability. The Fourteenth Street Theater was left over from vaudeville. A dinosaur that didn't
know the rest of its kind was off marking time in a boneyard. Specializing in cheap beer and bad burlesque, it was a hole
of a joint where comics and singers and novelty acts could go and do their thing for what constituted an audience. Between
acts the theater showcased strippers. Or, depending on how you looked at things, between strippers the theater had acts so
married guys could go home and tell their wives they were out seeing a show and not be lying about it.

I came around looking for the manager. I got a guy named Ray. I asked for an audition, asked with all the confidence I had
left, trying to sound like a young man who was going to light up the world and not just another kid who wanted to crack funny
but couldn't get stage time anywhere else.

Ray didn't seem to care one way or the other. He told me to come back two weeks from Sunday, to be at the theater at seven
o'clock, then was done with me.

They passed, but they took their time about it, me spending nearly every minute of every day refining fantasies about going
onstage, what it would be like up onstage, what my life—my gorgeous new life—would be like following the Sunday that was fourteen
days and counting to come. But prior to being reborn, there was my real and current life to be lived in its two main components.
There was my dad—always around and always high. Always ready to abuse— and there was my job at the moving company. I never
had much of a build, always slight. Standing six one but never tipping out at more than one seventy, I wasn't made for lifting
furniture. Except I was black. That was about the sole requirement for manual labor.

One time Mo and I were on a job, the fellow we were moving had a big … thing. Still don't know for sure exactly what it was.
Like a chest of drawers only longer. Not as tall. Solid wood. Heavy. Of course it wouldn't fit in the elevator, so me and
Mo had to haul it downstairs. Six flights, and on a New York-hot day. Hot like little sister. The heat, the weight of the
thing, the sweating they made you do, didn't help my grip any. Also didn't help to have the guy who owned the piece at the
top of the stairs barking down orders drill sergeant-style. “Don't drop it!You boys be careful and don't drop that!” Like
if he hadn't told us we would've thrown it down the stairs for lack of knowing better.

“Don't drop it!Don't you drop that!”

His voice kept pounding my ears. The stifling air kept choking my throat. Hands wet, slick on the wood. Back screaming at
me, arms crying. My foot caught a step wrong. No way to keep steady. I let my end drop. The piece hit the stairs. Not hard.
Too hard for the cat it belonged to. He flew down the steps at me; he came fast and he came swinging. The side of my head
took his punch and lit off fireworks inside my skull. When my eyes stopped rolling and fluttered open, I was where I'd so
often been: on the floor, again. My face turning red under the black, again. Looking up at my attacker, trying not to cry,
trying to take what I'd been given like a man. But my version of stoic was trembling and going teary-eyed. Again.

And while the man was raging at me with “how dare you” bits, cursing my useless Negro—not the word he used—self for dropping
his expensive whatever, Li'l Mo stood watching him. Watching and balling his hands into tight, angry fists the same way he
had back in the logging camp when he was ready to have a go at that redneck and his redneck clan. He was set to lash out,
strike a blow against the oppressors. Li'l Mo was ready to start the revolution.

From my spot on the floor I gave Mo a look that told him to cool it. Only thing starting trouble would buy us was more trouble.
Wasn't worth it. It was never worth trying to fight The Man.

Day over but not done, wanting to be alone, I gave Mo some story about needing to be somewhere to do something and went off
walking, kept company by my stinging face and angry thoughts. I wanted bad to have at that white cat for slapping me. I wanted
to fist up my hand and smack him right back. But hitting him would've gotten me fired. At least that. I hated my job, but
I needed my job and had affection for the money that came with it. It's hard to have pride when lust and greed get in the
way. Especially when your skin color is a permanent factor. So I took the man's slaps. And so what if I did? Real soon I'd
be in a place where that white guy, where anybody, wouldn't be able to give me the back of their hand again. Real soon. Less
than fourteen days.

Into my own thoughts, my eyes missed a two-by-four that had been tossed out in the alley I walked. My foot caught it, got
tripped up, and I went over. As I flew for the ground, my hands jumped out to take the fall. Waiting on the pavement to meet
my right palm was a piece of broken glass. Small, but just big enough to gash my flesh and start up a flow of blood. I sat
on the dirty ground, pants torn at the knee, bleeding. And my face still hurt.

I looked up.

Sitting in the alley was a brand-new 1956 Packard Caribbean, a chromium wonder. Parked. Lifeless. Not doing a thing. Nothing
except mocking me. It bragged of things I would never have: a near-six-grand touring car that I couldn't afford in a lifetime
of trying. Whitewalls, white leather interior, and a tri-tone paint job—eggshell, sky blue, tango red—fresh-polished to a
mirror shine. And that grille, that chrome-dripping grille that was like a big fat smile that came with a ridiculing laugh.
A laugh directed square at my face: See me, Jackie? See what you can't have you poor, dumb, useless—

The two-by-four was in my hand. The two-by-four was all over the Packard. It smashed and spider-webbed the windshield. It
de-sideview-mirrored a door. A swing and a hit; the hood ornament was sent out of the park. And then the grille. Then I went
to work on that stupid, shining grille. The wood tore at the chrome, peeled it back, dented it in, beat down the bulbous points
that were excess for the sake of excess. I beat them, but what I was doing was smacking back the white man who'd smacked me.
I smashed die headlights, but I was giving it to my dad after taking it for so long. I pounded and pounded and pounded the
car, but what I was really doing … What was I doing?

I stopped.

After the hammering of wood on metal the alley was horribly quiet. All of New York around me and the only thing I heard was
the sound of a dog barking deep in the city, the sound of my heart beating in my chest. I heard the sound of the two-by-four
clunking against the ground. All of New York around me, and I felt like every citizen was listening to the sound of my deep
breathing and racing feet as I busted from the alley, from my victim: a Packard that had the misfortune of being in the wrong
place at the wrong time.

S
UNDAY.
F
INALLY
S
UNDAY.
I hit the theater around five-twenty, spent a solid forty-five minutes cooling my heels before the joint opened up enough
to even let me in. That got followed by another thirty minutes of standing around waiting for the show to start. When it did,
fifteen people sprinkled a house that sat two hundred. I was scared I was going to get thrown on first. How was I supposed
to do any kind of a show for that non-crowd?

I was burning calories with worry over nothing.

The seven o'clock hour passed and so did the eight with lots of acts going on and me still marking time.

After nine. The house was closing in on half full—as full as it was likely to get. The audience—all men, slobbish, and in
a class somewhere between middle and low, warmed up and fairly sober even with the beers they downed at a pace—was peaking.
The moment was ripe for me to take the stage, display my skills. I didn't. Instead, up went some singers, a couple of comics,
specialty acts, dog acts, a guy who recited lines from a play, and strippers. All kinds of strippers. Every shape, size, and
age equally represented. Except the good-looking kind. Those the theater apparently banned from the premises. The men in the
house didn't much care. The men in the house gave the women drunken salutes, and in thanks the women peeled their clothes
with a smile and a tease before letting them fall away altogether. It made the boys happy, and the boys made the girls happy,
and everybody was happy except for me. I was just standing around watching the crowd get half as large and twice as loaded
and plenty more hot with every comic and singer and dog act that went on taking up good and valuable stage time that could
be better enjoyed with more stripping.

I tried to pin down the emcee, get a rough idea when I might— might—be going on. Scared mice were easier to corner. His best
estimate, when I could get any out of him, was: “Soon, chum. Real soon.” He said the same thing to some old guy with a banjo
when he asked when he'd be going up.

Ten o'clock got to be eleven and twelve. The audience got cleaved. One and one-thirty cut their size again. The strippers
had been through two rotations and a half, but to the boozed oglers who remained, the girls were new and unfamiliar, and with
an alcohol makeover they were nearly beautiful.

At about two-thirty, when I was tired by just the thought of the full day of moving furniture that was waiting some five hours
away from me, the emcee came over, said: “You're next, Jake.”

“It's Jackie,” I started to say. But just that quick, after standing around all night, I suddenly had to wrestle with my stomach,
which decided it was nervous and had to empty itself. Sweat-slick palms clutching gut, I took up a spot in the wings. Occupying
my future space onstage was a girl whose talents lay in her ability to unbutton buttons and unzip zippers nearly in rhythm
to music. Nearly. And when she'd finished the job the house would belong to me. I tried to snapshot every second that passed
as I waited. I wanted a museum-quality collection of memories of this event, this moment of personal history. I wanted it
well documented in my mind, easily recallable in complete and exact detail for the day, for the certain day, when people would
say to me: Tell us, Jackie. Tell us how it all began.

So, let me tell you: It began with the stripper ending her act, taking a couple of well-milked bows waiting for crumpled dollar
bills from the audience that would never get tossed her way. The boys were drunk, but not so drunk they would pay a cent more
than cover to peep what the girls were shaking. This one finally got to bundling her clothes and heading offstage with hot
and not particularly well-hidden grumbles for the boys and their cheap, cheap ways.

The emcee took the stage, his stroll arrogant in its laziness. Never mind he was bringing on acts at a burlesque house past
two in the morning, he was above his station. “Ooookay,” he said slow and soft and dead tired, his too-good-for-this manner
infecting his speech as well. “This next guy is a comic. How about some applause for Johnny Mann.”