A Conversation with the Mann (14 page)

“Fran? You'll take on Fran?”

“You got another singer? God help me, you don't have another singer.”

“No, no. Just Fran.”

“Just Fran. Just Fran is enough.” Sid took out another card, handed it to Fran along with the same spiel on when to come around
to his office. He lamented: “A comic who squeezes me, and a singer I don't need. My lucky night.”

My lucky night. Sid had gotten me off a sharp hook. In the moment I'd stood up for Fran. She was my friend. And being my friend,
without thought, I'd done everything I could to swing Fran a piece of the good fortune that'd stumbled in my direction. I
told myself there was no other way things would've happened.

I was telling myself a lie.

The truth …

The truth of it was I wanted like nothing else to get out of the Fourteenth Street Theater. The truth of it was I wanted it
so bad, so hard, so deep, if it'd come to it… if it had come to it, I would have left Frances right where she was.

Fran was strictly sunshine and smiles, not hardly believing in the span of a couple of minutes the two of us had gone from
burlesque acts to, if nothing else, burlesque acts with an agent. Sid got gratitu-dinal hugs and kisses smothered all over
him.

Done with us, afraid if he didn't get out of the theater and get out fast he was going to end up with more acts he had no
use for, Sid left as he'd come in: quiet and unnoticed.

Fran wrapped me up in herself. Between tossing out excited thank-you bits and quick riffs on how life was going to be so much
better now that we had an agent handling things for us, she put her lips to mine.

Across the backstage area, near a lighting board, some union guy—hair buzzed marine short, once big muscles Jell-Oed fat—locked
a gaze on me and Fran. Me hugging Fran. Fran kissing me.

He dipped his head toward the floor and spat.

I
WENT 'ROUND
S
ID'S OFFICE.
After ten and before five and not between noon and one. It was a small space on an upper floor of a building just below Midtown.
That's about as descriptive as you could get with the place unless you went into detail about its dull wood paneling that
complemented the dull wood furniture. There were some framed headshots on the wall. I thought I recognized a guy in one of
them. The office did not jump up and down and yell show business. It did not have the luminescence of entertainment. All it
had was Sid's name stenciled across the glass of the door, and below that:
TALENT AGENT
.

He offered me a cola and sat me down. We talked. Not about show business or my aspirations. Not at first. At first we just
talked about whatever, beat the chops on this or that. Sid asked me where I was from. I told him. I told him about growing
up in Harlem, told him I was without a mother and just about without a father, a little about my logging days and some about
my moving job and my history on Fourteenth Street. Those were pretty much the Jackie Mann highlights.

Sid told me about him. Like me, he was from New York, White Plains. He was a widower, had a brother and a niece he adored.
Other than that he had his work, having fallen in love with show business years and years back when he once caught his uncle's
vaudeville act. Sid had wanted to be a performer. He discovered that he had no talent. He discovered that no matter he had
no talent, he was able to finagle himself bookings. Sid figured if he could book a no-talent like himself, he ought to be
able to strike gold booking acts with real skills.

Not quite gold.

Sid cared about his clients, thought of them as more than ten percent. He was concerned, wanted to know if his acts were well
or not, happy or not—outside of show business—and if not, why. Sid gave a damn about people. Giving a damn about people, their
feelings, keeps you from being a good agent. Anyway, he made a comfortable living.

Done with the getting-to-know-each-other jazz, Sid asked: “What do you want, Jackie?”

The question sounded a little nutty to my ears. If people ever asked me what it was I wanted, it was rarely. Even so: “Sullivan.”
The answer ready without thought. “I want to do the Ed Sullivan show. I want to be famous.”

“Interesting.”

“What?”

“You would say it that way. Not that you want to be funny, you want to be the best comedian around. You want to be famous.”

“I do.” No embarrassment. No shame. “I want to be famous.”

Sid nodded. He didn'tjudge. He'd asked me what I wanted, and I had told him. Whatever answer I'd given, as long as it'd been
honest, would've been okeydoke by him.

We talked some more business. Sid told me again that he had a number of rooms where he thought he could get me booked, that
he had road clubs and how he thought they would be good for working on my act, and he did expect me to work on my act. He
didn't want any laziness, didn't want me just parroting other comics' bits. He wanted an act who would go at things as hard
as he would.

I okayed that.

Then he told me about some of the acts he handled. Some of the names I'd heard of, they worked around at a few of the Village
clubs. Most of the names were new to me. The point Sid was trying to make without coming right out and saying so was that
he wasn't hardly the King of Entertainment.

No. He wasn't. But he was the only guy in the business in the whole of New York City who wanted to have anything to do with
me. So when he started to ask me the second time if I was sure I wanted to work with him, very much like the first time I
cut him off with: “Yes.”

We sat for a tick.

I asked: “So, now what do we do?”

Sid held out his hand. I took it, shook it.

He said: “We're in business.”

M
Y LIFE BECAME VERY OKAY
. Not great. Not by any means. But when I started working with Sid it got better than I could recall up to that point. There
were, as Sid'd promised, those pocketful of clubs where he booked myself and Fran. Real quick the Fourteenth Street Theater
became part of our past. He got us our police ID cards. Cabaret cards. We should've had them when we were working the theater,
but didn't. At that time, the standing law was you couldn't work a club or cabaret, any joint in the city that served booze,
without one. To get one you had to go through the N.Y.C. Police Department. The idea, cops controlling the cards kept the
riffraff out of the clubs. Riffraff, according to the ordinance, was “Anyone convicted of a felony or of any misdemeanor or
offense.” Riffraff was also “Anyone who is or pretends to be a homosexual or lesbian.” Even in New York, if blacks had few
rights, gays had none. To the law they were no different, no better than criminals. Made me thankful all I had to worry about
all day, every day, was being a nigger.

Me and Fran got our cards, got booked, got work—one type of club more suited for Fran and another for me. She did spots at
the St. Regis, the Drake Room … the ninety joints. I was strictly downtown, the coffeehouses and cellars of the Village. That
killed me and Fran palling around. But what's good was I was working clubs that not a month before the only way I'd get into
was by lining up and shelling out my green same as every other Charlie off the street. Now I was the guy the Charlies were
paying to see. Now I was working my bits on the same stages as Sahl and Kitt, Nichols and May. Working those stages, yeah,
but still at the crack of dawn. My location had improved, not my hours. My act I was working on.

The times he could swing it, Sid would be in the house, watching, taking notes. After sets we would have a very late dinner/early
breakfast, and Sid would break things down for me: how this joke or that went over, do I need to move it up or back, or toss
it altogether. I appreciated Sid taking an interest, that I wasn't just a cut to him. I appreciated most, for the first time
in my life, having something besides a pillhead for a father figure.

When we could, Fran and I would get together, talk about how things were going for us, what famous face we'd caught up close.
Fran had me beat with a young Barbra Streisand.

That was the thing about the clubs: After the jazz of your first few weeks of working a real gig faded, after the late nights,
the low to no pay, and the reality of you being just one more guy in the city full of people trying to sing or dance or joke
their way to a better life, there were still the surprises: who might be doing a drop-in, what big-time so-and-so was in the
audience checking out acts. In those days, in New York, when stars were made in the depths of the city, there were always
surprises.

“H
I
,”
SHE SAID.

I jumped up from the spot where I was sitting backstage. Sitting. Drifting. Killing time till my set. I jumped up and banged
my head on a shelf just above me, tipped it, and got caught up in a shower of electrical cables.

The times previous we'd crossed paths in the clubs, if I'd ever spoken two words to her, they were
hel
and
lo
. But in my head we'd been through a thousand conversations. In every one of them I was movie-star cool, and she was wide-eyed
and pining. Then she says one word to me, “hi,” she says, and I go Charlie Klutz right in front of Thomasina Montgomery.

“Are you all right?” She was laughing a little, but concern came through her smile.

Her teeth were a little less than absolutely straight. Just a little. Other than that the girl was perfect.

Rubbing my head: “Wasn't anything.” After you've been hit by flying booze bottles, no, it wasn't.

“ You're funny.”

Great. I was a clown to her.

Thomasina picked up on me taking the comment wrong, added: “I mean onstage. I've seen your act.”

“Really?”

“You sound surprised.”

“I never fig … I didn't think you knew who I was, let alone you'd watch my act.”

“I've seen you around, heard some other people say you were funny. Besides, I'm a healthy young girl. I like to watch a handsome
man perform.”

Well, let me tell you: My tongue went slack and flopped around inside my mouth. The whole of me took on a general retardation.
I stood there, hoping against hope Thomasina wouldn't notice how she was drugging me.

“I'm Thomasina. Tommy.”

“Jackie.”

A beat.

“So …” she said.

“So …”

“I guess this is where you ask me out.”

Holy … Was this for real? Was it really happening? After all my dreaming and wishing and imagining, was this girl really swinging
me a little attention? And if all those fantasy bits I'd swapped with Thomasina—Tommy—were finally going to come true, then
at the very least couldn't I play my part?

Turning up the charm star-style: “Yeah, but since we both know I'm going to ask you out, I was just going to wait for you
to go ahead and say yes.”

“But since we both know I'm going to say yes, I was just going to wait for you to go ahead and pick a place.” She didn't miss
a beat with that. It was as if we'd been swapping snappy-clack our whole lives.

I offered up: “The Five Spot?”

She came back: “I'm already there.”

T
HAT
I'
D NEVER PREVIOUSLY
been to The Five Spot didn't matter. Everybody knew, you wanted to show someone you were hep, The Five Spot was where you
cruised. It was a jazz hang down on Bowery where “new” jazz and “progressive” jazz were being experimented with in the same
dead-serious style the brain boys had experimented with the atom at Los Alamos. It was a kind of music I never much dug. Raw,
unstructured, to me it sounded like someone threw a drum kit down some stairs, then tossed a horn and a cat after it. But
in the day, everybody grooved to the noise. It was the music to which the Beats recited and the white niggers slummed. Jazz
was the sound track to the times, and the sound happening then was especially fierce and wild and ignorant of rules. Bip-bop
is what Monk called it. Bebop is what it got called. It's what Dizzy and Sonny and Mingus and the Prez played, and none of
us understood, and since we didn't get it, it had to be deep, daddy-o. So people went to jazz clubs same as congregations
went to churches. When the sermon was over, maybe you didn't get God any better, but you felt a whole lot closer to Him.