A Conversation with the Mann (27 page)

Sid and I got out of the cab on Sixtieth and Madison, went for the Copa's doors—my freshly cleaned suit bagged up in plastic
and slung over my shoulder. Inside we got a “Hey, howzit” from Jules Podell, who owned the club, and were given a quick introduction
all around. The waiters, bartenders. I said a hello to them all.

Mostly I got back lukewarm stares.

We got walked to my dressing room, a suite in Hotel Fourteen above the club. Tony Bennett came 'round before I had a chance
to stop over and greet him. He told me he'd heard great things about me, about my act. Said he was looking forward to a terrific
stand together, and if there was anything he could help out with, be sure to give a holler.

He wanted to know if there was any way he could help
me?

Tony was strictly decent. Around him I didn't feel like a kid catching a break but that I was among his kind, that I was just
about a star myself.

He wished me a good show again, then went back to his dressing room to make ready.

Sid hung around some before claiming to want to go check the crowd. Truth is I don't think he wanted to infect me with his
own nervousness. He left, tossing off good-luck bits on his way.

Me, I just put my heels up and relaxed. With a good quarter-plus hour before the show got started, I enjoyed the quiet moment.
I riffed in my head about the time I'd come around knocking on the Copa's door and couldn't get past the guy with the bad
combover, how in short order I'd be onstage, taking in laughs, claps, and smiles from an audience full of people who'd paid
top dollar to see me.

Okay, they'd paid to see Tony, but I came along with the deal, so in a way it was
like
they'd paid to see me, too. Anyway, I assured myself it wouldn't be long before my name was at the top of the bill and there
was no doubt who was shelling green to see who.

I thought of Tommy.

I picked up the phone and the long distance operator put me through to her hotel in Detroit. She wasn't in.

I flipped my wrist, checked my watch. Just a few minutes before the show. I reached over for a glass of water. It spilled
on my hand. Or really, my hand was shaking so badly, I couldn't keep the water from sloshing out of the glass and onto me.
I stood up to grab a towel, but my knees barely worked as supports. On top of that, taking a good, steady breath was turning
into a circus trick.

Nerves.

Nerves that I'd been dodging all day were wolves closing in on me. Never mind the months on the road, forget all that other
club work I'd put in. This was the Copacabana. I could play things cool all I wanted, for everyone else I could act as if
tonight was just another show, but all I was doing was acting. The truth of it: Opening for a cat the size of Tony Bennett
scared the hell out of me. Working the Copa terrified me. Maybe Sid's counsel had been right. Maybe I should've made sure
I was absolutely ready for everything I did every step of the way. And real suddenly I didn't feel like a seasoned act but
a frightened little boy who had no business thinking he could entertain people. I felt again what I'd so often felt inside
myself, not special, just different.

I got myself from my dressing room downstairs to the backstage area—a space married to part of the kitchen. Jules Podell was
watching the house from the wings, his fat hand swallowing a highball glass. He looked at me, saw my pale blackness, asked:
“What's the matter, kid?”

I copped: “Just got some jitters. Guess I'm a little nervous. Honest? I think I'm going to throw up.” I laughed some. At myself.

Jules smiled at me, smiled as if he were about to go all fatherly with some wise words from a longtime club owner.

He said: “What the fuck are you talkin'; you're nervous, you goddamn nigger coon?”

Right then I got hip. He wasn't smiling, he was sneering.

“I bring you into my club, feed you food, let you drink my booze, pay your nigger-ass good goddamn money just so you can cry
like a bitch? ‘Oooh, I'm scared,’ ” he mocked.

Why didn't he just reach over and slap me? I was better at taking slaps.

“You listen to me, you little black shit. I don't want to hear any of your fuckin' cryin'. You get your moolie jig ass out
on that stage and tell your goddamn jokes. And be fuckin' funny.”

Pep talk done, Jules took a hit off the glass hidden in his hand and wandered away, sick of my presence.

The waiters, the hired help in the kitchen, they went on hustling, filling orders, scooping melon balls. Whatever. Worse than
laughing at me, I wasn't even worth their attention.

I stood around feeling Jules's verbal punches, extra fear now jiggered in with my nervousness. I had no desire to see how
unpleasant the man could get should I be anything less than hysterical.

The announcer started in. I heard my name. I went out onstage. The applause I got greeted with was good. Good until the audience
of suited, evening-dressed, jewelried, and beehived people got a look at my blackness. Then their clapping got dialed down
to polite before it just went away.

I found myself standing at the edge of that gulf again—that quiet spot separating the applause, what applause there'd been,
and the laughs from my first joke told. That night the spot wasn't just quiet, it was graveyard silent.

Between the audience's lukewarm welcome and Jules's sendoff, I was good and dazed. Couldn't help but be. My usual opening
bit was swimming somewhere in my head, but I couldn't reel it in. Instead, winging things, I stepped into the gulf with: “Well,
dig this crowd. Never seen so many dressed-up people in my life. Guess this is where Tiffany's goes when they want to buy
jewelry.”

There was the sound of silverware on china. A call to a waiter about a steak that wasn't done right. And there were laughs.
A few. Most weak. Not that the line wasn't funny, but all those people didn't much know how to respond to me. Except for catching
Nat King Cole on television, and maybe Sammy in the flesh right there at the Copa, they weren't hardly acclimated to watching
a black onstage. On
their
stage at
their
club. What was the world coming to? And trying to figure the answer to that question kept them from getting much cackling
in.

Kept most of them.

From a booth stage left came the noise of an asthmatic bear hacking up a Virginia ham. Took me a second before I figured out
it was a guy laughing. And that laugh was followed up by a bunch more little ones—other people in the booth jumping in.

Just as those laughs were dying down, I tossed out: “Classy joint, the Copa. I don't want to say it's pricey, but you know
they've got three waiters at every table. One gives you the bill, the other two revive you.”

Like before: The cat with the choker's laugh started up, followed by other laughs at the booth.

People looked, tried to ID the fellow who was having the good time. A little murmur worked its way across the room the way
fire works dry brush.

I went into my next bit, tried to circle my way back into my act. “I'm not used to this kind of class. Didn't have much money
growing up. We were so poor, when I was a kid I couldn't afford a second thought, only changed my mind once a year, and never
had a new idea.”

Now the laughs were strung together, the cat in the booth, the people with him, the whole rest of the crowd. They were easing
up, relaxing. The fact that the fellow in the booth dug me made it okay for everyone else to dig me, too.

And that right there was all the more handicapping I needed. I got my stage legs back, my timing and my rhythm. Same as a
fighter catching an opening, I knew I could take this bunch, and for the next twenty minutes I hit them with bits just as
hard and as fast as I could throw 'em.

That show, that first one at the Copa, was a long way from being the smash I'd spent nights and waking hours dreaming of,
but it wasn't close to the disaster it could've been. By the time I'd wrapped things, the audience was good and warm and ready
for Tony, and that was all the more I needed to do. I got off to stronger claps than I'd gone on with, and as I went, the
fellow in the booth yelled a few things at me. I was too jazzed to make out exactly what he was saying, but it wasn't “lousy
nigger,” so I figured it was a step up from where the night had started.

Sid was waiting for me backstage. “It was a good one, Jackie. You pulled it out. Almost lost it, but you pulled it out.”

That's what I liked—that's one of the hundred things I liked about Sid: He didn't sugar-coat or soft-pedal. From him you didn't
get underplay or oversell, you didn't get told half-truths just because he thought it was what you wanted to hear. Everything
was straight from the shoulder. My set had been solid but nothing better, and that's all the more praise Sid laid on me.

Jules was another story. When he got backstage he was strictly smiles and warm hands. “Great set, Jackie. Really terrific
stuff. That bit about your uncle, I just about bust a gut. You want somethin' to eat? After a set like that you gotta have
an appetite. Hey, Nick, what are you doin'? Get Jackie a menu.”

Was this the same Jules who just prior to my set had stopped yelling at me only because he'd run out of slurs? And the rest
of the staff, the same people who had greeted me with nothing kinder than a cold stare, now jumped around like if I went unattended
for more than a second, heads were going to roll fast and hard. I wish I could've believed all this goodwill getting tossed
my way was on account of my performance, but my ego wasn't so swelled I didn't know the workmanlike job I'd done onstage didn't
rate me the attention I was getting. Something else had thrown everyone's switch from nasty to nice.

Tony finished his set. The houselights went up along with a rowdydow from a well-pleased crowd.

Jules came back to the kitchen, where I was putting down the last of my New York cut. “Jackie, somebody wants to have a meet
with you.”

A fan wants to talk to me? Who doesn't have a minute for that?

Jules guided me from the kitchen into the show room. Along the way I caught an earful of congratulations tossed out from the
tables we passed: “Great show, kid.” “Dynamite stuff, Jackie.” “Sensational. You were killing me.” It was like the whole joint
was infected with some kind of Dig Jackie virus. As I walked the room, I wondered if I could pay the Russians to release it
into the water supply.

From Jules's trajectory I knew right off where we were heading: the booth. The booth stage left where the hard-laughing cat
had been sitting.

Six people at the booth—it was the largest in the house—three guys and their dates, bottle blondes who most probably handed
out affection on an hourly basis, and when you said good-bye to them it was with cash on the nightstand and a pat on the cheek
as you slinked off into the morning.

Jules did a quick introduction. “Frank, Jackie Mann.”

The fellow smack in the center of the booth nodded at me. He was a weighty guy, but not fat. Kind of pudgy. Kind of jowly.
Other than he was a slick dresser—silk suit, silk shirt, silk tie—he was average-looking. Except for his nose. His nose was
some whole other thing. There was a lot to it, and it took up most of his face. Not pointed or hooked, it arched from between
his eyes, way out, then back in to land just above his lip. An arch: That was the best way, the only way to describe what
was going on there. An arch.

The man, Frank, said: “Good meetin'ya, Jackie.” His voice was slightly high-pitched and partly choked off like he was talking
at me through a vacuum cleaner hose. It came off as a wheeze more than anything else and sounded especially funny slipping
out of such a beefy guy. “Tell you this, you're a funny boy.”

Boy.
I didn't care for that. Didn't say anything about it, either.

Jules had plenty to say. “You bet he's funny. Wouldn't've hired him otherwise. Just about bust a gut listening to this kid,
and I've heard 'em all. All of'em, Frank. You remember that one time we had Martin and Lewis here and Lewis went off an—”

“Hey, why don't you go make sure the drinks've got enough water in 'em?” Frank rasped.

Jules left without a word more.

Whatever this cat's voice lacked in bass it made up for in authority. He talked, people listened. I made a note regarding
that kind of respect: Get some.

All around, couples and parties at their tables sat, not paying any attention to each other, not saying a word, not wanting
to miss a second of me having a talk with this Frank fellow. Forget about what I, or even what Tony had done up onstage. What
was going on now, this was the show.

Frank wanted to know: “That bit about your old man not being a drunk …” He tried to recall the wording.

One of the other guys at the table jumped in and jumped in fast the way a lapdog jumps to its master with the morning paper.
“He said his father's not a drunk, 'cause he can lay on the floor without holding on.”

Frank gave a burst of that hearty-stifling laugh of his as if he were hearing the bit for the first time.

The other guys laughed.

The girls just smiled.

“Where'd you learn a rib like that?” Frank asked.

“It's not a rib, sir. It's the truth. My father's got passing out down to a science,” I said very seriously.

Frank and his table did more laughing.

“If drinking were an Olympic sport, my pop would be the gold medal record breaker. The Jesse Owens of boozers … as long as
he didn't have to run in a straight line.”

Frank—face going from red to blue—waved a hand in the air, signaling me to stop before he choked himself out.

The other guys did the same. Threw in some foot stomps and table smacks just so Frank would know for sure how excruciatingly
funny they found me.

The girls just smiled.

I stood thinking of my pop, the lush, who'd started this laugh fest. At least he was good for something.

Frank: “Have a siddown, Jackie.”

There wasn't any room for me at the booth. It took about half a second to notice that, but it was apparently half a second
too long with someone not making a move to accommodate me.