Streets of Gold (37 page)

“Stella, I think you ain’t listening to me,” Nick said. “Look, it’s two days till Easter, where you gonna be spending Easter Sunday?”

“At my father’s house.”

“Okay. You want me to tell Jimmy to come here Easter morning, pick up you and the kid and take you to Harlem? How’s that, Stella?”

“Who cares?” my mother said. “Tell him what you like.”

“Okay, I’ll tell him to pick you up Easter, okay?”

“Tell him what you like. Who cares?” my mother said.

My father came back to the house at ten o’clock on Easter morning. Nick had neglected to mention that the day after my father had left home, he’d withdrawn most of the money in my mother’s and his joint savings account. He was driving a new Dodge, and carrying armloads of gifts for my mother and me. (I forget what my presents were.) The trip to my grandfather’s house in Harlem was frosty with silence. When we got to the apartment on First Avenue, my grandfather clasped my father in his arms and said, “Jimmy,
Buona Pasqua!
Come! You have to help me bring some wine from the cellar.”

“I’ll help,” Pino said from the other room.

“No, Pino,
sta qui
,” my grandfather said. “Jimmy and I can manage alone.”

I do not to this day know whether or not my father had an Irish whore on Pelham Parkway. I did not believe the Virgin Mary had accosted my mother on White Plains Avenue, of course, but I could find no reasonable explanation for a strange woman coming up to her with such information. I thought of a great many possibilities, but none of them made much sense. Was it conceivable, for example, that the woman in black had
herself
been my father’s doxy, and that she’d gone to my mother seeking revenge after a lovers’ quarrel? Or was she the sister of my father’s whore? Or her mother? Or was it all simply a case of mistaken identity? My father’s partner on the Pelham Parkway route was named Jimmy, too, and he also wore a mustache, and was about my father’s size, though a bit heftier. Was it
he
who’d been
shtupping
the lady every afternoon? Had the informer in black fingered the wrong fornicating mailman?

I began to check up on my father. I became the first blind detective in history. I would drop in unexpectedly whenever he was playing a wedding or a dance, using the excuse that I wanted to sit in and get some practice playing with bands. My father’s ( band — he then called it James Palmer’s Rhythm Kings — was square to the toes, and sitting in with them was total torment. But I wasn’t there to advance my musical career. I was Ignazio Di Palermo, Private Eye. Blind in both, I wouldn’t have recognized an Irish whore if I’d tripped over her vagina and stumbled into County Killarney. (Remind me to tell you the joke about George Washington’s horse sometime.) I never did get the goods on my father, nor did he ever once deviate from his story: The lady in the street was crazy, he did not know a whore on Pelham Parkway or anyplace else in the world, the receipt for the gold earrings with the sapphire chips had been given to him by the jeweler when he went to pick them up for a friend. Eventually, my mother forgave him. But to keep the matter in perspective, and to correct any misconceptions about the extent of her willingness to forget, she promptly stopped talking to my Uncle Nick, who had served as nothing more than an innocent go-between in the entire affair. Nick was a house painter. He died in 1953, when he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage after a fall from a ladder. My mother had not spoken to him since that Good Friday in 1944, and she did not go to his funeral.

Who says there never
were
any streets of gold in America? In 1944, I found one. I had learned from an issue of
Down Beat
that Biff Anderson was back in New York. I sought him out again. I told him I’d been trying to understand bop, and was hopelessly confused. He told me that was tough shit. I told him he was the one who’d advised me not to even
try
playing Tatum piano, that bop was the new thing, and that was what I should be learning. He said That’s right. So where am I supposed to learn it? I asked. Nobody’s teaching it, Biff, there aren’t any bop solos in Braille, there aren’t even any
Tatum
solos in Braille, what am I supposed to do? (I was using the little-blind-bastard ploy that hadn’t worked on my grandfather with Vesuvio; it didn’t work on Biff, either.)

“Look,” he said, “I don’t know you from a hole in the wall, I got enough problems of my own, I don’t need a blind man hanging around me all the time asking questions.”

“Biff,” I persisted, “if you saw me walking down Broadway with a cup full of pencils, you’d take pity on me, wouldn’t you?”

“Oh, sheeee-it,” he said.

“Biff, all I’m asking you to do is take me around a little, help me to understand the styles, okay? And then if I decide I want to play bop... which is what
you
advised me to do, right? am I right?”

“Yeah, yeali,” he said.

“Then all I want you to do is give me a lesson every now and then. Or even if I decide to play Tatum, okay? I just need some help, that’s all. I can’t take it off the records anymore, I’m not getting anywhere.”

“Where in hell you want to go, man?” he asked.

“I want to be the best jazz piano player who ever lived.”

“Oh, sheeee-it,” he said again.

“I can’t pay you much for the lessons, Biff...”

“Ain’t gonna
be
no lessons,” he said.

“Fifteen, twenty dollars a week maybe, that’s what I was paying the man who taught me classical music...”

“Man, you one hell of a pushy blind person, you know that?”

“I’ve got to be,” I said.

He was quiet for a long time.

Then he said, “I must be outa my fuckin’ mind.”

Fifty-second Street was pure gold. I very nearly suffered a cardiac seizure the first time Biff took me downtown and I learned (he had saved it as a surprise) that Tatum was playing at the Famous Door, with a bassist and a guitarist as his sidemen. We got there at ten, and I sat there in ecstasy till two in the morning, when Biff took me up to meet Tatum. The next night we went to hear Sidney Bechet, an old-time New Orleans soprano sax player, and the night after that Biff took me to hear Coleman Hawkins at the Onyx. Biff had played with Hawkins many years back, and he told me this man could shake down the Empire State Building with his horn. Man, he shook me to the roots. He was playing with two young musicians who had cut their chops on bop, a drummer named Max Roach, and a trumpet player named Howard McGhee. Biff asked me to pay particular attention to the drummer, who had learned from Klook Clarke (another new name to me), and I listened to him very carefully and did not like what I heard. The next night we went to the Downbeat and listened to Red Norvo on the vibraphone, and the night after that we caught Eddie Condon playing Chicago-style jazz, and Biff introduced me to him, and later told me he was the one who’d said, “The boppers
flat
their fifths; we
drink
ours.” For the next six months, or seven, or eight, Biff and I walked from door to door on the Street, and then taxied downtown or crosstown to every jazz joint he could find, listening to the main attractions and the intermission bands. For me, it was like rushing through an encapsulated chronology of jazz from its earliest beginnings to its then current form, all the giants and near-giants assembled, blowing for all they were worth in cabarets stinking of booze and smoke — Bobby Hackett, Don Byas, John Kirby, Pee Wee Russell and Bud Freeman and Zutty Singleton and, of course, the Bird — who was playing at the Three Deuces with a band that spelled Erroll Garner, who was the feature attraction.

I hated what the boppers were doing. I hated their music on the few records I’d heard, and I hated it all over again hearing them in person. I cursed Kenny Clarke, who, Biff told me, was the first drummer to stop playing time, hated the klook-a-mop explosions that erupted unexpectedly from bass drum or snare like mortar shells in an undeclared war. I hated those flatted fifths the horn men were playing, though Biff told me he’d first heard them played on a
piano
as far back as 1940 (while I was still laboring over Chopin) by a man named Tadd Dameron, who was also one of the first to play in what Biff described as “the legato manner,” using his English accent, which I learned was both defensive
and
derisive. I think he hated bop as much as I did, but he was stuck with it, he recognized it as the wave of the future, and like my Uncle Nick, he wasn’t about to buck the system. I hated Gillespie and I hated Parker and I hated Powell and Wallington, Pettiford and Monk, and the whole damn gallery of men who were, it seemed to me, forcing me to change my path even before I’d firmly placed a foot upon it.

To me — I was eighteen and eager and excited and ambitious — these men were doing this deliberately, were trying to screw up my life, were out to get
me
personally. I wasn’t far from wrong. They were out to get Whitey, though he was known as Charley in those days. They were playing music they thought the white man could not steal, changing the names of songs so that when they played them with strangely revised charts, they would be unrecognizable to square Charley - “Ornithology” was “How High the Moon”; “A Dizzy Atmosphere” was “I Got Rhythm”; “Hot House” was “What Is This Thing Called Love?”; “Donna Lee” was “Back Home in Indiana.” The machine-gun chatter in the early stages of this war was an idiomatic cliché vocalized as “Bu-REE-bop,” or “Du-BEE-bop,” and probably deriving from Gillespie’s “Salt Peanuts,” a tune with a I, VI, II, V chord pattern and a Sears Roebuck bridge. Salt-PEA-nuts — the tonic, the octave, and the tonic again. The “Salt” was an eighth note on the second beat of the bar, followed by an eighth-note rest. The “PEA” was an eighth note on the upper tonic, and the “nuts” was an eighth note on the tonic below; beamed together they comprised the third beat of the bar. And there you were — “Ru-BEE-bop” or “Bu-REE-bop,” later shortened to “bebop” or “rebop” and finally to “bop” as the definitive label for the new jazz.

Freed from the need to express themselves in an archaic musical tongue, the boppers invented a shorthand verbal language as well, and this became the coinage of everyday communication. A word like “ax” was first used to describe a horn of any kind, but its scope rapidly expanded to include
any
instrument, even the guitar and piano, which are about as far removed from an actual ax as a giraffe is from a water buffalo. The word “gone” was initially an abbreviation of the expression “out of this world.” If you are out of this world, why, then you are literally gone, no? But it was also used in brief exchanges such as this:

“So I’ll see you Tuesday, man.”

“Gone.”

The “gone” meant “okay,” or “all right,” or “agreed,” and was frequently used interchangeably with the word “crazy,” which also expressed approval, and which was sometimes linked with the word “like.”

“Like three bills for the gig, cool?”

“Like crazy.”

“Like” was probably the most overworked word in the new jazz vocabulary. If, on the battlefield, soldiers (black
and
white) were using “fuck” in its numberless variations — “Pass the fuckin’ ammunition, you fuck, or fuck if I give a fuck what fuckin’ happens” — so were black musicians at home using “like” with every fucking breath.

“I was like walking along, when I dug this wigged-out chick, she like gassed me.”

“Like I’m short of gold, you got like a pad for me tonight?”

“Like, dig, man, you puttin’ me on?”

“Like I got eyes for like retiring like in Paris.”

“Like gone, man.”

“Like I like
love
you like.”

Like
I
 like
hated
it, man.

I hated the music, which I thought was simplistic, crude, mysterious, irritating, architecturally inept, and utterly without warmth or feeling. I figured the only reason Bud Powell was playing such primitive stuff was because he had tiny hands, as Biff had pointed out, and couldn’t reach those resounding Tatum chords. Tatum had riches to squander; he threw gold coins into the air, rubies poured from his ears, he swallowed emeralds and belched black pearls. Bop seemed impoverished to me, and the boppers — for all their dexterity — made music I considered emotionless and cold. I know a lot of jazz players who assign colors to keys. B flat will become brown, F will be green, E pink — meaningless references for me. I think instead in terms of warmth or lack of it. D is my favorite key, but only because it represents the
feel
of sunshine, and not because I think of it as saffron or burnt umber. Keys, as a matter of fact, have never meant very much to me. The problem confronting me each time I sit at the piano is not what
key
I’m going to play in, but only what I’m going to
do
with the tune. If I’m going to bomb out in E flat, I’ll bomb out in G as well. As far as I was concerned, the hoppers were bombing out in all twelve keys, and if they were playing in
any
color at all, it was the opposite of black, which most of them were; the music they made was cold and white. Dead white. I listened to it, and I thought This can’t be it, this can’t be where it’s going, this has got to be a fad.

I hated them for systematically and maliciously (I thought) destroying a sound I had loved instantly and without reservation from the first minute I’d heard it; I hated them for their exclusivity, which I did not recognize as naked hostility until that day years later when Rex Butler put me down on Broadway; I hated, them because they caused me to long for acceptance into their inner circle, where they spoke a childlike code, easily cracked and therefore no code at all, and yet impossible to imitate without incurring derision from them. Actually, I was missing the point, and it took me a long time to realize that Charlie Parker had been right. He understood, intuitively, that jazz as it was being played had come as far as it could ever go. There was no longer any way to modify or refine the existing system; it had to be completely demolished. He had reevaluated the entire harmonic and rhythmic structure and decided — not consciously; none of these decisions are ever conscious — to return jazz to its purest form.