Streets of Gold (41 page)

“Where are you going?” a girl’s voice asked.

“Canal Street,” I said.

“You’ll never get a taxi, this is Christmas,” she said. “You want to share mine?”

“Thank you,” I said.

I heard the door opening. I felt for it, edged my way around it, and using it as a guide and a support, climbed into the taxi. I was reaching over to pull the door shut behind me, when the girl said, “Can you manage?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“Okay,” she said.

I closed the door, slamming it to prove I was entirely capable of performing such a simple action.

“Don’t break the window, huh, Mac?” the cabby said.

“Sorry,” I said.

“So what is it now? Houston, then Canal?”

“Yes,” the girl said.

The driver put the cab into gear and pulled away from the curb. The girl and I sat side by side in silence.

“This is very kind of you,” I said at last, in apology for having slammed the door.

“Listen,” she said, “don’t I know what it’s like trying to get a cab?” Her voice was pure Bronx Jewish. I suddenly thought of Rebecca, the girl with the green eyes. We rode the rest of the way downtown without saying another word to each other. On Houston Street, the girl directed the driver to the building she wanted, and then offered to pay him what was on the meter. I told her that wasn’t necessary, I’d take care of it when I got to Canal Street. She then offered to pay at least half, but I refused that as well. Sighing, she got out of the cab, said, “Happy Chanukah,” and slammed the door behind her,

“
Everybody’s
tryin’ to bust my windows today,” the cabby said, and threw the taxi into gear again, and squealed it away from the curb. He was silent for several moments, and then suddenly and angrily said, “Why’n’t you let her pay?”

“What for?” I said. “I’d still be standing on that corner if it hadn’t been for her.”

“For
her
? For
me
, you mean. By rights, I ain’t supposed to pick up no passenger when I already
got
a passenger in the cab. That’s ridin’ double, an’ that ain’t allowed. By rights, when I let her out on Houston, I shoulda collected what was on the clock and then thrown the flag again. That’s by rights.”

“What difference does it make?” I said.

“I work percentage, Mac. Every time I throw the flag, I get a percentage of the first drop, too. What do you think I ony get a percentage of ony the rest, is that what you think? By rights, I’m gettin’ gypped out of part of the fare.”

“I’ll make it up on the tip,” I said.

“Sure,” the cabby said. “Everybody’ll make it up on the tip.”

“I can’t read the meter, anyway,” I said, “so just charge me whatever the fuck you want, and shut up, will you?”

“Nice,” he said. “Nice for a blind person.”

“Just drive the fuckin’ taxi,” I said.

“Very nice,” he said. “Oh, beautiful.”

When we got to Canal Street, I paid him what he said was on the meter, and then added a dollar to it. “Can you make it upstairs?” he asked.

“I can make it.”

“I’ll help you upstairs, if you like.”

“I don’t need any help, thanks.”

“Fuck
you
too,” he said, and drove off.

There was usually an old black man running the cage elevator in Biff’s building. But this was Christmas, and after I’d been ringing the bell for several minutes, I realized he probably had the day off. I felt around in the hallway for a door leading to the steps, found a metal fire door, eased it open, and cautiously began climbing. The iron stairwell stank of urine and booze. I had been coming to this building for more than a year now, but I had always been taken up to the third floor in the elevator run by the old black man, who smelled of whiskey a bit, true, but never of tiger piss. Biff had described him to me as a punch-drunk old club fighter who always wore a brown leather jacket and a woolen watch cap. In all the time I’d been taking lessons from Biff, the old man had never said a word to me. I’d get into the elevator, he’d carry me to the third floor, and then pull open the gate and wait for me to get out. The stench began to dissipate as I climbed higher. I figured the ground-floor landing was a haven for bums who wandered over from the Bowery. I kept climbing, tapping the metal steps. I had counted the steps from the ground floor to the first-floor landing, and knew there were thirty-six of them between floors. When I reached the third floor, I opened another fire door, and then located the elevator door so that I could direct myself from there to Biff’s loft. There was a bell set into the metal doorjamb there. I knew exactly where it was. I reached for it, and heard the bell ringing inside the loft. Footsteps approached the door.

“Who is it?” a voice said. It was the voice I’d heard on the telephone.

“Iggie,” I said.

I heard the night chain being removed, and then the lock being turned. The door opened.

“You’re blind,” she said at once.

“Yes.”

“He didn’t tell me. Whut the fuck help
you
gonna be, man?”

“Where is he?”

She closed and locked the door behind me. I knew my way around the loft by heart; it was as familiar to me as my own home in the Bronx. The grand piano, which Biff had bought in better times and never parted with, sat against the Canal Street wall, huge windows above it opening to the street. There was a battered easy chair near the piano, and a mattress on the floor in the middle of the loft. Biff was lying on that mattress. All I could hear was his tortured breathing.

“Biff?” I said.

He did not answer. I reached out to touch him. He was drenched with perspiration. The sheets under him were wet.

“Biff?” I said again. I turned to the girl. “Is he unconscious? What’s the matter with him?” I was beginning to panic. I could not see him, and he was trembling under my hand, and I did not know what was wrong with him. “Why didn’t you call a doctor?”

“I didn’t figure it was nothin’ at first,” the girl said. “He was ony complainin’ his neck felt stiff, tha’s all. I figured it was bad shit.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“Lots of bad shit runnin’ roun’ the city.” She was silent for a moment. She must have been staring at me, she must have been trying to look through my dark glasses and see into my eyes, read what was in my eyes as though I were sighted, trying to fathom my confusion. “Listen,” she said, “I thought you an’ Biff was friends.”

“We are.”

“An’ you don’t know?”

“Don’t know
what
, for Christ’s sake?”

“That he’s a junkie?”

“No,” I said. I was not answering her question. I was denying the information she had just given me. “No,” I said again.

“Hooked clear through the bag an’ back again,” she said.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Come down, man, he been a addict for ten years now.”

“Then... then... what...?” There was a sudden sharp movement on the mattress; his body lurched under my hand.

“Oh, Jesus!” the girl said.

“Where’s the telephone?” I said.

“Ain’t none here,” she said. “I called fum a booth downstairs.”

“We’ve got to get an ambulance,” I said.

“What
for
, man? One thing we don’t need on Christmas is any heat about dope.”

“Where’s that phone booth?” I said. “Don’t leave him alone, you hear me? Just stay with him while...”

“Cool it, man,” she said softly. “I’ll go make the call.”

He died that night. He died of asphyxia or exhaustion or a combination of both. Medical bullshit. I listened to medical bullshit from an intern in the charity ward of a hospital built twenty years before my grandfather first came to .these shores. Biff died in spasm induced by the tetanus bacillus that had infected a subcutaneous abscess on his left arm, undoubtedly caused by repeated insertions of a hypodermic needle. He’d been a dead man a week or two before I’d arrived at the loft that Christmas Day; that was the incubation period, the intern told me, that was how long it had taken for the exotoxin to launch its fatal attack on the central nervous system. He died with his jaws locked shut. He died in a room as black as the color of his skin. (Light, it had something to do with light, they did not want light in the room.) The nurses tiptoed quietly past the door, not because a man was dying inside, but only because any sudden noise (it had something to do with noise) might set off another racking spasm. The spasms were killing him. He was being shaken to death and choked to death, that poor lovely son of a bitch.

I left the hospital at ten minutes past one on the morning after Christmas. That was five minutes after they’d pronounced Biff dead. A thin drizzle was falling. I stood outside the main entrance with the girl. She didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she sighed, and said, “Well, that’s that, man,” and began to weep. She did not want to go back to the loft. I took her to Harlem in a taxi, and then I found a pay phone in a bar where bad jazz musicians were trying to play Charlie Parker, and I called my grandfather’s house. He answered the telephone before it rang twice. I told him not to worry, I was okay. I went to the bar, and sat down, and began drinking, and got drunk for the first time in my life. When the black bartender asked me what I was doing up in Harlem, I said, “I don’t know. What are
you
doing up in Harlem?” and he laughed.

That’s what happened that Christmas Day.

I made it all up.

I like to think, even now, that I made it all up.

In 1946, I began playing at a place called Auntie’s on Macdougal Street in New York’s Greenwich Village. The “auntie” who ran the joint was a crazy old Frenchwoman, named Madeleine. She paid me and my sidemen $350 a week for playing six nights a week, from 10 P.M. to two in the morning. I gave the bass man and the drummer a bill apiece, and kept $150 for myself as leader. My bass player was black, my drummer was white. The odd sets were played by a piano man who was black; his name was Oz Rodriguez. Oz was in his late fifties, a gifted musician steeped in Waller and Hines. He played solo piano the way I’d first heard it on my brother’s records, spelling us during our fifteen-minute intermissions and doubling as an accompanist whenever anybody wanted to sing a song. Madeleine was always wanting to sing a song. I sometimes think she opened the club only so she’d get to do her world-famous imitation of Piaf as often as she liked. She used to bug poor Oz out of his mind. Once she came to me and asked if I’d accompany her on “La Vie en Rose.” I told her I wasn’t an accompanist, I was leader of the house band. She told me she could get another house band any time she wanted. I said she was free to do so, if that was her desire, but the boys and I had built at least
something
of a following since we’d begun playing at Auntie’s and I’d hate to have to move over to the new club that had opened two blocks south of Sheridan Square, and take good steady drinking clientele to another place. “Ike,” she said,
“tu es vraiment un bâtard aveugle.”

I had adopted the “Ike” the moment I got the steady gig at Auntie’s. The name came to me out of the blue. I went into the kitchen one night, and said to my mother, “How do you like Blind Ike?”

She said, “What?”

“For a name,” I said.

“What do you mean for a name?”

“For the trio. The Blind Ike Trio.”

“Ike?”
she said. “What’s that?”

“Instead of Iggie,” I said.

“What’s the matter with Iggie?”

“Nothing, I just think Blind Ike sounds better. There are lots of blind piano players, you know. George Shearing is blind, you know.”

“Does he call himself Blind Ike?”

“Well, no, but...”

“Then why do you want to call yourself Blind Ike? Your name is Iggie. What’s the matter with
that
name?”

“Nothing, Mom. I’m thinking of what
sounds
better, that’s all.”

“Iggie sounds fine to me.”

“Well, I’m going to tell Madeleine to put it on the poster outside the club. The Blind Ike Trio. Okay?”

“If you decided already, why are you asking me?”

“Because if you ever come down to Macdougal Street, I want you to know who I am.”

“I know who you are,” she said. “You’re Iggie, that’s who you are.”

(But today she calls me Ike, the same as everyone else.)

I can’t remember what kind of piano I was playing back in 1946. I was searching for a style, and stealing from everything I heard. There was a lot to hear. I’d listen to it, and try it for a while, and then abandon it when I heard something I liked better. Jazz musicians are notorious thieves. I’m not talking about the fact that throughout the history of jazz the white man has packaged and commercialized the innovations of the black man. That’s not theft. That’s American free enterprise. I’m talking about a lick that’ll suddenly pop up in a horn solo, deliberately or unconsciously swiped from something the musician heard the night before at another club, or on a record, or hummed from behind the door of a pay toilet. I listened a lot, and stole a lot. Or, to put it more delicately, I was “influenced” a lot. By Nat Cole, Garner, Powell (reluctantly, because I
still
thought he was a crude pianist), Hampton Hawes, Herbie Hancock, Joe Albany, Lennie Tristano, Mary Lou Williams, Clarence Profit, Monk, Oscar Peterson — the only man, incidentally, who ever had the motor skills to play Charlie Parker on the piano, a consummate musician with more technical facility than any of us. I listened to whoever was making records or appearing in person in New York City, and invariably tried to copy what they were doing. The sidemen in the trio — Stu Holman on bass and Cappy Kaplan on drums — were my accomplices in crime. We stole outrageously, casing joints all over the city, busting open a style the way we might a bank vault, plundering what was inside, throwing away the wrappers around the bills, spending all the loot, and then searching for another safe to crack. We were serving our apprenticeship in the only way we could. None of us, you see, were true innovators. But in America, you don’t have to be.