The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (19 page)

We'd go the Adams, if there was a show. We'd go to other high schools' lunchtimes and hang out. We might go to somebody's house. For instance, G's girlfriend Mary was living with an aunt, and the aunt would be away at work. We might pick up Pinball or Calvin, a drummer, or some other developing hipsters (later the word was “hippies,” before white youth took the word over in the late '50s) and just breeze around being
cool
.

Because if the blues and rhythm and blues especially had made us hot as blue flame, now we, in hooking up one way or another to bebop, wanted to be cool. As we got more conscious of bop we got more conscious of wanting to be cool. (The word as it was used before Chet Baker and Lee Konitz absorbed it.)

Cool, for us, was to be there without being into nothing dumb. Like, the whole thing. The society — right? But this was an accretion, a buildup of consciousness. Though we were talking about being cool in that fish truck or when we played hooky or as we strode out of Barringer homeroom on the way outside and down to the Adams, we were being cool. We did not want to be attached to anything stupid, though in those days we did not yet understand how widespread stupidity was nor how valuable to those who ruled us.

I got a job, my mother got me a job, really. Next door to where she was working then. The white-collar experience my mother had in the war she had used since (once the war was over and they started letting the war boom people go, especially the black [include brown] Rosie the riveters, as the slogan went). She now had a job at the community hospital as an assistant administrator (the administrator's name was Romeo Brigs) and she got me a job, working Fridays after school and Saturdays at a grocery store next door to the hospital. After I checked out OK I began working everyday after school and all day Saturdays. It was OK with me because it was a new experience and kept a few coins in my pocket. I was making about forty-five big ones a week, which allowed me to start buying my own clothes and go the various places I was coming to decide I wanted to go and to buy my own records.

I was a more solitary night traveler now. Though sometimes I would walk around with G. to someplace where music was playing or with a dude we called “Limes” because people thought he dressed and carried himself like Harry Limes (Orson Welles in the movie
The Third Man
. Limes is now a New Jersey politician and he still looks like Limes). The trombone player, Little Jay Jay, was another one of my sometimes late night walking buddies. (He was called that cause he worshiped J. J. Johnson.) Because that late night walking was more and more about music. I might meet them at one of the various places we knew where the music was being played. We were looking for bebop. The Hillside Place dudes I didn't see as much now because they were still going to the canteen. Sometimes I would go to the canteen and see them or just go around to K. or R.'s house or they come round to mine. But they did not dig bop like I did.

I was with G. or Little Jay Jay the night we went to the Silver Saddle on Clinton Avenue and checked Bird. It was a burst of magic to me. I didn't know what to make of it. It was a burst of magic. It was blue and pink and white (or were those the lights over the bar, which whirled around and shot spears off a globe of many refracting surfaces?). It was blue — but a
blue that shattered into many unknown moods. Moods unknown to me. Different modes of thought. The playing in the bar shattered (was it the lights?), it showered me with blue and red dancing things held in blinding light. It was moods. Modes. Ones breaking into twos and them breaking. It was a burst of magic.

The dark crowd that night — you walk up Belmont to Avon, then turn left, go down three blocks, turn right at Hayes Circle and the Silver Saddle is right there — I couldn't even see them clearly. They might have been one large head bouncing under the music taking it in! But the music was magical and it covered me over and turned me into myself.

Afterwards, I was by myself now (for some reason), I came out and began walking down Clinton toward Hayes Circle and there was Bird sitting there smoking a joint with a white woman. I didn't know that's what they were doing because up till that time I didn't know anything about marijuana, just as some strange reference in the magazines. The idea of heroin seemed to me some crazy jail-death idea that people wanted to down you with. I didn't fully understand it or even what it was.

But it was the woman who had played piano with him in the club. (I found out later her name was Lorraine Geller.) But I passed close to them and Bird was talking and Lorraine was lighting up the joint he had just handed to her. They didn't even pause as I came close and I did not even pause though I had them fixed in my eyes and in my head as I passed, turned the corner, and went up the street. When I got a little distance up the street I turned and looked back at them and they were still smoking and talking and joking. A white woman, I thought, that's weird!

Saturdays I brought my trumpet to work with me. Steve, the owner, said I could take a long lunch cause that's when I took my trumpet lessons, not far from the store, over on Springfield Avenue. And I loved the idea of walking with my trumpet, in a brown imitation leather bag I'd got that looked like the trumpet bags Diz and Miles carried. I didn't want the hard square cases, I had what they called a “gig bag” and I tucked it under my arm and bopped those five or six blocks to Springfield and dug the idea of people looking at me thinking I was a trumpet player.

My father had asked me one day, “Why do you want to be a bopper?” Who knows what I said. I couldn't have explained it then. But bebop suggested another mode of being. Another way of living. Another way of perceiving reality — connected to the one I'd had — blue/black and brown but also pushing past that to something else. Strangeness. Weirdness. The unknown!

I guess that's what it was. The music took me places I'd never been. Literally. One night I found myself snaking through the darkness up to the Orange Armory for a dance. The dance had Larry Darnell as one part of the bill and Stan Getz as the other. I remember the fags was cuttin' the fool with Bermuda shorts in bright plaid colors. I came in and stood in front of the stage unmoving and checked two sides of that equation out. To show the mix of the times. Getz and Max Roach had played together as part of the BeBop Boys on records. I dug Getz's “The Lady in Red.” That wispy romantic tone. And a lot of the bebop groups were mixed in that period. Later, I even dug Stan Kenton and went down to Symphony Hall when he had his band with Art Pepper, Maynard Ferguson, Bob Graettinger, June Christy, Frank Rosolino. I bought that album which consisted of pieces named after the players, plus something of Bob Graettinger's called “City of Glass.” And that stuff was really weird. But I dug it, for that reason, and it seemed linked to the whole experience that bop had opened up for me. The fact that they were white people meant nothing to me. What they were playing was linked to something I dug.

But my deepest experience of that period was with Miles. For me Miles was what
cool
meant. (And later, over the years, his various getups on the record covers, and the music that went with them, have always remained the highest explanation of that definition.) My last year or so in high school I ran into Miles's “Venus de Milo” and “Move.” In fact all the tunes in that series of recordings he made with the big band: Max, Lee Konitz, John Lewis, J.J., Gerry Mulligan, and those tunes by Mulligan, Denzil Best, George Wallington, John Lewis, Bud Powell and Miles himself, Johnny Carisi, Cleo Henry. To me that was where the definition of “high art” began. But especially “Venus de Milo,” “Move,” and “Darn That Dream.” I liked all of the tunes and once I found out it was a whole series, I pursued all those records, which you had to get on 78s then.

The music was heavy to me almost like what they called “classical” music, which had only interested me in those terrible themes they played in the movies. I liked movie music and I dug Aaron Copland's music “Salon de Mexico” in one of those Esther Williams MGM musicals. And somewhere I heard the “Firedance” of de Falla, but it was all in tune with the movie happenings, though I did continue to think about “Salon de Mexico” for a long time. And I'd heard and liked the popular themes from Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, and Chopin the movies played.

I would be carrying packages across High Street delivering them. (There were still some white families, mostly Jewish, living then on High Street,
in what were then spacious luxury apartments and some one-family houses. Some black doctors had moved in there and on a couple of streets some other links in the black middle class. But only a couple blocks away, even then, was nothing but bloods, though they were a little more mixed in with Polish Jews and Catholics.) I'd be whistling “Venus de Milo,” then “Move,” then “Darn That Dream.” I would sing “Darn That Dream.” like I was Pancho Hagood, who sounded like a hipper kind of Mr. B. to me. Cause I always dug Mr. B. and even had a couple shirts with “Mr. B.” collars earlier, around the time he was in the movies and sang “I Left My Hat in Haiti.”

I was delivering packages and singing “Darn That Dream” or hearing those wild harmonies of “Venus de Milo.” I'd hum and whistle the opening of that tune over and over. The big band weight of the music and strange harmonic voices made me think of “classical” music but it was
my
classical music, because it meant something to me. Something serious and personal and out there. It was
weird
.

The trumpet teacher I had was an Italian classicist and he had me blowing those hard round whole notes like I was playing the overture from some Italian opera or at least that's what I thought. He was really trying to teach me to play “legitimate” trumpet, if you can dig that. But I didn't want that. I wanted to play like Miles Davis, so I had to slide the horn to the side of my mouth sort of to try to get that sound. Because the way the trumpet teacher was teaching me, only those big old round notes would come out and I thought they were square. (Though I listened to Maynard Ferguson play those same kinds of notes. But he was playing so high up in the stratosphere the novelty of that hid the fact that he was playing the same kinds of notes as my trumpet teacher was trying to mash on me!)

When I was in grammar school I would take my father's clothes and wear them to the Court, the late night recreation program. He must've known it but I guess that's one of the trials of parenthood. His sweater and shirts and even a couple of ties I would wear, like it was secret, and then try to slip them back in his closet when I came home on Dey Street.

They bought clothes for me at Larkey's (where a friend worked and they could get deals) and Ripley's which leaned a little toward Hollywood. They used to have a store in Newark with palm trees sitting outside like it was Hollywood and I went in there too.

In high school my ideas must've changed somewhat. I know by the time I got a high school letter, the big one, I had on a red corduroy jacket to go with the white “B” sweater. But earlier in high school some guy had made
fun of me for wearing a green sweater and blue pants. My clothes thing was fairly scrambled up.

In the canteen I'd got, I mentioned, the checkered “swag” coat we called it (a single-breasted English type overcoat with slit pockets). The green Tyrolean, I guess both of these were influences of my peers, and the peacock band I saw somewhere. I know. I was reading
Esquire
because my father subscribed to it for a long time. And I looked at the fashions and as I got older began to try to buy some of the things. I know that's where I saw Dizzy and the
Esquire
jazz polls which dropped all those names I picked up.

It's complex though. I did not just leave out of The Hill or up off it. The Masonic and the house parties and the Hillside Placers and the yellow mob plus white high School Barringer all continued to have some influence. For instance grey flannel was being talked about. That's what college dudes was beginning to wear, so spake the whatever that I picked up, maybe it was
Esquire
. So I went where those of us who was hip on The Hill had our clothes made, Wohlmuth's, and had a grey flannel suit made. The only thing was that it was a Hill suit with twenty-two-inch bottoms. (The style on The Hill was bellbottoms at the time.) I remember a girl at the Jones Street Y say it was a “black wool” suit. But she said it was a hip suit, a hip black wool suit. It was a black suit, dig it?

I went to a Howard-Lincoln basketball game for some reason at the Newark Armory and checked out those people. I was a little kid, by myself. Knowing no one, really, though there were some folks there I thought I dug. And something about that was really hip, but something else about it was disturbing. I was going to the Golden Gloves matches up there by myself and the basketball game was OK too, my parents seemed to approve.

I saw white bucks being worn. And I'd read (again,
Esquire
?) that that's what college kids were wearing. And also that they wore them dirty. Dirty? That was weird. But I bought a pair. And a couple of corny people remarked on the white shoes how dumb they were. (They bought them a year or so later and wore them until they really were dumb!) One Negro, B.P., a yellow stuck-up nee-grow from way back (he was a cheerleader for Barringer briefly till he gave that up and began driving the library truck which was some uppity shit for bloods in them days. The first nee-grow cheerleader was, yes, from yellow headquarters, and never spoke that I knew of. He ran on white approval, much like Jeckie Raw-bean-son. He was soft, like a pudgy yellow mistake. And only made sounds when
cheering, “Gimme A, B,” etc., clapping with pudgy little yellow paws) actually took the lead in kicking dirt on the shoes. He thought it would make me mad. What made me mad was the idea that this turkey would kick dirt on my shoes. But the result was what I really desired. At least I knew that was supposed to be hip, so I didn't really mind. In fact I treated it like they were just doing work for me, saving me the work, of having to dirty them myself. I even ran around the track with them after school at track practice to show the stupid buggers that I wanted them dirty. And what was so satisfying was that these very dudes was the kind of stiff five-and-ten-cent Ivy Leaguer types who a few years later would
have to
have them a pair of such shoes.