The Jazz Kid (16 page)

Suddenly it hit me that I might never see her again. That was a shock. I went kind of numb, and grabbed on to the rim of a garbage can. In a minute she reached the bottom step, turned off to the left, and walked out of sight. Would I ever see her again? Well, sure I would. It was crazy to think that I wouldn't. But it might be a long time—years, maybe. Suppose she died in the meantime? I shook my head to get that idea out of it. Then I got up, went down the alley and peered out. Ma was out of sight. I crossed the street and went on up to the apartment. Being there alone felt kind of funny. It never happened very much—once in a while, but not often.

But now it was empty, and quiet—no sound of John talking, no sound of Pa's footsteps going into the bathroom, no sound of Ma clanking pots and pans on the stove. I went into the kitchen and sat down at the old wooden table. How many times had I sat there before? Hundreds, I figured; thousands, maybe. I tried to multiply it out, but my heart wasn't in it. When would I sit there again? I looked around. It was all so familiar and homey. Everything in it reminded me of Ma—the big spoons she used to stir soup and beans with, hanging over the stove; the little china teapot she made her cup of tea in every afternoon; the little salt and pepper shakers shaped like swans me and John gave her for Christmas one year when we were little. There wasn't a thing in that kitchen she hadn't touched a thousand times. The kitchen didn't just remind me of Ma; it
was
Ma.

I realized I better get out of there before I busted into tears. I got a paper bag out from under the sink where Ma kept them, and went into our room, trying to keep my
eyes
from roaming over familiar things. I opened my bureau drawer, shoved my money in my back pocket, loaded some socks, underwear and extra shirts into the bag. I got a pair of pants out of the closet, and my old sneakers, and shoved them into the bag, too. That pretty much filled it up. Then I crouched down and got my cornet mouthpiece out from behind the bureau where I had hid it.

I was pretty nervous, and now I just wanted to get out of there. I had a quick look around to see if there was anything else I ought to take. My history book was lying on my desk. For a minute I thought about taking it down with me and chucking it into the garbage can on my way out. I decided not to. It wasn't mine—I had no right to throw it away. Then I left.

Tommy would be asleep. I couldn't wake him up for a while, but I went out to his neighborhood anyway, killed some time over a cup of coffee, killed some more time in a train station reading a newspaper I found on a bench there. When it got to be four o'clock I bought him his usual coffee and pie and went on up.

He sat up in bed when I came in, rubbing his eyes. “Boy, what a head I got. They brought this guy Bix Beiderbecke into the joint last night, after he got off his own gig. He sat in all night. I can see why everybody's just nuts about him, but boy does he drink.”

“Who does he sound like?”

Tommy shook his head. “Sounds like himself. Got a beautiful sound, great ideas. He don't slur so much the way the colored guys do. Pings off the notes like bells. It's a whole different idea from Oliver. I wish I could play like that. He got me to thinking maybe I ought to change my whole style.”

“He's better than King Oliver?”

“I wouldn't say that. Different, is all. I got to hear him some more.”

“Where was this gig? One of Herbie's?”

“No. Some other crook named Silva.”

“Is it regular?”

“So far.” He swung his feet out of bed and reached for the coffee. “I need that,”
he
said. “It's just another after-hours dump out in the old Levee.” He took another swallow of coffee and blinked his eyes. “I ought to learn my lesson. Some fellas can drink and play. I can't. Lose control of the horn. I was hitting clams all over the place. I wanted to play good in front of Bix and I made a hash of it. These people he came in with, they were loaded with dough and were buying everybody in the band drinks. You don't like to say no to them. I should of ordered gin and told the waiter to fill the glass with water.”

“Maybe Bix will come back again and you'll have another chance.”

“He said he would. He don't know how long he'll be in Chi, but he said he'd come back.” He swallowed some coffee and bit off the end of the pie. “Where's your horn?”

“I don't have it anymore.”

“What the hell do you mean, kid?”

“Pa took it back to Hull House. I flunked everything at school and he took my horn back.”

“Jesus. That's too bad, kid. Just when you was coming along real good. What can you do about it?”

“I already did it. I ran away.” I held out the paper bag so he could see into it. “I took my clothes and my mouthpiece and left. I got enough money to last me for a couple of weeks. I got to buy a new horn.”

“Ran away, did you?” He took another bite of pie and a swallow of coffee. “You sure that was the right thing to do?”

“If I figured I had a chance to pass I would have stuck it out. Give up playing for a little while until I pulled my grades up. But I didn't see where that was going to happen.”

Tommy shook his head. “I never did understand that about you, kid. You ain't stupid. How come you can't pass?”

I frowned and looked down at the floor. “I guess I don't want to,” I said.

“That don't make any sense at all.”

“
I know,” I said. “That's the way I am, is all.” I wanted to get off this topic. “Anyway, it was either run away or quit playing. I didn't see where I had a choice.”

“Your ma agreed to your pa turning your horn in?”

“She said I had my chance. She said I should have tried more.”

Tommy shook his head. “It's a tough one, kid. I can see that. Now you take me, kid, my family was pretty low-class. Nobody cared much about school. My pa could read and write and do sums enough to make sure his money came out right at the end of the week, but he didn't have much more schooling than that. He didn't care about it very much. I don't know what Ma would of said about it, but she was dead. Sis quit school and went to work as soon as she could, and when Pa busted his leg in the stockyard I had to go to work and nobody ever said anything about it. But you come from a good family. Maybe you ought to think about it.”

“I thought about it already. If I go back home I'm bound to flunk again. Pa'll put me in the plumbing business and that'll be the end of music. I don't care about anything else, I'm going to be a musician. They can't stop me.”

“Well I can understand that, kid. I was the same way myself—nothing going to stop me from music. But I didn't have nothing else going for me. Without music I'd be working in the stockyards, lumberyards, steel mill, maybe.” He ate some more pie and swallowed some coffee. “But you got a chance to get yourself a trade. Something to fall back on if times get hard again. I wish I had a trade.”

“I made up my mind,” I said.

He finished off the pie, and licked his fingers. “Well if you made up your mind, I guess that's it. I ain't doing such a hot job running my own life.”

I didn't get that. It seemed to me he was doing perfect.

“You're doing what you want to do, aren't you?”

He drank the last of the coffee. “Yeah, but what's the future in it? I can't even think about getting married, much less having kids.”

“Why not?”

“No decent woman would have me. They say, Tommy, you're a swell musician
and
we have a lot of fun. But what kind of a husband would you make, spending all your time in dives and coming home just in time to see the kids go off to school? A decent woman, she wants her husband around in the evenings.”

“Maybe you could marry some woman in show business. A singer or something.”

“That'd be a swell way to raise kids, wouldn't it.” He picked a shirt off the chair where he'd flung it when he'd come home. “I guess you can sleep on the floor here for a while. Maybe I can swindle a couple of sheets off the landlady.”

“They're bound to look for me here.”

“Do they know where I live?” he said.

“No. Not now. But sooner or later Pa'll think of checking with the union and they'll find out.”

He finished dressing. “Well, okay. We'll think of something. In the meantime let's see if we can't find some kind of horn in a pawnshop. It can't be no worse than that piece of tin you been playing.”

W
E TRAIPSED THROUGH
a half a dozen pawnshops, trying out horns. Finally we came across a nice Selmer which Tommy figured wasn't more than five or ten years old. There were only a couple of dents in the bell, and most of the lacquer was still on. Of course Tommy told the guy it was in lousy shape, needed a lot of work, and got him down to fifteen dollars. Then the guy said he'd throw in a case for another five. Tommy worked him down to three, and I walked out of there with my first decent horn for eighteen bucks. It cheered me up a good deal just to carry the thing back to Tommy's. It didn't matter that the case was worn at the corners and the horn had a couple of dents in it: it was a real horn and it made me feel proud to own it. When we got back to Tommy's place we took the horn apart, and cleaned it out good with warm soapy water and Tommy's little brush. Right from the beginning I got a fuller sound.

Tommy's job didn't start until midnight. We had a lot of time to kill. Tommy decided we might as well go out to the South Side and see what was what. We could get something to eat out there cheap: there were Chinese places where you could stuff yourself with rice and chop suey for a quarter. Maybe we could turn up Calvin Wilson and go around to hear Oliver at Lincoln Gardens.

Well, the whole thing was pretty exciting. I was moving into a brand-new life. No more natural resources, no more pipe wrenches, just plenty of music and excitement. I could hardly believe how much freedom there was in it. I could eat when I wanted to, go to bed when I wanted to, practice when I wanted to, go here or there when I wanted to. Of course I'd have to get some kind of a job, which would cut down on the freedom a good deal. But the rest of the time would be my own. Imagine it—I could go out to hear a great jazz band any time I wanted to, if I had the money.

But still, underneath the excitement, I was homesick and scared, too. I missed the family something awful—my gut kind of ached for them all the time. But I was determined to stick it out, and I resolved not to think about the family or any of that, and
concentrate
on the good stuff—concentrate on the idea that I was going to be a musician, and nobody could stop me.

We took a streetcar out to the South Side and got off at Thirty-fifth and State. “Here you are,” Tommy said. “Smack dab in the middle of the jazz world. There's the Nest over there. Usually a good band there, but it ain't cheap to go in. There's the Dreamland Cafe. A lot of the New Orleans guys played there. This clarinet player Bechet used to play there when it was the Dreamland Ballroom. Down there is the DeLuxe. Everybody played there one time or another—Oliver, Jelly Roll, Bechet, Freddie Keppard—a whole bunch of them.”

“What about Lincoln Gardens?”

“That's down on Thirty-first Street.”

“Can we go hear King Oliver? He said it was okay.”

Tommy stood there thinking about it. “I wished you had long pants,” he said finally. “I don't know what they'll say.”

“Why would they say anything?”

He shrugged. “Some of these places, like the Dreamland, are black and tans, where whites and colored mix. But Lincoln Gardens is for colored, and they don't always like it for whites to come prying around. If they know you're a musician, and are coming in because you admire Oliver and the rest of the band, that's another thing. You don't look much like a musician in them knee pants.” He thought for another minute. “Let's go along the Stroll and see if we can turn up Calvin.”

We walked along. The last time I'd been out there it was afternoon, and everything had looked pretty ordinary. Now it was pushing eight o'clock and it was all different—the streets crowded; red, yellow, green, blue lights shining; and music coming out of doors and windows everywhere. And sure enough, in about fifteen minutes we came across Calvin Wilson, strolling along in his derby and a midnight blue overcoat, with the cigar in the middle of his face.

When he saw us, he stopped and tipped his chin up, so the cigar pointed towards the roofs across the street. “Tommy. And Little Tommy. Joy of the evening to
you.”
He shook hands with us both like he was the King of England and we were his dukes. “To what do we owe this honor?”

“We just came out to see how the swells was doing.” It was a joke, but there was truth in it, too. Calvin Wilson made a pile of dough and spent hundreds of dollars on handmade suits and handmade shoes, whereas Tommy went around in a brown overcoat with threadbare cuffs and one button missing.