The Hunger and Other Stories

by Charles Beaumont

  Then Sonny quit. He wiped his mouth again and stepped back and Mr. “T” took it on his trombone while I beat up the tubs.

  Pretty soon we had The Jimjam Man rocking the way it used to rock. A little slow, maybe: it needed Bud Meunier on bass and a few trips on the piano. But it moved.

  We went through Take It From Me and Night in the Blues and Big Gig and Only Us Chickens and Forty G’s—Sonny’s insides came out through the horn on that one, I could tell—and Slice City Stomp—you remember: sharp and clean, like sliding down a razor—and What the Cats Dragged In—the longs, the shorts, all the great Spoof Collins numbers. We wrapped them up and put them down there with him.

  Then it got dark.

  And it was time for the last one, the greatest one. . . . Rose-Ann shivered and cleared her throat; the rest of us looked around, for the first time, at all those rows of split-wood grave markers, shining in the rain, and the trees and the coffin, dark, wet. Out by the fence, a couple of farmers stood watching. Just watching.

  One—Rose-Ann opens her coat, puts her hands on her hips, wets her lips;

  Two—Freddie gets the spit out of his stick, rolls his eyes;

  Three—Sonny puts the trumpet to his mouth;

  Four—

  And we played Spoof’s song, his last one, the one he wrote a long way ago, before the music dried out his head, before he turned mean and started climbing: Black Country. The song that said just a little of what Spoof wanted to say, and couldn’t.

  You remember. Spider-slow chords crawling down, soft, easy, and then bottom and silence and, suddenly, the cry of the horn, screaming in one note all the hate and sadness and loneliness, all the want and got-to-have; and then the note dying, quick, and Rose-Ann’s voice, a whisper, a groan, a sigh. . . .

  “Black Country is somewhere, Lord,

  That I don’t want to go.

  Black Country is somewhere

  That I never want to go.

  Rain-water drippin’

  On the bed and on the floor,

  Rain-water drippin’

  From the ground and through the door . . .”

  We all heard the piano, even though it wasn’t there. Fingers moving down those minor chords, those black keys, that black country . . .

  “Well, in that old Black Country

  If you ain’t feelin’ good,

  They let you have an overcoat

  That’s carved right out of wood.

  But way down there

  It gets so dark

  You never see a friend—

  Black Country may not be the Most,

  But, Lord! it’s sure the End . . .”

  Bitter little laughing words, piling up, now mad, now sad; and then, an ugly blast from the horn and Rose-Ann’s voice screaming, crying:

  “I never want to go there, Lord!

  I never want to be,

  I never want to lay down

  In that Black Country!”

  And quiet, quiet, just the rain, and the wind.

  “Let’s go, man,” Freddie said.

  So we turned around and left Spoof there under the ground.

  Or, at least, that’s what I thought we did.

  Sonny took over without saying a word. He didn’t have to: just who was about to fuss? He was white, but he didn’t play white, not these days; and he learned the hard way—by unlearning. Now he could play gutbucket and he could play blues, stomp and slide, name it, Sonny could play it. Funny as hell to hear, too, because he looked like everything else but a musician. Short and skinny, glasses, nose like a melted candle, head clean as the one-ball, and white? Next to old Hushup, that café sunburn glowed like a flashlight.

  “Man, who skinned you?”

  “Who dropped you in the flour barrel?”

  But he got closer to Spoof than any of the rest of us did. He knew what to do, and why. Just like a school teacher all the time: “That’s good, Lux, that’s awful good—now let’s play some music.” “Get off it, C. T.—what’s Lenox Avenue doing in the middle of Lexington?” “Come on, boys, hang on to the sound, hang on to it!” Always using words like “flavor” and “authentic” and “blood,” peering over those glasses, pounding his feet right through the floor: Stomp! Stomp! “That’s it, we’ve got it now—oh, listen! It’s true, it’s clean!” Stomp! Stomp!

  Not the easiest to dig him. Nobody broke all the way through.

  “How come, boy? What for?” and every time the same answer:

  “I want to play jazz.”

  Like he’d joined the Church and didn’t want to argue about it.

  Spoof was still Spoof when Sonny started coming around. Not a lot of people with us then, but a few, enough—the longhairs and critics and connoisseurs—and some real ears too—enough to fill a club every night, and who needs more? It was Collins and His Crew, tight and neat, never a performance, always a session. Lot of music, lot of fun. And a line-up that some won’t forget: Jimmy Fritch on clarinet, Honker Reese on alto-sax, Charles di Lusso on tenor, Spoof on trumpet, Henry Walker on piano, Lux Anderson on banjo and myself—Hushup Paige—on drums. New-mown hay, all right, I know—I remember, I’ve heard the records we cut—but, the Road was there.

  Sonny used to hang around the old Continental Club on State Street in Chicago, every night, listening. Eight o’clock roll ’round, and there he’d be—a little different: younger, skinnier—listening hard, over in a corner all to himself, eyes closed like he was asleep. Once in a while he put in a request—Darktown Strutter’s Ball was one he liked, and some of Jelly Roll’s numbers—but mostly he just sat there, taking it all in. For real.

  And it kept up like this for two or three weeks, regular as 2/4.

  Now Spoof was mean in those days—don’t think he wasn’t—but not blood-mean. Even so, the white boy in the corner bugged Ol’ Massuh after a while and he got to making dirty cracks with his horn: WAAAAA! Git your ass out of here. WAAAAA! You only think you’re with it! WAAAAA! There’s a little white child sittin’ in a chair there’s a little white child losin’ all his hair . . .

  It got to the kid, too, every bit of it. And that made Spoof even madder. But what can you do?

  Came Honker’s trip to Slice City along about then: our sax-man got a neck all full of the sharpest kind of steel. So we were out one horn. And you could tell: we played a little bit too rough, and the head-arrangements Collins and His Crew grew up to, they needed Honker’s grease in the worst way. But we’d been together for five years or more, and a new man just didn’t play somehow. We were this one solid thing, like a unit, and somebody had cut off a piece of us and we couldn’t grow the piece back so we just tried to get along anyway, bleeding every night, bleeding from that wound.

  Then one night it bust. We’d gone through some slow walking stuff, some tricky stuff and some loud stuff—still covering up—when this kid, this white boy, got up from his chair and ankled over and tapped Spoof on the shoulder. It was break-time and Spoof was brought down about Honker, about how bad we were sounding, sitting there sweating, those pounds of man, black as coaldust soaked in oil—he was the blackest man!—and those eyes, beady white and small as agates.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Collins, I wonder if I might have a word with you?” He wondered if he might have a word with Mr. Collins!

  Spoof swiveled in his chair and clapped a look around the kid. “Hnff?”

  “I notice that you don’t have a sax man any more.”

  “You don’t mean to tell me?”

  “Yes sir. I thought—I mean, I was wondering if—”

  “Talk up, boy. I can’t hear you.”

  The kid looked scared. Lord, he looked scared—and he was white to begin with.

  “Well sir, I was just wondering if—if you needed a saxophone.”

  “You know somebody plays sax?”

  “Yes sir, I do.”

  “And who might that be?”

  “Me.”

  “You.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Spoof smi
led a quick one. Then he shrugged. “Broom off, son,” he said. “Broom ’way off.”

  The kid turned red. He all of a sudden didn’t look scared any more. Just mad. Mad as hell. But he didn’t say anything. He went on back to his table and then it was end of the ten.

  We swung into Basin Street, smooth as Charley’s tenor could make it, with Lux Anderson talking it out: Basin Street, man, it is the street, Where the elite, well, they gather ’round, to eat a little . . . And we fooled around with the slow stuff for a while. Then Spoof lifted his horn and climbed up two-and-a-half and let out his trademark, that short high screech that sounded like something dying that wasn’t too happy about it. And we rocked some, Henry taking it, Jimmy kanoodling the great headwork that only Jimmy knows how to do, me slamming the skins—and it was nowhere. Without Honker to keep us all on the ground, we were just making noise. Good noise, all right, but not music. And Spoof knew it. He broke his mouth blowing—to prove it.

  And we cussed the cat that sliced our man.

  Then, right away—nobody could remember when it came in—suddenly, we had us an alto-sax. Smooth and sure and snaky, that sound put a knot on each of us and said: Bust loose now, boys, I’ll pull you back down. Like sweet-smelling glue, like oil in a machine, like—Honker.

  We looked around and there was the kid, still sore, blowing like a madman, and making fine fine music.

  Spoof didn’t do much. Most of all, he didn’t stop the number. He just let that horn play, listening—and when we slid over all the rough spots and found us backed up neat as could be, the Ol’ Massuh let out a grin and a nod and a “Keep blowin’, young’un!” and we knew that we were going to be all right.

  After it was over, Spoof walked up to the kid. They looked at each other, sizing it up, taking it in.

  Spoof says: “You did good.”

  And the kid—he was still burned—says: “You mean I did damn good.”

  And Spoof shakes his head. “No, that ain’t what I mean.”

  And in a second one was laughing while the other one blushed. Spoof had known all along that the kid was faking, that he’d just been lucky enough to know our style on Basin Street up-down-and-across.

  The Ol’ Massuh waited for the kid to turn and start to slink off, then he said: “Boy, you want to go to work?”. . .

  Sonny learned so fast it scared you. Spoof never held back; he turned it all over, everything it had taken us our whole lives to find out.

  And—we had some good years. Charley di Lusso dropped out, we took on Bud Meunier—the greatest bass man of them all—and Lux threw away his banjo for an AC-DC git-box and old C. T. Mr. “T” Green and his trombone joined the Crew. And we kept growing and getting stronger—no million-copies platter sales or stands at the Paramount—too “special”—but we never ate too far down on the hog, either.

  In a few years Sonny Holmes was making that sax stand on its hind legs and jump through hoops that Honker never dreamed about. Spoof let him strictly alone. When he got mad it wasn’t ever because Sonny had white skin—Spoof always was too busy to notice things like that—but only because The Ol’ Massuh had to get T’d off at each one of us every now and then. He figured it kept us on our toes.

  In fact, except right at first, there never was any real blood between Spoof and Sonny until Rose-Ann came along.

  Spoof didn’t want a vocalist with the band. But the coonshout-ing days were gone alas, except for Satchmo and Calloway—who had style: none of us had style, man, we just hollered—so when push came to shove, we had to put out the net.

  And chickens aplenty came to crow and plenty moved on fast and we were about to give up when a dusky doll of 20-ought stepped up and let loose a hunk of The Man I Love and that’s all, brothers, end of the search.

  Rose-Ann McHugh was a little like Sonny: where she came from, she didn’t know a ball of cotton from a piece of popcorn. She’d studied piano for a flock of years with a Pennsylvania longhair, read music whipfast and had been pointed toward the Big Steinway and the O.M.’s, Chopin and Bach and all that jazz. And good—I mean, she could pull some very fancy noise out of those keys. But it wasn’t the Road. She’d heard a few records of Muggsy Spanier’s, a couple of Jelly Roll’s—New Orleans Bump, Shreveport Stomp, old Wolverine Blues—and she just got took hold of. Like it happens, all the time. She knew.

  Spoof hired her after the first song. And we could see things in her eyes for The Ol’ Massuh right away, fast. Bad to watch: I mean to say, she was chicken dinner, but what made it ugly was, you could tell she hadn’t been in the oven very long.

  Anyway, most of us could tell. Sonny, for instance.

  But Spoof played tough to begin. He gave her the treatment, all the way. To see if she’d hold up. Because, above everything else, there was the Crew, the Unit, the Group. It was right, it had to stay right.

  “Gal, forget your hands—that’s for the cats out front. Leave ’em alone. And pay attention to the music, hear?”

  “You ain’t got a ‘voice,’ you got an instrument. And you ain’t even started to learn how to play on it. Get some sound, bring it on out.”

  “Stop that throat stuff—you’ singin’ with the Crew now. From the belly, gal, from the belly. That’s where music comes from, hear?”

  And she loved it, like Sonny did. She was with The Ol’ Massuh, she knew what he was talking about.

  Pretty soon she fit just fine. And when she did, and everybody knew she did, Spoof eased up and waited and watched the old machine click right along, one-two, one-two.

  That’s when he began to change. Right then, with the Crew growed up and in long pants at last. Like we didn’t need him any more to wash our face and comb our hair and switch our behinds for being bad.

  Spoof began to change. He beat out time and blew his riffs, but things were different and there wasn’t anybody who didn’t know that for a fact.

  In a hurry, all at once, he wrote down all his great arrangements, quick as he could. One right after the other. And we wondered why—we’d played them a million times.

  Then he grabbed up Sonny. “White Boy, listen. You want to learn how to play trumpet?”

  And the blood started between them. Spoof rode on Sonny’s back twenty-four hours, showing him lip, showing him breath. “This ain’t a saxophone, boy, it’s a trumpet, a music-horn. Get it right—do it again—that’s lousy—do it again—that was nowhere—do it again—do it again!” All the time.

  Sonny worked hard. Anybody else, they would have told The Ol’ Massuh where he could put that little old horn. But the kid knew something was being given to him—he didn’t know why, nobody did, but for a reason—something that Spoof wouldn’t have given anybody else. And he was grateful. So he worked. And he didn’t ask any how-comes, either.

  Pretty soon he started to handle things right. ’Way down the road from great, but coming along. The sax had given him a hard set of lips and he had plenty of wind; most of all, he had the spirit—the thing that you can beat up your chops about it for two weeks straight and never say what it is, but if it isn’t there, buddy-ghee, you may get to be President but you’ll never play music.

  Lord, Lord, Spoof worked that boy like a two-ton jockey on a ten-ounce horse. “Do it again—that ain’t right—goddamn it, do it again! Now one more time!”

  When Sonny knew enough to sit in with the horn on a few easy ones, Ol’ Massuh would tense up and follow the kid with his eyes—I mean it got real crawly. What for? Why was he pushing it like that?

  Then it quit. Spoof didn’t say anything. He just grunted and quit all of a sudden, like he’d done with us, and Sonny went back on sax and that was that.

  Which is when the real blood started.

  The Lord says every man has got to love something, sometimes, somewhere. First choice is a chick, but there’s other choices. Spoof’s was a horn. He was married to a piece of brass, just as married as a man can get. Got up with it in the morning, talked with it all day long, loved it at night like no chick I ever h
eard of got loved. And I don’t mean one-two-three: I mean the slow-building kind. He’d kiss it and hold it and watch out for it. Once a cat full of tea tried to put the snatch on Spoof’s horn, for laughs: when Spoof caught up with him, that cat gave up laughing for life.

  Sonny knew this. It’s why he never blew his stack at all the riding. Spoof’s teaching him to play trumpet—the trumpet—was like as if The Ol’ Massuh had said: “You want to take my wife for a few nights? You do? Then here, let me show you how to do it right. She likes it done right.”

  For Rose-Ann, though, it was the worst. Every day she got that look deeper in, and in a while we turned around and, man! Where is little Rosie? She was gone. That young half-fried chicken had flew the roost. And in her place was a doll that wasn’t dead, a big bunch of curves and skin like a brand-new penny. Overnight, almost. Sonny noticed. Freddie and Lux and even old Mr. “T” noticed. I had eyes in my head. But Spoof didn’t notice. He was already in love, there wasn’t any more room.

  Rose-Ann kept snapping the whip, but Ol’ Massuh, he wasn’t about to make the trip. He’d started climbing, then, and he didn’t treat her any different than he treated us.

  “Get away, gal, broom on off—can’t you see I’m busy? Wiggle it elsewhere, hear? Elsewhere. Shoo!”

  And she just loved him more for it. Every time he kicked her, she loved him more. Tried to find him and see him and, sometimes, when he’d stop for breath, she’d try to help, because she knew something had crawled inside Spoof, something that was eating from the inside out, that maybe he couldn’t get rid of alone.