CHAPTER THREE
WITH THE LIBRARY SORTED out, I had four afternoons a week free to ‘hit the steps’, as Mac had said after our visit to the Jazz Warehouse on Friday. He’d encouraged me to play my harmonica, but we both realised that trying to listen to the jam sessions while I worked on a few chord progressions wasn’t going to work. After my initial attempt, he decided to join his old group out in front so I could mess about trying to follow the musicians. I’d said to him, ‘Mac, I don’t mind not playing at the jam session. I can take stuff home in my head and work on it there.’ But he wouldn’t hear of me not playing the harmonica at a session.
‘Jack, never mind me. I get to hear the music properly with my friends and you and me can talk on the way home. Hey, that’s what buddies are all about – leave some space for one another.’
While it was true that I could carry a lot of music in my head, it was much better trying to work it out on the spot. In this way I could hear a melody or some piece of musical phrasing, then attempt to play it. Then, when it was repeated later in the jam session, I could play along and see how I was doing.
I sensed that Mac was a bit of a loner, too. He never talked about other guys. I think he’d enjoyed the twins when they were little and he’d tell me funny stories about them, but now they were teenagers, going on fifteen, and I don’t think it was the same for him. Like I said before, I wished my mom had married Mac and that he was my father. He was always cheerful and didn’t seem to have bad moods, even when he’d been in a labour line since early morning or done a hard day’s manual labour on a work site. Sometimes he’d come to the jam session looking shabby and dirty after work, but he’d always greet me with ‘Hi, Brother Jack,’ poking his head under the steps and waving to let me know he’d arrived.
After that first time, when Dolly and the twins had been out quilting, we’d separate when we approached the neighbourhood, just in case someone from Cabbagetown saw us together and told Dolly that the one-time ‘enemies’ were thick as thieves. I’d go ahead and he’d wait five minutes before following.
Three weeks went by and it was the Christmas school-holiday break, so I had almost nothing to do during the day except practise and read and play marbles with friends or go skating with them on the big pond in the factory area along the banks of the Don. It stank to high heaven in the summer and even frogs wouldn’t go in it, but when it iced up and the stench froze it was our winter playground. I was a pretty good skater and shinny player. We’d play in the mornings when the air from the gas depot didn’t stink as much and the surface of the pond was freshly frozen. But still, if you fell and got your face near the ice, it smelled real nasty. Pond hockey was the best part of winter.
One night a Panhandle Hook blew in over Lake Ontario, and I knew that next morning the ice on the pond would be perfectly frozen with no slush. I was on my way to play shinny when I met Mac coming down the stairs. ‘Hi, Jack,’ he said quietly, so his voice wouldn’t carry to ‘them upstairs’. He pointed to my skates tied by the laces and slung over my shoulder. ‘Shinny?’
I nodded. Then he pointed to the front door to indicate that he’d meet me in the street.
Once outside and away from the house, he said, ‘Let’s have a look at that hockey stick.’
I handed him the worn and battered stick, and after examining it for a moment, he said, ‘Bit small for you, isn’t it?’
It was true. I seemed to be growing so fast that nothing was the right size for long. But the stick was the least of my concerns. Skates were always the biggest problem. My feet kept on getting bigger each year, and somehow every winter my mom would find the money to get me a second-hand pair.
‘Can you hang on a minute, Jack? I might have just the thing.’ He turned and hurried back into the house and returned a couple of minutes later holding a nice-looking hockey stick that was definitely bigger than my own. ‘Here, Jack, try this,’ he said, handing it to me.
Now, Mac was definitely not the ice-hockey type; he’d never even brought the subject up and I’d never mentioned playing pond hockey either. ‘Jeez, thanks, Mac, it’s a beauty!’ I exclaimed. It was, too: almost new and made from maple wood, like a proper professional ice-hockey stick. ‘Where’d you get it?’
Mac grinned. ‘I’ve had it for a few years now. It’s a strange story. I was re-covering an old chesterfield for someone, and I’d lifted the three big cushions to get to the springs underneath to realign them when I saw that someone had slit the lining and pushed that hockey stick down between two rows of springs.’
‘What for?’ It was a silly question.
Mac shrugged. ‘Damned if I know. It wouldn’t have helped stabilise the chesterfield any. Someone must have been hiding it. It’s not unusual to find the odd thing hidden in a couch or lounge chair. I once found a gold brooch . . . then, on another job, I found a silver cigarette case. Anyhow, I’m glad I hung onto it. It’s yours now, Jack.’
The new maple stick really helped my game. Soon I was among the first to be chosen in a pick-up shinny side. Sometimes, walking back from the pond, I’d make up different stories about why the hockey stick had been hidden in the lining of the couch. Then my mind would drift to the precious gold brooch and silver cigarette case, although the reason why these had been hidden was pretty obvious – probably to stop someone from taking them to the pawnbroker. But a kid-sized used hockey stick wasn’t pawnbroker material. Some of the stories I made up went on for ages and got very complicated. In one, a father used it to beat his son and so his mom hid it, but there was much more to the story than that. The imagined boy’s name was Tom. I can tell you, life wasn’t easy for him. The only fun he ever had was playing shinny.
Anyhow, back to hitting the steps at the Jazz Warehouse. In the three weeks since my first visit with Mac, we’d been eleven times. It should have been twelve but on one of the days there was a blizzard coming through, so I was forced to stay home. Then came Christmas and the Jazz Warehouse closed for a week. The downtown offices closed for four days, so my mom was home and I couldn’t practise my jazz. She would have immediately noticed the difference in the music and asked about it.
But the good thing was that I was beginning to get the hang of it. After about three sessions, I’d worked out the button on the end of the harmonica, which up till then had been a bit of a mystery. Playing is only a question of sucking and blowing. On a chromatic harmonica, there are four notes in each individual hole. Two notes are played either by sucking or blowing with the button pressed in; the other two with the button pulled out. This means you can play all the notes in the scale across three or four octaves, depending on the size of the harmonica. This gives you almost unlimited musical possibilities. Not that I could have explained that at the time, of course; I just gradually worked it out for myself.
When I couldn’t practise jazz because my mom was home, I’d play other music. Right from the start, I’d played for her while she worked in the kitchen. She had to endure all the ‘them upstairs’ music, and sometimes, just to break it up, I’d sing Daisy’s reply from ‘A Bicycle Built for Two’ in my piping soprano. But she especially loved the stuff we’d heard together on our walks over the summer. She’d sometimes stop at the sink or stove, close her eyes and say, ‘Oh, Jack, that’s lovely.’ One night she’d said, ‘Jack, I’d love it if you played to me while I had my first cup of tea.’
We called them ‘First Cuppa Concerts’, and it was nice, but now I longed to play the new music I’d learned and see what she thought. Sometimes I’d feel it so strongly that I was glad when it was time for her second cup so I could stop and brush her hair. Every time I played the old stuff and not the jazz I’d learned, not telling my mom weighed heavily on my conscience. It bothered me that I hadn’t told her about hitting the steps to learn jazz. Hitherto there had never been a secret between us. I’d tell her everything and she knew all about the gramophone and me teaching myself the harmonica.
Christmas Day came and went, my dad disappearing for the e
ntire day, and soon my mom was back at work. Chilblain time was well and truly upon us, and she always wanted me to play while she soaked. The trouble was that I was totally consumed by jazz. Sometimes I’d practise for hours, and before long I could harmonise a few numbers and play a couple of short solos. I was dying to play them to her but I hadn’t even played for Mac. We’d decided I wouldn’t show him my progress for two months.
The more I learned and the more involved I became, the more I worried that my mom might not like me going to the Jazz Warehouse with Mac, especially to learn American black people’s music. Ragtime I knew she liked, and it was kind of like jazz and kind of like the marches we’d hear at some of the summer parades, only with hiccoughs. In fact, it had helped me grasp some of the elements in the jam sessions. Much later I’d learn that jazz was closely related to ragtime. It also adopted lots of the musical vocabulary of the ‘blues’, with bent notes, ‘growls’ and smears. But of course I knew none of this at the time. All I knew was that my mom enjoyed ragtime, so maybe she’d also like jazz.
I knew what my dad’s views would be. If he found out I was playing ‘nigger music’, he’d hit the roof and probably me, and then stop me playing or even listening to jazz again. I wanted to learn enough so that if this happened I could go on playing secretly. But when I thought about it properly, I knew I would need my mom to co-operate. She didn’t mind black people one little bit and although there were women in Cabbagetown who suggested she possessed a touch of the tar brush she was proud of her Iroquois blood, which wasn’t white or black but sort of in between. I finally decided that the best way to break the news to her was during our next First Cuppa Concert to play the little I’d learned, watch for her reaction and then come clean.
So, one night, when her feet were in the pail and her hands were warming themselves around her first King George cup of tea, I sat on the second kitchen chair and took up my harmonica, ready to play. ‘Mom, I’m going to play you something different tonight,’ I announced with my heart thumping.
‘You mean something new? That’s nice, Jack. Is it from the rotunda or a marching band?’
‘No, just wait and see,’ I replied, looking suitably mysterious, a kind of half-smile on my face, which I hoped would prevent her seeing how nervous I suddenly was.
‘New? What is it? I can’t wait,’ she replied, then took a sip of tea and looked up over the cup at me. ‘Go ahead, Jack, I’m listening.’
I began to play. I’d practised all evening before she came home to make doubly certain I got it right. I’d decided that if she didn’t like it, I was going to have to tell her about the Jazz Warehouse anyway, and about Mac and me hitting the steps. It was not something I could keep to myself any longer. Like I said, we never lied or kept things secret from each other and I was feeling increasingly guilty. It was going to be a pretty hairy four minutes and then I’d have to face her questions afterwards.
The music seemed to come out okay, in fact real good, even if I say so myself. I ended it with a long ‘bluesy’ wail from the harmonica. She’d had this smile on her face while I played, but when I stopped it was replaced by a quizzical look. ‘It’s jazz?’
‘Yes. How did you know?’ I asked, surprised.
‘I’ve heard something like it. In 1924, I think it was. I remember it was played at the Canadian National Exhibition by an American orchestra and was called “Dixieland”. But where on earth . . . ?’
‘Were there black people – Negroes – playing?’ I asked quickly, thinking that she could have known about the Jazz Warehouse all this time and it would probably have been all right.
‘No, I don’t think so, I’d have remembered if there had been. I remember being very excited.’
‘Jazz is American black people’s music,’ I announced.
‘I liked it a lot, Jack,’ she said, ignoring this last remark.
‘Are you sure, Mom?’
‘Of course I like it! Why shouldn’t I? Where on earth did you hear it? Was it during the Christmas break? Why didn’t you tell me before?’
‘I wanted to surprise you,’ I said, not telling the entire truth.
‘Well, you certainly have. From the sounds of it, you’ve been practising a lot. Did you hear it all in one go? And where exactly?’ she demanded, perhaps smelling a rat. She gave me another quizzical look. ‘Jack, we’ve never kept anything from each other, have we?’
‘Well, it was, you know, Dad finding out and all . . .’ Saying it out loud, it sounded pretty lame. ‘I was a bit scared, like I said . . . he hates black people, and it’s their music . . .’
‘So? Black, yellow, piebald – so what? Since when does music have skin colour! And when have we ever shared anything we do together with your father?’
Her questions were raining down on me like hailstones and I felt ashamed, as though I’d betrayed her.
I confessed the whole thing, about Mac and the Jazz Warehouse, and even about the cutaway burlap on the pipes under the stairs, so as to reassure her that I was always nice and warm.
To my surprise, the first thing she asked was, ‘Has Mac ever touched you, Jack?’
‘Touched me, how?’ I asked, puzzled.
‘You know, somewhere private . . . on your body.’
‘No!’ I cried indignantly. ‘We shake hands when we meet and say goodbye, just like grown-ups do.’ I couldn’t understand why she’d ask me such a thing. Mac wasn’t a stranger and if he’d been to jail, everyone would have known about it. You couldn’t hide your past in Cabbagetown. Someone would have seen him in prison. If he’d gone in for sexually molesting a child, he wouldn’t have been coming back to Cabbagetown. And now with the Depression, and homeless men all over the place, kids had been warned to be extra careful.
Of course, looking back, sexual molestation must have been common enough, with drunken fathers sexually abusing their children. But wives and kids were too ashamed or too frightened to talk about such matters. My mom had been right to ask the question. Mac could have been abusing the twins, although I couldn’t imagine it. If he had been, Dolly wouldn’t be like those other moms who hid the truth. I reckon she’d have simply beaten him to death. Fortunately, as it turned out, Mac was as good as he seemed.
‘And Mac takes you when you go to this warehouse and then brings you back?’ she asked, still somewhat suspicious.
‘Most times we go together or he meets me there and we walk home after. But not always,’ I admitted. ‘Some days he gets a job and works overtime.’ I told her about us parting as we reached the beginning of Cabbagetown, in case someone saw us and told Dolly McClymont.
‘Yes, I agree that’s sensible. If that nasty piece of work upstairs knew about you and him being together, she’d give him a thrashing he wouldn’t forget in a hurry.’
Although she hadn’t said so yet, I could see she was dead worried about my being away from home every weekday until early evening, especially in the winter when it was often dark before five o’clock.
‘Mom, I promise to be careful. I can see you’re worried, but there are kids out much later, stealing coal from the railway yards along the Don. I promise I’ll be home by half-past seven every night.’ Then I added, ‘Even in winter that’s not real late.’
‘So you like learning jazz, Jack?’ she said, ignoring my reassurances.
‘I love it, Mom! It’s the best thing I’ve ever done. Better even than books!’
‘Oh, Jack, you’re not going to neglect your reading because of jazz?’
‘No, Mom, I wouldn’t do that.’ Reading had been the mainstay of my life. It had more or less conquered my loneliness after my mother had landed her job as a night cleaner.
‘Good. I can tell you love it by the way you sway and tap your foot. I’ve never seen you put so much into your music.’
‘Mom, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before.’
‘Why didn’t you, Jack? I thought we shared everything. I’m really disappointed. Working nights, I simply have to trust you and I always ha
ve done.’ I could see she was pretty upset.
‘Sorry, Mom,’ I repeated.
‘Jack, if anything happens with Mac, you are to tell me immediately, you hear? We have to be honest with each other. You know what I mean, don’t you?’
‘Yes, Mom, I promise.’ So she really was worried about Mac perhaps being a pervert. But she didn’t know him like I did.
She handed me the King George for her second cup. ‘You will be careful, won’t you?’ She looked at me, her eyes suddenly welling. ‘Jack, you’re all I’ve got, my precious boy. You do understand the world can be a dangerous place, especially at night, so you will be on your guard all the time, won’t you?’
I wanted to give her a big hug but I was holding the King George.
They say confession is good for the soul, and I have to say I felt a whole lot better for telling my mom what I’d been doing. I resolved that henceforth I would tell her everything. After all, if you didn’t count Mac, we only had each other.
Nine months or so after that first time I went with Mac to the Jazz Warehouse, I could actually jam along with the musicians. It was almost the beginning of fall. Fall is one of the best times in Toronto, with the weather perfect and the maple leaves changing colour. Quite often now, Mac would sit with me under the stairs and listen to me playing along. Sometimes when the music stopped indoors, he would shake his head like he was truly impressed. ‘Brother Jack, you got what it takes, man! Yessiree! You can jam with the best, Brother Jack! You got the true gift!’ he’d say in his phoney black accent.
I didn’t take him too seriously. Mac was like my mother, over-generous with his praise. My own ear told me I was still a beginner.
During the summer school break I’d arrive half an hour early and wait across Dundas Street to see the musicians arriving, instead of hitting the steps at the usual time. The first time I saw them, I was amazed to discover that only two of them seemed to be proper Negroes. One was a very tall and stooped old man with grey frizzy hair who walked with a limp, and the other was a guy about the same age as Mac; neither carried an instrument. One of them, I knew, must be the piano player. This wasn’t at all what I’d imagined. I’d hardly ever seen a proper black person and all my ideas about them came from Uncle Tom’s Cabin and other books, like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The most surprising thing was that white people could play black people’s music. It was pretty exciting, even if the musicians did look like everyone else. It meant I didn’t need to be black to be a jazz musician one day.
Jack of Diamonds Page 6
