Jack of Diamonds

by Bryce Courtenay

  There was truly lots and lots to see and you couldn’t take it all in, even going every day for a week. For me the two individual highlights were The Arctic Girl in Her Tomb of Ice, and Elektro the Motorman, a seven-foot-high robot that talked and sang, could see and smell things and count on his fingers. I don’t know how they did it, but people would hold up something, an apple or a leather purse or a dollar note, and he’d say it right off.

  But the weirdest was the Dream of Venus at the Dali pavilion. Now, okay, I was only a young kid, fascinated by robots and a girl buried in ice and something called television and the General Motors Exhibition that showed a huge diorama of New York where the whole city was connected with bridges that sometimes spanned tall buildings. These showed the future, or a possible future, although nobody mentioned the war in Europe and how that might change things, and the Germans weren’t there to give their opinion about what was going to happen if they won.

  However, this Salvador Dali exhibition was something else and I would always remember it, which is strange for a boy like me who knew very little about art, except what my mom and I had seen occasionally at the Art Gallery of Toronto on weekends when it was raining and you couldn’t go anywhere else. I remember my mom once said, ‘Modern art is like the Depression; it shows a world falling to bits that don’t make no sense.’ Once, before my dad left us, we saw a Picasso painting of a woman’s face all squiffy, with her eyes and mouth and nose in the wrong places, and Mom said sadly, ‘That’s exactly how it feels after one of your father’s drunken backhands.’

  I went back three times to the Dali pavilion, and each time people were coming out and shaking their heads and saying things to each other like ‘Disgusting!’, ‘Simply awful!’, ‘Too crude for words!’ One short, fat old guy with a droopy tobacco-stained moustache came out and stood under the huge girl’s legs at the entrance, shook his fist and yelled, ‘You filthy Dago son of a bitch! This is the United States of America! Go back home!’

  I admit it was pretty darn weird but I couldn’t figure out what all the fuss was about. Dali’s Dream of Venus was the creation of the famous surrealist painter, Salvador Dali. I confess, at the time I’d never heard of him. But his pavilion was surreal, all right! A strangely shaped building with no corners, it contained a wet tank and a dry tank. In the wet tank real girls swam under water, where two of them milked a bandaged-up cow that must have been dead because it couldn’t stay down there and breathe, or maybe it was just a model. Other girls tapped on typewriters like they were busy in an office. Then I noticed a piano keyboard painted on the body of a girl lying down that looked very real until you realised she was made of rubber. Then, in the dry tank was what was called the Sleeping Venus: another rubber lady reclining in a 36-foot bed covered with white and red satin, live flowers and leaves. Oh, I forgot to say the girls in the wet tank had uncovered breasts, which was what all the fuss was about, I think. Then, on various parts of the ceiling were upside down umbrellas and telephone receivers hanging down, and above the big bed were lobsters grilling on live coals and bottles of champagne.

  I must say, although it was meant to be highly erotic, it didn’t affect me anything like seeing from the back one of the twins walking out of the club in a tight silk dress and high heels.

  But it was what was outside the pavilion that was really funny and got people’s backs up so that some just refused point-blank to enter. I remember one woman shouting, ‘I am a born-again Pentecostal Christian and this is the Antichrist!’ If she was born again, then it was a while back because she was no spring chicken and reminded me of Dolly McClymont. What Pentecostalists and the Antichrist were all about I hadn’t any idea, but she was sure steamed up and practically foaming at the mouth. Then she started shouting, ‘Jesus saves!’

  First, you bought your ticket for the Dali exhibition at an office shaped like a large fish’s head and then, to go into the pavilion, you had to walk through these giant parted female legs wearing stockings and high heels, where the man with the moustache had been standing. I mean giant legs so you couldn’t touch either side with your arms spread out wide and with the tops of the stockings way above your head and the high-heeled shoes the size of a baby’s pram.

  I loved it. Every other pavilion was sensible and about the future and showing stuff off, but this one took no notice and just went mad all by itself with fish’s heads and ladies’ legs and umbrellas upside down and telephone receivers, and they must have done it all without asking permission.

  Each day at the Waldorf started with the same breakfast: ham and eggs. I’d say to the waiter, ‘Over easy, please,’ and he’d reply, ‘Yes, sir, with your ham crisp as usual?’ I told Miss Frostbite I needed to tell him not to call me sir, but she said he had to because it was his job, and this was the Waldorf, after all, and if they didn’t maintain standards, then who would?

  Then there was the travelling back and forth to the World’s Fair every day in the subway. Lots of black and brown and white people, with everyone laughing and joking, kids pushing each other and their moms and dads carrying baskets with food and thermos flasks and having a good time even before they got there.

  I really, really wished my mom could’ve been with me. I don’t think she’d have minded the Dali pavilion one bit. We’d seen nude ladies in the art gallery – I mean, in pictures, of course – and she’d said they were a bit fat, but beautiful, and the artists were very clever; you’d think looking at it from a distance that it was real skin that hadn’t ever been out in the sun. That was when I was much younger, because now, of course, I know all about nineteenth-century figure and portrait paintings from school, as well as the French Impressionists – Degas, Cézanne, Renoir, Monet – and lots of others. It was part of all the stuff I knew that wasn’t about life here and now, or living in Toronto and waiting to be old enough to go to war.

  The real big thrill was hearing some great musicians. First came what Miss Frostbite called ‘housekeeping’, that is, the interviews to find three new jazz musicians. The piano player was the most important because if you got him right the rest would follow. The reason the piano was so important was that the left hand could supplement the rhythm of the double bass and the right hand could play the melody; also, the pianist was free to sing. I was secretly a bit disappointed. As you will recall, I’d hoped they’d invite me to be the pianist, but Miss Frostbite, as usual, read my mind and said that, while she’d love to have given me a chance, she didn’t dare break the law – I’d have to be eighteen to play in a nightclub legally.

  They found a piano player from Memphis who could also sing the blues, which was good. His name was Noah Payne and he was fifty years old and was willing to move to Toronto. He’d only just moved to New York and hadn’t settled down there yet. His wife had died of breast cancer the previous year, and his two boys were both in the American army and stationed in Hawaii. He said that in jazz circles he was known as No Pain and that was what he preferred to be called. Miss Frostbite explained that she and Joe had heard him play and he was pretty good and had a good blues voice, but it was between him and another pianist from New York, and he was also very good so they couldn’t decide. But then Noah Payne chuckled and said, ‘Ma’am, I got me that name because when I play piano, your patrons, they don’t feel No Pain no more.’ She’d liked that and he was hired on the spot.

  The next musician was much younger – in his mid-thirties – and played the tenor and baritone sax. He hailed originally from Chicago and his name was Jim Shantyman, and Joe said he had a sound that was sweet and big and pure. ‘That good to find in the one and only player. Usually they got one sound better than the other.’ Both he and No Pain were Negro guys. But it was the third musician who was causing Miss Frostbite to bite her nails and for once making Joe unsure of what they needed at the Jazz Warehouse.

  He was a white guy from Tennessee named Elmer Perkins, who played the electric guitar. He was thin as a beanpole, with straw-coloured hair you couldn’t comb because it grew in f
ive different tufts on his head and stuck out every which way. He had pale blue, red-rimmed eyes, and eyelashes that were almost white, lighter even than his hair, and his skin was practically transparent. Joe said to me the night after the first interview, ‘You gotta believe, this cat, he ain’t no pretty sight. He play the ’lectric guitar with his tongue hanging out the side his mouth and a look he got on his face like he ’bout to cry.’ Miss Frostbite and Joe both admitted Elmer Perkins was good, very good, but the problem was that the band had never contained such an instrument and it meant a new sound in the Jazz Warehouse combo. Joe explained that the electric guitar, made by companies such as Gibson and Rickenbacker, had been introduced into jazz in the early 1930s, so it hadn’t worked itself into the blood and sinew of jazz yet.

  ‘Old man like me don’t hear that ’lectric sound too good. For me it got a twang like there’s cats caterwauling on a tin rooftop. But that don’t mean it ain’t good. I ain’t saying that. I got to keep my heart from decidin’ and my min’ open. It a good jazz sound, and it young and got good rhythm and can go solo. All that gonna be mighty handy in a jazz combo. Floss, she like it, but she ain’t sure ’bout the boys back home. They ain’t worked with no ’lectric guitar before and we don’t want no dis-cor-dant note in the band music. Mr No Pain says no problems, ain’t no ’lectric guitar gonna concern him wid the piano.’ Joe paused. ‘That worth considering seriously; when the piano man don’t concern himself, then no trumpet or sax or rhythm section got nothing to complain themselves about. Mr Shantyman says he worked wid one such before in Chicago and he say it was just great. He says that ’lectric sound is where jazz music heading in the future, and we gotta in-cor-por-rate it because Mr Gibson and Mr Fender, they made a whole new ’lectric sound that gonna stay wid us a long, long time.’

  All this discussion would take place in Harlem or Greenwich Village, where we’d go someplace Joe knew for our dinner, because you had to be careful you were welcome, him being Negro. We went to a different place every night and then afterwards we’d hit the clubs.

  Now, I’m going to begin with Billie Holiday, nicknamed ‘Lady Day’ by her great friend and musical partner Lester Young because of something she sang that I will never forget. Now that I’m older and can understand even better, it makes me want to cry for the human race every time I hear it sung. But when she sang it that first time at the Café Society in Greenwich Village you wanted to cry anyhow. It was so sad, but also so beautiful.

  But first about the name, ‘Café Society’. Miss Frostbite explained that it was a send-up because a lady named Clare Boothe Luce, who was the wife of the man who started Time magazine, had coined the phrase ‘Café Society’ to describe the rich New York socialites who were still plentiful even during the Depression. I think they must have been the same people coming out of the Waldorf the night we arrived, the men with cigars and white silk scarfs and the women waving their long red-painted nails and wearing gold high-heeled shoes.

  Miss Holiday had her shiny black hair pulled back tight over her scalp and tied at the back, like my mom sometimes wore hers after I’d brushed it to a shine every bit as good as hers. As a matter of fact I think my mom’s hair was even better. On one side of Miss Billie Holiday’s head were these white flowers Miss Frostbite said were gardenias. She had a beautiful voice but when she sang this song I could see there were tears rolling down Joe’s cheeks and he didn’t speak for quite a while afterwards. Miss Billie Holiday was dressed in a red evening gown, and she had a nice figure and was also quite pretty.

  The song was ‘Strange Fruit’, and the description of southern trees hanging with the bodies of lynched Negroes almost made me cry, too. After listening to a song like that, I was really scared Elmer Perkins might be like those southerners who hanged Negroes, being from Tennessee as he was. I couldn’t help it, although as it turned out I was proved quite wrong. I thought perhaps that was why Joe was a bit concerned about the electric guitar player, and that the ‘discordant note’ wasn’t about the music at all but about having a white man and a southerner in the band.

  But Elmer Perkins loved jazz, black music, and even sang the blues real well, but when he did, those people would have this look on their faces as if they couldn’t tell where the sound was coming from. Surely it wasn’t coming from the white beanpole with the blue red-rimmed eyes and hair going every which way? Because hearing blues from somebody who looked like Elmer was truly weird and unnatural. Joe would sometimes chuckle and shake his head. ‘Elmer, when you singing them blues, it like Mrs Roosevelt using bad cuss words when she givin’ out her famous quotes to American women. Ain’t never suppose to happen.’

  Elmer would laugh and pick up his electric guitar and sing a verse from Dixie. Joe would later say, ‘Inside Elmer, his soul, it black as the ace o’ spades, only that the good Lord, He spilled too much Clorox in the mixture when he was stirring up to make him.’

  At The Famous Door on Fifty-Second Street we heard Count Basie. How do you describe the greatest big band that ever was? They were in full-tilt boogie and it was like trying to keep ahead of a runaway express train. Then he followed this with his belting Memphis- and Kansas City-flavoured piano solos and my head was spinning. It was receiving more than it could take in in one go and still stay sitting on my shoulders. I’d lie in bed at night at the Waldorf and the sounds would come rushing, one smashing into the others, swirling and gyrating and booming and soothing and I couldn’t stop them; they were so real that I used the cushion to cover my ears.

  Then, the next night at the same place we heard Lester Young play saxophone and clarinet, and it was so marvellous that for a moment there I wished I’d taken up those instruments instead of piano. Miss Frostbite said he was breathtaking and if only . . . I think she meant if only she could afford someone like him as a guest at the Jazz Warehouse.

  Then, on the last day in New York Joe said, ‘This afternoon, Jazzboy, we gonna go down to Harlem and we gonna pay us a visit to my good friend.’ That morning Miss Frostbite took me up to the top of the Empire State Building, the tallest building in the world! Did you know it has 2500 toilets? If you used a different one every day, it would take you six years and 310 days!

  Joe was waiting for me outside the Waldorf at two o’clock. ‘Where we going, Uncle Joe?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, we gonna see an old friend o’ mine I think maybe you gonna like some,’ he replied, but didn’t explain any further. Miss Frostbite said she had to arrange a few things and pack for the following morning so she wouldn’t be coming. Later Joe would explain that where we were going was sort of for men only. Not official but understood.

  We got to Harlem and made our way to a restaurant called Jerry’s Chicken Place. It wasn’t ritzy or anything, not like the other places we’d been, just some restaurant with a tin cut-out of a rooster that was rusting a bit hanging above the door. I thought maybe Joe’s friend was just someone who sold fried chicken who he knew way back when and we were paying him a polite visit. Inside there were tables and chairs and a piano. A chicken shop with a piano was different, but this was in Harlem, so who knows what’s different? There was a Negro man sitting at the piano when we walked in and I followed Joe, who walked up to him and placed his hand on the piano player’s shoulder. I saw that the man sitting at the piano was nearly blind. ‘Who this?’ he asked.

  Joe chuckled. ‘It your old buddy, Joe Hockey, Mr Piano Man.’

  ‘Hey, Joe! Welcome, back! Where you bin, man? You still that damn place in the boondocks other side them Great Lakes? They cain’t play good jazz there because you gone and stayed and they never found out you no good.’ With this he threw back his head and laughed uproariously. ‘Welcome home, brother Joe.’

  ‘Art, I want you should meet my good friend Jack Spayd.’ Joe turned to me. ‘Jazzboy, say hello to Mr Art Tatum.’

  You could have knocked me down with a feather. I completely lost my voice and when it finally came back I squeaked, ‘Good afternoon, sir.’

  Art Tatum
grinned. ‘We don’t do no “sir” at Jerry’s Chicken. Here we all brothers and buddies.’ He looked up at Joe. ‘And even old chil-hood friends who once every ten years maybe they bother themselves to come by to pay their respect is still welcome.’ He turned to me and extended his hand. ‘Welcome, Jack. You play piano, white boy?’

  ‘Only classical piano, sir . . . but I hope to play jazz piano some day,’ I stammered. There was no way I could ever call the greatest piano player on earth by his first name.

  ‘That where I got myself started. It the best training if you gonna play jazz piano. It jes a matter of practice, practice and more practice. Now you remember that good, son!’ He held his hand out palm upward. ‘Let me see your hands, first the left then the right.’ I did as he asked and he gripped each hand in turn, his fingers feeling, kneading, pulling mine, then he released them. ‘Big hands, that real good, Jack. Now you got to learn yourself speed, big hands and speed, that the beginning.’ He reached out again and touched me on the arm. ‘Good luck and play good, always from the heart, you hear? Jazz ain’t about reading music, it about reading the life and the pain that’s in plain folk.’

  Art Tatum then began to play for an hour and a half with only one or two pauses to drink black coffee. Joe explained that he played nights on ‘The Strip’ on West Fifty-Second Street not far from where we’d heard Count Basie, and was getting his hands limbered up. Only his personal friends were ever allowed to come to Jerry’s Chicken Place in Harlem, where he hung out during the afternoon.

  When we were about to leave Joe and me went up and said goodbye and I shook Art Tatum’s hand a second time. ‘Next time you come to New York you come see me, Jack. You come play jazz piano. I wanna see them big hands working and the speed you meantime learned yourself. You come back here to Jerry’s Chicken, you hear now, white boy?’