Young Man With a Horn

by Dorothy Baker

  But that’s just one way, and a wrong one, of looking at it. He might have, if he’d stayed around schools and the right people had happened to get interested in him (a service that the teaching profession performs fairly regularly)—he might have become what he almost was, a man who had something important to say.

  The fact that he didn’t turn up at Lowell High School for almost a year, and then under a compulsion that made it impossible for him to do anything but cut loose again, makes speculation useless.

  What he did do was fine, in itself; you can say that, at least. It’s pretty sweet to think about a boy, just turned fourteen, being at All Souls’ Mission every day, sometimes as early as six in the morning, working out on the upright in the corner and looking not unlike St. Cecilia, only blond and smaller and thinner in the face. Looking not at all like St. Cecilia, in fact, but giving the same impression of being busy with music.

  He was completely one-track. He sat there and took them one by one. When he had one down, he’d open the hymnal to another place, at random, and start another one. This random choosing was the only element of chance in his method. The rest of it was routine that he developed in the first three days and never swerved from thereafter. First he played through the hymn with his right hand—the vocal part—to fix the tune in his mind; then he’d take it measure by measure: right hand alone, left hand alone, then fit them together and keep it up, over and over, until it was perfectly all right to go on to the next measure. And when each single measure had been done that way, he’d go through the whole thing, over and over until it was right. At first it took him about two days to a hymn, and then when he began to spot frequent combinations it didn’t take so long. In a month’s time he had it down to about one an hour. And then he stopped the random opening and began to pick and choose; he had come to see that some of the hymns had a kind of style to them that others missed. He found one, for instance, that looked a lot simpler than it was. It was called ‘Adeste Fideles,’ and it took him the better part of two days to make it come out; but when he had it he liked it the best of the lot, notwithstanding the outlandish title.

  It was only by the purest good fortune that he didn’t happen to run into any of the All Souls’ crowd any sooner than he did. He didn’t even try to avoid them; it never occurred to him after he got interested in finding out how to play a piano that the mission was anything but a room with a piano in it. But it was. They had meetings there a couple of nights a week and all day and most of the night Sunday. Rick missed them Sundays because his aunt and his uncle were usually at home and he thought he ought to stay around. And he was never there at night because he had never found out how to turn the lights on.

  But that kind of thing couldn’t last forever, and it didn’t. Late one afternoon five or six of them, early comers, came in on him and made quite a to-do about finding him there. Not that they were displeased about it; on the contrary, they were tickled to death. Rick was sitting at the piano, playing along very nicely, and he didn’t even hear them come in. He had his head on one side and his mouth pursed, and his hair was bright from the last of the sun that came through the window in a single, concentrated beam. To one practiced in hallucination the beam might conceivably have looked like a halo. It was enough for this crowd, in any event. They got the idea, being hipped, as they were, on religion, that Rick was an angel, and not only that but that he’d been put down in All Souls’ for a reason—very possibly to give them some advance information on the Second Coming. They proceeded, on that assumption, to try to get some kind of Message out of him. They were all pretty well lit with whatever it is that cults of that kind always seem to get hold of, and they got fairly rough with Rick, each one eager to get the story first. They made a tremendous noise, considering that there weren’t very many of them, and for Rick it was like being awakened from a sweet sleep by marauders.

  They were a notorious group, the All Souls, and their creed was a nice blend of spiritualism, holy-rolling, direct communion, and exorcism. In fact they had once been hauled up in a body for questioning after they had attempted to exorcise one of their number by flagellation. They literally beat the devil out of the fellow and he died. The case was dismissed, finally, for lack of evidence, the Souls being able, when the occasion demanded, to keep very quiet. It was nice for Rick that he didn’t know this story; he was scared silly as it was. He couldn’t say a word in the way of a message, and they, for their part, lost interest in him and began making up their own messages. Finally the whole thing broke up into aimless and unreasonable yelling around: ‘Praise the Lord, I’ve led a wicked life.’

  Rick got hold of himself after a long time of it. He tried the simplest of ruses and it worked. He went up to one of the women, the one who seemed to be the ringleader, and said politely and confidentially, ‘Pardon me a minute; I’ll be right back,’ and got out. He ran all the way home and intended to sleep with his uncle. The only thing that kept him from it was that his uncle didn’t come home.

  3

  After that Rick had the fear of the Lord in him. He was lost and wandering with nothing now to do, now that the All Souls’ upright was out. It was a question, for him, of going back to school and working his head off to catch up after he’d been told off for six weeks’ delinquency, or of shutting himself up at home with library books, or of doing the impossible: going back to the mission, taking a chance on another run-in with the Souls and playing their piano in spite of them. There was no satisfactory choice to make here. Reading wouldn’t hold him any more, and it was sort of late to go back to school—even the Mexicans can beat you out with a six weeks’ handicap, and the Japanese were probably on the point of graduating again. And the All Souls’ Mission was so much poison now. He couldn’t get within a mile of it without having his liver go white as a sheet. Three choices, and not one he could choose.

  So he followed the course that offered least resistance to his interest. He hung around pawnshops eyeing portable musical instruments and trying to figure out, through the window, just how you’d go about getting from one note to the next on a clarinet. And when he thought he understood it, he went on to the study of the trumpet (there were five in the window), but it was a much harder instrument to play by eye. There are eight tones in a scale and only three things to push on a trumpet. He gave it up, finally; at least he decided to wait until a time when he could get his hands on a trumpet and find out for himself. He thought of hocking something and getting himself one; in point of fact, that’s all he did think of, but the only plan that looked good to him—that of hocking library books—he had to abandon as impracticable. He had, at that time, four pairs of pants, each one as good as the last, and three very tricky hangers for them, but he wouldn’t allow himself to think of hocking his pants; his aunt had to put herself to so much trouble to get them for him. No more could he hang around the streets all the time with his nose against pawnshop windows. They throw you in for that kind of thing; that’s vagrancy. Worse still in Rick’s case, it was vagrancy and truancy, the kind of thing they haul you back to school for. He knew without being told.

  And then, all at once, it occurred to him that the smart thing to do would be to get a job and earn enough money to retire to his uncle’s apartment with a clarinet or a trumpet honestly paid for and take up his studies where he had left off. Easiest thing in the world to pick up a hymnal some place; All Souls’ isn’t the only church in Los Angeles. Easiest thing in the world to pick up some sheet music too, if you knew where some was.

  He was little, though; at fourteen he looked ten, and not such a strong ten either. He might have got on in a boys’ choir—that’s about the only job he’d have been right for—but there weren’t any boys’ choirs. There was, on the other hand, a fight arena in that part of town, and he went there to ask about selling programs and near beer on fight nights. He didn’t get the job. He knew it before he asked. He had been too much indoors and too little nourished and he bore precocious scars of contemplation; and with these
items lined up against him it was impossible for anyone to expect him to develop the aggressiveness and low-down optimism so necessary to the salesman. Same thing next door at the gymnasium of Harry Beavers. Rick stood around, and after a while Beavers himself came up to him and said, ‘What do you say, kid?’ And when Rick had said it, Beavers gave him a friendly grin and said: ‘Tell you what I’ll do. If we ever need a man to throw in a sponge I’ll phone you up.’

  And then, when things were looking the very worst, a job fell bang in his lap. He went downstairs to Gandy’s Pool Hall, Billiards, Snooker, and Bowling, one noon to get himself a chocolate bar, and even as he chose it he saw a sign inside the showcase: Boy Wanted. He bought his bar, put it in his pocket, and walked across the room to calm down. Then he went back and said to the man behind the counter (it was Gandy himself), ‘Do you still want a boy?’

  That was about all there was to it. He went right to work. All he had to do was set up tenpins in one alley while they were being knocked down in the other alley, and then set them up in the other alley while they were being knocked down in the one he’d just finished setting them up in, and repeat. The kid that had the job before Rick, Gandy told him, wasn’t paying attention to his business one day and he sort of got his leg hurt, so watch them balls, see, we’re not liable.

  Nice work and two-fifty a week for it, twenty dollars for two months, forty for four, and taper off from there; quit and buy anything you like, just like finding it. Meanwhile, watch those balls.

  4

  Edward Richard Martin got along fine with his work. At least he kept his job. He set them up in the other alley very nimbly, he didn’t let himself get bowled over, and he drew his pay every Saturday night, two-fifty right in his hand. And besides that, it was at Gandy’s that he met his first friend, Smoke Jordan—his first, last, and always friend, Smoke.

  Smoke Jordan worked at Gandy’s off and on; he swept out and mopped up. He had had Rick’s job, too, a long time before, but the bowling trade kept falling off and Gandy figured it out finally and ended by hiring a shorter and less deliberate pin-setter. Smoke was eighteen, easy six feet tall, and on the dark side between oxblood and midnight blue, a good deep color with fine high lights in it. He was a thoughtful boy, inclined to philosophy, and his movements were precise and slow. Gandy didn’t give him credit for being all there, but he was wrong. Smoke was slow, but he had a reason for it. The way he walked, that slow drag, might have looked offhand to be simply the gait of the shiftless, but if you’d really watch him walk, judgment suspended, you’d see that the drag had a pretty vigorous timing behind it, like very slow dancing. That’s what it was too. Smoke Jordan had rhythm in his ears all the time; sometimes he sang with it, most of the time, in fact; and sometimes he just walked the floor with it, going very slowly and barely lifting his feet. You could tell what it was if you paid any attention, because once in a while he’d hear fast rhythm and then he could get across the floor like anything. But he really liked it slow, and that’s what got Gandy mixed up.

  When he pushed a broom nothing much came of it; he had developed a style of sweeping that was good to listen to from start to finish. It had its drawbacks, however, from a utilitarian standpoint; it raised an awful dust and it didn’t get anywhere.

  And so he only worked off and on. Gandy fired him with a regularity which, graphically expressed, would make a periodic wave. But he rehired him almost as regularly, because Smoke was almost always around and Gandy’s eye almost always fell on him when he wanted something done. He even took a personal interest in him; he tried more than once to teach him to sweep with a utilitarian slant, all the strokes going in the same direction in such a way that when you’ve gone the length of a room with such strokes you inevitably have a pile of whatever it is, right there in front of your broom, nothing to it, try it.

  And then Smoke would try it with Gandy right at his elbow counting for him like a coxswain: stroke, stroke, stroke, forward, forward, forward; no, damn it to hell, not backward; just pull it through the air on the way back so you won’t sweep the dirt the wrong direction like I told you not to, you dope. Forward, always forward, like that. But the minute Gandy had to turn away to get the dice box or a cigar for a customer, Smoke would go right back into his off-beat swishing with all the single-mindedness of the unswerving, incorruptible artist.

  After Rick came to Gandy’s, Smoke knew with the instinct of a compass where his audience was, and he came to sweep almost exclusively behind the bowling alleys where there was no great need of it. And there it was that the black one taught the white one what rhythm is, and not by precept, either. By example. ‘Get this,’ he’d say before he started a new one. ‘And get this. What’d you think of that?’ He gave out examples of his work until he had Rick built up to the place where he’d laugh out spontaneously over a new and almost inextricably involved pattern, and after that anything could happen; Rick was a marked man, a lifelong sucker for syncopation.

  The thing grew fast. Rick began to sing the songs that Smoke sang; they’d come into his head when Smoke had gone. He’d find himself whistling the tunes, and then the words would begin to spin themselves out automatically, with Smoke’s accents and interpretation, as if from under a phonograph needle. Rick had, right off to begin with, a repertory of some fifteen songs that he’d soaked up in the first month of knowing Smoke. They were blues, mostly; somewhat more self-conscious and city-dwelling than the pure-strain, deep-south, negro blues, but born of a common melancholic parent by a younger and possibly white sire. The blues that Smoke, and then Rick, sang—‘Memphis Blues,’ ‘Beale Street Mamma,’ ‘Stackolee Blues,’ ‘Wang Wang Blues,’ ‘St. Louis Blues,’ all those—inherited from their elder parent a primitive dignity of phrasing for stories that are eternally the sad stories—poverty, the slow death of love, the awful fact of infidelity, the need to get out and go some place where it will never happen again, to pack your bag and make your getaway. Very sad stories in very sad words that meant no more to Rick Martin than the words of ‘In the Sweet Bye-and-Bye,’ just so many jugs to carry the tune. The tune was the thing that held Rick to the songs, and what held Smoke was the firm, strict beat, the unfailing four-in-one, that he knew how to send in who knows how many directions.

  Smoke revealed himself, finally, for what he was, a professional drummer with amateur standing, and with amateur standing only because he had never been able, what with Gandy firing him so often and the family demands on him when he was in the comparative money, to get himself a union card. There was the further matter of his not having had a bass drum since the time his kid sister, Bluebelle, fell off the sink and went spang through one side of the drum and sort of loosened up the other. It was a peculiar accident; Smoke never did find out exactly what happened. He had the drum down on its side putting adhesive tape on a place that had got scratched almost through; he thought he heard somebody at the front door, so he went and it was Mrs. Johnson, and he just barely let her in when he heard an awful howl from the kitchen, and he ran back and found Bluebelle clean through one side of the drum. Nothing he could do about it; Bluebelle couldn’t tell him how it happened because she was too little to talk at the time, and now that she’d learned to talk some she couldn’t seem to remember anything about it.

  Since that time all Smoke had for a bass drum was a big old suitcase his brother Henry had one time when he was selling jersey knits. It sounded pretty good when you kicked it right in the middle, but it was next to impossible to make the thing stay in one place. You’d have to keep moving around after it all the time, because every time you’d kick it, it would move a little bit. And if you’d set it against the wall it didn’t sound so good; seemed like it needed to be out in the open to sound deep the way you want it.

  Smoke was the first person Rick ever talked to, the first one he ever had anything to say to. He scarcely knew his aunt and uncle, and during his library book period he’d got along without friends. But now here was Smoke, a coon, no getting around that, with
a face that shone like a nigger’s heel, and a mouthful of white, white teeth that flashed out like so many lighthouses whenever he opened his mouth, and a clean round skull covered with close-lying, pencil-width rows of tight black curls. He was African by nature, too, slow and easy. He talked more and more to Rick; and Rick, warmed for the first time by the feeling of being sought out and showed off for, came back with a few personal revelations—revelations in kind, about his need to make of himself a musician of amateur or any other standing. He told Smoke about the All Souls’ fracas and admitted that he had been on the high-road to piano virtuosity when the upset came. Smoke gave him the kind of sympathy he had a right to expect. Since the trouble he’d had, himself, with Bluebelle and his bass drum, Smoke’s heart went out to anyone forced, like him, to suffer interruptions in his chosen career. He could, of course, play his snare and kick his brother Henry’s suitcase, he wasn’t quite so bad off as Rick; but on the other hand Rick had a good steady job, he wasn’t always getting himself canned, he didn’t have to hand over everything he had to his pap every Saturday night, and sooner or later he’d have money enough to buy a piano. No, not a piano, Rick said, a horn of some kind, like a cornet, something you could keep around with you, so you could pick your own time to play it.

  ‘Piano’s nice, though,’ Smoke said, and Rick, who had been lying awake nights for close to two months thinking how nice a piano is, was the first to agree with him.

  ‘Yes,’ Smoke said, ‘a piano’s mighty pretty when it’s played right. Nice slow and nice fast.’

  And on this subject—‘speaking of piano’—he brought up the case of his friend Jeff Williams, who played piano in his own band at a place in Vernon called the Cotton Club (and not to be confused with Frank Sebastian’s Cotton Club: this one was just a plain cotton club). There were five men in Jeff’s band—a tenor sax, a trombone, a trumpet, traps, and a piano—all of them good enough for a medal any place, but, baby, you ought to hear this Jeff Williams. He knew what he was doing. The kind of piano player Jeff was, the guys in the band tried to keep him playing the piano all night, after the dance was over. Not always, of course; they were all good and they liked to cut loose after hours themselves, but every so often they’d just sit around the piano and listen to Jeff and not give two whoops if he ever quit. And when you get a bunch of fellows, all of them good, that want to put up their horns and listen to another guy play piano all night, you can be pretty sure it isn’t just any old piano playing.