Young Man With a Horn

by Dorothy Baker

  ‘How do you mean roll?’

  And Rick with pedagogical thoroughness explained what a roll is. It’s a habit, and a ruinous one. He heard this boy Jones playing a little sharp on high notes, and so he took a look at him and there it was—a roll—not bad yet, but on the way. It comes from dropping the mouthpiece too low on the lower lip, and if you keep on playing that way you get so you can’t bring it up where it belongs; somehow you just can’t do it. It’s the hell on trumpet players, he went on to say in the same tone people use when they talk about incurable diseases.

  ‘The way a fellow explained it to me,’ he said, ‘was that a rolled lower lip is like a nozzle on a hose. Say your lips are a hose; if you close the nozzle, the water, which is your air, in comparison, see, backs up or swells up in the back of the hose, which is really your throat, see? When you open up the nozzle of a hose the water flows out easy, comes right out, same rate of speed all the time.’ He had his forehead puckered up with lines going in three directions, he was trying so hard to keep the figure straight.

  ‘It’s like this,’ he went on, though Jack was obviously wanting to get on with his drinking and stop having things explained to him analogically, ‘you get a roll and it closes up your lips and gives you a choked feeling in your throat, and you get tireder than Christ himself after about a half hour of steady playing.

  That’s what puts so many brassmen in the nut house, and I mean it. They blow their heads off and get dizzy and if they keep it up they’re dizzy all the time. The only way to play good is to take your horn and your breathing for granted; then you can think about how you want it to be; you just think it and it blows right out the other end of the horn. You know,’ he said to Jack, who by that time was on one foot and then the other so fast it began to look like a dance, ‘you know, when I was first starting in to play trumpet, I was sort of teaching myself, practicing on stuff I’d hear other fellows play, and without knowing anything about it I was beginning to develop a roll. One day I was showing this fellow that gave me lessons once in a while, I was playing something for him to ask his advice about it, and I just barely put the horn up to my mouth, and he let a yell out of him like he’d seen a spook. “God Almighty, boy,” he said, “you’re getting a roll there like a tramp!” I didn’t even know what one was.’

  ‘Is that so?’ said Jack. ‘Let’s go over and have another drink.’ They went to the jug and Rick kept the narrative going. ‘Well, this fellow told me to quit playing trumpet for a while until I got the idea out of my head, and all that week I just went around holding my mouth the way he said to, with my lower lip tight against my teeth, and no higher or lower; the way Art told me to do it was to figure it was just the same as putting a clarinet reed on a clarinet mouthpiece; you’d put it just exactly even, not any higher or lower.’

  ‘Art who?’ Jack said.

  ‘Hazard,’ Rick said.

  ‘Not Art Hazard, not the real one?’ Jack said, holding the paper cup away from him and looking at Rick with real interest. The rest of them were around the jug too, and it was no longer a private conversation. ‘What about Hazard?’ one of them said.

  ‘Sure,’ Rick said, ‘that’s the one; there’s only one of them.’

  ‘Well,’ Jack said, ‘I’ll be damned.’ He turned to the whole group and said to them, ‘This fella learned to play trumpet from Art Hazard, what do you know?’ He turned to Rick. ‘Why didn’t you ever say anything about that before? How’d you happen to get to know him in the first place?’

  ‘Oh,’ Rick said, embarrassed now because all of them were looking at him, waiting for him to talk, ‘he used to live right near me, used to play at a little place in Vernon.’

  ‘The hell he did,’ Jack said. ‘I always supposed he was from the East. What band?’

  ‘Jeff Williams,’ Rick said. ‘It was the same bunch that’s playing with him now, but there were only five of them then. They got a lot of new guys now but the original five are all still with him. Ward, the first drummer he had, died and he got Jordan, but Jordan played drums for him for two years before they went East, so one way you think of it, he’s part of the original band too.’

  Jack seemed mixed up. He was beginning to feel the gin. ‘You mean to tell me a white man would play in a coon band? Art Hazard really plays for Jeff Williams?’

  ‘Hazard isn’t white,’ Rick said.

  ‘You mean Art Hazard isn’t a white man?’ Jack said, his jaw way down.

  ‘Heck no,’ Rick said, and Tracy, the drummer, backed him up. ‘He’s black as your hat. Haven’t you ever seen a picture of him? He’s a nigger, all right.’

  ‘Well, anyhow, he doesn’t play in Williams’s band now,’ Jack said. ‘He gets out his own records: Art Hazard’s Rhythm Band. I’ve got a couple of them myself and I’ll show you.’

  ‘That’s just to get around a contract,’ Rick said. ‘Williams is under contract to get out two records a month, but he can make as many as he wants under a different name. He’s made a lot under different names. Did you ever hear of Smoke Jordan’s Dixie Blazers? That’s Williams. Or Snowden’s Cotton Pickers? That’s Williams. It’s all the same band. You can tell if you listen to it. Nobody else plays that way.’

  ‘Maybe so,’ Jack said. ‘So Art Hazard’s a nigger?’ He shook his head. ‘Next thing you’ll be telling me Red Nichols is a nigger.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Rick said, ‘Red Nichols isn’t.’

  All of them laughed and Jack looked happier. He hated like poison not to be a smart boy all the time. ‘I’m glad I’ve got you here to tell me about Nichols,’ Jack said to enforce his advantage. And when Rick saw that he was taking a boobing he simply said, ‘Oh, I thought maybe you really didn’t know,’ and the thing was turned around again and Jack was glowering.

  Everybody began to feel the strain, and nobody wanted to. The result was that each man hit the gin as a kind of insurance against strife in their midst; and the gin, in its turn, hit each man according to his temperament and special aptitudes. The rehearsal had its ups and downs. Rick went carefree, but only to a certain point. He stopped caring what Jack thought about Jeff’s band, he didn’t let Jack’s musical standards bother him, he didn’t let anything bother him. He acquiesced to the leader very simply and kept on playing the arrangements for what there was in them and for what he could get out of them. And because he couldn’t get in any licks and couldn’t improvise, he gave himself to tone. He got a quality into his playing and a tone out of his horn that melted Jack Stuart’s heart, and at the end of another hour and three more gins there he was again in excellent repute, top man in the show from anybody’s point of view. Jack did him honor. He broke down and said: ‘Boy, they told me right about you. You could take a seat in any band in the country.’

  At two o’clock there were three of them left, Rick and Eddie Phelps and Tommy Long, the guitar player. The rest of them had gone under one by one; some had just wandered off and hadn’t come back; others had left in a hurry and hadn’t come back either. Jack had taken Jones home. He said he’d come back but he didn’t. And then there were three, all three good and drunk but still able to play. They folded up the music and did a home-made job. They’d start something, play three choruses of it, ease down as if to break it off, and then one of them would take it again, just for a final run, and at the end of that one somebody else would get another idea and pick it up again. Perpetual motion. When they finally got it stopped, they’d just sit there and laugh like mad until they started to play again.

  But things like that can’t go on forever. Comes a point where change is bound to occur. Tommy Long’s little finger began to bleed where the guitar strings had cut it through. ‘I gotta quit,’ he said, ‘or I’ll be getting blood all over my new guitar.’

  ‘I’d just as soon quit,’ Rick said. ‘I can take it or leave it alone.’

  Phelps didn’t say anything. His face was tomato red and his shirt was soaked from armpits to belt. Tommy gave him a slap on the stomach and it sounded like a we
t towel. ‘You get yourself all warmed up, don’t you?’ he said.

  ‘I’ll say,’ Eddie said. ‘I’ve been this way all my life. I had to quit dancing because I was always in an awful shape after just one dance.’

  Rick was wiping off his trumpet and putting it away. ‘They say,’ he said, ‘it’s a sign you’re healthy if you can sweat a lot. When you get so you can’t sweat, you die.’

  He was measuring out his words one after the other, as if the only way he could manage the breath to talk was to take it slowly, one step at a time. ‘I hardly sweat at all, anytime. I get so hot I could blow my top but I just don’t sweat,’ he said.

  Phelps was pulling his shirt away from his ribs. ‘I sure do,’ he said. ‘It might be a good idea to go swimming now; cool off.’

  It was about half-past three then, that unclassified and unadaptable time of night which traditionally is no proper time to retire, and yet no time to start the day. It looked like a good time to go swimming, and the three who survived the rehearsal walked to the bay. Placid water, they felt, would suit their purpose better than the smashing surf.

  They undressed on the boathouse float. There was no moon and the water at the edge of the float was black. Phelps went off with a splash and made a sound of surprise. Then Tommy Long got in and said Jesus. Rick stood naked and apprehensive and called out with fake heartiness, ‘How is it?’ And Phelps’s voice came back carrying a phrase frightful in implication: ‘It’s wonderful once you get in. Come on.’

  Rick sat down on the edge of the float and immersed his legs up to the knees. ‘Oh, God,’ he whispered with the beginning of a sob. Then he recalled with coward’s pleasure that this water would be deep, twenty times as deep as he was, God knows, eighty maybe, and he with a bare knowledge of how to tread water. Get yourself drowned. Only fools rock the boat. Bad business. He pulled his legs up, found his own shoes and socks, and put them on and felt himself a man once more—a man with his shoes on.

  He stood there single and whole, a little man on a wooden float that lay on the surface of a great ocean beneath a night that was as big as all outdoors. His arms were folded across his bare chest, his feet were farther apart than need was to brace him against the gentle rocking of the float, and he looked upward at the stars that were stuck into the night. But not humbly, not like Pascal. The eternal silence of those infinite spaces did not move him to fear. Lunks of stars—no brains, no ability, no senses—just nothing but simple chunks of matter kicking around in space. He was as steadfast as they were, and he could think and talk and know who he was besides. What, after all, has a star got?

  Pretty, though. Stand there and look at them and they get prettier and prettier, almost pretty enough to persuade you. Rick kept his face turned upward and shifted his feet farther apart to brace himself against an inward rocking that was a personal matter and had nothing to do with the float. The breeze was soft, and it had just enough movement to bring him constantly a new touch and a reminder that it was there with him. Funny thing about stars on a black night, they put you in mind of other things, things like the stars only so much more complicated. Where, for instance, is there a girl who will have this same cool brilliance? What would her name be? How do you inquire for her?

  After an endless time of standing, he went down, lay back and let the night fall over him, and he was cured, then, of inward rocking. He lay still on his back, looking up, aspiring, and without any fanfare about it he knew everything at once. He thought it out without words, the way music thinks—in depths and currents that have nothing to do with linguistics. In these gracious terms he knew that there was good in the world, and tenderness, and sadness; and when it can be said of you that you know anything at all, you will know what these things are.

  The float lurched, and Eddie Phelps pulled himself up and spattered water all over when he stumbled against one of Rick’s feet. There were questions, then, and answers, and all sorts of talk; and then Tommy Long pulled himself aboard too, and there was dressing and huffing and puffing, but none of it mattered, and Rick Martin walked back to the house, troubled slightly, as if he’d missed something big by a very little.

  2

  It turned out precisely the way the man at the soda fountain had said it would. Schools began to close down at the end of the first week in June and then Balboa was a hive, but not of industry. The beach was a solid half-mile of striped canvas umbrellas, and each umbrella functioned as base for a group of boys or girls or boys and girls held together by some tie or other, friendship, love, fraternity, chance, or plain sodality. The wonderful thing was that a man could leave his base and go down to the sea to swim and cool off, and find his way back, apparently, to the same umbrella and the same people he had left. You wouldn’t believe, just to look at all those striped umbrellas and all those bare legs stretched out like spokes in the sand below them, that there could be differentiations, that it would matter much whether a man found his way back to one or to another.

  At night it was much the same thing except that the center of things was not the beach but the Rendez-Vous ballroom. At night, instead of lying prone on their stomachs in the sand, the youths and maidens stood upright on their feet and danced to the music. Two-bits per capita admission, and five cents a dance; sailors, but no holds, barred. The Rendez-Vous had not been let out an inch too much by that real-estate man from Los Angeles; the Collegians played to a capacity crowd on Saturday nights, Sunday afternoons, and Sunday nights, and they got a good crowd on week nights too after the first of the season. They got Monday night off, and needed it.

  It was a good-looking band; not a bald head in the bunch, not a paunch in the lot. They wore white flannels and blue and white blazers and black and white shoes, and they looked, individually, right in them, which is a hard thing, as a rule, for any ten men to do at the same time. Their pictures, singly and group-shot, were put up beside the entrance, retouched until you could scarcely tell Jack from Rick or Phelps from Long.

  Their music was what Jack wanted it to be, smooth and expressive of collegiate emotion. Maybe it was better than that; it was good enough, in any case, to draw an occasional party from Hollywood. The rumor went that Buster Keaton came down to dance almost every week end, and with that for a lead rumor ran rife. The Rendez-Vous became, less than three weeks out, a famous place to dance. Some of the rumors may even have had a basis in fact.

  It was sometime around in here that Rick began to turn out his famous solo work, and it got started in a strange way. The boys in the band, most of them, had established romantic liaisons with girls on the beach early in the season, and every night as the night’s work wore on, all of them would get unbearable inclinations to jump ship and go dance. It bothered them to sit there and play music while other men danced with their girls. So they worked out a system. Every fourth number was a waltz; the saxophones would take one out, the brass the next, tuba drums and guitar fixed it up among them, and Rick, who didn’t care about leaving the stand often, doubled on piano when Jack danced. It didn’t disrupt the band badly; they played three fox trots in a row, tutti ensemble, and the waltzes didn’t matter much. From a dancing point of view there’s no crying need of a full orchestra for a waltz. They even stopped using scores for waltzes, and took to playing ‘Sweetheart of Sigma Chi,’ ‘Roses of Picardy,’ ‘I Love You Truly,’ and others of that stripe in medleys.

  But one time when Jack was off and Rick was supposed to play piano while Tommy played the violin in front of a bank of reeds, Rick let the reeds go too, and told Tommy to put away that violin and play guitar while he played trumpet. He pulled the tuba and drums in close, the four of them in a half-circle, and he told them what to do and they did it. They gave out the rhythm and he played, not in three-four time, but very slow four-four, an old tune called ‘Japanese Sandman.’ He played it straight as the crow flies, and clear, to be heard distinctly all over the hall, but there was a push behind it and a lift to it and a measured clarity that made something happen in that long, narrow R
endez-Vous ballroom. He finished three choruses and lost his nerve, jumped at the piano, handed Tommy his violin and bow, and went as if to underbrush into the opening bars of ‘I Love You Truly,’ waltz time.

  But the thunderbolt he expected never came. When Jack came back and gave him a curious look, Rick gulped and made introductory vowel sounds trying to think what to say for himself, and all Jack said was: ‘Mary-Lou’s back from San Francisco already, she just came in, and now I’m going to be in a hell of a mess with Barbara. I’ve got to think of something quick.’

  Rick pulled his sleeve across his mouth and didn’t have to say a thing. He just sat in his chair and made his plans. He felt like a kid that has just happened to look down and see a dollar lying in the gutter at the corner of Sixth and Main.

  He sat through the next three numbers and thought it all out, and at the end of three when Jack said to him man to man, ‘What would you do?’ Rick said: ‘Go dance with her and tell her you were lonesome and here was this other babe going for you and nothing you could do. Just tell her how it was.’

  ‘Sure,’ Jack said. ‘Only I think Barbara’s so much cuter than Mary-Lou now.’

  ‘She’s cuter all right,’ Rick said. ‘Why don’t you go dance with her then and tell her you were stuck with Mary-Lou before you saw her and now you’ll try to fix everything up? Go on, dance with her.’

  Jack pulled himself together and said: ‘Look here, I can’t leave you stuck all the time, just because you’re big-hearted. It’s time you took one off. Maybe I’d be better off not to see either of them.’

  And Rick, keeping his voice level and managing somehow to make it sound natural, said: ‘Hell, Jack, I can’t dance. I’d just as soon play for you every time, and if I didn’t mean it I wouldn’t say it. Go on, dance with Barbara and tell her how the whole thing happened before it’s too late and she’s sore. Go ahead, or you won’t be able to find her.’