Not that I had ever actually decided that I was going to make New York City the place of my permanent and official residence one day. I had thought of being at home there as I had also come to think of the possibility of getting to feel at home in Los Angeles and Hollywood and then perhaps in Paris and on the Côte d’Azur and also in Rome and in London. But that was not at all the same as choosing the place where you would eventually settle down for good, which many, maybe most, people do years before their thirtieth birthday.
As a matter of fact, even as I used to listen and realize that the Philamayork of the blue steel, rawhide, and patent-leather yarns being unspooled once again during fireside and swing porch tell-me-tale-time sessions, I also realized that it was also yet another homespun version for the fairy-tale castles I already knew about from rocking-chair storybook times. And it now seems to me that on some subconscious level of awareness I also knew even then that sometimes a fairy-tale castle was no less a point of departure than a point of arrival. Which is precisely what I had found New York City to be when I was a member of the band, the castle town from which the Bossman and his merrymakers like the dukes of derring-do of yestertimes were forever sallying forth to encounter and contend with the invisible and indestructible dragons of gloom and doom once again and again.
I knew all that very well. And yet getting to feel like a New Yorker among other New Yorkers (a very significant number of whom had as I was also very much aware grown up elsewhere not only across the nation but also around the globe) was the main reason I had decided to come to do my graduate work in New York City and not in New England, the Midwest, or anywhere in the Far West or out on the Pacific coast.
And it was also why I did most of my library research for assignments at the public library rather than on the campus at Washington Square. In fact, I used the excellent university library only when certain references that professors had put on special reserve status were not also available in the public collection at Forty-second Street, which was not very often, the point not being that it was as if the New York Public Library was really a part of NYU but rather that it was not. Not to me, at any rate. To me it was to big-league research technicians and world-class scholars and intellectuals what Yankee Stadium and Madison Square Garden were to championship-caliber athletes.
There was, as I not only realize and acknowledge now but also as my old roommate and I were completely and admittedly aware from the outset and at every turn even then, an entirely obvious element of make-believe in a considerable amount in everything we did as undergraduate students. And we were also very much aware of the fact that our playing around with notions of medieval scholarship and the Renaissance workshops of the likes of Benvenuto Cellini, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci, the polymath, led other students to respect our sincerity and dedication. To them it was an act, a jive tune, a put-on.
And as for our identification with life in the grimy garrets of bohemian Paris, not with berets and goatees but with plain gray extra-large sweatshirts symbolizing smocks that made being in college on scholarship merit awards (but in my case mostly without pocket change or even bus fare for a two-hundred-mile trip to Mobile for Christmas) more a matter of bohemian glamour and vagabond adventure and romance than of the grinding poverty that it undeniably was.
But when I arrived in New York that September, being a graduate student was another matter altogether. So much so that the fact that I was now actually living in Greenwich Village, the legendary center for bohemian life in the United States, had much less to do with what I had read by and about the generation of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Maxwell Bodenheim, E. E. Cummings, Max Eastman, and the like than with New York friendships I had made backstage or in nightclubs when I was in town as a member of the band. And besides, along with the time that I had spent doing what I had been doing since leaving the campus in central Alabama, there was also the fact that I had now become a man with a wife.
Perhaps for some of those who go directly from the bachelor’s degree to the master and sometimes the doctorate programs, often on the same campus and sometimes with some of the same professors, the break was not as obvious as it was for those who took time out to teach for a while or did something else, as I did before enrolling as a graduate student. In any case, I had decided that graduate-level academic work was really a special form of adult education, and as such there was something part-time about it even when you were enrolled in a full-time course of study that you were expected to complete in a scheduled (even though not strictly required) time frame.
What I really had in mind when I decided that the time had come for me to register for a graduate course of study that year was not a specific profession, but what Miss Lexine Metcalf had kept repeating to me when I reached senior high school because that was when you really began competing not only for college eligibility ranking, but also for scholarship grants, some special few of which were not only for tuition but also for room and board. And it was also at this point in the Mobile County Training School program for upward-bound early birds that vocational guidance sessions began to focus on individual career choices, which in due course also became a matter of the choice of your first, second, and third preference as to the college you hoped to attend, given your final grade-point average and your financial means. Which in my case was a matter of a high grade-point-average eligibility and high faculty recommendation and hardly any financial means whatsoever. As she well knew but only regarded as a challenge to my ingenuity and no great one at that. Certainly not for the sort of splendid young man that she herself always led me to believe that she thought I was, or that she was still counting on me to become, as she had begun doing when she became my homeroom teacher when I reached the third grade. Which was the beginning of geography books and maps and the globe and the sand table projects and windows on the world bulletin board displays of peoples and customs of many lands. That was where and when it had begun between her and me. And she was the one who even so early on as that had already earmarked me as a likely prospect for Mr. B. Franklin Fisher’s early bird list of candidates for the Mobile County Training School extracurricular program for the talented tenth, who according to his doctrine of uplift and ancestral imperative were the hope and glory of the nation. It was the early birds from whom he expected the most immediate and consummate response to his exhortation to so conduct, nay, acquit yourselves in all of your undertakings that generations yet unborn will rise at mention of your name and call you blesséd.
Incidentally, it was Mr. B. Franklin Fisher, the principal and thus the man as in the big man and bossman, but who looked like a boy evangelist, who was the one who spoke of ancestral imperatives in national and also in ethnic terms, such as our nation and our people and our people in this nation, whereas Miss Lexine Metcalf never said who else among our people if not you, but who else in the whole wide world if not you. Which is why hers was the school bell time voice that I always found myself responding to even as I had always that of Miss Tee’s rocking-chair storybook time voice and as I had also already been responding to the baby talk voice of Mama herself calling me her little mister scootabout man out there among them! Which is why Miss Tee also called me little mister man and then my mister. Hello, my mister. You, too, my mister. You can, too, my mister.
But it was when Mr. B. Franklin Fisher, whose pulpit eloquence with its reverberations of Henry Ward Beecher and Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois and ranging from down-to-earth aphorism to silver-tongued oratory as the occasion required, delivered another one of his ancestral imperative pep talks that you heard the school bell time equivalent to the ethnic and political concerns that you had come to know about and identify with from all the talk and signifying that also went with all the tales, tall and otherwise, from the fireside, porch swing, and even on the front stoop and around the hot stove near the cracker barrel in Stranahan’s General Merchandise Store on Buckshaw Mill Road.
All of that was what Mr.
B. Franklin Fisher was best known and celebrated for. Whereas with Miss Lexine Metcalf, as with Miss Tee and with Mama, you did what you had to do because that was what growing up into full manhood was all about. And yet even when she insisted that you had to go on beyond high school as she did when you were in the ninth grade, she never was to say which college or what for. Nor did Mr. B. Franklin Fisher himself, who after all was not only the ultimate approval authority on college eligibility and scholarship grants at Mobile County Training School, but also had a record as an expert on vocational guidance that was unchallenged. When he referred to himself as a fisher of humankind, a spotter of prospects, and a molder of heroes and nation-builders, nobody ever took issue, not even in private. In public, the response was always applause, which became a standing ovation.
Still, not even he, with whom my status as an early bird was second to none and who was forever predicting to the student body at large that I would become one who would accomplish something that would make me a credit to my people and the nation, acknowledged or not during my lifetime, but would enjoy the high regard of generations yet unborn even so. All I ask of this one, he said on commencement day, as if keeping a promise to Miss Lexine Metcalf, is that he always do his best. Not even he ever gave the slightest hint of a suggestion as to what my career field would be.
Meanwhile, Miss Lexine Metcalf was the one who never stopped reminding me that I might just be one of those whose destiny was to travel far and wide in order to find out what it was that I should try to make of myself in the first place. Which she had begun to do when I reached the third grade and the firstyear geography book that you had to have for the homework to go along with the maps on the wall rack with the globe and the displays on the bulletin board better known as windows on the world, and also the sand-table cutout mock-up projects that made her classroom seem like a department store toyland from time to time.
That was where she began, and it was as if she were my own private Mobile County Training School guardian from then on, because all of my subsequent homeroom teachers and officially designated class sponsors deferred to her on all matters concerning me. As did Mr. B. Franklin Fisher himself. Or so it still seems to me. Because I still cannot remember any special project that he ever assigned me to be responsible for or any award that he recommended me for that had not already been discussed with her beforehand. But then I had been her special candidate for his early bird initiatives program in the first place.
Whatever she said to him, to me she always said, Who if not you? Who if not you, my splendid young man, who if not you? Who if not you may have to go where you will go and find out what you will find out, whatever you will find out? To me she also said, You will know you are where you should be by the way you feel, where you should be for the time being; at any rate she also said because such was the also and also of whatever you do wherever you are.
All of which is also why she had also come so immediately to mind along with Mama and Miss Tee when my old roommate read to me the passage from Remembrance of Things Past that he was recording in his notebook, the passage in which Marcel Proust has an artist tell the narrator that we do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness that no one else can make for us, that no one else can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to view the world.
Which I also find to be entirely consistent with the behavior of Miss Tee toward me, especially as it struck me after I found out the secret about how she came to be in Gasoline Point that I didn’t know about until the night I awoke on the front porch in Stranahan’s Lane during Mr. Ike Meadow’s wake and kept my head in Mama’s lap as if I were still asleep.
So yes, on the outskirts of Mobile, Alabama, where I come from, you were indeed weaned from the home to be bottle-fed by teachers, but from these same teachers you also learned that you had to prepare and also condition yourself to assume total responsibility for yourself, because once you graduated and went out into the world, you were on your own. And who if not Mr. B. Franklin Fisher himself for all of his community uplift and vocational guidance expertise always ended his annual commencement address by reminding the graduating class that it was going out into the real world equipped with what really amounted to a compass, a knapsack, and a notebook or chap-book (for what my old best of all possible college roommates was to call the goods).
III
So you decided to get yourself back on some school bell time for a while, hey statemate, Joe States said as we waited for our orders to be served that afternoon of the day before the band headed back out west by way of upstate New York and a swing over into Canada to Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto after its second trip back into town that fall.
I had come up from the Forty-second Street library and he had come across and down Sixth Avenue from the recording studio the band was using on Forty-eighth Street about halfway to Seventh Avenue and Times Square, and which was also only a few doors from the music store from which he had always bought most of his drum equipment over the years.
I can dig it, he said. And so can the boss and Old Pro and everybody else I spoke to. But what the hell, I don’t have to enumerate and elaborate and all that because I’m satisfied that you really know more about them than they actually know about you. Because you came in with us already checked out on us all the way back to our first records and broadcasts. I just want you to know there’s not just only me and the man and Old Pro. Because hey, man, these cats know a special thing when they see it and they pegged you special from day one. And the thing about how you laid that bass in there with us right from the get-go. That let everybody know that you had your own personal way of listening. Everybody in every section felt like you heard every note they were playing. Because you see, now, me, sometimes my job is to make them get to me. And the way you laid your thing in there helped them stay with the man and me. Man, you could have had that job for as long as you wanted it. I mean, even if Shag Phillips had wanted to come back we’d have had two basses. And if you’d wanted to come back we would have had two, you and Scratchy.
Hey, but the thing I’m really getting at, he said as the waiter served our orders, is not just how you fit in the band. I’m talking about how much these guys respect your judgment. Believe me, these cats will lay money on anything you decide to try. And of course that also means if you need some bills, get to us first. Don’t hesitate. Get to us first. Get to us fast.
We were in a restaurant that he had first taken me to one night between shows back during the first week of the run we had had in that showcase theater in Times Square with Earlene Copeland as our featured vocalist. He used it when he wanted to get away from the showbiz crowd he ran into in the snack bars in or near Times Square and along Broadway up to Columbus Circle. We both had ordered oxtail soup and a mixed green salad and pumpernickel bread, which was still something of a New York City novelty for me in those days.
But now what I’m also to make sure you understand is that every cat in this crew knows exactly what the Bossman and Old Pro were talking about when they said what they said when you stayed behind in Hollywood. As we pulled on out to the end of the freeway and headed into the open country again I went up to talk to them and feel them out. And guess what? The goddamn Bossman sounded like he was more concerned about how much I was going to miss having you to be clucking at and carrying on over than the effect on the music. But finally he also said, You know something, Joe? As much as we all liked having him in here doing his special little thing with us, he just might turn out to be somebody that can do us even more good out there doing his thing on his own. And Old Pro said, Whatever his thing turns out to be, I’m sure that what we’re trying to do in this outfit is going to be an important part of it. That’s been my idea about him ever since he decided to put off going right on into graduate school at the end of that first summer. Mark my words.
Now me myself, Joe States said as we buttered our bread and started in on the t
hick, meaty oxtail soup, as far as I can figure it out I myself was put on this earth to make music. This music we play. So what else can I tell you, my man? I’m lucky. Hell, when you come right down to the facts of life, I really owe this band. And the only way I can pay my debt is by always giving the Bossman my best, and I’m also going to do what I can to have somebody else ready to fill my shoes when the time comes.
That was also the afternoon that he told me what he told me because he wanted to remind me of several other details of his special slant on the facts of life that he had begun clueing me in on as the band bus circled down into Kentucky and back up into Ohio, rolled on across to West Virginia, and Pennsylvania on the meandering route to the one-night dance stands we were booked for beginning the weeks following the June morning on which I arrived in Cincinnati.
One thing is for damn certain, Schoolboy, he had already gone on to say during one of those early-on open-road sessions, as far as I am concerned, I for one was definitely not put here on this planet among all these possibilities just to spend my time and whatever little talent I might have going around bellyaching because some paleface somich don’t like me as much as I might think he ought to. Hell, me? If somebody don’t like me, I don’t like him right back, and if we tangle and the somich don’t do me in for good, I’m sworn to get him back if it’s the last thing I do. Me, I don’t look for no trouble. And I don’t run from it either, once I’m in it.
The Magic Keys Page 2
