Well now, seeing as how y’all already been through Christmas and New Year’s up in this part of the country, Royal Highness said as Cherry Lee went back to the kitchen to bring in the coffee to go with the dessert, I’m satisfied that you got everything squared away in the chitlins, hogmaw, and trotters department, including all the trimmings. After all, young soldier, you were in that band long enough to pick and choose chitlin joints and barbecue pits from border to border and coast to coast. So I’m sure that old Joe States personally saw to it that you got checked out on the choice of trimmings in New York.
And when I said, Including a little ceremonial taste of moon-shine as well as the big uptown, up north thing of champagne, he said, Hey, what you talking about, young soldier, whatyoutalkingabout?
It was a very fine old-time down-home dinner table get-together like some of the very special ones for very special out-of-town company that you remember from childhood. And as Royal Highness and Stewmeat Anderson and I headed back to the drawing room to settle down and puff on the extra-special Cuban cigars that Royal Highness would choose for us from his antique buccaneer humidor while Cherry Lee took Eunice on a tour of the apartment, the topic was the band again. And when Cherry Lee and Eunice rejoined us, I had been brought up-to-date on the band’s current tour, and Royal Highness went on to say again what he had said early on about how pleased he was over the fact that I had decided to spend the time I had spent with the band between graduating from college and going on to graduate school.
That’s something you’ll never regret you decided to do, young soldier, he said. Then as he turned to Eunice he said what he said about having very special high hopes for me not because he thought I had all of the earmarks of a young man on his way to fame and fortune in the usual everyday sense of becoming a widely publicized celebrity with a big income and lots of expensive possessions, but because my earmarks were those of a young man who just might someday be able to fulfill the ambition I finally settled on. Whatever it was, he said. And that was when he also said what he said about how it was perfectly normal for some people to make up their minds about their line of work way back in early childhood and about how some can remember exactly when, where, and why they did and others can’t remember when they had not already done so. And then he said what he said about how it was also perfectly normal for some others, some very special ones, to spend a lot of time still trying to get themselves together and on to some definite course even after their formal schooling was well into the postgraduate level because they were the ones who saw themselves as having so many possibilities to pick and choose among.
Anyway, he said, as he stroked Eunice’s hand, what I’m talking about is what I saw when this one turned up here holding down old Shag Phillips’s job like that, mainly just because he needed a temporary gig for the summer after graduation from college. When the Bossman brought him up here, the earmarks I saw belonged to a young fellow with as wide a range of eligibility and potential as I’ve ever come across. And I’ve covered some territory, Miss Lady.
Which was the very point he came back to at the end of the visit as we stood up to shake hands and head for the door. As he gave her his ceremonial four, one for each cheek, kisses, he said, I hope I didn’t say anything to give you any notion that I think you didn’t already know what you were letting yourself in for when you hooked up with my young soldier here. I just want to let you know what kind of impression he made on me and the Bossman and all them old thugs in the band, too. So I’ll just say this. All of us think that maybe what he’s still trying to figure out is how to do something that none of us even know we need him to try to be the one to try to do for us.
Then as we headed for the elevator he said, Now that you’ve been up here and seen us for yourself, don’t be no stranger.
X
Taft Edison was the one who made sure that I was alert to the so-called revolutionary political recruitment operating procedures that you were likely to encounter in New York City in those days. But it was through Roland Beasley that I became more sensitive to New York City variations on old confidence games that he pointed out as having been a universal element of city life ever since the first trading and business settlements came into being and the first bargains and markdown sales were offered and special escort and guide services part-time or full-time became available for hire or for free.
Not that Roland Beasley thought that I needed any of the usual fundamental orientation to big-city life as such. After all, when he met me in Paris I was on my own after having been in most of the biggest cities in the United States. And as for my being a down-home boy, the fact that I was also a college boy who had worked with the band that I had worked with in order to go on to graduate school was not likely to be lost on him either, not to mention the fact that not a few of the most notorious big-city slickers in just about every region of the nation were once down-home boys.
I think Taft Edison may have assumed that the time I had spent in the band with Joe States looking after me had pretty much taken care of the big-city initiation part of my postgraduate orientation. But I also think that he may have felt that I probably did not know very much about political recruitment because the band never stayed in any one town long enough for any revolutionary political recruiters to make any effective follow-up on whatever may have been set up by any initial contact. And I also think that Taft Edison may have felt that I was a more attractive possibility to political recruiters because I was a graduate student than I had been when I was a musician who was not a headliner with a lot of worshipful fans. As a graduate student I was a potential revolutionary intellectual technician who could be especially useful in recruiting and/or indoctrinating the so-called masses in preparation for the rebellion that would overthrow the status quo.
But he actually told me what he told me when he told me to be me on immediate alert mainly because of what was happening to him, and which he thought might involve me simply because I was beginning to be in regular contact with him. Yet the way he said it also let you know that he did not expect you to be alarmed. It was as if he took it for granted that you would take it as yet another kind of thistle in the briar patch.
Which in effect was also what Roland Beasley expected of me when he explained what he explained to me about confidence games of the local city slickers as a routine part of my orientation as a newcomer settling down in New York for an extended or maybe permanent residency. But unlike Taft Edison, who was outraged by what struck him as the self-righteous gamesmanship of what he called revolutionary recruiters out to kidnap your mind, Roland Beasley almost always sounded as if he were sharing his curiosity about something rather than warning you about it.
He never sounded as if he thought you needed to be warned. It was always as if what he said about some example of the confidence game as he knew it was something that amused him and also something that you could probably match with some anecdote of your own. And whenever you did, he would say, Hey, old buddy, that’s my good buddy. Man, you’re as up with this stuff as old Rolo.
Even when he started breaking it all down in terms of variations on basic game patterns, it was still as if he were primarily concerned with your appreciation of his anecdotes, and it all came across as if it were more of a hobby, like cowboy and gangster movies and sea stories, than as a matter of serious concern.
But as is often the case with many people and their hobbies, his insights on procedures were no less precise or comprehensive for not being professional, and one day after we had been going to museums and galleries and bookstores together for several weeks after my first visit to his studio, we stopped in at Gotham Book Mart, and while I was browsing the shelves labeled We Moderns, he bought a book the clerk had been holding for him, and when we came back outside he handed it to me and said, Hey, man, I know you already have a good grip on this jive because you had some basic anthropology in college, so you know this stuff is not just a matter of classic pattern and variation, this stuff probably goes
all the way back to primitive rituals of those early days when people first started using words to make deals with. Because I’m pretty damn sure that jiving and conniving are just about as old as language itself. Hell, even older. After all, there was a lot of bullshit gesticulating and face-making before they got around to using words.
And that was when he said, Anyway, this is something you might find very interesting when you can spare the time away from your academic assignments. I think you just might find this kind of journalistic writing amounts to something pretty close to anthropology.
It turned out to be as evocative of certain aspects of American city life during the first forty years of the twentieth century as such old Herbert Asbury books as Gangs of New York, Ye Old Fire Laddies, The Barbary Coast, The French Quarter, and The Gem of the Prairie (Chicago). But its specific focus was on the dynamics of the swindling racket known as the confidence game or the big con, which it described as being operated by one or more grifters, who choose and set up the prospective victim or mark, who is led to the store, which is operated by the often informally recruited but expertly coordinated mob, who set him up for the kill by allowing him to make an impressive amount of money by some means the mark knows is crooked. This gives the mark confidence and sets him up for the kill, which is the amount of money the mark is willing to risk on a sure but illegal bet or investment. The grifter then plays the mark against the store, which is immediately raided by the other members of the mob disguised as law-enforcement officers. This allows the grifter to brush off the mark by spiriting him away by pretending to be as vulnerable to the arrest as he is. The objective of the confidence game is not simply to take money from the mark but also to do so without allowing him to catch on to the fact that he has been taken.
Indeed, the book also makes much of the fact that the mark is not supposed to realize that he has been duped and thus lose confidence in himself. The very fact that his confidence remains high is what leaves him vulnerable for other grifters! Much is also made of the fact that many people become ideal marks who are roped, taken, and brushed off time and again because they have come to believe that the high social status they enjoy because of the money they inherited or married into is a result of some inherent special superiority. His unshakable confidence in his own keen business judgment is precisely what leads him to get roped into one con game after another.
I started reading it on the way home, and when we got together about ten days later I had checked back through Suckers Progress and The Gem of the Prairie, which was one of Joe States’s favorite books on the subject. He had given me a copy of it that he had picked up in the Pickwick Bookstore in Hollywood several days after the visit to Ross Peterkin’s apartment after I said what I said about the night I spent with Fay Morgan in Bel Air following the first Beverly Hills party I went to with them after the band opened at the Palladium. And the first thing I said was, Hey, man, anthropological is what it adds up to, all right. But come on now, man, this stuff is not only loaded with ritual patterns and variations. It is also just as full of visual patterns and variations. So don’t tell me you haven’t been noodling and doodling and vamping and riffing at least some sketches for some uptown takes and takeoffs on not only the likes of Daumier, Goya, and Hogarth. But what about Brueghel’s Revelers and some uptown takeoffs on Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Delights?
I said, Man, ain’t no telling what some Beasley riffs could add up to. I said, Man, how about a series or sequence of From Down-Home to Uptown Sketches, the Natural History of a Hipster, or, say, The Shady Side of the Stem (as in mainstem), or Slapping Seventh Avenue with the Sole of My Shoe, or The Rounder, or The Sidewalk Pounder ? Man, I could go on and on and so could you. Me, I’m just running on and on about something I just thought of.
And he said, Hey, but you’re on to something, man. And then he said, Did old Taft tell you that I took classes with George Grosz at the Art Students’ League? And I said, Ecce homo. And he said, The same. And then said, I was very much into political and social cartoons at that time. But when I went to study with him, he turned out to be the one who really put me on to the fundamentals of serious craftsmanship, and he inspired me to study the world history of art and learn from the great masterpieces.
So like I said, he said, You’re on to something, my man. Then he threw a playful left jab and clinched me and on the break he said, So didn’t you tell me that old Joe States and the Bossman’s wrecking crew called you Schoolboy? Well, that means that they really appreciated what you are really about, and just to show you that I do, too, I’m herewith designating you Chief Literary Consultant. But no kidding, my man, as soon as we got together in Paris, I realized that there were a million things I’d like to talk to you about.
In Paris he had told me that his studio was on 125th Street in Harlem, in the same building as the Apollo Theatre. But when he had answered the phone number that Taft Edison had given me, he said he had moved all the way down to Canal Street near Sixth Avenue, on the way to Chinatown. He had invited me to come down as soon as I could spare the time. But my first and only visit so far had been a very brief pop-in call one afternoon.
Not long after that was the first of the three times that he had stopped by the library to treat me to a snack on the way to the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, and the galleries on Fifty-seventh Street and along Madison Avenue. This was before the Guggenheim was built, and the Whitney at that time was still down on Eighth Street between MacDougal and Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village, near where most of the small galleries and studios were located in those days.
On my first trip down to the studio on Canal Street there had been only enough time for me to see the framed paintings, drawings, and sketches of his that were hanging on the walls, along with the framed works of other New York painters who were mostly close personal friends of his. And there were also a few of his framed and unframed and perhaps not quite finished canvases on the floor leaning against the wall, against a chair here and there and the worktable near the easel.
But when I went back the second time, he had brought out a number of framed and unframed but finished pieces from his storage area, and there were also several sketchbooks and folders of drawings and watercolors on the worktable. And when he said what he said about giving me some idea and concrete evidence of what he had been up to and what he was about, I said, It does, man, it does.
And I was impressed but not really surprised because by that time, his responses to what I had gone with him to see in the galleries and museums had given me what turned out to be a very reliable impression of his general aesthetic and intellectual orientation and also what his special individual emphasis was and how it fit into the comprehensive context of the role of art in human consciousness. In fact, at the time of that second visit I had already begun to think of him as someone who just might become my very special visual arts cut-buddy, as Taft Edison was becoming my literary cut-buddy, as my now faraway best of all possible roommates had become during my freshman and sophomore years in college.
Which is why when he said what he said about wanting me to give him my literary response to what he had done, was doing, and would be doing, I said, If you say so, man. Because by that time I also realized that he was as enthusiastic about popping into bookstores and browsing through the literary section with me as I always was about going to exhibitions with him whenever I could spare the time away from my academic assignments.
Man, he said, when I looked at my watch and stood up because it was time to go, I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to what we are going to be doing about all this stuff. Man, I can’t get over it. Man, see now that’s that goddamn Paris for you and this goddamn New York. Where the hell else am I going to find just the right kind of down-home cat I didn’t even know I was supposed to be looking for?
And that is when I said what I said about being like the man in the frame shop. And he said, The literary man matting and framing for the exhibition. That’s i
t, man, that’s it. You already got it. The man in the frame shop is the one who is most immediately involved with how I want this stuff seen. The man in the frame shop. Hey, that’s pretty good. That’s damn good. Context, man. But I said, Not just in the literary sense of mythological or historical context. I said, That, too, but we’re also talking about a frame that functions like the stage proscenium when the curtain opens. It makes the make-believe believable and at the same time it reminds you that it is all also a matter of artifice.
You got it, man, he said, you got it. Then he said, Man, that goddamn Paris. Man, this goddamn New York. This goddamn United States. We got to get with it, man. What does it all mean? What are we going to do? He said, Get with it, man. Me, I’m all about the figure in the fabric, and I think of you as being about the angle of vision, the relativity and ambiguity of it all. My man with the four dimensions of space which include Proust’s dimension of time. Plus metaphor and syncopation!
XI
Two nights before the band came back into town that next time, Joe States called from Richmond to give me the name and address of the rehearsal studio they were going to be using until they moved into the recording studio I remembered from the last time. He sounded as fine as usual, and when I said so he said what he always said, and I could see his eyes and his lips and the tilt of his head and the angle of his neck, and the sound of his voice made me feel the way it always made me feel.
Me and you, Schoolboy, me and you. Get to me fast. And this time I’m also speaking for the Bossman, too. I just told him I was on my way to make this call when I waved to him over that crowd around him in his dressing room, and he said for me to tell you that he hoped the two of you could work out a little one-on-one checkup this time around. Like I keep telling you, Schoolboy, you got yourself another alma mater, of which he’s the papa.
The Magic Keys Page 8
