“It just does. I know a cornet player, fine player, who took up playing jazz and within six weeks he split his lip right on the bandstand, blood all over his dress shirt. You don’t want to mess with that stuff.”
I wasn’t sure I believed it. “I heard some guy playing a couple of days ago. His lip seemed okay.”
“He won’t get away with it forever,” Mr. Sylvester said. “I’m telling you, Horvath, you’ll ruin yourself.”
It was clear enough that I couldn’t learn jazz from Mr. Sylvester. I had a feeling he didn’t know much about it anyway. There had to be somebody around who could teach it to me, but who? The only ones I knew were those guys at the Society Cafe. Could I get that cornet player to give me lessons? I knew there was no point in asking Pa. He’d say it was nigger music, and I shouldn’t have anything to do with it. Same with Ma. She wouldn’t call it nigger music, because she wouldn’t use words like that. She always called them colored people. But she wouldn’t like the idea of me having a lot to do with them, whatever you called them. Nor would it do any good to say it wasn’t just nigger music, for white people played it, too. They’d say a white man ought to be ashamed for lowering himself that way.
But I couldn’t see it their way. How could anything that made me feel that good lower me? I figured there had to be a whole lot of people who agreed with me about jazz. Didn’t that piano player say if I hadn’t heard of jazz I must have been hiding in a closet? Didn’t he say it was mighty hard to miss around Chicago? Ma and Pa were wrong about it, that’s all there was to it.
The problem was, I’d finally found something I could take serious, and naturally it was something Ma and Pa wouldn’t like. I should have known it would be that way. What I liked about jazz was that, even though it had planning to it, it was a different kind of planning. John and Pa wouldn’t have seen the planning, but I did. And I could see that the time was going to come when I’d have to tell Pa I wasn’t going into the plumbing business, I was going to be a musician. But I didn’t have to worry about that yet.
For the moment my problem was getting back to the Society Cafe. I didn’t see how I could sneak out of the house at midnight. That was too much of a risk.
Then it dawned on me that I didn’t have to sneak out in the middle of the night. Didn’t that cornet player say that sometimes they played until the sun came up? Maybe if I went over there first thing in the morning they’d still be playing. I knew I’d better do it soon, in case they stopped working there.
So the next morning I got up early, even before John was up. “My,” Ma said, stirring the oatmeal on the stove. “You’re an early bird this morning, Paulie.”
“John was snoring.” That was true—he had the sniffles.
“Well, the oatmeal isn’t quite ready.” There wasn’t any use in trying to get out of there without breakfast—Ma wouldn’t stand for it. So I danced around from one foot to the next until she served out my bowl. I shoved the oatmeal home, gobbled down my milk, and raced out of there.
The sun hadn’t come up over the buildings yet, and the streets were empty and quiet—a milk wagon clip-clopping along, a newspaper truck rumbling by with a couple of kids hanging on to the back, ready to leap off with the papers. As soon as I was out of sight of our apartment, I started to run towards the Society Cafe. It was a good distance, about twenty blocks, and by the time I got there I was panting and sweating some. I stood at the corner to get myself calmed down for a minute; then I walked down the street to the place.
It looked worse by daylight than it had at night, for you could see how rusty the tin roof was, and how much paint had scaled off the clapboards. But none of that mattered to me, for I could hear coming faintly through the door the thump of the drums and the chime of a cornet. I went up the steps, feeling pretty nervous, and knocked. Nothing happened. I swallowed, and knocked again, louder. For a minute more nothing happened, and then a small panel in the door slid open. I could see one eye and part of a nose. “Whadya want, kid?”
“My pa sent me. We left a wrench here when we were fixing the pipes last week.”
“You Frankie Horvath’s kid?”
“Yes.” I was surprised he knew Pa’s name. Mostly people just called him the plumber. “I might have left it in the toilet. Or in the cellar.”
The panel slid closed. I stood there waiting, wondering if he had gone away for good. Time went along, and I was just about ready to give up, when the panel slid open again. “There ain’t no wrench in the toilet.”
“It must be in the cellar, then.”
“Jesus,” he said.
“Pa’ll kill me if I don’t find it.”
“Okay,” he said. “Go on around back. I’ll let you in.”
I skipped down the alley to the cellar door, and waited some more. Finally the door opened. It was the same big guy, only this time he wasn’t wearing an overcoat, just a dark suit, and a white shirt buttoned up at the neck, no tie. Now I could hear the music more clear, for the trapdoor was up: piano, drums, banjo, cornet, and saxophone. The big man jerked his head towards the cellar. “Help yourself,” he said. “Slam that door good when you go out.” He went back up the cellar stairs, grunting through the hole in the floor and let the trapdoor slam shut.
Now what? I was happy enough just to listen to the music, and if I had the time I could have sat down there in the damp, stinky cellar all day and listened. But I had to get to school soon. I stood there for a few minutes, so as to make it seem like I was looking around for the wrench. Then I climbed up the cellar stairs and knocked on the trapdoor.
Nothing happened. I went back down the cellar stairs, found a half a brick lying on the dirt floor, went back up the stairs, and pounded on the trapdoor with the brick. Suddenly the trapdoor flung up. The big guy in the dark suit was staring down at me. “What the hell do you want now?”
“The wrench isn’t down here. I figure it must be up there somewhere.”
“Naw, it ain’t up here. I told you, I looked in the toilet.”
“Maybe I left it someplace else. Pa’s going to be awful sore if I don’t find it.”
“It ain’t like Frankie Horvath to leave tools laying around.”
It sounded like he knew Pa pretty well, which surprised me. I thought he’d be just a plumber to him. “It was my fault. That’s why he made me come find it myself.”
He jerked his head in the general direction of the barroom. “I’ll give you five minutes. Then I’m gonna run you the hell out of here.”
I climbed up out of the cellar and stood up behind the bar, looking across the room to the band. There was hardly anybody in the joint—one couple dancing, another couple sitting at a table, and three men and a woman at another table, laughing. For a minute I stood there, just listening to the music, trying to figure out how they got that rocking feeling, that bounce or whatever you called it. I noticed that they had a different pianist from the one that was there before—a white guy.
I didn’t have much time. I started to go around the bar, when suddenly the music stopped without any warning. In the kind of music we played at Hull House—marches, overtures, medleys of folk songs—you could tell when the end was coming. But this stuff didn’t give you any warning; it just stopped.
The fellas in the band stood there by the piano for a minute. Then the cornet player laid his horn on top of the piano, and strolled towards the door with the saxophone player.
I slipped back down the cellar stairs, raced out of the cellar, slammed the door tight and ran around to the street. The two musicians were standing on the sidewalk in front of the place, shivering a little in the cold morning air. It was around seven-thirty, and every once in a while they blinked, like they weren’t used to daylight. I stood a few feet away, looking at them, and trying to figure out what to say to them. Finally the cornetist noticed me. “Hello, kid,” he said. “What the hell are you doing around here this time of day?”
“I came over to hear you play.”
He cocked his head sid
eways. “You the kid with the plumber?”
“Yeah, that was me.”
The saxophone wasn’t paying any attention to me.
“Tommy, we got to do something about that damn banjo player. He plays like he was driving nails. He can’t swing a lick.”
Under my breath I said, “Tommy” just to try it out.
“He’s all right,” Tommy said. “He’s doing the best he can.”
“That’s the trouble,” the saxophone said. “If he wasn’t doing the best he could we could improve him. But as it is, we can’t.”
“He thinks he’s doing all right,” Tommy said. “I haven’t got the heart to say nothing to him.”
I would have liked to have stood there awhile, just listening to them talk. It was like they had a secret club that maybe I could get into. But they were bound to go back inside pretty soon. I walked closer. “Could I ask you something?”
The saxophone put on a kind of disgusted look, but Tommy said, “Sure, kid.”
“I play cornet in the Hull House band. How could I learn to play like you do?”
“You’re at Hull House? Benny Goodman came out of there. And Art Hodes. How long you been at Hull House?”
I heard of both of those guys. Benny Goodman was supposed to be some kind of genius. He wasn’t more than a couple of years older than me, but already he was playing professionally and making a pile of dough. Art Hodes was a piano player. He was older and played in a dance band they had at Hull House called the Marionettes. “I started there in the summer,” I said.
“That’s the first you played cornet?”
I didn’t want to seem like too much of a beginner. “I studied piano for a while, too.”
“It’s plain to see the kid’s a boy genius,” the saxophone said. He flapped his arms to warm up. “We better go in, Tommy, before Herbie has kittens.”
“We got a couple of minutes,” Tommy said. “We played six sets already. What does Herbie want, for God’s sake?”
“Listen,” I said quickly, looking at Tommy. “I wonder if you could give me lessons.” I didn’t have any idea how I would pay him.
Tommy laughed. “That ain’t exactly my line. I don’t know how I do it myself. You got to get a feeling for it.”
“Come on, Tommy, let’s go in,” the saxophone said. “I’m freezing out here.”
“Maybe you could just show me stuff.”
“He told you no once,” the saxophone said. “Come on, Tommy.”
“You’re real eager, ain’t you, kid. What’s your name?”
“Paulie Horvath. My Pa’s Frankie Horvath.”
He reached into his hip pocket, took out a worn-out wallet, and poked around inside of it. “Here,” he said finally. He handed me a dirty card that had been bent in half at least once and straightened out. “You might catch me at home around five or six sometime. We got to go back on.”
They turned and went on back up the steps to the Society Cafe. I stood there looking at the card in my hand:
TOMMY HURD AND HIS JOYMAKERS. MUSIC FOR ALL OCCASIONS.
It felt like somebody had given me a key to a room where there was a store of gold and jewels, if only I could get to that door. Tommy’s address was out in the near South Side somewhere. It’d be a hike to get down there, but I could walk it.
THE NEXT MORNING I got up late as usual, flung on my clothes, and raced out to the kitchen, where my oatmeal in my yellow bowl was on the kitchen table, stone cold, with a crust on top. I dumped some cream and sugar on it, stirred it around to mix the crust in, and gulped it down.
Ma came in. “Paulie, that shirt’s filthy. Take it off this instant.” I’d got dirt on it from prowling around in that barroom cellar.
“I’m late, Ma.”
“You’re not going to school in that shirt. What’ll your teachers think?” And while I was sitting there gulping away at my oatmeal, she began to unbutton it down my front.
“I’ll do it, Ma,” I said. I jumped up from the table, flung off the shirt, ran into our room to grab another shirt, put on my jacket, and tore out of there. And it wasn’t until I was standing by my desk in my homeroom mumbling the Pledge of Allegiance that I remembered that Tommy Hurd’s bent card was in that shirt pocket.
I ran all the way home after school. Ma was standing over the ironing board in the kitchen. Beside her was her clothes basket, and on the kitchen table a stack of neatly folded stuff she’d ironed. My shirt was there in the stack. I pulled it out, and stuck my hand in the breast pocket.
Ma was watching me. “I threw it away, Paulie.”
“Ma?”
“Where did you get it?”
To be honest, I didn’t believe in lying. If you felt a certain way, why shouldn’t you be honest about it? I mean, no matter what anybody said, you ought to be able to tell the truth. But sometimes you couldn’t, that was plain. “Some kid at Hull House gave it to me.”
“It’s some sort of cheap jazz band, isn’t it?”
“Ma, there’s nothing wrong with jazz.”
“What were you planning to do?”
“I figured I might take lessons from him.”
“You’re already taking from Mr. Sylvester,” she said. “That’s plenty. You’ve got your schoolwork to consider.”
“Where did you throw it? I’m going to find it.”
“I tore it up and flushed it down the toilet.”
“Ma,” I shouted. “It was mine.”
“Paulie, it’s one thing to play in the Hull House band, where they’ve got proper supervision. But I’m not having you getting mixed up with a lot of low-class jazz musicians. That’s flat.”
But it didn’t matter what she said—I was going to get involved with a lot of low-class jazz musicians. I hated going against her. Me and Ma usually got on pretty good, for she made allowances about me not being like everybody else, which Pa didn’t. But she could only make allowances so far, and then the fringed lampshades got in the way. It made me sad to think that we had to disagree. I went around feeling disloyal, like I’d broken my word to her, and sometimes when she started to joke around with me, I felt bad, and couldn’t get into it the way I used to. But what could I do about it?
Two days later I was sitting on my bed in our room, puffing away at the cornet, trying to get that rocking feeling that Tommy Hurd put into his music. John was sitting at the table, doing his homework. Suddenly he raised up his head. “Shut up a minute, Paulie, I want to hear.”
“What?”
“Shhhh.” We sat quiet. Somebody was talking in a big, heavy voice.
“Come on outside, Frankie. We got to have a little chat.” There was something familiar about the voice, but I couldn’t catch it.
Pa’s voice came through the bedroom door. “We can chat here, Herbie.” Herbie. Was it that big guy from the Society Cafe?
“I got a couple of things I wouldn’t want to say in front of your old lady. You better come out with us.”
Then Ma’s voice came. “What’s it about, Frank?”
“I don’t know. It’s some kind of mistake. I’ll go straighten it out.”
“Let’s hope it’s some kind of mistake, Frankie,” Herbie said.
For a minute there was nothing, and then we heard the front door shut. The next minute our bedroom door opened and Ma put her head in. “Pa had to go out on business,” she said. “Supper’ll be a little late. You boys just go on with what you’re doing.” She shut the door.
I sat there holding the cornet on my lap, feeling mighty worried. Did it have anything to do with me? Did he come over to tell Pa I was over there? “What do you think it is, John? Why wouldn’t he talk with Pa in the apartment?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe they just had to talk to Pa about something.”
It wasn’t about nothing—that much I knew. It was about something, and it scared me. I didn’t feel like playing, so I picked up John’s copy of The Wampus Cat and lay on the bed trying to read. But I couldn’t
concentrate on reading, either, so I just lay there, worrying, and listening to John’s pen scratch along the paper as he worked on his history report.
Finally we heard the apartment door open. John stopped scratching. We heard Ma say, “Frank, what did they do to you? Are you all right?”
“I’m all right. They just crowded me a little.”
“What was it all about?”
“That’s just what I’m going to find out.”
It was me. I sat up on the bed listening to his footsteps come closer. The door swung open. Pa stood there, looking at me. His eye was swollen and there was a scratch down his cheek.
Suddenly I wished I’d planned things out a little more. It was one thing to sneak off to the Society Cafe to hear those guys play. It was another thing to get Pa smacked around for it. I felt mighty sick in the pit of my stomach. I wished I hadn’t done it. I wished I’d thought about it more before I ran over there. But it was too late for wishing.
“John,” Pa said without taking his eyes off me, “Go somewhere else. I got to talk to Paulie.” He went on looking at me. “Close the door behind you.”
“Pa—” But I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“What was you doing in that joint the other morning?”
I was plenty scared. “I wasn’t doing anything wrong, Pa.”
“That’s for me to decide. What was you doing there? You told them I sent you to find a wrench. I never sent you there.”
I hung my head down. “I went to hear those guys play,” I whispered.
“Look at me.” I put my head up. “What the hell did you need to hear them for? You got a whole band of your own over at Hull House.”
“It isn’t the same. It’s a different kind of music.”
“I know what it is, Paulie. It’s that nigger music.”
“Those guys are white,” I said.
“That don’t make no difference. It makes me sick to see all these white people running after that nigger music. I don’t want you to have anything to do with it. And if I ever hear of you going anywheres near that joint again I’m going to beat you within an inch of your life.” Then before I knew it, he whacked me good and hard across my face with the back of his hand. It snapped my head back and for a moment I went blank. I felt myself sway, but I didn’t fall. “That’s just to remind you I’m serious,” he said. He turned and walked out of the room.
The Jazz Kid Page 3
