I hung my head down. I felt just sunk. All that work for nothing. The whole thing had been a waste. I looked up at him. “How long will it take?”
“Six months and we’ll have you in some kind of shape.”
“Six months?” It sounded like forever.
He laughed. “You’ll live,” he said. “You’ll come out ahead in the end. We’ll give you a nice firm embouchure, good intonation, some range without all that pressure.”
There was no way around it. I could see that he was right. My lips had a nice red ring around them all the time. Either I had to quit or do what he told me to do. Oh, but it was awful. At first he had me playing nothing but long tones: start down at the bottom on F-sharp and work my way up, holding each note out until I ran out of breath, all the while trying to keep the pitch centered. I was so used to digging the mouthpiece into my lip, the first couple of days without pressure I could hardly get a tone out. But it began to come along, and pretty soon I could see some progress. Before, when I hit a note, it was likely to be a little off at the first instant—flat or sharp or rough or choked—until I pulled it to where it was supposed to be. The ordinary person wouldn’t notice exactly what was wrong, but they’d know it was some kid playing. Now I was beginning to hit the notes right on the nose. Seeing some progress cheered me up a good deal, for I knew that in the long run I was going to be way ahead of the other kids in the band. I knew what they were doing wrong, and I wasn’t doing it anymore.
Of course it meant I had to give up playing jazz for a while. I’d just ruin myself all over again if I went back to “Farewell Blues,” and there wasn’t any point in going out to look for Tommy Hurd; I couldn’t play for him. All I could do was be patient and slog away every day: it’d come, Mr. Sylvester said.
In the meantime, I couldn’t play in the band. The big joke about that was at Thanksgiving they marched in a parade, and of course I was out of it and didn’t get to wear a uniform. But by Christmastime I’d got enough of a lip worked up so I could get back into the band on third cornet, where I wouldn’t have a lot of high notes. I played the Hull House Christmas concert, and finally got to put on one of those fancy uniforms. It didn’t mean anything to me anymore. The way I felt about music, what difference did it make what I was wearing when I played it? I could be in my pajamas for all it mattered.
So the weeks went along. Day by day I built my lip up. Mr. Sylvester was right: I just had to be patient and keep after it. I was hitting the notes nice and clean, with a full sound, and I could see the time would come when I’d make high C’s without any trouble.
In March my birthday came, and I turned thirteen. What I wanted for my birthday was a Harmon mute, but there wasn’t any chance I’d get one, for Ma believed in practical presents. I got a winter coat and a winter hat with earflaps, even though winter was almost over; winter clothes were on sale that time of year, and Ma got the coat a little big, so I could grow into it. We had cake and ice cream and when they sang “Happy Birthday” to me I got out my cornet and played it along with them.
Pa gave me a couple of days to get used to being thirteen and then over supper he sprung it on me. “Paulie’s thirteen. It’s time he done something useful around here.”
“Did,” Ma said.
“Done or did, so long as he does it. I’m going to start him off working with me regular.”
“I don’t want Paulie taking time away from school,” Ma said. “He mustn’t get left back.”
“What time off school?” Pa said. “He hasn’t done a lick of homework for weeks that I saw. He spent all his time playing that damn cornet.”
“I did some homework.”
“Frank, you got to admit that Paulie’s worked hard at his music. He’s stuck to it.”
“That’s the problem. It’s just like Paulie to stick at something you can’t make a living at. If I knew he was going to stick at it I wouldn’t of let him start in the first place. I figured it’d be like everything else he put his hand to—here today and gone tomorrow.”
The whole thing was making me mighty nervous. He’d make me work with him Saturdays for sure. What if he made me work after school, too? My embouchure was coming along real good: I couldn’t quit now. I wished I could persuade them. “You can make a living being a musician,” I said. “Did you ever hear of this kid Benny Goodman? He was at Hull House last year. He’s making big money and he’s only fourteen or something.”
Pa rapped his knuckles on the table. “Paulie, I don’t want to hear no more about being a musician.”
“Any more,” Ma said.
“Any more, no more. John started working with me when he was twelve. He kept up his schoolwork good, too.”
The upshot of it was that on Saturday morning Pa rousted me out of bed at six-thirty, and by seven me and him and John were on the streetcar with the toolboxes headed out to the West Side. “What kind of a place is it, Pa?”
Pa looked around at the people on the streetcar. Then he said, “You’ll see soon enough.”
We got out there. It was a neighborhood mostly of two-story brick houses. Smack in the middle of the block was a row of stores, and upstairs over them a dance hall. Lettered along the windows was PEACOCK BALLROOM. We walked along, and then when we were about a hundred feet from the place, Pa stopped. He bent forward, so as to get his face close to mine. “Now, Paulie,” he said in a low voice. “This here is another one of Herbie Aronowitz’s joints. I don’t want you getting into no foolishness like you did before. You understand, son?”
“Pa, is Herbie a gang—”
Before I could finish Pa had reached out and given me a shake. “That’s the exact thing I meant. You go in there, you do your job, you don’t see nothing, and you don’t talk about nothing but the Cubs.” He gave me a steady look and squeezed my shoulder a little. “You got me, son?”
“Yes, Pa.”
I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of Pa working for a gangster. Some people admired gangsters and would boast about how they knew Al Capone’s second cousin, or had come along two days after some gangster got machine-gunned and saw the red spot where he’d bled to death on the sidewalk. And I could see how you could get excited by getting to know one. But there was something about them I didn’t like—that kind of badness to them, blood and death and slamming people around because they didn’t like your face. Of course, all I really knew about gangsters was what it said in the newspapers: how they beat up some old Chink laundryman because he didn’t pay protection money, or got into a gang war over control of the gambling joints. According to the papers, the gangsters ran Chicago, and the government was in cahoots with them. Pa always said you couldn’t believe anything you read in the papers, but I wasn’t so sure. Some of it had to be right, and it seemed clear enough to me that gangsters weren’t very nice in general. So why would Pa want to have anything to do with them? I wished I understood it. I figured I’d ask John when I got a chance.
But I couldn’t ask anything then. We marched on up the street, went through a door with PEACOCK BALLROOM lettered on it in swirly gold letters that had got worn and scratched, and up a flight of stairs to the dance hall. There was a bandstand down at one end of the room and a bar at the other, and along the walls small tables and wire chairs. On the bandstand there was an old upright piano, and on the wall behind the piano a banner saying
TOMMY HURD AND HIS JOYMAKERS
Just to see that sign set my heart thumping. Tommy had been on my mind so much for so long I wasn’t sure he was real anymore, that the whole thing at the Society Cafe had really happened. But here he was, real again at last.
When I thought about it, though, I could see it wasn’t awful surprising for me to run into him again. Pa worked for Herbie Aronowitz and so did Tommy—why wouldn’t we bump into each other from time to time? The big question was whether I would get a chance to talk to him.
Did Pa remember that Tommy was the guy from the Society Cafe? Probably he wouldn’t; it wasn’t like Pa to stick something in
his mind that didn’t have to do with work and rising up in the world. And if Tommy came in while we were there, what would Pa say if I went over and talked to him?
But I couldn’t think about it then, for we had work to do. They were putting in tap beer, and our job was to run pipes up from the cellar where they kept the beer kegs. Pa sent John down to the cellar, and after that it was, “Paulie, hand me that there pipe wrench.” “Paulie, see if you can find a one-inch T in the box.” “Paulie, for God’s sake hold the damn pipe steady.” Of course, being as it was Prohibition, it was illegal to sell beer. And it crossed my mind that maybe it was illegal to put in a tap set-up, too. It made me feel kind of funny that Pa might be breaking the law.
Anyway, I was mainly thinking about whether I’d run across Tommy Hurd. “Pa, what time do you figure we’ll get finished this afternoon?” He had a carpenter’s pencil in his mouth. “We got to be out of here by five. They open up at six.”
There was the answer: they didn’t want plumbers working in there when the band was playing and the customers dancing. Still, maybe Tommy’d come in early to warm up. But the day went on, and by four o’clock we’d got the job pretty much done. Pa told me to find a broom and sweep up where we’d been drilling and sawing. There was a little kitchen behind the bar, where an old man with big yellow teeth like a horse was making sandwiches. “You got a broom anywhere?” I asked.
He pointed over his shoulder with the bread knife. “In that there closet, sonny.”
I opened the closet door. It was filled with junk— shelves along the back heaped up with cans of nails, rolls of string, boxes of candles, a couple of oil lamps, and a dustpan. Hanging from a hook was a dirty apron. A mop bucket sat on the floor and a couple of brooms leaned up against the shelves. I grabbed the dustpan. A pad of notepaper came up with it and dropped to the floor. I picked it up and started to put it back on the shelf, when suddenly an idea came into my mind. It wasn’t an idea Pa would like very much, but I was getting to the place where I didn’t much care what he thought. I ripped a sheet of paper off the pad, and stuck it in my back pocket. Then I snatched up the broom and dustpan, went back out into the barroom and began to sweep up.
Pa was crouched down behind the bar with the flashlight, checking the new pipe joints for leaks. I swept my way over to the toolbox, knelt down like I was sweeping stuff into the dustpan, and rambled around in the tools until I found a carpenter’s pencil. I put the sheet of notepaper on the floor, and wrote:
Dear Tommy Hurd,
I lost your card. Please send me your address again so I can take cornet from you.
Your pal,
Paulie Horvath. The plumber’s boy. 1635 West Seventeenth Street.
I folded the paper, stood up, picked up the broom and swept my way across the ballroom to the bandstand. When I got there I looked back. Pa was out of sight down behind the bar. I slipped up onto the bandstand and eased the front of the piano open, trying not to make any noise. When I’d got it lifted up about a foot I gently pushed down middle C, a note any pianist was bound to play almost as soon as he sat down, just enough to raise the hammer. That told me which were the C strings. I stuck the note in between two of the strings: when the pianist hit middle C he’d get nothing but a dead clunk. He was bound to open the piano to see what the trouble was. I pushed the piano closed again, but of course my hand slipped and half an octave fired off like a gong. Pa popped up from behind the bar.
“What’re you doing with that piano, Paulie?”
“There was some sawdust on the keys, Pa. I was just dusting it off.”
“Never mind about that. Go get John and let’s get out of here.”
A COUPLE OF days went by, and then a week, and I didn’t hear anything from Tommy Hurd. It was hard to know what might have happened. Maybe he didn’t get the note; maybe the piano player just pulled it out of the strings and threw it away without looking at it. I wished I’d written something on the outside of it, like Please don’t throw away, or something. Or maybe Tommy didn’t want to be bothered with teaching some kid in the first place. But if that was so, why did he give me the card? Or maybe Herbie got into it and told Tommy not to have anything to do with me. I didn’t know what had happened, but I didn’t hear anything from Tommy.
By this time my lip had come along good enough so I was back to playing with that Rhythm Kings record. I knew my instrument a whole lot better than I’d done before, and it was a lot easier for me to pick up from the record what that cornet player was doing. I could see that it was just like everything else; if I kept after it, copying stuff off records would get easier and easier. But I only had that one jazz record and didn’t know how I was ever going to get any more. I couldn’t borrow from John again—there wasn’t any hope of that. I figured that if I went on working with Pa on plumbing jobs, sooner or later he’d ease up on docking my allowance and give me a little money here and there. But knowing Pa, he wasn’t going to be in any rush about it.
Then, a couple of weeks after I’d left that note in the piano, Pa had to work late. He came in around eight. Ma fixed him his supper and he sat down to it. When he’d got it shoveled home he called me out of our room where I was practicing the Arban book, and told me to sit down opposite him at the table. Ma was at the sink, washing Pa’s supper dishes.
“Why am I in trouble now, Pa?” I said.
“I don’t know as you are,” he said. “I was back there at that dance hall again. The band was playing and when they took a break one of those fellas came over to me.”
“Tommy Hurd? Was it Tommy?”
Pa reached into his shirt pocket, took out a card and looked at it. “That’s what it says here.” He put the card back in the shirt pocket. “He said you left a note for him, but he didn’t get around to answering it.” He leaned back and looked at me. “What was you doing, writing notes to musicians?”
Ma turned around from the sink. “Paulie, that’s not the same one who gave you his card before?”
Why did they have to be so against the only thing I ever really wanted? It made me feel hopeless. Wasn’t there any way to convince them? “I only wanted to take lessons from him. Don’t you want me to get better?”
“I don’t want you playing that cheap jazz,” Ma said.
There just had to be something I could say to convince them. “Jazz is very big nowadays. If I got good enough I could make a lot of dough.”
That caught Pa’s attention. “What kind of money you talking about?”
“The guys over at Hull House say this kid Benny Goodman makes a hundred dollars a week.”
“I don’t believe it,” Pa said. “Who’d be crazy enough to pay a kid that kind of dough to play music?”
“That’s what everybody over at Hull House says.” To be honest, it was hard for me to believe, too, but everybody said it.
Pa took the card out of his pocket and tapped it on his thumbnail. “How come you need lessons from this guy? You’re already getting free lessons over at Hull House.”
Maybe I had a chance to convince Pa. “That’s band music. You can’t make any money from band music. You got to play for dances. That’s where the big money is. That’s what I got to learn.”
Pa tapped the card on his thumbnail again. “I don’t know. I’m suspicious of it. It don’t make any sense to me that you could make that kind of dough out of music.”
“Frank, I don’t want any child of mine working in some low-class dive.”
“If I promised not to play in any dives? If I just played tea dances and excursion boats?”
“I got to think about it, Paulie,” Pa said. He put the card back in his shirt pocket again. He was interested. Pa was always telling us how he had to drop out of school at twelve and go to work. He knew the value of a dollar. He wanted us to get our education, that was true; it was helpful in rising up in the world. But he said he’d never had much schooling and couldn’t see where it had hurt him much. Pa wasn’t as worried about low-class dives as Ma was; he’d come u
p rough.
But it wasn’t anything I could count on. He might decide to let me take lessons from Tommy, but it was more likely he wouldn’t. Ma was bound to be against it. She was pleased I’d stuck to my music, but there wasn’t any hope that she’d let me go into jazz if she could help it.
Then Pa said he was tired and had to get up early. He took off his shirt, hung it over his chair, and began to wash up at the kitchen sink. Ma took down her sewing basket from the shelf and went out into the living room. I had just about one minute to slip that card out of Pa’s shirt pocket, before he’d finish washing, and take the shirt into their bedroom with him. It was mighty scary to think of taking something out of Pa’s pocket, even though I wasn’t going to steal it, just look at it. I’d never done anything like it before.
But what else could I do? I might never get a chance like this again. I snatched the card out of Pa’s shirt, took a look at it, and dropped it back into his pocket again. Then I went into our room and scribbled Tommy’s address down on a piece of paper. For a minute I stood there looking down at that address. What would it be like to have parents who liked jazz, who would let me study with Tommy Hurd, and give me New Orleans Rhythm Kings records for my birthday? I figured I’d never know.
The next day I took my cornet and slipped out of the house while Ma was out shopping. It was a good long walk down to where Tommy Hurd lived. I went along as brisk as I could. I hoped people would notice me going along with the cornet. I hoped they were thinking, Look at that kid, a musician already at his age. He must be a genius. But maybe they weren’t.
The Jazz Kid Page 5
