“Colored gangster. Politician, gangster, I don’t know what you call him. Runs half the Black Belt. Calvin was in with him, and played his clubs. I started sitting in with him. He didn’t mind—give him a rest. That’s how we got to be buddies. He ain’t a real great jazz musician—still got a lot of ragtime in him. So you can’t say every colored guy is a natural-born jazz musician. But I learned a lot from Calvin.”
“How come he never plays in your band?”
“Are you nuts, kid? You can’t put a colored guy in a white band. White guy in a colored band, neither. Oh, a white can sit in with a colored band and nobody’d say nothing about it. But not as a regular part of the band. The cops would close you down if you tried it. And worse if a colored guy went to sit in with a white band. It just wouldn’t happen.” He shook his head. “But I can sit in with Calvin. Maybe some time you can get your folks to let you out at night, I’ll take you out there. Go to Lincoln Gardens and hear King Oliver. Seeing as I don’t start till midnight we could go over there for a couple hours first. You got to get hold of long pants, though.”
Oh, it took my breath away to think of going out to Lincoln Gardens to hear Oliver, but I knew there wasn’t any hope of it, either. Not until I was older and on my own, anyway. “How come they never made any records?”
“I heard they just went down to Richmond, Indiana, to cut some sides for Gennett, but I ain’t seen any in the stores yet.”
Gennett was the same label the Rhythm Kings made their records for. “Do you think King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band is better than the Rhythm Kings?” I hated to think that, for I’d gotten loyal to the Rhythm Kings.
Tommy thought about it. “Don’t know. All them New Orleans fellas are pretty damn good. A couple of years ago this fella Lawrence Duhé had a mighty fine band at the DeLuxe. Freddie Keppard was in that. Keppard was all the rage until Oliver came along. Freddie got to drinking, that was his problem. I ain’t against a man taking a drink, but Freddie took it to where he couldn’t play right. Then there was this clarinet with Duhé named Bechet who had everybody talking. I didn’t hear him myself. He ain’t around no more. I don’t know what happened to him.”
“These are all colored guys?”
“Colored, all from New Orleans. But I’m not saying as you can take it away from the white guys, either. I don’t reckon there’s any better bass player around than Steve Brown. And Rop—I’d put him up there with the colored clarinets.”
For a minute he sat there thinking. “You know, kid, it’s kind of mixed up, when you get down to it.
See, a lot of these guys ain’t exactly colored. They’re Creoles. Frenchmen, they call them down in New Orleans. You and I might take them for colored, but they’ll tell you they’re different. Pretty light-skinned, some of ‘em. Take this here piano player Jelly Roll Morton—he’s as light as you or me. Great player. Speaks good, too. Speaks better than me, when you get down to it. When you look at it that way, you might say these here Creoles are the key to it. Keppard, Bechet, Duhé, Jelly Roll—all Creoles. I guess Oliver’s part Creole, too, although he don’t look it. I mean they call the band the Creole Jazz Band, don’t they?”
The whole thing confused me a lot. It was the way Tommy talked about the colored that struck me funny. When somebody I knew mentioned the colored, you could tell just from the way they talked that they took them to be low down. They didn’t have to say it straight out—it was just there in the way they put things. If you just called them niggers, that’d do it. But there wasn’t any of that in the way Tommy talked about them. For one, he never said nigger. He talked about them like they weren’t any different from anybody else. They had their own ways, maybe; I guess Tommy would say that. All people had their own ways, when you got down to it—Italians, Irish, Jews, whatever. A lot of times you could tell who somebody was just by the way they talked, or from their clothes. I could see that just by looking around my own neighborhood. The colored had their ways, too. But leaving that aside, from the way Tommy talked about this musician or that musician, it didn’t seem to matter very much where they came from. It was how they played that mattered. I could see the justice in that. But it was new to me, and I wasn’t used to it.
I never paid Tommy anything and he never asked me to. Of course he wasn’t giving me real lessons like Mr. Sylvester. You know, sit there playing exercises over and over until I got them right. But I was wasting a lot of Tommy’s time, a couple of hours a week. For a long time I was afraid to bring it up. If he decided he wanted to get paid, there was no way for me to get hold of the money. But not paying him made me feel guilty. Pa had drilled it into us that a man paid his own way. I didn’t feel good about getting free lessons from Tommy, and finally I brought it up.
He laughed. “How much could you pay me, kid? A half a buck or something?”
I couldn’t even pay him that much, but I didn’t say so. Instead I said, “Yeah, around that.”
“You know how much I make with Herb Aronowitz?”
“No.”
“Seventy-five smackers a week. You think your pa makes that kind of dough?”
To tell the truth, I didn’t know how much Pa made. A couple of times I asked Ma. All she ever said was, “That’s your Pa’s business, he’ll let us know if he wants to. We’ve always had a nice home and we never missed a meal. That’s all we need to know.” But I knew that seventy-five bucks a week was big dough, because most working people considered they were doing good if they made twenty-five. “How come he pays so much?”
“They all do. Everybody wants to get out to dance and they need music for it. There ain’t enough musicians to go around. Those fellas with Paul Whiteman, some of ‘em are drawing a hundred-fifty, two hundred bucks a week. Of course they double two or three instruments and can sight-read anything you put in front of ‘em like they practiced it for a week. Some of ‘em could go into the Chi Symphony tomorrow, but they won’t because they’re making too much with Whiteman. But even a fella like me, who can’t read so hot, can make good bucks nowadays. Jazz is popular. It’s what a lot of people want for dancing.”
“Do you think I’ll ever make that kind of dough, Tommy?”
“Sure you will, kid. I saw that right from the first time I heard you play. You just got to keep after it.”
But it still didn’t explain why he was willing to waste so much time on me, so I asked him.
He shrugged. “I don’t rightly know, kid. I ain’t one for asking myself a lot of questions I can’t answer. It don’t do to dwell on yourself too much.”
“But there must be some reason.”
He sat there on the side of the bed, fingering the valves and thinking. Finally he said, “Well, you’re looking at things from the bottom, kid. I look pretty grand to you. But I ain’t so high and mighty as you think. I’m just a guy nobody ever heard of banging away in tough dives like the kind Aronowitz runs. I ain’t in it with the Rhythm Kings or Oliver or them New York guys like Phil Napoleon and Miff Mole. I never made no records, I never played in any of them fancy cabarets like Lamb’s or the College Inn. Only tough dives. I figure I’ll get there some day. But I ain’t there yet and it’s almighty nice for a change to have somebody look up to me. You take King Oliver. Down there at Lincoln Gardens they put on a Midnight Ramble for whites every once in a while. The place is packed, Oliver’s got that many fans. I ain’t got so many fans I can afford to be casual about it.” He grinned. “You’re about the only real fan I got, kid.”
You can believe that set me up a good deal.
TWO DAYS LATER my report card came through. Miss Hassler didn’t hand it out to me with all the rest. Instead she held it back and told me to come see her after school. “Paulie, you didn’t turn in but three or four homework assignments all term.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. Instead I looked at my feet.
“Do you want to get left back?”
“No,” I kind of whispered.”
“Look at me.” I raised my head. “Pa
ulie, you’re not stupid. You know that.”
“I guess so.”
“If you only worked a little you could at least pass. Why can’t you do that?”
I couldn’t tell her the truth—that music kept getting in the way of my homework. For if I told her that she was bound to tell Ma and that’d be the end of my cornet. “Pa says I got a lazy streak.”
“What’s your pa going to say when you bring home a report card with nothing but F’s?”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to think about it.
“What will he say?”
“I don’t guess he’ll like it.”
“I don’t guess he will, either. Now I want your ma to come in to see me. No ifs, ands, or buts.” She gave me a long look, which was supposed to tell me something.
Oh, now I was sorry as could be that I hadn’t done some homework. Why hadn’t I planned a little more? It wouldn’t have been that much trouble to do a little homework every night. Why couldn’t I make myself see there wasn’t anything wrong with planning a little? If only I’d squeezed in an hour or so a night. I could have passed—could have passed a few things, anyway. Why hadn’t I? But it was too late for that.
I took my time getting home, dawdling along the street, looking in store windows, watching some little kids play hopscotch on the sidewalk. For once I didn’t even feel like playing my cornet.
But even with the dawdling, I ended up getting home. I went on up the stairs. Ma was sitting at the kitchen table peeling potatoes. “Where’s John?” I figured I’d confess to him first, so as to practice saying “I flunked” a little.
“He went off with Pa to get a load of pipe.”
It was best to get it over with while Pa wasn’t around. I took a deep breath. “We got our report cards.”
Ma raised up her head, but she didn’t stop peeling the potato. She knew what was coming. “Oh?”
I took another deep breath. “I flunked everything.” I handed her the report card.
She took the card out of the envelope. “So you did,” she said. “It was what I expected.” She was being very cool, like I got what I deserved, and she wasn’t going to help me out of it.
“Miss Hassler wants you to come to school and talk to her.”
“I expect she does.” She tapped the report card on her cheek. “You know what this means, Paulie.”
Why hadn’t I made myself think ahead? What a dope I was. I would have liked to give myself a real hard boot in the tail.
“Ma—”
“Paulie, do you think for one minute your pa is going to allow you to go on with your music after this?”
I felt hot and my hands were clenched by my sides. “I don’t care. I won’t quit.”
She didn’t say anything. Then she said, “You better go to your room for a while. And if I were you, I wouldn’t be playing your cornet when Pa comes in.”
She was right about that, anyway. I went into my room feeling good and sore. “You can’t stop me,” I whispered under my breath. But I knew they could. For a long time I lay on my bed with my hands under my head, staring at the ceiling, feeling sore at them and sorry for myself. After a while I got up, sat down at the table, took out my math book, and tried to do some problems. I couldn’t do them. I was too far behind. I lay my face down on the book. It felt smooth and cool, a nice feeling. But inside me, I didn’t feel so good. So I sat up, turned the pages back to the last place where I understood it, and began to catch up.
Pa and John came home at five. By that time I’d put in an hour on my math book, which was more homework than I’d done the last two months put together. I’d got up to around December, I figured. At that rate I’d catch up to the class by June, but of course they’d keep on moving ahead of me. And it wasn’t just math, it was English, civics, science, and all the rest of it. It was hopeless. Why hadn’t I tried just a little?
After a bit Ma stuck her head in the bedroom. “I haven’t said anything to Pa yet, Paulie. Come on out and eat your supper.” It was New England boiled dinner, which I loved, but I couldn’t take much pleasure in it. Pa was feeling pretty cheerful, for he’d won the bid on a good job, and was talking about buying a truck. He’d been talking about getting a truck for a couple of years. All along he’d said he had the dough, but it didn’t do to rush into things. Now it looked like the time was ripe—he knew of a fella who had a secondhand Ford for sale cheap. He figured he’d look into it. Ordinarily I’d have been all excited by the idea that we were getting a truck. But right then I didn’t feel like part of the family: they were getting a truck, not me.
After dinner I washed the dishes and went back to our room. It wasn’t that I was eager to do any school-work. I just wanted to get away from Pa and Ma. John was already in there, scratching away at his Shakespeare paper. I shut the door. “I flunked everything,” I said in a low voice so Pa wouldn’t hear.
John stopped scratching. “I figured you were going to. You didn’t do anything all term but play your cornet. What did you expect?”
“Couldn’t you even say you were sorry about it?”
“Sure I’m sorry. Who likes to see their little brother get left back? But you brought it on yourself.”
“Listen, John, you got to help me catch up.”
“I don’t ‘got to’ do anything.”
“Please.”
“All right,” John said. “What’s the worst?”
“Math. I’m years behind.”
“Where’s your book? Sit down here and let’s see how bad it is.” He helped me for a while, and moved me up to January, but then he had to get back to his Shakespeare paper. I went on by myself for a while, but I was feeling mighty discouraged about the whole thing, and finally I put on my pajamas and went to bed without brushing my teeth.
Something woke me up. The lights were out, and I could hear John breathing in his sleep. Then I heard Ma’s voice. She was speaking low, and I couldn’t make out her words, but when Pa came in I could hear him clear enough. I figured that was what woke me up—him saying my name pretty loud. Now he said, “I’m going to chuck that damn cornet in the Chicago River.”
I wanted to hear Ma’s side of it, so I slipped out of bed and crouched down by the door with my ear resting against the keyhole. “You can’t do that,” Ma said. “The cornet belongs to Hull House. We’re just renting it.”
“Then it can go back. I’ve had enough of Paulie. He’s got to learn nobody owes him a living. You give in to him too easy. He’s got to learn he isn’t going no place without a lot of hard work.”
“Frank, he’s just a baby.”
“No he isn’t. That’s where you got it wrong. He’s thirteen. When I was thirteen I was doing a man’s work.”
“You had to, Frank. You didn’t have any choice. You always said you wanted the boys to get their schooling instead of having to work like you did.”
“All right, fine. Schooling. I didn’t say nothing about playing rotten music instead of doing his homework. Now that’s the end of that. I’m taking that damn thing back to Hull House tomorrow. If he even whistles around this house for a month of Sundays I’m going to do something drastic.”
There was a silence, and then Ma said, “Frank, this is one time when you got to give me my way. This is the first time in his life Paulie ever got his teeth into anything. It isn’t my idea of what I wanted him to do, and—”
“You was the one who said he had an artistic temperament and should take piano.”
“Maybe that was a mistake. Maybe I shouldn’t have got him started on that. Heaven knows, I wish he’d gotten his teeth into some worthwhile kind of a hobby, like collecting stamps or building ship models, where he’d learn something. But he didn’t. Right from the day he went to that parade with John he took to music, and he’s stuck with it for almost a year now. He never stuck with anything for more than a week before.”
“I sure as hell wish John had kept out of it.”
“If it hadn’t been that parade it’d hav
e been something else. He was bound to come across music somehow.” There was a silence. “It’ll kill him if you take this away from him, Frank. I won’t be responsible for his actions. You’ve got to listen to me about this, Frank. I know Paulie. He’s taken his music to heart. There’s a lot worse things than that. He’s finally got his teeth into something. You can’t destroy it.”
Pa didn’t say anything. Then he said, “He’s got to pass his schoolwork. I don’t care what he’s got his teeth into, he can’t get left back.”
“I promise, Frank. He’ll pass. He’ll pass if I have to break every bone in his body. But I want him to keep on with his music.”
I couldn’t listen anymore, for I was all swelled up inside and so confused the only thing I wanted to do was cry. Ma wasn’t against me after all. But I couldn’t cry, for it would wake up John. He’d want to know what was wrong, and I sure didn’t want to talk about it. So I crawled back into bed, pulled the covers over my ears, and by and by I went to sleep.
FOR TWO DAYS nobody said anything about it. For one thing, Grampa Horvath got sick again. Ma and Pa were worried about him, and Ma had to keep going out to the North Side to see him.
I was careful to do my practicing over at Hull House, or at Rory’s, and didn’t touch the horn at all when Pa was home. Besides, I was still trying to get some homework done each night. It was a struggle, especially the math. English and civics were easier because what I was supposed to have learned before didn’t matter so much to understanding what we were learning now. I mean I didn’t have to have read “Oh Captain, My Captain,” to understand Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. But it was a struggle, even so.
Finally one afternoon Ma cornered me when I got home from Hull House. “I talked to Miss Hassler today,” she said. “You should appreciate her, Paulie. She’s got your interests at heart.”
I figured that was true—at least she thought she had my interests at heart. “What did she say?”
“She said she knew you weren’t stupid, and she could see from talking to me that you came from a good home. But you were always daydreaming in class and hadn’t done a lick of homework for weeks. So I explained it to her.”
The Jazz Kid Page 7
