by John Boyd
“That’s more than this mucking dive pays me in a week.”
If Freddie had told the truth, the statement was either a thousand-dollar lie or the masterful bit of British understatement. But Ward, back-pedaling in sympathy, delivered a low blow.
“Man, that’s no bread in Birkenhead.”
“What do you know about Birkenhead?”
“Nothing,” Ward parried. “Just a Big John rhyming joke.”
“You are the peculiar one… Al, I’m willing to record the song and advance you fifty dollars against ten percent of the royalties. Is that fair?”
“That’s fifty percent fair on the advance, but only twenty-five percent fair on the royalties.”
“But I’m the artist,” Glamorgan jabbed.
“I’m the poet,” Ward jabbed back.
“It’s my name that draws. I compose the tune and play it. Playing sprung rhythms on a three-stringed lute demands skill. And the lyrics will have to be changed, old boy.”
Glamorgan had dropped his guard. Ward’s face froze in hurt and hostility.
“Sorry. I meant ‘old chap.’ ” Glamorgan was contrite.
“Half of that money goes to the AA2CP,” Ward said.
From the ropes, Glamorgan asked, “Is that something like Snick?”
“That’s me and my roomie. Our rent’s due… But what’s this about changing the lyrics?”
Still on the defensive, Glamorgan was glad to get back to specifics. “This line, ‘All innocents into earth are laid,’ won’t come off. I suggest ‘All maidens are eventually laid’ to give the lyrics an upbeat ending for mini-bopper virgins.”
Ward had rehearsed his answer. “That’d be all right for nightclubs, sir, but it would get you banned on radio.”
Puckering his brows, the Welsh Bard said thoughtfully, “And praps telly.”
It was a masterful maneuver. As Ward was translating the remark into “And perhaps television,” the Welsh Bard struck.
“Jest Al, you’re too bloody materialistic for a poet. I’ll go one hundred dollars against forty percent of the royalties.”
Negotiations were ended, but Ward hedged. “That’s fine, as long as you put my name Jest Al on the label.”
“Good, I’ll have my manager draw up the contract… But why not your entire name? Are you on the lam?”
Ward nodded. “Aggravated assault in Mobile. I broke a musician’s guitar over his head because he welshed on a deal… Beg pardon. Because he went back on a deal.”
“You felon.” Glamorgan smiled his bright smile as he pulled out a roll of bills. “Well, one confidence deserves another. I was rapped once with a statutory, myself, in Liverpool.”
Two nights later, Glamorgan sang “Youth Grows Wiser,” the ultimately agreed-upon title, to a whistling, whooping, foot-stamping ovation which had not stopped after four encores when Glamorgan carried on the remainder of his program. The next day, the Welsh Bard cut a 45 r.p.m. which the recording company air-expressed to its distributors. Within the week, “Youth Grows Wiser” had knocked a Johnny Cash from first place and had set the development of country and Western rock back by six weeks.
Glamorgan wanted more Jest Al lyrics, so he pushed for and got an early royalty payment which the company advanced on forecasts. Ward split his proceeds with Freddie, paid Freddie $449 back room and board plus services, sent Ester $1,000, tithed $280 in the poor box of Our Lady of the Angels to the memory of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and had enough left over for a wild weekend in Watts.
Thereafter money accumulated so fast he opened a checking account at a Western Avenue bank under the name A. Ward and halved with Freddie by check. Now cash stilled Ward’s conscience as he went plucking lyrics from the public domain. Poe’s “To Helen,” retitled “To Hattie,” disappointed him, but Burns’s “Whistle and I’ll Come, My Love” almost upset Hopkins. The Silky Sullivan in the pop lyrics field was Winthrop Mackworth Praed, 1802-1839, who held seventh place for six weeks and then jumped to second, hanging there for two weeks, then moving ahead of Wilde’s “The Ballad of Folsom Jail” which had, by then, edged out Hopkins.
But the listings were tabulated later. Ward spent the remainder of June swabbing floors, writing lyrics, looking for Dolores, and waiting for an answer to Dionysus’s message from Aphrodite. Diana’s failure to respond shadowed his triumphs with anxiety.
Next to her desecration, he feared Diana’s death. If she died, he would be consigned forever to youth and darkness, becoming, as it were, the Wandering Negro.
By the end of July, Freddie had bought a lavender Cadillac with his half of the royalties, and he became thenceforward Freddie the High Wheeler. While monitoring a new song by Glamorgan, Ward also met Margie again and found that Miss Frost had banned Dolores from the premises. She was too controversial, politically.
The climax of July came when Glamorgan refused to accept another extension at the Daisy Chain and accepted an offer to appear in Las Vegas for twenty grand a week.
At news of Glamorgan’s departure, Ward arranged with the record company to send a fourth of the music royalties to Ester. Actually, the giant step upward on the salary scale was a relief to Ward, who was overloaded with cash and welcomed a chance to lay by the Welsh Bard’s lute.
The new attraction at the Daisy Chain was Gollenberger and Stein, specialists in songs with a social message. They were in rehearsal two weeks before Glamorgan’s departure, and Ward’s maintenance work suffered. In soprano voices, the duet wailed discords about lonely lampposts, littered streets, forlorn garbage pails, and children leaning out of windows for love. Sometimes, between songs, they wept over their own keenings and their sorrows warped the orbit of Ward’s mop because he sympathized with despair.
Having heard of Jest Al, the Mop-Handle Poet, Gollenberger and Stein shyly let it be known that they would like a few of Ward’s lyrics if he could work in social content. Ward liked them although they were liberals and, as a black, white liberals turned him off. But Gollenberger and Stein had “schmaltz,” the Jewish equivalent of “soul,” and both had natural Afros.
He might have converted “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” into their style of protest music, but T. S. Eliot was not in the public domain. The 18th-century poets were lacking in social consciousness. In addition, he was too tired—tired of his job, tired of waiting, tired of writing.
An encounter with Miss Frost near the end of the week’s hiatus between Glamorgan’s final performance and the Gollenberger and Stein opening night pointed up to Ward the degree of his weariness.
On that morning he was swishing his mop two-thirds of the way from the bandstand to the edge of the dance floor, while unseen in the shadows Miss Frost was watching. Despite the high notes from the musicians at their final rehearsal, he ordinarily would have heard her elevator, smelled her, or sensed her through more basic vibration.
Suddenly she spoke from behind him.
“Al, you’re giving that floor nothing but a lick and a promise. If you keep this up, you’ll be reduced to a janitor.”
Her voice was snappish and without a trace of that furtive longing which Freddie called “the hots.” Looking toward the bandstand lights, he could tell from the reflection on the floor that she was right.
“Yes’m.”
“I declare, you’ve been mooning ever since Glamorgan left. Are you some sex degenerate? Is it Glamorgan that you moon for?”
“No’m.”
“Look at that mop. It’s not even wrung out properly. Fetch me the mop bucket.”
He hurried across the floor at her command and she called after him, “You’ve even lost your prance.”
After he returned with the bucket, she put the mop in the wringer, hoisted her skirt, and lifted her leg to press down on the wringer pedal.
“That’s how it’s done.” She brandished the dry mop in front of him. “Now, you do that whole area over again, you lazy no-’count, and put enough grits in your gizzard to write a nice song for those Jewish boys, unless y
ou’re one of those anti-Semitic Nigras as well as a pervert. That pap they’re whining is entirely too negative for the Electric Daisy Chain. You write them a song about happy darkies, you hear?”
“Yes’m.”
Hands on her hips, she looked at him with something approaching contempt. “Dionysus, indeed. Hmmph.”
She turned and strode from him, heading toward her private elevator, as he wondered vaguely how she knew that he was Dionysus. Then another thought came to him, bringing with it overpowering evidence of his decline.
When the silver flash of Miss Frost’s inner thigh had glimmered in the glow from the bandstand, he had been no more interested in Miss Frost’s legs than he would have been interested in the legs of a jaybird.
Ward motorcycled home that afternoon on a hog his caution had turned to a piglet and walked into the apartment to sit heavily on the divan. Freddie entered and handed him a copy of the Los Angeles Times folded back to the fourth page.
“Is this your old man?”
Ward was looking at a one-column cut of himself made from a wedding portrait he had had taken with Ester.
FUGITIVE TOUTED
FOR NOBEL AWARD
Doctor Alexander Ward, biology professor at Stanford University, sought for questioning since early June in the disappearance and suspected murder of Doctor Ruth Gordon, Stanford gerontologist and financier, was listed among nominees for the Nobel Prize, Friday. Doctor Ward’s contribution was a system of analysis which extends mathematical reasoning to include organic reactions.
According to Doctor Sir Peter Waverly-Pritchard, visiting professor of theoretical mathematics at Stanford, Doctor Ward’s system opens the way to include organic phenomena in the Unified Field Theory.
Ward disliked “touted” for “nominated” in a story on the Nobel awards, although he supposed headline writers had to watch character count. But Freddie had asked him a question.
“Yes,” Ward answered.
“Murder must run in your family… I’m taking a nap. Would you give me a call about six?”
“Better set the alarm, Freddie. I’m dead myself.”
“Okay, but burn that paper.”
Ward went to the fireplace and burned the paper, thinking, even my brain’s tired. His ideas had been irrelevant, detached. The big story was his own nomination for the Nobel Prize, which meant he should have no trouble getting his grant extended on his terms.
No. He was a fugitive from justice, and the big story was that Ruth Gordon was a financier. With good reason he had always assumed she was poverty-stricken, but even if she had money to carry out experiments in human biological controls, she still did not have him, the missing link… linkage.
Getting back to the divan was an uphill effort. Galloping anemia? he wondered. There was so much he had to think about, and the most he could do was remember the afternoon in the patio and someone talking about a C note set on a tuning fork. Disassociated linkage?
Ward slept to awaken dully at the sound of Freddie’s alarm clock, dozed, and reawakened when Freddie slammed the kitchen door, going out in his “poor” clothes to hustle tips at the parking lot. Ward wondered why Freddie continued the work. Now that he was a Cadillac owner, he was parking cars so cautiously his tips were halved. Still, the parking lot was a listening post. Recently Freddie had brought news that both Army and Navy Intelligence had joined in the hunt for Ward.
When he heard Freddie’s car go out the driveway, Ward went to the garage to get his solution and electrodes. He felt rested, but he lacked the inward fire that composing songs demanded, and the missy had asked him to write a song about happy darkies. He would have to work a little social protest into the happiness for Gollenberger and Stein and a few acoustic patterns for himself.
Ward had no theory about his fatigue, only a vague hunch. But when he stepped from the bath to towel himself and caught himself whistling as he scrubbed, his hunch had advanced to a hypothesis. He swung into the kitchen, tore a paper towel from the roll, and sat at the table with his favorite pencil stub. Before starting to write the song, he scribbled out the master equation for molecular disintegration he planned to use as the theme of his lyrics and set it to one side.
He bent to write.
It was then Ward wrote the last and crowning lyrics of Jest Al’s career in words as pristine as if newly coined from the sweat, tears, and tumult of black fate. At the outset it was all there, hopelessness, frustration, rejection, rage, jingling in Negritic rhythms from his memories of Saturday nights in Watts. Yet into his words came also a wine-dark laughter.
He was writing the immortal “Flutter High, Butterfly.”
In the artlessness of genius, Ward knew not what he wrought. Essentially he was trying to construct an acoustics pattern matching a series of dissonant high notes to appropriate vocal sounds. Thus the simplicity and originality of his opening lines, so seldom sung but so essential to the motif of the entire poem:
Swinging through the alleys wild,
Jiving sounds of rhythmic glee,
On a fence I saw a child
And he, laughing, said to me,
“Daddy-O, make a song for me.”
The child symbolizes the primitive savage and thus, by extension, the oppressed proletariat of the world, whereas “Daddy-O,” as an exuberant cognomen, relates the child more closely to Rousseau’s version of the primitive as a noble savage and expresses the artist’s faith in the irrepressible good humor of the common man. As a symbol, the central figure, or Daddy-O himself, extends beyond Rousseau, back to the chthonian roots of myth, and is more appropriately represented, perhaps, as Prometheus bringing fire ( laughter ) to the world.
But the critical appraisals would come later.
Certainly, seated at the table, one eye closed, six inches away from the paper, Ward could not foresee that in a matter of a fortnight his words would be whanging out in Mandarin among the rice-wine bars of Canton and clicking in Swahili through the cantinas of Mozambique.
Flutter high, butterfly,
High, high into the sky.
That bright disk of sun afire you
Cannot reach but can aspire to.
He was not conscious that he was writing a masterpiece, but after Gollenberger and Stein’s opening night he knew the sounds had a functional effectiveness that no one could understand besides him and Doctor Sir Peter Waverly-Pritchard in Palo Alto.
Two nights later Ward sat with Freddie, front row center, weary from muscle fatigue. He had worked overtime waxing the ballroom floor for the opening.
At first, Gollenberger and Stein’s musical appeals to social consciousness were lost on an audience of boys and girls who came mostly from Beverly Hills and Bel Air. They found it hard to sympathize with children leaning out of windows for love while their psychiatrists were attempting to solve their own problems of alienation.
When Stein announced the finale as a new offering by Jest Al, the applause was a tribute Ward shared with Glamorgan, he knew, but the voices dropped around him. As he had planned, there was a complete silence when Stein announced that the Mop-Handle Poet wished to dedicate the number to Miss Frost. Had the woman far above them in the darkness stiffened in horror at his presumption or melted in delight at his homage? No matter. The crowd was silenced.
With Gollenberger handling the drums, Stein’s voice was too high-pitched to belt out the prologue. Instead, it whiplashed against a wall of audience indifference. When it grooved into the chorus, the listeners leaned forward and the wall came tumbling down.
In a devil’s mask with dry-gourd rattle, bare feet strumming a tom-tom beat, Mumbo Jumbo danced into the Daisy Chain in visions woven on pot-smoke gloom. Through the fetid smells of a jungle night, lean blacks stalked lithe black girls by their anklet clicks of leopards’ teeth. A leap and cry in the velvet dark was followed by the rattle of the Simba Swap in simulated cannibal rites as the drums cried “More” to the guitar’s “Stop.” After the whirr of a Springbok Spin, the music circled in a ca
kewalk strut till dawn broke over the Congo, silvering the black, wide river.
Up from the reeds margining the banks a butterfly fluttered toward the rising sun.
Shaken, the listeners sat for a moment in silence, then began to pound the floor with their heels, begging for an encore. Though Ward’s innercellular structure had been ripped by a sonic storm, his mind was rested. He had written a song about happy darkies as the missy had requested.
After the tumult died and Freddie had complimented him on their new hit, Ward said, “I reckon Miss Frost will have us waxing again tomorrow. This heel-pounding has ruined my floor.”
“Man, this is no time to talk about waxing floors… You talk tired. Want me to drive you home?”
“No. You got to go to work. I’ll make it.”
Motorcycling home, Ward was revived by the night air. He knew, now, what had caused his torpor, and he knew, too, if Miss Frost didn’t take him off the floor tomorrow and into the penthouse with her, he would have to resign. There was only enough solution for one more revival of his SA(2) factor. If she didn’t take him tomorrow, she wouldn’t want him after another barrage of Gollenberger and Stein’s high notes.
And the Daisy Chain was the only place where Diana could find him.
At the apartment Ward brought his electrodes and solution in from the garage, but he was too tired to take a bath. Slipping into his pajama bottoms, he went into the living room to watch television, and he had hardly settled into his chair when a knock came at the door.
He went to open the door, turning on the entrance light.
Outside the screen stood two white men, crew-cut, wearing blue suits. An animal wariness about them reminded him of Joe Cabroni, which was explained when the man nearest the door held up a billfold opened to his identification and said, “We’re from the FBI and we’d like to speak to Freddie the Hustler.”
Despite his weariness, Ward inwardly alerted. Their information was dated; Freddie was now the High Wheeler. As the information registered on his consciousness, Ward noticed that the second man was studying his head with the same objectivity Ward had observed in the Barber and Hattie.
