by John Ridley
Panicked, afraid she'd missed her cue: “Am I on?”
“You've got to meet somebody.”
“Is this a fix-up? I don't have time for that. I need to go over my number.”
Forget it. My hand to Fran's wrist. I yanked her back the way I'd come. I'd explain things to her same time I explained things to Sid.
“Mr. Kindler”—I started in before me and Fran had even finished covering the distance—“this is Frances Kligman. Frances, Mr. Kindler.”
“Sid.”
“… It's good to meet you.” Fran was real noncommittal with that thinking—fearing—this was my idea of a date for her.
“Mr. Kindler's an agent.”
“Sid.”
“Ohhh …” Some smiling rode with that. No longer Sid-the-potential-boyfriend. Fran flashed ivory to Sid-the-potential-agent.
“Fran's a singer.”
Sid nodded to that. “Seen her. Heard her. Nice voice.”
“She's real talented.”
“She's veiy talented.”
“Think you could, you know, agent her, too?”
“I'm not looking for singers. I'm looking for comics. A comic. Nice to have met you, Miss Kligman.”
Sid started to turn away. I stopped him with: “But I can't leave her here.”
“Leave her?” Behind his glasses Sid's eyes did acrobatics, got narrow, scrunched together. It was a floor-show version of trying to figure what I was talking about. “It's New York City, not Siberia.”
“It's a burlesque house, and you said I could spend the rest of my life here. Same thing could happen for Frances.”
“Nothing's going to happen but good things. She's a”—looking past me to Frances—“you're a very talented young lady.”
“You said I was talented. You said I was talented, and you said I could spend the rest of my life here.”
“What I meant was … What I was trying to …” Sid took a second, a breath, then got back to his point: “I don't need a singer right now.”
“It's all right, Mr. Kindler.” Fran was being gracious but had to work to keep her smile going. “I understand. Thank you anyway.”
I went a little light-headed: blood pressure dropping. Anxiety rising. I said to Sid, to the man who was throwing me a lifeline: “I can't work with you unless you work with Fran, too.”
Fifteen or twenty people backstage, maybe forty out in the house watching a harmonica act hack up the stage. They all got drowned out by my heart grinding like a bad gearbox.
Fran broke up the ugly noise. “You don't have to do that for me.”
Have to? I didn't even want to. But Fran was my friend, and instinct told me friends were supposed to stand up for each other. The words just came pounding out of my mouth riding bareback on emotion.
“So I don't take her on”—Sid laid things out, made sure he was understanding me—“you won't let me take you on?”
“I just thought you … I'm just saying …” My thinker was doing double time trying to conjure a way to make everybody happy—stand firm but back down without looking to Fran like I was caving in. I came up idealess. There was a reason I was telling jokes onstage instead of working at the U.N. I figured that was my career right there; not many percenters would let a late-night comic tell them how to do business. My good luck, Sid wasn't one of them. He tossed his hands in the air—defeat meets frustration. “All right, I'll take the singer, too.”
“Fran? You'll take on Fran?”
“You got another singer? God help me, you don't have another singer.”
“No, no. Just Fran.”
“Just Fran. Just Fran is enough.” Sid took out another card, handed it to Fran along with the same spiel on when to come around to his office. He lamented: “A comic who squeezes me, and a singer I don't need. My lucky night.”
My lucky night. Sid had gotten me off a sharp hook. In the moment I'd stood up for Fran. She was my friend. And being my friend, without thought, I'd done everything I could to swing Fran a piece of the good fortune that'd stumbled in my direction. I told myself there was no other way things would've happened.
I was telling myself a lie.
The truth …
The truth of it was I wanted like nothing else to get out of the Fourteenth Street Theater. The truth of it was I wanted it so bad, so hard, so deep, if it'd come to it… if it had come to it, I would have left Frances right where she was.
Fran was strictly sunshine and smiles, not hardly believing in the span of a couple of minutes the two of us had gone from burlesque acts to, if nothing else, burlesque acts with an agent. Sid got gratitu-dinal hugs and kisses smothered all over him.
Done with us, afraid if he didn't get out of the theater and get out fast he was going to end up with more acts he had no use for, Sid left as he'd come in: quiet and unnoticed.
Fran wrapped me up in herself. Between tossing out excited thank-you bits and quick riffs on how life was going to be so much better now that we had an agent handling things for us, she put her lips to mine.
Across the backstage area, near a lighting board, some union guy—hair buzzed marine short, once big muscles Jell-Oed fat—locked a gaze on me and Fran. Me hugging Fran. Fran kissing me.
He dipped his head toward the floor and spat.
I WENT 'ROUND SID'S OFFICE. After ten and before five and not between noon and one. It was a small space on an upper floor of a building just below Midtown. That's about as descriptive as you could get with the place unless you went into detail about its dull wood paneling that complemented the dull wood furniture. There were some framed headshots on the wall. I thought I recognized a guy in one of them. The office did not jump up and down and yell show business. It did not have the luminescence of entertainment. All it had was Sid's name stenciled across the glass of the door, and below that: TALENT AGENT.
He offered me a cola and sat me down. We talked. Not about show business or my aspirations. Not at first. At first we just talked about whatever, beat the chops on this or that. Sid asked me where I was from. I told him. I told him about growing up in Harlem, told him I was without a mother and just about without a father, a little about my logging days and some about my moving job and my history on Fourteenth Street. Those were pretty much the Jackie Mann highlights.
Sid told me about him. Like me, he was from New York, White Plains. He was a widower, had a brother and a niece he adored. Other than that he had his work, having fallen in love with show business years and years back when he once caught his uncle's vaudeville act. Sid had wanted to be a performer. He discovered that he had no talent. He discovered that no matter he had no talent, he was able to finagle himself bookings. Sid figured if he could book a no-talent like himself, he ought to be able to strike gold booking acts with real skills.
Not quite gold.
Sid cared about his clients, thought of them as more than ten percent. He was concerned, wanted to know if his acts were well or not, happy or not—outside of show business—and if not, why. Sid gave a damn about people. Giving a damn about people, their feelings, keeps you from being a good agent. Anyway, he made a comfortable living.
Done with the getting-to-know-each-other jazz, Sid asked: “What do you want, Jackie?”
The question sounded a little nutty to my ears. If people ever asked me what it was I wanted, it was rarely. Even so: “Sullivan.” The answer ready without thought. “I want to do the Ed Sullivan show. I want to be famous.”
“Interesting.”
“What?”
“You would say it that way. Not that you want to be funny, you want to be the best comedian around. You want to be famous.”
“I do.” No embarrassment. No shame. “I want to be famous.”
Sid nodded. He didn'tjudge. He'd asked me what I wanted, and I had told him. Whatever answer I'd given, as long as it'd been honest, would've been okeydoke by him.
We talked some more business. Sid told me again that he had a number of rooms where he thought he could get me booked,
that he had road clubs and how he thought they would be good for working on my act, and he did expect me to work on my act. He didn't want any laziness, didn't want me just parroting other comics' bits. He wanted an act who would go at things as hard as he would.
I okayed that.
Then he told me about some of the acts he handled. Some of the names I'd heard of, they worked around at a few of the Village clubs. Most of the names were new to me. The point Sid was trying to make without coming right out and saying so was that he wasn't hardly the King of Entertainment.
No. He wasn't. But he was the only guy in the business in the whole of New York City who wanted to have anything to do with me. So when he started to ask me the second time if I was sure I wanted to work with him, very much like the first time I cut him off with: “Yes.”
We sat for a tick.
I asked: “So, now what do we do?”
Sid held out his hand. I took it, shook it.
He said: “We're in business.”
MY LIFE BECAME VERY OKAY. Not great. Not by any means. But when I started working with Sid it got better than I could recall up to that point. There were, as Sid'd promised, those pocketful of clubs where he booked myself and Fran. Real quick the Fourteenth Street Theater became part of our past. He got us our police ID cards. Cabaret cards. We should've had them when we were working the theater, but didn't. At that time, the standing law was you couldn't work a club or cabaret, any joint in the city that served booze, without one. To get one you had to go through the N.Y.C. Police Department. The idea, cops controlling the cards kept the riffraff out of the clubs. Riffraff, according to the ordinance, was “Anyone convicted of a felony or of any misdemeanor or offense.” Riffraff was also “Anyone who is or pretends to be a homosexual or lesbian.” Even in New York, if blacks had few rights, gays had none. To the law they were no different, no better than criminals. Made me thankful all I had to worry about all day, every day, was being a nigger.
Me and Fran got our cards, got booked, got work—one type of club more suited for Fran and another for me. She did spots at the St. Regis, the Drake Room … the ninety joints. I was strictly downtown, the coffeehouses and cellars of the Village. That killed me and Fran palling around. But what's good was I was working clubs that not a month before the only way I'd get into was by lining up and shelling out my green same as every other Charlie off the street. Now I was the guy the Charlies were paying to see. Now I was working my bits on the same stages as Sahl and Kitt, Nichols and May. Working those stages, yeah, but still at the crack of dawn. My location had improved, not my hours. My act I was working on.
The times he could swing it, Sid would be in the house, watching, taking notes. After sets we would have a very late dinner/early breakfast, and Sid would break things down for me: how this joke or that went over, do I need to move it up or back, or toss it altogether. I appreciated Sid taking an interest, that I wasn't just a cut to him. I appreciated most, for the first time in my life, having something besides a pillhead for a father figure.
When we could, Fran and I would get together, talk about how things were going for us, what famous face we'd caught up close. Fran had me beat with a young Barbra Streisand.
That was the thing about the clubs: After the jazz of your first few weeks of working a real gig faded, after the late nights, the low to no pay, and the reality of you being just one more guy in the city full of people trying to sing or dance or joke their way to a better life, there were still the surprises: who might be doing a drop-in, what big-time so-and-so was in the audience checking out acts. In those days, in New York, when stars were made in the depths of the city, there were always surprises.
“HI,” SHE SAID.
I jumped up from the spot where I was sitting backstage. Sitting. Drifting. Killing time till my set. I jumped up and banged my head on a shelf just above me, tipped it, and got caught up in a shower of electrical cables.
The times previous we'd crossed paths in the clubs, if I'd ever spoken two words to her, they were hel and lo. But in my head we'd been through a thousand conversations. In every one of them I was movie-star cool, and she was wide-eyed and pining. Then she says one word to me, “hi,” she says, and I go Charlie Klutz right in front of Thomasina Montgomery.
“Are you all right?” She was laughing a little, but concern came through her smile.
Her teeth were a little less than absolutely straight. Just a little. Other than that the girl was perfect.
Rubbing my head: “Wasn't anything.” After you've been hit by flying booze bottles, no, it wasn't.
“ You're funny.”
Great. I was a clown to her.
Thomasina picked up on me taking the comment wrong, added: “I mean onstage. I've seen your act.”
“Really?”
“You sound surprised.”
“I never fig … I didn't think you knew who I was, let alone you'd watch my act.”
“I've seen you around, heard some other people say you were funny. Besides, I'm a healthy young girl. I like to watch a handsome man perform.”
Well, let me tell you: My tongue went slack and flopped around inside my mouth. The whole of me took on a general retardation. I stood there, hoping against hope Thomasina wouldn't notice how she was drugging me.
“I'm Thomasina. Tommy.”
“Jackie.”
A beat.
“So …” she said.
“So …”
“I guess this is where you ask me out.”
Holy … Was this for real? Was it really happening? After all my dreaming and wishing and imagining, was this girl really swinging me a little attention? And if all those fantasy bits I'd swapped with Thomasina—Tommy—were finally going to come true, then at the very least couldn't I play my part?
Turning up the charm star-style: “Yeah, but since we both know I'm going to ask you out, I was just going to wait for you to go ahead and say yes.”
“But since we both know I'm going to say yes, I was just going to wait for you to go ahead and pick a place.” She didn't miss a beat with that. It was as if we'd been swapping snappy-clack our whole lives.
I offered up: “The Five Spot?”
She came back: “I'm already there.”
THAT I'D NEVER PREVIOUSLY been to The Five Spot didn't matter. Everybody knew, you wanted to show someone you were hep, The Five Spot was where you cruised. It was a jazz hang down on Bowery where “new” jazz and “progressive” jazz were being experimented with in the same dead-serious style the brain boys had experimented with the atom at Los Alamos. It was a kind of music I never much dug. Raw, unstructured, to me it sounded like someone threw a drum kit down some stairs, then tossed a horn and a cat after it. But in the day, everybody grooved to the noise. It was the music to which the Beats recited and the white niggers slummed. Jazz was the sound track to the times, and the sound happening then was especially fierce and wild and ignorant of rules. Bip-bop is what Monk called it. Bebop is what it got called. It's what Dizzy and Sonny and Mingus and the Prez played, and none of us understood, and since we didn't get it, it had to be deep, daddy-o. So people went to jazz clubs same as congregations went to churches. When the sermon was over, maybe you didn't get God any better, but you felt a whole lot closer to Him.
Out on the street, in the cold, a stack of people waited to get into The Spot. A twenty to the guy at the door got me and Tommy inside in under half an hour. We got a table at the back of the house, the house being so small, the back was practically the front. We were just far enough away from the stage that we could carry on a conversation. Not far enough away that some jazz artist on a xylophone—and don't ever make the mistake of not calling them artists—sent some stink-eye our way for not listening while he was trying to school us.
To hell with him. I was with Tommy Montgomery.
We had a few drinks and smokes—you weren't hip without sticks—and Tommy brought me up to speed on the short history of Miss Montgomery. She was a Philly girl, younger t
han even I had originally figured—in some states me just smiling at her was skirting the law—but already a veteran. She'd won her first talent contest at eleven, been playing clubs in Pennsylvania and Jersey since turning thirteen, and laid her first sides at fifteen. She'd even managed to squeeze in backing up the Godfather of Soul. That gig didn't last long, and what she said—or didn't say—about the man made me think there was more than just music to their relationship.
The thought of it, the thought of her with him—no matter how big a star he was, no matter at the time I didn't even know her—made me somewhat but very instantly jealous. I knew then if I hadn't already fallen off the deep end for Tommy I was taking a fast run at that cliff.
Tommy turned the questions to me, and I ducked and dodged some. Did a Philly girl need to know I was a dirt-poor Harlem kid? Did a nice young lady from a good home have to hear about the pharmacy of a father I had waiting sprawled out for me? I wasn't trying to lie to her about who I was … what I was. I was just trying to hide it a little.
Changing tracks, Tommy asked: “Why do you want to be a comedian?”
I shrugged. “Probably for the same reason you want to be a singer.”
“That's not an answer.”
“I want to have a life, and it's the only way I know how.”
“You don't have a life now?”
“Not like the one I could have.”
“And you could have … ?”
“Nothing but glad hands and backslaps. A life of getting what you want when you want it. You get to be somebody and nobody pushes you around. And if they do, you push them back. You push them hard.”
I realized my tone and volume had jacked. I realized I was ranting, and that Tommy was staring.
She said as soft as I'd been harsh: “You've got a lot of anger in you.”
I went soft, too. “I've got a lot of anger in me because that's where they put it.”
“Laughing in the … What do they say about comics? Laughing on the outside, crying on the inside?”
