by John Ridley
In the whole of my life, how many people had ever been so much as decent to me? Sid included, I didn't need all the fingers of a hand to count them.
I twisted my wrist, read my watch. “I should get home to change. We” I stressed, “need to be at the Copa by six-thirty.”
THE COPACABANA. The Copa. The object of my devotion. Icon of its era: upscale class. Big money-style. You read about it, you heard about it, but most workaday Americans would burn up a month's salary just paying for the cover, food, and drinks. And even if they could scrape up the green, they'd find once they got to the Copa, they couldn't get into the Copa. Forget that the club wasn't black friendly. Neither were the Stork, '21,' and most especially El Morocco. The Copa wasn't friendly to anyone who didn't have dough or juice or some combo of the two. The Copacabana was progressive that way: It discriminated against everyone equally.
Sid and I got out of the cab on Sixtieth and Madison, went for the Copa's doors—my freshly cleaned suit bagged up in plastic and slung over my shoulder. Inside we got a “Hey, howzit” from Jules Podell, who owned the club, and were given a quick introduction all around. The waiters, bartenders. I said a hello to them all.
Mostly I got back lukewarm stares.
We got walked to my dressing room, a suite in Hotel Fourteen above the club. Tony Bennett came 'round before I had a chance to stop over and greet him. He told me he'd heard great things about me, about my act. Said he was looking forward to a terrific stand together, and if there was anything he could help out with, be sure to give a holler.
He wanted to know if there was any way he could help me?
Tony was strictly decent. Around him I didn't feel like a kid catching a break but that I was among his kind, that I was just about a star myself.
He wished me a good show again, then went back to his dressing room to make ready.
Sid hung around some before claiming to want to go check the crowd. Truth is I don't think he wanted to infect me with his own nervousness. He left, tossing off good-luck bits on his way.
Me, I just put my heels up and relaxed. With a good quarter-plus hour before the show got started, I enjoyed the quiet moment. I riffed in my head about the time I'd come around knocking on the Copa's door and couldn't get past the guy with the bad combover, how in short order I'd be onstage, taking in laughs, claps, and smiles from an audience full of people who'd paid top dollar to see me.
Okay, they'd paid to see Tony, but I came along with the deal, so in a way it was like they'd paid to see me, too. Anyway, I assured myself it wouldn't be long before my name was at the top of the bill and there was no doubt who was shelling green to see who.
I thought of Tommy.
I picked up the phone and the long distance operator put me through to her hotel in Detroit. She wasn't in.
I flipped my wrist, checked my watch. Just a few minutes before the show. I reached over for a glass of water. It spilled on my hand. Or really, my hand was shaking so badly, I couldn't keep the water from sloshing out of the glass and onto me. I stood up to grab a towel, but my knees barely worked as supports. On top of that, taking a good, steady breath was turning into a circus trick.
Nerves.
Nerves that I'd been dodging all day were wolves closing in on me. Never mind the months on the road, forget all that other club work I'd put in. This was the Copacabana. I could play things cool all I wanted, for everyone else I could act as if tonight was just another show, but all I was doing was acting. The truth of it: Opening for a cat the size of Tony Bennett scared the hell out of me. Working the Copa terrified me. Maybe Sid's counsel had been right. Maybe I should've made sure I was absolutely ready for everything I did every step of the way. And real suddenly I didn't feel like a seasoned act but a frightened little boy who had no business thinking he could entertain people. I felt again what I'd so often felt inside myself, not special, just different.
I got myself from my dressing room downstairs to the backstage area—a space married to part of the kitchen. Jules Podell was watching the house from the wings, his fat hand swallowing a highball glass. He looked at me, saw my pale blackness, asked: “What's the matter, kid?”
I copped: “Just got some jitters. Guess I'm a little nervous. Honest? I think I'm going to throw up.” I laughed some. At myself.
Jules smiled at me, smiled as if he were about to go all fatherly with some wise words from a longtime club owner.
He said: “What the fuck are you talkin'; you're nervous, you goddamn nigger coon?”
Right then I got hip. He wasn't smiling, he was sneering.
“I bring you into my club, feed you food, let you drink my booze, pay your nigger-ass good goddamn money just so you can cry like a bitch? ‘Oooh, I'm scared,’ ” he mocked.
Why didn't he just reach over and slap me? I was better at taking slaps.
“You listen to me, you little black shit. I don't want to hear any of your fuckin' cryin'. You get your moolie jig ass out on that stage and tell your goddamn jokes. And be fuckin' funny.”
Pep talk done, Jules took a hit off the glass hidden in his hand and wandered away, sick of my presence.
The waiters, the hired help in the kitchen, they went on hustling, filling orders, scooping melon balls. Whatever. Worse than laughing at me, I wasn't even worth their attention.
I stood around feeling Jules's verbal punches, extra fear now jiggered in with my nervousness. I had no desire to see how unpleasant the man could get should I be anything less than hysterical.
The announcer started in. I heard my name. I went out onstage. The applause I got greeted with was good. Good until the audience of suited, evening-dressed, jewelried, and beehived people got a look at my blackness. Then their clapping got dialed down to polite before it just went away.
I found myself standing at the edge of that gulf again—that quiet spot separating the applause, what applause there'd been, and the laughs from my first joke told. That night the spot wasn't just quiet, it was graveyard silent.
Between the audience's lukewarm welcome and Jules's sendoff, I was good and dazed. Couldn't help but be. My usual opening bit was swimming somewhere in my head, but I couldn't reel it in. Instead, winging things, I stepped into the gulf with: “Well, dig this crowd. Never seen so many dressed-up people in my life. Guess this is where Tiffany's goes when they want to buy jewelry.”
There was the sound of silverware on china. A call to a waiter about a steak that wasn't done right. And there were laughs. A few. Most weak. Not that the line wasn't funny, but all those people didn't much know how to respond to me. Except for catching Nat King Cole on television, and maybe Sammy in the flesh right there at the Copa, they weren't hardly acclimated to watching a black onstage. On their stage at their club. What was the world coming to? And trying to figure the answer to that question kept them from getting much cackling in.
Kept most of them.
From a booth stage left came the noise of an asthmatic bear hacking up a Virginia ham. Took me a second before I figured out it was a guy laughing. And that laugh was followed up by a bunch more little ones—other people in the booth jumping in.
Just as those laughs were dying down, I tossed out: “Classy joint, the Copa. I don't want to say it's pricey, but you know they've got three waiters at every table. One gives you the bill, the other two revive you.”
Like before: The cat with the choker's laugh started up, followed by other laughs at the booth.
People looked, tried to ID the fellow who was having the good time. A little murmur worked its way across the room the way fire works dry brush.
I went into my next bit, tried to circle my way back into my act. “I'm not used to this kind of class. Didn't have much money growing up. We were so poor, when I was a kid I couldn't afford a second thought, only changed my mind once a year, and never had a new idea.”
Now the laughs were strung together, the cat in the booth, the people with him, the whole rest of the crowd. They were easing up, relaxing. The fact
that the fellow in the booth dug me made it okay for everyone else to dig me, too.
And that right there was all the more handicapping I needed. I got my stage legs back, my timing and my rhythm. Same as a fighter catching an opening, I knew I could take this bunch, and for the next twenty minutes I hit them with bits just as hard and as fast as I could throw 'em.
That show, that first one at the Copa, was a long way from being the smash I'd spent nights and waking hours dreaming of, but it wasn't close to the disaster it could've been. By the time I'd wrapped things, the audience was good and warm and ready for Tony, and that was all the more I needed to do. I got off to stronger claps than I'd gone on with, and as I went, the fellow in the booth yelled a few things at me. I was too jazzed to make out exactly what he was saying, but it wasn't “lousy nigger,” so I figured it was a step up from where the night had started.
Sid was waiting for me backstage. “It was a good one, Jackie. You pulled it out. Almost lost it, but you pulled it out.”
That's what I liked—that's one of the hundred things I liked about Sid: He didn't sugar-coat or soft-pedal. From him you didn't get underplay or oversell, you didn't get told half-truths just because he thought it was what you wanted to hear. Everything was straight from the shoulder. My set had been solid but nothing better, and that's all the more praise Sid laid on me.
Jules was another story. When he got backstage he was strictly smiles and warm hands. “Great set, Jackie. Really terrific stuff. That bit about your uncle, I just about bust a gut. You want somethin' to eat? After a set like that you gotta have an appetite. Hey, Nick, what are you doin'? Get Jackie a menu.”
Was this the same Jules who just prior to my set had stopped yelling at me only because he'd run out of slurs? And the rest of the staff, the same people who had greeted me with nothing kinder than a cold stare, now jumped around like if I went unattended for more than a second, heads were going to roll fast and hard. I wish I could've believed all this goodwill getting tossed my way was on account of my performance, but my ego wasn't so swelled I didn't know the workmanlike job I'd done onstage didn't rate me the attention I was getting. Something else had thrown everyone's switch from nasty to nice.
Tony finished his set. The houselights went up along with a rowdydow from a well-pleased crowd.
Jules came back to the kitchen, where I was putting down the last of my New York cut. “Jackie, somebody wants to have a meet with you.”
A fan wants to talk to me? Who doesn't have a minute for that?
Jules guided me from the kitchen into the show room. Along the way I caught an earful of congratulations tossed out from the tables we passed: “Great show, kid.” “Dynamite stuff, Jackie.” “Sensational. You were killing me.” It was like the whole joint was infected with some kind of Dig Jackie virus. As I walked the room, I wondered if I could pay the Russians to release it into the water supply.
From Jules's trajectory I knew right off where we were heading: the booth. The booth stage left where the hard-laughing cat had been sitting.
Six people at the booth—it was the largest in the house—three guys and their dates, bottle blondes who most probably handed out affection on an hourly basis, and when you said good-bye to them it was with cash on the nightstand and a pat on the cheek as you slinked off into the morning.
Jules did a quick introduction. “Frank, Jackie Mann.”
The fellow smack in the center of the booth nodded at me. He was a weighty guy, but not fat. Kind of pudgy. Kind of jowly. Other than he was a slick dresser—silk suit, silk shirt, silk tie—he was average-looking. Except for his nose. His nose was some whole other thing. There was a lot to it, and it took up most of his face. Not pointed or hooked, it arched from between his eyes, way out, then back in to land just above his lip. An arch: That was the best way, the only way to describe what was going on there. An arch.
The man, Frank, said: “Good meetin'ya, Jackie.” His voice was slightly high-pitched and partly choked off like he was talking at me through a vacuum cleaner hose. It came off as a wheeze more than anything else and sounded especially funny slipping out of such a beefy guy. “Tell you this, you're a funny boy.”
Boy. I didn't care for that. Didn't say anything about it, either.
Jules had plenty to say. “You bet he's funny. Wouldn't've hired him otherwise. Just about bust a gut listening to this kid, and I've heard 'em all. All of'em, Frank. You remember that one time we had Martin and Lewis here and Lewis went off an—”
“Hey, why don't you go make sure the drinks've got enough water in 'em?” Frank rasped.
Jules left without a word more.
Whatever this cat's voice lacked in bass it made up for in authority. He talked, people listened. I made a note regarding that kind of respect: Get some.
All around, couples and parties at their tables sat, not paying any attention to each other, not saying a word, not wanting to miss a second of me having a talk with this Frank fellow. Forget about what I, or even what Tony had done up onstage. What was going on now, this was the show.
Frank wanted to know: “That bit about your old man not being a drunk …” He tried to recall the wording.
One of the other guys at the table jumped in and jumped in fast the way a lapdog jumps to its master with the morning paper. “He said his father's not a drunk, 'cause he can lay on the floor without holding on.”
Frank gave a burst of that hearty-stifling laugh of his as if he were hearing the bit for the first time.
The other guys laughed.
The girls just smiled.
“Where'd you learn a rib like that?” Frank asked.
“It's not a rib, sir. It's the truth. My father's got passing out down to a science,” I said very seriously.
Frank and his table did more laughing.
“If drinking were an Olympic sport, my pop would be the gold medal record breaker. The Jesse Owens of boozers … as long as he didn't have to run in a straight line.”
Frank—face going from red to blue—waved a hand in the air, signaling me to stop before he choked himself out.
The other guys did the same. Threw in some foot stomps and table smacks just so Frank would know for sure how excruciatingly funny they found me.
The girls just smiled.
I stood thinking of my pop, the lush, who'd started this laugh fest. At least he was good for something.
Frank: “Have a siddown, Jackie.”
There wasn't any room for me at the booth. It took about half a second to notice that, but it was apparently half a second too long with someone not making a move to accommodate me.
“Paulie, what the fuck ya doin'? Get the fuck up and let Jackie have a seat.”
Paulie, whoever Paulie was, got from where he sat and did it like he was trying to earn a stay of execution.
I took the open space next to Paulie's lady friend.
A murmur flared its way across the room. I couldn't tell if the buzz was about me sitting with Frank or me sitting next to a white broad.
Frank. I hadn't caught a last name, and I couldn't figure who he was. The face was familiar. Vaguely. He kind of resembled George Raft but wasn't an actor. A movie mogul? My heart upshifted. Was I getting tight with a movie mogul? He was jeweled up like he had that kind of juice. The whole of the booth was pinky-ringed and gold-watched and diamond-stickpinned and pearl-strung.
While I was thinking, Frank said, said again: “You're a funny boy. How come I haven't never seen you here before?”
“Never worked here before, sir. Mostly done Village clubs, coffeehouses.”
“Workin' with those long-haired freaks.” Frank made it plain he didn't care for the Village crowd. “You don't do drugs, do you?”
“No. No, sir.”
“Nothing but poison. You stay the hell away from poison.” Frank killed the liquor in his glass.
“Yes, sir. I've spent a lot of time on the road recently. Just now breaking into the class joints.”
Frank nodd
ed to that, said: “I like how you don't have a foul mouth. Lot of these acts, specially the ones who work with them long-haireds, everything is fuck this, fuck that. Not you. I could bring my wife to see you.”
“You could, Frank,” Paulie chorused from his penalty box beside us in the booth. “She'd enjoy the show.”
A red jacket appeared, replaced Frank's drink, was gone without a word.
I felt something brush along my thigh. I looked over at the woman I was sitting next to. Paulie's girl. She was staring at Paulie and sporting a dull smile.
Frank: “You ever worked Tahoe?”
“Lake Tahoe? No, sir.”
“Got to get you up to Tahoe.” To Paulie: “Remember me to talk to Momo about getting this kid into the club.”
Paulie took out a pen and paper, wrote things down rather than chance them to memory.
I asked: “Who's Momo?”
Frank did a quick jump from sincere to sharp. “Somebody we know, that's who the fuck he is. Don't fuckin' worry about it.”
I didn't worry about it. I was more worried about what else I was going to get besides a good talking-to for asking the wrong questions.
“Jules takin' good care of you and everything, getting you something to eat?” Frank, sincere again. I was getting hip to the fact that he was the variety of cat who would just as soon slap you as stroke you, and neither really meant a thing to him.
“Yes, sir. Had a nice New York steak.”
Nodding a couple of times, then: “Well, I know you've got to get ready for the next show …”
I'd been in entertainment long enough to catch a cue when I heard it.
Getting up: “Thank you for your hospitality and kind words, sir.”
That hacking laugh started up again. “Hospitality and kind …” Frank turned to the others in the booth. “You hear this fuckin' kid? Sounds like fuckin' Shakespeare.” He laughed some more.
As always, I didn't care to be laughed at.
As usual, when the person doing the laughing had juice, especially when they had enough juice to get me into Tahoe, I didn't say or do a thing about it.
