by Ted Heller
Ziggy's solo was the most traumatic thing I've ever seen. I don't know, to be honest, how I felt: Was I pulling for him to succeed or did I want him to fail? Well, if I wanted him to fail, I certainly didn't want him to fail this miserably.
He got onstage, adjusted the mike down to his size, way down because he was only five foot four. That was the last laugh he got. That was the last sound he got.
He shook his head to one side, like he was trying to shake out some words there, then he shook it to the other side. He began twitching a little . . . and sweating a lot. It was pouring off him. I was worried about him getting electrocuted by the mike, with all that perspiration. His lips were moist and he was just staring off, like he was catatonic. This was going on for five minutes. I was thinking, This is what you get for getting rid of your parents, you schnook, but, you know, it was too pathetic; he was too sad a figure to be angry about or vengeful over.
It's time for me to play the cavalry now. So I go onstage and sit down and I'm just about to play some songs that he and I had performed, when I hear this very slight whimper come out of him. He won't be able to sing, I thought. No way.
I walked over to him and whispered to him, “Are you okay?”
He said, “I'm scared.”
“Let's go then, okay?”
“I can't walk, Danny. I can't move.”
“Come on . . . just take my hand. I'll do the moving for us.”
“Tell them to turn the lights off. Please.”
I made the throat-cutting gesture and the lights went out.
He took my arm. I never felt a hand so cold in my life. It gave me goose bumps. He grabbed tighter and very, very slowly we made it off the stage.
SALLY KLEIN: I'd never seen someone so mortally terrified in all my life, and when the lights went down and I heard nothing but Danny and Ziggy's footsteps slowly creeping off, something hit me and it scared me half to death: I thought, Oh my God, I'm going to be with Ziggy Blissman until the day I die.
DANNY McGLUE: I took him to his little dressing room, closed the door, and poured him a scotch—he always kept a bottle of Dewar's or Johnnie Walker in his dressing room.
“Take some, Ziggy,” I said but I don't think he heard me. He sat there and was shaking and was as white as a ghost.
“Look, this happens,” I told him. “You're not the first person this has happened to.” He rubbed his hands over his head, in his hair, then he put his head down in his arms on the vanity table.
I heard a knock on the door and figured it was [hotel owner] Bernie Heine. I said, “Go away, Bernie,” but I heard Sally say, “It's me, Danny,” and I let her in.
Ziggy started weeping softly. Sally and I sat down.
“I'm such a failure,” he said. It was hard to make out what he was saying-—his arms were muffling things. “I'm a failure, a failure, a failure . . .”
“You had two hundred people in that room,” Sally said, “because they'd seen your act with your parents and loved you! You are not a failure.”
He said, “I'm so ugly . . . I'm ugly. I've always been ugly. Funny looking! I'm funny because I'm so ugly.”
Sally and I looked at each other. I couldn't think of anything to say except, “Ziggy, there are plenty of ugly people like you who aren't funny.” But I didn't say it.
“What am I gonna do?” he said, still sniffling like crazy. “What job could I ever have? I can't do nuttin'.”
Sally said, “Zig, there's plenty you can do . . .”
“I'm so lonely,” he said. “I hate being me . . . I hate it. I'm so lonely.”
I said, “When you're onstage they love you. The crowd loves you.”
He said, “They love me 'cause I'm funny. Why am I funny? 'Cause I'm ugly. I can't do nuttin'.” God, I think he even said he was going to die.
There was a knock on the door and I said, “Go away, Bernie.” Bernie said, “The kid owes me a show, for Christsake!” Then Bernie went away.
Ziggy said, “I can't never go on alone again. Ever! And when my parents die or they quit then nobody will ever like me and I won't be able to get a job nowheres. I got bubkes.”
“Ziggy, Ziggy, Ziggy . . .” I said.
(And you have to remember: Me and Ziggy, we're not really friends yet. We're not that close. And I kept getting in these emotional scenes with him, for years!)
“Do you want to take a walk?” Sally asked.
“No, Sal. Just leave me in here,” Ziggy said.
So she and I stood up. I remember that on the way out I accidentally touched Ziggy's neck and his skin was still ice cold.
We walked out and I gently closed the door.
“You think he's gonna be all right?” I asked Sally, and she said she didn't know.
We heard him from behind the door . . . he was sobbing now.
Sally grabbed a chair from down the hallway and set it up right outside his dressing room. She sat down and said, “Danny, go to sleep. Don't worry—I'll make sure he's okay.”
“Now I'm worried about you,” I said.
She rolled her eyes like I was an idiot to care and I left her there. The next morning at seven she was still in the chair, fast asleep, and Ziggy was still inside.
When I saw her then—I think it was that moment. I had a serious case on her.
SALLY KLEIN: Ziggy was booked at Heine's for a week. And for a week people showed up. But he couldn't get himself onstage. He would go to his dressing room and then not move. Bernie was furious. We canceled the other engagements he had . . . Joe Gersh and Murray Katz had lined up three or four weeks' worth.
He was like a zombie. He wouldn't eat. Finally, after a few days, I convinced him to walk outside and take a few steps . . . but he would just stare at the ground. He got tired very easily and slept a lot.
One day—it was June and very beautiful out—Ziggy, Danny, and I drove out to a lake and went swimming. There were lots of children around with their parents, dozens of kids running around. It was a very happy scene . . . that wonderful noise that kids make on the beach or near swimming pools, like happy birds. Kids would run up to Ziggy and he would make faces at them and they would make faces back and he'd make a more funny face and they'd start giggling and then run away to bring back their friends.
It was late in the afternoon—his shoulders and stomach were red from the sun—and he started talking about new routines and performing and also the contract with his parents and how he'd like to get out of it.
I looked over at Danny because I thought this was a good sign.
DANNY McGLUE: I remember thinking, Hey, good! Ziggy's being Ziggy again! But then I thought, Oh no, Ziggy's being Ziggy again.
• • •
PIP GRUNDY: I have no idea if Thalia Boneem was her real name. She was dark-skinned and had luxurious raven black hair, but the thing that struck you right away was her eyes. They were big and dark—like Turkish coffee—and melancholy, and she spoke with just a hint of an accent.
There were always women around—it's that way with musicians. They were in the lobbies of the hotels, they were waiting outside the clubs, they were in the bars. I married my high school sweetheart and I remained true to her. I cannot tell you how rare that was. Cueball Swenson was married and had three kids but he was known to take the occasional dip. Harry Bacon, who was really Harriet Bacon, had a wife but Harry played around too, though how and with whom and with what I do not know.
“I can't get enough,” [Floyd] told me once. “I can't never get enough. The more I get, the more I want. And the more I want . . .”
But all that ended with Thalia Boneem.
ARNIE LATCHKEY: He met her in an elevator at the Hotel Casey in Scranton . . . we were there for a weekend in the spring. The way I heard it, he didn't say a word to her, she didn't say a word to him. There was electricity between them, bolts of it, like in Frankenstein's laboratory. It just lit up and cackled.
She was about twenty-four or twenty-five years old and she was a virgin. I'll take his word fo
r it.
I have never seen such a change in a human being in all my life. “This is the one, Arn,” he said to me once before a gig, when everybody was setting up. “My whoring days are through.”
I looked over to her; she was standing in a corner, dressed all in black. Looks-wise, was she something to write home about, you wonder? Well, I might have written home about her, sure, but I don't think that the letter would've been very long.
“Latch,” Floyd told me once, blushing like a tomato, “she just turns me into a big baby all over again.”
PIP GRUNDY: Despite the unprofessionalism of our orchestra, we'd always been consistent. We always showed up twenty-five minutes late to play . . . but still, it was always twenty-five minutes. We were known to play the wrong notes here and there . . . but they were always the same ones in the same songs at the same times. Vic had been with us for a few months now and we were much more energetic with him than we'd been with Fain. The energy was really bouncing back at us from the crowd, particularly from the women.
I remember in a parking lot in Cleveland; Vic emerged—it was after a show—and he had a woman under each arm, two blondes with sunny smiles, fresh wind-pinched faces, bright lipstick, blue eyes.
Floyd was getting into a car and Thalia Boneem was in the front and Vic winked at Floyd. Floyd walked over to Vic and said, “What was that about?”
“I was just remembering how you said I was going to steal all your cooze away, that's all,” Vic said.
“You can have it, Vic. And you know, you shouldn't talk like that,” Floyd said. He got into the car and drove away.
ARNIE LATCHKEY: Stu and Larry Morrell was the closest to Floyd personally, but because they were Siamese twins, you couldn't keep too many secrets. You want to talk about in one ear and out the other?!
So Stu told me what it was all about. It was the fit. That's all it was. The fit. Floyd must have oozed into her like a hand into a glove with a quicksand lining. It was that simple. He called her his little bear trap.
You could hear them down the hallway and four flights up. He sounded like an elephant getting its trunk amputated without any anesthesia, and she made these squeaky noises, like a manual pencil sharpener handle that needs oiling going around slowly.
But he eventually became this whimpering bowl of jelly. Thalia once told him that she kissed a boy when she was fifteen back in the old country and he started blubbering for three hours straight. The gig was canceled that night. In a hotel in White Plains, Thalia told him when she came to America she'd worked for some guy sewing buttons onto schmattes on Essex Street and that he'd once put his hand on her tush, and Floyd destroyed the hotel room . . . the furniture and the floorboards were splinters. She would bring up a man that she knew only casually and Floyd would grill her for hours and hours . . . it was like a personal Spanish Inquisition.
I think about fifteen gigs were canceled on account of this behavior.
She had him under her thumb, this little dark Gypsy-ish girl and this massive bald Humpty Dumpty-like trumpeter. For hours she would sit in the bed and he'd just bawl his eyes out, in boxer shorts that Moby Dick couldn't fit into . . . all because some fella had once asked her for her phone number.
Don't forget: she was a virgin. And she was exotic. And . . . well, let's not mince words here, my friend: She must have been like a goddamn cyclone between the sheets.
PIP GRUNDY: We got off the bus and filed slowly into the lobby of the Eliot [Hotel] in Boston. We got the feeling back in our legs—it had been a very long bus ride. Floyd was talking to Arnie, going over room arrangements and rehearsal times, and Cueball poked an elbow in my ribs. One of the bellhops—this boy could not have been older than eighteen—was talking to Thalia; she was looking at him with those dark mystical eyes. Floyd then espied them talking to each other—it really was quite innocent—and he abruptly stopped the conversation with Arnie. He watched the two of them talk, his face getting more flushed by the second, and we watched Floyd watch the two of them. The bellhop walked away and everybody turned to Floyd. He sat down in a chair in the lobby and buried his head in his hands. A minute later he beckoned for Arnie, and he and Arnie whispered to each other.
Arnie then gathered us in a circle and said, “Uh, guys, the gig is off.”
We groaned and Floyd lifted his head out from his hands and shot us a very nasty look.
“Okay, everybody back on the bus,” Arnie said.
GUY PUGLIA: I'd seen Vic with every band he'd been with, from that crew of Boston blue bloods and that dive in Brooklyn with the sticky floor, and this was him at his best, so far. They even recorded a few songs, including “What Would I Do Without You?” and “Good-bye, Sweetheart, Farewell.”
He'd send stuff to Lulu, he'd send her earrings and stockings and chocolates and stuff. But he wasn't too big on writing letters. One time me, Hunny, and Vic were in Jimmy Dooley's bar in New York and I says to Vic, “Hey, how come you don't write Lu a letter?” Hunny says, “Yeah, Vic, write that nice girl a letter.” So Vic grabs a piece of paper from the hatcheck girl and a pen, and he shoves it over to me and says, “Gaetano, write something nice for me, would you?” I said, “Me? I don't wanna marry her!” I shoved it to Hunny and Hunny said he didn't want to marry her either and he wasn't too big on writin' nothing. “Just write something nice for me, okay, Guy?” Vic said to me.
So I wrote this really drippy sweet letter to her, like “Vic is really, really missing you and he really wishes he could be with you. You mean so much to Vic, you're the thing that keeps him going, the first thing he thinks of in the morning and the last thing he thinks of at night. He's just no good without you.” And it went on. It was really very emotional . . . I was gettin' all choked up writing it! I slid the page over to him and he didn't even read it! He just said, “Thanks . . . send it tomorrow morning first thing.”
PIP GRUNDY: The buses we traveled in . . . I never did enjoy them. Too cramped, too smoky, all those nasty smells coming from twenty men. You can imagine. The trains were fun though. We were based in Camden but went as far north as Maine, as far south as Florida, and as far west as Kansas. In the trains you could spread out and unwind.
Floyd and Thalia shared a sleeper, all very hush-hush because it was 1940. But perhaps not so hush-hush, for at three in the morning I'd wake up to what I thought was a long freight train going in the opposite direction, but it was just Floyd and Thalia attaining their climaxes.
But the dining cars, we used to take them over . . . that's where the card games were, the dice games too. We'd be tending to our instruments or just fiddling around. Some of the boys were serious about music and knew all about Lester Young, Basie, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Django, and Roy Eldridge. It's a pity that Floyd insisted on that middling “society” sound.
ARNIE LATCHKEY: Vic arranged it, he set the whole damn thing up . . . I had nothing to do with it except I went along with it.
Who was in that card game? . . . let's see . . . it was Harry Bacon, Cueball, Sid Gibson, and Floyd. Cueball lost all his dough and then Roy Lindell hopped in and he got cleaned out quick. When Roy dropped out, Vic came in to the dining car and took his seat. I remember distinctly he rubbed his nose with his forefinger when he sat down. He asked for a drink and Sid passed him a flask. It was Floyd's deal and he was shuffling, and Vic asked the porter for a hot towel.
Floyd dealt and I was pretending to read the paper but I had my eyes on Floyd's hand. I could see the whole thing. They were playing five-card draw mostly. I could see Floyd's hand and Harry's and Sid's . . . best seat in the house. Vic and I had worked out the system: I scratch my nose this way it means this; I scratch my ear that way it means that. It was perfect.
Vic won the first hand and Harry gets the deck. We're all making small talk, farting and smoking and what have you. Vic gets the hot towel, wipes his hands and his forehead. He won this hand too, thanks in great part to me scratching and twitching and rubbing. Now the deck went to Vic. I remember Floyd had nothing, just
ace high, and Harry had even worse. I licked my lips and Vic bet low so as to keep them in the game. They drew and Vic suckered them in and he beat them, three hands in a row.
Floyd is now shuffling. He changes the game to seven-card stud. No, what he did was, he put his head in his hand and thought about it for a while and then changed the game. He'd dealt them two cards and he said, “Hey, Vic, where you been?”
“Just getting some shut-eye, Floyd.”
“This card smells like cooze,” Floyd said.
“I don't know about that,” Vic said.
“Harry, smell this card,” Floyd said and he passed the card—which was a queen of diamonds—over to Harry. He said, “I don't know . . . it smells like a card to me.”
“Yeah, like you know the smell of cooze!” Floyd said and he dealt the card. He's still dealing and he gets another whiff and says, “You sure you were just getting some shut-eye, Vic?”
“Sure am,” Vic said. But I started to get uneasy . . . because Vic was looking uneasy.
Vic wipes his hands with another hot towel and Floyd continues dealing and then he comes to a card—it was the ace of spades that Vic had won with the game before—and he draws in a huge, huge breath. Vic looks over to me. He looked very scared . . . the color drained out of his face like it was sucked out.
I heard this noise, this strange noise. It came from Floyd's gut, his huge stomach . . . it was this inner yowl, like a lonely dog baying miles away. Floyd cleared the card table with his hands, he just swept the cards and the ashtrays and the money off the table. His face is all red and he's quaking.
Well, Arnold Latchkey felt the fear of the Almighty shoot right through him . . . because well I knew that big Floyd Lomax kept a pearl-handled Colt with him, in his trumpet case. And there was his trumpet case, right next to him. I stood up and said to him, “Okay, look, I can explain . . . yeah, we was cheatin' but it was all Vic's idea . . .” but he wasn't even listening to me. He yelled at the top of his lungs, “THALIA! THALIA! THALIA!” It was deafening, no exaggeration. “THALIA! THALIA! THALIA!” Imagine being inside the belly of a timpani for Beethoven's Ninth. That's what this was like.
