Low Down: Junk, Jazz, and Other Fairy Tales From Childhood

by A. J. Albany

  There was a big buzz going around about some little blue pills that everyone referred to as “jolly beans.” They seemed to make whoever took them terribly happy, and since I liked the name, I snaked one out of its hiding place and tried it. That was the day I fell in love with speed. Like Icarus flying on high, drunk with a sense of invincibility, and like the best-ever carnival ride, speed was a blast, until you fell to earth, the ride ended, and you were left feeling sick and broken.

  When the time came to leave Dalton’s, it was—as usual—sudden, and the reasons why unclear. I’d become accustomed to our transitory life and no longer wasted time asking questions. It seemed to be our destiny to stay on the move, like unhappy sharks.

  alain

  Alain looked like the illustration of D’Artagnan in my copy of The Three Musketeers. When he smiled, it was the brilliant Technicolor smile of Errol Flynn in Robin Hood. He was beyond dashing. He was the first-ever object of my desire, and he was only forty-eight inches tall. Although his head was not misshapen—on the contrary, it was unearthly beautiful—and his torso was proportioned, he had the short arms and small bowed legs that are common in most dwarfs.

  I met him at Dalton’s, where he was starring in one of Dalton’s art-porno flicks. His life was one of unspeakable sadness and adventure that made my own problems seem so relatively small, you’d need a microscope to spot them. His father was a religious zealot who believed that his son’s deformity was an indication of God’s displeasure with Alain’s mother, who he beat regularly. He also attempted to stretch his son on a self-styled rack, which Alain endured until the age of eleven, at which time he ran away and hooked up with a Danish carnival that featured a troupe of performing dwarfs.

  He spent the next seven years traveling the world. On the road, he was introduced to morphine to help with the almost constant pain that his body was in, and became what he called a “medicinal user.” He could recite Romantic poetry in four languages, had a splendid singing voice, was an impressive magician, and was tragically unhappy. He lived on Bronson, just off Franklin Avenue, which was ten to twelve blocks away from the St. Francis, where we were once again living. I would ride my bike over to his apartment with my father’s approval, since he believed that all females, clowns, people in animal costumes, and anyone shorter than myself were harmless companions for me.

  Perhaps I was a sick and devious nine-year-old to be so enamored of a twenty-two-year-old morphine-addicted porno-movie dwarf. It’s a possibility that I have always been comfortable with. In Alain’s room was the waist-down half of a male mannequin, dressed in slacks with big shoes. He’d climb up onto the top of the mannequin’s waist and put on a large jacket that he’d button around the dummy’s front. “Look! I am a normal man now.” I was unimpressed, and remember thinking, I would adore you no more at eighty-two inches than I do at forty-eight inches. However, Alain was mesmerized by this image. His mannequin was strategically placed in front of a full-length mirror, where I imagine he spent hours staring at his impossible fantasy. My own guarded fantasy was made public after a creature named Nadine, who Dad was knocking around with, found my journal and read it aloud in front of Dad and his friends, Lou and Art. “Alain my love, I long for the day our lips meet, and we run away on a silvery horse and . . .” Dad silently snatched the book away from her as I slunk, horrified, into the bathroom, where I pressed my ear against the door, fearing the possibility of my father’s anger. For a while, there was silence, then Lou spoke: “Ha! That’s cute. Kids are something else.”

  “Well, I’d keep them apart. Isn’t there a word for people who like midgets?”

  “He’s a dwarf, and fuck you, Nadine. She’s an empathetic kid—always for the underdog, picks out the runt of the litter.”

  “Oh, sure, no worries, man—she’s a sweet kid.”

  Awkward silence.

  “Maybe she needs professional help.”

  “Shut up, or maybe you’ll need medical help, Nadine.”

  “He is a nice midget, though.”

  “A dwarf.”

  “Right. What’s the difference, anyway?”

  “Well, I think she’s looking for, you know, attention.”

  “I give her attention.”

  “Oh, sure, I didn’t mean—”

  More silence.

  “What’s with the silver horse?”

  “There’s no such animal, is there?”

  “Nadine, you’re a fucking moron.”

  After more silence, Art spoke up. “All right—so who’s holding tonight? Empty your pockets, gentlemen.”

  That was my cue to call it a night. In a few minutes, they’d be in the stratosphere. I grabbed Dad’s robe off the back of the door, rolled up a towel for a pillow, and went to sleep in the tub. Sometime during the night, Dad picked me up and put me on the sofa bed. Next morning I kept a low profile, nose buried in my copy of The Three Musketeers with a now-altered drawing of a very short D’Artagnan. In the afternoon, I decided I would go to see Alain for the last time. Dad was brooding like a hurt child, as he always did when I upset him, and I could not bear it. I told him I was riding my bike over to the market. He regarded me with suspicion. “One hour, no more.”

  When I arrived at Alain’s he looked amused, and I figured he had heard about the journal, since everyone shared the same drug connection. After one last look at the dark blue eyes and chestnut hair that curled around his glorious face, I told him I could see him no more. Before he had a chance to answer, and with a weird confidence I must have stolen from Cupid, I bent forward deeply from the waist, having been a polite distance back from the door as to not appear needlessly tall, and offered my lips as I had seen done a hundred times in old movies, prepared for my first kiss. He was sweetly accommodating, and something like electric liquid traveled down my body, startling me. I fled down the hall and onto my silvery bike-horse, leaving a trail of luminous blossoms that stretched all the way back to the St. Francis.

  the stuttering boy

  Bunky had a terrible stutter. The stutter became apparent around the age of six, when Tex, his stepfather, first entered his life. Dad called Tex a “soulless yahoo,” among other things, adding disdainfully: “He’s a pillhead too—strung out on Percodan of all things.” Dad didn’t have much use for southerners, having had a number of negative experiences with them each time he toured down South. The first time was when he played with, I believe, Benny Carter’s band, and the KKK tried to turn over the tour bus. On another occasion, he was in the company of Max Roach when they were refused service at a lunch counter. Dad threw a fit that almost landed him in jail.

  Tex definitely gave Texans a bad name. For years, he had been throwing his stepson against the wall like some oversized handball. He also terrorized Bunky’s mother and anybody who had the misfortune of crossing his path. Bunky and his mom walked the halls of the St. Francis with nervous, dark-circled eyes, their shoulders hunched high, as if they expected an anvil to drop on their heads at any moment. The first time I ever spoke to Bunky was up on the roof, where we would seek refuge from the drama of life down below. From atop the St. Francis, you could see much of sprawling Tinseltown, from a distance sufficient to make it all appear shining and beautiful.

  Viewed at street level, its beauty became lousy with an overabundance of flaws. Only thirteen years old, Bunky had the defeated aura of a sad old man. Each time I saw him, he had a new evident injury. We’d share a stolen cigarette, and usually didn’t have much to say. To engage him in conversation seemed a little cruel; it took him a long time to work out a sentence.

  One afternoon, when he appeared with a split lip and purple eye, I asked him why he stuck around. “You’re old enough to take off,” I said, rather foolishly. Even his sigh was a stutter. “I should have run away the day I was born. Now it’s too late.” I knew what he meant. Bunky often gazed intently in a southeasterly direction. Once I asked what he was looking for. “Arkansas. It’s out over that way, somewhere.” Bunky’s family had come to
L.A. from Arkansas five years earlier, in pursuit of the elusive golden dream that might or might not exist here, at the end of the world. Since then, Bunky’s mom had been waitressing at Schwab’s on Sunset, and Tex had become a full-time loser. After a while, Bunky had given up on school; the kids hassled him so relentlessly about his stutter.

  There finally came a day when Bunky’s mom, tired of being a human heavy bag, packed up, took her son, and went down to the Vine Street Greyhound station, where they caught a bus for home. When Tex was lucid enough to realize he’d been left high and dry, he went on a rampage, screaming down the halls, banging on everyone’s door. He banged on our door, yelling: “Hey, kid, where did they go? I bet Bunky told you.”

  Dad was furious at this intrusion: “Beat it, you shit-kicking, cow-fucking mook.” Dad had a great way with words. Eventually, the cops showed up and carted Tex off. The next morning, I headed up to the roof at five thirty, my favorite time of day. I looked southeast, out beyond Fern Dell, as Bunky had done, and for some reason I cried, though my thoughts were about how pleased I felt for him. He had made it out, and though I didn’t know a damn thing about Arkansas, I was certain he’d be better off there. “Run, Bunky, run!” I yelled from the rooftop. Then I smiled. My time to escape would also come.

  out of towners

  The L.A. Free Press was a local paper that sold for a quarter and could be found all over town in the late sixties, early seventies. The paper’s demise occurred around the same time the concepts of peace and freedom became passé. These and a handful of other human virtues lost out to self-obsession and a manic desire to obtain as many possessions as possible. In the back of the Free Press, there was a personals column that always included letters from desperate parents searching for their runaway children: “Judy—Please come home, I won’t make you go to school. I miss you. Love, Mom.” Or, “Billy—I don’t care what you’ve done, just please call your mother, she’s worried sick.” Et cetera, et cetera.

  The fate of most of these lost teens and preteens wasn’t very pretty. They hustled, stole, got hung up on drugs. Sometimes they were murdered, their bodies disposed of off Angeles Crest and other desolate stretches of highway. There was a girl, Janyce, who met her end starring in a snuff film. She went into it like a kamikaze pilot, knowing full well what would happen. Her only stipulation was that a copy of the film be sent to her mother and stepfather, who’d destroyed her with years of sexual and physical abuse. Her sometime-boyfriend, Johnny, who I knew as a regular Boulevard fixture from my own wanderings, told me of Janyce’s end with a surprising air of detachment. Apparently he and a few other local kids had bets on whether she’d actually go through with it or not. “Goddamn,” Johnny exclaimed after telling his story. Finally, some remorse, I thought. Just as I was going to offer a word of sympathy, Johnny said: “I lost twenty dollars betting she wouldn’t do it. That bitch.” I walked away wordlessly, reminding myself never to talk with him again.

  The kids who descended on L.A. came from every corner of the U.S. They’d hitchhike or bus in from Detroit, Tennessee, North Dakota, everywhere and nowhere, with wild delusions about Hollywood and the fame and riches that awaited all God’s children who entered the city limits. I knew a guy named Willie, thin, with acne and big eyes, a Kentucky boy, who said he’d spent a whole week down at the beach and never once saw the Banana Splits riding in their dune buggy. “That’s why I came here,” he said earnestly. “Everyone on the TV looked like they were having so much fun. I sure wasn’t.” Willie was one of the legions of the disillusioned who roamed the Boulevard, hanging outside the Two Guys pizza place or Orange Julius, anywhere, looking for handouts and affection. Some acted tough while others were visibly frightened.

  As sad as it was, I felt just as sorry for my city. L.A. became an overburdened mother who couldn’t care for all her wayward children. The world looked to her with a thousand glittering, impossible expectations that couldn’t be lived up to. The crime rate between ’69 and ’72 quadrupled as all the disappointed transplants began to explode. I wanted to say: “Wise up. No one owes you anything, and even if they do, odds are they’ll never pay up. Go back to Palookaville if you can’t hack it.” Anyway, they stayed, and many more came. They trashed my hometown, and it suffocated under the weight of their anger and ignorance. Hollywood was beaten beyond recognition. It would never recover, but I would never leave.

  king for a day

  Dad rarely looked too hard or too long at the madness of his own addiction, but he often lamented the toll drugs took on the lives of his friends. Around 1985, he was playing somewhere—maybe at Sweet Basil in New York City—when an extremely down-and-out Chet Baker came in. Dad and Chet had known and, surprisingly, even liked each other for almost forty years, though they hadn’t met up since the early seventies, when both were playing a jazz festival in Europe. Chet approached Dad and asked if he could spot him a little cash, as he was at a real low end, and God knows it wasn’t easy “to find one kind face in all of cold fucking New York,” as Dad used to say. At that point, however, Dad had hit rock bottom himself, sometimes barely making it through the few gigs that still came his way. “Chet, you know I’d spot you if I had the bread, but I spent my advance and don’t even have cab fare home. You’re welcome to crash at my pad tonight.” Chet took Dad’s hands and squeezed them. “Thanks, Joe. You’re a sweet guy.” Dad was looking at a reflection of his own devastation, and told me that at that moment, he felt like crying. In the land of poor, blind Chet, my one-eyed Dad was king on that particular night.

  A week later could have seen the situation reversed. At least Chet had experienced fame, a real celebrity that was usually reserved for pop stars. A great part of it was the James Dean good looks of his youth, and a willingness, to some extent, to play the game. Why, just once, couldn’t Dad have swallowed his pride and allowed himself to be gawked at by the curious who would gladly pay to see what the wreckage of a once-great jazzman looked like? Chet and Dad could have traveled together as a sideshow act: “Step up and see the once-handsome and –talented great white hopes of the jazz world.” There were a hundred other guys who could have gone on that tour too—the pianist Dodo Marmarosa, for one. Dad’s oversensitivity and paranoia crippled him. He couldn’t hear praise without feeling certain it was tinged with an underlying mockery. A young Frenchman came up to Dad on a Paris street once and asked for his autograph. “Why?” Dad said suspiciously. “Because you’re the legendary Joe Albany, right?”

  “Well, really? You think?” Dad mumbled, and shifted awkwardly like a kid, finally taking the guy’s pen and scrawling an extensive declaration of his appreciation for the kind attention. Someone would have had to knock Dad over the head with a fat collection of all the great reviews he’d garnered and well-respected recordings he’d made before he’d accept the significance of his place in jazz history. He’d traveled far from his beginnings as an accordion-playing kid from New Jersey. Lester Young said he was “the best white pianist I ever laid eyes on,” and when Charlie Parker couldn’t get Bud Powell, Dad was his next-favorite choice. He also had the rare honor of being one of the few pianists not to be booted off the bench by Monk after Monk heard him play his composition “Ruby, My Dear.” In the end, none of it seemed to mean much to him. His accomplishments never brought him much happiness.

  Three years after their last meeting in that New York club, Joe Albany and Chet Baker would die within a few months of each other. Confidence or lack of, West Coast or hard bop, straight hair or curly, none of it had ever mattered. For both of them, musical obsession was their driving joy and staying high their tragic undoing in the end.

  part three

  separating

  By the end of ’71, Dad was boxed into a bad corner filled with cops, pushers, and psychos. All over town, people were after him with various axes to grind. Around Christmas 1971, Dad was contacted by an English music promoter who said he could keep him working in Europe, book him into all the jazz festivals. Since work seemed to
have dried up in L.A., Dad took him up on his offer and split for England. Over the next eight years, I would join him for brief periods. We lived in Denmark for a while and got to see a lot of Dexter Gordon, who I adored, but never again would it be just us two, each surviving for the sake of the other.

  After Dad left, I lived with my grandmother. The general consensus was that, at nine, it would be good for me to settle into a normal life, but a normal life held little appeal. On the day I went to the airport to see him off, he was upbeat, and he said he’d send for me as soon as possible. We said goodbye, and I was watching him walk toward the plane when he spun around and yelled, “Ace-one-boon-white-coon, you’re the nuttiest!” and then he was gone, and I felt my spirit drop out the bottom of my shoes, rarely to be seen again. This was the first time Dad ever left me behind by choice, and it put me in a mild state of shock. When the shock wore off, loneliness set in, and left me hard around the edges.

  The only joyful thing I did around this time was to start collecting records. I bought the Velvet Underground and the Clockwork Orange soundtrack, and I stole Led Zeppelin III and the Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request, figuring the latter two bands didn’t need the money as much—ever a thief with a conscience. Dad left me his jazz LPs, but now I forged out on my own, musically.