The Great Pretenders

by Laura Kalpakian

  “See what I mean about cool, daddy-o?” said Diana, giving us all a knowing grin as we followed her to the bar.

  Galaxies of planets and orbs were painted across the ceiling in dull gold and amber and a dirty white. The chandelier twirled slowly, rotating shards of starlight over all, and splashed along the walls were comets with fierce, beautiful tails. All this was dimmed by thick clouds of cigarette smoke and the scent of reefer. We crowded at the bar and ordered drinks while money and liquor and music flowed all around us. The crowd was perhaps two-thirds Negro and one-third white. Many tables had black and white people together, something you never publicly see except on Central Avenue. Though there was a dance floor, no one was dancing except for one lone woman, who nodded and rocked, eyes closed, hips swaying. Everyone else, unless they were talking or flirting, succumbed to the rhythms, enchanted. The jazz was nothing I recognized, nothing I could groove to, and it was so loud that everything had to happen by way of expressions or gestures like a silent film.

  The Negroes were indeed cool cats, wearing formfitting jackets, their slim legs in tight pants, their women in luxurious clothes that clung to their bodies, their hair sleek and shining, even in the smoky ambience. Most of the white men wore tuxes, their women in evening gowns and long white gloves; expensive furs lolled over the backs of chairs like animals at rest. The six of us were more casually dressed—Bongo in nonstop black and a beret, Jonathan in a shirt open at the collar. The two actors wore sport coats. Diana’s silk trousers swayed when she walked, and I wore the proverbial little black dress with a gold belt.

  Diana turned to us and shouted, “You see that man on trumpet? That, my friends, is the sexiest man who ever drew breath. Don’t you doubt it. I’ve never had it so good as I have with him.” She nodded toward the bandstand as she rolled and thrust her hips.

  The band took a break, and the trumpet player ambled over to us, and right there in front of God and everyone, he took Diana in his arms and kissed her on the lips for a very long time, as much an act of ownership as passion. She laced her arms around his neck and went nearly limp in his arms. Admitting publicly to an affair with a Negro? That was over the top. Even for Diana Jordan. Bongo and the two actors put down their drinks and left without another word.

  “You lily-livered stupidshits!” Diana called out, laughing at their retreating backs. Then she introduced Jonathan and me to Booker Dexter.

  Except for the name, I wouldn’t have known him immediately as Terrence Dexter’s brother. He was not as tall, nor as handsome, as Terrence, who at that very minute I saw across the room, deep in conversation with none other than Clayton Strong and his girlfriend, Rita. Something Clayton said made Terrence throw his head back and laugh out loud, very unlike the man who had given me a ride in his Porsche. He turned and saw me, and as his eyes met mine surprise lit his features. An unlooked-for frisson of delight rushed through me as he crossed the smoky room with a smile on his face.

  “Miss Granville.”

  “Mr. Dexter. I’m so sorry I didn’t thank you for the ride the other day. It was unforgivable.”

  “No, really, I’m sorry I drove off in a huff. That deer had me really rattled.”

  “I’ve never been so scared.”

  “I lost my cool. I apologize.”

  “You know this chick?” asked Booker.

  “We’ve met.” He gave me an intimate smile.

  “Crazy, man! My uncle working for your grandfather,” said Booker after all the intros, connections, and exclamations were exchanged. “Terrence tell you all we used to park cars at your granddaddy’s? ‘Yessir, lemme park that Jag for you, sir!’ Terrence, he once drove a Jag halfway to Santa Barbara and still had it back when the party ended.”

  “Don’t ever let Clarence know,” said Terrence seriously.

  “You dig the music?” Booker asked Jonathan and me. “West Coast Cool.”

  “Sure,” said Jonathan. “Can’t dance to it, though.”

  “Don’t have to. It gets you here”—his hand splayed over his heart—“and here”—down to his guts—“and here.” He grabbed his groin and laughed, then threw an arm over Diana’s shoulders, and they meandered away, probably out to her car.

  Jonathan and I followed Terrence to a table, where we crowded in with Clayton Strong, Rita, and two others, friends from UCLA. For the friends’ benefit, Clayton and Jonathan recounted the loincloth-burning party at Casa Fiesta, and commiserated over toga roles. Clayton recited the stale paeans reserved for Negro actors, nearly all of which began with “Master,” and Jonathan offered up some of the god-awful lines he and Paul Newman and Jack Palance had recited in The Silver Chalice. Jonathan had everyone laughing till it hurt, then he bought another round of drinks and invited all of them to Casa Fiesta next weekend.

  “Laurel Canyon?” said Terrence. “We better not show up there unless we’re parking cars.”

  “No,” I said, “everyone comes to Casa Fiesta.”

  “That’s true,” said Clayton. “I thought Rita and I were goners the night of the toga-burning party when the police and fire department showed up. We could have been busted, and it would have gone hard for us, but”—he nodded to Jonathan—“he sent us upstairs to wait till the coast was clear.”

  “We put the bedroom to good use,” said Rita.

  Musicians gathered again on the stage and tuned up. Booker was the last to appear, while Diana came to our table, where she all but oozed sexual surfeit. We could smell it on her.

  “What do you think of the music?” Terrence asked me once they started in on a new set.

  “When I think of jazz, I think of Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald. I saw Sidney Bechet play in Paris a few times.”

  “That old-timey stuff? That’s New Orleans crap. Sidney Bechet is old enough to be my granddaddy. Nobody but squares digs that anymore! Everyone who’s cool digs bebop, hard bop, progressive jazz. West Coast Cool, that’s what we call this.” He nodded toward the bandstand, where, even if the musicians were cool, sweat gleamed on all their faces. “The greats all got their starts here on Central Avenue, grew up around here. Buddy Collette, Art Pepper, Chico Hamilton, Charles Mingus, Dexter Gordon.”

  The names meant nothing to me, but I nodded as though they did.

  “When I was a kid, you’d ride up and down the streets delivering the evening paper, and you’d hear all these kids practicing, and playing in church. That’s where they learned their licks, most of them, playing hymns in church.”

  “A hymn in church seems a long way from what they’re playing here.”

  “No, see, Roxanne, you gotta know your hymns before you can bust them up into something else. A hymn is comforting because every chord has its expectable chord right behind it, every note has its expectable note right in front of it. Jazz takes all that, shatters it. Jazz don’t comfort. Jazz wakes you up, because you never know what’s coming next.”

  “Did your brother play hymns in church?”

  “Oh, believe it! Booker and me both. We had rented instruments and Mama said to pay our part for them, we had to play in church every Sunday. People would come to that church just to hear Booker Dexter play! I tell you, the old ladies wept in the aisles.”

  “And the young ladies too, no doubt.”

  “No, the young ladies got damp and frisky.” He grinned. “My brother and I, we were every Sunday in those pews, no matter what we’d been doing on Saturday night.”

  “I won’t even try and imagine what that was.”

  He laughed. “Music kept us out of real trouble. We played in church and at school. At Jefferson High there was Dr. Browne. Man, he turned out more jazz musicians than any school ever has in the history of the whole world! I play a little piano, a little sax, but my brother has God-given genius. Oh, children! When Booker puts that trumpet to his lips, he leaves you slain! Well, you can hear him! He could bring down the walls of Jericho.
He’s a progressive jazz man.”

  “It certainly sounds progressive.”

  “Dig it!” Terrence nodded in time to the beat. “They are cookin’ tonight!”

  Later, the band took another break, and Booker and Diana again disappeared. A different drummer and piano man came out and seated themselves at their instruments. A vocalist shimmered out from behind flimsy curtains and took the mic. She wore a white strapless evening gown and long white gloves that contrasted vividly with her dark skin. She had orchids pinned in her hair, which was upswept with lots of escaping curly tendrils. The piano man introduced her as Miss Jaylene Henderson. As soon as she opened her mouth and the first notes of “The Man I Love” poured out, the Comet Club came to a standstill, and even the musicians lapsed into something of torpor. She lit into “How High the Moon,” and everyone in the room seemed to rise on the tide of her voice. Throughout her set, she alternated sad with soaring till I felt like my emotions had been through the wringer. She could do anything with that voice, silky one moment, rasping the next. She sang “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” in a voice like molten honey. Terrence asked if I wanted to dance.

  He held me in a practiced embrace, and he danced well, though not like anything I’d been taught at L’Oiseau d’Or, and certainly not like free-form bop to Bill Haley and the Comets at Casa Fiesta. His arms wrapped round me like you would feel a silk scarf around you. His physical warmth penetrated my skin, down to my very bones. He responded to the music, and I responded to him. He had, I noticed, perfect, small ears.

  She finished “Smoke,” nodded to her musicians, and her voice, like a ribbon of lyrics, rolled out, “‘You must remember this . . . ’”

  “‘As Time Goes By’ is my favorite song,” I said, “from my favorite movie, Casablanca.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “You never heard of Casablanca! Why, that’s like . . .” But I could think of no equivalent.

  “Well, I heard of it, but I’ve never seen it.”

  “You don’t know what you’ve missed.”

  In reply, he gave a light laugh and pulled me closer. “Maybe you’ll have to show me what I’ve missed.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  “What’s that cologne you’re wearing. It’s . . .”

  “Panache, and you have to have panache to wear it.”

  He gave a slight laugh, and a twirl, and when the vocalist lingered over the last few lyrics, he laid me back in his arms, and I let myself trust him.

  Jaylene bowed her head and accepted her applause with the same aplomb that Cleopatra might have shown to a throng of unworthy Romans.

  We returned to our table, and Jaylene descended on us in a cloud of Arpège. She lifted one of Terrence’s cigarettes and lit up. She blew the smoke in my direction, giving me a long, hard assessment.

  “Jaylene Henderson,” said Terrence, “this is Roxanne Granville and Jonathan Moore. Jaylene and I went to Jefferson High School together.”

  I nodded. I couldn’t imagine this woman as a high school girl.

  “And the church choir,” she added, giving Jonathan a flicker of interest, which he reciprocated. “I was a soloist.”

  “I was never that good,” Terrence admitted.

  “He was good at other things.” She exhaled knowingly, then added, “He was in the top five in typing class. Fast, but not accurate.” An admiring white man came up and asked if he could buy her a drink, and she drifted away on his arm.

  We stayed so late that Clayton and his friends had all left, and other musicians were coming in and setting up for an after-hours jam session. Booker played his last set and joined our table. Jonathan swooped up the last tab and paid it with a fat tip. We five exited the club, Booker and Diana in the lead, his arm over her shoulders. We had no sooner stepped out on the street than we were swarmed by photographers, shouting and blinding us with flashbulbs.

  “There she is! Get her! Get her, boys! Get ’em together! That’s right! Hey, Diana! Kiss him, Diana! Let’s see you—”

  “Bastards!” yelled Diana, freeing herself from Booker and using her full girth to ram into one of the photographers. He stumbled back, and fell. Booker used his trumpet case to smack another in the guts. Curses rained down. A photographer blinded me with his flashbulb right in front of my eyes, and I swung my handbag at him, knocking the camera out of his hands onto the sidewalk, where it landed with a gratifying crack. I felt a smack across my face, a blow that made my ears ring, and I reeled and fell with a thud to the pavement. With one hand Terrence pushed the guy away and with the other he pulled me to my feet, wrapped his arms around me, holding me close. Though mayhem raged around us, we seemed briefly isolated as I looked up into his eyes, and suddenly remembered the deer jumping over us, and our frantic physical clutching at each other, but just then police sirens blared and cop cars descended. Uniformed men with nightsticks poured out of the vehicles and swept through the crowd, some invading the Comet Club, crying out, Raid! Raid! Terrence and I were yanked apart, and he was marched toward the wall while I was thrust roughly in the other direction, stumbling when my high heel broke off. I could see Diana, bent forward, a cop twisting her arm behind her back as he marched her to the car and thrust her into the back seat. I was prodded with a nightstick into that same car. While Diana spewed invective, I watched as Jonathan was dragged along the sidewalk by the back of his coat and flung into the car beside me. His beautiful face was a mass of blood. My face was smeared with blood too. The door slammed shut.

  From behind the grille we watched as white and black people were marched out of the Comet Club, pushed, punched by armed cops, everyone screaming and swearing over the sirens. The white people were thrust toward the curb, the Negroes, the men flung up against the wall, the women treated a little less brutally. From around the corner I saw another cop leading Booker in handcuffs. The cop held his trumpet case and now and then hit him with it, once in the head, once in the stomach, once in the groin. Booker crumpled. The last I saw of Terrence, before the car we were in sped away from the scene, he was lined up with other Negroes, men and women, facing the wall, feet spread, hands behind his head.

  Jonathan, Diana, and I were dumped at the police station. We were told to sit in a line of benches that felt like pews in the Church of Stink and Wallow. All around us were moans, men peeing themselves and women so spent with tears they were hiccupping. I ached everywhere, my eye throbbed, blood had dried on my dress, my face hurt, and I hoped my nose wasn’t broken. Diana was a nonstop fountain of curses. Jonathan kept hollering through his bloodied lips, Do you know who I am! Do you know who my father is? until some cop came along and told both of them to shut the hell up.

  “You can’t tell me to shut up. You can’t hold us,” cried Jonathan. “We haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “Resisting arrest.”

  “We weren’t resisting arrest. We got in a fight with photographers.”

  “It was a drug raid. They had drugs.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “That’s what they told me.”

  “We are important people. You will regret this.”

  “Not as much as you will. Look at that lip! Now shut up or it will get a lot worse.”

  We could see that was true. White people swept up in the raid streamed into the station, some the worse for wear, but few were badly bloodied. The Negroes shambled in, pushed with nightsticks, their clothes stained with blood, their heads too. Many limped or leaned on one another. Men and women who just hours before had seemed so graceful, so joyous, so in command of the Comet Club and their music, shuffled in, abject. They were told to sit separate from the white people across an irregular aisle. Jaylene Henderson was not among them. Terrence was one of the last. His right eye was swollen shut and bloody, and his shirtfront was red. The cop nudged him with the nightstick to the small of his back. He moved forward, but without haste. He glanc
ed at me, and looked away.

  From down the hall a voice bellowed out, “My horn! My horn, gimme back my horn, goddammit!”

  Two cops thrust Booker in front of them. He was badly beaten. Terrence jumped to his feet and started toward his brother till a cop blocked his path. Diana leapt up and cried, “Motherfuckers! Dirty bastards! Sonsofbitches!” She kept swearing and shouting till they led Booker away, down a long hall.

  Terrence sat down, bent over, his head in his hands. I rose and started to hobble toward him till a cop roughly took my arm, marched me back to Jonathan and Diana, and told me to stay put and shut up. Jonathan put his hand over mine.

  “This is Irv Rakoff’s doing,” Diana said, her voice thick with rage and pain. “This is his revenge. I should never have . . .”

  “Fired him?” I asked. “Of course you should have fired him! Look what he was doing to you every time you wanted a new role!”

  “I should never have let him know about Booker. That’s what I meant. I was drunk and angry when I called Irv. I wanted him to know what a piss-poor lay he was, and so I, well, I let him have it, right where I knew it would hurt the most.”

  “You told him about Booker?” asked Jonathan, incredulous. “And the Comet Club?”

  “When they print those photographs,” I said, “they’re going to slay you.”

  “I slipped up,” she admitted. She gulped, her shoulders shook, and she collapsed into an emotional heap. Brassy, brave, charismatic Diana Jordan, weeping, blubbering? Not a sight I ever thought I would see. She wiped her nose with her hand. “Irv must have called every slimy rag in town and told them to show up at the Comet Club at closing time if they wanted to catch me with Booker.”