American Gangster (31 page)

“You finish a hunk and he says, ‘Funny.' That's it. Just ‘funny.' No explanation, no commentary. Nothing. Just ‘funny.' You do another bit. He listens. Again, no clue, a total stone face. ‘Not funny,' he says. ‘What do you mean,' I'm yelling, ‘not funny? I love this bit. It's a fucking riot. He looks at me like I'm a bug. ‘Look,' he says, ‘I ain't here to suck your dick. I'm here to tell you what you came to find out.'”

After Lewis thought about it awhile he concluded, as almost every comic who comes to see “the ear” eventually does, “That George was right.”

Comics for whom George offers “the ear” know what they're getting. Every so often, the big names like Robert Klein and David Brenner, who make as much as $30,000 a week in Vegas, come by to do sets for the traditional $6.90 plus subway fare pay. The place is packed, everyone's drunk, and George gets the money to stay in business another season.

Back in the day, George used to listen to all the comics who came into Pip's. It didn't matter if they were good or bad. “There was something about
the process that thrilled me. Call it what you want but being a comic is an existential act. It takes risk. Like, if you get some kid up here and he's a singer and he's fucking awful people will say, Wow, that kid can't sing at all. If a comic gets up and he's rotten, the response is going to be, ‘What an asshole, I hate that
mocky
bastard.' They want to murder you…. Comedy is personal that way. The stakes are high. If you do good you say you killed. If you do bad, you say you died. Kill or be killed. Simple as that.”

Now, though, George says, the drama has gone out of the laughing game. “Probably it's TV but everyone more or less knows what a comic sounds like. They know how to pace their act, how to defuse hecklers. They have a safety net. That's the way it is with everything now. You see a stock broker on TV, then at least you know how to talk like a stock broker. The gangsters watch the
Godfather
to learn how to talk like a gangster. Once I'd come down and didn't know what the hell I was going to hear. It could be really terrible, just the worst shit you ever heard. Or it could be something totally new. Flat-out brilliant. Either way it would be
interesting
. Now hardly anyone is really bad, but hardly anyone is really good. I'd rather stay upstairs and jack off.”

This doesn't mean strange nights don't come up. “I get a lot of wannabes in here, you know,” George says. “There was this one guy, he's like a candy salesman from Buffalo or somewhere. He comes to the City a couple times a year. Always calls me. ‘
George!
Let me stand-up! I got stuff that's great. You'll piss in your pants.'

“I always put him off. One time I guess I'm feeling kindly, or stupid, so I say, ‘Yeah, if you want to come in early do a few minutes.' But I forgot that was the night my friend who teaches these adult slow learners is bringing his class in. I didn't know what to tell the guy, so I just kept my mouth shut. He comes in, with this idiot Frank Fontaine hat on and squirting flower on his lapel, I kid you not. He does his five minutes or so, these terrible old jokes. But the slow learners—they love it. They're cracking up every time he opens his mouth. They'll laugh at anything. The guy gets off stage and he's completely blitzed. ‘Did you hear them,' he's shouting. ‘They loved me.
I killed!
' He goes back to Buffalo thinking he gets more laughs than Jack Benny. Now he keeps calling me. ‘George,
I'm gonna be in. My shit's
even better now
.' I'm ducking him. I don't have the heart to tell him: ‘You made retards laugh. That's what you did, you fucking idiot.'”

These days with his sons taking over a lot of business of the club, George finds himself with more time to do a little fishing in the Bay, if you want to call reeling in a mutant eel fishing. Sometimes he'll stroll around the now shuttered Lundy's where the last reclusive Lundy brother used to live in the attic surrounded by a dozen Doberman pinchers he used to sic on bill collectors.

“Mostly I just walk around and blink,” George says. “The blinking, I don't know where it came from. It starts like a twitch in my forehead, moves down to my eyes. It comes in patterns. Like blink, then blink, blink. I think maybe I'm sending Morse code only I don't know to who. I could be sending out Paul Revere one-if-by-land-two-if-by-sea signals to aliens in flying saucers waiting for a sign to take over earth.”

George figures he'll keep Pip's until he croaks. Recently, in an attempt at upgrade, he put in a brunch menu. “It's the only place in Brooklyn you can get brunch, whatever the hell that is.”

Just then a mah-jongg lady who said she'd been living in Sheepshead Bay since before Lundy's walked by.

She said, “You had David Brenner, I hear.”

George said, “Yes, David Brenner.”

She said, “David Brenner, very good. David Brenner.”

George said, “David Brenner.”

She said, “David Brenner, I like him. On the TV, very funny.”

“David Brenner. He's good.” Then the mah-jongg lady looked at George's window where Marty had stenciled
SUNDAY BRUNCH, SALADS QUICHES
. And said, “So what's a quitch?”

To which George said, “Quiche. Quiche.”

To which the lady said, “Quitch. I don't know from this quitch.”

To which George turned and looked across Sheepshead Bay and blinked rapidly.

Next to Bill Clinton, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis is about the most charming man you'll ever meet. No matter how busy he appears to be, he has all the time in the world to talk to you. His recall for small pleasantries, like remembering your birthday or the names of your children, is hard to beat. He also can play better than Clinton. For sure no jazzman, not Charlie Parker, not Duke Ellington, ever raised $130 million. The story of a modern Balanchine in full, but cool, glad-hand mode. From
New York
magazine, 2001
.

“Let the ass-whipping begin,” Wynton remarked, a bit of opening commentary as he walked onto the courts behind the Sixty-fifth Street projects. Nothing personal, the musician said; with him, ass-whipping need not be adversarial. It can be more a statement of loving engagement with the material at hand, be it Mahler, another take on “East St. Louis Toodle-oo,” or a supposedly friendly game of one-on-one.

Still, it was probably a mistake, snickering when the trumpet player started in about his jumper, how sweet it was. Somehow it seemed unlikely, unfair, creepy even, that Wynton Marsalis—only forty but already into his second decade as the semi-officially anointed “most important musician of his generation,” the only jazzman ever to get a Pulitzer Prize (for
his symphonic-size
Blood on the Fields
), winner of both jazz and classical Grammys on the same night, one of
Time
magazine's “25 most influential Americans”—might be good at basketball too.

But here they came, the jumpers raining down. “Money in the bank,” Marsalis gloated, canning his seventh in a row, which is a bitch when you're playing winner's out, which is the way Win-tone, as he is sometimes known, always plays. There was nothing to do but watch the perfect ball rotation and flawless follow-through, all that immaculate, Apollonian form. After all, a lot of things, nasty and nice, have been said about Wynton Marsalis since he arrived on the scene with his brother Branford back in the late seventies, a Jazz Messenger with an unbeatable New Orleans pedigree, formidable upper register, and decided lack of shyness in matters of cultural-aesthetic polemicizing. No one, however, has ever knocked Marsalis's technique.

Except now our contest had taken a critical, potentially calamitous turn. You see: When Wynton's got that J going, you've got to play him close. In such proximity, a defender's elbow might—inadvertently of course—come in contact with the jazzman's wry, moon-shaped face. That elbow might even bash into Wynton's lip. Hard.

“Uh,” Wynton grunted, checking for blood.

“Oh man, sorry. You all right?”

Wynton did not answer, only smiled, that chubby-cheeked best-boy-in-the-class smile, so down-home sincere, so full of you're-going-to-get-yours. It is a marvelous, disorienting Cheshire sort of smile. Like the twenty-one words Eskimos have for snow, it is a smile with multifarious definitions and intentions, including innocent. It can suck you in, make you forget exactly who you are up against. Like those scowly gym rats uptown a couple of weeks ago. Hip-hoppers all, they took one look at Wynton's somewhat stumpy body and scoffed, “Hey, Winston, where's your flute?” Maybe he had a couple of dollars to lose in a little, friendly contest of HORSE. Wynton just smiled and canned a dozen or so in a row. Before it was over those boys just shook their heads in genial surrender. That's the secret of Wynton's game. The way he does it, you don't even mind the ass-whipping.

“Yeah, man,” Wynton said. His lip was okay.

This was a relief, because you don't want to be the guy who split Wynton Marsalis's kisser. Only the night before, in the claustrophobic kitchen-dressing room at the Village Vanguard, after playing three sets of (mostly) bop with Charles McPherson's quartet, hot on “Night in Tunisia,” mournful on “Pork Pie Hat,” Wynton had been talking about his lip, how sore it was. It happens to trumpet players, that puckered stress on the
obicularis oris
. During the thirties, Satchmo himself's own immortal chops suffered near permanent ruination from hitting those high
C
's every night. But throughout a history that includes the classic lips of Roy Eldridge, Sweets Edison, Clark Terry, Rex Stewart, Dizzy Gillespie, Clifford Brown, Miles Davis, Lester Bowie, and a hundred other bugle geniuses, never has so much been riding on singular embouchure.

That much was clear a couple days later, 100 feet above Columbus Circle, amid the swing of giant cranes and the hot blue blind of welding torches. They're building the new Twin Towers here, a pair of eighty-floor, 750-foot-tall spires, on the former site of Robert Moses's squatty old New York Coliseum. It is the biggest construction project in post–September 11 New York, a $1.7 billion complex that will include the new headquarters of AOL Time Warner, a five-star hotel, two hundred or so condos (with Trump-priced penthouses), and a vast, no doubt brutally upscale shopping mall. This is also the site of the new home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, Wynton Marsalis, Artistic Director. And today, Wynton, hard hat over close-cropped hair, has arrived along with other J@LC board members and officials to inspect the progress of their $130 million, 100,000-square-foot digs.

Wynton says American jazz is “the most abstract and sophisticated music anybody has ever heard, short of Bach.” But the music of Mingus, Monk, and Charlie Parker has never seen anything like what's happening here on Columbus Circle. Columbus Full Circle you could call it, since it was here, where Eighth Avenue meets the park, that in 1910 a new music called ragtime made its New York debut at Reisenweber's café, a cavernous joint famous for $1.25 fried frog blue plate special.

Touted as “the world's first performing-arts facility built specifically for jazz,” the new hall will have three separate performance spaces: a
1,100-seat, concert-style Rose Hall, named for the late, civic-minded Frederick P. Rose, who provided funds for the new planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History; the 600-seat, nightclub-style Allen Room; and a smaller “café” slated to accommodate 140 fans. Also in the plan are recording and rehearsal studios, plus a large jazz-education center. On square footage alone, you could fit twenty Village Vanguards in here, several Five Spots, Slugs and Minton Playhouses, the whole Cotton Club, and still have plenty of space for strung-out musicians to get high, not that any Wynton-fronted organization, however tradition-minded, would condone such unhealthy habits.

Wynton has long been thinking about a “permanent home” for the music he first played marching through the Vieux Carré streets with Danny Barker's Fairview Baptist Church Brass Band. The topic often came up back in the eighties, during the semi-legendary conversations-plotting sessions Wynton engaged in with his great friends and mentors (some say Svengali figures): the ever combative essayist Stanley Crouch and novelist-philosopher Albert Murray, a longtime confidant of Ralph Ellison and Duke Ellington, who called the dapper eighty-five-year-old Murray “the most unsquarest man in the world.”

It was up in Murray's apartment on 132nd Street and Lenox, surrounded by “all these books, Faulkner, Hemingway, Malraux, most of which Stanley and Albert had actually read,” Wynton recalls, “that I began to envision my life on a bigger scale than I previously thought possible…. I mean, you go to the bathroom and there's a photograph of the Army Air Corps, 1943. There's about two hundred uniformed officers, and Albert—the only black guy in the picture…. I knew a few things about music because my father was a musician. I'd grown up around jazz musicians. But I was just a kid, from New Orleans, with a New Orleans education, which is basically no education. This was something else altogether.”

Amid much holding forth on the issues of free will in Thomas Mann and the majesty of Louis's solo on “Potato Head Blues,” the conversation at Albert Murray's house always came back to the future of jazz, how this priceless heritage would survive the dark ages of ascendent pop idiocy and Sypro Gyra–style fusion. The need for the establishment of a jazz canon
and a place where the music could be preserved through both repertory performance and instruction was paramount, everyone agreed.

Already involved with a Lincoln Center “Classical Jazz” series, Wynton was the logical point man. Armed with Crouch's social critique of how to play Establishment (read: white) organizations, that unbeatable smile and country-boy manner (even though Kenner, where he grew up, is a New Orleans suburb), Wynton offered an undeniable package. He was, after all, the ultimate crossover artist, arguably the best single jazz and classical trumpet player in the world, a most presentable and courtly young black man who had performed Haydn's Trumpet Concerto with the New Orleans Symphony at fourteen—someone to whom race and class barriers simply do not apply.