Jack of Diamonds (37 page)

Like many an only child, I’d spent most of my life with adults, and although most of them had been women, there had been Mac and Joe and the members of the band as well, so I didn’t feel out of place among these men. While it would have been nice to have friends of my own age, I’d never quite managed to have a buddy at school. I’d always had my days mapped out for me with music and the library and weekends spent accompanying my mom to museums and parks.

As I passed through puberty I longed for a girlfriend, but girls had always been scarce in my life and when I did meet one she usually thought I was a bit weird and we had nothing to say to each other. What does a classical pianist say to a Cabbagetown girl when he’s either got his head in a book or he’s practising scales and she believes she’s hit the jackpot if, at sixteen, she can leave school and get a job as a kitchen hand in a downtown café and eventually become a waitress?

I’d been a kitchen hand at the Jazz Warehouse, but you soon exhaust the conversational possibilities of dishwashing. The most fun I could ever remember with my peers was during winter when we’d play shinny on the frozen pond, but even that had ended when Miss Bates noticed a bad bruise on my left hand where some kid’s hockey stick had connected with it. ‘Your hands are your future, Jack!’ she’d scolded. ‘Broken fingers could put an end to everything. I simply won’t have it!’

It seems crazy, but as a kid I understood women better than men and men better than boys my own age; girls I understood not at all. The twins were the closest I ever got to girls, and they were six years older than me, and light years removed because of their experience. At seventeen I was going on forty but I’d missed out on the experience of getting there. My childhood adventures had all come through the characters I read about in books and most of them were either English or American.

I guess this was why Joe wanted me to get the hell out of Cabbagetown and live a bit, fall flat on my face a few times and harden up. Life wasn’t meant to be as easy as it had been for me, and if the Depression had taught kids anything it was that few avoided an apprenticeship in hardship before they launched themselves into the world. I’m sure he was right. But while most young guys my age were going through the tedious and difficult process of growing up, I needed to grow down, or backwards, if such an experience is possible. The only thing I had in common with a normal teenage boy was puberty, that strange time when nothing makes sense and your hormones are going berserk and you are happy for no reason, and angry at most of the people you know at some stage, or at life in general and most particularly yourself. Of course by the time I got to Moose Jaw this onerous time was pretty much over for me. Still, I needed to grow down to seventeen or eighteen and my best hope of doing so was, of course, the army – lots of young guys together seemed an ideal way for me to grow backwards into becoming a normal kid, young man and soldier.

I missed jamming at the Jazz Warehouse and longed to play with other musicians. Finally, after a lot of discussion over many hands of poker, I persuaded my older buddies in the poker school to form a small group. The owner of the Caribou Café, John Robert Johnson, had agreed we could have a gig for an hour and a half before our poker games. He was a truly great guy and trucked in a piano from home which he claimed his mother had once played and then his daughter. It had stood idle in the parlour for five years because, to his disappointment, his daughter had lost interest as a teenager, married early and become a young mother almost immediately.

It was a Grinnell, an old upright from before the Great War, but he’d had it tuned and the key pads replaced and it wasn’t all that bad. We played to the Saturday-morning coffee crowd which soon grew in size and we were able to repay John Robert Johnson in a small way for his generosity as his takings increased.

I offered to play the harmonica and leave the piano for Reggie Blunt but he insisted that he’d been fascinated by the electric guitar ever since it had appeared on the musical scene as a new instrument and had purchased one three years back. He had been taking lessons by correspondence, he claimed. I’d never really appreciated the skill Elmer Perkins had brought to the Jazz Warehouse from Tennessee until I heard Reggie play; there’s a lot more to the electric guitar than meets the unfamiliar ear, though of course Reggie’s guitar, despite being the butt of many a joke among the other musicians, was welcomed.

As for me, I was attracted to the free forms adopted in the twenties by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five. Those dazzling extended solos were where I wanted to go on the piano. I was groping towards my own style, and it was this, I believed, that was attracting a more involved audience to the Sunday solo concerts where I had possibly cornered the market for jazz purists in Moose Jaw and Regina.

While the group muddled along and played well enough without a bass player, we all felt the lack. A group without a bass instrument is like chewing without back teeth. Then several weeks after we’d started, a guy from the audience introduced himself as Robert Yuen and asked us if we had room for a double bass. Whoopee! There must be a god in heaven!

Robert Yuen was twenty-five and the son of the wealthy owner of more than a dozen small hotels in towns along the rail line and the Trans-Canada Highway. He must have known we’d grab him with both hands. We now had the final instrument to allow us to achieve a characteristic jazz sound, and his addition made all the difference to the group. Although all of us were professionals who played in other bands on River Street, our group began to have its own sound and pretty soon people were begging us to play at private parties. We all had night jobs elsewhere, so we had to decline most of the invitations.

In honour of our generous patron we called the group the John Robert Johnson Caribou Café Band. A bit of a mouthful I admit, but such was his generosity that we never shortened it to the Caribou Café Band, and I think he liked the tribute. He was a great guy, ‘salt of the earth’ as Reggie would say.

My hope was that we’d progress sufficiently to do a Sunday afternoon gig at the Brunswick, but, as I said before, the kids who came were essentially purists, cool and demanding, insisting on a standard of jazz I could only barely reach. While I’m not suggesting I was all that much better, the others were set in their ways and had always been functional middle-of-the-road musicians making a living. We were pretty good by Moose Jaw standards, but that wasn’t quite enough for my diehard Sunday fans.

However, Robert Yuen, the ring-in who’d approached us, turned out to be good, I mean
really
good. He’d studied at the Juilliard, and was back in Moose Jaw because his dad had cancer. As the oldest son he was expected to take over. Although he didn’t say much, I think he was pretty disappointed at having to give up a musical career. He’d once said to me, ‘Jack, man, you saved my life. I always wanted to play jazz and now at least I’ve got something going aside from fucking buildings and leases.’ He and I soon worked up a gig that was pleasing enough for the Sunday aficionados. Cam Kerr could hardly refuse a $10 Sunday salary for Robert when we were so popular, but he wasn’t all that keen to begin with. Piano and bass are an unlikely combination, but it worked.

I’d bought a state-of-the-art harmonica, the magnificent Hohner Echo Elite, from a Main Street music shop, the last one of its kind in stock. I felt guilty just owning it, not because it was German, but the word ‘new’ to me had always been preceded by ‘almost’ and meant
second-hand in good condition
. We’d get an item of clothing from Mrs Sopworth and my mom would exclaim excitedly, ‘Why, it’s almost new!’

I also bought a lot of sheet music, then once I knew it by heart I’d start extemporising. Even Joe had once remarked, ‘Yo real good, Jazzboy. Yo bin the fastest ever I seen to get a melody in yo head.’ Miss Bates, pretty stingy with her compliments, had said much the same on more than one occasion, commenting that she believed my big hands and musical memory were going to be my greatest assets in classical music.

I must have been improving because the Sunday afternoon ballroom crowd continued to grow, despite the five-cent surcharge on drinks and despite swing being all the rage. When Robert Yuen came along with his bass I think we both took a big leap forward.

My most ardent desire was to return to the Jazz Warehouse, casually sit down at the piano knowing they’d be expecting a bit of backsliding, and then positively knock their socks off. I wanted Joe to say, ‘Hey, Jazzboy, you three notch up the Tatum totem pole.’ He’d told me when I’d left (as a huge compliment) that I was past the first notch and ‘jes toe-touchin’ the secon’. When I asked him how many notches there were on the totem pole, he’d laughed. ‘Maybe twenny-five, maybe fifty, maybe dat totem pole be the stairway to heaven. Ain’t nobody ever gonna get all the way up. Mr Fats Waller? No! Mr Earl Hines? No! Mr Teddy Wilson? No, no, no!’

Joe never explained his antipathy for Teddy Wilson, whom I greatly admired. He was simply up there with the very best and it wasn’t like Joe, who, by his own admission, was never a great jazz piano player. I knew he was better than he made out, but he was nowhere near Teddy Wilson’s class. Few jazz musicians were. But he knew a great jazz player when he heard one and I was yet to meet a musician, including Art Tatum, who didn’t respect his judgment.

Jazz wasn’t my only obsession. I mean, here I was, in the epicentre of sin, with girls leaning from windows and balconies everywhere I looked. They called me Honky-Tonk Jack, and had come to know me as a regular and not as a mark, a professional who worked on River Street as they themselves did, but this hadn’t stopped me imagining dozens of scenarios with different girls. Once, a very pretty, dark-eyed girl with skin the colour of milk coffee and a smile that would have lit up a moonless night, had opened her coat and flashed me the entire bodyworks, leaving nothing to speculation. What I witnessed had sent my imagination into a fever for two weeks. Jim Greer’s nightly absence during the week permitted some blessed release, but not before I’d turned my back on his
Asleep in the arms of Jesus
quilt.

Which goes to show how mixed up I was about sex. I knew I was hungry for love,
starving
in fact, yet I lacked the courage to confront Miss Flash, as I termed her, or for that matter any of the other girls. As for meeting what might be termed a ‘nice’ girl, I was even less certain about how to go about it. There were lots of them at my Sunday concerts, but there was nowhere to go afterwards and besides, as I’d learned at the Jazz Warehouse, Miss Frostbite’s first immutable rule was no fraternising with the patrons.

Reggie Blunt seemed to know most of the balcony sisterhood, as he called the girls, I suppose because he had been a widower and had hung around River Street for so long. He and I used to walk over to the Brunswick and he’d have a whisky after our poker game. One day he said, ‘My dear boy, the balcony sisterhood are putting a dollar each week in the proverbial hat towards a party. They’re selling raffle tickets at 25 cents each to be drawn at the shindig to see who’ll be the first to put Honky-Tonk Jack on his back.’

I laughed, though I could feel my face burning as I tried to conceal my embarrassment. ‘Reggie, do they know how old I am?’

‘Ah, exactly, that’s half the challenge, old boy. A good-looking, tall, broad-shouldered, seventeen-year-old virgin who is clean as the driven snow and yet still a legitimate part of the River Street scene is close to a miracle. A mark who is untainted and talented – you’re the dream of every member of the sisterhood.’ He laughed. ‘You’re big time, you draw a hundred and fifty or more young people to the ballroom on Sunday. I know for a fact that six of the River Street girls attend religiously. They see you as the big prize, my boy, the scalp they all want, the status symbol, the notch on the rifle butt, or in this case, on their own butt.’

He paused and gave me a bloodshot, weepy-eyed, whisky-nosed look. ‘You
are
a virgin, are you not, Jack?’

All I could think to say in reply was, ‘Not in my head, Reggie.’

I immediately recalled Mac’s story of being seduced by Dolly and how he’d returned to his apprenticeship having only gained one thing from the altogether frightening experience in the bushes beside the Don River: the right to nod sagely when the loss of virginity was discussed and, if asked, admit casually and modestly to being a veritable stallion.

While I was certainly ignorant, there wasn’t a skerrick of innocence in my head. I imagined doing sexual things to a woman that I could never talk about to anyone. While they were neither vicious nor violent they didn’t allow her any choice in the matter. In my head she’d be completely compliant and go along with whatever it was I wanted and if I wasn’t absolutely sure what I required, nevertheless it was all one way, all about me and my pleasure. I am ashamed to say that if my imagined partner had any needs of her own in my torrid fantasies, they had never occurred to me.

Despite this, Reggie Blunt’s words filled me with terror. It was not what I wanted, it was what
they
wanted, and they were professionals. They’d actually know the what, the where and the how. If they’d won me in a raffle they could do whatever they desired and I was terrified that I might prove entirely inadequate.

Apart from the glimpse of the neat triangle of dark hair on the milk-coffee-coloured Miss Flash, I had absolutely no idea of the precise appearance or use of the intimate parts of the female anatomy when it was naked. I had even less idea of whether women enjoyed sex, and if so, how they went about it. It wasn’t a subject discussed in any of the hundreds of books I’d read, other than in the most unspecific phraseology. Couples ‘made love’ or ‘consummated their relationship’ and were therefore happy, satisfied and mutually fulfilled afterwards. It was the words ‘made’ and ‘satisfied’ that preoccupied me. ‘Made’ suggested at least one specific task that led to a highly satisfying conclusion known as ‘mutually fulfilled’, but there were no books that told you the details. I was a man. How the hell could I be expected to know how to satisfy a woman?