Jack of Diamonds (50 page)

However, I was wrong again. Nobody had expected me to win. In fact, quite the opposite was meant to happen. Reggie’s idea was to leave me destitute, to completely humiliate me and send me back to Toronto with my tail between my legs, his revenge a satisfying, stone-cold dish.

Juicy Fruit must have known there could be trouble the moment Reggie’s dubious friends had appeared at Madam Rose’s for their free evening’s dalliance. She’d have realised Grover and Fred had been included to make the game appear to be honest. Reggie’s pals would have arrived around the time she was getting ready to come over to the Brunswick for our cocktail-hour gig. She’d done the only thing she could do for me and at some real personal sacrifice. It was clear that she had refused to sleep with Fred on previous occasions even though he’d lusted after her, but had agreed to do so when she’d gone to Madam Rose to ask if the two railroad men could take care of me if something went wrong. She knew they were straight even though they were fairly rough characters. Fred, grasping the opportunity, had made screwing him the condition for their protection. Sleeping with Gorilla Fred for free when I was certain she wouldn’t have agreed to do so even if he’d offered to pay, was more than a gesture of friendship.

She’d tried to warn me. ‘Our Reggie isn’t what you think he is . . . be very careful.’ And she’d returned two hundred bucks, which meant I had
exactly
the amount I’d had when I went into the game. In theory, anyhow, I hadn’t lost a dime. She’d taken money that wasn’t really mine, and I no longer thought of it as stolen. I couldn’t begin to repay her for her generosity of spirit, nor for what she’d done for me, which was something I would never forget.

On top of this she’d got me out of Moose Jaw unscathed. You couldn’t put a price on that, could you? I wasn’t under any illusions about what my fate would have been without Grover and Fred standing by: Snake Eyes would have beaten the living daylights out of me and taken my winnings. If I’d been found battered and bleeding in the gutter outside Girls Etcetera at two in the morning it would not have given the police any cause for alarm. Losing the money was by no means the worst thing that could have happened to me.

Here I was sitting in a compartment heading home with my body and mind intact. What, I asked myself, was that worth? What had I lost? The money won in a single night’s gambling, my Mrs Sopworth suit and anorak and a few bits and pieces – books, a framed picture of my mom, a pile of sheet music.

And then it hit me. Of course I had the money for my mom’s nose! I’d been feeling so goddamned sorry for myself, so preoccupied with losing my winnings, that my memory had done a blank. See what I mean about self-deception?

I’d only taken two hundred dollars to the game, leaving one hundred and fifty dollars back at the boarding house. That was only twenty-five bucks short of the hundred and seventy-five dollars my mom had returned to me from what she’d saved out of my wages as a kitchen hand at the Jazz Warehouse. The rest of my stake had come from my personal savings and small poker winnings while in Moose Jaw. Now when you added the two hundred I had from Juicy Fruit and deducted the three dollars in rent I owed Mrs Henderson, I had a total of three hundred and forty-seven dollars. I only needed three hundred for the nose operations. I hadn’t broken my promise to myself that my mom would be pretty again.

Jim Greer and Mrs Henderson were born-again Christians; I guessed they could be trusted. I’d write to ask them to send back my stash, which I’d buried in a tin box in a corner of the woodshed where I went to fetch wood for the fire in the parlour so I could read there on winter mornings. Mrs Henderson would get her money and be able to pay for the postage, Jim Greer could have the clothes and there’d be enough money for my mom. So there you go, clickety-clack, clickety-clack, all’s well that ends well, as Shakespeare said.

I don’t know how it happened – probably the thrill of winning big money – but I’d well and truly caught the gambler’s disease. I’d never before seen such a huge amount of money, let alone won it, but I told myself it wasn’t the money, it was the game. The bug had bitten deep. Poker made me feel independent, totally reliant on my own wits and nerve; Jack Spayd pitting his skill against all comers. I liked that, I liked that a lot, mind against mind, mine against my opponents’, winner takes all.

It was nonsense of course, but I believed it at the time, believed it was something only I could do and that, like jazz, it gave me an opportunity to be myself. The reason I’d given up classical music was because I didn’t want to be always playing in the past tense, demonstrating someone else’s genius, someone who was long dead. While I was never going to be Art Tatum, jazz let me be an individual – it was music that began in the heart, satisfied the head and gave me the opportunity to extemporise and add something of my own.

But with poker I was
really
on my own. Win or lose, every game started afresh, every game was my own doing or undoing. (Ha ha, and who was it who rescued me when I was about to be undone playing poker? Well, a woman, of course.) But this didn’t change my idea that, come what may, I would henceforth make my own decisions. Up to this moment I had always done as I was directed. Even scuffing, though it was meant to teach me independence, had been Joe’s idea. I was determined right or wrong to be solely responsible for the man I was to become.

I foolishly believed that if I played fair and didn’t cheat or lie or steal that everything would be okay and I’d come out on top. In other words, that life was just and fair and that whatever you sowed you would ultimately reap.

Even though the poker game had been a set-up, I’d been unaware of Reggie’s bitterness over my taking his job at the Brunswick, so how could I have possibly been aware that he’d want to take his revenge by fleecing me in a crooked game? Juicy Fruit had told me Reggie wasn’t what he seemed to be, a remark I’d conveniently forgotten, and when Grover informed me the game was rigged, I’d still played it straight. As a result of playing good poker, in other words, sticking to my principles, I had beaten a bunch of crooks. Didn’t that show that good always triumphs over evil? Which goes to show that being almost eighteen isn’t exactly a wise age. For a guy with a dad like mine I should have known better. But then again I was also the kid who believed that a royal flush was only as far away as the next hand. Talk about being naïve! Looking back I now realise that I was far from qualified to be my own man, independent of the opinions of others.

The irony was, of course, that I was determined to be at the recruitment centre as soon as I turned eighteen, where my newfound manliness and independence would count for nothing. My life for the foreseeable future would be totally controlled by other men, but I comforted myself with the thought that where there are men there’s bound to be a poker game. Clickety-clack, clickety-clack . . .

I arrived in Toronto two days after I’d left Moose Jaw, and choked up when I saw that everyone was there to meet me: Miss Frostbite, Joe, Mrs Hodgson, Mac and of course my lovely mom, who burst into tears the moment she saw me sticking my head out of the carriage doorway waiting for the train to slow sufficiently for me to jump down onto the platform. This could only have been Miss Frostbite’s doing. I’d given my mom very little notice and here they all were at the station to greet me. Or perhaps working for the twins had taught my mom a whole lot about organising things. I knew from her weekly letters how happy she was with her new job, but despite my constant assurances that I was doing well, eating well, enjoying my life and, of course, that I missed her greatly, she always ended with the same sentence:
Jack, I pray to God every night that He’ll keep you safe in those dreadful endless prairies.

I hopped off the train before it had fully stopped and while the brakes were still squeaking. There were hugs, kisses, handshakes, back slapping and laughter all round. Everyone seemed to be talking at the same time as I gathered my sobbing mom to my chest, her arms clasped tightly around me.

‘Where are your bags?’ Mac asked, about to enter the carriage to retrieve them.

I shrugged and said, ‘Nothing worth keeping except memories.’ Yes, I admit I’d rehearsed it, and it didn’t sound anything like as good as I’d imagined.

Joe laughed, slapping me on the back. ‘Jazzboy, that skuffin’, my man. You done gone and survived. That good! You ain’t got nuthin’ lef’ ’cept your own skin and a whole heap a’ ex-peer-ee-ence. That ex-cee-lent!’

Miss Frostbite held me close. ‘Jack, becoming a man is a difficult process, especially with so many women in your life. I guess that’s why you want to join up.’ She laughed. ‘But do be careful, won’t you? We don’t want to waste all the effort that’s gone into making you the splendid young man you are.’

My mom couldn’t stop weeping and eventually I asked Mac to get us a taxi. Still sniffing, she protested, ‘Jack, we can’t afford a taxi!’

‘No, it’s okay,’ I reassured her.

To my astonishment, Mac had hailed another black Model A Ford with bright orange wheel spokes just like the one that had taken Miss Frostbite and me to visit Miss Bates that first time to see if she’d accept me as a music pupil. While there were still lots of Model A’s around, bright orange spokes were rare and so I remarked on the coincidence to my mom, explaining that the first taxi I’d ever been in had orange wheel spokes and here we were, all these years later, in yet another taxi with orange wheels. The driver overheard me. ‘Sir, this is the only taxi in Toronto that’s got orange wheels. I painted them myself when she were brand new because I thought folks goin’ to see me better with them coloured wheels.’

‘Then this is the same taxi and I guess you must have been the driver?’

‘Ain’t nobody but me ever drove this old gal, sir.’

My mom, who’d stopped crying at last and was clutching my hand, said, ‘Fancy it being the same taxi, and fancy remembering it had orange wheels! That has to be a good omen,’ she said excitedly.

I laughed. ‘Mom, it was the first time I’d been in a taxi! I don’t know about an omen but it seems as if I’ve kind of come full circle, beginning my music education with a ride in an orange-wheeled taxi and returning home from scuffing in the same taxi ten years later.’

‘It’s an omen, all right. God is telling you your musical education is over and now you’re a professional musician. Oh, Jack, you’ve worked so hard – I wish you didn’t have to go off to war.’

Miss Frostbite had suggested at the station that we all meet the following night at her apartment for a welcome-home celebratory dinner at eight o’clock. ‘Jack,’ she said, ‘Joe and I have cancelled our performance for the night – the band will jolly well have to manage on its own.’ It was a lovely gesture. I can’t remember an evening at the Jazz Warehouse without their double piano act, Joe in his pale blue tails, flipping them free of the piano stool as he sat down, Miss Frostbite in one of a dozen elegant evening gowns, a gardenia in her hair in spring and summer, looking pretty as anything.

It turned out to be a lovely evening, and after dinner Joe suggested we go through to Miss Frostbite’s practice room and ‘See what scuffin’ done do to you, Jazzboy.’

I sat down at the Steinway and played a medley, a sort of updated Rachmaninoff to ragtime but with a bit of fancy finger work he wouldn’t have seen or heard before – some of the stuff I’d used for the Sunday concerts. It was satisfying to see the look of surprise on his face as he turned to Miss Frostbite. ‘Maybe Mr No Pain can take that holiday he been hankering for. He got hisself jes two weeks to visit his old folks in New York.’

Joe explained that No Pain’s parents were getting on, his dad wasn’t well, and he’d wanted to visit them for some time. Would I take my seat at the Jazz Warehouse piano for the two weeks until I turned eighteen and went off to ‘take care of that Hitler bastard’?

Would I ever! Even Miss Frostbite, who was a stickler for the law, said she could hardly see the police making a fuss if I was going off to fight for king and country in a fortnight, the day after my eighteenth birthday.

I was still at the Jazz Warehouse when Mrs Henderson sent the money and my mom’s picture minus the rent I owed her and the postage. She included a note:

Dear Jack,

Praise the Lord you are safe. We were all very worried and Mrs Spragg and Mr Greer thank you for the money and the clothes and I thank you for the rent money.

I will continue to pray that Jesus, Praise His Precious Name, will save your soul and that you will be Born Again. You are a good young man and one day will see the Truth and the Light and be snatched from the clutches of Beelzebub, the prince of demons and the devil!

Yours, in His Precious Name,

Mona Henderson (Mrs.)

So Juicy Fruit had even handed over the fifty dollars to Mrs Spragg, as I’d asked her to do.

My eighteenth birthday was to be celebrated alone with my mom. It was something she’d asked for especially. The previous night – well no, it was after 2 a.m. so it was actually my birthday – when we’d finished at the Jazz Warehouse, the band, Joe and Miss Frostbite gave me a small presentation, popped three bottles of champagne and gave me a solid gold signet ring, the face inscribed with the single word:
Jazzboy
. I had half a glass of champagne, which tasted awful, the first and last drink I’d have in my life. I was terrified that I might go the same way as my father, sensing from my obsessions with both music and poker that I had an addictive personality.