The Jazz Palace (16 page)

The Quarters Club was a replica of an old Southern mansion with large white columns. On the backdrop painted with weeping willows and slave quarters, black men strummed. An old woman carved a watermelon. Down four steps was the dance floor, which was also used for floor shows, and a full orchestra that performed in front of large double doors of the mansion. Waiters dressed in red shirts, overalls with suspenders, a bandanna around their necks. They got paid a dollar a night and made good money on tips.

It was one of the few fancy clubs that served blacks. Most of them catered to an all-white crowd, but the Quarters Club was a black and tan that served savory ribs and let in well-dressed blacks with money to blow. The owners, an Italian family named the Sorvinos, ran a few clubs with the philosophy that allowing black customers added to the local color. Blind Johnny and his band had been performing there for months.

Napoleon brought Benny down the steps on his arm. Because he had a white boy with him, they got a table near the front. Blind Johnny, dressed in a purple shirt, an orange jacket, and red-plaid trousers, was in the middle of his second set, but he gave Napoleon a wave. Napoleon waved back. “He's not really blind. Just color blind. Look at what he wears. He prides himself in it.”

They sat back, taking in the music of the twelve-piece band.
Napoleon tapped his fingers on the table and smiled a wide grin. “I love this place. Reminds me of home.” Napoleon laughed. “Actually I love the music.” The cocktail waitress with pickaninny pigtails came by. “Have a drink. It's on me.”

Benny shook his head, thinking about the one time he'd had a whiskey. “I don't drink,” he said.

“Well, then order whatever that bottle is that you're always sucking on.”

Napoleon had a whiskey and Benny sipped his cream soda. They settled back to listen to Blind Johnny and his band play some real jazz. The dance floor, which could hold almost a thousand people, was packed with young couples, cutting up the carpet. Napoleon glanced around, taking in all the other well-dressed white couples. He smiled, his pearly teeth shining as he told Benny, “You know, someday I want to play at a place like this.”

“So why don't you?” Benny said.

“Why don't I…” Napoleon laughed. “You're Italian, right?”

“I'm a Jew, but it's a secret. Don't tell anyone. I pass for Italian when I need to.”

“Your secret's safe with me. Besides I love Jews. They've been good to me. So to answer your question, I don't work here because I'm owned by the Rooster.”

Benny put down his cream soda. “You're owned?”

“Oh yeah. The Gianellis own us.” Napoleon explained that when he came north two black brothers named Jethrows owned the Rooster, but then they sold it and moved back to Kansas City and the Gianellis bought it. “They bought the club and they bought the musicians with it.”

“I don't understand,” Benny said, shaking his head.

Napoleon leaned forward to explain to Benny the facts of life. He told him that the Stroll is a big plantation. The musicians had their jazz slave masters, just like in the old days. Because he was under a contract with the Rooster, he could not play anywhere else for profit nor could his children and nor their children and so on. To the club owners he was just a
melanzane
. An eggplant. A black boy to these guys. “If word got out that I wanted to play at the Quarters
Club…” Napoleon made a sign of a knife sliding across the bottom of his throat. “And basically it's all run by Capone. In this part of town anyway.”

Benny shook his head. “This can't be true.”

“What planet are you from? Don't you know that about gangsters? They love jazz 'cause it's got guts and it don't make them slobber.” Napoleon laughed, but Benny sensed the bitterness in his voice. “So they own us, man. Just like we used to be owned. We're owned like the Civil War never happened.”

“You mean you aren't free…”

“You could say that,” Napoleon said with a laugh. “I'm not exactly free. But,” Napoleon said, making a fist and gazing out across the posh club, “I'm gonna be.”

That evening as Napoleon was heading home, the city smelled of trash. As he walked, someone fell into step behind him. He couldn't tell if it was two or three people, but he was certain that they were men. Their footsteps came down hard on the pavement. Napoleon kept walking, but soon it seemed as if they were trying to walk to his beat. Glancing back, he saw two hefty men in shiny suits. He thought he'd seen them before, but he didn't know where or when. Napoleon avoided their eyes. He put his head down and ducked into an alleyway. They didn't follow him. He heard their footsteps receding, but he didn't look back. He never wanted to show a white man that he was afraid.

Since he'd been hanging out at the Rooster, Benny had been writing down the music he heard in his head. He'd long ago filled the notebook his piano teacher had given to him. He'd gone to a music shop, purchased a dozen more, and these he'd filled as well. He found that once he started writing down the tunes that came to him, he couldn't stop. If he didn't have a notebook with him, he wrote on menus and napkins, on receipts and newspapers. It was usually just a few notes, a bar, an opening refrain. He stuffed these scraps into his pockets where they might be forgotten unless Hannah rescued them from the wash.

But most nights when he got home, Benny spread them out on his bed. He drew lines on paper and wrote down the music he made up. Everything he heard found its way into the notes he made. As the dawn light crept into his room, he pulled the red suitcase from beneath his bed. He took the sheets with melodies he'd written, opened the zipper pouch, and stuffed in the music he'd scribbled.

He wrote all the time except during those late-afternoon hours between night and day when he didn't know what to do with himself. When work was over and the evening hadn't yet begun. He saw people going about their business, on their way home on the streetcars, walking with the evening newspaper in their hands. He looked at the dull gray of the city as it settled to dark, the clatter of dishes,
children's heads bent over books, cooking smells—chicken, stews, soups—drifting into the street.

It was in the pauses, in the space between notes, in the slips and breaks, a kind of slow steady interval as if one thing could lead to the next. As if you could go to sleep and wake up and it would be a new day and somehow things would be different than they'd been before. But Benny knew otherwise. Life didn't get better as it went along. It got narrower as if you were walking through a tunnel that was closing in on you, toward a distant beam of light that kept receding. Life got slower and the pauses got longer. Benny didn't mind the day when he was busy, and he waited for the night when he'd go somewhere and listen or play if they let him. It was the in-between time when he felt lost.

He started a song about that as well. He called it “Twilight Blue.” In motion he was fine. It was when he stopped that the gray limbo settled around him. It would go away for a time. Then when he thought it wouldn't come back again, it did. It was the time of day when he didn't know what to do with himself. In the chiaroscuro light other people went home, made supper, played cards, read the paper, made love, slept, talked to the children. But for Benny it was the dead time. This is what it's like to move through the world as a ghost. Benny wrote about this too. He scribbled it on his bits of paper, on menus. Across the palm of his hand.

In the Rooster late at night, between sets, Napoleon watched Benny scribbling. He heard Benny sit down at the piano and play what was written on the scraps of paper. Napoleon hadn't ever really wanted to write his music down before. He didn't want it codified or inscribed. He had wanted it to be open ended, whatever he made up in his head. But now there was so much of it and he couldn't remember one version from the next. And, he was beginning to realize, the music would die with him.

“My music,” Napoleon said, “once I play it, it's gone.”

“I could help write it down for you,” Benny offered one night between sets.

“Naw, I don't want you doing that.” And though Napoleon didn't
want to say this to Benny, he was afraid that if it was written down, white boys would steal it as they had stolen so many things.

“Okay, so I won't.” But Benny didn't believe him, and he began transcribing Napoleon's tunes as well as his own. When Napoleon played, Benny wrote as fast as he could. He wrote down what he was able, then asked Napoleon to play it again so he could pick up the rest. Napoleon never asked why. After hours he played a tune maybe half a dozen times before Benny had it right. He heard the music, then wrote it down. But not Napoleon. He had to rough it out, play it with his fingers. There were no colors racing through his head. He had to hear it in his joints, in his bones. But lately those fingers had been stiffening up on him. At times he woke up in the night, not able to find his hands. They stayed asleep long after the rest of him was up and drinking its coffee. Some mornings his fingers felt like wooden sticks. He soaked them in a bucket of scalding hot water. Once he made the water too hot, and the skin peeled off.

Benny wrote down all the music for himself and for Napoleon. He took it home and stuffed it into the red suitcase. He opened the zipper pouch where he kept his music pads and sheet music. He stayed up until all hours, writing from memory the tunes he'd heard Napoleon play and the ones he'd played with them. On the music composed by Napoleon he wrote “Written by Napoleon Hill/transcribed by Benny Lehrman” and the date.

B
enny showed up at the Rooster almost every night. He sat in the back, his cap pulled over his head, sipping his cream soda. He never asked to sit in, but when the Judge took a smoke break, something he was doing more and more often, Napoleon gave the boy a nod. Napoleon wondered if this time the boy was here to stay or if he'd disappear again. He could look up any night and the boy would be gone. Past his bedtime, Napoleon thought. “Don't you have a mother?” Napoleon asked one evening between sets. “Don't you live somewhere?”

“I'm an orphan,” Benny told him. Though his mother still waited
up for him and his father slept in the chair until he was home, Benny thought of himself in this way. As if he lived in the streets by his wits.

Napoleon took this in. “You aren't an orphan,” he replied. “Your shirts are too clean. You just act like one.”

Benny gave Napoleon a little smile. Strange kid. Outside of the Chimbrova family, the only white people Napoleon had ever met were dead people. That was in New Orleans when he'd lived in Lafayette Cemetery where the bodies were buried above the ground. Otherwise, when the groundwater rose, the bodies floated away. At night when he was a boy who could not afford any other bed, Napoleon lay down on these crypts and slept. Before he drifted off, he looked over the raised graves, rested his hand on chiseled stone. He ran his fingers over what was etched.

These were white people's graves. Black people were buried in open fields with hand-carved cement slabs to mark their graves. Burnt-out trees served as wishing stumps, carrying the hopes of the living to the dead. White people didn't have wishing stumps. They were buried in cement. They didn't fertilize the fields. They didn't play the blues. But this boy did. His arms were long and loose. They reached all over, winding as back roads, twisting as if they could grab and pull you in. Napoleon had seen arms like that before, but he couldn't quite place it. Then as Benny was playing a break, his arms flailing, Napoleon did.

When they finished the tune, Napoleon said, “I got a name for you. You know, I'm gonna call you Moon Jelly. That's the jellyfish we got down on the Gulf Coast. I've seen them on the beach and popped them with sticks. Seen them get caught up in the fisherman's nets. ‘Jelly' 'cause you're loose and ‘Moon' because you're white and changeable. That's what you remind me of.”

“Moon Jelly.” Benny liked the sound of it. He ran it over and over in his mind. “Okay, so that's what I'll be.” He dropped his head down and started riffing on his “Twilight Blue.” He'd been fiddling with the melody for a while but hadn't gotten it right. Napoleon picked it up in G minor and soon they were improvising, letting it go wherever it went. Benny's foot stomped away as he added some changes at the end of the first chorus, and Napoleon took off on that
as well. Now they were swinging, eyes on each other, barely coming up for air.

Benny was hunched over the keys when two men in sharkskin suits walked in, but something in him stirred and made him look up. He almost laughed. They were big, like walking vaults. One man's suit was an electric blue and he wore a bright yellow tie. The other was dressed in green with a red shirt. They looked like Christmas ornaments as they ordered lemonade that they sipped through straws. The man in green tapped his hands on the table but not in time with the music. The other was cleaning his fingernails with a knife. Benny switched to “Fat Man Rag” and grimaced as Napoleon flubbed a high note that was well within his reach.

“What's up?” Benny gave Napoleon a look, but Napoleon kept on playing. When they finished the last set, the customers trickled out. But the two men in the sharkskin suits remained. The one in green sipped his lemonade until it made a slurping sound. The other was still filing his nails. He let the shavings drop to the floor. Benny wanted to stay and help close, but Napoleon shook his head. “You'd better get home. You've got a ways to go.”

“Remember, I'm an orphan.” But Napoleon made a gesture that said “scram.”

“You sure?” Benny asked. “You don't want me to stick around?”

“Naw, go on. Take a powder,” Napoleon said. “You get out of here.”

It was a brisk spring morning, and Benny wasn't in a hurry. The fresh air felt good off the lake. He thrust his hands into his pockets and picked up his step. He listened to the click of his footsteps on the pavement. The sounds of the city rose around him. A car door slamming, a truck making early morning deliveries rattling by. Laughter came from a building above.

But he was uneasy. He'd forgotten something. He had a feeling he'd left something behind. Halfway down the block he remembered his notes for “Twilight Blue.” He checked his pockets, then realized he'd left them on the piano. They'd be in the trash by morning. Benny turned and raced back to the Rooster as the cock's comb went dark. He tapped on the window, then on the door, but no one was
inside. He banged again, then told himself he'd have to come back in the morning. As he turned to leave, he heard the clatter of trash cans. He thought it was tomcats rummaging in the trash, but then he heard it again—louder this time.

Peering into the alley, he saw the scuffle. The two men were jumping on a third. They were the men in sharkskin suits who'd been sipping lemonade. They were jumping on a man in a shiny pearl-gray suit. Benny poked his head farther down the alleyway and saw that they had Napoleon on the ground. Before he knew what he was doing, Benny rushed into the fray. He was small and wiry but strong. He grabbed an arm, tugging it back as the man tried to slam Napoleon into the pavement. He was amazed at the man's grip. The arm shook him off, flinging Benny against the trash can. Benny returned, laying a punch with his long arms. Something hard landed against his jaw. He swung back, though he was worried about his hands. He curled them into tight balls as he got in a few more punches.

A silver blade flashed. Benny saw the knife coming toward him, and he tried to grab the man's wrist. But the man pushed Benny aside the way a child might discard a toy. They weren't interested in him. They batted Benny backward to get him out of the way, their arms hurling him against the walls of the alley as he flailed like a man who suddenly realizes that he can't swim. Within seconds the men took off, but not before, with a few deft strokes, they left Napoleon bleeding.

They slashed his cheeks, his throat, and his lips. The cheeks and throat were just surface cuts, but his lips were sliced in two. Benny put his fingers on them to stanch the bleeding, but the cut was deep. The puffy lips that he massaged every day with eucalyptus and lard were butterflied like a fish. Napoleon looked up, dazed. He sobbed, sputtering out the words “I'm never gonna play again,” as the blood rolled down his chin. “They knew what they was doing. I ain't ever going to play again.”

“You will,” Benny said, though even as he said it he wasn't sure. “Come on. Let's get this stitched up.”

“Jew boy,” Napoleon said, “get out of here.”