Young Man With a Horn (11 page)

The Collegians’ engagement was for eleven weeks and the pay was fifty dollars a week. They went down the last week in May to start rehearsals and get established.

Rick made the trip alone on the Pacific Electric train and arrived in the center of what business district there was at ten o’clock on a Monday morning. It was his first trip south of Long Beach. He got off the car, set his suitcase and his trumpet case down in the sand beside the tracks, and after the train had gone he just stood there feeling the warmth of the spring sun and smelling the salt and hearing the breakers. It was the first time he’d ever stopped to notice these things.

You don’t feel the touch of nature around Central Avenue in Los Angeles, and Ocean Park, as Rick knew it, has perverted what natural flavor it might once have had. There he could not see the sea for the roller coasters. But Balboa is something else. It is a peninsula about five miles long and a half mile across, so that on one side there is the open sea rolling up breakers six feet high, and on the other side there is a placid lagoon that is widened and deepened at the upper end to form a yacht basin. Compared to the beaches around Los Angeles, this one is Cape Cod itself. It is a base for deep-sea fishermen, but there are no canneries to clutter things up. And no roller coasters and no kewpie dolls.

Rick stood beside the tracks at the main intersection of the town. All four corners were built up. On one there was a bank; across the street from it a real-estate office; and the other two corners were held down by a restaurant and by a building that was even then in the process of being labeled the RENDEZ-VO—. The painter had the U and the S blocked out, but he had stopped to sit down on the scaffold and smoke a cigarette before getting the last of the painting done. Below the scaffold, leaning against the building, there was another sign, painted on canvas and torn in a couple of places. The lettering was done in mock-Chinese script—The Green Dragon—and the dragon himself was right there sliding in and out between letters. The place was evidently being rechristened.

Rick picked up his suitcase and his trumpet case and crossed the street. The narrow side of the Rendez-Vous was a soda fountain with a counter open to the street and stools on the sidewalk. Rick sat down on one of the stools, and when he felt the sun go through his coat and hit him between the shoulder blades, he yawned and took off his hat.

A man with a white apron and a white overseas cap came through a door at the back, set a glass of water on the counter in front of Rick, and asked him what it would be. ‘Double straight coke with a lot of ice,’ Rick said. ‘Lot of ice,’ echoed the man behind the counter, as if it were rush hour and he was breaking his neck to keep his orders straight.

‘Anybody in this town but you and me and the painter?’ Rick asked. The sun was warm and the air was salty and everything was fine, but what becomes of a dance band if nobody comes to dance?

The man behind the counter said maybe not this week, but come back next week if he wanted to see a mob. All a matter of school getting out. One week nobody and the next week college kids till hell wouldn’t have them. He talked man to man with Rick without making the mistake of assuming that he might be a college boy himself. You wouldn’t have made that mistake about Rick at twenty. He dressed like a college boy, his hands were clean, and there was nothing much wrong with the way he talked, but there was something in his face that marked him as no college boy. It was the tight, nervous face of a man who knows something, the kind of face that goes with passion of whatever sort. You see it in revolutionaries, maniacs, artists—in anyone who knows he will love one thing, for good or ill, until he dies.

‘They’re fixing up the dance floor in there now,’ the man behind the counter said. ‘Last summer, or I guess it must have started summer before last, the college crowd started to come down here, and it boomed the town, in one way. Some big real-estate man from Los bought this place. He’s changing the name and making the hall bigger, and I understand he’s getting a different orchestra, fixing up for a heavy season.’

Rick had finished his drink and was blowing ice neatly out of his mouth and making it bounce into the gutter across the sidewalk. He was so full of the good feeling of leisure that comes just before an auspicious starting to work that he didn’t even ask the man about a place to live. He just sat there and blew pieces of ice out of his mouth and watched them bounce, and didn’t care whether he walked up the street to the beach or down the street to the bay, or stayed where he was. And before he got around to deciding, four men, one of them Jack Stuart, turned the corner, and the leisure was gone.

Jack Stuart had an extra-curricular collegiate look to him, no doubt about that; he was wearing white linen knickers—plus sixes or possibly plus eights—and a white shirt open at the neck, and, pinned to the front of it, an outsize fraternity pin with more pearls than you’d care to count. He had black curly hair and a genial, man-of-the-world manner. He stuck out his hand to Rick, gave him a handclasp so firm that it hurt, and said, ‘Glad to see you, fella; meet some of the rest of the crowd.’ Rick met them, and at the end he knew precisely which was which: in the order of their presentation they were drums, saxophone, and trombone.

‘Have you got it with you?’ Stuart said at the end of all the handclasping, and Rick said, ‘Yes,’ and pointed to his trumpet case on the stool beside him. ‘When do we start?’

Stuart laughed and said: ‘Take it easy. We don’t start until Saturday night. Let’s go in and look things over.’

The five of them walked up the steep incline to the double doors and went inside. It was a very long and narrow hall, and at the far end there were three men down on their hands and knees sanding and scraping the floor. There was a grand piano on the stand and a lot of chairs. Jack Stuart said, ‘It looks as if they’ve already got this front part waxed.’ He took a short run and slid twenty feet or so down the floor. Rick jumped up on the stand, put his trumpet case on the piano bench, and started setting chairs together the way they should go, in threes: reed section, brass section, rhythm section, and the extras one on top of another in a corner. Sliding on a floor wasn’t his line. He pushed the trumpet case over, sat down on the bench, and began to hit chords to see how the piano was, and after that it wasn’t long until he was playing, and not much longer until he was playing the hard way, really trying things. It brought the collegians right up to him, hanging on the piano, looking the new man over. He was supposed to be a trumpet player.

When Rick stopped playing, Jack said, ‘You certainly play whorehouse piano, fella, and nigger whorehouse at that,’ leaving it up in the air whether or not he meant it to be a compliment. And when Rick blushed in the unmistakable way he did, Jack laughed loud and long and said he guessed he’d sized things up better than he thought, by the color of Martin’s face. He pushed in beside Rick on the bench, saying, ‘Forgive me, brother; let’s play four hands.’ Rick had the bass end; he gave out some chords in A flat and Jack played ‘Yes Sir, That’s My Baby.’

He didn’t have Rick’s ability to strike into the deep levels of a piano’s subconscious, but he was all right. He played about the way most American boys do when they have behind them a natural feeling for music and on top of that a history of an hour-a-day’s practice firmly supervised by some disciplinarian in the family. It usually happens with this kind of boy that at the age of sixteen when he’s interested in dancing and popular music and general social accomplishment he suddenly finds out that he can play, that the years of practicing an hour a day have brought him to the place where he can read sheet music or even work up popular tunes by ear. So he gets a revival of interest in playing the piano, and sometimes he keeps it up and, like Jack Stuart, makes a business of it. Jack was, you could tell from one chorus of ‘Yes Sir, That’s My Baby,’ a competent pianist.

Rick moved off the bench, set his trumpet on a chair, and let Jack take over the whole piano. And while Jack played, Rick looked the trombone man over with speculative eye, trying to find some outward indication of what he might be worth. He seemed not so slick as the other three; he missed being a fat boy by about twelve pounds, and he had a round, candid face that might indicate stupidity or earnestness or some of each. He was standing a little bit away from the piano, so Rick went up to him and began his ground-clearing. No harm in finding out what the brass in this band was going to amount to.

‘Who do you think is the best trombone player in the country?’ Rick asked him, straight out, like a kid saying to another one, ‘Where’s your old man work?’

It was as good a way as another to approach this boy. He thought a moment and said, ‘Playing now? I think Jack Teagarden.’

‘Uh-huh,’ said Rick solemnly. It was one of the right answers, but it didn’t reveal a prying mind. It left him feeling that the thing had been resolved too easily—as if you asked someone who’s his favorite writer. ‘Living now?’ he asks. ‘No,’ you say, ‘any time.’ And quick as a flash he gives his answer: Shakespeare. It’s an answer you couldn’t quarrel with, but it might have seemed more satisfactory, since he had at his disposal all the writers of all time, if he’d spent more time looking the ground over. If he’d said, for instance, that La Fontaine, across the channel, or Racine weren’t to be overlooked, or that there’s something to be said for Milton, and then had gone ahead and chosen Shakespeare, it would have meant more.

‘Have you heard this boy Snowden that plays trombone for Jeff Williams?’ Rick asked him.

‘Oh,’ the boy said, ‘niggers. I was thinking about white bands. Niggers are in a class by themselves.’

Now they were getting somewhere. Rick looked at the boy and said: ‘That’s a funny thing. You’d think any white man could learn to play as well as a negro.’ He paused and thought it over, and then went on in a voice of a peculiarly different quality: ‘Well, I think a white man could do it, all right, if he’d only try hard enough to. But these negroes don’t even seem to have to try; they’re just born that way. You say you’d heard this boy Snowden?’

‘Just records,’ the boy said. ‘You hear a lot about Williams’s band, but they never seem to be playing anywhere where you can hear them.’

‘They’ve been mostly in Chicago and New York the last three years,’ Rick said, ‘but I’ve got every record they ever made. First one was “Dead Man Blues” with one of Williams’s own pieces, “Black Scramble,” on the other side. Didn’t you ever notice Snowden’s chorus on “Black Scramble”?’

‘I can’t say I have,’ the boy said; ‘it must have been a pretty long time ago.’

‘If you’d ever heard it, you’d know,’ Rick said. ‘It’s the—oh, I don’t know, it’s not like anything you ever heard tell of. It doesn’t even sound like a trombone much, the way Snowden plays that chorus. The way he plays it, it sounds more like a trumpet, everything sharp and not gliding. He doesn’t play a valve trombone either, just a regular slip-horn. You don’t see how he does it.’

‘What are you fellas saying about me?’ Jack said, looking up from the piano keys, very well pleased with things.

‘Nothing. This guy,’ the trombonist said, pointing a thumb at Rick, ‘says he’s got every record Jeff Williams’s band ever made.’

‘That so?’ Jack said. He stopped playing. ‘Why didn’t you bring them along?’

‘I did,’ Rick said. ‘They’re right here in my suitcase, all fourteen. I’ve got them here but I haven’t got a phonograph. You can usually find a phonograph, though.’

‘Bob Jones the second trumpet’s got a portable with him. Up at the house. We’ve been taking it down to the beach in the afternoons.’

‘I don’t want to bust any of these records,’ Rick said. ‘A lot of them you can’t get hold of any more since Williams got popular.’

He spoke in the tone of a connoisseur, a trusted keeper of the seal, and the collegians seemed disinclined to take exception to his stand.

‘You must think Williams is pretty good,’ was all that Stuart said.

‘Yes,’ Rick said, ‘I think he’s the best.’

They took that, too, from him. Something about the way he said it gave it an edge, made it incontrovertible, and more than that, convincing.

They stood around the piano, quiet, all of them looking at Rick, and finally Jack Stuart got up from the piano and said, ‘Let’s go; I’d like to finish my tan this week without burning all the hide off of me.’

‘Get some of that E.Z. Tan dope,’ the drummer said. ‘I got a peachie tan last summer with that.’

‘No, thanks,’ Jack said. ‘I’m the kind of a man that can’t stand any greasy stuff on me. The only way to get a tan is to go out about an hour a day the first week and keep zinc ointment on your nose.’

The first week went that way. They had a house together on the bay front, five bedrooms for the ten of them and a living-room, dining-room, and sun porch. They took their meals at the restaurant across from the Rendez-Vous and used their own kitchen as a workshop in which they worked all possible combinations of bootleg gin and mixers, orange juice, lemon juice, grapefruit juice, grape juice, ginger ale, lime rickey, coca cola, and on one occasion root beer.

They got up late, all the way from eleven until one; they lay around on the beach all afternoon, interpolating periods of athleticism when they put on shoes and kicked a football up and down the beach, or played Sink the Ship, or rode breakers. All ten of them got fierce sunburns. Rick’s was so bad that he was delirious all one night and got blisters that he could roll very carefully from his elbows to his shoulders just by raising and lowering his arms. Very bad blisters. It was a rotten start. It was impossible to get all ten of them in a mood to rehearse at the same time. If the leader had been tougher, he might have kept them in some kind of order and got them down to work, but Jack Stuart was first of all a collegian, and with him the going was always easy. And that first week was more like a fraternity house-party, stag and unfettered, than anything else.

The round-faced trombonist, Eddie Phelps, shared a room with Rick. He was more tractable and less volatile than the others, and Rick fed him Snowden choruses, one after the other, until he built up his taste for them. It was Phelps’s first good job, and he meant business; he was willing to be taught anything, and Rick was willing to do the teaching. The two of them left the beach and went back to the house every day at about three and tried things out, sitting in the sun porch in their bathing suits. When the rest of the crowd came in around six, there they’d be, glistening with sunburn salve, sitting on the edges of a couple of wicker chairs and blowing out good brass duets one after another. It put the rest of them in a mood to play, as a rule, and all ten of them would play around for a half hour or so, fighting for solos and finally breaking off one by one to go mix a drink and get dressed for dinner.