Young Man With a Horn (15 page)

‘Sure, you’ll quit,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to. Lee’s stuck, and he says you’ll do. I can get somebody to finish out this four weeks. He’s a great guy and a good friend and I want to help him out of this. So you’ve got to go with him. If I’m willing I can’t see why you aren’t.’

He pulled himself up and went back into his bedroom and shut the door behind him. It had been a cash deal the night before; Jack had released his part of Rick for four hundred and seventy-five dollars in currency. The roll was in his pocket. Rick was sold whether he knew it or not. He had become, overnight, the property of Lee Valentine.

IN BALBOA
, California, in the month of August, the sea is blue and the breeze blows fresh, as opposed to the city of New York, where you wonder in the month of August how those long buildings can maintain their dignity.

Lee Valentine’s band arrived in New York the eighth of August; and at five o’clock of the same day Rick Martin went, instructed, to be measured for a tuxedo and a tail coat. There were six days to kill before the band opened at the Porter Grille, free time except for rehearsals. It was a nice prospect, and when Rick came out on the street from the tailor’s, he came out convinced that New York was, and would keep on being, his favorite place to live. He got it settled as quickly as that. It was too hot, but he didn’t know it; in six months it would be too cold, and he wouldn’t know that either. What had him was something in the air, nothing you could point to or say much about, just a sense of the imminence of everything anybody would want. Desiderata for the asking.

He didn’t go back to the hotel, and he didn’t go to the speakeasy where some of Valentine’s boys were going to foregather at six. He had dinner and put in time until ten o’clock and then he went to the Old South Club. He looked up the address in a directory, and then he walked sixty blocks to get to it. It didn’t occur to him to take a car; he started walking and saw that he was going in the right direction—at the end of each block the number went up one—and then he simply let himself glide the rest of the way in a daze, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, just getting himself to the Old South.

And when he got there he was afraid to go in, so he made it four more blocks walking around thinking it over. He didn’t know what to expect inside. He didn’t know whether it was a big nickel dance like the Rendez-Vous or whether it was one of those cabaret places where you have to call up first or whether it was just for negroes or white men could come in too. Maybe it was all white; no way of knowing. It was the right place, though, so much was sure. There was a small marquee extending out over some steps that led down half a flight to a shining black door with a silver cubistic design on it, and there was a doorman, a bright-looking negro boy in a red bell-hop’s uniform. Rick straightened his tie and went down the stairs. The negro boy didn’t say stay out; he said good evening, and held the door open.

It was dim inside, with blue lights cutting through the smoke. Rick’s pulse fluttered like a bird. When a man came up to him and said, ‘One?’ Rick said one, and then in a moment he was sitting at a small table, about the fifth tier away from the floor. Through it all the music was playing, and somewhere inside it there was the meanest, rattiest, godawful lovely horn Rick had heard since he’d heard the same one four years before. And behind it all there was the kind of drum beat that could send any band out of this world never to return.

Rick looked at Smoke Jordan’s black face shining above that magnificent collection of white-skinned drums, and he saw how much the same he was. Same one that used to do the hot sweeping at Gandy’s, only that one wore yellow cords and this one wore a white tuxedo. Daniel Jordan in a white tuxedo pounding the prettiest set of drums in existence. A dazzling sight. His eyes were turned obliquely upward and he chewed his lower lip all the while he played; then he’d knock out a beauty and turn his eyes down, startled, as if he’d surprised even himself with that one. If he knew Rick Martin was in the room would he play any better or worse? He couldn’t play any better.

Rick looked up and saw a waiter standing beside him with the air of a waiter who has been waiting fifteen minutes and is about to call the customer’s attention by poking him one. ‘Two gin fizzes,’ Rick said. The waiter turned up the other chair and said, ‘You’re expecting someone?’ ‘No,’ Rick said. ‘Two for me.’

There were eight new men in the band, two trumpets and a trombone, four saxophones, and a string bass. But the original five were all there, as original as they’d ever been. They had a new system of taking solos standing up, and the solo takers were always the Los Angeles boys. Art Hazard was up now taking one for an awful ride. He was better than he used to be, probably; more assured, and along with it a little more spectacular. He was no longer a kid doing the best he could in a five-piece band in Vernon; he was a mature musician, a master who looked well on the way to becoming a past master. Of the five of them, he was the one who had changed the most. He was at least fifty pounds heavier than he’d been in Los Angeles, and he had a wise look on his face, as if he’d found out something or other about a way of living. He looked like a black Bacchus, a vile and merry man.

His was the last chorus, and when the music stopped the crowd went into a collective tantrum. They clapped, they whistled, they stomped; and when, as a pacifier, Arthur Hazard stood up again and repeated the last solo, there was no end to it. Rick didn’t clap; he felt a wave of heat rise to his head, and he drank his second gin at one shot, like a glass of water, with the idea that the heat would go down with it. He was at home now, natural and right, and this was homecoming. The only home he’d ever known was this kind of music, and here it was, changeless and abiding. A solid structure with a light in the window.

Arthur Hazard was standing up there, his silver trumpet looking fragile between his hands, bowing to the right of him, bowing to the left of him, and loving it. He was the man of the evening, and this white crowd couldn’t get enough of him.

There was a floor show at two, and at three the place closed. People went weaving out to get their hats, and Rick stood up, crossed the floor, jumped up to the stand, and said, ‘How are you, kid?’ to Smoke.

Smoke looked up, opened wide his eyes, and said, ‘Well, I’ll be good God damned,’ in slow, measured syllables. ‘Is that you?’

‘Sure.’

They couldn’t seem to think of anything else to say, but they didn’t have to because in a moment everybody was there, ganged around Rick, shaking his hand and asking him what it was all about, how come he came to be in New York, when’d he get in?

Rick told it, and when he’d finished, Jeff said: ‘Valentine, huh? What you doing for him?’

‘First trumpet,’ Rick said.

‘Boy, you must have got good getting a job like that,’ Jeff said.

‘Valentine said you told him to look me up’s why he ever happened to.’

And Jeff said that Art had had a part in it too. They all got to figuring he was probably getting good by this time, and they told Lee when he left.

They stayed at the Old South for another hour, just talking things over, and from there they went to another place in Harlem, a black and white place called the Domino, and at one time they were in a place called Galba’s, and there was some music there. It was a celebration, a gala night of it, old acquaintance not forgot, and at seven-thirty Smoke and Rick were walking up Lennox Avenue, tacking once in a while, but most of the time going straight ahead. The rest of the band had dispersed somehow, and there were left just these two, Smoke still wearing his white tuxedo.

‘Let’s go get us some chow mein,’ Smoke said.

‘We just had some,’ Rick said.

‘What a memory!’

It was a bright summer morning, already hot, and they were walking it off and getting steadier and more rational all the time. But it didn’t matter; for them, in those days, reality was just as good as hallucination. The world looked all right any way they chose to look at it. They could stand it as it was, or completely out of focus and heavily veiled.

‘Let’s go get us some peanuts, then,’ Smoke said. ‘We ain’t had any of them yet, have we?’

But there wasn’t any peanut place and Smoke went on talking and talking, saying boy, did you wow them! Did you wowm there at Galba’s.

‘Wow who?’

Rick couldn’t seem to remember anything about it, but that was one part of the night that Smoke knew everything about. They’d got into Louie Galba’s place, a little sixth-floor salon with a platform no bigger than six feet square with a studio piano on it and a set of traps and Louie Galba sitting on a kitchen chair balanced right on the edge of the platform playing a trumpet while some woman sang a slow song. When the song was finished, Louie came over and set them all up a drink, and then everybody set everybody else up two or three more and Jeff told Louie that Rick was in New York to play trumpet. ‘Go on, then,’ Louie said, ‘play mine for a while.’

‘Can’t remember a thing about it,’ Rick said. But as he said it he caught the memory in the muscles around his mouth and he knew it was true. Smoke said there was no doubt about it, that he tore the place wide open; that horn of Galba’s never trafficked in anything like it before, and everybody there knew it. Everybody was asking Jeff who he was, where he came from, and Hazard told them all that he himself raised that boy up, taught him to play a horn when he was so little he couldn’t hold it up, he had to rig him up a couple of apple boxes to carry the weight of it. Yes sir. He taught him how. He showed him the way.

‘I guess that’s damned near true,’ Rick said. And Smoke said come off it, nobody could ever teach him nothing. What he played last night he couldn’t have learned off of no guy, not even Hazard. It’s something a man’s got to put in by himself, when it’s like that. You don’t learn it, you make it.

‘I guess I must have been sort of tight,’ Rick said.

‘Funny you didn’t seem tight,’ Smoke said. ‘Too bad you can’t remember, because you sure did wowm.’

‘I like this town,’ Rick said. ‘Too bad We can’t find you a peanut wagon, though. Place this size.’

Smoke said he wasn’t no woman, he could get his mind off a thing if it wasn’t handy, and right out of that he said that he bet by four o’clock this afternoon there wouldn’t be a good musician in town that hadn’t heard about Rick at Galba’s last night. There were a lot of them there. There were always a lot of musicians at Galba’s; they didn’t come to hear Louie; he was all right, but who they came to hear was that girl sing. Lou Marble, that long, narrow girl that was singing when they came in, the one that gave them the dirty look when Jimmy Snowden tipped over his chair leaning back. She was what they came to hear; she was sort of a secret. Louie wanted everybody to hear her, but he kept his fingers crossed hoping nobody’d hear her who could offer her a lot more money. That’s what happened to the last girl he had singing at his place; some show fellow saw her and gave her a part in a play, not even singing, and she’s a big-time actress now, what the hell’s her name? Then Louie found this one; he had a way of finding girls, but she had him really scared; she’s too good. He knew somebody’d come along and take her away, just any time now.

Rick thought hard and said he guessed maybe he did remember her a little. He could call back a slow, tired voice, soft and damp like a fog. He could call it almost all the way back when he really tried.

But when Rick started playing Louie Galba’s trumpet, Lou Marble’s star was blacked out for the evening. She didn’t even care, when he really got going, whether it was or not. She was the first one that came over to Jeff and asked who Rick was, where he came from, how he happened to be in town and nobody’d ever heard him.

‘No fooling?’ Rick said.

‘God’s my judge,’ Smoke said.

They were stopped at a corner, each of them leaning an elbow against one side of a mail-box. They stood there a long time before Rick said: ‘Whyn’t we get going? What’re we waiting for?’

‘Here’s where I live,’ Smoke said, jerking his head toward the four-story flat-front house on the corner. ‘I got an apartment in here. You want to come up?’

Rick said yes, very simply and honestly, and followed Smoke up three flights of circular stairs. Smoke found a key, unlocked the door, and pushed it open for Rick to enter.

It was a large, high-ceilinged room with two tall windows facing the Avenue. Opposite the windows there was a glazed-tile fireplace with a gas stove set into the opening. The walls were covered with plain yellow paper, very pleasant. Rick went straight to the mantel to look closer at a photograph in an elaborate stand frame. It was Josephine, full length, wearing what must have been a peacock costume—cut-away skirt of plumes erect behind her, fan shaped; bejewelled brassière, crested head-piece, and spike-heeled pumps. Nice outfit. Slanting across the bottom there was an inscription in loose, undisciplined handwriting: ‘To my brother Dan, love Josephine.’ A modest sentiment from one whose face was pure, direct, old-line heathen.

‘Where’d she get the get-up?’ Rick said, and Smoke answered from another room that she’d worn it in a revue at the Club Alabam when she was in the chorus there, and she had the picture made to send to the folks for Christmas to show them she was getting along all right. And two days after she sent it the Alabam closed and she didn’t get a lick of work for damn near three months. Then she got a job checking hats at the Royale and then she sold cigarettes there, and finally she got a job singing from four to six at an uptown speakeasy. She had the kind of guts it takes to get along; no need to worry about her.

Smoke came into the room wearing a pair of gray trousers and a white jersey. He was talking into a towel, and when he took it away from his face he saw Rick stretched flat on the couch, asleep. One hand was clenched on his chest and the other hung limp over the edge of the couch. Smoke looked down at his clear, serious face and heard the regular up-beat of his breathing. Then he went back to the bedroom and got some sleep himself.