‘And if she’s any part, I’m a Hindu,’ Josephine said. ‘Do you know her?’
‘No,’ Rick said. ‘I’ve only heard her name.’
‘She’s all right, but whatever she’s got it’s got her worried, poor devil. She’d keep telling me she’s one of these. Nothing I could do about it, give her another drink. She got pretty tight. We all did.’
‘How was Amy?’
‘Swell, same as always. Sore at you, though. She was counting on you to bring Dan and Jeff and have them play. She said you said you would. I think she was pretty sort of put out.’
‘We played somewhere else,’ Rick said. ‘What are we going to make?’
‘I told you twice last week. “Mama Goes Where Papa Goes,” and “Sam, the Old Accordion Man.”’
‘Nice pair,’ Rick said. ‘It ought to sell.’
Morrison’s boys were getting out; the studio was almost empty. Phil came up to Rick and told him to get some beefsteak on that as soon as he could.
‘Don’t he look like hell, for a fact?’ Josephine said. ‘Dan and Jeff look all right, but look at him!’
‘All three of them look like hell to me,’ Phil said, and he meant it. He turned back to Rick and said, ‘Another thing, they want me to make up a band for a college shindig in Boston next Friday night and they want you in it.’
‘Too far,’ Rick said. ‘I wouldn’t go to Boston if they gave it to me.’
‘That’s what I told them, but they won’t take anybody but you, and they seemed to want you bad. Two hundred and a quarter.’
‘I’ll have to think it over,’ Rick said. ‘Boston’s a hell of a ways. Tell them to have it down here and I’ll play. I like to stay in town.’
‘They want you there. Two and a quarter and transportation.’
‘I’ll think.’
Phil started to leave, but he turned at the door to come back and say, ‘Get your hair cut, too; you look like a Greek.’
It was almost eleven-thirty. Rick looked at his trumpet, Josephine took off her coat, and Jeff sat down at the piano. Smoke began to assemble his drums and the four of them got their signals together: for ‘Sam, the Old Accordion Man,’ it was to be a lead-off by Jeff, then verse with voice, piano and drums, then chorus with Rick playing a running obbligato, then trumpet solo for the first section of the second chorus with Josephine coming in at the mid-section to finish it up. It was the stock arrangement for vocal records. Same thing for ‘Mama Goes Where Papa Goes’ except for trumpet in the lead-off and two bars of vamp-till-ready to build up Josephine’s entrance.
Everything was set. The light came on and they started with Sam. Josephine was in form; she was always in form, anytime, day or night. Her voice was rich and rough singing
He plays those chords like nobody can.
They call him Sam, the old accordion man.
Rick stood right beside her and played obliquely out from every note she sang. Among them, they made a good thing of it, Josephine and Rick lifting the melody and Smoke and Jeff weaving it tight with rhythm. Josephine came through in the fine wild way she had; she was the star, it was her record, but Rick could never play anything without lighting up a little on his own.
They did ‘Mama Goes’ next, and it was in that one that the unheard-of happened. It went beautifully almost to the end. Josephine sang verse and chorus, Rick played the first eight bars of the second chorus, Josephine took it from there, and then, for a finish, they went into half-time together for a short coda that built up from the tonic note higher and higher and wilder and wilder until Josephine held it and Rick pushed it on, staggered up and down the scale with it until he hit his note, and then slid up to catch it once and for all—and he fluffed. No doubt about it, it went wrong. It would have been a killer, but it missed.
Nobody said a word. Rick held onto his trumpet and stared straight ahead of him. Smoke and Jeff got up and moved a step or two toward him and stopped. Then he raised his arm and they had to grab him to keep him from throwing the horn against the wall. Smoke took it away from him, and he sank into a chair, put his hands over his face, and stayed there that way.
‘The record’s all right,’ Jeff said to him, quietly. ‘They can polish off those last ribs, nothing to it.’
Matthew Brown said, ‘Of course.’
Smoke put the trumpet in the case, got Rick’s coat and his own and said, ‘Let’s get out. We’re through,’ and when Rick just sat there without moving, Josephine leaned down and kissed him lightly on the side of the head. ‘Go ahead, baby lamb,’ she said, ‘and get some steak for that. The record’s wonderful.’
Rick stood up, felt in his pockets until he found a cigarette, and lighted it. He took his coat from Smoke, put it on, took his trumpet case, and went out the door without saying anything.
‘Whyn’t you go with him?’ Jeff said to Smoke.
‘He don’t want me; I can tell.’
Jeff and Smoke and Josephine and Matthew Brown stood around for a while, thinking about it, and then Jeff said: ‘He hasn’t got any call to take it so hard. We can do it over.’
They waited a minute, and Jeff went on almost as if he were talking to himself: ‘I don’t know what the hell that boy thinks a trumpet will do. That note he was going for, that thing he was trying for—there isn’t any such thing. Not on a horn.’
5
Word gets around. Smoke and Jeff didn’t say anything, but Josephine was female and Matthew Brown was there, and within a week it was all over town that Rick Martin had spoiled a record for Josie Jordan.
Narration varies with the narrators. The thing began, no doubt, with Matthew Brown telling someone that the record had to be scrapped, or with Josephine telling someone that Rick ran out on his wife’s party and turned up next day at the studio with a blue eye. Simple statements, but a simple statement that runs the gauntlet can take a serious beating. All kinds of things were said, but the essence of all the tales was that the great Rick Martin was played out, the skids were under him, it wouldn’t be long now; too bad, too; he used to be the fair-haired boy of lot until he got to tearing around with the Harlem crowd. Niggers can stand that stuff, but a white man can’t.
There was a variant that started the same way but ended by laying the blame on his having married a rich society girl and having gone soft on her old man’s money. Poor bastard, he was all set to climb into the social register when the girl threw him out on his ear.
No one ever said that he was the one that did the leaving, that he left the girl because he knew, without even thinking the words, that she wasn’t good enough for him. That wouldn’t have occurred to anyone. And it didn’t occur to anyone that the reason he stayed with the Harlem crowd was that they were his rightful friends, they were closer to the music than any of the white men were; they were close to it in the same way he was.
And finally it never occurred to anyone that he really wasn’t slipping, he wasn’t played out; he was only getting so good that he couldn’t contain it. Nobody but Jeff Williams realized why he’d mugged up the record.
6
There wasn’t much fuss about his leaving Amy. She was in trouble of her own and she scarcely knew when it happened. The morning Rick went back to the apartment to get his clothes, a week or so after the session at Silver’s, he found her asleep on the sofa with her coat on. He’d gone in thinking she’d be away at school, but there she was asleep in the living-room with a long green dress on, and silver sandals, and a fur coat, and she started up, scared, when he came in.
‘Oh, you,’ she said. She didn’t ask him where he’d been; he didn’t ask her where she’d been. She looked around for something to say, and said: ‘You’ll have to pardon the condition of the house. Ramundo’s taking finals.’
He looked down at her for a moment. She looked tired out.
‘Don’t you go to school any more?’ he said.
‘Me?’ she said, surprised. ‘Oh, yes, I go to school; I was just on my way now.’
It was all right. Ne
ither of them cared what either of them said. It was simply a question of holding up the exterior, making speech and gesture to prove that they were of this world, human beings on the face of the earth.
‘I’d like to get some things,’ Rick said.
‘Right,’ Amy said, and he went into the hall and came back with six suits and dumped them on a chair and went out the front door and came back in five minutes with a taxi-driver. ‘Those,’ he said, and the driver picked up the suits and took them out. Rick went back to the hall and brought out other suits and overcoats and hats and shoes, and the driver came back and took them, while Rick packed a bag of shirts and socks and those things. Amy didn’t get up from the sofa all the while he was there. She just lay there looking tired and glazed and beautiful.
When Rick came back into the studio with his bag, she said, ‘It didn’t work out, did it?’ ‘What?’ Rick said, and she said: ‘The thing with us. It was a flop, wasn’t it?’
Rick stood by a moment, not looking at her, and then he said, ‘Yes, something was wrong.’
‘Yes,’ Amy said. ‘Something always seems to be. Get your records before you tell me good-bye.’
‘Keep them. I don’t need them.’
‘Neither do I.’ Amy turned and looked up at him, with the old, curious look. ‘Kiss me before you go,’ she said.
Rick bent down and kissed her, but even so he left.
7
It wasn’t so simple when he left Phil, because Phil didn’t want him to go, and he really didn’t want to go either. It was just one of those false plays, and it got out of both their hands, so that what happened was that Phil fired Rick and Rick quit at the same moment. Phil only meant to ask him if he didn’t want to take a vacation, get some rest, but he had a nasty nature, and first thing he knew he was telling Rick either to quit drinking on the job or get out. And Rick, who had built up a taste for adulation and had never even smelled any criticism, flared like a torch and asked what it was, anyhow, a Salvation Army Band? Then he liked the sound of that and he went on to say that, come to think of it, it did sound like one; it was a foul band, a terrible band, and no wonder he got tight on the stand, sitting in there listening to it every night of his life. Either get tight or go nuts.
‘So my band’s foul?’ Phil said.
‘It’s terrible,’ Rick said. ‘It’s awful. Who’ve you got besides me? The trio’s good, but they can’t sing all the time. If you had enough ear to hear Jeff Williams’s band just once, you’d shoot yourself.’
‘I’d shoot myself on account of Jeff Williams’s band! Listen, you!’ Phil had his coat halfway off, but Rick simply turned around and walked out as straight as he could.
And that split a combination that had seemed as solid as the earth. Phil Morrison’s Orchestra with Rick Martin, first trumpet. Mention Morrison’s Orchestra in those days and you immediately thought of Rick Martin. Mention Rick Martin and you thought of his horn in Morrison’s records. It had lasted five years, and that’s long.
It was the first time Rick had been out of a job since the truant officer caught up with him at Gandy’s. He could have had fifty jobs the first day, but he didn’t want even one job. His job with Phil Morrison had been a tie with the world, like his job at Gandy’s, and the moment he was free of it, he knew he didn’t want any more of it. By that time, the fewer obligations he had, the better he liked it. Music, for him, wasn’t a business; it was a passion, and he was ready to give up to it.
The upstairs and downstairs places saw a lot of him after he left Morrison. He made records with anybody that asked him, but he didn’t sit behind any orchestra leaders and he didn’t play any more hotel dance music. He simply didn’t take offers. He stayed in the joints with his own kind, the incurables, the boys who felt the itch to discover something. He stayed within the closed circle of the fanatics, the old bunch of alchemists, and there he did his work. One night after another he soaked out the real world with alcohol and, free of it, he played music that could stand up with any music. There were times when a bell rang and he had the pleasure of knowing he was a good man. He knew it once in awhile. The rest of them knew it all the time, every time he played that horn.
When he stopped working for Morrison he stopped making any bones about drinking. It was all the time and nothing to do about it, no reason to have to do anything about it. Drinking was as much of a method as any he’d ever worked out, and it served two purposes for him: it gave him a way out, a means of pushing out beyond the actual, banal here-and-now, and at the same time it kept him on his feet. Something had to keep him on his feet; he was tired in those days, dog-tired all the time, ready to drop. If he’d ever unwound and relaxed, it would have been all over, he couldn’t have lifted a finger. He had to keep shoving everything off-center, not let himself find out how tired he was. He needed to keep himself keyed up and stretched tight to play the way he wanted to. It was work and a way of working.
But it was a drastic means and it worried his friends. It had got to the place where no one could tell how drunk he was unless he hadn’t been drinking for a few hours. When it began to go out you could make a guess about how much it had been. The rest of the time you couldn’t be sure whether he was drunk or just preoccupied. He’d learned to handle the outward signs when he was playing with Morrison.
Smoke Jordan tried hard to get him to take it easier, maybe not play so much, maybe take a vacation, Florida’s nice.
‘Get yourself wheeled up and down like an icky banker?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Smoke said. ‘It’s all right. You wouldn’t haf to get wheeled. Lay on the beach and look at the waves.’
‘No Florida,’ Rick said.
‘If I wasn’t working I’d get out of this town and go somewheres, boy, I’m telling you that.’
But it didn’t do any good. Rick didn’t leave New York all winter long, and he worked harder than he ever had when he had had a job. Every tenth record you’d pick up in those days would have some of that magnificent horn in it somewhere. Apparently anybody could call on him and he’d sit in just for the fun of it, just for the fun of riding along and pulling a whole band with him.
His own recording band, however, turned out to be a lost cause. He got the band together, one of the most exciting personnels anybody ever rounded up. Ten men, four black and six white. It was to be a co-operative, and they were signed by a company that was just getting its start and felt like taking a chance on something good. Rick had Smoke and Davis and Snowden and Jeff from Jeff’s band, and La Porte from Morrison’s, and Cohen from Freeman’s, and Roland from Moss’s, and Barrow and Lake from Deane’s. The band was called Dick Rogers’s Memphis Ten for the sake of anonymity, and it’s too bad the record company went broke before any of their records were issued, because Dick Rogers’s Memphis Ten was shaped like a winner.
But the company went broke. And Rick took it hard, because he had felt right about it. The thing he’d wanted to do ever since he could remember was to get a good band and make records that weren’t held by anything. He got the band, that part worked out.
He showed up, icy-eyed, at Louie Galba’s the night he found out the company had gone under. He pushed through the door and went to a table alone. He didn’t have his trumpet with him; all he had was a flask which he fetched out of a pocket and laid on the table in front of him. It was about two-thirty. At three Jeff came in and Rick told him as much as he could.
‘We ought to have expected it,’ Jeff said. ‘Same thing I told you a year ago when you wanted to try it. Only I thought this really looked good. Too damned bad.’
‘You don’t have to worry,’ Rick said. ‘You’ve got a band and you can make what you want, in a sort of way. Where does a white guy get, though? What can he do?’
‘Do you wish you were playing in a band again?’ Jeff said. ‘Like Morrison’s? Maybe you ought to go back. It’s a good band. Good as any when you played in it.’
‘I don’t want to go back,’ Rick said; ‘but, at that, I wou
ldn’t mind being regular in a good band, one that was good all the time, not just one chorus in ten. I don’t know. I can’t get along in a band. I used to work for Morrison, did you know that?—worked for him for five years.’
Jeff looked at him closely and didn’t answer.
‘I can’t get along in a band,’ Rick said. ‘It…I don’t know, it sort of weighs me down. I couldn’t get along at Balboa. I worked down there once when I was a kid for a summer, and I couldn’t get along from the first day. No use to try it again. I can’t get along in a band. Gotta go now.’
He stood up, collected his flask, and pushed straight out the door. There was something about the way he walked. It wasn’t stiff-legged, exactly, but it was on that style.
8
He didn’t show up anywhere for three weeks. The boys were laying bets he was dead. Smoke forced himself through the morgue twice, looked over the whole display, tags and all. Then he called up all the jails. Not the right Martin. But he wouldn’t give it up. He kept trying everything he could think of, and then one morning an old woman gave him a tip and he found him and put him in a cure.
It was one of those cures where they saturate you with alcohol and then pump you full of a preparation that gives you an allergy to alcohol. It makes a conflict. The forces for good do battle with the forces of evil and the patient has a time of it. The patient is expected to remember the conflict as long as he lives, and the assumption is that he’ll never take a chance on another. He’d just prefer not to.
Smoke came to get Rick the day he was supposed to be released. He’d had his suit cleaned and he brought it along for him to wear home. He rang a bell in the waiting-room, and a man in a surgeon’s smock came in and said thank heavens he’d come, they’d been trying every place they knew to get in touch with him or somebody that knew the patient.
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