Really the Blues

by Mezz Mezzrow

  (You got it made, daddy.)

  To Bessie Smith, Jimmy Noone, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Zutty Singleton, Johnny Dodds, Sidney Bechet, and Tommy Ladnier.

  (Grab a taste of millennium, gate.)

  Book One: 1899–1923

  A NOTHIN’ BUT A CHILD

  When I was a nothin’ but a child,

  When I was a nothin’ but a child,

  All you men tried to drive me wild. . . .

  BESSIE SMITH’S Reckless Blues

  1. DON’T CRY, MA

  MUSIC SCHOOL? ARE YOU KIDDING? I LEARNED TO PLAY THE SAX in Pontiac Reformatory.

  Pontiac was called “The School” on account of the kids who were sent there. I’ve been to a mess of schools like that—ones you won’t find on the approved list of any Parent-Teacher Association. Guess I learned more tricks there than a spider monkey does on a trapeze. Took my public-school training in three jails and a plenty of poolrooms, went to college in a gang of tea-pads, earned my Ph.D. in more creep joints and speakeasies and dancehalls than the law allows. Pontiac was just a kindergarten to me.

  Pontiac was thirty years ago. I’m forty-six now and in pretty good shape, except for a little gas on the stomach and a slight neurosis before coffee in the morning. What they piled into this knowledge-box of mine hasn’t brought me down any. I still get my kicks out of the music I picked up in that reform school; it’s been a primer and catechism and Bible to me, all rolled up in one.

  More than once I strayed off from the music and did my share of evil, and served my time. Other times the opium had me so strong it turned me every way but loose—then I packed away the sax and the clarinet and cut right out of this world. Messy. But I always crawled out of the fog and latched on to my horns and began to blow again. I always came back to the music. I was cut out to be a jazzman the way the righteous are chosen for the church.

  I’ve been in the stir and I’ve had my miseries, but all in all life’s been good to me. I fly right now. The other cats from the corner of Division and Western didn’t do so good. Bow Gistensohn shot it out with his best pal in a gang war and wound up in the morgue. Mitter Foley, who gave it to Bow, was laid to rest on a slab too. As for Emil Burbacher, he messed with the law some kind of way and got twenty years in Joliet. Those boys didn’t live healthy.

  I did all right, considering. In spite of jail and drugs and bad times my skin’s still in one piece. Today I’ve got my good friends all over the world, from Lenox Avenue and Sugar Hill to Java and the South Seas. I used to walk in the shade but I’m on that sunny side now. When I get off on my horn the joint still jumps, and that’s a good feeling. Old Lady Fortune sure laid it on me when she handed me that tinny old sax in Pontiac jailhouse.

  They taught me the blues in Pontiac—I mean the blues, blues that I felt from my head to my shoes, really the blues. And it was in Pontiac that I dug that Jim Crow man in person, a motherferyer that would cut your throat for looking. We marched in from the mess hall in two lines, and the colored boys lockstepped into one side of the cell block and we lockstepped into the other, and Jim Crow had the block, parading all around us, grinning like a polecat. I saw my first race riot there, out in the prison yard. It left me so shaky I almost blew my top and got sicker than a hog with the colic. Jim Crow just wouldn’t get out of my face.

  But out in Pontiac I got my first chance to play in a real man-size band, with jam-up instruments, and it was a mixed band at that, Negroes and whites side by side busting their conks. During those months I got me a solid dose of the colored man’s gift for keeping the life and the spirit in him while he tells of his troubles in music. I heard the blues for the first time, sung in low moanful chants morning, noon and night. The colored boys sang them in their cells and they sang them out in the yard, where the work gangs massaged the coal piles.

  I’ve played the music in a lot of places these last thirty years, from Al Capone’s roadhouses to swing joints along 52nd Street in New York, Paris nightclubs, Harvard University, dicty Washington embassies and Park Avenue salons, not to mention all the barrelhouse dives. It’s the same music I learned in Pontiac. The idiom’s still with me. That’s what I’m going to tell about in this book.

  Poppa, have you got any idea how a man took to jazz in the early days? Do you know how he spent years watching the droopy chicks in cathouses, listening to his cellmates moaning low behind the bars, digging the riffs the wheels were knocking out when he rode the rods—and then all of a sudden picked up a horn and began to tell the whole story in music? I’m going to explain about that. And about how he fought across the no-man’s-land between the races, outing Jim Crow as he went, to get where he had to go. And how it felt when he got there. I’ll tell about that too, especially that. Listen hard, now. This is a story that happened in the U.S. of A.

  I was born on a windy night in 1899, along with the Twentieth Century. . . .

  ●

  Don’t get the idea I was born a criminal. I wasn’t one of these raggedy slum kids who have to use a sewer grating for a teething ring. Nothing like that. My family was as respectable as Sunday morning, loaded with doctors, lawyers, dentists and pharmacists, and they all worked hard to make a solid citizen out of me. They almost did it, too. The law didn’t catch up with me until I was sixteen years old.

  The streets of Chicago’s Northwest Side were like a magnet to me; all the honey in a beehive couldn’t keep us kids indoors. There was something in the air that whispered of big doings you wouldn’t want to miss. The sidewalks were always jammed, big gamblers and racketeers, dressed sharp as a tack, strutted by with their diamond stickpins, chicks you heard stories about would tip up and down the avenue real cool, the cops toured the neighborhood in big Cadillacs filled with shotguns. Anything and everything could happen on the Northwest Side—and usually did.

  Our gang made its headquarters at “The Corner,” the intersection of Division and Western Avenues, after Emil Glick opened his poolroom there. We used to do crazy things together. We had a yen, every time we got away from home and school, to strut and act biggity and shoot the works, live our whole lives out before the sun went down. We picked fights and robbed candy stores. We sat around a fire on a vacant lot until all hours, roasting potatoes and giving mouth-organ concerts to stray cats and dogs. Sometimes we’d hop a freightcar to St. Louis or Cape Girardeau, Mo., for a poor man’s Cook’s Tour. When we’d come down the street the girls would tear out for the other side—we were known to be the wildest gang this side of hell. In school we chewed tobacco and snuff, using the inkwells in our desks for cuspidors. Most of us stole .22 rifles or .38 bulldog revolvers from our fathers and roamed through the streets and alleys like desperados, loud-checked caps with three-inch visors pulled down over our eyes. We got our sport by taking potshots at sparrows and the glass insulators on telephone poles. We came on like Jesse James.

  It took just a whispered “kike” or “Jew bastard” from a member of some rival Polish or Irish gang, and fists were flying between us. One time in Humboldt Park Leo “Bow” Gistensohn, our leader, didn’t like the way a cop down by the lake called him “sheeny.” The next thing we knew Bow had him in a bear-hug, swinging him off the ground. The cop yanked his .38 out and let Bow have it in the stomach, but Bow didn’t even loose his grip. With that bullet in him and blood spurting out like water from a faucet, he lifted that two-hundred-pound cop clear over his head and heaved him in the lake. They took the bullet out of him and he lived, just to spite that cop, I guess.

  At fifteen I was all jammed up full of energy, restless as a Mexican jumping bean. Something was all puffed up in me, but I couldn’t dig what it was or give it a name. All the sights and sounds of the Northwest Side, the balalaika chords my father used to strum, the tunes we blew on our mouth organs, the gang fights and the poolrooms, the gats we packed in our hip pockets and aimed at each other for fun, Bow Gistensohn and Murph Steinberg and Emil Burbacher and the colored boy Sullivan, the squealing girls—they were all jumbled up in my head. I we
nt around humming and whistling all the time, trying to straighten out all this jumble. When we hung out at The Corner, I’d keep working my fingers like I was playing the piano or the balalaika or maybe a sax, anything that would make the right patterns of sounds when you worked over it hard with plenty of feeling. Sometimes I patted the pavement with my foot, or beat the top of a garbage can with a couple of sticks, making time the way I’d seen Sullivan do when the spirit hit him. It got me so bad most of the time I couldn’t sit still. I felt like I wanted to jump out of my skin, hop off into space on a C. & A. locomotive, anything but stay put.

  I wasn’t much interested in girls yet, but girls wouldn’t have helped. It was a lot more than a mere sex flash that kept me all keyed up. I was maneuvering for a new language that would make me shout out loud and romp on to glory. What I needed was the vocabulary. I was feeling my way to music like a baby fights its way into talk.

  Music was my kind of talk. I didn’t get that straight before Pontiac, but my instincts were on the right track.

  ●

  What landed me in the reformatory was a big shiny Studebaker touring car. Sammy “O’Brien” rolled up to The Corner in this job one afternoon and asked me to go riding with him.

  We called this kid O’Brien because his beak was so big and hooked it kept the sun out of his face and got caught on clothes lines. “Sammy,” we used to say to him, “if we had your nose full of nickels we’d be rich.” Sammy bummed his way from the ghetto on New York’s Lower East Side and hung around the poolroom doing odd jobs and camping on the pool tables at night. He was in the wrong pew behind the wheel of that Studebaker, sporting all around town.

  In those days, when automobiles were still a novelty, we got a big kick out of joyriding in somebody else’s car. We knew every make of car on the road, and we knew that cars didn’t have locks but only needed standard magneto keys to turn on the current. Every one of us had his pockets stuffed with a collection of popular keys—Bosch, Remy and Delco. We could take Mr. Anybody’s car any time we had a mind to.

  While we were touring around I asked Sammy how come he was driving this car and he said he was driving for some bigshot doctor, but later he confessed that Emil Burbacher had taken the car from in front of a church. That soft seat got hard to me before the words were out of his mouth. When the car stalled in front of a gang of cops waiting for a streetcar, I felt that hardwood jail bench under me, and creosote filled the air. Sammy took one look at the cops and flew, leaving me to hold the bag.

  “Whose car is this, son?” one of the cops asked. I told him it was mine. “Sure it is,” he said. “That’s why I’ve got the number listed here as a stolen car.”

  “Well, you see, sir, I can tell you about that,” I said real quick. “Dad took the car to church this morning and I had a date with my girl this afternoon so, while he was in church, I just took it and went on my date. I just this minute left my girl’s house and I’m on my way home now.”

  The cop wasn’t in a believing mood. He thought that even so, we ought to drop over to the station house, just to check my story. I handled that car as though the tires were soapbubbles, because I didn’t want him to guess I never drove before in my life.

  I didn’t want no part of jail; I kept wondering how the hell I was going to get out of this mess. Then I got a brainstorm. This car was so open, all you had to do was put one foot out and you were running. I figured that if I swung up over the curbstone, the cop naturally would have to grab for the wheel instead of his gun and I could run. I worked it all out, with my heart pounding so loud I couldn’t even hear the motor. When I had the plan all set in my mind, I waited for just the right spot, then swerved hard and ran up on the sidewalk—to find myself right outside the station house, knee-deep in brass buttons.

  Inside, the sergeant asked what my name was, and I said, “Milton Mezzrow.” A minute later he was talking to the license bureau on the phone and writing on a slip of paper. By stretching my neck I could read the words: “Edward Mikelson, 2715 Logan Blvd., no phone.” The sergeant asked sarcastically for my name again.

  “Sir, now I’m really going to tell you the truth,” I said, putting on the weeps as though I figured the game was up. “My name is Milton Mikelson and I live at 2715 Logan Boulevard. I didn’t want to tell you that before because I was afraid my father might whip me for getting into trouble and I’d never get the car again, so I lied about my name. Please leave me go home and I promise you I’ll never do it again.”

  The sergeant looked up at the cop, then back at the slip of paper on his desk. “That’s the name, all right,” he said. “I guess the kid’s O.K. Listen, you, get the hell out of here and don’t pull any more stunts on your father or we’ll lock you up the next time.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I said, with gratitude that came straight from the heart, “yes, sir, thanks a million.” I cut out from that place every way but slow, and was just climbing into the Studebaker when I heard something that made my stomach drop down to my socks. Somebody called me by my right name.

  “Hey, Mezzrow, what you doing in this part of town?” It was a lieutenant I knew from my neighborhood. He came over with a big smile, glad to see me getting so prosperous. Right there on the station-house steps was the cop who had brought me in.

  “What’s that name, Lieutenant?” the cop said. I began to smell that creosote again.

  “Mezzrow,” the lieutenant said. “Why, he’s from my old neighborhood. Knew him years ago when I pounded the beat on Division Street.”

  “We-ell,” the cop said, grabbing me by the neck. “We’ll put this bird back in the cage.” He yanked me out of the car and kicked me so hard with his bulldog toe, I flew right into the precinct house. Five minutes later I was booked and locked up with a couple of drunks.

  ●

  My education began right then and there. In the county jail, where they put me to wait for my trial, I shared a cell with a German named Schneider who said he was an alien prisoner of war. He had worked for the Humboldt Safe Company before his arrest, and he took a shine to me. In one week flat, just to pass the time, he taught me all the secrets of safecracking and the art of making skeleton keys to fit any type of lock. That’s one business I never did find time to go into, but those lessons came in handy later, when I was always losing my keys to apartment and hotel rooms.

  At my trial there was a long discussion between the judge and my uncle, who brought his lawyer to court to represent me. He sure did some representing. The three of them went into a huddle and decided it would be good for me to get a dose of reformatory medicine. A few days later I was on the train, bound for The School at Pontiac.

  I wasn’t as lonely as I thought I was going to be. With our gang on the train, handcuffed right to me, was Emil Burbacher. He had stolen a car, he told me, and was sentenced to the reformatory for it. Bow and Murph, I found out, were already enrolled as star pupils in The School for breaking into a candy store and trying to steal some mouth organs. It wasn’t like going to jail at all. Somebody just picked up the corner of Division and Western and moved it out to Pontiac, gang and all; the only things left behind were Emil Glick’s pool tables and a pair of dice.

  After the fingerprinting routine and short-arm inspection at Pontiac, we were given numbers and sent to the barber shop, where I got my first lesson in jailbird humor. When it came my turn they sat me in the chair and asked me how I wanted my hair cut. “Straight down in the back,” I said, “and no clippers on the side.” “Oh, no,” the barber said, “we never do that.” He went to work with his comb and shears while I huddled there kind of bewildered, wondering how I’d find Murph and Bow. All of a sudden I felt a pair of clippers starting at the nape of my neck and chugging like a locomotive straight over to my forehead. The way that barber ploughed over my head, it’s a wonder he missed my eyebrows. “Oh, oh,” one of the inmates working around the shop said sympathetically, “now ain’t that too bad, and him with such nice pretty hair and everything.” This was a great j
oke to the keeper, but not to me. “Well,” the keeper said, “you might as well take it all off now. We don’t want him looking like that around here.” The barber took his advice. When he got finished a fly would slip and break his neck where my hair used to be.

  I had no trouble looking up my pals. Word buzzed through the grapevine about the new “fish,” and it didn’t take a day before one of the “politicians” (that was what we called the trustees) slipped me a folded piece of toilet paper. It was a note from Murph. “I’m in the band,” he wrote. “Try and make it.”

  At my interview a few days later I practically convinced the officials that I was the impresario of the Chicago Opera, picked up by mistake. They took me at my word and assigned me to the cell block that housed the band members. Here I saw Murph again. He was the bugler for the block, waking us with reveille every morning and sending us to bed with taps every night.

  In the band room I met Professor Scott, a friendly sort of man with a pleasant face and a nice, easygoing manner about him. He started to warm up as soon as he heard I had studied the piano and could read music.

  “I used to play solo trombone in Arthur Pryor’s band,” he told me. “Look, Milton, we’ve got a pretty good band here, but there are two instruments we miss a whole lot because the boys don’t want to study them, and they’re the flute and the piccolo. Now, then. You asked me could you learn to play the saxophone, so I’ll make a deal with you. You learn the flute and I’ll teach you the sax too. It won’t be hard because the fingering’s about the same on both.”

  I sweated over that flute like it was an overgrown tuba, and after I learned my daily exercises I’d shoot for the alto sax. I guess I blew enough wind into those two instruments to fill the Graf Zeppelin. The clarinets were all assigned to other inmates, but they didn’t hold my interest just yet.