Really the Blues

by Mezz Mezzrow

  ●

  Sidney Bechet’s curved soprano put a bug in my head. I went right down to take my old flute out of hock and traded it in for a soprano sax. As soon as I could blow three notes on it I began to practice the St. Louis Blues. Many a time I’d just sit around looking at my horn—I could hardly believe I had one of my own. I wanted to shout out to the whole world, “You all look out now, here I come, everybody step aside, I’m gonna show you where from! I’m gonna blow in this horn and make you know that jazz is the king and let it be so!”

  One day while I was practising it got so good to me that I put my horn under my arm and cut out for the South Side. I didn’t know where I was going; I guess I just had the feeling that a man who plays a horn ought to go where people really understand about horns. I was wandering up and down State Street, carrying that case like it was my passport, when I passed a shoeshine parlor and heard something that attracted me. Some kids in there were making riffs with their rags as they massaged the shoes. It sounded like tapdancing, and it drew me inside.

  “Boy, what you got in that case?” one of the kids asked, as though he didn’t know. It looked like I got the case open before he was through talking, I was so tickled. “You play that thing?” he said. As much as I had played it at home and as good as I thought I was, when I put the horn together and blew on it I couldn’t make a sound, I was so nervous. That was my first case of stage-fright. Finally I got going on St. Louis Blues, while all these kids began to clap their hands and pat their feet, some keeping time with their rags. When I finished a chorus they all smiled and looked friendly. They were like a group of adults standing around a baby that’s just spoken its first word. One of them asked could he blow the sax, and when he put it to his mouth he didn’t even know how to place his fingers on the keys but he blew a tone so full and natural it knocked me out. I had really come to the right place.

  I wanted to buy some music, and these boys directed me to Clarence Williams’ music store on State Street. Clarence was sitting out in front, sunning himself. He was a very congenial-looking guy, with a big broad smile and wide eyes that said he was willing to help you anytime you asked. This fine man was a music publisher (he put the great Bessie Smith on records) and the composer of a lot of numbers that are jazz standards today—old standbys like Sugar Blues, Royal Garden Blues, I Ain’t Gonna Give Nobody None of My Jelly Roll, I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate, I Found a New Baby, Everybody Loves My Baby, and plenty more. He took me in as though he had known me for years and sat down at the piano to play Royal Garden and Sister Kate for me. Before I left he gave me the sheet music and wouldn’t take any money for it.

  What struck me about Royal Garden was the way the bass worked as a sort of masculine counterpoint against the harmonies and melodies of the right hand. I felt at last I had found the secret of jazz, just what I’d been looking for all along. These little inflections of Clarence’s are something the greatest musicians of today have missed. He gave me a rendition of the lyrics too. The comp he played was just like the style of the old guitar players—bass and chord, bass and chord, with the hands alternating most of the time. The main thing all through was the inversion of chords in the true jazz idiom, which gives the improvising soloist just the right foundation to build his variations on.

  Solid. I was all set now. I had the sax, and music to practise with, and good, friendly people to help me when I needed it. All I wanted to do was to work on my sax all day, then hang around the De Luxe and the Royal Garden all night, visiting Clarence in between to keep me straight. I’d made it at last, I figured—I was really a musician now.

  Don’t look for no chitlin’s before you kill your hawg. Wham, I woke up to find myself in jail again. It was getting to be a drag.

  3. THE BAND HOUSE, THE BAND HOUSE

  I AIN’T DONE NOTHING, JUDGE, YOUR HONOR. HONEST, I WAS just sitting in that hashhouse, smacking my chops on a egg sandwich, minding my business. . . . Joe Tuckman felt like balling that night cause he beat Big Izzy for ten grand in the crap game, and he took us all out for some sport. After catching the show at the Royal Garden and a couple other spots, we wound up in this restaurant for some breakfast, with the cab driver tagging along. We just began to eat when in breezed these two pounders on the bloodhound tip, hunting down the owner of the cab parked out front. The driver told them he was their man and what about it. “This about it,” one of the cops said pleasantly. “You wouldn’t by any chance know where we could find the owner of these guns, would you? It just so happens they were snuggled up under the back seat of your cab.” Out from his pocket came a gang of .22’s and .38’s, enough steel utensils to open a hardware store.

  I didn’t know who belonged to those pistols, and today, twenty-seven years later, I still don’t. In those days guys packed rods like women do lipstick; practically every hip pocket in town was a walking arsenal. I couldn’t figure out why a copper would go poking his nose under the seat of a respectable-looking cab at six in the A.M. It goes to show you what comes out of minding other people’s business. Snoop and ye shall find. I wonder what do cops want to be that way for? It just gets people in trouble.

  You could have heard yourself think in that beanery—a pin dropped then would have made an explosion like a cannon cracker. Everybody got busy at once, some studying their fingernails and the cab driver shoveling food in so fast that when the cop tapped him on the shoulder he coughed up a spoon. “You’re sure a gabby bunch of guys,” the cop said. “I hear better conversation down at the morgue.” He sighed. “O.K., O.K., come along then, I’ll take you to a place where you’ll have plenty of time to sit down and write out your speeches.”

  After we were booked at the precinct station house Joe Tuckman put up our bail, and two days later we showed up for trial. If you pleaded guilty to carrying concealed weapons the usual fine was twenty-five bucks and costs, but when the judge asked who owned the guns we all got tongue-tied again. Bop, he hit us with the whole book, $200 and costs or six months in the house of many slammers. I was the kid in the group, so after paying everybody else’s fine the boys said, “We’ll come and get you out tomorrow, Milton, just sit tight now and don’t worry.” Off I went to Chicago’s city prison at 26th and California, the Bridewell, known as “The Band House” in the underworld. I tried hard not to worry but I didn’t make out so good.

  When we stripped naked and lined up for our numbers and prison clothes, my morale hit zero and kept sinking. Jack, the drapes they handed me a jungle bum wouldn’t wear on weekdays. Long underwear that looked like the housing project of some gophers on a fresh-air kick, about ten sizes too big and five quarts of creosote too funky. A blue-and-white striped rag that they called a shirt, faded and torn and built for a humpy giant to begin with. Socks made from some kind of stiff string, with less give than a stinchy miser. Hobnailed, high-topped gunboats weighing about ten pounds each, with one-inch soles as flexible as a petrified tree. Those excuses for shoes were handed to us after being put through a sterilizing process, with impressions dug into their inner soles by the toes of all the lousy bums who wore them before. When you stood up and put your weight on those violin cases you thought you were standing barefoot over the iron grating of a subway ventilator. A busted ragpicker would have given those togs the go-by.

  We were hustled off to the south cell block, where I was locked up in a cage that would have cramped a canary. In the corner I spied a bucket coated with two inches of lime inside and out, with no cover; from the tip-off my nose gave me, I figured this was the can. The bed was about two feet wide and six feet long, with an inch-thick straw mattress stretched over some rusty, sagging old springs. It would have been more restful kipping on a pile of hardtack, unbuttered. At mealtime they marched us to the mess hall and dished out some cold baked beans with a hunk of salt pork that had seen better days about the time Dewey took Manila. Then we lockstepped back to our cells and about nine o’clock the lights were switched off. I was really in the dumps, but I finally dozed off b
ecause the social life was so boring.

  Maybe misery doesn’t love company but it sure seems to attract it. A minute later I was hopping around that cell entertaining more company than Elsa Maxwell. Hundreds of the largest bedbugs I have ever seen (and I’ve been a blood donor for many a prizewinner in my time) had opened up transfusion offices all over my body and were feasting on plasma-an’. There must have been something wrong with their thyroid glands, they were so overgrown. They were so cocky and drunk with power, not to mention my blood, that they didn’t bother to play fair—they just maneuvered into position on the ceiling and dropped down on me like dive-bombers on a target. It was insulting, the way they paid the rules of the game no mind. Most of them were so large and bloated that when you smacked one on your face or arm it would pop like the cork on a wine bottle. I found out then that chinches never die. When they get tired of scuffling for their chow and want to retire, they just go and live happily forever after in The Band House.

  I called the guard and he brought me some matches and a newspaper to burn them out. “Be sure you get them cracks, bud,” he told me, pointing to the blistered and scaling whitewash on the walls, but there wasn’t much hope in his voice. I lit the paper at each hole and they marched out in squads—grandma, grandpa, and the whole family, generation after generation all the way back to the Ark. Later on, the guard, maybe out of a sense of fair play, slipped me a blowtorch to make the battle a little less one-sided. It would have took a flamethrower to even up the score.

  No rest for the weary—between the bugs and the food they dished out to us I was put in mind of a song the kids used to sing in the streets of my neighborhood:

  The Band House, The Band House,

  I’ll never go there any more.

  They give you bread as heavy as lead,

  They give you soup that’ll make you puke,

  They give you meat that stints like feet,

  I’ll never go there any more.

  “Occupation?”

  “I’m a musician, sir.”

  “Musician, hey.” That deputy warden made it sound like it was lower than whaleshit, and that’s at the bottom of the ocean. “Huh, you goddamn Jews and niggers are always duckin’ work. Well, the only kind of music you’ll make around here’ll be with a pick and banjo.” Before I could dig what he meant he turned to his stooge and yelled, “Brickyard!”

  My job was to load up a wheelbarrow with smoking bricks from the kilns and haul them over to the stockpiles. But I never did any manual labor before, on account of some lung trouble when I was a kid, and when I went to lift that loaded wheelbarrow it wouldn’t budge; it felt like it was riveted to the ground. After a couple of tries I tipped the whole works over, spilling the bricks on the ground.

  “Hey, you Jew bastard!” The keeper came trotting over with a club in his hand. “So you’re one of these sheenies that won’t work, hey. Well, we’ll see about that.” I was led back to the deputy, who asked what the trouble was and then, before I had a chance to open my yap, said, “Shut up or I’ll bust you in the nose. You’re goin’ back to the brickyard, and this time you’re gonna get a pick and banjo.” I began to dig that they weren’t planning to make me the star boarder around there.

  Back in the brickyard I was assigned to the clay hole. Here came that wheelbarrow again, but this time I had to load it with clay and push it up a plank incline to the brick machine. I never got as far as the planks; every time I tried to pick up the handles and push, I dumped the whole load. The screw got disgusted with me and yelled, “Get the hell over there and help those cons pile up them bricks, but believe me if it was up to me you’d be down in that quarry with a sledgehammer, makin’ little ones out of big ones.” That’s how The Band House got its name, I found out. In the quarry a pick was called a pick and a shovel was a banjo. You should have heard the special arrangements the picks and banjos played, and the riffs the sledgehammers laid down. That was one band I didn’t want to hear nor see. Those instruments didn’t belong to my music school.

  I had to stand on top of the pile, trying to catch four or five bricks at a time when the man below heaved them at me. The first batch caught me right in the breadbasket and bounced square on my toes, and the next shipment almost mashed my fingertips off. I quit then and there, so back to the office I was marched, to stand with my face to the wall for two hours. Next day I was shifted to the pottery yard, where they made me bounce fifty-pound wads of clay on a concrete floor to make them compact. Those soggy chunks kept slipping out of my hands before I got them two inches off the ground. Slap my wrist and call me Butterfingers. It looked like I just wasn’t going to make it on the slave tip—the spirit was willing but the flesh said uh, uh.

  That night my back felt like it had been run through a wringer and massaged with a sledgehammer. Worse yet, it looked like I was in for six solid months of this routine, because my pals kept on not showing up with the ransom money. I wasn’t on any health kick and I didn’t go for the body-building program they had mapped out at all. Who wants to be a corpse with muscles?

  The only way to keep my health, I figured, was to get into the prison hospital, where they had nice clean beds, good chow, and no straw bosses. I began to study over all the pains and diseases known to man, to see which ones I could come down with the fastest. There were a lot of doctors and druggists in my family, and I used to hear a lot of medical jive when I apprenticed in my uncle’s drugstore, so I knew which symptoms went with what sickness.

  Just before lights-out I began to moan like a pup with the stomach-ache, and when I heard the keeper coming I stuck my hand down my throat practically to the elbow and began to throw up. “Oh, my side, my side, it’s killing me,” I groaned. The head keeper came on the run and sure enough I was rushed to the hospital. I had all the right pains in all the right places, so when the doctor looked me over he diagnosed appendicitis. They cleaned my bowels out and put me to bed to wait for an operation in the morning.

  That night the famous race riots of July, 1919, broke out on the South Side. The whole city must have become a slaughterhouse because people were getting shot up all over the place, and all the hospitals in town were turned into emergency stations. Every hour or so they brought in guys who had been used for target practice. When the head doctor made his rounds I told him I was feeling pretty good, so he said maybe they’d hold up my operation and treat just the emergency cases. He was such a smooth talker, he convinced me. The nurse was given orders to keep me cleaned out in case I took a turn for the worse and had to be cut open in a hurry. I decided not to take a turn in any direction; I didn’t want to be no trouble.

  There weren’t enough doctors or nurses to go around, so I got up out of bed to help the emergency patients. One guy was brought in with a double-barrel load of buckshot in his back. We had some job removing all the pieces of lead—his hide looked like the moon’s surface seen through a telescope, it had so many lumps and craters. We took a big paint brush and plastered him with iodine, then yanked out the pieces one by one with some large tweezers and forceps. The poor guy squirmed and wriggled like a jellyfish with the d.t.’s. Another man had had a kind of freak accident: he’d been driving through the South Side, holding onto the wheel with both hands, when a stray bullet passed clean through almost all his fingers.

  There was open warfare on the streets of Chicago that night. The trouble started, they told us, down at Jackson Park beach in the Negro district, when some white guys beat up some colored boys who wanted to go swimming. It must have spread like a prairie fire, because the victims were carted in from all over town. That was one night I was glad not to be out on the streets. One race riot was all my belly could hold.

  For three or four days I lived on fluids, and I got so raving hungry I was ready to chew on the bedclothes. Finally I buzzed Big Buster, a colored boy who worked in the hospital kitchen, and he took pity on me. Buster had been Jack Johnson’s sparring partner and you could see why—he was about six foot five, with a wonderful natu
re, and as good as he was he was just that tough. As soon as he saw the fix I was in, he made up a triple-decker sandwich a couple stories shorter than the Empire State, with chicken and bacon and all the trimmings, and slipped it to me in an ice-pan, under a towel. My jaws were going so fast I almost ate right through the pan.

  An hour later I was wheeled into the operating room. That head doctor must have had an itchy scalpel that day.

  ●

  All I remember, after they gave me a shot in the arm and shaved me, is the smell of burnt rags when I sniffed the ether. When I opened my eyes again the doctor and a gang of nurses were standing around my bed looking like pallbearers. I was hid from the ward by a white screen. Now every time I’d seen that screen before, it meant some poor cat was bowing out for keeps. Gee, I really fooled these people, I thought, I’m not dying and I better tell them. “Take that screen away, Doc,” I said, “because if you’re going to stand around until I stop inhaling and exhaling you sure going to have a long wait.” The doctor smiled and ordered the screen removed.

  One nurse stayed with me, holding a small curved pan shaped like a cucumber near my chin. I looked down and saw big chunks of clotted blood in it. My mouth felt like it had been coated with varnish. “Water,” I said. That nurse was feeling contrary. “No,” she said, “ice.” I sucked on some chipped ice, then I felt sharp pains in my stomach and started to moan. The nurse tried to take my mind off my misery by holding up my appendix and giving me a spiel about it, like a guide taking some sightseers through the Grand Canyon. She showed me a big cherry pit on one side and a couple of other points of interest, but I wasn’t in the mood for a travelogue.