Really the Blues
Page 6
I blew my top for seven days—I couldn’t eat or pass water or move my bowels in all that time. Then the doc showed up with a tube and a wire and wanted to catheterize me. “Nothing doing, Doc,” I said. “You moved my insides around like you were playing checkers with them, and threw out all my spare parts, and I didn’t kick, but this is sure one part of me I’d like to keep just about the way it is, so lay off, Doc.” A man has got to protect his interests some of the time. He gave up and went away.
Then one of the head nurses came to my bed and said, “Milton, I think I know how to relieve you of those gas pains, but you mustn’t breathe a word about it even if it works because it’s against doctor’s orders. Are you game?” I told her I was ready to try anything. Right away she mixed up a mess of olive oil, glycerine, soap and turpentine (I don’t remember whether or not she threw in the kitchen sink) and gave me the whole works for an enema. When it was over I was so relieved that I cried like a baby, while she held my hand and stroked my hair.
During a talk with the doctor I found out what had caused my internal bleeding, and he told me how close I came to paying Saint Peter a visit. That sandwich had caked up in my stomach like a block of cement and almost killed me; it looked like the chicken in that triple-decker wanted to roost in my stomach for the rest of her days.
On the ninth day my stitches were pulled out and I began to feel halfway alive again, thanks to that cure-’em-or-kill-’em enematic cocktail. The nurse asked me if I could ever look a chicken in the face again, and I told her I felt about that sandwich the way the Spanish Queen in that poem felt about other forms of pleasure:
It’s a hell of a life, said the Queen of Spain,
Three minutes’ pleasure and nine months’ pain,
Two weeks’ rest and you’re back at it again,
It’s a hell of a life, said the Queen of Spain.
My parents came to see me in the hospital and told me they didn’t have the money to get me out and my rich uncles wouldn’t come through because they thought some discipline would do me good. Those uncles of mine sure saved a pile of dough feeding me all that discipline at the state’s expense. Mom bawled her head off when she saw me stretched out so thin and weak in that bed. She must have got a funny impression of the prison system in the Commonwealth of Illinois, because every time she came to see me in jail I was flat on my back, looking like I was passing out of the picture. “Mom,” I said, whispering in her ear, “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea because I really am in great shape. I just pretended to be sick so I could lay around in the hospital and stuff myself on all the fine food they got here.” She felt a lot better when she left, but this time I didn’t get my sentence reduced for being a Boy Scout. They were a hard lot of oscars in the Bridewell.
Every afternoon the nurses ganged up around my bed and begged me to sing the blues for them. I was the life of the party in that ward, and always got some special dessert for my singing. One number they were all crazy about was Hesitation Blues, which I rendered with real feeling:
Oh, ashes to ashes and dust to dust,
If the whisky don’t get you then the women must.
Oh tell me how long, how long must I wait,
Oh can I get it now, or must I hesitate.
You’re playin’ in my orchard, now don’t you see,
If you don’t like my peaches stop shakin’ my tree.
Oh tell me how long, etc.
I really meant those words. The girls hung around my bed all day long, giving me sponge-baths and fixing my linen until my tree was shook so much, all the peaches were ready to drop. Nobody ever tramped around so much in my orchard before.
Everything was rolling along until I got some news that brought me down—they were figuring on shipping me back to the regular prison in a few days. It looked like I was getting too goddamn healthy.
Curtains. I suspected it would be tough making them believe I had appendicitis twice in the same place. My mind began to work fast. Then I remembered that in the rear of the hospital there was a TB ward. Now TB is a disease on which I am a specialist, because I’d once been in a sanatorium on account of pleurisy, and I still had some rales that would come in handy. Overnight I developed a hacking cough and a pain in my left lung. I could already taste those fat steaks and the milk, butter, eggs and fresh fruit those cats feasted on in the TB ward. I coughed harder and harder, with my mouth watering.
One of the colored porters, who used to sing the blues with me, was a pal of mine. “Hey boy, come over here,” I said to him. “I want you to do something for me. Tomorrow I’ll give you a paper sputum cup and I want you to go back in the TB ward and slip it to the sickest cat in there and tell him to cough up a lunger. Bring it back to me and be sure it’s full, hear?” He flashed me a big broad grin that meant: Good as did.
Next afternoon when the interne made his rounds I hacked and coughed and told him about the sticking pain in my left lung, the one that was affected when I went to the sanatorium. He ordered a sputum box and urine bottle for tests. When I woke up next morning about six, I saw a box on my table and when I picked it up it was so full I was scared of it. My friend the porter told me one of the TB boys had obliged me by coughing up some sputum a few minutes before, the morning being the best time to really get results. The porter had picked the sickest guy in the ward, some poor cat who had it so bad he kicked the bucket a few days later.
It didn’t take long before the whole staff of doctors was lined up around my bed, pounding on my chest like a flock of woodpeckers. The slide showed up positive and I had been pronounced a TB patient. Brickyard, my back you’ll never break—I got me a date with a two-inch steak.
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A guy really began to live in the Bridewell when he had TB. I strutted around the hospital like Poppa De-Da-Da, then was transferred to the west cell house back in the prison, a brand-new modern building. Here the cells, instead of being built in block form without windows, were arranged all around the cell house, making up the walls. Each cell was bright and clean, with a window, a modern wash basin and a honest-to-God toilet bowl. It was like the Waldorf-Astoria compared to the louse-trap I’d been in first. In this place you’d never wake up to find yourself in a clinch with Mr. Chinch. We had clean sheets and hospital beds with springs, real bounce-springs, and decent chow, and no work. On the top tier a dozen cells were set aside for us TB sufferers. They gave us our own dishes and silverware and fed us right in our cells. Maybe they weren’t so hard in the Bridewell, after all. You just had to show them you were dying and they got real kind.
On the tier below ours, just across from me, was a big colored boy named Red. He was a straw boss in the brickyard, and came in every night after work all covered with yellow dust. With that round, pleasant face of his, and his clean-shaven skull, and his barrel chest so big it made him topheavy, he looked like a guy you wanted to have on your side. Every night he’d come plodding back singing some chain-gang blues, the kind of wail the colored country folks call river music. He was dogtired but so happy to see another day gone that he’d chant,
Short time, poppa, short time for you and I,
Short time, Jew kid, another one’s gone by.
The “Jew kid” was me, and I didn’t mind it at all, the way he said it. “Hey Jew kid,” he’d call out to me, “how you feel today?” and it always made me happy because he really wanted to know.
It wasn’t long before we had a quartet going in the block, entertaining the inmates and keepers ’most every night. The way it happened, Red started to sing ’Way Down Upon the Swanee River one night, and a gang of us joined in. We kept on singing and the bad voices just dropped out one by one, without anybody ever telling them to, till at the end we had a perfect quartet. I got my biggest thrill when Red took off on Go Down, Moses and some other spirituals, and the other colored boys chimed in. I couldn’t hold myself back, even though I didn’t know the words or the music—those plaintive laments got me so bad I had to lift up my voice and speak my p
iece too. I fitted in with such ease, slurring to the different harmonies like they were part of me, that they all crowed with glee afterwards and Red called out, “Jew kid’s really in there too.” That was a wonderful feeling.
During the last part of my sentence they put me on the front gate of the jail, to help out the keeper there. I didn’t do much except stand around and lend a hand sliding the big gates open once in a while. Sometimes, when I pushed open the gate to the women’s prison, the chicks would rush to the window and look out at me longingly, like I was the last man left in the world. We got real friendly after a while. They were so lonely and I was so bored that we began smuggling red-hot notes back and forth. One of the girls would write, “If I could only explain how good you look to me out there. I love you.” Or another one would say, “Honey, I don’t know your name but I sure like your style. We could have some fun together. Where can I find you when we get loose from here?” I had those jailbird blues too, and I wrote back things like, “Baby, I sure could use you tonight, why don’t you drop around?” Other times, when the girls were sneaking a look, I’d feel in a serenading mood, so I’d wrap up my comb in a piece of toilet paper and blow on it like a kazoo, playing Ain’t Gonna Give Nobody None of My Jelly Roll. But it was only a kind of joke, I sure didn’t mean what it said in the song. I wasn’t that stir-happy.
My six months rolled by and I was turned loose. I walked through the gates, took one last look at the Bridge of Sighs that led over the canal to The Band House, and hopped a trolley for home. After being cooped up in a world of killjoy grays for so long, it made my head swim to see all the colors in the trolley ads and on the civilian clothes of the passengers. The sudden stops and starts, the loud clanging of the motorman’s bell, the bright sunlight and the cars rushing by, all made me dizzy. I figured I’d better shoot for The Corner fast and get my bearings.
I was curious about what was waiting for me, and a little unsure of myself. There was a gang of things I had to get with again.
What next?
4. QUIT FOOLIN’ WITH THAT COMB
I DON’T WANT TO SOUND BRAGGADOCIOUS, BUT FOR AWHILE I was doing so good I almost hired Wells-Fargo to haul my gold around. Back on The Corner I became manager of the poolroom, and with the chuck-luck and Indian-dice games at the cigar counter I was coining at least two C-notes a week. Some nights I’d try my luck in the crap game and wind up with a grand or more in my kick. Small-fry politicians began dropping around and handing me big fat cigars, and one time a rookie cop called me mister.
Now that I was in the money and had done two bits in the pen, I got more respect from the gang. Almost every night that I could, I’d get them together and ride them up to the South Side, instead of tagging along with them to the whorehouses. I began to collar that all the evil I ever found came from ounce-brain white men who hated the Negroes and me both, while most all the good things in life came to me from the race. Whenever I needed something so bad my life depended on it, it was always the race that came through for me. A song or a smile, a chicken sandwich or a sputum cup—all I had to do was look like I needed it and it came to me like Aladdin rubbing his magic lamp. I always felt good when I was around those people.
We started to go to the Pekin Inn a lot, a joint at 28th and State where the sporting crowd and the money guys hung out. Two detectives had been killed in there, and the place had been closed up a couple of times, so the gang was kind of touchy about going there at first, especially after the race riot. Feeling was still running high after that undeclared war, and the South Side wasn’t exactly a picnic-ground for whites.
Who should turn up as doorman at the Pekin one night but Big Buster, my boy who slipped me the sandwich in the Bridewell. He stood outside, towering a head or two over the crowd, smiling in a friendly way and keeping one eye peeled for the cops and ugly customers. Everything was in order for blocks around when Buster was on the scene; even the cab drivers, who were shooting and ramming each other all over town in a taxi war (the one Bow Gistensohn got killed in), got very polite and began tipping their caps when they drove up in front of Buster. The gang lost all their fears about the Pekin when they dug how friendly I was with that solid he-man, who took no stuff from nobody and whose heart was as big as his muscles. He really laid it on State Street.
At the Pekin they had Tony Jackson, a New Orleans musician, one of the greatest blues piano players that ever pounded a joybox. Tony could play the blues out of this world, yet and still he had a sweet and lyrical way of doing the pop tunes requested by white squares who only knew Sophie Tucker and the get-hot mob. Tony had a natural musical sense I’ve hardly ever seen equalled, and he wrote a number called Pretty Little Baby that really knocked me out.
A favorite piece of Tony’s, a kind of bawdyhouse blues that the crowd could never get enough of, went like this:
Keep a-knockin’ but you can’t come in,
I hear you knockin’ but you can’t come in,
I got an all-night trick agin,
So keep a-knockin’ but you can’t come in.
Keep a-knockin’ but you can’t come in,
I’m busy grindin’ so you can’t come in,
If you love me you’ll come back agin,
Or come back tomorrow at half-past-ten.
That number is a wonderful example of what happened to the blues when they moved out of the gallion, the work-gang and the levee and rode the rods into big towns like New Orleans, Charleston, Memphis and Chi. The Negroes who hit these cities found themselves on the bottom of the pile, on an even level with practically nobody but whores and sporting people, who had less prejudice, fake morals and intellectual stench about them. Besides, it often happened that a man who migrated into town couldn’t eat unless his woman made money off of other men. But these people didn’t get nasty about it; anyway they were half a step out of the gallion, and they were philosophical, and many a guy kept on loving his woman and camping outside her door until she could let him in, and they made up a lot of simple, plain-speaking songs that even had a chuckle or two in them about the trouble they saw.
Songs like Tony Jackson’s show the Negro’s real artistry with his prose, and the clean way he looks at sex, while all the white songs that ever came out of whorehouses don’t have anything but a vulgar slant and an obscene idiom. These blues from the South taught me one thing: You take the weight off a good man a little and his song will start jumping with joy. You can’t get a good man really down. Why, some of those work-gang blues and half-humorous whorehouse songs, once they got up North, even wound up as tender love ballads.
Joe “King” Oliver was killing them after hours at the Pekin with the same band that played with him at the Dreamland, the New Orleans Creole Jazz Band. Joe himself handled the trumpet, and with him he had Johnny Dodds on the clarinet; Honoré Dutrey, trombone; Ed Garland, bass; Minor Hall, drums; and on the piano, Lil Hardin (later Lil Armstrong, the wife of Louis Armstrong).
This band sounded entirely different from Lawrence Dewey’s outfit. Joe set straight and simple patterns on his horn that were like the spice added to a dish by a master chef to make its flavor just right. When Joe played, the man improvising out in front had freedom to move around, yet there was a foundation under him as solid and steady as the Rock of Gibraltar. That’s why Johnny Dodds’ clarinet sounded so wonderful with Joe behind him. Whether Joe played open horn or with a mute, the effect was the same.
Nobody could improve on Joe’s way of coming in for his own solos just before the chorus started, taking off from a solid riff with the ease and sureness of a graceful diver sailing out from a spring-board. Dewey’s band played Scott Joplin’s arrangements, so their music was more organized and according to the book, with less real collective improvisation; but Joe’s men always picked tunes and harmonies right out of their heads, making it up all the way. It was Joe’s free style that inspired Clarence Williams to write Royal Garden Blues.
I ran into Clarence again at the Pekin, and when I told him where I�
�d been during the riot he took me over to his music store to show me something. On the wall outside there was a big grease-spot where his head always rested when he sunned himself, and all over it was a gang of bullet holes. “I was down in New Orleans when all that stuff happened,” Clarence told me. “Looked like the Lord must have been with me and sent me away, Milton, ’cause I’d a sure been sittin’ here and you know the answer.”
About five o’clock one morning Joe Oliver finished up at the Pekin and took me out to eat. He steered me around to a bakery, where he bought three big loaves of hot bread, then over to a Chinese chop-suey joint. All he ordered was a big pot of tea for a nickel, and then he got fidgety and began to look all around the place. The waiters all seemed to be ducking him. Finally Joe cornered the boss himself and said, “Man, what’s your story, bring on that sugar.”
I saw right away why all the sugar went into hiding when Joe showed up in that place. As soon as the sugar bowl arrived he tore a whole loaf of hot bread in half, poured most of the sugar into it, and ate it like a sandwich, sipping the tea to wash it down. He would eat two or three loaves at a time, with as many bowls of sugar. “Man,” he told me, “this is what I call real eatin’. Moms always used to make sugar sandwiches for me when I was a kid.” Clarence Williams must have seen Joe fussing with the Chinaman one night when all the sugar was hid on him, and got the idea for Sugar Blues.
I got to be part of the fixtures at the Pekin and a lot of other South Side spots—Elite Number One, Elite Number Two, the Dreamland, Entertainers’ Café, and the Lorraine Gardens, where Jimmy Noone played clarinet with Freddie Keppard, Jimmy Bertrand, and Tony Jackson. Making friends with Jimmy Noone, and Sidney Bechet and Joe Oliver and Clarence Williams, I began to feel like I owned the South Side. When I stood around outside the Pekin, beating up my chops with Big Buster, and he put his arm around my shoulder in a friendly way, I almost busted the buttons off my vest, my chest swole up so much. Any time I breezed down the street, cats would flash me friendly grins and hands would wave at me from all sides, and I felt like I was king of the tribe. I was really living then.