by Mezz Mezzrow
Burnham’s real business center was made up of these pleasure houses—this was one place where business and pleasure were buddies—and it was a block from the Arrowhead Inn, where we played. Business jumped all the time at the Inn from the traffic going and coming. You could always dig whether a cat was on his way to or coming from a workout at one of the houses when he dropped in at the Arrowhead for a bracer. If he was all hopped up, cracking wise, acting big buying drinks for the house, he was on his way. But if he came in with his haunches dragging the ground and his chin in his lap, looking to drink up all the whisky on the bar, you could gamble he’d been there and gone. Sugar plums became salt mackerel fast in that town.
The girls leaving the eight P.M. and four A.M. shifts would stop off at the cabaret for some sport, and they were good-natured and sociable, even after eight hours of grinding at the mill. I used to walk from table to table, playing request numbers on my horn while one of the entertainers sang. I never in my life saw a flock of chicks who could turn on the weeps so fast when we played their favorite tear-jerkers—songs like Ace in the Hole, My Gal Sal, and Melancholy Baby. One girl always asked for Victor Herbert’s Kiss Me Again and began to rain in the face like a professional mourner every time she heard it. All these chicks went to Weep City when they heard the words to The Curse of an Aching Heart:
You made me what I am today,
I hope you’re satisfied,
You dragged and dragged me down
Until my soul within me died.
You shattered each and every dream,
You fooled me from the start.
And though you’re not true
May God bless you,
That’s the curse of an aching heart.
That was the Number One song on their Fit Parade.
Al Capone’s syndicate owned a piece of the Arrowhead, as well as the whole town, including the suburbs, but there was a part owner living on the premises with his wife, a tall, husky well-built guy named Frank Hitchcock who looked like ready money. We were one big happy family at first, the musicians and girl entertainers and the Hitchcocks, all living upstairs in separate rooms and small apartments.
The piano player in the band was an old maid about forty-five who knew every song that had been published in the last hundred years and could play in any key you named, each one cornier than the other. Fuzzy Greenfield, a tall gawky kid with heavy horn-rimmed glasses, handled the plectrum banjo, a five-stringed instrument with a long neck. Fuzzy was a studious guy, never hit a bad chord, and always had himself a good time. Ray Eisel, the drummer, was a thin and wiry fly cat who really beat his tubs. He was raised in the colored district on the South Side, where drums could talk.
Ray and Fuzzy were salty with our unhip no-playing piano player, because she broke time on the piano so bad that the strings yelled whoa to the hammers. The three of us got along fine. The first time we began to jawblock we found out that we all were from the jazz school, and that made us friends right away. When I dragged out my music library and showed them the copies of Royal Garden that I got from Clarence Williams in person, my stock became preferred to them. We began to rehearse like mad, and walked around so chesty we would have made Miss Peacock pull a fade-out.
One afternoon I went into Chicago to pick up some music at the Melrose Brothers’ Publishing Company. Somebody was playing the piano in one of the rehearsal rooms in a way that made me know he was colored, and when I busted in I came face to face with Jellyroll Morton, the composer of many a jazz classic. Nobody ever played just like him—he was lyrical and didn’t have as much of a beat as some guys, but his delicate and flowery touch was Jelly’s trademark. We got to be pals fast, and he gave me the orchestrations for his famous tunes, King Porter Stomp and Wolverine. When I brought that music back to the Inn the boys jumped on it like mice on cheese.
If you could catch a couple of cats that just met each other talking about certain musicians they know or humming a riff or two to each other, before you could call a preacher they’d be practically married. Don’t forget that in those days our music was called “nigger music” and “whorehouse music” and “nice people” turned their noses up at it. Jazz musicians were looked down on by the so-called respectable citizens as though they were toads that crawled out from under a rock, bent on doing evil. We could roam around a town for weeks without digging another human who even knew what we were talking about.
When I told Ray Eisel I knew those two great colored drummers, Tubby Hall and Baby Dodds, he jumped for joy because they had inspired him to play the drums and were his ideals. We got so close to each other that we made the Siamese twins look like they were standing on opposite sides of the Grand Canyon. I really went for Ray’s press roll on the drums; he was the first fay boy I ever heard who mastered this vital foundation of jazz music. After a while Ray and I even had our suits made of the same material and cut in the same style by the same tailor, to show we belonged to the same hip school.
Our little band shaped up fine, especially after we outed that nickelodeon piano player and got Eddie Long, a kid who had a very heavy touch but a wonderful ear and a gift for transposing like Old Man Rudiments himself. We sopped up a lot of learning at Capone’s University of Gutbucket Arts. The entertainers mooched from table to table singing fifteen or twenty choruses each, most of them howling in ungodly keys, and none of them ever had any written music so we backed them up by ear and it was collective improvisation all night long.
Pretty soon I was made leader of the band and put in charge of the entertainers, doing the hiring and firing. I guess I took my work to heart because inside of a month they were calling me “The Professor” around that University, and meant it.
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One day along about noon Frank Hitchcock yanked us all out of our pads and took us downstairs. There was a lot of excitement around the place and we were called out to the back yard, where we saw some men putting up a large circus tent. I figured some carnival was coming to town and we were going to play for it.
Carnival hell. When we went inside the tent we saw barrels of beer being lined up in long rows, and a large icebox being built off to one side. I didn’t dig this set-up at all until a man named Jack, one of Capone’s lieutenants, came along. He gave us a brace and bit, a box of sticks like the butcher uses to peg meat with, and some galvanized pails. Then he yelled, “One of you guys drill holes in these barrel plugs and let three-quarters of a pail of beer run out of each barrel. Then another guy plugs up each hole with these here wooden sticks, to stop the beer from running out.”
It was just about that time that Capone bought up the Blackhawk Brewery in Chicago, but he couldn’t brew anything stronger than near beer there because the Feds had his water on and it was boiling. So these barrels of near beer were trucked out to the Arrowhead to be spiked.
After we let out the right amount from a barrel, another guy came along with a large pail that had a pump and gauge attached to it. In this pail was a concoction of ginger ale and alcohol, just enough to equal the amount of beer that was drawn off. This mixture was pumped into each barrel, plus thirty pounds of air, and you had a barrel of real suds. I think they got as high as seventy-five bucks a barrel for this spiked stuff.
Jack showed up then for the next maneuver. That cat was stronger than Samson after a raw steak dinner. He would roll a barrel over so the plug was facing up, then break off the meat stick and place a new plug over the old one. With one mighty swing of a big wooden sledgehammer he would drive the new plug all the way in, forcing the old one clean into the barrel. In all the time I understudied at this spiking routine, I never saw Jack take a second swing at a plug.
I began to get better acquainted with the rest of the mob, including Mr. Shot himself. Al always showed up surrounded by a gang of trigger men—they sat in a corner, very gay and noisy but gunning the whole situation out of the corners of their eyes. Al’s big round face had a broad grin plastered on it and he was always good-natured, which didn’t annoy m
e at all.
Al’s youngest brother Mitzi, then about eighteen years old and studying to be a Romeo, used to hang around the place whenever he had time. His job was to follow the beer trucks out to Burnham, riding in a small Ford coupé with Little Dewey, another protection man, to make sure the load wasn’t hijacked. Their cute little Ford tagged along behind those big trucks like a harmless pup, nobody ever guessing that it was loaded up with tommy guns. Mitzi was handsome and streamlined, and he really broke it up with one of the entertainers, Lillian, a sandy-haired, pleasant girl who was more sedate than the other chicks, more the clean-cut small-town type. Mitzi went all the way for her, and big brother Al didn’t like it at all.
Al pitched a boogie-woogie about Mitzi’s romance, and that’s how I got my nickname of The Professor. “Fire that girl,” he told me. “Get her out of here. If I hear any more stuff about her and Mitzi you’re booked to go too.”
I should have had my head examined—all of a sudden I got interested in talking it over. “I won’t fire her,” I said. “She’s one of the best entertainers we got around here. Why don’t you keep Mitzi out of here, if that’s the way you feel about it?” I was so hot under the collar, I forgot that you need something to wrap a collar around.
“She can’t sing anyway,” Al said.
“Can’t sing,” I yelled. “Why, you couldn’t even tell good whisky if you smelled it and that’s your racket, so how do you figure to tell me about music.”
All of a sudden I remembered that I was talking to Mr. Fifty Caliber himself, and lockjaw came on. I began to wonder how many bounces my head was going to take crossing the street.
Five or six of Al’s henchmen were standing around and they began to laugh. I guess I managed to put up a kind of feeble grin myself, while I waited for their typewriters to begin pounding out their farewell notes to me. Might as well go out smiling, I figured. Happy as the day is long. Die laughing.
Al busted out howling himself. “Listen to the Pro-fes-sor!” he said. “Haw! haw! The kid’s got plenty guts.” But then he got serious again, and so did I—it was funny how my moods began to run right after his. “But if I ever catch Mitzi fooling around here it won’t be good for the both of you, see.” I saw. I could even see the goose-pimples on my goosepimples.
That’s how I got my nickname, without so much as a bruise. But for a long time after that I wasn’t so good at conversation—you never saw a Professor with less gift of gab.
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Romance began to romp all over the Inn. Frank Hitchcock called me outside one day and swore me to secrecy, then handed me the keys to his big McFarland sedan and told me to run over to Hammond and pick up Millie Smith, the best-looking and singinest gal we had in our crew. On the way back Millie asked me to help her out of the mess she had gotten into. Mrs. Hitchcock was hip to her romance with Frank and that eternal triangle was about to be squared. “I want to quit, Milton,” she said, “but Frank is so much in love with me that he threatens to hunt me down to the end of the world if I leave Burnham. Oh, Milton, what am I going to do?”
Millie was a fine-looking girl with sweet ways about her, but I couldn’t see how I would fit into this picture. If I didn’t play ball with Frank he would be frantic, yet Mrs. Hitchcock was all right with me because she always looked out for us. She kept the books for the syndicate, checked the cash registers, and gave the musicians a break when she figured up our tabs for drinks. Things were messy.
One night a waiter winked me off the bandstand and said the boss wanted to see me in the back yard. I found that big slob sitting out there on a beer barrel, bawling like a two-year-old. “Millie and me have been fussing,” he said, “and she’s sitting on a log out there in the woods and won’t come back. You got to do something, you just got to.” It seemed like the syndicate was beginning to get hot about his affair with Millie—Mrs. Hitchcock was threatening to leave and Al’s boys were trying everything in the books to break it up. They needed Mrs. Hitchcock because they knew they could trust her bookkeeping. A bigtime pimp was sent in to Millie and tried to lean his affection on her; he kept her sitting up after work until high noon, fruiting her, and the plan worked. Frank got wind of this heavy romancing and had a brawl with Millie out in the woods. Seemed as if Scarface was in there when it came to psychology too.
Frank had a proposition to make me. “Look, Milton,” he said, “I’ve got a big bankroll socked away in a vault in Chicago, and I want you to come to Mexico with Millie and me. I got plenty of connections down there. All we got to do is take the McFarland and drive down and go in the dope-smuggling racket. In a few months we’ll clean up a million bucks and then we’ll quit and go to Europe and lead a wonderful life. It’s no use, Milton, I love Millie so much I can’t help myself.”
I began to think that sure was no lie and told him I would think it over, just to quiet him down. He asked me to take the car and go over to the woods to get Millie.
Right here is where we pulled a boner. I didn’t know at the time that I was being followed, but my leaving the bandstand out of a clear sky and taking Frank’s car called for a tail. The mob figured that Frank and I were cooking up something, and before the night was over I was called to the bar and put on the carpet by Johnny Patten, the Boy Mayor of Burnham.
Johnny Patten was known from coast to coast in the underworld. He was a sharp cat, about twenty-five; a fashion plate, always jolly and full of stuff, with a real Irish wit. Johnny took me outside and came right to the point. “Kid,” he said, “I like you and I don’t want to see you get in wrong, so stay away from Frank and Millie. We’ll take care of that.” The pat on the back he gave me was friendly enough, but it could have been a shillelagh just as well. Johnny could get away with murder if he wanted to, and I mean murder. There never was a town sewed up as tight as Burnham was under the syndicate. The chief of police was our bartender, and all the waiters were aldermen, so we never had any trouble with the law. The only time the board of aldermen ever had a meeting was when enough of the waiters ganged up around the bar to talk about the laines they clipped, and the police chief was too busy mixing drinks to bust himself under the prohibition act.
Things began to happen fast. First Mrs. Hitchcock packed up and took a powder, and there was hell to pay. There was nobody to run the Inn and keep the books—that is, nobody without sticky fingers. After a conference of the syndicate I was called in by Johnny Patten again. “Kid, can you keep books?” he asked. “Not much, just for the joint and like that.” I’d studied a little bookkeeping in school, and I’d done that kind of work for Mottel Rovech, so I told him yes.
Johnny threw up his hands and exclaimed, “Well, you guys, our worries are over—The Professor’s gonna keep school now. Now look kid, all we want around here is a 60-40 break. Don’t say a word if you catch these mugs stealing; so long as we get sixty cents on the dollar we’ll call it even.” He showed me how to operate the cash registers and slipped me the combination to the safe.
Things went along good for a while, and then I was summoned before the council again. “We’ve bought the Roadside Home on the road to Joliet,” Johnny told me, “and we want to know if you will take your band and some of your entertainers out there and run the place for us? We’re putting the joint in Millie Smith’s name because that’s the only way to get her out of here and get Mrs. Hitchcock back. We know you’ll give us a break and make yourself some nice dough too. How about it?”
It was O.K. with me and I told him so—I was getting fed up with all the plotting and buzzing around the Arrowhead anyhow. “You won’t have any headaches,” Johnny assured me. “Little Dewey will be out with the beer every day and you can get together with him and leave us know how things are going.” Just like that I was in business.
The Roadside Home was a pretty sort of restaurant with a semicircular driveway in front, a nice flower garden, and sharp landscaping. It was built on the style of old English architecture, three stories high, with gabled roofs all around, real fancy. There was
a large screened-in porch out in front, and the whole place looked more like somebody’s mansion than a cabaret. The joint had been closed down for a year by the government, on account of a murder being committed there and some booze being found on the premises.
I loaded up the band, four of the entertainers, and Bonnie, the checkroom girl, and off we went. The reason I took Bonnie along was because I liked her; in fact, we got married later. She was a dark-haired, attractive kid, always full of spirit and very congenial, and she had ambitions to be an entertainer. Whenever I looked over at her from the bandstand during a number, she’d put her thumb in her mouth and blow her cheeks out, making fun of me, and it always gave me a laugh. I taught her the words to Nobody’s Sweetheart and Lots O’ Mamma, plus a little Charleston step like I’d seen on the South Side, and she was a performer. I had to play Svengali to her Trilby all the time—she couldn’t follow when anybody else played the piano, so I backed her up when she sang.
One night two new entertainers showed up at the Roadside, and I took them upstairs to their rooms. One of them had a gang of beautiful evening gowns but couldn’t sing a lick, and I wondered why the agent sent her out. Her name was Ann Brown. I didn’t know anything was up until Little Dewey spotted her one night and almost crawled into a beer barrel. “What’s she doin’ here?” he yelled.
“Hell, that’s one of the new entertainers,” I said. “Don’t tell me she’s one of your loves.” By this time I was ready to believe everybody was romancing everybody else. I’d already caught Frank Hitchcock up in Millie’s room in the Roadside, which didn’t help my nervous indigestion any.
“One of my loves!” Little Dewey exploded. “Christ, that’s the big boss’s wife.” The boss, naturally, was Capone himself.