Really the Blues

by Mezz Mezzrow

  I was right in the middle of a meal but I ate no more, even though we had our famous dish that night, milkfed spring chicken. It seemed that Ann had heard about one of the boys being mixed up with an entertainer in Burnham and didn’t know it was Frank Hitchcock, not Al, so she was doing a little snooping on her own. I decided to separate myself from that place right quick.

  I called Burnham and told Frank to get another band, and he almost climbed into the telephone making me all kinds of propositions, because he didn’t trust anybody else with Millie. I was a safe thirty miles away, so I told him I was leaving inside of a hour and I didn’t want to get mixed up in any kind of swindle that the boss wouldn’t be happy about. The only tense I ever wanted from Al Capone when he mentioned The Professor was the present tense.

  Bonnie got her things together and piled in, and we cut out for Chicago. That was the last I saw of Burnham and the Roadside Home. A couple of years later Frank Hitchcock’s body was found in a ditch on one of those lonely roads. Some musician married Millie Smith, and she got TB.

  6. THEM FIRST KICKS ARE A KILLER

  I GUESS I MUST BE THE SOCIABLE TYPE—MY LIST OF ASSOCIATES was beginning to look like a Barbary Coast police blotter on Saturday night. On my next job, besides meeting Leon “Bix” Beiderbecke, “the young man with a horn,” I found myself running with a literary ex-pug, a pistol-packing rabbi, and a peewee jockey whose onliest riding crop was a stick of marihuana.

  Monkey Pollack was a frantic cat, small, tough and game as they make them. I knew him from way back, because we’d both been roustabout kids on the Northwest Side. For a long time he made out good as a welterweight prizefighter, which explained the mashed-up nose that detoured all over his map and those sagging Ubangi chops. Monkey could really mess with the King’s English, and later on he went to work as a reporter on some East Chicago newspaper. He used to hang around the Arrowhead Inn when I was playing there, and for a pencil-pusher he sure could flash plenty of Uncle Sam’s I.O.U.’s. That cat had enough gold to pay the whole Newspaper Guild’s liquor bill for a year.

  One night Monkey came over to me at the Arrowhead and buzzed in his happy-go-lucky way, “Milton, how’d you like to come and work for me?” He puffed on the big cigar that he always had stuck in his face and posed back like a big butter-and-egg man. “I’m a bigtime cabaret owner now—I took over a big joint in Indiana Harbor that I’m gonna run as a high-class club, and your band would cinch it in that town. We can’t miss, we got everything. Boy, what a sweet set-up, I even got a two-gun rabbi for a bartender.”

  After we cut out from the Roadside Home I got to thinking about that Yiddish Buffalo Bill and the idea tickled me so much that I looked Monkey up. In the late Summer of 1924 I got the band together and we headed for the Martinique Inn at Indiana Harbor, righteous and ready.

  Monkey wasn’t jiving about that bartender. He wasn’t exactly a rabbi, yet and still Mac was an honest-to-God Jewish root-toot-tooting cowboy straight from Peckerville, Texas, pardner, and itchy in the trigger finger. He was one of the best marksmen that ever came out of the Panhandle, and he had a gang of medals and cups for his sharpshooting, plus a Dead-Eye Dick control on the trigger and nerves like high-tension coiled springs. For our afternoon sport we’d go out in the back yard and watch him pick dimes off beer bottles with a six-shooter at fifty paces, whooping as though Indians were biting the dust by the gross. Sometimes he would twirl his lasso and rope the whole bunch of us in with one flick of his wrist, yelling “Yippee-i-yip!” like it was round-up time on the range. One of the funniest things I ever heard was Mac spieling in Yiddish, because he spoke it with a thick Southern drawl, piling on more “you-all’s” than a Geechee senator. “Was macht ir, you-all?” he’d say with his nasal twang, and he had us rolling on the floor. We called him “Ragtime Cowboy Jew” and Monkey nicknamed him “Yiddle.” Mac was always sitting out in the yard, sunning himself and twirling his guns lazily at the hip, so I made up a little doggerel song about him that went, “Don’t fiddle with the Yiddle, or he’ll riddle you in the middle.”

  Mac was about medium height, lean and wiry, one of those Arrow-Collar-ad guys with slick black hair and sharp features. Indiana Harbor was a drinking town, and he must have shoved enough rot-gut across the bar to fill Lake Michigan, but he never touched the juice himself. Maybe he figured he had to keep his wits about him because things wound up in a brawl almost every night at the Martinique. One guy leaning on the bar would make a friendly remark about his neighbor’s tie or the style of his haircut, and in nothing flat each one was cussing up a breeze about the other’s mother until they began to rumble. Mac would conk the ugly customers on the top and carry them outside to become acquainted with the good earth, all without getting one hair on his Romeo head out of line. When he was tending bar he always wore a ten-gallon cowboy hat and high-heeled boots, tight-legged pants and a white collar stiff as a plaster-of-Paris cast. A pair of pearl-handled blue-steel pistols always hung from his waist as though they grew there. Mac had about six revolvers to his name, all won in shooting contests, plus two Winchester repeating rifles and a shotgun. The guy was a walking Wild West show.

  Indiana Harbor was small but it jumped like mad. It was a steel town, not far from Gary, Indiana, and a lot of the Poles who worked in the mills used to come down to the Martinique to wet their tonsils or maybe dissolve them altogether. Those hunkies were lush crazy and could they drink. They would stick around all night until six in the morning, bending their elbows like they were doing setting-up exercises, then go straight to work. Some of them practically lived in the place, carrying on all their personal business from the bar. I once found a letter on the barroom floor that one of the millhands had been trying to write, and this is what it said: “Dear Mary, I wuz be riting on you for 2 weeks you wuz anser me never, are you mad or wot.” The note was signed “Stanislaus Kawajzak.” Love, you funny thing.

  ●

  It was that flashy, sawed-off runt of a jockey named Patrick who made a viper out of me after Leon Rappolo failed. Back in the Arrowhead Inn, where I first met Patrick, he told me he was going to New Orleans and would be back one day with some marihuana, real golden-leaf. He asked me did I want some of the stuff, and coming up tough I said sure, bring me some, I’d like to try it. When Patrick marched into the Martinique one night I began to look for the nearest exit, but it was too late. “Hi ya, boy,” he said with a grin bigger than he was hisself, “let’s you and me go to the can, I got something for you.” That men’s room might have been a death-house, the way I kept curving away from it, but this muta-mad Tom Thumb latched on to me like a ball-and-chain and steered me straight inside.

  As soon as we were alone he pulled out a gang of cigarettes and handed them to me. They were as fat as ordinary cigarettes but were rolled in brown wheatstraw paper. We both lit up and I got halfway through mine, hoping they would break the news to mother gently, before he stopped me. “Hey,” he said, “take it easy, kid. You want to knock yourself out?”

  I didn’t feel a thing and I told him so. “Do you know one thing?” he said. “You ain’t even smokin’ it right. You got to hold that muggle so that it barely touches your lips, see, then draw in air around it. Say tfff, tfff, only breathe in when you say it. Then don’t blow it out right away, you got to give the stuff a chance.” He had a tricky look in his eye that I didn’t go for at all. The last time I saw that kind of look it was on a district attorney’s mug, and it caused me a lot of inconvenience.

  After I finished the weed I went back to the bandstand. Everything seemed normal and I began to play as usual. I passed a stick of gauge around for the other boys to smoke, and we started a set.

  The first thing I noticed was that I began to hear my saxophone as though it was inside my head, but I couldn’t hear much of the band in back of me, although I knew they were there. All the other instruments sounded like they were way off in the distance; I got the same sensation you’d get if you stuffed your ears with cotton and talked out loud.
Then I began to feel the vibrations of the reed much more pronounced against my lip, and my head buzzed like a loudspeaker. I found I was slurring much better and putting just the right feeling into my phrases—I was really coming on. All the notes came easing out of my horn like they’d already been made up, greased and stuffed into the bell, so all I had to do was blow a little and send them on their way, one right after the other, never missing, never behind time, all without an ounce of effort. The phrases seemed to have more continuity to them and I was sticking to the theme without ever going tangent. I felt I could go on playing for years without running out of ideas and energy. There wasn’t any struggle; it was all made-to-order and suddenly there wasn’t a sour note or a discord in the world that could bother me. I began to feel very happy and sure of myself. With my loaded horn I could take all the fist-swinging, evil things in the world and bring them together in perfect harmony, spreading peace and joy and relaxation to all the keyed-up and punchy people everywhere. I began to preach my millenniums on my horn, leading all the sinners on to glory.

  The other guys in the band were giggling and making cracks, but I couldn’t talk with my mouthpiece between my lips, so I closed my eyes and drifted out to the audience with my music. The people were going crazy over the subtle changes in our playing; they couldn’t dig what was happening but some kind of electricity was crackling in the air and it made them all glow and jump. Every so often I opened my eyes and found myself looking straight into a girl’s face right in front of the bandstand, swinging there like a pendulum. She was an attractive, rose-complexioned chick, with wind-blown honey-colored hair, and her flushed face was all twisted up with glee. That convulsed face of hers stirred up big waves of laughter in my stomach, waves that kept breaking loose and spreading up to my head, shaking my whole frame. I had to close my eyes fast to keep from exploding with the joy.

  It’s a funny thing about marihuana—when you first begin smoking it you see things in a wonderful soothing, easygoing new light. All of a sudden the world is stripped of its dirty gray shrouds and becomes one big bellyful of giggles, a spherical laugh, bathed in brilliant, sparkling colors that hit you like a heatwave. Nothing leaves you cold any more; there’s a humorous tickle and great meaning in the least little thing, the twitch of somebody’s little finger or the click of a beer glass. All your pores open like funnels, your nerve-ends stretch their mouths wide, hungry and thirsty for new sights and sounds and sensations; and every sensation, when it comes, is the most exciting one you’ve ever had. You can’t get enough of anything—you want to gobble up the whole goddamned universe just for an appetizer. Them first kicks are a killer, Jim.

  Suppose you’re the critical and analytical type, always ripping things to pieces, tearing the covers off and being disgusted by what you find under the sheet. Well, under the influence of muta you don’t lose your surgical touch exactly, but you don’t come up evil and grimy about it. You still see what you saw before but in a different, more tolerant way, through rose-colored glasses, and things that would have irritated you before just tickle you. Everything is good for a laugh; the wrinkles get ironed out of your face and you forget what a frown is, you just want to hold on to your belly and roar till the tears come. Some women especially, instead of being nasty and mean just go off bellowing until hysteria comes on. All the larceny kind of dissolves out of them—they relax and grin from ear to ear, and get right on the ground floor with you. Maybe no power on earth can work out a lasting armistice in that eternal battle of the sexes, but muggles are the one thing I know that can even bring about an overnight order to “Cease firing.”

  Tea puts a musician in a real masterly sphere, and that’s why so many jazzmen have used it. You look down on the other members of the band like an old mother hen surveying her brood of chicks; if one of them hits a sour note or comes up with a bad modulation, you just smile tolerantly and figure, oh well, he’ll learn, it’ll be better next time, give the guy a chance. Pretty soon you find yourself helping him out, trying to put him on the right track. The most terrific thing is this, that all the while you’re playing, really getting off, your own accompaniment keeps flashing through your head, just like you were a one-man band. You hear the basic tones of the theme and keep up your pattern of improvisation without ever getting tangled up, giving out with a uniform sequence all the way. Nothing can mess you up. You hear everything at once and you hear it right. When you get that feeling of power and sureness, you’re in a solid groove.

  You know how jittery, got-to-be-moving people in the city always get up in the subway train two minutes before they arrive at the station? Their nerves are on edge; they’re watching the clock, thinking about schedules, full of that high-powered mile-a-minute jive. Well, when you’ve picked up on some gauge that clock just stretches its arms, yawns, and dozes off. The whole world slows down and gets drowsy. You wait until the train stops dead and the doors slide open, then you get up and stroll out in slow motion, like a sleepwalker with a long night ahead of him and no appointments to keep. You’ve got all the time in the world. What’s the rush, buddy? Take-it-easy, that’s the play, it’s bound to sweeten it all the way.

  I kept on blowing, with my eyes glued shut, and then a strange thing happened. All of a sudden somebody was screaming in a choked, high-pitched voice, like she was being strangled, “Stop it, you’re killing me! Stop! I can’t stand it!” When I opened my eyes it seemed like all the people on the dance floor were melted down into one solid, mesmerized mass; it was an overstuffed sardine-can of an audience, packed in an olive-oil trance. The people were all pasted together, looking up at the band with hypnotic eyes and swaying—at first I saw just a lot of shining eyes bobbing lazily on top of a rolling sea of flesh. But off to one side there was discord, breaking the spell. An entertainer, one of the girls who did a couple of vocals and specialized in a suggestive dance routine, was having a ball all to herself. She had cut loose from her partner and was throwing herself around like a snake with the hives. The rhythm really had this queen; her eyes almost jumped out of their sockets and the cords in her neck stood out stiff and hard like ropes. What she was doing with the rest of her anatomy isn’t discussed in mixed company.

  “Don’t do that!” she yelled. “Don’t do that to me!” When she wasn’t shouting her head off she just moaned way down in her sound-box, like an owl gargling.

  Then with one flying leap she sailed up on the bandstand, pulled her dress up to her neck, and began to dance. I don’t know if dance is the right word for what she did—she didn’t move her feet hardly at all, although she moved practically everything else. She went through her whole routine, bumps and grinds and shakes and breaks, making up new twists as she went along, and I mean twists. A bandstand was sure the wrong place to do what she was trying to do that night. All the time she kept screaming, “Cut it out! It’s murder!” but her body wasn’t saying no.

  It was a frantic scene, like a nightmare walking, and it got wilder because all the excitement made us come on like gangbusters to accompany this palsy-bug routine. Patrick and his gang of vipers were getting their kicks—the gauge they picked up on was really in there, and it had them treetop tall, mellow as a cello. Monkey Pollack stood in the back, moving a little less than a petrified tree, only his big lips shaking like meatballs with the chills, and the Ragtime Cowboy Jew was staring through the clouds of smoke as though he was watching a coyote do a toe-dance. That girl must have been powered with Diesel engines, the way she kept on going. The sweat was rolling down her screwed-up face like her pores were faucets, leaving streaks of mascara in the thick rouge. She would have made a scarecrow do a nip-up and a flip.

  The tension kept puffing up like an overstuffed balloon, and finally it broke. There was the sharp crack of pistol shots ringing through the sweat and strain. Fear clamped down over the sea of faces like a mask, and the swaying suddenly stopped.

  It was only Mac, our gunplayful cowboy bartender. Whenever he got worked up he would whip out his pistols and f
ire at the ceiling, catching the breaks in our music. The excitement that night was too much for him and to ease his nerves he was taking potshots at the electric bulbs, with a slap-happy grin on his kisser. Every time he pulled the trigger another Mazda crossed the Great Divide—he may have been punchy but his trigger finger didn’t know about it.

  The girl collapsed then, as though somebody had yanked the backbone right out of her body. She fell to the floor like a hunk of putty and lay in a heap, quivering and making those funny noises way down in her throat. They carried her upstairs and put her to bed, and I guess she woke up about six weeks later. Music sure hath charms, all right, but what it does to the savage breast isn’t always according to the books.

  The bandstand was only a foot high but when I went to step down it took me a year to find the floor, it seemed so far away. I was sailing through the clouds, flapping my free-wheeling wings, and leaving the stand was like stepping off into space. Twelve months later my foot struck solid ground with a jolt, but the other one stayed up there on those lovely soft clouds, and I almost fell flat on my face. There was a roar of laughter from Patrick’s table and I began to feel self-conscious and nauseous at the same time. I flew to the men’s room and got there just in time. Patrick came in and started to laugh at me.

  “What’s the matter, kid?” he said. “You not feeling so good?” At that moment I was up in a plane, soaring around the sky, with a buzz-saw in my head. Up and around we went, saying nuts to Newton and all his fancy laws of gravitation, but suddenly we went into a nosedive and I came down to earth, sock. Ouch. My head went spattering off in more directions than a hand grenade. Patrick put a cold towel to my temples and I snapped out of it. After sitting down for a while I was all right.

  When I went back to the stand I still heard all my music amplified, as though my ear was built right into the horn. The evening rolled away before I knew it. When the entertainers sang I accompanied them on the piano, and from the way they kept glancing up at me I could tell they felt the harmonies I was inventing behind them without any effort at all. The notes kept sliding out of my horn like bubbles in seltzer water. My control over the vibrations of my tones was perfect, and I got a terrific lift from the richness of the music, the bigness of it. The notes eased out like lava running down a mountain, slow and sure and steaming. It was good.