Really the Blues

by Mezz Mezzrow

  Then the tea hit him—all of a sudden he jumped up from his chair and began to squeal like a monkey with his tail cut off. It was really something to see, this bad trigger man running over to the window, tearing at his collar and yelling, “Oh my God, I’m dyin’, I’m dyin’, call the doctor! For Christ’s sake, get me a doctor!” I felt like asking him didn’t he want some more of that farina but my P.A. system blew a tube.

  We knew that Frankie’s gargling and gagging wasn’t exactly a death-rattle. He was just having a stomach attack from over-eating or constipation, and the most he needed was some bicarbonate of soda and a physic, not a croaker. You see, when you get high off of gauge it dries up the saliva in your mouth and your stomach fills up with gas and presses against your ticker, till for the first time in your life you feel every beat your heart is making without looking for it. It’s the strangest sensation you ever had since you were old enough to know better, like somebody was using your eardrums for tomtoms. At first you hear your heart beat fast, then it begins to come on slow with loud accentuated beats that confuse you so much you can’t hear them at all. That’s when the fun begins. It’s like there’s an alarm clock buried under your ribs, ticking off the seconds and reminding you that the shroud-tailor has designs on you. Then it stops. The next thing you think of is, Lord, I must be dying, I can’t hear my heart beat any more. It’s really on then.

  It’s funny how the toughest gorilla gets tame and whimpers like a young pup when he begins to hear his own pump riffing. A guy who’s got a bad conscience likes to keep away from timepieces. Trigger men don’t want to think that everybody goes when the wagon comes and they have to wind up six feet under the sod too, just like all the rest of us, when the clock runs down. The more guys they wash away, the more they get to feeling like they’re immortal or something. Never remind a gangster of his pulse, unless you want to lose yours fast.

  Frankie’s hard crust mightn’t ever have been punctured by the hop, but it sure turned to lard fast after those two sticks of tea got a hold of him. Muta takes all the goddamn hardness and evil out of you, cuts down the tush-hog bullying side of your personality and makes you think straight, with your head instead of your fists; it digs the truth out and dangles it right in front of your nose. Everything comes out in the wash starched and clean. A viper doesn’t like lies—he’s on the up-and-up and makes you get on the ground floor with him. You call your shots all the way in viperland. Frankie probably began to see the faces of all the guys he plugged full of daylight and figured it was Judgment Day instead of an ordinary bilious attack. At first he was squinch-eyed but now his eyes blew up like soap-bubbles and panic danced all over his face.

  That prize gunman was one sick rooster that day. He may have been hip to his hop, but the muta made him fly right for a hot minute.

  ●

  A gang of gay sporting people used to come up to Luigi’s and pretty soon I found myself hanging out with them. They were mostly gamblers and big spenders, flashy good-natured Jews, dressed in loud checked suits and open-necked sports shirts. At first I took them to be bigtime businessmen and we had some fine times together, eating in private restaurants run by Mrs. Come-And-Get-It and getting our bones cracked in the Russian baths. One of them was a happy-go-lucky guy called Sam “Trombanick” (that means “bum” in Russian), who owned The Oriental Rest on Division Street, where they broiled rib steaks over a charcoal fire and served them on wooden platters.

  One Sunday morning, after a workout at the Russian boiler room where they steamed us down to a low gravy, I tagged along with this gang to somebody’s apartment in the Charlotte Hotel. In the large living room most of these guys climbed out of their jackets, got a stranglehold on their coronas with their molars, and settled down to a game of knock rummy, with me sitting in. But three of them beat it into the next room without a word and shut the door. Pretty soon a funny smell took charge of the room, and one of the fellows at the table got a wet bath towel, rolled it up, and squeezed it against the crack at the bottom of the bedroom door. I couldn’t dig this mess but I kept my mouth shut and tried to play hip. Nobody else seemed to be paying any mind and I figured I’d be out of line if I cracked my jaw. I kept sniffing that odor and I began to feel queer and out of place, kind of like a Hottentot who wanders into the Union League Club looking for a nickel’s worth of betel nuts.

  A little later two of the fellows who did the disappearing act came back and joined the game, while a couple more left the table and went into the bedroom. When the door opened I could see a wet sheet hanging on the inside of it, and my skull began to play a quiz game. “What the hell’s going on in there?” I asked.

  “Send him in here and let him find out for himself,” somebody yelled from the bedroom. I began to wish I didn’t have such a gift of gab, but now I had to keep up my front. I got up and strolled into the next room, not knowing whether to shake or grin and doing a little of both.

  That was one walk I sure wish I had never taken. It took me five seconds to get into that room and, later on, damn near five years to crawl all the way out again, on my hands and knees.

  The smell in that room was enough to knock you out. It was sort of sweet, with a punch in it, heavy as an insomniac’s eyelids, so thick and solid it was like a brick wall built all around you. It made my smeller tingle, got me scared and excited me too, put me on edge—it promised a rare jam-up kick, some once-in-a-life-time thrill. The three guys were stretched out crossways on the bed, one of them facing the other two, and between them was a round brass tray full of funny little gadgets, with a small lamp burning right in the center of it. There was a bowl of fruit laying on the bed too. It looked like a scene straight out of the Arabian Nights, with the thieves and princes disguised in pinchback sports jackets. I was looking for the carpet to flap and take off any minute now and sail out of the window, bed and all, with the four of us sprawled out on it.

  I had introduced one of these borscht-guzzling oriental potentates to muta, and he spoke up. “Come over here,” he said, “and lay down with your head on my chest and I’ll let you smoke something that’ll make you throw your muggles in the ashcan. There ain’t nothin’ to them weeds, kid, try this and you’ll put them up for keeps. This is something you’re gonna enjoy.”

  “Jesus, what is it?” I asked, and my heart began to make sounds like an outboard motor running out of gas. “Lay down and try it—I wouldn’t give you anything that could hurt you, kid. We do this every two weeks or so. This is called pleasure smoking, the rich man’s kind, it’s hop and it’s good for what ails you.” They all came on with kyaw-kyaw over this brilliant dialogue.

  Grefa was kid-stuff to me, but opium meant dope and I was really scared of it. Hell, I thought, Detroit is really a hoppy town—people must order their opium along with their groceries. That bed might have been a cold marble slab, the way I eased down on it until the opium layout was right square in my chops. The guy opposite us was cooking the stuff. In one hand he held the long ebony pipe (a fancy one, sporting a big diamond on the stem), with a bowl stuck on it where he did his cooking.

  “So you’re a musician, hey?” he said. “All you horn-tooters smoke them weeds, don’t you? What does it do, make you get hot when you play? You know it’s a funny thing, come to think of it, this very same pipe was made by one of your musician guys only he quit playing and now he makes flutes and clarinets. Looks like a flute, don’t it? But wait’ll you hear the song this little pill sings with it. You play the flute too?” he asked me, signifying to the others, and they all fell out at this funny gag.

  In this comedian’s right hand was the yen hok, a wire about as long and thin as a hatpin, with finer wire wound around the handle. He would dip the point of the yen hok into a jar of dark-brown gooey stuff that looked like tar, then hold a drop over the flame until it began to swell up like a tiny balloon, adding more to it now and then. Over and over he kept hearing this small hunk of hop, rolling it on the thumb of his left hand until it was compact and looked like
a right little wad of brown cotton. Then he held the pipe bowl close to the top of his special lamp and stuck the pill on the edge of the bowl, drawing the yen hok round and round to stretch the opium, which was now golden-brown in color. . . . (I’ll skip the rest of the details because right now I’m not supposed to be writing an instruction manual on how to become a dope fiend in three easy lessons.)

  Several times the master of ceremonies stuck the pill close to my nose and told me to smell it. Poppa, you never laid your sniffer on anything so fine in all your life. It made me feel like I wanted to waller all in it, chew on it, plaster it all over my fine body and then lick it off inch by inch. I just took a deep breath, sighed, and whispered “Mmmmmmm, that sure smells good, Jack.” For a second I was really for it.

  “This is what you call shyin’, kid,” the cook said. “This cooks all the poison out of the pill.” Finally the gummy pill was given another going-over until it was shaped like a cone, then it was stuck into a small eye in the center of the bowl. When the pipe was passed to the man behind me he drew on it—the stuff began to dance and curl a little around the edges, making a sizzling sound, and then it ran into the bowl and disappeared. The chef fixed up another pill and passed it to the next man. After a couple of centuries my turn came around. The chairman of the meeting began to pass me the pipe, but then he drew it back and laid it down on the tray.

  “This your first pill, kid?” he asked. I told him yes, wondering if maybe they were giving me a last-minute reprieve. “I’ll be damned if I’ll give it to him,” he said, and called out for one of the fellows in the next room. “Hey Jake,” he yelled, “come on and give this Johnny-Come-Lately his first pill. You know I got a habit.” I found out later a man that’s hooked on hop will never lay the first pill on a beginner, because he doesn’t want it on his mind in case you become a hophead. This is a strong superstition among the “legion of the condemned.” Dope fiends are full of nice little rules and regulations like that; Emily Post could write a book just on hophead etiquette.

  Jake came in, glad to lend a helping hand, and passed me the pipe. “Keep puffin’ in short jerks,” he said, “and swallow the smoke at the same time.” I felt like I couldn’t even swallow my own tonsil-juice without gagging then, but I tried to follow instructions the best I could, wondering how many of my old pals would miss me after I was gone.

  Goddamn if I didn’t live through it. Man, I even liked it. Before I finished one pill a heatwave heaved up out of my stomach and spread all through me, right down to my toes, the most intense and pleasant sensation I have ever felt in all my life. At first it tipped easy-like through my main line, then it surged and galloped down all my sidestreets; and every atom in my body began to shimmy in delight. That fiery little pill was toe-dancing up and down every single strand of my nervous system, plucking each one till it hummed a merry song, lighting up a million bulbs in my body that I never knew were there—I didn’t even know there were any sockets for them. I glowed all over, like the sun was planted in my breadbasket. Man, I was sent, and I didn’t want to come back.

  “How’d you like that, kid?” the cook asked. “Better than your muggles?”

  “I’ll say it is,” I said, beaming at him. “Gee, you feel it way down to your crunchers. Tea don’t do you that way.” They all began to laugh and that put me on a complex towards the whole situation, but in a minute I was pulling on my second pill. This time my stomach began to growl a little—not in protest, not kicking up any fuss about it, but like an old hounddog having his flea-bites scratched and moaning low in pleasure. After a while, when my belly rhumba stopped, I laid back with not a care or a worry in this world. I was a skinful of contentment, a bundle of happiness in a blue serge suit. I found myself watching the cook dreamily, as though he had some magic formula. I didn’t ever want to lose that warmth and tingling ease in my body. My blood had turned to hot rum-and-butter, my skull was crammed full of sunbeams.

  When I smoked about five pills they told me I had had enough and should eat some of the fruit in the bowl. “Eat an orange, Milton,” the cook said. “Fruit and hop go together, and it’s good for you.” I don’t think an orange ever tasted any sweeter to me; it was like some nectar the angels juice up on in the driftsmoke neighborhood, not anything that ever came off a lousy old tree.

  We finally got up and went back to the rummy game. My eyelids seemed to have weights on them and the lights sort of dazzled me at first; I felt self-conscious because I knew all these guys were gunning me and grinning. Pretty soon I began to feel sick at the stomach and tore out for the bathroom. In a couple of minutes it was all over and I had that grand and glorious feeling again, all sunny and mellow, with ultra-violet rays playing hide-and-seek all through my frame. The gang told me to lay down for a while, and when I stretched out on the couch I felt as satisfied as a cat under a hot stove. It was too good to be true. Muta never came on like that. But then I got to thinking that this stuff was the real thing, and if I had to keep on using it I would be a dope fiend, and that kind of brought me down.

  I didn’t work that night—I sent a substitute in my place and drove straight for home, to stash my frame between a deuce of lily-whites. All night long I slept sounder than an Egyptian mummy. When I finally got back to work I felt a little shaky and hazy, and took everything easy; the stuff didn’t affect my playing much except that I felt sluggish and went around in a sort of halfway stupor. This doesn’t compare with muggles when it comes to playing, I told myself, and I made up my mind not to mess with it again. That’s one resolution I sure wish I had kept.

  Years later, when I was living in New York, I finally found out who all my hophead friends were. One day I saw Sam Trombanick’s mug staring at me from the front page of a Manhattan paper—he was one of the leaders of the Purple Gang and he had just been bumped off. That Purple Gang must have included in its membership the whole goddamned population of Detroit. After that, one by one, I saw the kissers of most all those good-natured sporty guys in the papers, including the yen hok expert and Jake, who gave me my initiation to hop—they all got theirs sooner or later. One day even Frankie Riccardi’s pan jumped out at me. He was Louie the Wop’s brother; until he made his exit he was head torpedo for the mob.

  Oh, about Jane—her wind-up was sad. I never got to see her very often after I started at Luigi’s because I brought my wife and her kid (by a former marriage) out to Detroit. But once when I ran into her she told me she was doing real good, working in a restaurant and living in a small apartment of her own. She came up with a bankbook that had a balance of close to a thousand bucks, better than I could show myself. Tips must be good, I thought.

  Tips, hell—taps would have been more like it. One evening I was walking down Bobian Street, igging the girls in the windows. The chopstick arrangement they were beating out on the glass panes didn’t attract my attention none. But then I heard something that made me put on the brakes and look up. It was a tricky syncopated beat that doesn’t usually come from a whorehouse window—bip-bop, bip-bop, bip-a-di-dee, bip-bam—that steady solid Baby Dodds break, straight from the South Side. Suddenly it stopped. Sitting there in the window was sweet innocent little Jane, togged in a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t kimono, looking first like one thing and then another. She held those chopsticks in her grabbers with her arms raised in front of her, frozen stiff, looking like a mechanical doll waiting to be wound up. I didn’t say anything. I looked up, and she looked back at me, and that was all that happened. Then I hunched my shoulders and walked away. That was the last I saw of Jane—a little later my wife got homesick for Chicago and we headed back to the big city. I kept thinking to myself, O.K. Jane, all right, I’m not mad, it’s your life and you got to live it—only why did you have to beat on the window that particular way? Why did she have to use Baby Dodds that way? She didn’t have to do that. It kept worrying me.

  It’s a lot of things you got to skip and forget in life, is what I keep telling myself. You got to be built like Master Pangloss,
Jack. By the way, I still believe that little girl’s story—every word of it, all the way back to Des Moines, bouncing baby, traveling salesman, and all.

  8. GOT THE HEEBIES, GOT THE JEEBIES

  IN 1926, ST. VITUS WAS DOING A MARATHON BUCK-AND-WING through the country, accompanied by the stutter of sub-machine guns. From sundown to sunup life was one romping, rollicking bath in a 22-karat gold tub filled with spiked milk-and-honey. All day long, to accommodate those who needed a pick-me-up, the corner druggist dished out quart bottles of short-order salvation from under the counter, disguised with hair-tonic labels. The cotton-mouthed hangover became America’s occupational disease; hair-of-the-dog was adopted as the national morning-after beverage. Rotgut and remorse trickled through Uncle Sammy’s veins. . . .

  There was a revolution simmering in Chicago, led by a gang of pink-cheeked high-school kids. These rebels in plus-fours, huddled on a bandstand instead of a soap-box, passed out riffs instead of handbills, but the effect was the same. Their jazz was only a musical version of the hard-cutting broadsides that two foxy studs named Mencken and Nathan were beginning to shoot at Joe Public in the pages of The American Mercury—a collectively improvised nose-thumbing at all pillars of all communities, one big syncopated Bronx cheer for the righteous squares everywhere. Jazz was the only language they could find to preach their fire-eating message.

  These upstart small-fries were known as the Austin High Gang, and gumption was their middle name. It was on Chicago’s West Side that they started hatching their plots, way out in Austin, a well-to-do suburb where all the days were Sabbaths, a sleepy-time neighborhood big as a yawn and just about as lively, loaded with shade-trees and clipped lawns and a groggy-eyed population that never came out of its coma except to turn over. In all their scheming these kids aimed to run out of town the sloppy, insipid, yes-we-have-no-bananas music of the day, which seemed to echo the knocked-out spirit of their sleepwalking neighbors. They wanted to blast every highminded citizen clear out of his easy chair with their yarddog growls and gully-low howls.