Really the Blues

by Mezz Mezzrow

  “Hey,” Josh said, holding up his hand to stop the tongue-wagging traffic, “what’s a matter, you got trouble, Pasquale?”

  For an answer the little guy grabbed the paper out of somebody’s hand and shoved it right under Josh’s nose. “HOY—FIN DEL MUNDO!” was what the banner headline screamed, or something like that. It didn’t mean a thing to unspic us. “Is all finish!” Pasquale bellowed. “Finito, yessir! It say here, make one hell of big noise tonight, boom, whole chingando world blow up like Fourth July! Is not long, mira—one-two hour more, when clock make twelve, world come to end!”

  Josh and I busted out with the giggles, once the screwy idea sank in. I felt pretty smug because, no matter how unhip I was to all the Blue-Broadway jive, at least I knew the Old Fireball was going to come ballooning up in the East tomorrow morning. When all these Calamity Joes crowded around us to dig what we knew about the good Lord’s timetable, we waved them off, explaining that we weren’t at liberty to give out any inside information. Then we eased out and sat down on the rickety little porch to light up. After all, we had our own troubles.

  We must have been out there for quite a while, just gunning the ground and not cracking our jaws once, getting more and more wrapped up in our dark-brown thoughts. My frame sopped up that muta like a blotter does ink, and I felt the glow creep all through me, but I still couldn’t shake off my drugg feelings and neither could Josh—we were as lonely as a couple of longshoremen in the middle of the Sahara. Then all of a sudden I looked up and, poppa, it was on. I’ll be a motherferyer if that old sky, black as an undertaker’s shroud a minute before, wasn’t all lit up with crazy jitter-bugging shafts of light, all of them different colors, restless and jumpy and quivering like some wet puppies on ice. Looked like Mother Earth was blowing her top for real. The rainbow was on a spree up there, a-hopping and a-skipping from one clump of driftsmoke to another, zooming around like a frantic cat with a tin can tied to its tail. I’d never seen anything like that in my whole life—big dancing ribbons of color that shimmied from horizon to horizon, like somebody had struck a match and set fire to the air way up to the stratosphere. At first I thought the muta was making me see things, but I shook my head till it rattled like a penny-bank and rubbed my eyes till they were ironed flat, and when I looked up again some practical joker was still tossing those neon javelins around Saint Peter’s dommy.

  Daddy, them was fireworks! I began to know how insignificant and puny I was, along with the funking little whirling pingpong ball of an earth I was squatting on. Those great big technicolor tongues kept shooting out, lapping at the sky, twisting and squirming like the arms of an octopus about to snatch up the earth and squeeze it into a spray of dust and tears—and then, goddamn, those words popped into my head again: “HOY—FIN DEL MUNDO!” Hoy, it said. Oi-oi, I said. Lordy, that scrawny little Mexican paper must really have been in the know, after all. That four-page hot-tamale sheet had gone and scooped the A.P., the U.P., and the I.N.S., along with Reuters and Tass and all the other globe-circling know-it-all news-hawks. This was it! Another minute now, just time for another quick drag on my muta, and there’d be one hell of a blowup, Chicago would go avalanching into Lake Michigan and the whole Western Hemisphere would begin boiling and fizzing, the earth would crack open and turn inside-out like a punctured old tennis ball and all of us strutting little fly-specks, Josh and me and Pasquale and all the guitar players, we’d all go tumbling into space head over heels, in a shower of boulders and gravel from the Rocky Mountains, with maybe a little extra debris from Fujiyama. . . .

  “Ooooo-oo!” Josh yelled. I’d been too scared to open my yap and point it out to him, but he had just looked up and got a load of it for himself. “Well, what do you know!” he said, like he was seeing something in a dream. “It’s the Aurora Borealis, Milton, that’s what it is, the Aurora Borealis! You don’t get to see that very often. Isn’t it wonderful?”

  “What, what in the hell is that?” I said, in the closest thing to a human voice I could produce on such short notice.

  “Why, it’s the Northern Lights, you dope,” Josh said. He went on to talk about magnetic fields and the laws of reflection and refraction and a whole lot of electrical jive, because he was a bug on amazing-stories magazines and he was really up on all that Jules Verne stuff. I didn’t pay him no mind after that—I was too busy learning how to breathe again.

  All the weight was off me, finally; I wiped my face dry and then I thought of the Mexicans inside. “Hey,” I said, “let’s go get those guys out here, Josh. They’ve got this idea about the world coming to an end and they’ll really pass out when they see this.” I felt so foolish about having been so shaky, I guess I wanted to see somebody else throw a fit too.

  We banged on the door and slipped inside again. “Pasquale,” I said, “you and your boys come on out pronto, we’re gonna show you something.” They all scraped themselves off the floor and trucked out behind us.

  Brother, you should have seen their maps when they took one peep at those strutting searchlights up above. There was death-and-taxes writ all over their poor frantic mugs. “Chinga!” Pasquale howled, The Reaper doing a Charleston round and round his saucer-eyes. “A la mierda! Oh, Jesu Cristu, madre mia, world is come to end, my paper she is right! Is come, is time now, is all finish!” The whole gang of them dropped to their knees and began crossing themselves as fast as if they were slapping mosquitoes, yelping and yapping like madmen. Then came the pay-off. “Amigos!” Pasquale yelled out, “Hey, vamo’nos, come quick, we get ready!” Into the house they flew, those greyhound peons, and no sooner did they get inside than there was a mad scramble for all the rosaries, holy medals, sombreros and guitars that they could lay their hands on. Then they lit out for the street.

  All of a sudden Pasquale stopped them short with one hysterical yell. “Grefa!” he screamed. “Grefa, grefa!” You should have seen them put on the breaks; it was like a call-to-arms, a rallying cry. Zip! About they faced and back into the house they tore, like a school of meteors on drill.

  To prepare for the long, long journey, every last man began scooping up great handfuls of rolled and loose grefa, cramming it in their kicks, shoving it down inside their raggedy shirts, stuffing it into their big sombreros. They weren’t going to be caught short, no matter how they wound up; not these hombres. Don’t expect any hay in the Blue Broadway, so carry it with you, that’s the play.

  I could have hugged those peons then, one and all, if they would only of stood still long enough—guess I got a soft spot for any guy who’ll go out to meet Judgment Day packed up with a battered old git-box and as much hay as he can carry. The last we saw of them they were flying down a dark alley, screaming bloody murder and bulging like a load of overstuffed potato sacks, their guitars swatting the air and muta coming out of their ears.

  ●

  Things went from bad to worse, and kept right on traveling. I was dead beat, troubled with the shorts; not penny one did I have, and I prowled around town in the only suit I had to my name, a beat-up old tuxedo with holes in the pants where I sat, and my hair grew so long that Louis Armstrong got the impression I was a violin player. I was living in a scrimy moth-eaten dump of a furnished room with my wife and stepson, and if the rent got paid I never knew about it. Bonnie worked a little as a hat designer to scrape up some eating money, but just about then her season wound up, so beg-borrow-or-steal was the play and I was too nervous to steal. The blues had me, Jack. I was melancholy, morbid and miseryful, and I felt bad too. I was really bad off, the forgottenest man in town; my smiles all got born upside down, and when somebody cracked a joke my eyes would wet up with tears. All night long I would sit around with Josh, getting loaded and playing my records (until my landlady wound up with most of them for the back rent). Josh was no vacation for anybody either. He had the dismals too.

  The way it happened, we were sprawled out one night in a friend’s car, carving up the gloom with our fingernails. Mike, the guy who owned this buggy, was a saxo
phone player and a hell of a regular cat, and he was working and sticking, but he was singing the blues too. He was a close pal of Gene Krupa’s, and two weeks had limped by with no word from young Gene.

  “Mike,” I said, “tell me one thing, have you got this car of yours insured?” The answer was yes, and I began to talk very fast, putting down a righteous spiel. “Look, Mike, I got a proposition to make and it’ll be a life-saver for us if you’re game. Josh and me have got to clear out of this town before they start padding up a couple of cells around us. What do you say you fill up your car with gas and oil and let us drive it to New York? Just give us about twenty-four hours, see, then report to the police that your car’s stolen. As soon as we hit The Big Apple we’ll ditch the buggy, and when the New York cops find it your insurance company will have to pick it up and ship it back to you. How about it, Mike, what do you say?” I would have been down on my knees if that car was a little roomier.

  The idea was solid—we scuffled with it from all angles but we couldn’t find any slip-ups. Good old Mike! He agreed right away, without a second’s hesitation, on one condition, that we would send for him if we ever got a job in New York. We said sure. Then, to top it off, he dug into his poke and laid fifty bucks on us for pocket money. If we didn’t kiss him it was only because we were parked in a congested area at the time, and people might not have understood.

  Buster, Jim; this was soft as cotton and twice as fuzzy. We scooted home and got together a few belongings—some records, my horns, a portable record player and a good supply of muta. Then, just so’s I’d be sure to have enough fuel to hold me up, I made a stop on the South Side and bought me twenty capsules of cocaine, to help me keep awake on our no-stop drive to the East. Some of us had taken to sniffing snow not long before; we liked it because it makes your mind very alert, you do some high-jive thinking and talk up a breeze. Many was the night we sniffed and philosophized, philosophized and sniffed, until the early bright was upon us.

  Then, finally, we were all set. So long, warden! Bye-bye Chicago, you old rockpile of a town! Plant you now and dig you later. Off we shot in a cloud of dust, hitting the road like a couple of cons making a get-away.

  That car must have come with an automatic pilot installed in it, because we sure didn’t pay much attention to driving it. When we weren’t inhaling snow we were sipping tea, and most of the time we hardly knew whether we were scraping the big drink in a submarine or clipping the cloud-tips in a plane. We couldn’t wait to get with the gang in New York; we kept telling ourselves how it was going to be when we busted in on them, how we’d all jump with joy and play the records we brought along and smoke up all the grefa. Time bulleted by that way, and all of a sudden we found ourselves way up on some mountain, riding smack in the middle of a cloud. It must have been in Pennsylvania, somewhere in the Alleghenies, near as I could figure out afterwards. Man, the fog was so thick you couldn’t see for looking. Visibility hit zero and kept sinking. We were up near the Head Knock’s territory, messing with his jive that makes it drip, and we were scared. Talk about Bix’s mist—right quick the sky was filled with a mixture of shaving lather, beer suds, woolpack and Pacific surf. In a Mist, hell. If Bix could have dug this mess he would have written a number called In the Pea-Soup.

  I was plenty jumpy and I didn’t want Josh to leave me, but it had to be done. While I stayed glued to the wheel, he got out and walked a foot or two ahead of the bumpers; he’d yell out “Okay!” and I’d shoot ahead another inch or two. My spirit was dropping fast, because even with my messy mathematics I could see that the way we were going, we’d hit the big city somewhere in 1970, and we only had a few more hours before Mike sounded the alarm about his car being stolen. There was little time to go before I’d be a hot musician in a hot car, and I didn’t much like the idea of playing tag with John Law no-way. “Okay!” Josh bellowed. I swam another yard through the moo-juice.

  Then Josh up and disappeared: I squinted and strained, but not one trace of him could I spot up ahead. I got panicky. “Josh!” I shouted. “Hey Josh, where are you! Come back, hear?” I began to get a queer, unreal feeling, like the whole world was dissolving in a dirty gray spray and I was drifting along in the middle of all the swirling muck, ten million miles from nowhere, just me and my little coupé, lost in space. I sure felt lonely. A flagpole sitter on top of Mount Everest would have thought he was surrounded, compared to how I felt just then. I didn’t care if Josh came back with green hair, one eye in the middle of his forehead, and six thumbs on each hand, as long as he came back. “Hey Jo-osh, can you hear me?” No answer. I wished we had gotten more cocaine. My hands were trembling.

  Then I saw something—it was just a wavering vague blob of a shadow at first, rising up out of the fog, and then it began to take on some outline. Whew! Josh was there after all. What a relief! Only there was something funny, it didn’t look just right, it sure as hell was a face but. . . . The face kept getting bigger and bigger, and clearer and clearer, and I kept on liking it less and less. Because the head was too goddamned big, that was the trouble, and the eyes were heavy-lidded and twice the size they should of been, and the lips were thick and loose and sliding over each other while saliva kept dripping down from them, and there were funny pointed ears that stood straight up, and a neck as big around as a tree-trunk. Oh Lord, I thought, we’re in some other world where they’ve gone and changed Josh into something like a cow. Oh Lord, I whispered, make Josh stop being a cow and I promise, I’ll never sniff any more cocaine or smoke any more grefa, word of honor. . . .

  My prayer was answered; all of a sudden Josh was back in his own frame, standing beside the car and leaning over towards me. “Guess what,” he groaned. “We’re caught in the middle of a herd of goddamned cows, so help me.” And that’s exactly how it was. Pretty soon I saw another maniac cow-face blinking stupidly at me, then another, then a whole gang of them, all around me. It was a herd of cows, all right, and the farmer leading them couldn’t do a thing about it—he tried to clear a way for us but those dumb animals kept falling back into formation and blocking the road again, so it took us two hours just to get over the summit of that mountain, moving one foot at a time. Finally the cows turned off into a pasture, and we drove on until the fog was out of our face. I never did tell Josh about my fear that he had turned into a heifer; I just giggled a little too frantically every time I heard his voice, and let it go at that. For a while, though, I really thought seriously about laying off the dope. I never wanted to see Josh gunning me with that vacant idiot stare again, chewing his cud.

  Well, we made it finally. Mike was supposed to give us a twenty-four-hour head start, and it had taken us thirty hours for the trip, so the Chicago police must have flashed a lookout about the stolen car hours ago. I was plenty jittery by the time we shot through the Holland Tunnel, and so was Josh. The minute we hit Canal Street in good old Manhattan, Apple of apples, we parked the car, gathered up our belongings, and started to do a Houdini out of the neighborhood. But we’d only gone a couple of blocks when Josh stopped short and let out a yell. “Hey!” he said. “This is terrible, we went and left two full cans of muta in the car!” I was all for leaving the stuff—for all we knew there was a squad of cops swarming all over the car by this time, and I wanted to be in another precinct entirely. I needed a brush with the law just then like a toad needs sidepockets. But try knocking some sense into that thick skull of Josh’s. He couldn’t stand to lose his supply. Back he went, while I waited with the luggage, and in a few minutes he showed up again, both pockets of his jacket loaded with the tin cans.

  We rushed into a phone booth and called the Cumberland Hotel, at 54th and Broadway, where we knew the whole gang was flopping. I could hardly sit still while I waited for the switchboard to connect me. Finally there was a voice at the other end, Eddie Condon’s voice, big as life! “Where are you Roll!” he shouted. It was sweet music to my ears, to hear that old nickname again. I could hear a loud gasp when I told him nonchalantly that I was down o
n Canal Street and Josh was with me. I guess he must have fainted.

  There was a silence for a minute, and then Tesch’s voice came rolling over the wires. He didn’t waste any time on formalities. “Hey Milton,” he said, “did you bring any muta?” Then I knew I was home again, back among my own people. Solid. Oh, good deal.

  Josh and I shot down the street as fast as our shaky legs would carry us, headed for a subway and the old gang again. I rubbernecked around some as we streaked along the avenue: there were all the skyscrapers, just like you read about them, and the crowds bustling around, and the home-stretch tension and the faster-faster excitement. It was like seeing a fairy-tale come true. We had really made it, at last. Nothing could hold us back now. King Jazz was moving in, heading up his whole army of horn-tooters and skin-beaters, and I was right in there with them, ready to cover all spots.

  There was The Big Apple dangling right in front of my nose, shiny red and round and juicy. I surer than hell was going to get me a taste of it. New York, look out! Here we is and we’s gwine took over. Gonna grab you by the knockers and never let go, hear? Goin’ to rock them bright lights till Broadway does the mess-around.

  Made it, man. Oo-wee!

  1. See Appendix I for further discussion.

  2. See Appendix I.

  Book Three: 1928–1935

  THE BIG APPLE

  Praise Allah! Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle,

  Praise Allah! Wiggle and dance. . . .

  Everybody’s doin’ fine

  All you folks that ain’t in line