Really the Blues

by Mezz Mezzrow

  The night wound up with them accusing me of trying to pass for white, because they couldn’t believe that any white man could be as hip to the jive as I was! They told me they’d been suspecting me all along, as they watched me in the pit at Minsky’s. That twist gave Columbus double kicks. He kept on saying, “Man, why don’t you come clean, don’t nobody fault you for makin’ out you’s ofaginzy,” talking as though he was on the girls’ side and knew I was really colored. To this day those girls probably believe that I was passing. “If you ain’t one of us,” they argued, “how in hell could you play that horn the way you do?” How I wished they were right.

  ●

  Minsky’s was sure getting me down. The star strip-teaser would come out on the runway, unwrap her enamel, and then begin grinding the ozone while the hysterical short-histe audience shrieked “More! More! More!” I never could see what the hell they wanted more for. She was well-built and voluptuous, all right, but she didn’t do a thing with her body that an elephant couldn’t do. Those simps just had to see a free-wheeling pelvis throw a couple of bumps and grinds their way, and their tongues were hanging out. They got their kicks from watching a headless and soulless sex-machine, or a reasonable facsimile of one, jogging for a while—it never occurred to them that this chick couldn’t dance step one and didn’t have an ounce of talent in her body. If it was violent and brutal and set their nerves jumping, it was art to them.

  I couldn’t help thinking about how different it was in Harlem. When you passed over 110th Street it was like zooming off to another planet where they didn’t build any brick walls between wanting and doing, the urge and the act. People up there, even the kids, led full and functioning lives, no matter how heavy a ball of oppression they carried around their necks, so they weren’t walking skinfuls of repressions and they didn’t mope around having sex flashes every hour on the hour. They never had to sneak like emotional pickpockets into shows and movie-houses to get their erotic kicks second-hand.

  I felt like I wanted to take all the “clean living” people, Brother Sanctimonious and Sister Full-Bosom and their whole congregation of paralytics, down to Minsky’s to get a good look at those rows of heated-up faces and frustrated maniac grins and bulging eyeballs every time the strip-teaser heaved her middle. Then let them tell me that their kind of “morality” produced a race of healthy human beings. People of “culture” couldn’t live loose and carefree like my Harlem friends? Sure, you got culture, plenty of it. A culture where all your dreams dangle from a G-string. Take a good look around Minsky’s. In our “culture,” between the urge and the act come the footlights, or anyhow a movie projector. It’s culture, maybe, a culture of masturbators. . . . Up in Harlem a dancer had to have real talent, make wonderful graceful steps with her feet and do delicate things with her body, really express something, before anybody applauded. Tongues didn’t hang out at the sight of a torso with the palsy.

  I gave the Minskys my notice. That was the last ofay job I ever held in my life, the last time I was ever connected with anything white and awkward, ugly and soul-starved. In the Fall of 1929 my soul moved across 110th Street, straight into Harlem, with me toddling along right behind it. The two of us have been living there ever since. I’ve never again been inside a burlesque house.

  Some people think that I run out on my own kind, scampered away like a scared rabbit. Sometimes I’m told that I was a turncoat, a renegade to my “own” flesh-and-blood. Well, like that T. S. Eliot says,

  In a world of fugitives

  The person taking the opposite direction

  Will appear to run away.

  That’s the stuff you got to watch.

  12. TELL A GREEN MAN SOMETHING

  WAY BACK THERE THE MUSIC GRABBED ME BY THE STRINGPOST and yanked me off The Corner on Chicago’s Northwest Side. Now the same music parked me right smack on another corner, this time in the heart of Harlem where 131st Street breezes across Seventh Avenue.

  This wasn’t just one more of them busy street crossings, with a poolroom for a hangout. Uh, uh. This corner was a whole atlas by itself—the crossroads of the universe, meeting-place of the hipsters’ fraternal order. In this block-long beehive life was close-packed and teeming, a-bubble with novelty, and in its many crannies you could find all the many kicks and capers your heart yenned after. Back on Chicago’s street-corner haunts you tangled with gamblers and racketeers and poolroom sharks, and all day long your tongue wagged its way from money to horses to women and back again. There your outlook was plenty hemmed-in, squeezed down to one dimension. But on The Corner in Harlem you stood with your jaws swinging wide open while all there is to this crazy world, the whole frantic works, strutted by. Life was full and jumping in that fantastic place, covered all spots and invaded all dimensions, including the fourth.

  Anything you had a yen for—that’s no lie. You couldn’t see for looking, there were so many things to dig on The Stroll between 131st and 132nd. Dramas and tragedies in your face all the live-long day, till there were more lumps in your throat than you’d find in drugstore mashed potatoes. Happiness and ease too, in such big doses that fine-and-mellow was the play day in and day out. All the emotions, all the time, simmering in one big bubbling cauldron that covered a city block. Most all the great musicians, performers and entertainers the race produced used to congregate on The Corner, drawn back there by a powerful magnet after traveling all over the world. This place was the central clearing-house for a global grapevine—you could stand under the Tree of Hope without budging from one year to the next and know what was going down all through the South, or in Hollywood and Chicago, or Paris and London and Berlin and Stockholm. Let any of our boys get in a scrape with the pecks down in Memphis or Little Rock, or let them panic the English in Albert Hall or send the Danes in the Tivalis Koncertsal, and the news buzzed back to us on Seventh Avenue quicker than right now.

  When good old Buck, of Buck and Bubbles, was driving along down South in his big Cadillac and dared to challenge the supremacy of the white race by passing a couple of white trash in a dinky old rattletrap Ford, he spent the night in jail for his crime and we knew all about it almost before his cell door closed. When Fats Waller was touring the South and kept having his big Lincoln sedan wrecked, with sand poured into the crankcase and the tires slashed, he made his booking agent rent him a whole private Pullman car before he’d budge, and we heard about it before Fats boarded his special train. When a little white girl was out strolling with her mother along a Paris boulevard, and then spotted Louis Armstrong and ran up and threw her arms around him yelling “M’sieur Armstrong, M’sieur Armstrong, comme il est beau!” and Louis grinned with delight, we were in on it before he stopped grinning, damn near. We were planted at the race’s switchboard there, the listening-post for the whole planet. We had our earphones on all the time.

  You had your pick of hangouts on The Corner. Just on Seventh Avenue alone, going north from 131st Street, the line-up was: a barber-shop, a drugstore, the Performers and Entertainers Club and under it the dicty Connie’s Inn, then the Lafayette Theater, then a candy store, the Hoofers’ Club down in the basement, and finally, Big John’s famous ginmill. Around on 132nd Street were Tabb’s Restaurant, and next to it the Rhythm Club, where you could call any hour of the day or night and hire a musician. And back on 131st Street, soon as you turned into it you found a fine rib joint called the Barbeque, the entrance to a gang of upstairs halls where top bands like Armstrong’s and Count Basic’s and Jimmy Lunceford’s and Cab Calloway’s and Erskine Hawkins’ used to rehearse, and a speakeasy and nightclub called the Bandbox. Most important of all, there was an area way running all around the corner building there, a wide alley with entrances from both Seventh Avenue and 131st Street. This alley led to the Lafayette’s backstage entrance and also to a special bar in the rear of the Bandbox, and here it was that most of our social life was spent. Louis Armstrong was heading the Connie’s Inn show (it was “Hot Chocolates,” written by Fats Waller and Andy Razaff and
staged by Leonard Harper, and it was doubling at the Hudson Theater down on 46th Street) and all the cats from the show would come out in the alley and mingle with the other great performers of Harlem who were appearing at the Lafayette, and they would be joined by visitors from all over, including a lot of white musicians that I began to bring up from downtown. I dragged so many cats uptown, I got to be known as the “link between the races” after a while.

  And, finally, out in front of the Connie’s Inn marquee on Seventh Avenue there was the legendary Tree of Hope, Harlem’s Blarney Stone, which the guys would hug and kiss half playfully when they prayed for their dreams to come true. Once a good friend of mine, a fine hoofer who was having trouble getting bookings, ran up to that tree, gave it a big smack, and yelled “Lawd please make me a pimp, any kind of a pimp, long as I’m pimpin’. I’m tired of scufflin’ and my feet are too long’ outa work.” Years later, when Seventh Avenue was widened, Bill Robinson had the Tree of Hope transplanted out to the strip of parkway that was built in the middle of the avenue, and there it still stands today.

  This was my happy hunting ground. Right from the start I was surrounded by a lot of wonderful friends, the first gang of vipers in Harlem (who I didn’t make vipers out of, no matter what anybody says, because they were buying their gauge from some Spanish boys over on Lenox Avenue before I ever came to Harlem). There were some other fine kids too, including Little Fats, who knew everybody and was the key to the grapevine, another youngster named Mark, an orphan boy named Travis, a dancer named George Morton, little Frankie Walker and his dancing partner Dooley, Oakie, Nappy, Brother Raymond of that famous dance trio, Tip, Tap & Toe, and two girls named Thelma and Myrtle. Most all of us were real poor, until some of us began pushing reefer, but we loved each other and we had our fun. We’d sit in the Barbeque, right over the bandstand in Connie’s Inn, and wait to catch the first few notes from Louis’ horn. Zutty used to really punish those tomtoms when Louise Cook was doing her Salome routine, and the whole building would bump and fishtail right along with her. Soon as we heard the finale we knew Louis was going to start playing for the dancers, so we’d tear out for the street and kneel down on the sidewalk at a small boarded-up window, where Louis came through loud and clear.

  Then it got to be wintertime, and the sidewalk was covered with snow, so we’d race into the alleyway and huddle up in front of a huge exhaust fan that was built into a shed. You could hear Louis there too, if you didn’t choke first on the smoke and funk that was pumped in your face. Warm air came out of the fan too, so things were groovy. Course, I could have gone downstairs in the Inn and stood backstage to hear Pops, but it wouldn’t have been so good that way, with all my friends outside at the fan. I wanted to stick with the gang because those cats enjoyed every note Louis made, and their delight sent me even more. I couldn’t sneak down and get those kicks by myself—that kind of selfish quality evaporated when it came to hearing Louis because you wanted the whole world to dig what he had to say on his horn. Roaches were passed round and round, and even though some of those vipers were plenty raggedy they loved Louis like nobody else. We spent most all the Winter of 1930 squoze together in front of that fan-shed.

  Yes, it was my hunting ground, and it was solid happy. Course, my home wasn’t exactly in Harlem—Bonnie wasn’t with me all the way on that issue, and she had her son to think of, so I compromised by moving right next door to Harlem, just across the river in the Bronx, on the Grand Concourse. But it was just a quick ten-minute ride to The Corner from where we lived, and all my waking hours were passed down there. . . . My brain would never soak up all the jive my eyes and ears were drinking in. It was really too much.

  On The Corner I was to become known as the Reefer King, the Link between the Races, the Philosopher, the Mezz, Poppa Mezz, Mother Mezz, Pop’s Boy, the White Mayor of Harlem, the Man about Town, the Man that Hipped the World, the Man that Made History, the Man with the Righteous Bush, He who Diggeth the Digger, Father Neptune. I don’t mean to boast; that’s what the cats really called me, at different times. I did become a kind of link between the races there. My education was completed on The Stroll, and I became a Negro. The next ten years of my life were to be spent there, and in a cellar opium pad a few blocks away.

  ●

  We vipers lived in the Barbeque, eating ribs five or six times a day and listening to one of the first juke boxes in Harlem. Little Frankie Walker was always at my side, even though we never lit him up on account of his age. Frankie was a hell of a bright kid, only about fourteen, and he loved me as much as I did him. He had razor legs, snaggle teeth and dribble lips, and many of my white friends were embarrassed when I first brought him in their company, but after Frankie sat down and cut a few steps for them everything was jam-up and they all took a liking to him. That kid would sit in a chair and lay more iron than a lot of the best dancers who stood up and beat the boards in Harlem. He was an orphan and lived with his partner, Dooley, and his mother. I sort of adopted Frankie and dressed him up, and wherever I went he went too and danced on all settings.

  When I first hit The Stroll, Guy Lombardo was head man on the juke boxes—the girls liked him especially, because his sax section had such a lyrical quality and played the sentimental tunes so pretty. Well, one day I caught up with the man changing records in the Barbeque, and gave him the names of some of Louis’ records. Pretty soon Frankie cornered me and told me he heard through the grapevine that the juke-box man was looking for me. I went to see this guy, and he gave me a big hello and bought me some drinks. “Man,” he said, “those records of Louis’ are making me a young fortune on my machines.” He begged me to give him some more suggestions, so I named Louis’ Ain’t Misbehavin’, Black and Blue, Some of These Days, After You’re Gone, St. Louis Blues, Rockin’ Chair and Song of the Islands. They all hit the juke boxes fast, and they rocked all Harlem. Everywhere we went we got the proprietor to install more boxes, and they all blared out Louis, Louis, and more Louis. The Armstrong craze spilled over from Harlem right after that, and before long there wasn’t a juke box in the country that Louis wasn’t scatting on. Around The Corner there was only one record we’d allow on the boxes with Louis, Bing Crosby’s When the Blue of the Night. That was a concession to the sentimental chicks too, because they were starved for sweet romance and they sure didn’t get much of it from Louis’ recordings.

  Louis had brought his private chauffeur to New York with him, a fellow we all knew from the Sunset and the Nest in Chicago. Anywhere you showed up on the South Side, there was Too Sweet on the scene, ready to act as a guide to the younger boys who came around. Now Too Sweet was about six-foot-two, with a massive body, his playground sticking out in front of him about two feet. With Louis getting so famous, he started to walk up and down The Avenue, posing back with a cane so you almost thought he was Mr. Armstrong himself. One day as little Frankie and I approached the corner, we saw a crowd out in front of Connie’s Inn, and we made our way through to pick up on what was going down. It seemed as though Too Sweet couldn’t stand Louis’ getting all the glory in The Apple, because everywhere you turned the cats were buzzing about Pops, and Too Sweet couldn’t get in the play. This night he decided he was going to get some note for himself, so there he stood on The Corner in a pair of bright purple shorts and a yellow top shirt, swinging a walking stick with a knob on it big as an oak tree stump, and on his shoulder was an honest-to-God monkey. Too Sweet stopped traffic that night, and he was happy. He even made the papers.

  Louis and I were running together all the time, and we togged so sharp we got to be known as the Esquires of Harlem. Dig these outfits: oxford-gray double-breasted suits, white silk-broadcloth shirts (Louis wore Barrymore collars for comfort when he played, with great big knots in his ties), black double-breasted velvet-collared overcoats, formal white silk mufflers, French lisle hand-clocked socks, black custom-built London brogues, white silk handkerchiefs tucked in the breast pockets of our suits, a derby for Louis, a light gray felt for me with
the brim turned down on one side, kind of debonair and rakish. Louis always held a handkerchief in his hand because he perspired so much, onstage and off, and that started a real fad—before long all the kids on The Avenue were running up to him with white handkerchiefs in their hands too, to show how much they loved him. Louis always stood with his hands clasped in front of him, in a kind of easy slouch. Pretty soon all the kids were lounging around The Corner with their hands locked in front of them, one foot a little in front of the other, and a white handkerchief always peeking out from between their fingers. All the raggedy kids, especially those who became vipers, were so inspired with self-respect after digging how neat and natty Louis was, they started to dress up real good, and took pride in it too, because if Louis did it it must be right. The slogan in our circle of vipers became, Light up and be somebody.

  Every day, soon as I woke up about four in the P.M., I would jump up to Louis’ apartment and most of the time catch him in the shower. That man really enjoyed his bath and shave. I would sit there watching him handle his razor, sliding it along with such rhythm and grace you could feel each individual hair being cut, and I’d think it was just like the way he fingered the valves on his horn, in fact, just like he did everything. When he slid his fingertips over the buttons, delicate as an embroiderer and still so masculine, the tones took wing as though they sprang from his fingers instead of his lips. The way he shaved put me in mind of the time Louis was blowing and I brushed up against him by accident, and goddamn if I didn’t feel his whole body vibrating like one of those electric testing machines in the penny arcade that tell how many volts your frame can stand. Louis really blew with every dancing molecule in his body. He did everything like that, graceful and easy but still full of power and drive. He was a dynamo with a slight slouch.