Really the Blues

by Mezz Mezzrow

  I was sure suppressed on the creative side, but I didn’t have the time to worry over it none. The action on The Avenue went down so fast that it was all I could do to strain my eyes and ears and follow it. Listen-and-learn was the play, all the way. And although I wasn’t blowing my horn, I was sure advocating some, being the philosopher, and I got some kicks out of that. Wherever I went, in the cafés and theaters and dancehalls and ginmills, my say-so was respected. The bands always outplayed themselves trying to come on for me, because I’d talk all over town about the performers I liked, and my word was getting to mean something—now and then it led to other engagements, bigger bookings, and record dates. I was really, in a modest way but enough to make me feel good, acting as a kind of link between the races, hipping some of the whites to the genius of the most talented Negro boys, getting members of both groups closer together and beginning to appreciate each other more.

  I could dig that there’d never be a way out for me without a mixed band—the most inspired whites and Negroes playing together. There’d maybe be room for me in such a set-up, sooner or later. But the mixed band was just a pipedream in those days (and still is, in any real sense of the term—one colored guy in a big white swing band isn’t exactly a “mixture”). Louis and I used to talk about it all the time—it was our idea of the millennium. But Pops, with his great practical wisdom, figured that for a first step, it shouldn’t be a colored band taking in a white man, but the other way around, because the privileged should make the first overtures of friendship towards the oppressed.

  Anyhow, those talks with Louis did have one result: they led to the first important mixed-band recording dates that I know about. First Louis himself got together with Jack Teagarden, Eddie Lang, Joe Sullivan and some colored boys, and they made Knockin’ a Jug and Muggles for Okeh, early in 1929. Chances are I would have been on that date, if I hadn’t been on the high seas, bound for Paris. Then Fats Waller, who was solid for the idea too, got together a recording group for Victor that he called “Fats Waller and His Buddies.” Under this name Fats played with Eddie Condon, Gene Krupa and Jack Teagarden, plus the colored boys, on Lookin’ Good and Feelin’ Bad and I Need Someone Like You; and then, using Eddie and Jack in the band, he made Ridin’ But Walkin’, Won’t You Get off It Please, Lookin’ for Another Sweetie, which was the original of the number that later got famous as Confessin’ and When I’m Alone. All these records were made in 1929 too, when we first began mulling the mixed-band idea over.

  So there I was, advocating, signifying, being the link between the races, selling my reefer on The Corner—and not blowing a note. I never tried to make a real business out of the gauge, but the demand for it just sprang up by itself, and even after giving the other guys their cut I always had a couple of hundred bucks come the end of the week. I was able to take care of Bonnie and her kid real good, with some new furniture in the house, plenty of clothes, and everything else they needed. My name was getting around the country like wildfire. Cats would bust in from Texas or California and look me up, saying “Man, I heard about you and that good gauge way out on the coast.” When Connie Immerman came out of his Inn and climbed into his great big Packard, the guys would say to me, “Mezz, you gonna be ridin’ in one of them things some day too.”

  Maybe it should have set me up, all this success and easy money, but it didn’t—it made me feel worse and worse. Even if muggles weren’t illegal, they were still looked down on by the outside world, and what I was doing for a living was considered a racket. The last thing in the world I wanted to be was a racketeer. The last straw was when those East Side gangsters from downtown started coming around and making me fabulous offers to tie in with them and let them build up a real big racket out of the reefer. They were plenty bad guys. Not long before they had tried to rub Connie Immerman out, and I knew they would give the same treatment to anybody else who stood in their way. They hung around the gangster-owned saloons in Harlem and kept after me to get them big quantities of the weed wholesale. Soon I was getting visits from Dutch Schultz’s boys and Vincent “Babyface” Coll’s boys every day in the week. With each day they got less good-natured about it. Each day their voices got harder, and their demands more insistent.

  Now I sure don’t want to blame anybody for what happened to me next. People very seldom get themselves messed up unless they been asking for it some way, no matter how much of an innocent victim they look like from the outside. Here I was all bottled up musically, kind of deserted by the white musicians, and with my idol Louis gone too; all jammed up with inferiority feelings on account of not making music; worried over the prospect of peddling reefer the rest of my days; afraid that the gangsters would force me to become a racketeer, so I’d be trapped in a mess I couldn’t ever fight my way out of again. You can see that I was ready for anything. . . . But the way it actually happened, I didn’t go after the hop on my own. It was just about then that a couple of my old pals from downtown started to bother me about hop. They’d had it a couple of times back in Chicago and wanted to try it again just for a thrill, and they figured maybe I could make some connection in Harlem for them. Just to humor the guys along I told them I’d see what I could do, and then I put it out of my mind. Back in Detroit the Purple Gang had put me on a complex about the stuff, so I wasn’t hot for it.

  Then one day, as I was coming out of the Rhythm Club, a cat stepped up and introduced himself as Frankie Ward the drummer, and said he wanted some gauge. We went into the alley to light up, and he said “You ever smoke hop Mezz? This don’t compare to hop.”

  So I knew Frankie was a hophead. I thought no more about it until my friends began pestering me again about a hop connection. Then I ran into Frankie again and I asked him how about it. He took me by the arm and steered me over to “Beale Street,” which is 133rd Street between Fifth and Lenox, the toughest block in Harlem, and there he introduced me to the guy who supplied him with opium, an old smoker by the name of Mike. Frankie told this man I was O.K. with Pops, and fixed it so I could get the stuff any time I wanted it.

  During the next two months I went back to see Mike a couple of times, and picked up enough hop for my friends—my wife was out West visiting friends for a few weeks, so the boys came up to my house and there we smoked the stuff. Mike moved over to Eighth Avenue to take a job as superintendent in an old tenement house, and there I found him again. One night he invited me to lay down with him. I found out that Mike had started on hop when he was sixteen—in those days you could practically buy it in the corner candy store—and he’d been on the stuff for thirty-five solid years now.

  How long did it take before you got the habit, I asked.

  Oh, sixty days or less, he told me, depending on the strength of the stuff and how often you used it.

  He agreed to let my friends come around and smoke with him once in a while. I went back myself, two, three, four times, I don’t remember exactly how often. I told myself I would just watch it, not take too much, not go back too soon, and that way I’d be playing it safe. If you were smart, you wouldn’t get the habit.

  I went back once more, again, and another time. All the while I was taking care, playing it safe. Then, one fine morning, I woke up and pretty soon I found all my neuroses boiling up, and I was mean and evil all through. My mouth was dry as cotton and I couldn’t stop yawning, and my stomach felt like it was caved in and my eyes were full up with water till I couldn’t see. I wondered if I was coming down with pneumonia. I had a craving for something, I could hardly tell what; my hands were trembling something awful. I was one great miserable itching bundle of need. All my nerves were stretching their fingers out, begging for alms.

  Then it hit me what the trouble was—I had a yen, a terrible terrible yen for hop. I had to have some right away, nothing could stop me. It was an obsession, it drove every other thought out of my head. I was going to get some hop fast, and if anybody stood in my way I’d cut his throat. Nothing else mattered. I was hooked.

  14. TOUGH SCUFF
LE, MEZZIE

  FOR ALMOST FOUR YEARS SOLID I LAID AROUND IN THE BUNK. Let me tell you about The Bunk. That was the name we gave to a little old six-foot-square coal bin down in the cellar of Mike’s tenement that we cleaned out and converted into our hop-pad. In this kind of shed we set some heavy planks down on top of some beer boxes, then covered them up with some old Army horse blankets to make a big bed, and it was here that we stretched out for days on end and smoked and philosophized and smoked some more. We were a hophead triumvirate: in addition to Mike and me there was Mike’s buddy Mackey, who lived with him and helped him out with the janitoring. Up on the brick wall of The Bunk was a big cowhide, hair and all, and the other walls were plastered with pictures of pretty chicks tore off some old calendars. We had an old beat-up gas heater to keep us warm, so things were pretty cozy. The days oozed by like a melted movie film, all run together.

  Mike and Mackey were both along in their fifties, and they’d both grown up in the “Jungles” of San Juan Hill (the tough neighborhood on 10th Avenue along in the Sixties, just above Hell’s Kitchen), so they had some stories to tell. We’d lay around there in a sunny haze and they’d tell me about how they were always fighting the Irish kids when they were young—how they had to battle their way to the grocery store and slug their way to school. About the only sport they remembered having was to sneak up on a roof somewhere and empty garbage cans loaded with bricks on the heads of the Irish cops on the beat. They’d grown up in that no-man’s-land with James P. Johnson the fine piano player, and they still remembered him and loved him. When we laid down and began to cook, Mike’s dog would smell the heavy fumes and bust right in. He had a bunk habit too, so he was evil in the morning, eyes watering and mouth gaping all the time, but as soon as he got a few whirls of the smoke he’d settle down and go to sleep content, making soft little growls to show how he enjoyed his smoke.

  Mackey, with a bellyful of hop and feeling all mellow and good, would sometimes jump up and say “Goddamn, it’s eight o’clock and I ain’t called my garbage yet.” Then he’d rouse Mike and the two of them would go over to the dumbwaiter and start rounding up the garbage. They sure hated the idea of hauling that thing up and down, so they worked out a system to save wear and tear on their muscles. Soon as Mackey rang the dumbwaiter bell he yelled up the shaft “Garbage!” Then he’d put one hell of a big can in the shaft and not move it an inch from the basement, because the idea was for everybody to drop their garbage down the shaft, aiming for that can. Mackey’d yell up “Hey, never mind them pails baby, drop what you got in paper bags and you better not miss the can, hear!” As the bags thudded into the can, ka-plunk, ka-plop, he shouted “That’s it! Your eye’s pretty good today, baby! Hole in one!”

  I was the handyman around there, and I helped out doing repairs and fixing sinks and toilets when they went bad, which they did all the time. That was some building. The rats were big as alley cats, and they ran up and down the dumbwaiter ropes just as bold, so when people hauled the dumbwaiter up they had to fight them monsters off with broomsticks. But when we got our big police dog he scared them away some. All the toilets in the building were out in the dark and narrow hallways, one to a floor, and the streetwalkers on the block would sneak inside with their customers and take them into the toilets, because they were always open. Whenever we’d be laying around late at night and we’d hear a toilet flush somewhere in the building, Mike would say “Uh, uh, there’s one of them mudkickers again,” and he’d run up and chase them out, yelling “G’wan, you didn’t pay no room rent around here, scat!” What tenants we had there. On the second floor was a King Kong speakeasy, where you could get yourself five-cent and ten-cent shots of homebrewed corn, if you didn’t care about dissolving the enamel on your teeth; then on the third floor there was another King Kong joint, only this one did nothing but a cash-and-carry package business; and up on the top floor, the fifth, some guys used an apartment to cook corn mash in a still, making King Kong. One thing, though, there weren’t any whorehouses in the place. Mike figured they gave too much trouble and he was for having everything run smooth and respectable.

  Mornings, when I came shuffling in full of quakes and quivers inside, a whole family of frantic bats in my stomach, I’d pass the fish store in front of the building and get walloped by the stink there, then I’d rush down through the basement and get slugged by the stench of the garbage cans lined up in rows. But as soon as I laid down and inhaled a few pills my guts relaxed and everything began to smell like Chanel Number Five to me. As we lolled around there, hour after wavery hour, we discussed everything under the sun and settled the problems of the world. We were a three-man town hall meeting, a real hophead forum. We analyzed Jim Crow, the numbers racket that was flourishing in Harlem, the white gangsters, the merits of different jails and penitentiaries, Uncle Tomism, how good all the different musicians and performers were, race psychology, war and peace and the international scene, which wasn’t pretty. Mike would tell us how he was a pioneer in Harlem and knew Ethel Waters and Fats Waller when they first started, and we’d talk over the different shows at the Lafayette. I made Mike’s apartment my headquarters for the gauge, and both Mike and Mackey helped me push it, so pretty soon a lot of the performers began dropping around to see us, and that gave us more to talk about.

  With the money they began to make, and their new interest in life, these two wonderful guys began to crawl up out of their sunken life some. They got dressed up, ate porterhouse steaks most every night, started to move around to see different shows and nightclubs and various sights, and just woke up all around. We had a lot of talks about dope. They had a terrible contempt for the guys on the “white sniff”—heroin, morphine, and cocaine, all drugs that you took with a hypodermic needle—and they told me how when you got hooked on it you got afraid of water, let yourself get all dirty and would never wash or shave, and your clothes turned to rags and you just became a gutter-bum. Hopheads at least were clean and neat, and liked to tog sharp. It was funny: they shunned guys on the white stuff just like vipers shun liquor-heads.

  Mike and Mackey were unschooled cats, illiterate and all, but still they were full of mother-wit, with a wonderful down-to-earth slant and practical wisdom. They sure didn’t want me to get hooked, and they did their best to run me out of there. “Gate,” Mike would tell me, so earnest his voice got the trembles, “you don’t know what you’re messin’ with. If I could play that stick like you do I’d be out there runnin’ with all them high-powered chicks in all the fine places, and you white too.” There was an accusation in his words that upset me—he meant that, being white, I had all the advantages, and still I was so weak I let myself go just like he had. He at least had some excuse, he didn’t have any other way to make himself feel good, he was a penniless beat black man and he was stuck. . . . He said to me, “What’ll Louis say if he knows you’re on this stuff, he ain’t gonna like it. Boy, leave me tell you one thing, if you knew like we know, you’d leave this jive alone, but fast. . . . ” They pleaded with me, like the wonderful friends they were. But I always consoled myself by saying I could break whenever I wanted to, I’d just go to a sanatorium and take the cure. Hop makes you feel so good when you’ve got a skinful that you just say to hell with everything, this is what I want, when I feel so fine there can’t be anything bad about it. And then when you wake up next morning your whole nervous system is screaming, and you can’t think about anything but getting some more, and fast. Then you get feeling hazy and mellow again, and nothing worries you. . . . So it’s a vicious circle. I just whirled round and round it, kidding myself that I was always at the controls and could break whenever I wanted to. I never did tell Louis about it until years later, after I broke the habit, and then I didn’t tell him the whole story.

  That was the Summer of 1931, when I moved into The Bunk. All that season, and the following one too, I had part of a box reserved out at the Yankee Stadium, and when the sun was shining we’d get ourselves feeling fine, pack along some yen p
ox (opium pills that you eat), and go out there to the baseball game. A lot of our friends (not hopheads) would join us—Bill Robinson, Buck, Tommy Dorsey, and some cats from his band. I chewed on them pills like the other guys munched peanuts.

  Mike lived in an apartment upstairs with Lil, his fine old lady, and she treated me so fine when I was there that everybody thought she was my wife. I installed a push-button under the sink in Lil’s kitchen, and connected it to a buzzer down in The Bunk, and the idea was that Lil was to ring three times for me, twice for Mackey, once for Mike—and four times if the law showed its nose anywhere near. Well, it seems that one day some stoolie tipped off the cops that Lil was selling hop in her place, which was a lowdown dirty lie because it was only marihuana and I was selling it, not her. A whole squad of cops showed up, and that buzzer began to ring in four-four time. Mike and me grabbed our layout and out into the airshaft we climbed, till we finally got into the next building, and then we went up to the second floor and peeked out the window. There was Mackey out in front of the house just as unconcerned, sweeping the sidewalk with slow, easy strokes, while the cops swarmed all over the place. He was a busy man, and he just couldn’t be bothered by such doings. Then he raised his head a little, and just out of the corner of his eye he spotted us two up in the window, holding our bellies to keep from collapsing with laughter. He didn’t say anything; not even his eyebrow twitched. His expression was the same as before. Down went his head again, and this time he set to work sweeping that sidewalk like he was possessed, making that old broom fly so fast it was just a fuzzy blur. That was the only way he could show he was laughing with us, way inside. We three hopheads, we felt too good to be upset by a puny little police raid. It almost washed us away.