by Mezz Mezzrow
I believed Mackey’s story all the way, and I still do. But he was plenty scared of the white man’s court. He went up for a hearing and the judge appointed two more attorneys to the case, and these mouthpieces finally made a deal with the D.A. for Mackey to plead guilty to manslaughter or something like that, and Mackey was ready to do it because at least it meant he wouldn’t burn. He was sent up to Sing Sing for seven-and-a-half to fifteen years, our old friend was, and without a single yen pox on him. By that time I was a man without a band again. I had plenty yen pox.
Gerald X.? His wind-up wasn’t so good. I heard that he died a year or two later from the usual “overdose of sleeping pills,” but some say it was heroin, or some kind of evil white stuff.
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I went around to see Jack Kapp, recording manager at Brunswick, and told him my story, I was so mad. “If I give you a date, your records won’t sound like Condon’s, will they?” he wanted to know. I assured him they wouldn’t, and got the date. Then I flew over to see Benny Carter. We only had a week to prepare our arrangements, so I sat down and wrote Dissonance, and also dug up one Alex and I had done called Swingin’ with Mezz. Benny came up with two of his own, Free Love and Love You’re Not the One for Me.
Then came the problem of men. Benny had just started his own band, and from it we took Teddy Wilson on piano, Johnny Russell on tenor, and Benny himself on sax, so with me on alto and clarinet that made four. I think this was Teddy’s first date for Brunswick, and led to his getting a contract with them. For trumpets I got Ben Gusick, Max Kaminsky, and Freddie Goodman (Benny’s brother), and Floyd O’Brien on trombone. Then there was Jack Sunshine on guitar, George “Pops” Foster on bass, Jack Maisel on drums. For one afternoon, at least, I had a real mixed band.
Teddy Wilson plays one of his finest solos on Dissonance, but it was Benny himself who gave me my biggest surprise. I had composed and arranged Dissonance long before, hoping to have Louis record it some day, and you get a pretty good idea of what Pops would have done to it from Benny’s trumpet solo. I’d always known he was one hell of a sax man, but on this date he pulled out a trumpet and was gone, then topped it all by singing a chorus on the back of the record, and that was solid too. . . . Later, when the record was released in England, Louis was over there and he wrote: “Say Gate . . . how wonderful your records are. Everybody enjoys them very much. All of them are perfect. My favorite one is Love your not the one for me and the one where your trumpet player hits that F right square in the face Yea man. By the way who is that fellow? Who ever he is hes mess (Mezz) I aint no playin Hes perfect. . . .” That was Benny Pops was raving about.
I wandered back into the opium fog after that date, and didn’t even try to break my habit again till the next year. In the Spring of 1934 RCA-Victor contacted me, saying Panassié had asked them to have me record and would I be interested in a date. That brought me out of my daze a little. Right away I got busy with Floyd O’Brien, who was living with me then, and together we arranged 35th and Calumet. Then I wrote and arranged Apologies, and got out an arrangement of Old Fashioned Love by Alex Hill and me. The last number was a head arrangement I got together right in the studio, called Sendin’ the Vipers. On this date we had no less than four colored orchestra leaders who were on their way to the top: Benny Carter on alto sax, Chick Webb on drums, John Kirby on bass, and Willie The Lion on piano. In fact, just about everybody on that session won the fame they deserved but Floyd O’Brien, who I consider studied harder and got closer to the New Orleans trombone style than any white man that ever lived. . . . So, once again, I was the mixed-band king for a day.
I tried again to break my habit, this time with Mike. Just couldn’t make it; guess I didn’t have enough incentive. My mind kept nagging me, telling me to go back to the music, but the craving was too deep under my skin, and the music too far away. . . . Mike saw how I suffered, and tried to console me by naming all the powerful men who had been hopheads at one time or another, but it didn’t help. My mind wasn’t eased even a little until Fats Waller came around and hired me for a recording date at Victor. I told him about Floyd, and he said sure, bring him along too. On this date we made six sides: How Can You Face Me, Sweetie Pie, Mandy, You’re Not the Only Oyster in the Stew, Let’s Pretend That There’s a Moon, and Serenade to a Wealthy Widow.
Just about then I got another lift. I’d been arguing with Louis for all of two years, trying to convince him he had a terrific future waiting for him if he toured England and Europe, and he’d been afraid of the idea, but finally he took my advice. When he went over there, first in 1932 and then later on a very long tour, he like to caused a riot wherever he went. He sent me a whole batch of clippings about the wild receptions he got, and they knocked me out. Best of all, he was an inspiration to Hugues Panassié, who went overboard for Pops and helped to arrange his concerts around Europe. Hearing Louis’ great horn was such an eye-opener to Hugues that he sat right down and wrote his first book on jazz, which was a trail-blazer in lots of ways, even though he didn’t have his perspectives at all straight yet. The book was Le Jazz Hot, and one day a copy of it arrived in the mails, with a little dedication written on the fly-leaf: “Dear Milton, if you had not come to France and taught me so many things I would never have been able to write this book.”
Well, I figured, at least I had helped to spread the gospel around a little, and I’d done my modest bit to further the careers of two wonderful guys, Louis and Hugues. I might be finished, but they were just getting started. . . . I kept reading Hugues’ inscription, and pasting Louis’ press clippings in a scrapbook. It wasn’t much consolation. I went on smoking my pills, and eating my yen pox, and feeling mighty bad.
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You hear sometimes of these proud hermit guys who go forth into the wilderness, all alone under the twinklers, and have a great soul-shaking showdown with themselves, wrastling with that beast inside. In October of ’34 I packed up with my family and moved out to Jackson Heights, Long Island, to fight it out in the wilderness of the Borough of Queens. No dice. I tried my damnedest, couldn’t make it. . . . To ease my mind a little, every night I’d have Fats Waller, Teddy Wilson, Ben Webster, Floyd O’Brien, Max Kaminsky, Buck, and a gang of musicians come out, for a private jam session. Fats loved the Steinway grand in my living room, and Teddy too would sit there for hours playing. Down in the cellar I had an upright, so we could jam all night long without breaking up the neighborhood. When Gene Krupa first came out to visit me, he took a look at the layout and said, “Man, this looks like one of those Hollywood houses that you see in the movies.” There was only one difference: this house had tins of opium stashed in every bureau.
I tried to stop selling the gauge, but when I’d fall out on The Avenue cats would say “Man, what you goin’ to do with us, Mezz. If you don’t want to push it no more, give the connection to somebody else, but don’t let your people down like that.” The Mexican who supplied me said that he would quit when I did, because he didn’t want to do business with anybody else, but I couldn’t tell the boys that—they would have thought I was jiving. I was really in the middle, what with the habit and the gauge and my rusty clarinet tugging at me from different directions. Day after day I’d go down in the cellar to practise, but the opium would make me fall asleep. One day I nodded and nodded till the clarinet fell right out of my hands. When that horn hit the floor, my blood froze. . . .
It got to be 1935, the days all clumping by on clubfeet. Then one fine day Louis popped up, just in from Europe, and moved out to my house. There was a Broadway agent who was mighty anxious to sign Pops up, because he had split up with Johnny Collins over in France, and this guy offered us a three-man corporation, me being the musical director and him the business manager. He offered me a thousand bucks if I could produce Louis in his office, and I brought him around there and the agent handed me his check for one grand. But when he showed us the corporation papers not a trace of my name could I spot anywhere; the guy was pulling a fast one, trying to ti
e Louis up all by himself. “Come on Mezz, let’s go,” Louis said, and dragged me out of the place. I took the check and tore it in a million pieces and strewed it all over the man’s rug. . . . Back in my car I lost all control and began to cry like a baby. I tried to tell Pops that I had to get away from the tea racket because I wasn’t happy, I needed to play music, that was where life began and ended for me. Now my chance to get with him was gone again. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him about the habit, but it sure fed my weeps some too. “Mezz, stop cryin’,” Louis said. He was about ready to bust out in tears himself. “Don’t worry, I’ll go back to Chi and rest my chops for a while, and you go to work on some arrangements for me and we’ll start out together. Get that horn out and start workin’ up your lip and you can get out in front of the band. I’ll just come out and do my specialties, and then when your name gets big enough you can go and start your own band.” I stopped crying then. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him about the worst complication of all, but the words just wouldn’t come.
When we got back home, Louis wrote out a note to Local 802 of the Associated Musicians of Greater New York, announcing to whom it may concern that Milton Mezzrow was his manager and musical director. Bad as I felt, I couldn’t help smiling. I told him there wasn’t any need for papers between the two of us. Then he pulled out his American Express traveler’s checkbook and began to write. “Look Mezz,” he said, “here’s a thousand dollars, we’re goin’ to make plenty more and I’m stickin’, I won’t need it. You stop sellin’ the gauge and pay up about six months’ rent so’s you can sit down and write some arrangements with a clear head, nobody knockin’ at your door for the rent.” I refused the money, so he tried to stash it away under the shirts in my bureau, and finally I compromised by taking five hundred of it. Then he left for Chicago, and soon he wrote to me (on March 12th), saying that his lips were getting better all the time, and he was knocking out a lot of new arrangements with Randolph, his second trumpet player. “You see ‘Gate’ ” he wrote, “I figure with you and Randolph handling the Arrangement department I can’t go wrong. Eh?”
It looked like I really was going to go with Louis, after all these years. There was the biggest chance of my life, dangling right in my face. I had to straighten myself out, right quick. I sat down and went to work on some arrangements for Louis, and I ran smack into that brick wall again—in two minutes I’d be nodding off, my eyes all fuzzy and my mind as alert as seaweed, and my elbows would slip off the piano and crash down on the keyboard. I couldn’t keep my attention on the notes, couldn’t even stay awake. I wasn’t breaking the habit. It was breaking me.
Something sure got to go, I told myself—the hop or me. On April the 6th I called Doc Grad. “Doc,” I said, punctuating my words with yawns, “you’ve got to promise to come out to the house every day from now on, because this time I’m going to cure myself or bust. I don’t care if you chain me to the wall, or tie me up in a straitjacket, or stick me in a padded cell, you’ve got to help me keep away from the hop, you’ve got to.” Then I dove into bed. I was asleep before I hit the pillow.
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The doctor was blunt about it. “Milton,” he said, “it’s no use wasting your time and mine. You’ve tried several times before and it didn’t work. There’s one in a million that ever gets away from that stuff so there’s no use kidding yourself.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “Well doc, you can say it’s two in a million now, because I’m breaking away right now.”
“O.K.,” he said wearily. “Have this prescription filled and stay in bed, and I’ll be out again in the morning.” The medicine was yellow nembutal capsules, to be taken as a sedative.
That night I slept pretty well, but I woke up in the morning wringing wet, my mind as soggy as the bedclothes. Pretty soon the doctor showed up and told me to double the dosage of nembutal, and then he took my wife aside. As I learned later, he gave her strict orders to disconnect the phone and allow me no visitors until he said so. I was to be treated like a prisoner, held incommunicado. That was to make sure that when the agony got too much I couldn’t make any last-minute connection and start the merry-go-round whirling again.
I began to feel terrible weak. Along towards evening I started to throw up, and a sad case of dysentery took hold of me. I kept whipping around in the bed like an insomniac snake, my legs aching till I couldn’t stand it, and I was dripping worse than a shower-bath. Then my head puffed up big as a dirigible and just floated off among the planets, somewhere beyond Saturn; I got delirious, began to scream for the doctor, and swallowed almost all of those yellow capsules in one gulp. Bonnie and the doctor wound in and out of my feverish ravings, sponging me, taking my pulse, checking on my temperature, and most of the time I didn’t know whether they were really there or was I just imagining them. I tossed and turned and screamed at the top of my lungs at everybody who was conspiring to do away with me. All of my nerves joined in the chorus, some bawling, some bellowing, some just whimpering, but none of them still for a moment. The doctor gave me some more medicine, much larger capsules this time and white instead of yellow. “Take one of these,” he said, “and you’ll go right to sleep,” and he told Bonnie to give me one every time I woke up. They were some powerful kind of knockout powder; each one clunked me on the skull like a brickbat.
In the middle of the night I woke up yelling “Murder! Murder! They’re killing me! You’re a murderer!” and the neighbors heard me through the brick walls and called the cops. Legs Diamond and Babyface Coll and Dutch Schultz and Scarface and Louis the Wop, along with a gang of other mugs I couldn’t quite recognize but still their murderous leers were sort of familiar, had been chasing me all over the Milky Way somewheres, and it was wet and slippery, gooey so I kept sinking and sliding, and they were all hugging enormous diamond-studded opium pipes close to their ribs like tommy guns, and they kept pelting me with hand grenades that thudded against my body with a sickening sticky softness because they weren’t metal at all but great big overgrown yen pox, and I ran and ran, hearing a wailing weeping horn blasting away in my ears, and I knew if only I could find that horn Louis would be behind it and I would be saved but Louis wasn’t anywhere, not behind any of the tremendous glistening diamonds that were planets, and when I got closer I saw that all those planets were diamonds and they were all set in tremendous opium pipes that stretched clear across the sky and out of sight, and behind each one was the evil leering face of Legs Diamond or Babyface Coll or Dutch Schultz. . . . I sure cussed up a breeze in my delirium. Bonnie gave me another knockout capsule and off to sleep I went, falling down and down, head over heels, into a big bottomless pit filled with blackness that was velvet-soft and yielding, gooey, suffocating. . . . In the morning I had the awfullest feeling of my whole life. I’d yawn for fully a minute, my mouth stretching wide open, and the hinges of my jaws hurt so bad I could hardly close my mouth again. Tears gushed out of my eyes and my nose ran like Niagara Falls, no blowing or nothing, just a steady stream down over my lips. The sheets were all soaked, and I couldn’t control any of my functions. The muscles of my legs hurt so bad I just laid there kicking like a bike-racer on the seventh day. I screamed till poor Bonnie had a fit.
Then, just when I thought I couldn’t take it any more, an idea hit me. Right away I got very oily and shrewd. I told Bonnie slyly to go down to the drugstore for some Sloane’s Liniment to rub my aching muscles, figuring that while she was out I would sneak down to the cellar and find some empty tins of opium stashed away there and scrape enough together to eat and take this bad feeling off me. Soon as she left I tried to stand, and my knees caved in and I fell over backwards. When I opened my eyes, I found Bonnie standing over me with a wet towel, trying to raise me off the floor. I had conked myself on the radiator—my head was bleeding and I’d been out cold for half an hour. The doctor came again, and told me to take two of the white capsules instead of one. I did, and felt much better right away. . . . A little later, the doc confessed to me that those
knockout capsules contained nothing but some real powerful powdered sugar.
Well, for about a week I couldn’t stand to even smell food cooking, and the smoke from a cigarette made me nauseous. I lost about thirty pounds that first week, and it like to scared me to death. The second week I began to feel a little better, but my legs kept giving me a fit. It’s funny: when you first take hop it goes right to your legs, and when you try to break away from it your legs go bad too. Coming or going, the hop aims straight for your pedal extremities. . . . Doc Grad kept telling me he never believed I’d do it, but now that I’d finally made it I had to stay in bed till he told me to get up. As if I could have moved even my little finger without a derrick. By the third week I could sit up for a few minutes at a time. With a little bit of arguing you could have convinced me I was alive.
Then something happened that almost sent me back to the hop. Just before I decided to break the habit, I traded my old car in for a new one. Now, just about when I was ready to get out of bed, a fellow from the finance company came out with some papers for me to sign. Bonnie showed him up to the bedroom, and he put the papers in my lap and handed me a fountain pen. When I tried to sign my name I couldn’t write letter one.
If you ever want to feel that you’re through for good, you should have that happen to you. I had no more control over my hands than a newborn babe. Now, I thought, I really know why they say you can never break a habit, and that you always go back to the stuff. That poor guy just looked at me with his mouth wide open. “Gee,” he said, “you really must have been sick, don’t bother signing now, I’ll be back again sometime later.” He grabbed his hat and coat and couldn’t get out of the house fast enough. I just lay back and stared at my trembling hands. There was nothing in the world I craved just then but a tin of hop, a whole vat of it, so I could dive into it and never come up again. A guy who can’t handle a fountain pen can’t do much with a clarinet.