“Given I still say she’s fourteen, it’s the Chuck Berry speech. And good for you, child prodigy, to know there’s a goddamn difference.”
Toby rose from his chair. “Yes, well—”
“Jack Johnson went down because his woman was white. Not because she was young. Chuck Berry, that girl was young. And white. So yes, dear boy of mine, this is the Chuck Berry speech.”
“Marie is only six years old,” Toby sang quietly.
“Not that young.”
“Ta-da.”
“But white.”
Toby lifted the necktie from the back of his chair and slid it under his collar. Fastening his top shirt button, he glanced to the ceiling and intoned, “The color white. ‘The intensifying agent in things most appalling to mankind.’”
His father squinted. “Damn straight.” A finger softly tapped the side of his cup. “Who said that?”
“Melville,” Toby replied. “White guy.”
“You’re developing a serious case of snide, know that?”
As he passed his father, Toby caught the sharp sour taint coming from the old man’s tea. He stopped, leaned forward, sniffed. “Tell me that’s not what I think it is.”
His father tipped the cup away and nodded toward the door beyond which Nadya still lingered, out of sight. “Seems to me you got your own business to mind.”
“You are my business. I wouldn’t be here if you weren’t.”
A car horn sounded from the street. “Good God.” Toby checked his watch. “Nadya,” he called out. “Go out, please, tell Francis I’ll be there in five?”
The girl edged out from the shadow of the doorway. She was petite, finely boned, with jet-black hair, dressed in a turtleneck, overalls, hightop Keds. Fierce eyes dominated a bone-white face. Nadya Katarinya Lazarenko. Toby liked saying the name out loud, quietly to himself. Ukrainian, it conjured images of tormented exiles, seraphic ballerinas.
“Five minutes,” he said again, gentler this time.
She nodded, held out her hand, every finger extended—as though to respond, “Gotcha, five, over.” Toby half expected a cartoonish fffuuttt as she withdrew the hand, spun around, and fled. It was part of her charm, this comic, almost goofy eccentricity. A defense she’d concocted against her family.
Speaking of which, he thought, turning back to his father. He nodded at the cup. “You’re light one kidney, remember? You got a death wish we need to talk about?”
The car horn blasted again. At the front of the house the door slammed open and closed as Nadya ran out to tell Francis, Toby’s tenor man, to wait.
“Next time, you’ll need a kidney donor. Don’t come to me. Not if you’re gonna play the fool like this.”
He pushed past, squared himself before the bathroom mirror. His father ambled behind, sprawling himself in the doorway. “You wouldn’ta lasted twenty minutes in my day, know that?”
Toby shook his head, murmuring, “Here it comes,” as he looped his tie into its knot.
“Woulda done you good. Play the juke joints down Grove Street. Only way to keep your job, win a cutting contest. Outplay the new guy or lose your chair.”
“Spare me. Music as martial art. Funk Fu.”
The bathroom wall was dotted with aging black-and-white portraits of his father in years gone by—standing with Frank Foster and Freddie Green of Basie fame, Ann Peebles, Etta James, Bill Doggett. The images hovered about Toby’s reflection in the mirror like Sistine sibyls and ignudi.
“Know what you remind me of?” his father said. “One of them little old Filipino ladies here in town, think what we need is a cultural center. Museum for dust. Place for fat girls to fuck up ballet.”
“Yeah, well, let me stop you before this gets too fascinating.”
Toby smoothed his collar, made one last self-inspection, then eased past his father in the bathroom doorway. Gathering his jacket from its chair back, he shoved his arms into the sleeves, then grabbed his horn case and the beaten-up leather valise in which he carried his charts and lead sheets. He started for the door, but his father’s hand sailed out, caught his arm.
“You’re not really gonna leave me with that girl of yours, are you? All she does is sit there, screwed down tight, sadder than a map.”
“You’ll survive.”
“Try to talk with her, she shrinks up like a sponge. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry.’ Like everything’s her goddamn fault. When in doubt, blame her.”
“It’s commonly referred to as being shy.”
“No, what it’s commonly referred to as? Is white guilt. Or she got some new kind of ass-backward, fucked-up vanity they don’t have a name for yet?”
Toby felt the heat swim up into his face, but he checked himself. This was an old game. Only his father kept score.
“Look. Talk to me how you want. Like I could stop you. But when it comes to her—”
“You a virgin?”
Toby flinched. “Excuse me?”
“Reason I ask—if you are, then that means it’s your mother got you pussy-whipped like this. And that’s just too sad for a man like me to contemplate.”
Toby’s jaw went slack. The breath got caught in his throat. Unsure whether laughter or fury was called for, knowing neither would make a difference. “I’ll be sure to pass that assessment along,” he said finally, and turned to go.
“Whoa!” his father called to his back. “Stop the presses. Mr. Shoes-Too-Tight-and-Oh-So-Sensitive runs to Momma. And tells all …”
Toby went to the front door and waited as Nadya, returning from the street, slipped back through the gate beneath the bare branches of the old sycamore. Overhead, twilight gathered in a threatening sky. As she darted up the gravel path toward the house, he thought how odd it was that not even hightops and overalls could hide how lovely she was. And she was, he knew, hiding. He wondered sometimes if he was the only person in the world who actually saw her.
They’d met at the music store where she marshaled the sheet music and taught piano. They’d flirted clumsily, sitting side by side at a Bechstein concert grand as Toby showed her the tonal colorings of Billy Strayhorn’s “Chelsea Bridge.” She in turn played two short pieces by Scriabin, one called “Désir,” the other “Caresse Dansée,” to show him how much, for her, the dense, chromatic harmonies and sadly playful melodies echoed Strayhorn’s. Toby wondered if it hadn’t been decided in those first few minutes. The curiosity they’d felt for each other, it seemed a kind of gravity, as though the next thing worth knowing lay secreted inside the other person. Not music, but the thing they couldn’t get at except through music.
At twenty-two, Toby’d had his share of girlfriends—it was one of the perks of musicianship—but until Nadya, he doubted he’d ever been truly, honestly interesting to someone. And he doubted if he’d ever been as intrigued by someone as he was by her. It brought to mind one of his favorite sayings, by Coltrane: “If there is something you do not understand, you must go humbly to it.” That’s it, he thought. We go humbly to each other. And that humility, it formed a kind of tenderness, a depth of caring, he’d not known existed before. If that wasn’t love, it was at least a kind of longing unlike any other he’d heard tell of.
She took the porch steps at a run. He opened the door and she ducked past him, clutching herself for warmth. He followed her into the living room, where she plopped herself down on the red leather ottoman. Crouching before her, he took her hands in his, kissed her fingers. They were ice-cold.
“The old man, that little fit he just threw—unless I’m guessing wrong, you caught him spiking his tea.”
She flinched, shrank back a little. “I just came into the kitchen, he was at the sink. I didn’t say anything, I just—”
Please don’t say you’re sorry, he thought, recalling his father’s line about white guilt. “He’s in a mood. Might be a good sign, all things considered. Means he’s stronger. But it’s not your job to do anything but drive him to the club and back tonight.”
�
��I know.”
“I’d do it myself—”
“I know.”
She rolled her eyes, humphed, then smiled, revealing her slight overbite, like Gene Tierney’s. Toby’d had a similar problem as a boy. From age eleven on, though, daily scales on the trombone, hour after hour, had gradually nudged his upper teeth into place. A minor medical miracle, his father had cracked at the time. Better orthodontics through practice, practice, practice.
Toby clutched her fingers tighter. “He’s going to drink,” he said. “My father. Stupid as that sounds, given his operation and all, he’s going to do it and there’s nothing you can do to stop him and I don’t want you to try.”
He got no further. The shock on Nadya’s face told him, Turn around. He did so, in time to see his father, baritone sax poised before him like a battering ram, heading for the front door.
“Gonna go out and say hey to my man Francis,” he said.
Toby stared out through the front door at the gate through which his father disappeared. As Nadya sidled up beside him, he said, “Scratch the plan. I can’t leave you with him. Not in this mood. It’s like somebody lit a bottle rocket up his ass, pardon my French.”
“Baguette de fusée.”
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing.”
He checked his watch and groaned. “I wish I didn’t have this feeling.”
“It’ll be fine.”
“No, trust me, it won’t.”
“I can handle it, Toby.”
She reached for his hand, clutched his pinkie, and shook it. It broke his mood and he turned toward her, melting a little as their eyes met. He’d seen pictures of her grandmother who’d fled the Ukraine during the famine and pogroms of the thirties, and it was startling how much Nadya resembled her. Down to the pitiless sorrow in those eyes.
“If I had more time, I’d never in the world do this to you.”
She reached up and stroked his cheek. “You’re not doing anything to me, Toby.”
“If he gets out of hand, dump him. I’m dead serious. Walk away. Come back alone. Leave him to me or we’ll just let him cab it home. Won’t be the first time.”
Nadya searched his face. “Just leave him?”
“Absolutely.”
She lowered her hand from his face to his chest, smoothing his lapels, his necktie. “I don’t think I could do that. I mean, just desert him.”
Toby shook his head and laughed. “You’ll get tested. Trust me.”
Walking out to the street, he heard the cry of his father’s horn beyond the fence. Once through the gate he saw him—still barefoot, standing atop the hood of Francis’s ’72 Impala wagon. Eyes shut tight, the old man bent over the windshield like he meant to melt it away.
He ended his onslaught with a fusillade of arpeggios swirling down to a spine-rattling B-flat repeated in three fierce honks, the last extended, then sweetened—a crooning whisper that faded away into breath and silence. Eyes still closed, he smiled, satisfied. Turning, he jumped down off the station wagon’s hood and took a bow for the neighbors peeking out at the street from the edges of their lamplit curtains. The old man waved grandly, beaming a triumphant smile, then sauntered up to the driver’s side window of the Impala as Francis rolled it down.
“Francis, who plays for dances.” They pounded fists, then Toby’s father stepped back to inspect the car. “What sorry-ass Injun begged you to take this pile of junk off his hands?”
Francis shrugged. “Runs good.”
“So’s your little sister, I hear.”
Opening the curbside back door, Toby slid his trombone case in, resting it atop the other two horn cases already there—one for Francis’s tenor, the other a Walt Harris baritone case connected to a ceremonial surprise for his father that, given events of the past half hour, Toby was beginning to regret.
His father turned his attention from the car to Francis’s attire, which was nearly identical to his son’s—crisp gray suit, silk tie, spanking white shirt. “Nice to see the two of you done up right for once. I mean, what was it, year ago, you two troop on outta here looking like a couple Rastafarians. Thought you were heading over to Valley View, chant the bitch outta my sister.”
Toby put his valise on the floor between his feet and pulled the door closed. “One must be many things to many people.”
His father cackled. “Yeah, I’ve heard hookers say that.” He nodded toward the backseat. “You clowns must think I’m the village idiot. That or blind as Brother Ray. Think I don’t know a baritone case when I see one?”
Francis and Toby exchanged glances. Neither spoke.
“Which one of you fools thinks he’s gonna play that thing tonight?”
Toby gestured to Francis, Let’s go.
“Takes a man to play the baritone.”
“Then bring one with you,” Toby said.
His father leaned in through the driver’s side window, reaching across Francis. “I can still smack your head sideways, junior.”
“Mister Junior, to you.”
“Come here. Closer.”
Francis fought his way through the tangled limbs, turned the key, cranked the ignition, and put the car in gear. He revved the engine, inched the car forward, and Toby’s father backed out of the window finally, stepping away. Toby leaned across the front seat and shouted.
“Hey, Cranky McGeezer—you want to find out who’s playing that baritone tonight, go back inside, lay off the juice, behave like a human being, and maybe your white fourteen-year-old nurse will be nice enough to haul that spiteful, mean-mouthed, old’n’tired ass of yours down to the club.”
As they drove to Emeryville, Toby studied his lead sheets for the evening’s set. Holding two side by side, he spotted at a glance an omitted flat, an undotted rest. Taking out his pen, he removed the cap with his teeth and made the required changes, the various parts trilling in his mind. Beside him, Francis tugged from his pocket the mouthpiece for the baritone, inserted it between his lips, and worked it with his lip and tongue, plying the reed with saliva.
For that night’s set, as a surprise tribute to his father, Toby’d charted a septet version of Charles Mingus’s “Moanin’.” The number had been his father’s signature piece in virtually every band he’d been in, even the blues acts, whose players never shrank from a little jazz if the chance arose and the crowd seemed willing. The piece began with one of the most celebrated hooks in the repertoire, announced solo by the baritone: brash, sinister, and yet with this raunchy mad laugh to it. Once the rest of the band kicked in, the tune just held on for dear life and ran.
The original had been scored for six horns. Toby was working with four, and a Hammond B-3 instead of a piano. He turned the organ into a plus, exploiting its throatier stops. To recover the texture lost by fewer horns, he stuck quick little crossing harmonies in obbligato behind the theme. All four horns and the B-3 got a solo. Everybody wailed.
Toby’s mother, Felicia, attending one of their rehearsals, had sat there speechless and far-eyed when they finished their run-through, as though the music had conjured memories both too fond and too harsh to recall without feeling. Snapping back to the present when Toby stepped forward to get her reaction, she remarked, “You will make that nasty old creature very proud.”
This from the woman who thought her son should study law.
The Zoom Room filled an old warehouse space in the Emeryville mud flats, not far from a portion of the freeway called the Maze near the bayfront border of Oakland and Berkeley. Inside, it had high walls fashioned of glass brick and cinder block, with cement floors and metal-work still intact overhead. The high, hard surfaces gave the room all the acoustical warmth of an empty swimming pool. Worse, the bar stood a good ways off from the dance floor, in an area built out from former office space. You couldn’t sit with your drink and watch the stage. You had to mill along the edges of the dance floor, drink in hand, like some homely mope too sad to join in, too proud to go home. It meant the crowd often split into two dist
inct factions—one that danced, one that drank.
Near the stage, a poster propped on an easel announced the evening’s acts:
RETRO RENAISSANCE & BEYOND
There were four acts on tap, with Toby’s outfit up second. They’d get one set, forty minutes, following a group called Trane Stop and preceding an outfit named Miles To Go. The other bands were mixed but mostly white, the kind of California concept crew that relied more on theme and good intentions than talent—heavy beat with a funk accent, muddy chords, solos that slid around like a rainy night car wreck. Toby knew his men could blow the other players into dust, but this crowd might not notice, which kept him from getting too cocky. The evening’s headliner, for whom most people there would be waiting, was named Yesterday’s Memo, one of the few Neo-Swing bands that had survived the fad. It was a vamp act, Kid Coconut meets film noir, featuring a singer who called herself Carmen DiCarlo—a thin, small, throaty Kaye Starr impersonator who wore a turban and fishnets and smiled like a blind girl onstage.
Trane Stop wrapped up its set after a mere thirty minutes, leaving the crowd restless. Toby collected his band backstage after they’d set up their gear, running through his finalized lead sheets for “Moanin’” one last time before motioning them out into the lights.
Each man wore a prim gray suit, looking older than old school, almost Basie-esque. The crowd didn’t seem to know what to make of them as they took their places. Toby snapped his fingers to sound the count, on the downbeat a two-stick crack hit the snare, and the band launched hard into Booker Ervin’s “East Dallas Special.” The freight train came alive with the horns: Roderick Coover on trumpet, Ikem Ononuju on alto, Francis on tenor, Toby on trombone. Rounding out the band, the rhythm section—Chubby Jefferson on six-string bass, Penny Tyler on drums, Jimmy Seagraves on Hammond B-3—they drove the horns from underneath, the organ humming, bass and drums kicking hard, testament to their background as a blues trio in the Groove Holmes mold.
Done for a Dime Page 4