The Magic Keys

by Albert Murray

  And before the door closed I said, Hey, but as for old high butt Thomas Wolfe, man, I don’t remember all that time I spent and still spend in the library as any goddamn hunger to devour the whole goddamn earth at all. I can go along with the part about being somebody who reads whole libraries or at any rate whole collections as other people read books. Because, man, I don’t think I ever thought of reading as acquisition as such, but rather as preparation. Preparation for unknown, I thought, as the bus headed down Fifth Avenue toward Forty-second Street. Preparation by reducing the unknown. Be prepared. The Boy Scouts of America had already said that.

  VI

  As the fall term moved on into November of that first school year in New York, I began to feel that I had the preparation of all of my seminar discussion assignments and research reports well enough ahead of schedule so I could spend more and more time doing nonacademic things that made you feel that you were at last beginning to become another inhabitant of Manhattan at large as well as a student at the Washington Square campus.

  Not that Manhattan or anywhere else could ever become another benchmark in the same sense as Gasoline Point on the outskirts of Mobile, Alabama, on the bay of the Gulf Coast had always been and indeed in the very nature of things, would also always be. As not even the campus in central Alabama for all its archival treasures could also be, being, after all, only a four-year stopover en route to other perhaps temporary destinations as yet as undecided upon as Hollywood had turned out to be (although California, which was that many miles and travel days and nights west from Mobile by way of the L N to the Southern Pacific from New Orleans and left on the wall map in Miss Lexine Metcalf’s third-grade classroom, had once been a boy blue future point of arrival and at least somewhat like Philamayork itself).

  Because as benchmark, Gasoline Point, Alabama, would always be that original of all fixed geographical spots (and temporal locations as well) from which (properly instructed as to its functional and thus tentative absoluteness) you measure distances, determine directions, and define destinations, all of which are never any less metaphorical than actual. And, of course, there is also the irradicable matter of the benchmarks of your original perception and conception of horizons and hence aspirations in terms of which everything else makes whatever sense it makes.

  The also and also of all of which is, incidentally, why it is also in the very nature of things that even as you finally began to realize that you are beginning to feel about Manhattan as you had imagined you would as you began looking forward to your next return there back during your first year on the road with the band, you also realize that it would nevertheless remain the metaphorical Philamayork of the blue steel, rawhide, and patent-leather preschoolboy fireside aspirations you would always remember whenever you remembered the thin blue horizon skies fading away north by east beyond Chickasabogue Creek Bridge as you saw them from the chinaberry tree, south of which beyond the river and the bay and the old Spanish Main of buccaneer bayou times were the seven seas.

  (Along with all of that, to be sure, there was also always that ever so indelible twelve-bar matter of old sporty limp-walking Luzana Cholly picking and plucking and knuckle knocking and strumming and drumming on his ultradeluxe twelve-string guitar singsongsaying, Anywhere I hang my hat, anywhere I prop my feet.)

  Which is also why what it all really came down to was a matter of settling in for the time being whether for the duration of the courses at the university or for the duration plus whenever, whatever, wherever. In either case, beyond the immediately functional details of basic household and neighborhood routines that incidentally were no less directly geared to the academic schedule than was campus dormitory life, there was also the also and also of all of the daily, weekly, monthly, and seasonal metropolitan attractions of greater Manhattan and vicinity, which, after all, were why New York University had been the graduate school of choice at the outset.

  One of the very first things I almost always remember is how keenly aware I was of the way the northeastern weather changed from late summer to back-to-school autumn plus Indian summer and then to early midwinter as time moved on into my first year-round stay in New York at long last. Not that I hadn’t already had to adjust to temperature changes that were every bit as different from the range of variations (mostly above zero and seldom more than ninety plus or minus degrees) that I had grown up getting used to responding to down south. But a difference was that when I was on the road with the band, adjustment had never been a matter of the coming of seasonal changes in temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, and visibility, but rather a matter of traveling into different geographical regions where the climate was different whether you arrived in winter, spring, summer, or autumn. So I already knew from personal experience what the weather of the different seasons was like in areas from border to border and coast to coast, from New England and along the Great Lakes through all of the Midwest and across the Great Plains and beyond the mountain range country to the Pacific Northwest and then down the continental shoreline to the desert and Rio Grande country sometimes before zigzagging back down-homeward across the Southwest Territory before heading back northward again, sometimes as if barnstorming off the old L & N Railroad route from New Orleans by way of Mobile up to Chicago or as if off the Mississippi River by way of Memphis to St. Louis. And sometimes also as if off the old Atlantic Coast line or Seaboard Airline up from Florida.

  But the only time between graduating from college and settling into the furnished apartment in Manhattan that I had remained in one place long enough to find out how it felt to have the seasonal changes come and go had been the more than a year of months that I had spent in Hollywood, where seasonal changes were not really very noticeable.

  Incidentally, along with all of the other special New York attractions, there were also the famous men’s clothing stores that in those days included Abercrombie & Fitch, Rogers Peet, John Davidson, and Triplers as well as Brooks Brothers, J. Press, Chips, Herzfeld, and the men’s shops in such high-fashion department stores as Saks Fifth Avenue, Bonwit Teller, and Bergdorf Goodman, but the all-purpose wardrobe I had already gotten together on the circuit included everything I needed for the time being. So it was not me but the first-time arrival from the mostly milder and shorter winter weather down home, whose seasonal initiation also of necessity included Lord & Taylor and B. Altman. Not that I did not also make the rounds with her, nor have I ever cut back on seasonal window shopping. Not in New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Beverly Hills, and never in London. On the other hand, I have never had any strong urge to do very much if any in Paris, Madrid, or Rome in the first place. Men’s clothing has never been among the things I liked about France. Once I got beyond the beret stage in Paris, that was as far as my personal interest in French men’s clothing went until the arrival of bikini swim trunks.

  You knew that the northeastern winter weather would be there very soon when the roasted-chestnut vendors began to take their places near the warm pretzel stands and pushcarts along the sidewalks. Leaves in Washington Square had already begun to change from deep summer green to an early autumn yellow here and there by the middle of October that year. So we scheduled an outing in Central Park for the second week in November to catch the colors at their peak against the blue and white brightness overhead framed by the smoky gray haze of the Manhattan skyline as we remembered it all from Technicolor movies, travel brochures, and color spreads in the slick paper magazines over the years. And you couldn’t have picked a better day to spend doing what we did that Saturday.

  On our first visit during the early part of that September, we had gone in at the entrance off Columbus Circle. So this time we began at Grand Army Plaza, at Fifty-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue and came on down by the pond and the skating rink and made our way across to Sheep Meadow and then back through the Mall and by noon we had come along the lake and past the fountain to the boathouse area, where we stopped for a snack before rambling on through part of the birdwatchers
’ sanctuary before continuing on north beyond the Great Lawn and the Metropolitan Museum of Art area to the reservoir, beyond which by late afternoon we had also come on between East and North Meadows to Harlem Mews, and finally there was 110th Street, which was also Cathedral Parkway in those days.

  We came back downtown along Fifth Avenue on one of the open double-decker buses that used to be so much fun for New Yorkers and tourists back then. So on our left were the mansions and ultradeluxe apartment buildings facing out onto and over the east side of the park, and from time to time you could also see through open spaces all the way across the malls and meadows to the towers along and beyond Central Park West.

  Then as you rolled on down below Seventy-second Street, there was the Central Park South skyline in the offing, and when you pulled on into the vicinity of the Hotel Pierre, Sherry Netherland, and the Plaza with Fifty-seventh Street and the great midtown Fifth Avenue shopping district coming up you were suddenly aware once more of being in the most cosmopolitan area in the entire Western Hemisphere. New York, New York, I whispered, thinking, Philamayork indeed: to all intents and purposes the lodestone center of the twentieth-century universe and perhaps beyond. Philamayork, ultima Thule, capital of the world!

  As we crossed Fifty-seventh Street and came on beyond Tiffany’s nudging each other and nodding at the glittering stretches of cosmopolitan shop windows, I was thinking what I was thinking about how this part of midtown Manhattan always made you feel and about how when you were in some neighborhoods, sections, and districts you forgot all about the fact that Manhattan was actually an island, even when you were overlooking the Hudson or the East River or even the Battery. And, of course, it was almost always as if the tunnels and bridges had nothing to do with going onto or going away from an island.

  But as the bus moved on along in the canyonlike flow of the Fifth Avenue traffic toward Forty-second Street and the Empire State Building at Thirty-fourth Street, everything you saw, including the ever so obvious variety of people of different nationalities, most of whom seemed to be going about their daily routine activities, reminded you of how directly this part of Manhattan was related not only to Wall Street, the banks, and rail and air terminals and not only to all of the neighborhoods in all the boroughs, but also to the world at large.

  Capital of the world I thought again, remembering Ernest Hemingway’s short story about what happened to a young Spanish country boy’s fantasies in a Madrid that was never the capital of the world as Rome had been and Paris and London became. Then there were also Balzac’s young men from the provinces in Paris of the nineteenth century. Philamayork, Philamayork, remembering how the old L N Railroad porters used to call out stations and say here it is, been long hear tell of it, and now here it is. Take everything you brought with you, you’ll need it!

  After Thirty-fourth Street there was mostly the sound of the lower midtown Manhattan traffic of that late part of the day, and as we snuggled closer and I kissed her cheek ever so softly as she nodded off, the old sweet heartthrob pop song lyric that I suddenly found myself trying to remember after all those years stretching all the way back to how I was already beginning to feel about pretty girls and crepe myrtle blossoms even before Charlene Wingate told me what she told me that spring now long since once a upon a time was if you go north or south if you go east or west. Because the refrain was then I’ll be happy, which was the title, and the first words of the chorus were then I’ll be happy. There may or may not have been a verse, but the only thing that ever mattered to me was the chorus. I want to go where you go, do what you do, then I’ll be happy, sigh when you sigh, cry when you cry . . .

  The next big cross street coming up was Twenty-third, which was still that many blocks away so what you would see first in the distance would be the triangular Flatiron Building in the point where Fifth Avenue crossed over to the west side of Broadway, which came in diagonally from Herald Square and continued on down beyond Union Square and on through Greenwich Village and across Houston Street and Canal Street on its way to City Hall, Wall Street, and the South Ferry.

  After Twenty-third Street, Fifth Avenue would continue on across Fourteenth Street and end at the Washington Arch entrance to Washington Square and the New York University campus area. But the bus turned east on Eighth Street, so we got off and came west to Sixth Avenue and then down to Fourth and headed toward Sheridan Square and home that way.

  It was not until we came back from our bus excursion to see the fall foliage up along the Hudson River countryside that following Saturday that we finally got around to tasting the roasted chestnuts from one of the sidewalk vendors between Eighth and Waverly on Sixth Avenue. And I said, OK, but I’ll take chinquapins over these and she said, Me, too, and when we got home and looked up chinquapin in the dictionary and found out that the shrub we remembered from Alabama chinquapin thickets as we remembered huckleberry bushes from Alabama huckleberry thickets was actually a species of chestnut, and I said, bush nut rather than tree nut. And that’s also when I said that the only taste of chestnuts I could remember was in a sauce for venison that I had at a big spread for the band one night in Beverly Hills.

  I said, Me and you. I said, Me and you this many miles north by east from the chinquapin thickets off the blue poplar trail to Mobile County Training School, and she said, And the huckleberry thickets in the part of Alabama I come from. And I said, And the pecan orchards as you come out of Montgomery heading east on Route 80. And then there was the old crepe myrtle blossom pop tune again, but I didn’t whistle it and I didn’t hum it, but I did cross my fingers as I kissed her again.

  VII

  The next time Taft Edison and I got together again was when he came back by the library one late morning about two weeks following that afternoon in his workshop, and that was when he said what he said about getting together from time to time beginning even before he was ready to start reading parts of his manuscript to me. Just to keep in touch, he said. Because he had decided that being two book-loving down-home boys he and I had a lot to talk about, especially about the literary possibilities of the down-home idiom. Something beyond the same old overworked sociopolitical clichés about race and injustice that had long since become so usual that they were also the expected and tolerated and indulged. Neither one of us said anything at all about the down-home music of the blues and jazz at that time, but when I got around to saying what I said about it sometime later on, he said I was on to something basic and that I should consider some sort of graduate school paper on it just for a start. No telling what else would turn up, he said. Just remember the old Hemingway principle and stick to what it has really meant to you over the years and not what somebody else thinks it should have meant. Hell, they were not there, you were.

  I said I was all for his suggestion about getting together. And then I also said that I would also be ready for my noon break in about thirty minutes, and he said in that case he would wait in the periodicals room, which was downstairs on the first floor, if I had time to have a snack with him. And I said I would and when I came downstairs he was just putting a magazine back on the rack. And we came outside and east along Forty-second Street to Vanderbilt Avenue and the Oyster Bar downstairs in Grand Central Station and ordered New England clam chowder, and what we talked about that time was what we both remembered about some of the students and members of the staff and faculty on the campus down in central Alabama. He began by asking about some of the old campus slickers who used to hang out in and around the main entrance to the very same upperclassmen’s dormitory to which my roommate and I were assigned, in a somewhat atticlike fire-escape room on the third floor as freshmen and where I remained for all four years, two by myself after my roommate left for Yale.

  Old Daddy Shakehouse, he began by saying. And I said, the Lord High Chancellor of the Outlying Regions of the after-hours juke joints. And he said, Did that old bear chaser finish whatever it was he was supposed to be taking down there in the trades school area? Hell, he must have already
been down there on that campus at least three or four years before I got there. Man, he was a notorious campus operator of long standing when I was trying to get used to being a freshman. And I said, He was there on one of the work-your-way programs and he finally did get his certificate in industrial arts at the same time that I got my degree in a course of study that amounted to liberal arts. And that he then got a job in the maintenance department and was probably still there. We were both aware that we were talking about a place with a standard of living that was much higher than what most of the student population was used to in those days and perhaps most would settle for as graduates, as most faculty and staff members obviously had.

  Old Daddy Shakehouse, he said chuckling to himself as he ate several more spoonfuls of the Oyster Bar New England clam chowder that he had not only recommended over the Manhattan recipe but also as being unsurpassed by any other around town, including Gage and Tollner’s over on Fulton Street over in Brooklyn. Old Daddy Shakehouse, he said again.

  Then he said, What about old Jay Gould, old Jay Gould Weddington? Man, you had to know who old Jay Gould Weddington was. Everybody who was down there when I was there knew about him. And I said, old Jay Gould, old Jay P., John D. Weddington, the wolf of Wall Street. Business school. Man, when I graduated he was still running them floating card games and crap shoots, and was still the number one campus loan shark and pawnbroker. I think he must have hit that campus about the same number of years ahead of me as you did, but he was another one of those special work-plan students on a part-time academic schedule because his background in clerical work was such that he already could take care of several kinds of office jobs well enough so that sometimes he worked full-time during the day and took classes during the early-evening sessions and at other times he took a full class load during the day and did part-time office hours at the end of the day or for a few hours at night.