The Magic Keys

by Albert Murray

  You got him, I said. And then I also said, He was OK on that stuff in the Balinese islands and the southern part of Mexico, because he was looking at it as something ceremonial, ritualistic, and anthropological. But his down-home, across-the-tracks stuff and uptown stuff is only ethnic caricature that gets swinging all mixed up with being wild and gets being cool all confused with being melancholy.

  Then I said, OK, so we know very well that Callot’s Commedia dell’Arte stuff is very much the same stock character stuff as our old minstrels used to be based on. But hell, man, for my money even old Roark Bradford understood the farcical and satirical dimensions and implications of that stuff far better than Covarrubias, who gets it all tangled up with the grotesque. Man, as that tongue-in-cheek director and cast of Green Pastures knew, Old Roark was out to swing that stuff no less elegantly than Old Rabelais.

  We didn’t spend the amount of time that we usually spent browsing in Rizzoli’s whenever we were in that part of town, because it was already as late as it was when we got there that afternoon, and I wanted to get on back down to Forty-second Street to the library and the assignment I had planned to finish before going down to Washington Square. And also even as he went on talking about what we were talking about as we came back outside and along Fifth Avenue, I knew that when we came to Rockefeller Center he was going over to Sixth Avenue to take the D train down to Canal Street because he wanted to get back down to his studio and sketch pads as soon as possible.

  So when the phone rang as if on cue just as I was finishing my homework that evening I knew exactly who was calling and I picked up the receiver and said, Rollo, old Rollo. How about that stuff, Rollo? And he said, Man, what can I tell you, man, I’m off and running like a striped-assed ape. Man, I just had to stop and buzz you before you got to bed.

  And when I said, I was expecting this call, man, he said, I’m not going to keep you but a minute, but this stuff is coming at me so fast that all of a sudden I was beginning to feel like the man in that story about mounting a horse and dashing off in all directions. So I’m calling this late because I wanted to make sure to clue you to remind me to tell you about a bunch of fellow teenagers I used to hang out and make the scene in the after-hours rounds with, and how we used to sneak out after bedtime because our turf also included eavesdropping whichever any of those old rent party piano ticklers cutting contests and all-night jam sessions you could get close enough to. And man, sometimes we also used to just trail along, just following our favorite stage show entertainers to their all-night hole-in-the-wall joints. Then we would have to sneak back home to bed before daybreak. But guess what we called our crew? The Dawn Patrol. You remember that silent movie, etc.?

  When he came by the library to take me out to lunch that next Thursday, he was carrying a five-by-eight sketch pad in each of the two bottom pockets of his safari jacket. And as soon as he saw me spotting them, he smiled and patted the assortment of colored felt-tipped marking pens in the jacket’s left chest pocket and said, What can I tell you, Hawk? I’m hooked. Like I told you. All directions, coming and going. Man, I don’t dare get fifteen feet away from pen and paper. Man, I have to keep this stuff in reach, even in the bathroom.

  So you and your after-hours cut buddies used to call yourselves the Dawn Patrol, I said as we came outside and down the steps to Fifth Avenue and headed south to Forty-first Street on the way over to a French bistro on Madison Avenue that he wanted me to check out. And he said, Making the rounds, man. Talking about making the rounds, and we also used to call ourselves the Rounders. Here come the old rounders, bounders, and sidewalk pounders, which meant that you had to be slick enough not to get spotted by the cops walking the beats and tapping the lampposts and curbs with their billy clubs in those days.

  Then he went on to remember that the main avenues were Lenox and Seventh, and the cross streets were 125th, 135th, and 145th, with 125th Street just hitting its stride as he reached his mid-teenage years. And the Apollo was becoming as famous for having the music of the great bands onstage as the Savoy Ballroom up on Lenox was for dance dates and swing band battles. Down the block from the Apollo there was the Hotel Theresa, on the corner of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue. It was also during this time that the Hotel Theresa bar was just becoming the mainstem where most musicians, actors, entertainers, sports-writers, entertainment page columnists, politicians, pimps, gamblers, and racketeers popped in almost every day to keep current.

  There was also the Woodside Hotel, up on Seventh Avenue and 142nd Street. It’s a long block over from the Savoy on the east side of Lenox Avenue, stretching from 140th Street to 142nd Street. By the time I left town for my freshman year in college, the Theresa was the cornerstone of the mainstem and there were joints jumping in just about every block east to Park Avenue and west to Broadway and the Hudson River.

  At the cozy little French restaurant, we were seated immediately, and as the waiter left with our orders, I said, Believe it or not, Rollo, but down in that sawmill and L & N section gang quarters settlement on the outskirts of Mobile that I come from, my running buddy and I began eavesdropping outside the old piano and/or guitar jook joints and honky-tonks and at about the same time that we were considered big enough to go to and from school on our own.

  I said, We called ourselves the Rover Boys because we were also explorers and trailblazers. And then there was a classmate I started running around with as I moved on from junior to senior high school. We were the ones who eavesdropped on the admission fee dance hall dances, where the bands from downtown Mobile and New Orleans and other towns in the southeast territory used to play from time to time. We called ourselves the Night Owls. But actually we had to be home and in bed by midnight, because we were underage! And then we didn’t have the price of admission anyway.

  The latest thing we got a chance to stay up for back then was the radio, with those coast-to-coast network hookups. Back in those days they used to sign off at midnight, so eleven to midnight in New York was only ten to eleven in Mobile. So we knew about the Cotton Club in New York, the Grand Terrace in Chicago, and old Louis at Frank Sebastian’s Cotton Club all the way out in California.

  That was when we said what we said about listening to the sports announcers broadcasting the Rose Bowl games, the World Series, and the championship prizefights on radio. And he said, Look, man, we had a radio right there at home, but I’m sure you already know that the Dawn Patrol always had to get together somewhere for stuff like that even if it was in our own living room. Some things you might just take in on your own, but not stuff like that.

  He had taken his work pads from the pockets of his safari jacket and I had just started looking at his sketches and doodles he had pushed across to me when I saw the waiter coming back with our orders. And I said, I can already see what you mean by all directions. You also mean panorama. So now you’ve got to look out for old Goya. Old Goya zooming in. Old Goya’s microscope. Old Goya’s X-ray. All become old Rollo’s vamps, riffs, takeoffs, and getaways on Jacques Callot plus the Belle Epoque. We started in on our lunch as I was saying what I was saying, but before we were half finished, he opened the other work pad and started doodling and sketching again, moving back and forth from plate and fork to pen and pad as smoothly as if he were taking dictation on the phone while eating and talking about what we were talking about.

  Then, when it was time for me to be on my way back across to Fifth Avenue and the library, I said, Man, you and old Taft Edison. You and the Bossman Himself, and Old Pro and old Joe States. I said, Here I am, doing what I’m doing on this goddamn schedule and there you guys are, doing what you’re doing on your own. Because you want to and even as you’re doing it for yourself, you’re also doing it for others. Others here, there, and elsewhere. I said, One of these days, man. One of these days. But as of now I’ve got to be going back to the salt mines at Forty-second and Fifth.

  XVII

  The next time I had a midafternoon snack with Taft Edison our table was the same one at whic
h I remembered finding Old Pro having breakfast and checking through the final morning editions of the newspapers as the two-way traffic outside along 125th Street rolled east and west between Seventh and St. Nicholas Avenues on that first day in New York. I was on my way with my guidebook to see as much of midtown Manhattan as I could find my way around to alone before coming back uptown by check-in time for rehearsal. So I had come in to have a very quick snack, but when I saw him there by himself I remembered what Joe States had said about getting to the one closest to the Bossman Himself as soon as I could catch him off-duty and alone, I cut back on my sightseeing plans and asked him if I could join him.

  I didn’t mention anything about any of this to Taft Edison as we settled into our seats and gave our orders to the waiter that afternoon. Because when he called me that night before about joining him to check out the matinee performance of the band being featured at the Apollo Theatre that week, he had also sounded urgent when he said that there was a personal matter that he wanted to tell me about, and I was still waiting for him to bring up whatever it was, because he had not yet given me any clue to what it was about. Not even during the set changes between the variety acts.

  He hadn’t brought it up on our way to the restaurant and as we waited for the drinks he began talking about the music we had just heard, and about the band, which had begun as one of those now-legendary “territory bands” like the old Oklahoma City Blue Devils that he had grown up hanging around, as I used to listen to Papa Gladstone’s Dance and Mardi Gras Marching Band in Mobile and at the Boom Men’s Union Hall Ballroom up on Green’s Avenue in Plateau. The territory bands operated mainly out of Kansas City, which was where the Blue Devils became a part of the nucleus of the world famous Count Basie Band.

  Those guys. That music, Taft Edison said as we finished our drinks and started on our snack. That’s something I always have to keep in touch with. Hearing and seeing those guys riffing that stuff like that reinforces my connection with a lot of idiomatic fundamentals that I am not only trying to work in terms of as a writer, but also that I don’t ever want to get too far away from as a person. Man, that stuff plus all of that old church stuff was my raw material even when the music I was trying to learn to compose was concert hall music. Which is why I was all the way down there in Alabama and not at Juilliard or the Boston Conservatory or even Oberlin in the first place.

  And that is when he also said, Man, just the opposite of those folks taking owls to Athens, or coals to Newcastle, I’m trying to take chitlins to the Waldorf. And I suspect you’re also up to the same caper. Otherwise why would a liberal arts major with a fellowship to graduate school spend as long as you spent on the road with a band that keeps dipping as deep down into that old gut bucket no matter what else he’s up to. Anyway, the more I think about it the more I look forward to running some of my prose sequences by you even while I’m still fiddling around with them.

  Look, he also said, I know quite a few literary experts up here who think they know where I’m trying to go. But I’m counting on you to spot where I’m coming from. After all, since you and I took going to college as seriously as the best of them did we don’t need them to tell us what we’re trying to do. We just want them to be un-condescending enough to acknowledge what we are doing when we do it.

  It was not until we were almost through eating and ready to order coffee that he finally got around to bringing up the personal matter that he had mentioned on the phone the night before. And it turned out to be personal not in the sense that it was a very intimate private matter, but only in the fact that it concerned him as an individual. Which did not make it any less important or urgent, but it did make it less delicate and not embarrassing to talk about. But no less confidential—or maybe even more confidential because it was also potentially if not already a matter of personal security.

  Because it was about politics. By which it immediately became clear that he meant political indoctrination and recruitment for international revolution, any involvement with which required a degree of loyalty that exceeded the strictest religious devotion known to most Americans, if you were not for the organization you couldn’t possibly be neutral or politically uninvolved, you were against it and might even be a special espionage agent whose purpose was to collect names for some sort of blacklist for investigation by some wing of the federal government.

  You remember me telling you about those party girls and those pamphlets? he said. And about how I got myself mistaken for a likely prospect, because instead of throwing that crap in the trash can en route to the subway the next morning, I read it?! I told you about that. Well man, I’m not sure that that crew don’t have me tagged as an active enemy of the goddamn cause. I do think I have reason to believe that they are checking me out for some reason. Now it could be to find out whether or not I’m worth intensifying their drive to recruit me since I’ve published several little pieces of attempts at few basic definitions, nothing polemical, no clear cut position taken or specific political alignment, just attempts at elementary clarification. But you never know what they might make of it. They might see it for what it is and write me off for an academic which I’m not. Or they might decide that it is some sort of cover device for my underground mission. Anyway I’m pretty damn sure they’re checking me out, and I don’t know what the hell they’re up to.

  Man, he said, if this sounds paranoid, hell, maybe I am paranoid. But damn if I’m hallucinating—as I think I’m going to be able to show you before you head back downtown. Maybe I’m exaggerating but not out of thin air I assure you. I’m a suspicious son of a bitch I admit, but I’m not that suspicious.

  And that was when he said what he said about being more of a loner than anything else and reminded me that if I remembered anything about him from that year when we were on the campus down in Alabama at the same time, I couldn’t possibly have missed noticing that he kept to himself most of the time when he was not with the band or in class. And I agreed. Not that he ever struck me as being out of touch with what the hip crowd was up to.

  I made a reasonable share of the dance parties and the seasonal balls, he said. But I never was a joiner of any kind. Not even back in Oklahoma City. I had my contacts, but I didn’t belong to any gang. My only club on campus was really a scholarship club that also had its own socials from time to time.

  Then he got the waiter’s attention, and as we were waiting for the tab he nudged me and nodded toward a pedestrian strolling along the sidewalk outside the plate glass window and said, Whether you noticed it or not he’s been passing back and forth and looking in here ever since we came in. Sometimes on this side of the street and sometimes on the other, and I’m pretty sure that he’s not going any further east than Seventh Avenue and no further west than St. Nicholas.

  And I said, Now that you mention it. But after all I am not familiar enough with this part of town to make anything of what he might be up to. What do you make of it?

  And that’s when he said, Well now he could be a pimp keeping tab on his chippie or chippies. Or he could be in the numbers racket. Maybe. But I don’t think so, unless they’re just breaking him in, and I doubt that the numbers wheels would put a novice in this area. You earn your way up to territory like this. And of course he could be a greenhorn out on his own trying to peddle some cheap light stuff. But I don’t think so. No, this just might be something else. I have my suspicions. The question is whether this guy is as obvious as I think he is because he’s supposed to be obvious.

  So let’s find out, he said as we came outside and headed for the subway stop at 125th and St. Nicholas Avenue. He didn’t look back to see if we were being followed but he steered me to the uptown entrance instead of the downtown side. He still didn’t look back to see if we were being followed. But when we pulled into the 145th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue station, we crossed over to the downtown platform and took the express to Columbus Circle, from where he said he was taking the bus back uptown, and I continued on downtown on the expre
ss to West Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue.

  Well, that was that, he said on the phone when he called after I came home from class that night. I think he may have given up on it when we switched over on 145th. Anyway, my guess as of now is that the organization is spot-checking me. They evidently think that this writing involvement makes me somewhat special. On the one hand it’s something they can utilize in a number of ways in propaganda operations, not just as a journalist or a theorist working on one of their own publications, but as one of their agents working as a regular staffer on some establishment publications.

  But the problem as he saw it was not a simple matter of saying yes or no. The problem was that they knew that he spent Mondays through Fridays writing whatever he was writing in an office on Fifth Avenue at Forty-ninth Street as if on an official schedule for which he was paid by the hour. So, as far as they were concerned, he could very well be an undercover agent of some kind on official payroll and yet as he explained it, it was not necessarily as simple as that either. Because in addition to having to be on the alert for counterrevolutionary agents they also had to be able to spot agents from their own internal security system.

  I just called to fill you in, he said. That’s what I had in mind when I called about meeting to catch the show, and then there it was. So now I just want you to know that I don’t think it has anything to do with you personally. But if you notice anything like what happened today, let me know. I have my ways of dealing with invasions of my privacy. After all—or really first of all—I’m trying to write a goddamn novel, man, and, besides, I absolutely have no patience at all with any outfit that operates on the assumption that it has to enslave me in order to free me. Hell, I know something about military and also maritime discipline and these characters don’t allow furlows or shore leave.