Then he said, You noodle and doodle and jive and connive to my segue and here I come with my rawhide stride and my sporty, syncopated limp walk just like along any patent-leather avenue mainstem anywhere on the circuit, chitlin or caviar, transcontinental or intercontinental.
So there you go, young soldier, right on the money. The dancing of an attitude! Now, that’s saying something. Talking about not just what you say, but what you do and how you do it. That’s who you are. That’s your personal fingerprint, no, footprint, how about that, footprint in the footlights (thanks to Hollywood). After you’ve gone.
So what’s all this got to do with them blues you get in the planetarium? It’s what you’re stomping with, young soldier. And when you trip the light fantastic at them you really mess with them, because then you’re carrying on just like they ain’t even there. Hey, then the softer you tip, the faster they fade away! Man, that’s worse than thumbing your nose at them, because then you’re carrying on like they ain’t even there.
Man, when you start riffing on them breaks like they’re clause after clause and chapter and verse after chapter and verse of the Emancipation Proclamation, while treating all that border-to-border and coast-to-coast U.S.A. dissonance and cacophony like it’s sweet honey in the rock, you’re taking care of some business, and I’m talking about taking care of the nitty-gritty like it’s all fun and games and one feast day after another! What you talking about, young soldier, what you talking about?!
Footnotes, he said again then, that’s really pretty slick, young soldier. Footnotes! Right on the button from the get-go. Footnotes on insights and outlook. That’s exactly what riffing the blues on the afterbeat is all about. Walking that walk, like talking that talk. Because walking that walk, which ain’t straight and narrow, you’ve got to zig as well as zag. But don’t zig when you’re supposed to zag. And don’t be tapping when you’re supposed to be tipping, especially when you’re supposed to be tipping on the q.t., which I don’t have to tell you has as much to do with politics as poontang. Talking about signifying, young soldier. So let’s tell them what I’ve been showing them lo these many years on the boards here, there, and elsewhere.
So let’s roll, young soldier, he said.
Then before I could say what I was going to say about getting back to him as soon as I could spare the time, he said, So now just go on and find your classroom groove, and get back to me and let’s see what we can do about your Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks. Hey, how about me getting you all up here for Christmas? Anyway, whatever schedule we come up with, as far as I’m concerned this thing is already under way. As I’m calling to tell the Bossman and Old Pro and old Joe as soon as we hang up.
Hey, now, talking about some terpsichorean riff signification. Man, we got it percolating on the afterbeat already.
XXXII
Castle or city-state, my old long gone and now also long since last heard from but still best of all possible college freshman and sophomore year roommates imaginable used to say, Castle to castle, stone walls with or without moats (or beanstalk with or without keeps) no less than chapels whether perilous or beneficent, the second law of thermodynamics always applies. Entropy, my good man. There you have it. That’s the goods, my fine fellow. My estimate of the situation, as any elementary school trip to the planetarium should have long since made all too obvious. Elementary, my dear Watson, elementary indeed. Your notorious snark by any other terminology is still a bojum!
Thus if you miss the fun of the safari as such, what with all the standard deluxe equipment and provisions, sine qua non, you’ve missed the point! You’ve missed the metaphor! There is entropy, my good fellow, and there is metaphor, and if you miss the implications of the metaphor, you’re stuck with clichés, which most certainly should not be confused with the blisses of the commonplace! Which so often turns out to be precisely what luxury is really about after all— nay, first of all!
Moreover, he also used to like to say, arching his ever so subtly academic brow as he used the transitional device I never heard another freshman or sophomore use before or since. Moreover, as our very own La Bohème of Greenwich Village, NYC, U.S.A., said long before the publication of her ever so fatal interviews, “Whether or not we find what we are seeking is idle biologically speaking!”
So heh, heh, haay, roommate, he would go on in his mock penny dreadful villain’s voice once more, clasping his archcriminal hands and rubbing his insatiably avaricious pawnbroker’s palms, his eyes and nostrils narrowing satanically as if he also had a satanic tail to wag as he pounced!
It was ever thus, roommate, and so it will ever be—not only biologically speaking, but also geologically speaking, not to mention speaking in terms of third-grade geography after that field trip to the planetarium.
Anyway, so much for the all-American pursuit of the all-American melodramatic climax. After all, there is also the no less American soap opera, with its movie star good looks across the board and deluxe fashion and shelter magazine perfect town and country settings and dernier cri haute couture, may be concerned with existential problems that are much more relevant to human actualities as such in the context of the planetarium. After all, they almost always seem to be very well off indeed, biologically speaking. Their perpetual concern is with the ongoing problem of getting along with each other.
There is no guaranteed all-American movie-concocted melodramatic resolution out there, my ever so appropriately ambitious and unimpeachably sincere young man from the northbound L & N Railroad outskirts of Mobile, Alabama. Take it from old Geronimo, your newfound fellow trailmate from the South Side of Chicago. There is only the ultimate actuality of the entropy (repeat, entropy) of the void, upon which we impose such metaphorical devices as AND, as in (andoneandtwoandthreeandfourand) and one, and two, and three, and four and so forth and so on and on, from which we also get “and it came to pass and so on it went time after time after time, as has been recorded here, there, and elsewhere.
Picaresque, my dear fellow journeyman, he also used to like to repeat from time to time. Don Quixote and Candide, each in his own way, equals farce, the dynamics of coping with chaos, slapstick for slapdash: Buster Keaton’s deadpan, Charlie Chaplin’s ever so elegant nonchalance.
In all events, however modest that garden Candide so earnestly promises to cultivate, it had better include an adequate crop of ever more elegantly refined or at any rate resilient pratfalls, if you know what I mean.
So there you go.
XXXIII
So there you go, fellow, Eric Threadcraft said on the phone from Hollywood. Man, old Papa Joe and the crew were in town last night on a stopover on their way up the coast to Monterey, and he gave me the double rundown on what you’re up to and also heading into. Fantastic, old buddy. Like I always say, I’m still getting special kicks out of the fact that old Papa Joe was the one who had the idea that the two of us should get to know each other and stay in touch. Anyway, man, I must say that campus gig couldn’t have been more timely. And, of course, you know that the Bossman’s proposition knocks me out. Man, who else but him would realize how slick it is to begin with Royal Highness. Hey, that’s just as slick as it is deep, fellow, and so obvious that you hardly notice it.
Then before I could ask about Celeste, he said, And now comes the update on the situation chez old Mice: We are just about to do it, fellow. Man, I’m taking the plunge. So there it is, old buddy. You’re the first to know.
Then he said, Man, you remember that studio thing about foreign employee clearance that had me so nervous about political intrigue and extortion and stuff that morning when I got you to meet me at the Algonquin and then didn’t bring it up anymore because I was already so far gone on this lady that I just decided to play it as it lays.
And guess what? It turns out that what those studio-foreign background checks came across and mistook for some kind of political extortion and payoff turns out to be a very personal family matter. Man, Celeste is a very young widow with a daughter whose f
ather was what she describes as a café au lait painter from North Carolina, who was killed in a racing car accident. So guess what all the suspicion about political shake-down was about? Celeste didn’t want her child to come into this screwed-up racial situation over here until she’s gone far enough in school in Paris to have become indelibly French. Anyway, fellow, the suspicious “extortion payoffs” were all for child care. It was as simple as that. No international political intrigue at all. Hell, fellow, not even a case of small-town family illegality.
Then before saying, Buzz you later, he said, Oh, by the way, I’ve done my etymological homework on your Miss Fine People. So Eunice means happy victory! So what can I tell you? She couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person.
XXXIV
My old roommate had already said what he said about whoever turned out to be the one who was the one for me, when he replied to the letter along with the snapshot of me and Eunice that I had sent to him at Yale to tell him about what had happened to me and her between that third September and wisteria blossom time that next spring.
Man, he responded within the same week, you make it all sound like it’s those Gulf Coast area boy blue skies above those crepe myrtle yard tree blossoms and dog fennel meadows, not to mention those playhouse times all over again. But man, watch out this time around. We’re talking castles and perhaps even chapels perilous again, my man, he wrote. Because this, after all, is about fairy-tale princesses in the first place, is it not—without whom your castle may not be any more than just another earlier version of Fort Apache, if you know what I mean. Man, I know good and well that I don’t have to tell you that without a fairy-tale princess your castle is no more relevant than any old ultradeluxe wayside inn.
It is she, my good fellow, who is the embodiment of the quintessential. That fifth essence(!). Without her, there is only air, earth, water, and fire. She is the element, my man, that gets us back outside the soundless fury of the planetarium and into the realm of the blisses of the so-called commonplace!
Nor, as any competent student of architectural design and engineering should be able to testify, does the perception of the so-called blisses of the commonplace have any less to do with the dynamics of enchantment than do nursery rhymes, fables, and Mother Goose tales. After all, to us a multimillion-dollar mansion is no less a stage set for being registered as privately owned real estate!
So here again, it’s the metaphor that generates either the bliss or the banality! Thus one person’s restriction may be another person’s incentive! What one person may perceive as the outer limits of all that really matters (as the Chinese once dismissed whatever was beyond the Great Wall), another group of people may regard as the come-hither region of ever more promising horizons of aspiration.
In all events, that certainly strikes me as the snapshot of a fairy-tale princess you sent along with your update, my all too obviously lucky old cut buddy. So cross your fingers and touch your talisman and polish your wiles to their highest sheen. Who ever said that romance was not a game of chance?
Nor should you ever be unmindful of any of those slapdash— slapstick, nay, downright farcical escapades and labyrinthine misadventures old ever so jam-riff-clever Odysseus himself had to maneuver his way out of and back on course to and through the gateway to the remembered hometown boy blue bliss with the one for whom he had forsaken all others not only in Ithaca but everywhere else.
Albert Murray
THE MAGIC KEYS
Albert Murray is the author of The Omni-Americans, Stomping the Blues, The Hero and the Blues, South to a Very Old Place , Conjugations and Reiterations, and From the Briarpatch File. He is the coauthor of Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie and the coeditor of Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray. He lives in New York City.
ALSO BY ALBERT MURRAY
The Omni-Americans
South to a Very Old Place
The Hero and the Blues
Train Whistle Guitar
Stomping the Blues
Good Morning Blues:
The Autobiography of Count Basie (as told to Albert Murray)
The Spyglass Tree
The Seven League Boots
The Blue Devils of Nada
Trading Twelves:
The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray
(edited by Albert Murray and John F. Callahan)
From the Briarpatch File
Conjugations and Reiterations
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JULY 2006
Copyright © 2005 by Albert L. Murray
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and
colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents
either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events,
or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition
as follows:
Murray, Albert.
The magic keys / Albert Murray.
p. cm.
1. African American men—Fiction. 2. Graduate students—Fiction.
3. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 4. Married people—Fiction.
5. Young men—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.U764M34 2005
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eISBN: 978-0-307-42895-0
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