Modern American Memoirs

by Annie Dillard

  Shoot the Piano Player

  At sixteen I was embarking on a course that would admit me to the preeminent cabarets and ballrooms of Boston and San Francisco—a piano bench my passkey—entering via the back doors of assorted waterfront dives, backstreet saloons, and turnpike toilets. Tiny’s Carousel, on Route 9 between Worcester and Boston, embodied the middle reaches of the final category. A sign over the bar said, “Our waitresses are ladies of unimpeachable moral character,” and the band, a quartet, featured a Negro on tenor sax who played rings around everyone in town. I later learned that I acquired the job (following an undistinguished audition) and held on to it by grace of Tiny’s having come up before my uncle, a fairly well-known Worcester County judge, on an extortion charge. My uncle had given him a small fine and probation, and Tiny was the soul of deference and congeniality throughout my tenure at his club. “A fine upstanding man, your uncle the judge,” he’d say at the slightest provocation. Tiny hired only strippers six feet tall and over. Glamazons, he called them. I believe the coinage originated with Billy Rose at his Diamond Horseshoe. Tiny’s six-footers had names like Belle Adonna, Beryl Bang! (exclamation point hers), Eve Cherry, and Ginger Rhale. They rarely brought in music, simply asking for “some slow blues” or “any jump tune, medium tempo, ’bout like this”—snapping a thumb and middle finger in a brisk ellipse—or “‘Satin Doll,’ medium-slow, couple choruses, stop time on the bridge; when I’m down to the bra and G-string, double time and out.”

  Tiny, according to my uncle the judge, was a man “of humble origins and acquired manners.” Short and chunky, with a comical rocking motion to his walk, he intoned in a soft, husky voice expressions of civility such as “Happy to be making your acquaintance,” on being introduced to a new customer, and “Try the veal parmigiana, it’ll enliven the palate.” His introductions of the acts were equally florid: “Now for your postprandial pleasure, the pulchritudinous Ginger Rhale…” The second night of Ginger’s engagement Tiny changed her billing to “Silverella.” A lissome ebony-skinned beauty (“I grew up on a boulevard of broken lights,” I overheard her tell a man at the bar), she emerged from behind a red velvet curtain in glittering silver headdress and swirling layers of diaphanous mauve and scarlet, tracing a sinuous course between the tables under a pale blue spot to a Fats Waller medley of “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now.” Gutbucket tenor and boiling drums propelled the medley through a progression of crescendos, spurring Silverella to impassioned maneuvers—now prancing like a thoroughbred mare, now swinging her head to the floor, legs taut as a stork’s, and straightening abruptly with a rapid-fire shimmy of shoulders and switching of hips—all the while loosening strategically placed strings, allowing raiment to spin tempestuously from her body in incarnadine streamers. Thundering tom-toms, mingling with the crowd’s raucous exhortations, built to a frenzied pitch, rolling into the climax—the blue spot winking out on a vision that stormed the blood: Silverella, throat arched and arms akimbo, revealed in all her extravagant glory but for a phosphorescent coat of silver paint, collarbone to toes (and this fifteen years before Goldfinger!), shining diabolically in the black light. A hollering, foot-stomping ovation followed her regal exit through the swirling red curtain. She colored my dreams, Silverella, the most erotic fantasies I’ve ever known, and she departed before I could muster the courage to speak a word to her.

  Beryl Bang! was equally statuesque but more accessible. She had recently graduated from Pembroke, was funny and imaginative, and told me she had perfected her supple feline strut by conjuring a metamorphic image of herself as a Persian cat strolling along the top of a fence on a moonlit night. Her legs went on forever (“Do they go all the way up?” inquired a leering businessman as she sauntered past his table; “All the way to heaven, dearie,” came her over-the-shoulder retort), and her raven hair fell like a lace shawl about her shoulders. Toward the end of her engagement I plucked raw courage out of the air:

  “How about a bite of supper after the last show, Miss Bang!?”

  She wore three-inch spikes; I was five feet six, and her green gaze, which seemed to descend on me from the eaves, was not unkindly. “Honey, look at me and look at you and tell me what we’re gonna do together.”

  Strippers, I was learning, appropriate for their art the best, bluest, gutsiest tunes of the day, and that year and a half at Tiny’s was probably the happiest time I’ve ever known. Home at two in the morning and up at seven for school; trying to nap in the late afternoons but too keyed up in anticipation of nightfall, the lights, the funky, vibrant club and long-legged glamazons, and the music that sent the blood leaping and bucking in my veins.

  As it must to all nightclubs, the IRS came to Tiny’s Carousel—dispassionate agents armed with padlocks—and I gravitated back to Worcester, a solo spot at Vincent’s in the Shrewsbury Street Italian section. This was a shiny and opulent cabaret, incongruously situated among the neighborhood groceries, laundries, and pizzerias, and frequented by members of the thriving Worcester-Boston-Providence axis of La Cosa Nostra. I never learned who Vincent was. The manager, whom I’ll call Guido, owned two cocker spaniels, and every night at closing time he’d set out twin yellow bowls of food on either side of the leather-padded door, beneath the zebra-striped awning. Inside was a black marble fireplace and lots of mirrors on the crimson walls; from different angles they glittered and flashed with light thrown from the banquettes’ silver and glassware. The bar was separate, a small horseshoe affair called The Paddock, with black glass-top tables and framed photographs of racetracks and horses. In an alcove between the supper room, where I worked, and the bar was a combination coatcheck stand and cigarette counter operated by a pretty, faded woman attired in mesh stockings, satin corselet, and pillbox hat. This was Guido’s sister, and I would soon become overly familiar with a phrase that she invariably appended to her offhand remarks: “It’s fairly common knowledge, but for the love of God don’t quote me.”

  At that time you could distinguish the mob-patronized clubs by the preponderance of good-looking women who appeared to be unattached—it took an immoderately courageous or naïve outsider to find out—and middle-aged men in conservative suits. The younger men dressed more elegantly but still along reserved lines—dark suits of shiny material and monogrammed white shirts and light-colored silk ties, the sole note of ostentation residing in the cufflinks and tiepins that gleamed opulently in the restrained bar lights. The mobsters enjoyed contemporary music and the kindred arts—singing, dancing, comedy. They liked to conduct their business and relax in sleek and animated surroundings and could grow misty-eyed listening to a pretty girl singing a sentimental tune.

  I backed singer Amy Avallone and played solo segments around her. She was a full-bodied, sloe-eyed woman with olive skin and a marauding walk. (“Honey, I only walk down wide corridors ’cause I bruise kinda easy,” I heard her say to an aging mafioso.) She came in that first night wearing a luxurious fur coat, a monogrammed leather folder under one arm and a blue silk gown over the other; she dropped the folder on the piano. “Let’s run over my charts before the place fills up.”

  I glanced through the arrangements; they were elaborate and overwritten, dense with notes. My reading skill at the time was rudimentary, and to speak frankly, the notation looked about as decipherable as a spattering of bird droppings across a barn wall.

  “I know most of the tunes; why don’t we just fake them?”

  “I paid good loot for these charts. You can read, can’t you?”

  “Let’s save ourselves trouble. Just write out the order with keys and number of choruses.”

  She leaned her elbows disconsolately on the piano and for a moment seemed to be studying her reflection in the polished wood; then she muttered something under her breath that sounded like a resigned “What a pity.” When I got to know her better I realized the phrase had been “Shit city.”

  She opened each of her three nightly sets with “Once in Love with Amy” and closed with
some sprightly, maudlin jumper like “Aren’t You Glad You’re You?” (Ev’ry time you’re near a rose / Aren’t you glad you’ve got a nose?). The mafiosi ate it up. Part of my job was to boost her to a sitting position on the baby grand à la Helen Morgan, in one of her strapless sheaths (she wore a different one for every set and a week would elapse before I noticed a repeat). A rich and heady perfume came off her throat and shoulders like mist off a still pond, and I’d retreat from these exquisite exertions reeling.

  Between her sets I played ballads and show tunes of the day, trying to impress with a lot of gloss and technical display—cross-handed embellishments, two melodies rendered simultaneously (Watch this, Alec Templeton), and rhythmic variations on sturdy warhorses like “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”—what musicians call flagwavers. I thought it wouldn’t hurt to get on the right side of these guys. (Guido’s sister had told me he’d tried a pair of strolling fiddlers when the place first opened, “but the clientele wasn’t all that crazy about the horsehair shafts poking into their lobster Newburg. They lasted three nights and no one’s heard of them since. It’s fairly common knowledge, but for the love of God don’t quote me.”) What sometimes drifted across my mind as I served up my flagwavers to the blankly pretty women and blunt-featured men was an account I’d read in National Geographic of primitive Indian tribesmen in the remote upper reaches of the Amazon displaying “extraordinary emotional responses” to a recording of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto.

  Guido took me aside one night. Unlike his conservatively dressed clientele, he wore a brown shirt and yellow tie with his pin-stripe suit. Complaints had come his way: people were having trouble recognizing the melody, and a highly esteemed party at a reserved table had remarked that the piano player couldn’t seem to keep a steady beat—sadly mistaking my embroideries for rhythmic instability.

  “I like you, you’re a nice boy,” Guido said. “Amy wishes you’d use her music, but she’s happier than she was with the last guy. Now, you want to make an old businessman happy? My friends are simple good-time Charlies, they don’t like a lot of adornment. Knock off the fancy flourishes, cut down the DiMaggios [arpeggios]. Leave us hear the melody, capisc’?” And he drove a short playful right to my midriff and slapped my cheek in a friendly but brisk manner.

  Later that night an old and battered mafioso approached the piano while I was playing a medley from Oklahoma. His face was deeply seamed, and coarse tufts of gray hair sprouted from the backs of his thick hands. They lowered onto mine, at first merely covering them, then gently pressing them into the dead keys as if he were reluctantly squashing a pair of harmless but repulsive insects; “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top” went flatter than a doormat.

  “Play ‘Ciao, Ciao, Bambina.’ It’s for my wife.” His voice was a hoarse whisper. “Play it every ten minutes until I tell you to stop.” He raised off my hands, which involuntarily retained their crushed-bug position, and dropped a five-dollar bill on the piano; it fluttered like an autumn leaf, brushing the keyboard, coming to rest in my lap. To my considerable relief I knew the tune, thanks to my apprenticeship at the Italian-American Social Club two years earlier—and found myself smiling in recollection, thinking “Eat, Eat, Babe Ruth,” which had been an Armenian bass player’s designation for “Ciao, Ciao, Bambina.”

  Guido wandered in from the bar, grimacing painfully and banging the heel of his palm against his ear like a long-distance swimmer emerging from a heavy surf. “What’s with the same song, you’re sounding like a broken record.” I told him of the unusual request and pointed out the party who had made it. Guido took a look and said, “Keep playing it.”

  Now that I was reactivating my Italian repertoire and playing unadorned melody, a steady stream of drinks began arriving at the piano. I was drinking an occasional beer at the time but was not yet into the heavy stuff. I tried to cut off the flow; if a drink was pressed on me or arrived unsolicited I let it stand on the piano until it went flat. Guido noticed this aberration and spoke to me during a break.

  “It’s not a friendly attitude.”

  I told him if I accepted every drink offered me I’d be finished by the time I was thirty. (A piano-bar player I knew in Provincetown handled this problem by announcing at the start of the evening, “As I’m allergic to both booze and flowers, thunderous applause and the clatter of silver dollars will do nicely. Thanks a million.”)

  Guido gave a sad little smile and laid a parental hand on my shoulder. “Always order the drink. The bartender will send up colored water. Order an Old Fashioned, we’ll load it with fruit, you’ll have yourself a nutritious snack, capisc’?”—followed by the right to the midsection and the friendly slap across the face.

  I soon began to retch at the sight of maraschino cherries and orange slices. A stranger dropped into the club late one night, an out-of-town boy by the looks of him—charcoal suit, checked shirt, white scarf—and seeing three untouched Old Fashioneds lined up in front of me, said, “You seem to be overloaded here.” He hefted one and took a generous slug; a contemplative expression came over his face. “I see Guido’s still pouring the same old swill.” The next night I asked the bartender to substitute gin rickeys sans gin and very light on the lime juice. He had never been overly friendly toward me and greeted my request with mute contempt. I think I can safely interpose a blanket judgment here: bartenders are not enamored of musicians. They begrudge us our short hours—roughly half theirs—and our frequent (union-sanctioned) intermissions. A businessman at Tiny’s Carousel once tried to buy the band champagne cocktails. The bartender told him, “Pouring champagne for this crew is like feeding a pig strawberries,” and his accompanying smile failed to conceal the underlying rancor.

  After a month backing Amy Avallone I helped her on with her coat one Saturday night as she was leaving. It was either mink or a class muskrat and gave off a fragrance like a moon-splashed field of jasmine. I opened the door for her and blurted, “How about going somewhere for coffee?” She glanced at me in a sidelong, questioning way, smiling and frowning at the same time; a low chuckle rose in her throat. “You tired of living?” I watched her swing voluptuously across the street on spike heels, her breath pluming in the chill morning, and slide into the front seat of a black Chrysler. A man in a dark, shiny suit sat behind the wheel, smoking. At my feet Guido’s cocker spaniels were scarfing noisily from the twin yellow bowls. The club door opened, and the elderly mafioso who had flattened my hands on the keyboard a week earlier came out. He breathed deeply of the crisp air, buttoning his overcoat.

  “Guido tells me your name is Asher,” he said in his soft hoarse voice.

  “That’s right.”

  “Your father’s the judge?”

  “Uncle.”

  He nodded sagely and gazed down at the busy spaniels; an almost angelic smile crept over the bulbous, weathered face as he stooped laboriously to fondle one of the golden heads. “I see you dogs’re dining out again tonight,” he whispered.

  Guys and Dolls and Call Me Madam opened on Broadway, and eighty blocks north Bird and Dizzy were generating lightning bolts in the night sky over Harlem. I had moved to Boston and was studying with a virtuoso black jazz pianist at the Berklee College of Music (“You’ll have to pick up your final credits,” he told me, “in the University of the Streets of New York”), supporting myself by working with Rudy Yellin’s Society Orchestra. At wedding receptions, when the newlyweds posed with bright grins, their entwined hands gripping the engraved silver knife, we played the year’s hit tune, “If I Knew You Were Coming I’d’ve Baked a Cake.”

  On a busy Saturday night Rudy would have a dozen or more combos working in the Boston area’s hotels, country clubs, lodges, catering halls, and private homes. From a reservoir or “stable” of musicians he was able to put together units of any size and specification to fit a hostess’ needs. This pool consisted mainly of middle-aged professionals, family men moderate in habit and mien, who could both read and fake. (Only in the music business is the word “fak
e” nonpejorative. People are always asking musicians if they read or play by ear; most do both, but this reply for some reason creates consternation, as if an airline captain were to claim to be both pilot and navigator. A Boston colleague of mine responds to all such queries, “I read pretty good but not without moving my lips.”) Rudy’s stableboys, as they jocularly or plaintively referred to themselves, gave Rudy first call on all nights in return for a guaranteed annual income. They were steady and dependable (some had daytime occupations), maintained a repertoire of current pop and show tunes, and stuck close to the melody on their choruses. The younger jazz and club-date musicians scorned them as “mickeymouse” or “ricky-tick” players, but a good many could have acquitted themselves creditably in a Harlem jam session, and their families ate regularly.

  There is less real music to the society-band business than people think; or, putting it another way, the music itself is frequently a minor ingredient. The success of an organization like Rudy’s depends to a great extent on contacts with banquet and catering managers, club social directors, society leaders, columnists, and other community machers; this entails constant wining, dining, or alternative forms of cajolery. Competition is keen and bandleaders will often vie for engagements by outfitting their musicians in exotic costumes to fit an ethnic or thematic occasion. It’s the old sell-the-sizzle-not-the-steak concept. Theme parties are the bane of the professional musician’s existence, reducing him, in the space of one night, to the level of the meat-market clerk in phosphorescent green vest and paper bow tie on St. Patrick’s Day. With Rudy I found myself working classy hotel rooms and country clubs, attired in striped blazer, Hawaiian shirt (lei optional), serape, Gay Nineties brocaded vest (with straw boater and sleeve garters), balloon-sleeved Greek tunic, coolie shift and hat (endless choruses of “Slow Boat to China”), bowler derby, yarmulke, and accessories coincident to Halloween, Valentine’s Day, Thanksgiving, St. Patrick’s Day, Christmas, and the Fourth of July. It is the closest the professional musician comes to prostitution, other than playing the parlor upright in a reconstructed New Orleans whorehouse.