The Jazz Kid

by James Lincoln Collier

  Mr. Sylvester nodded. “They all are. The uniforms always get them.”

  “It isn’t just the uniforms,” I said. “I used to take piano.”

  He nodded. Suddenly he grabbed hold of my chin. “Show your teeth.”

  I opened my mouth. “Aanngg,” I said.

  “Just your teeth, not your tonsils. I saw all the tonsils I ever wanted to see conducting the girls’ chorus.”

  I snapped my teeth together and spread my lips, feeling like a horse trying to catch hold of an apple. “Good,” he said. “I think we can make a cornetist out of you.” He let go of my jaw, and jabbed his finger towards my eyes. “But you have to practice.” He gave me a serious look over the finger. “No point in even coming back if you aren’t going to practice.”

  “You hear that, Paulie?” Ma said.

  Well, I’d let myself in for it this time, all right. I had nobody to blame but myself. For now I would have to practice—there was no way around it. If I hadn’t begged so hard I could have gone along with it for a few weeks and then quit. But after Ma’d taken all that trouble—talked Pa around and got me to promise to do better in school, and carried me over to Hull House and everything, I would have to stick it out for a while. I’d outsmarted myself, I could see that. But maybe some good would come out of it. Maybe I could make Ma proud of me for once. That would be nice for a change.

  So that’s how it started. And for a couple of weeks it was pure misery. Before, when I had heard those kids tootling away in that parade I didn’t have any idea how hard it was just to get a sound out of that cornet, much less a note anyone would want to listen to. But after about a week of puffing and blowing, I got so I could get some notes out—pretty wobbly they were, more like a sick cow mooing than music, but notes even so. That encouraged me a little; and I was more encouraged after my third lesson, when I got to where I was playing some little tunes out of the songbook. “Maryland, My Maryland,” “Home, Sweet Home,” stuff like that. Well, I tell you, Ma was pleased as punch. Once, when I was whacking my way through my tunes she came and stood at the door of our room, listening. And I’ll be darned if after a minute she didn’t reach up and brush at her eye, like she had something in it. Of course Ma wasn’t much more of an expert on music than Pa was, aside from singing in the church choir when she was a kid. Still, when she rubbed her eye that time, it made me swell up so much I could hardly play.

  That night at supper she told Pa, “Paulie’s doing real well on his cornet, Frank. You should hear him.”

  “Humph,” Pa said. “Let’s hope he’s doing real good at school, too.” But after supper he came into our room and made me play “Maryland, My Maryland” for him. All he said was, “Humph,” but I could tell he was kind of surprised. It was those piano lessons, as little practicing as I did for them. They made all the difference, for the hardest part of reading music is getting the time right—quarter rests and dotted eighths and stuff—and I already knew how to do that. For a beginner I was ahead of myself. Even Mr. Sylvester said so. “I’m not saying what you’re playing could be considered music, Horvath, but I’ve heard worse. Keep at it and pretty soon I’ll put you in the band and give you the uniform that inspired you with your deep love of music.”

  It made me kind of proud of myself. I wouldn’t say it was the first time I ever did anything right. I was good at baseball—at recess I always got picked second or third after Rory, who had got left back and was a year older than the rest. I was good at sailing paper airplanes—me and Rory would shoot them off his back porch, which was tricky because of the clotheslines. But it wasn’t often that I was good at things the grown-ups admired. It was nice having Ma proud of me for a change. But it wasn’t pleasing Ma that kept me plugging away at those rotten exercises. It was remembering that gold and red, that sound and confusion and two bands playing at once. Somehow, that stuff was mine, where the plumbing business and fringed lampshades belonged to Pa and Ma and John. That’s why I could tolerate those rotten exercises— they didn’t have anything to do with the rest of the family.

  Still, practicing wasn’t any peck of fun. There was always something new to struggle with—a new key signature, triplets, six-eight time. Each time I started on something new I’d have to fight with myself to get through it. But then, when I had as much of the exercises as I could take, I let myself play some of the tunes I already knew. That was fun, just slinging the notes out there and listening to what they were saying; and if I hit off something real smooth it would kind of excite me that it was me who was doing it.

  So even though it was a struggle a lot of the time, I’d shove and haul myself through it, for I could see that I was getting somewhere. And I decided to stick it out at least until I got into the band and had my uniform, and played in a parade at last.

  So I did. Along about October, Mr. Sylvester told me I wasn’t what anybody would call a cornet player, but neither were half the kids in the band, and I might as well join in—I wasn’t likely to do enough damage to be noticed. They said the band was likely to parade on Thanksgiving and it always gave a Christmas concert. I figured I might as well stick it out to Christmas. That’d make six months, which was longer than I ever stuck to anything in my life. After that I’d see. Then something happened, and my whole life was changed.

  WHAT HAPPENED WAS, just before Thanksgiving we had a real cold spell—it can get mighty cold anytime in Chicago. A lot of people weren’t prepared for it, and their pipes froze. Well, of course, that was good business for Pa, but it meant he was on the run morning, noon, and night, for everything was an emergency. He even took John out of school for a couple of days; John was fifteen, and Pa trusted him to handle simple jobs by himself. So I had to go with Pa as a plumber’s helper.

  The night before Thanksgiving around eight o’clock we got an emergency call from a place called the Society Cafe, on De Koven Street. All the pipes in the cellar had frozen, and a couple of them had busted. They had to shut off the water and close the place down, which didn’t make the guy who owned the club too happy. John was already on a job, so Pa took me. We lugged the toolboxes over on the streetcar—you had to take a lot of stuff, for you never knew what you might come up against.

  The place was a real dump, a one-story wood building with a tin roof, running back from the street. Paint was peeling off the clapboards, and there were green curtains over the windows so nobody could see what was going on inside. Pa climbed up the low stoop and knocked on the door. The guy who opened the door was big—not so much fat as heavyset, black hair slicked back, wearing a camel’s hair overcoat. He scowled at Pa. “What took you so long?”

  “We came as quick as we could.”

  “Let’s go,” he said. He took us around back where there was a cellar door and let us in. It was a mess down there—cold dirt floor, wet brick walls, empty beer kegs giving off an old beer stink, a few busted chairs chucked in a corner, the coal furnace, and just one bare light bulb dangling down from the floor joists above. It was so cold we could see our breath. “Let’s get this over with,” Pa said.

  We set to work—well, Pa set to work and I did the best I could to stay out of his way, except to hand him tools when he asked for them, or hold the bull’s-eye lantern where he wanted it. We were going along like this, with Pa cursing to himself a good deal and calling out, “Damn it, Paulie, can’t you hold that light so it don’t shine in my eyes?” when I heard people walking around upstairs.

  “Somebody came in up there,” I said.

  “Never mind them. Where’s that one-inch elbow I had a minute ago?”

  The footsteps came right over my head. Then I heard a sound I never forgot: a stream of cornet notes suddenly spilling down, like a cascade of little silver balls. The sound froze me dead in my tracks, my mouth open, the elbow clutched in my hand.

  “Damn it, Paulie, where’s that elbow?”

  I came to and gave him the elbow. Then the stream of silver balls came again, this time splashing upwards a little after they hit bo
ttom. My head froze up again. Oh, I knew what it was—a cornet player warming up. But it was the way he hit those notes, just exactly so, that caused my head to stop working. They came out so delicate, light, precise, with just a sprinkling of vibrato dusted on the end of each note.

  “Damn it, Paulie, how many times do I have to tell you, move that light around here.”

  I jumped, suddenly back in that cold, damp cellar again. “I couldn’t hear you over that cornet.”

  “Forget about that cornet. It’s just that nigger music. Let’s get this job done and get out of here.”

  What did he mean by nigger music? How could anything that pretty be nigger music? Now from overhead there came the sound of somebody noodling on a piano, running a few scales up and down the keyboard. It was a pretty bad piano—even down there I could tell it was way out of tune. The cornet player peeled off another string of silver balls, and after that there was silence.

  “Give me that twine, Paulie.”

  I handed it to him. Overhead there came the quick tapping of four beats on the floor, and then they were going, just piano and cornet, some kind of music I never heard before, a music that danced along like sunshine flickering on the ripples in a lake. A chill went up my spine and curled across the top of my head.

  “Damn it, Paulie. I told you to forget about that nigger music.”

  “I’m sorry, Pa, I couldn’t hear with that music playing.”

  “Next time I’m going to music your fanny.”

  I had to get up there and see who was making that music. I just had to. Even if I plain ran on out of there, I had to do it. “Pa, how soon will the toilet be on? I got to take a leak.”

  “Not till I run this new piece of pipe up. Go take a leak out back.”

  “It’s too cold. I can wait.”

  “Suit yourself,” he said. “Where’s that can of grease?”

  Oh, I tell you, trying to concentrate on that plumbing job was about the hardest thing I ever did. That music kept pouring down from up there, one tune after the next, slow, fast, in-between. It was funny: sometimes I thought I recognized a tune, and a moment later I wouldn’t be sure. The cornet player would hint at things, and then he’d go running off in a different direction. That year “China Boy” was real popular, and in different spots it sounded like they were playing it. But every time I convinced myself, “China Boy” would disappear. Another time I got the idea they were playing “Chicago, That Toddlin’ Town,” which naturally everybody was singing along the streets then. But I never was really sure.

  It didn’t really matter what the tune was. What counted was the way that music felt to me, the sparkle that was in it, the funny way it scurried along, going here and there, disappearing behind something and then popping out again. I couldn’t believe music could make you feel that way.

  Hard as it was, I managed to listen to the music with one ear and Pa with the other, and finally we got the job done—well, Pa got it done. Then he said to me, “If you want to take a leak there’s a toilet upstairs. I’ll turn the water on, you crack the faucets in the sink and see if everything’s okay. While you do that I’ll start packing up so we can get out of here.”

  I didn’t have to be told twice, but shot for the rickety old wooden stairs. At the top was a trapdoor. I heaved it up and climbed out. I was behind a bar, which ran along one side of a big room. The place wasn’t much fancier than the cellar—an old wooden floor gray from years of mopping, a couple of big ceiling fans for summertime, the green curtains over the windows, a bunch of wooden tables with dirty red-checked tablecloths on them. Across the room from the bar stood an old ruin of an upright piano that reminded me of a horse ready for the boneyard. The only people in the room were the cornet player, who was leaning up against the piano, one leg crossed over the other, while he played; and the piano player, who was colored.

  But the cornet player was about nineteen or twenty and had straw-colored hair; so it wasn’t nigger music after all. When he saw me pop up from behind the bar he stopped in midstream and took the cornet away from his mouth. “Where’d you come from, kid?” he said.

  “We’re working on the pipes. They were all froze up.”

  The piano player swiveled around on the stool, and sat there looking at me. He had a cigar about the size of a baseball bat clenched in his teeth, a derby hat tipped back on his head, and he was wearing a dark blue suit with the coat open so you could see his fancy plaid vest and gold watch chain. He raised his eyebrows at me. “You always spring from midair like that?” He took the cigar out of his mouth so he could chuckle. “Mighty fine trick. Mighty fine.”

  “I came up from the cellar to check the faucets.” I wasn’t sure I ought to ask questions, but I figured I was likely to. “Where’d you learn to play that kind of music?”

  “What? The jazz?” the piano player said.

  “Is that what jazz is?” I’d heard of jazz, but didn’t know what it was.

  “You never heard any jazz?” the piano player said. “Where you been, hiding in a closet?”

  I didn’t want to seem like too much of a dope. “I think I heard it, but I wasn’t sure.”

  The piano player tapped the ash off his cigar. “Mighty hard to miss around Chicago,” he said. “We had it here eight, ten years, I reckon. They ain’t got nothin’ like it in New York. Nothin’ nowhere near like it.”

  I knew that if I didn’t check out those faucets pretty quick Pa’d swarm all over me. “Were you just rehearsing?”

  “Just jamming a little,” the cornetist replied. “Herbie said since the place was closed anyway, we could come over and jam.” He pointed his thumb at the piano player. “Me and him, we don’t get to play together all that much.”

  I didn’t know what he meant by jamming, but I didn’t want to look like a dope by asking. “How could you learn to play like that?”

  The piano player chuckled. “Can’t learn it.” He put the cigar back in his mouth and shook his head. “That’s a plain fact. You got to get a feelin’ for it.”

  From down below there came a shout. “Paulie, what the hell are you doing up there?”

  I leaned over the trapdoor. “I couldn’t find the toilet.”

  “What the hell? It’s that door right at the end of the bar.”

  It surprised me that he knew where it was: he hadn’t come up out of that cellar the whole time we were here. “Do you play here all the time?”

  The cornetist shook his head. “Sometimes I’m here. Nothing regular.”

  The piano player chuckled. “Jazz musicians don’t play nowhere all the time.”

  The cornetist pointed at the piano player again with his thumb. “He got a nice gig over at the Arcadia Ballroom. I’m here for now. No telling how long it’ll last.”

  “Maybe I could come over and hear you.”

  The cornet player shrugged. “I doubt if they’re going to want any kids in knee pants running around here. This is a pretty rough joint.”

  “Paulie!”

  “What time do you start?”

  “It’s an after-hours joint. We don’t start till midnight. Sometimes don’t get out of here till the sun’s up.”

  My heart sank. If only they started around eight or something, I might figure a way to hear them. But there wasn’t a chance Ma would let me go anywhere at midnight. “Do you ever play during the day?”

  “Yeah, sure. There’s tea dances sometimes. You never know when one’ll come up.”

  “Come on, Tommy. We done palavered long enough.” He rolled a series of chords up the keyboard.

  “Paulie, get your tail down here.” I ran out of there to check the faucets, before Pa ate me alive. But it didn’t matter, for finally I’d come across something maybe I could discipline myself about. And I knew for sure that for me the plumbing business was a dead duck.

  AFTER THAT I couldn’t think of anything but the music those guys were playing. It kept going around and around in my brain. I could actually hear it. Of course I couldn’t reme
mber exactly everything they played, but I could hear the sound of it, the feeling that was in it, in my head.

  But it wasn’t good enough just to hear it in my brains. I wanted to hear it for real again. I never wanted anything so bad in my life—never wanted a fielder’s mitt or a bike or anything so bad as I wanted to hear that music again.

  Naturally, I couldn’t rest until I tried to play it myself. As soon as we got home that night I unpacked my cornet and tried to play jazz. I just couldn’t do it. I didn’t know where to begin. I sat there for a minute, holding my cornet in my lap, and thought about it. I remembered how there always seemed to be a song flickering around in what they were playing—a song that would pop out here and there and then disappear again. I figured the thing to do was to start with a song. I picked out “Maryland, My Maryland,” which I knew by heart. Nothing happened. I couldn’t figure out how to put the jazz into it, and it came out plain old “Maryland, My Maryland,” no different than it ever was.

  It was clear that I’d have to study that jazz somehow. But how? Who would teach me? Were there any phonograph records of it? We didn’t have a phonograph. They were expensive, and considering that Pa was partial to music you couldn’t hear, it wasn’t likely that we’d get one in the near future. But there was a phonograph at Hull House, which they used for dancing classes, and Rory Flynn’s ma had one. Rory said that when she got to drinking beer she’d put on her favorite songs, like “Danny Boy” and “That Old Irish Mother of Mine,” and cry, which cheered her up. So if I could get hold of a record with that kind of music on it, I had places where I could hear it.

  Did Mr. Sylvester know anything about it? He might, I figured. I went to the next band practice early and asked him. “Did you ever hear any jazz?”

  “Jazz? Sure.”

  “I wondered if I could learn to play it.” He frowned. “What do you want to mess with that stuff for? It’s just nigger music. You’ll ruin your lip.”

  “How’d it ruin your lip?”