Them old guys, the Zoot suit cats, they didn’t like that, but they didn’t say nothing. Everyone remembered how Bird never took no shit off nobody back before he went off touring the solar system.
Man, all that scared me a little, but I still wanted to get onto one of them Frogships and hear what kind of music everyone was playing up there. They were hiring cats, everyone knew that, but that was all I knew about it. Now, I hadn’t never met Bird before, and I knew he wasn’t going to talk to me, but Max Roach, Max was drumming there that night, and I’d met Max one time before there at Minton’s, so I figured I could talk to him.
Max, he’d gone up onto the Frogships a year or two back. Well, he looked at me like he knew what I wanted, what I was gonna ask about, but he sat down to talk to me anyway. I told him I wanted onto the ships, wanted to know how to get in.
“You audition, same as for anything else,” he said, shrugging. “Who knows what they like? Don’t ask me.”
“But you been on the ships . . .”
“Uh-huh,” Max said, nodded, but didn’t say no more.
“What kind of music they hire you to play?”
“Oh, man, you just need to play whatever,” he said in that quiet, calm voice of his. He was a really cool, soulful cat most of the time. “Some of the time, they take cats who swing the old way, real old-fashioned; like what Duke’s band used to play in the old days, or Billy Eckstine’s. Hell, sometimes they want New Orleans funeral songs, or some cat who plays like Jelly Roll Morton. Other times they only take cats who play real hard bebop, man. You can’t never know what they want. But anyway, you don’t need to go on up to the ships. It messes a cat up, man.” He tapped the tablecloth with his drumsticks, hit my glass of bourbon with one of them. Ting.
I know better now, but then I just thought he was stonewalling me. Figured maybe there were only limited spaces, and he was bullshitting me, trying to keep gigs open for cats he knew better.
“What do you mean?” I said. “Look at Bird! Remember when he left? Cat went up there looking like death on a soda cracker, and look at him now!” I glanced over and saw him sitting at a table with Diz and Miles and Monk and Art Blakey and Fat Girl Navarro and a couple of them white women who used to hang around at Minton’s. They were laughing like a bunch of old women, like someone had just told a joke a second before. Bird, he wasn’t fat no more, he was lean, and real clear-headed and healthy-looking, nothing like when they let his ass out of Camarillo. He looked like a cat with a long life ahead of him.
“Bird’s been different, always, man,” Max said. “He’s just that kind of cat. Plus, they fixed him up. They wanted him bad, so they took him apart and then put him back together out there. A lot of cats, they just . . .” Then he stopped, like he didn’t know what to say, and his eyes went a little scary, the way Bird’s used to be, and he looked at me like he could see through my skin or something, and said, “Look, cats almost never come back like he did. The things that go on . . . you can’t even imagine,” he said.
The room went quiet sometime while we were talking, and I could tell Max was relieved. He didn’t like talking about the Frogships, didn’t want to recommend them to nobody. We both looked around and saw other people were all staring at the back of the club, at the entrance, and what do you know but this big tall-assed Frog had come on in the back and was standing there watching us all.
These days there ain’t a lot of cats who remember what the Frogs looked like, really. It’s been so long since they moved on, and let me tell you, the pictures don’t show not even the half of it. They were like these big frogs who stretched their skin over a real tall man, but they had more eyes and weird-assed hands. No fingers, just some tentacles on the ends of their goddamned arms, man, and they walked on two legs. Now, this Frog, he was fat, and he wore a Zoot suit tailored specially for him, hat and all, which just made him look totally out, man, just crazy. He came in with three or four guys, white hipsters, and they sat themselves down at a table in the front of the club that was set out for them in a hurry.
That Frog, he was smoking long, black cigarettes, four or five of them at once, on these long jade cigarette holders. He was looking around, too, with all these eyes on his face, as if to say, Where’s the goddamn music? I looked at him closely, and noticed that his skin, his face and hands, even his suit, it was all a little blurry, like a badly-shot photograph. He puffed on his cigarettes and looked around.
Nobody said nothing.
But all these cats, especially them sad Philly boys, they all thought it was their big chance. They hurried on up onto the bandstand, and they started to play their jumped-up jive-ass swing. That old Frog just leaned on back in its chair and kept on smoking those slow-burning black cigarettes, sticking its long blue tongue up into the smoke as it puffed it out. There were little black eyes all over its tongue, too, and they swiveled toward the bandstand.
I couldn’t tell if it was bored or enjoying the show, but I do know that finally, after they finished a few tunes, Bird had finally had enough. He tapped Thelonious Monk on the shoulder, and Monk nodded, and stood up, and went up to the bandstand. Everyone had heard about what had happened that night at the Three Deuces back in January in 1946; everyone knew how these Frog cats felt about Monk’s music.
Man, Thelonious, he just went on up to the piano and sat down, and everyone else on the bandstand just watched him, every one of them quiet and thinking, Oh shit. Monk, he lifted up his hands, all dramatic like he was about to play a Beethoven sonata or whatever, like that, you know what I mean, and when everyone shut up he started playing.
“Straight, No Chaser.” That was a fine tune, just a little jagged and twisted up. He played the head real simple, melody with his right hand, old-fashioned blues stride with the left. The alien leaned forward. Everyone knew how much they liked Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, granddaddy music like that.
But when Monk finished out the head the second time, and started improvising on the changes, man, you could see him sitting with this big-assed grin on his face up there at the piano. He started playing some of his really Monkish shit, all that weird, tangled up melody, banging out tone clusters over and over and plunking out his crooked little comping rhythms.
The Frog, when it heard Monk start up with all that, it stood itself up, dropped its cigarettes on the ground and slapped one hand over its huge front face-eyes and the other behind the back of its head. It was moaning—with three or four voices at once—and this blue stuff starting leaking out of its nose. Then it decided it was time to get the hell out.
It wobbled but finally made it out the door, shaky like a junkie dying to shoot himself up. All them hipster cats it came in with, they all followed it out, making out like they were all nervous and worried. Teddy Hill, who was running Minton’s Play house back then, he followed them all out with a scared face on, too. Bird, he laughed like a fucking maniac when he saw all that.
“Damn Frogs never could handle Monk,” Max said, laughing. “Man, that was beautiful!”
A few weeks later, my buddy J.J. came by with this poster he’d found on some lamp-post nearby. He read it out to me while I brushed my teeth one morning.
“Now hiring jazz musicians of all instrumental specialties . . . the intergalactic society of entertainers and artists’ guild . . . Colored Americans only please, special preference currently given to aspiring bebop players. No re-hires from previous tours please. One-year (possibly renewable) contracts available. See the solar system! Play blues on the moons of Jupiter! Go someplace where The Man won’t be breathing down your neck! Press HERE for more information!”
I spat out the foam from my toothpaste, put down my electrobrush, and asked, “So? Where’s the audition?”
He pressed his finger on the word HERE and the sheet went blank for a second. Then a map appeared on it. “Over on West 52nd, at the Onyx.”
“What?” I was shocked. Going to the Onyx for an audition, man, that was like going on a tour of Mississippi with a busl
oad of negroes, women and children and all. Over at the Onyx, man, it was all what my father used to call ofays—white men—running the joint, every last one of them motherfuckers so goddamned racist it wasn’t even funny.
“You heard me. The Onyx.”
“Shit. What time?”
“The Onyx?!” That was my woman, Francine. She’d been cooking and she’d come up behind J.J. so quiet we hadn’t heard her till it was too late. She looked at J.J. and man, it was like, No bacon for you this morning, motherfucker—
She pushed past him, put her hands on her hips, and said, “What are you gonna do? Go on up in space, and leave me alone with this baby?” she said, putting her hands under her big belly.
“Francine,” I said.
“No, Robbie, don’t try to sweet talk me,” she said, shaking her head like she was having none of this. “Goddamn! My mama told me I should stay away from you. Said musicians weren’t nothing but trouble.”
I looked up at J.J. and tilted my head in the direction of the door, and he just nodded and left us alone. She didn’t say nothing till the screen door clicked shut.
“Robbie, baby,” she said, looking up at me with those sweet brown eyes of hers. “You are not going to that audition at the Onyx,” she said.
Man, it just about broke my heart, but I knew that I was done, completely done with her. I knew she’d be a good mama, but not to my babies. It was all over right then.
So I looked at her, and I said, “I seen those letters you got all wrapped-up. Up in your sock drawer.”
“What letters?” she said, and it was almost believable, except I could see she was pretending. Lying.
“Francine, come on, girl. I wasn’t born yesterday. Maybe last week, but not yesterday, baby. I know about you and Thornton. And don’t be telling me it’s some one-sided thing, because I seen how you wrapped them letters up in a ribbon and hid them and all. And I seen the dates on them, too.”
She slumped a little, and said, “Baby, I . . .” and then she stopped. She couldn’t lie to me no more, and she knew it. She was tired of lying to me, too, I think. She was a good enough woman, Francine.
“Now listen, baby,” she said, and her voice cracked but she tried to sound strong just the same. “It ain’t like I never heard about you running around with those other women. I know I ain’t the only one of us who been unfaithful.”
“Francine, you and I both know that baby probably ain’t mine, the way you been rationing me around here—which is why I been with other women, since you don’t give me what I need. Did I complain to you? Have I been nagging your ass? No, that’s fine, I understand. But this . . . look, you want that baby to have a daddy, you better go marry the man who done gave it to you.”
“This is bullshit,” she said. “You can run around as much as you want, but you can’t never get pregnant. Me, I do it once or twice behind your back, and look what I get.”
“I know,” I said, and I tried to put my arms around her, but she pushed me away. “Life ain’t fair, is it, girl?” I said, and tried again. This time she let me hug her. It was breaking my heart, those brown-sugar eyes all full of tears, her arms shaking a little as she hugged me back. But I wasn’t gonna have no other man’s baby calling me daddy, and I wasn’t gonna stay with no woman who been going behind my back with no other cat, so it was probably a mistake, me being so nice to her just then like that.
She started crying, saying, “I’m sorry, baby. I’m sorry.” Begging and pleading, and kissing on me. She told me she wouldn’t never do it again.
“That’s good. You learned your lesson. Like you gonna be a good wife to Teddy Thornton,” I said. He was the one who’d written her the letters. Used to play drums around town, though I heard his granddad died and he went into business of the money he inherited.
And I tell you, when I said that, it was like the werewolf in them movies, you know, how he changes shape in a second? That was Francine, man. Bam. “What, you mean you ain’t staying, now, after all that?” Her eyes were full of a kind of fire only a woman can fill up with.
I shook my head. “I’m gonna get this gig, girl. Damn, Bird, and Hawk, and . . . all those cats who gone up there, they come back richer than Rockefeller. You damn right I’m going up there.”
“You son of a bitch!” she yelled, tears still running down her cheeks, and she grabbed a lamp from the hallway just outside the bathroom. “You was gonna run off to space no matter what, wasn’t you? God-damn you!”
Then she threw the lamp at me, but I was quick and jumped sideways, so it hit the floor and broke into a million pieces. Man, that pissed me off. It was my goddamn lamp, I’d bought it with the money I’d made off gigs, and I knew it’d be good as new in a few hours—it was the new foreign kind that was just coming out then, the kind that could fix itself—but this shit was still just a pain in the ass. I never did like being disrespected by no women.
But I just nodded my head. Didn’t matter what she broke, long as it wasn’t my horns. I wouldn’t need no lamp where I was going.
The Onyx was a nice place, inside. Fancy, I mean. Every cat I knew was in there, plus a few I wished I knew. Sonny Rollins was in there, Red Dog, and Art Tatum, and Hot Lips Bell, and some other cats I recognized too.
We were all outside the green room, waiting. Green room, that shit was funny: it’d always been called that, but at the Onyx, during these auditions, it was really the green room, with real green Frogs inside. That was where cats went in to play their auditions, and the Frogs would listen and decide whether they wanted them on the ships.
I waited my turn. Everyone was real quiet, more than you’d expect, and through the wall we could hear drums and bass start up every once in a while after guys went in. The bass sounded like one of those expensive self-amplified ones, the kind that looked like a regular bass but got real loud all on its own, except you had to plug it into the wall at night.
Cat after cat went in, played for five or ten minutes, and then left. I sat there with my buddies, Back Pocket and J.J. and Big Jimmy Hunt, and we all just cradled our instruments and watched the TV in the corner of the room, no sound, just color picture, and waited without talking.
Finally, after a few hours of listening and waiting, it was my turn. The door opened, and this skinny white hipster came out and called my name: “Robbie Coolidge?”
“That’s me,” I said, and I followed him into the room.
There were a couple of Frogs sitting on a couch in there, both of them smoking bouquets of the same damned cigarettes on long metal cigarette holders. They were wearing shades and black suits that didn’t hide the bumps they had all over their bodies, and they didn’t say nothing to me at all. On the other side of the room, a couple more of them hipsters sat there at a small table with piles of old-fashioned paper on it. Nobody bothered to stand or shake my hand, but one of them hipsters started talking to me. Didn’t introduce himself or nothing, just started talking.
“Tenor player.” It wasn’t no question.
“Yes sir. I can also play the alto and the flute, a little,” I said, just as cool as I could.
“You got a manager?”
“Uh, no sir. I, uh . . . I manage myself.” I wanted to sound cool, but I felt like a damn country negro right then.
“Well, that’s just fine,” he said, grinning that white hipster grin of his. “Why don’t you play us a song, then?”
So I called the tune, counted it off, and launched into it. The tune I played was one of Bird’s, “Confirmation,” and I guess their machine knew it, because as soon as I started playing it, bass and drums were piped in from nowhere. They wanted bebop, so I played my best bebop tune.
“Not bad,” the hipster said, and the Frogs were agreeing, nodding. “Can you play anything sweet?” he asked, and I played them a chorus of “Misty” as soulful and pretty as I could.
“That was just fine, Mr. Coolidge. Please leave us your phone number and we’ll call you soon. Thanks,” the boss man hipster said when I ha
nded him my name card, and one of his sidekicks showed me out. After that, I waited around while my buddies all auditioned, and they all said it’d gone pretty much the same.
I wondered whether that was a good sign or a bad one, but a few weeks later, I was on the subway when my pocket phone rang. I fished it out of my pants pocket, and dialed in my access number on the rotary dial to open the connection.
Looking at the face on the little screen for a second, I wondered why this slick, pale-assed young hipster was calling me, until I realized that it was that same hipster from the Onyx.
“Mr. Coolidge,” he said, “I have some good news for you.”
And that was how I ended up touring the solar system with Big C.
The space elevator, that blew me away. It was a fucking gas, man. I only ever rode up it once, and I swear it was smooth as Ingrid Bergman’s skin, or Lena Home’s smile, even though it was going faster than anything I’d ever been in before.
J.J. Wilson was the only one of my friends who also got a gig up on the Frogships, and he and I sat there side by side with our seat belts around our waists, looking down through the glass floor—it wasn’t really glass but we could see through it—at the Earth and everything we were leaving behind. It seemed so strange to be looking at the whole world like that. I could see South America, the ocean, some of Africa. Clouds, and ice on north pole and south pole. I could see places I’ve never gone in all the years since then, and probably will never go.
Only a few hours before, J.J.’s wife had driven us up into the Catskills where the Frogs’ launchpad had been. She’d cried a little, but soon she was making jokes and small talk. Francine, on the other hand: the first time she called, she was crying, and she pleaded with me on my pocket phone till I hung up on her. Then she called back screaming, and made me listen to her break plates and windows and shit. I’d felt a little lonely on the way up, and a little bad for her, but after that, I was glad she hadn’t come along for the ride, and I was sure I’d done the right thing by leaving her.
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