Low Down: Junk, Jazz, and Other Fairy Tales From Childhood

by A. J. Albany

  ace-one-boon-white-coon

  Dad told me that when I was an infant, Dizzy Gillespie dropped me on my head. It was a fact that always disturbed him greatly. He’d say, “Well, maybe he was stoned, but I think he was just trying to show off.” I never understood what that meant—seemed a strange way to show off, dropping a baby. Either way, it always bugged him. He said he never trusted Dizzy after that, which I choose to take as a sign of parental love. I’ve often wondered if this incident was the reason I’ve never been a big Dizzy Gillespie fan.

  I’m not certain if this is a first memory, or if I simply heard my dad tell the story so often that it feels like memory. In the summer of ’63 I was living with my parents in Harlem. Dad was playing at the Village Gate with Charles Mingus. He would later tell me that it was “a real sweat-box” playing with Mingus, and referred to the gig as “ten days of Sodom and Gomorrah.” Dad was also the only ofay in the group, which created its own brand of tension. One day we were walking down the street, passing a newsstand, when I stopped to pick up a magazine, maybe Life, with Thelonious Monk on the cover. I kissed it, and said, “Hi, Monk.” Dad, combusting with pride, picked me up and looked at me with his beautiful gray-green eyes and said, “From now on you’re not just my baby, you’re my ace-one-boon-white-coon.” That, he would claim, was the day we forever connected, and became more to each other than everything.

  dolls and great winged men

  Blood. Its distinct shade of red stays vivid even in memories that have long faded into shadow. I remember standing at the bars of a crib around the age of two, disturbed over fighting that was raging in another room. My mother came in, turned on the light, and staggered toward me, whispering, “Hush now. No more crying.” As she reached in the crib to lay me back down, I saw that her neck was covered with blood. It trickled onto my cherished baby doll that was dressed in a fleecy rabbit costume. I don’t recall being aware of any other colors aside from the bright blood that stood out like liquid poppies on snow against my mother’s long white neck. Somehow the sight of this silenced me. I lay next to my splattered doll and stared at it, unblinking. All sounds were distant now. A few days later, Mom said, “Oh look—you’ve gotten ketchup on your doll.” Perhaps I’d dreamt the whole thing. I thought it best to get rid of the doll in an attempt to forget the incident, but her discarded spirit called to me from the dark earth. The doll’s absence only intensified my memory of her. She was another fallen soldier of the drug wars, powerless and unlucky, with friends like herself buried all over town.

  It was around the same time I lost my doll that the Great Winged Man first appeared to me. He was born, I suppose, out of despair, though I felt certain that he was real, for he’d never come to me when I attempted to conjure him—only when I was beaten down and no one was near me to witness it. It was then that he’d approach me, always from behind, and pick me up with huge, black, batlike wings that covered me completely. He’d place me on his warm, levitating lap, where I was lulled into a gentle sleep. On occasion, I tried to capture a glimpse of his face. Once I managed to shift my head upward, out of the balled-up position his wings held me tightly in, and saw the smile of Louis Armstrong, and my father’s gray-green eyes looking down at me. He was my sympathetic demon superhero. There were times when I was weak with hunger and I felt certain he was Death come to carry me away. Instead he arrived to save me. The Great Winged Man hid me away and provided a safe place to sleep.

  some other “halves”

  Between my mother and father, I have an alleged total of eight half siblings who have shown up so far. Each of my mom’s five children has a different father.

  Most of my half siblings on my father’s side have inherited all of the sad vulnerability and unrest that comes with our father’s genes. My half brother, Joe Jr., has been institutionalized for most of his adult life, a paranoid schizophrenic, so they say. When I first met him I was fourteen years old. He must have been twenty-four or twenty-five. No one would allow him to finish his own sentences, a nervous habit that people often exercise around those they deem “not right in the head.” Acute sensitivity was the only thing Joe suffered from, as far as I could see. He’s too gentle for this world. My half sister, pretty and sharp tongued, enjoyed a good time, maybe too much so. That was years ago.

  For the past fourteen years, Dad has resided in a paint can toward the back of my closet. It’s not a scenic resting place, but it’s peaceful, and I’ve grown fond of having him nearby, though I’d originally intended to scatter his ashes in Paris, his favorite city. Another good reason for keeping him close is the fact that they can get DNA out of cremated remains. When the next somebody comes forward claiming to have been sired by Dad, I’ll give them a nickel bag of ashes and suggest they have a lab check them out before the family reunion begins. “Gee, was he really a jazz musician? What was his favorite color? Hey, that’s a coincidence. I feel like I know him already.” It’s as if I’d waited patiently to get on a ride, standing in a long, unending queue, only to have someone cut in front of the line. They put in no time, didn’t even buy a ticket. Being an only child, I don’t like to share, and once on that ride, I’m not keen to let anyone have a go.

  snapshots

  Sometimes, I feel I’m on the verge of remembering something. It only happens when certain elements are in place. It’s always at dusk, at the end of a warm day, when there’s a breeze—enough to flutter thin curtains—and I’m lying on my side, looking out the window. It’s then that something tries to come to me, but never quite does. Mostly, it’s about the air—the air has a particular hazy quality that makes the sadness come. Then there’s the sense of waiting. I’m waiting calmly for something that I’ve grown not to fear. Perhaps when the time is right—if ever—I’ll remember.

  One summer afternoon when I was four and the air was moving expectantly, two men came to take away our furniture, including my dad’s piano. He wasn’t home, but Mom was sitting on the porch in a rocking chair, close to the edge of the stairs. One of the men asked her to move, but she wouldn’t—only sat there with the faintest smile, serene as the Buddha. The man picked up the chair and dumped her down the stairs, as if emptying out a pail of water. Her head cracked open and blood flowed down the pavement, but her expression never changed. Men kept moving out furniture, just stepping over her like a slight imposition. “Goddamn junkies,” one of them said. I thought she was dead and I ran and ran, down the street to nowhere. It fades to black after that—like all my snapshot memories.

  sleeping in bars

  For a time in 1966, Dad maintained a regular gig at a bar in Hollywood. It was your classic dark, red-boothed, booze-drenched dive, warm and inviting to my four-year-old eyes. I would sit there each night with Daphne, a ravishing red-haired hooker, Martino the bartender, and a number of other regulars who kept an eye on me while Dad played his set. Dad referred to one particular group of four regulars as “the Hard-Luck Charlie Club.” They were all ex-vaudevillians of one sort or another; I know one man had been a hoofer for sure, because he taught me how to do a stomping triple-time step. The only woman in the group had done some act with a snake and a chimp that wasn’t clear to me at the time, though I knew she’d gotten arrested in Idaho Falls for “lewd acts.” “All for the love of some bum,” she’d say. Her bemoaning became more pronounced with each pink lady she polished off. I didn’t care for her because she took to berating Dad for exposing me to “degenerate riffraff,” herself included, I’m sure. Dad muttered that she was an “old hag chimp fucker” and henceforth refused to play her nightly request of “Polka Dots and Moonbeams.” “It’s a dumb-ass song anyway,” he said. I myself drank too many Shirley Temples with red and green cherries and listened to dirty jokes I didn’t get until years later. At some point, I’d be hoisted up on the piano, and I dutifully sang and danced to “Satin Doll” or “All of Me.” Around eleven o’clock I’d fall asleep and was placed behind the bar, usually on someone’s fur coat, until midnight, when Dad finished work. In the
morning it was my duty to count the tips that Dad had collected in the large brandy glass the night before. It was good early math education. When Dad’s habit wasn’t getting the best of him, he really tried to keep us together.

  the pickled pool

  I remember very little between the ages of two and five, though I don’t suppose many people do. Yet I do remember knowing instinctively that school would always be a source of great unhappiness for me, a parallel hell away from home. And so it was, beginning with my first—and last—day of nursery school. After my screams had subsided into jagged sobs of defeat, Dad left me in the hands of two women who must have been trained at the Charles Dickens School of Child Abuse. I was told to get in the sandbox and play, which I did for a total of thirty seconds before some lug of a kid shoved half a bucket of sand in my mouth. A teacher dangled me over the drinking fountain, commanding me to rinse, asking why, after only five minutes, I was already getting into trouble.

  I thought of a song I loved to play at home—“Look for the Silver Lining,” which I’d always assumed was sung by someone’s sexy young mother until Dad introduced me to Chet Baker one day and told me he was the singer on the album that I so admired. Thinking of it always helped a little. I tried to keep a low profile, after checking the gate and realizing that escape was out of the question. That place was “buttoned up tighter than a spinster’s snatch,” as Dad used to say. Lunchtime came, and of all the possible edibles in the universe, they served fish sticks, the very smell of which triggered my delicate gag reflex. A teacher was soon by my side looking dismayed at the sight of my untouched plate. “Start eating, young lady.”

  “But I feel sick,” I replied, sincerely, as I felt grains of sand still grating between my teeth. “You’ll sit here until you eat,” she said firmly. A kid across the table from me was proudly displaying an open mouth filled with congealed fish. Breathing carefully through my nose, I picked one up and bit the smallest-ever bite off the end. I suddenly felt a cavalry charging up from my stomach’s pit and into my throat and then threw up with a force so great that all who witnessed it fell silent, except for the teacher, who made some strange, indistinguishable noise.

  After cleaning up, I was permitted to lie down on a mat for the rest of the day. It was a brown vinyl mat that felt cool against my cheek. I left my eyes half opened. Since they were watery—my eyes always watered when I was sick—the sunlight through the windows streamed in like long, golden ribbons, pixilating with the moving air. The sound of kids taunting each other faded away, and I floated up, up, over the gates and into a bizarre dream that I remember vividly. In this dream, I was dancing with a jar of mustard around a pool that was filled with pickle juice. I loved pickle juice, drank it out of the jar. That and mustard had helped me survive on a least one occasion. Music played on, cares were none, and just as I was about to dive in for a swim, I heard my father’s voice: “Jo-Jo, hey.” I awoke feeling as though I’d spent a hundred years sleeping on the moon and could no longer function in the human race. It felt fine.

  Dad carried me home on his shoulders, saying that the teachers didn’t think I was ready for school yet. Now my contentment was complete. In time, however, I’d find out that my vomiting capabilities would not be enough to keep me out of school forever. The future would call for more drastic measures.

  three mother tales

  I.

  By the age of five, I was acutely aware that my life could be snuffed out in an instant. Never was this feeling stronger than when I was left in the hands of my lovely mother. Mom was petite and fair, with blue-green cat eyes—“Eyes you would happily drown in,” Dad used to say.

  Among Mom’s talents was an uncanny ability to forge signatures. It would land her in the glasshouse three times. Her favorite thing to forge was medical prescriptions, and the drug she most prescribed for herself was Dilaudid. She would spend days on end semiconscious, falling off toilets, not one motherly bone in her whole beautiful body—a fact that sort of impressed me, on some twisted level. I learned early to fend for myself, foraging for food like some small, freaked-out animal. When real food wasn’t available, I’d invent new things to eat. Shaving cream, toothpaste, and some pink, supposedly poisonous berries that grew on a bush outside our door.

  I wasn’t the healthiest kid around, but I survived, which, I guess, is a good thing. I decided to make a short list in my mind of the essentials. Besides food, there was the record player for pleasure and drowning out unpleasant sounds, and there was sleep. To sleep, I needed pajamas, and I was very fond of my flannel PJs—I felt safe with them on. One night, unable to locate them and with my mother out of her head in a Dilaudid haze, I ventured out into the Hollywood courtyard where we lived and started knocking on neighbors’ doors for some assistance. Since it was midnight and I was all of five years old and half naked, one would assume that a friendly face might emerge from behind a blank door—but that was not the case. It was my first lesson in humanity. Terrified women peeked out from their curtains, shooing me away. My parents had developed a reputation as the local lunatic druggies who played music at all hours, and I was simply their demon spawn. So there I sat, in the middle of our courtyard, on the edge of an old broken fountain that featured a lonely, armless cherub being strangled by weeds. The courtyard seemed huge. It was black out and freezing, a very pathetic scene. Dad was playing at the jazz club called Pepys on Sunset Strip and got home around 3:00 AM. When he saw me waiting there, he snapped, ran into the house, and smacked Mom around. I felt some sadness for her, but not too much. At least he woke her up, and I was able to get to sleep, properly attired, and dream that I was a thousand miles away from my life. I formed a lot of opinions that night that live with me, for better or for worse, like tiny devils. I hate the dark and the cold and the sense of empty space around me. I have no faith in most people, particularly women, but I’m fond of coconut-lime shaving cream.

  II.

  Mom would appear and disappear as often as the sun on a cloudy day. By the age of five, I went to great lengths attempting to endear myself to her. I turned into a pathetic court jester trying to avoid getting the ax from an unamused queen.

  Despite my efforts, every few months she’d depart, until I felt like the discarded result of a failed experiment and eventually grew weary of the whole situation. At the best of times, she’d dip her toe into the dark waters of motherhood and briefly display a distracted affection, ever looking over her shoulder for either her connection or her misspent youth.

  Mom was around when I was invited to the fifth-birthday party of a girl named Sherry who lived two courtyards down. The usual festivities were commencing: pinning of donkey tails and duck-duck-goosing, but I had difficulty entering into the spirit of things and fell back on my unconscious habit of picking my nose and eating its contents. For some reason, I was recalling a picture I’d seen of Joan of Arc that had made me very sad. The picture was in a children’s encyclopedia I’d found in a neighbor’s trash can. It showed young Joan being burned at the stake while a crowd of onlookers stood by and jeered. Her expression was calm and graceful, and her face looked toward heaven as she accepted and transcended her fate. I was entering the deep state of daydream where all outside sound dissipates when a fellow partygoer gave me a nudge and my thoughts were shattered. I looked around to see an army of vicious young eyes bearing down on me, laughing hysterically. I was busted. I took off running for home with the vermin in hot pursuit, a scene from Lord of the Flies. As I ran through the door in tears, crying for my mother, I found her unconscious on the floor, naked and facedown in her vomit. I sat cross-legged and thought for a moment. This wasn’t a new scene, certainly, but she was chillingly still and unnatural in color. My stomach growled—I’d left the party before the cake serving—and my finger once again went for my nose.

  There was an old Japanese gardener I’d noticed working next door. Maybe he would help. Pulling an old plaid blanket from the couch, I covered her up, and after much tugging and gesturing, the reluc
tant gardener came to my aid. Upon seeing my mother on the floor, he began jumping around like a man who’d stepped into a school of jellyfish. I suddenly thought of Jerry Lewis impersonating a Chinese guy, since this gardener came complete with buck teeth and a bamboo sun hat. As he called for an ambulance, I ran off to hide and lie in wait until my father returned home. Mom was in the hospital for a week, then went to San Francisco to recuperate. I assume she took a cure of some kind, though I don’t know any specifics. When she wasn’t around, I gained much attention from my dad, and if he worked, I’d usually go to the home of my grandmother, where I’d drink egg coffee, which was coffee mixed with a beaten yolk, sugar, and hot milk, and sit by the radiator, contented.

  When Mom returned, I felt somewhat disappointed, though everyone else treated it like a blessed event. Years later, Dad said: “Your mother nearly died that day,” to which my only reaction was: “Oh.” She died each time she took off. After the first few times, it was a phantom who returned to me, its image growing dimmer with each return.