Jack of Diamonds (25 page)

There was also a towel rack with two white fluffy towels and two more on a shelf above it. The towels were embroidered in dark green with ‘Waldorf-Astoria’ in fancy writing. I’d never been in a bathroom with a bath in it and hot and cold faucets, much less ones made of gold and shaped into dragons’ heads.

There was also a double bed in the bedroom with a cushioned backrest and two lights with little shades on the wall behind for reading, a chest of drawers for my clothes, as well as a wardrobe for stuff I didn’t have, except my suit jacket. There was a little notice on the bedside table that said to put your shoes outside the door to be cleaned by the boot boy. No way I was going to do that. What if, by mistake, he mixed up the boots? I’d wake up with no boots. I’d brought boot blacking anyway. This boot business was the only thing in the whole place that wasn’t perfect.

What a day! You couldn’t want for a better one even if you wished your hardest! What I also liked about a day like this one was that I’d learned a zillion things I didn’t know when I woke up that morning.

I was dog-tired and I’d already said goodnight to Miss Frostbite, so I took off my pants and put them under the mattress to bring the centre creases back, then cleaned my teeth, but there was no salt so I had to do it with just water. Then I washed my face and hands and dried them on a smaller fluffy white towel folded and placed beside the basin. Now, I suppose you’re wondering why I didn’t take a bath after such a long journey. Well, two reasons. I’d done nothing that would make me dirty and the other reason was that you only had an all-over wash if you were going somewhere, like on a weekend with my mom or to a piano competition. You never bathed just to go to bed, because that would have been a big waste of effort and hot water. I changed into the pyjamas we’d bought at the second-hand clothes shop and crawled into bed, where I reckon I fell asleep in about one minute flat.

How do I start describing the six days we spent in New York? Next morning Miss Frostbite and I had breakfast at the Waldorf (you didn’t use the second part of the name if you were staying there). I had cornflakes then ham and eggs that were really bacon and eggs, but in America they said ‘ham’, and she had an omelette with mixed herbs, whatever they were. I looked at her plate when she opened up the omelette but couldn’t see anything.

Joe was waiting outside for me at ten o’clock. Even though I’d been up since early, ten o’clock was real early for Miss Frostbite, because of the late hours she kept at the club, and she wasn’t coming with us. Joe had explained to me that the top hotels in Manhattan were for white folk only, so I didn’t have to wonder why he hadn’t come in to have breakfast with us.

Miss Frostbite had also explained that she and Joe would be spending their days conducting interviews, and suggested I might like to spend my days at the World’s Fair, and then at night we’d hit the jazz joints and dives together. With this in mind, she’d handed me ten dollars, more than a week’s pay. The idea was that Joe would take me to the fair on the first day to explain how to catch the subway to Flushing Meadows and how to return to Manhattan in the late afternoon.

Joe accompanied me to the gates where there was no entrance fee. ‘You be okay, Jazzboy?’ he’d said. ‘If you get lost, everyone know where Manhattan is and what subway, so you just ask polite.’ We shook hands and he left to do his interviews with Miss Frostbite.

So I just walked in with thousands of other people and started looking around. There were 1216 acres and the whole thing was called ‘The World of Tomorrow’. With hundreds of countries and companies showing their vision of the future, you’d have to practically run from one exhibit to another for more than a week to see it all.

I loved being on my own. It meant I could see whatever I wanted and didn’t have to be tentative or polite.

The first thing I did was to look for the Canadian pavilion. I don’t know what I expected but whatever it was, it wasn’t there. There was lots of stuff about the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, with Mounties in their scarlet jackets crawling all over the place. But for all that, it was dull as dishwater. There were lots of American pavilions (the General Motors Exhibition was the best), and when you visited them, they made Canada look even duller by comparison.

Later on in the week I decided to find the Australian pavilion, because Joe had called it the
‘end of the fuckin’ world’
, and I thought it might somehow be different from all the other places, being so far away. But it was worse than Canada, with only one main theme – ‘The Story of Wool’. I mean, seriously, they had a couple of stuffed sheep, one with all its wool on and one that had been shorn, and lots of big photos about shearing, with the sheep on its back and a guy called a shearer clipping off the wool in a long shed. There was nobody in their pavilion and I didn’t blame them. I couldn’t figure out what wool had to do with the world of the future, but then Canada wasn’t much better with its Mounties.

There was truly lots and lots to see and you couldn’t take it all in, even going every day for a week. For me the two individual highlights were The Arctic Girl in Her Tomb of Ice, and Elektro the Motorman, a seven-foot-high robot that talked and sang, could see and smell things and count on his fingers. I don’t know how they did it, but people would hold up something, an apple or a leather purse or a dollar note, and he’d say it right off.

But the weirdest was the Dream of Venus at the Dali pavilion. Now, okay, I was only a young kid, fascinated by robots and a girl buried in ice and something called television and the General Motors Exhibition that showed a huge diorama of New York where the whole city was connected with bridges that sometimes spanned tall buildings. These showed the future, or a possible future, although nobody mentioned the war in Europe and how that might change things, and the Germans weren’t there to give their opinion about what was going to happen if they won.

However, this Salvador Dali exhibition was something else and I would always remember it, which is strange for a boy like me who knew very little about art, except what my mom and I had seen occasionally at the Art Gallery of Toronto on weekends when it was raining and you couldn’t go anywhere else. I remember my mom once said, ‘Modern art is like the Depression; it shows a world falling to bits that don’t make no sense.’ Once, before my dad left us, we saw a Picasso painting of a woman’s face all squiffy, with her eyes and mouth and nose in the wrong places, and Mom said sadly, ‘That’s exactly how it feels after one of your father’s drunken backhands.’

I went back three times to the Dali pavilion, and each time people were coming out and shaking their heads and saying things to each other like ‘Disgusting!’, ‘Simply awful!’, ‘Too crude for words!’ One short, fat old guy with a droopy tobacco-stained moustache came out and stood under the huge girl’s legs at the entrance, shook his fist and yelled, ‘You filthy Dago son of a bitch! This is the United States of America! Go back home!’

I admit it was pretty darn weird but I couldn’t figure out what all the fuss was about. Dali’s Dream of Venus was the creation of the famous surrealist painter, Salvador Dali. I confess, at the time I’d never heard of him. But his pavilion was surreal, all right! A strangely shaped building with no corners, it contained a wet tank and a dry tank. In the wet tank real girls swam under water, where two of them milked a bandaged-up cow that must have been dead because it couldn’t stay down there and breathe, or maybe it was just a model. Other girls tapped on typewriters like they were busy in an office. Then I noticed a piano keyboard painted on the body of a girl lying down that looked very real until you realised she was made of rubber. Then, in the dry tank was what was called the Sleeping Venus: another rubber lady reclining in a 36-foot bed covered with white and red satin, live flowers and leaves. Oh, I forgot to say the girls in the wet tank had uncovered breasts, which was what all the fuss was about, I think. Then, on various parts of the ceiling were upside down umbrellas and telephone receivers hanging down, and above the big bed were lobsters grilling on live coals and bottles of champagne.

I must say, although it was meant to be highly erotic, it didn’t affect me anything like seeing from the back one of the twins walking out of the club in a tight silk dress and high heels.

But it was what was outside the pavilion that was really funny and got people’s backs up so that some just refused point-blank to enter. I remember one woman shouting, ‘I am a born-again Pentecostal Christian and this is the Antichrist!’ If she was born again, then it was a while back because she was no spring chicken and reminded me of Dolly McClymont. What Pentecostalists and the Antichrist were all about I hadn’t any idea, but she was sure steamed up and practically foaming at the mouth. Then she started shouting, ‘Jesus saves!’

First, you bought your ticket for the Dali exhibition at an office shaped like a large fish’s head and then, to go into the pavilion, you had to walk through these giant parted female legs wearing stockings and high heels, where the man with the moustache had been standing. I mean giant legs so you couldn’t touch either side with your arms spread out wide and with the tops of the stockings way above your head and the high-heeled shoes the size of a baby’s pram.

I loved it. Every other pavilion was sensible and about the future and showing stuff off, but this one took no notice and just went mad all by itself with fish’s heads and ladies’ legs and umbrellas upside down and telephone receivers, and they must have done it all without asking permission.

Each day at the Waldorf started with the same breakfast: ham and eggs. I’d say to the waiter, ‘Over easy, please,’ and he’d reply, ‘Yes, sir, with your ham crisp as usual?’ I told Miss Frostbite I needed to tell him not to call me sir, but she said he had to because it was his job, and this was the Waldorf, after all, and if
they
didn’t maintain standards, then who would?

Then there was the travelling back and forth to the World’s Fair every day in the subway. Lots of black and brown and white people, with everyone laughing and joking, kids pushing each other and their moms and dads carrying baskets with food and thermos flasks and having a good time even before they got there.

I really,
really
wished my mom could’ve been with me. I don’t think she’d have minded the Dali pavilion one bit. We’d seen nude ladies in the art gallery – I mean, in pictures, of course – and she’d said they were a bit fat, but beautiful, and the artists were very clever; you’d think looking at it from a distance that it was real skin that hadn’t ever been out in the sun. That was when I was much younger, because now, of course, I know all about nineteenth-century figure and portrait paintings from school, as well as the French Impressionists – Degas, Cézanne, Renoir, Monet – and lots of others. It was part of all the stuff I knew that wasn’t about life here and now, or living in Toronto and waiting to be old enough to go to war.

The real big thrill was hearing some great musicians. First came what Miss Frostbite called ‘housekeeping’, that is, the interviews to find three new jazz musicians. The piano player was the most important because if you got him right the rest would follow. The reason the piano was so important was that the left hand could supplement the rhythm of the double bass and the right hand could play the melody; also, the pianist was free to sing. I was secretly a bit disappointed. As you will recall, I’d hoped they’d invite me to be the pianist, but Miss Frostbite, as usual, read my mind and said that, while she’d love to have given me a chance, she didn’t dare break the law – I’d have to be eighteen to play in a nightclub legally.

They found a piano player from Memphis who could also sing the blues, which was good. His name was Noah Payne and he was fifty years old and was willing to move to Toronto. He’d only just moved to New York and hadn’t settled down there yet. His wife had died of breast cancer the previous year, and his two boys were both in the American army and stationed in Hawaii. He said that in jazz circles he was known as No Pain and that was what he preferred to be called. Miss Frostbite explained that she and Joe had heard him play and he was pretty good and had a good blues voice, but it was between him and another pianist from New York, and he was also very good so they couldn’t decide. But then Noah Payne chuckled and said, ‘Ma’am, I got me that name because when I play piano, your patrons, they don’t feel No Pain no more.’ She’d liked that and he was hired on the spot.

The next musician was much younger – in his mid-thirties – and played the tenor and baritone sax. He hailed originally from Chicago and his name was Jim Shantyman, and Joe said he had a sound that was sweet and big and pure. ‘That good to find in the one and only player. Usually they got one sound better than the other.’ Both he and No Pain were Negro guys. But it was the third musician who was causing Miss Frostbite to bite her nails and for once making Joe unsure of what they needed at the Jazz Warehouse.

He was a white guy from Tennessee named Elmer Perkins, who played the electric guitar. He was thin as a beanpole, with straw-coloured hair you couldn’t comb because it grew in five different tufts on his head and stuck out every which way. He had pale blue, red-rimmed eyes, and eyelashes that were almost white, lighter even than his hair, and his skin was practically transparent. Joe said to me the night after the first interview, ‘You gotta believe, this cat, he ain’t no pretty sight. He play the ’lectric guitar with his tongue hanging out the side his mouth and a look he got on his face like he ’bout to cry.’ Miss Frostbite and Joe both admitted Elmer Perkins was good, very good, but the problem was that the band had never contained such an instrument and it meant a new sound in the Jazz Warehouse combo. Joe explained that the electric guitar, made by companies such as Gibson and Rickenbacker, had been introduced into jazz in the early 1930s, so it hadn’t worked itself into the blood and sinew of jazz yet.