Ice-Cream Headache (21 page)

“Yeah, he in town. I just telling Baby.”

That was when we noticed Baby was gone. He had moved down the vacant bar and was talking to some cats at the other end.

“So you boys know old Punch,” King said. “Whyn’t you go look old Punch up.”

“We don’t know him,” one of us said. “We just—”

“Here. I give you his address,” King said. “He be real glad to see you boys. Old Punch is down and out. He on his uppers, and he sick. That’s nowhere to be, not in this New York town.” He wrote the address on one of Ryan’s cards and handed it to the nearest one of us. “I just telling Baby about old Punch. You go see him.”

“We don’t know him,” one of us said. “We just—”

“Why don’t you put your name on it, too, King?” the one who had the card said. “I’d like to have it.”

The King’s eyes kindled. “You boys know me? Sure, I sign it. Here. Gimme that card.”

“Hell yes, we know you,” one of us said.

“You ever hear me play?”

“Just on records.”

He nodded. “You boys stick around. I going to play here, pretty soon. They din’t ask me, but I going to anyway.” He shook the trumpet case at us. “They don’t ask ol King no more to these jam sessions. But I just come down anyways. I see you boys.” He went off down the bar toward Baby Dodds and the talking cats.

“I’m going to keep this card,” our bass man said, shaking it at us, as we crossed the street to Johnny’s. “I’m going to keep it forever.” He put it in his pocket carefully.

“It don’t belong to you,” our trumpet man said. “Belongs to the whole band.”

“Like hell,” the bass man said.

We argued about the card over our series of rye-highs in Johnny’s Tavern, without reaching a decision, until we heard them start up again across the street, and then went back over there.

There wasn’t any minimum at the Sunday sessions and we got bottles of beer and moved down to a table as close to the band as we could get. They were already gone and going strong on
Nobody’s Sweetheart,
with Wild-Bill-Bailey punching out the drive in that surcharged style of his.

King Jefferson was standing in the passageway around the left of the stand to the men’s room with his trumpet in his hand. He would play a few bars, low, along with them, and then he’d stop and reach up and pluck at Baby Dodds’ shirt sleeve. Baby would look down at his drums embarrassedly until he couldn’t any longer, and then he’d look down at King and frown and shake his head and say something, and then smile, with that constrained look of trying not to look constrained on his face embarrassedly. It was bothering his playing. King didn’t even leave him alone when he was on his solo choruses. He kept it up all through the set, but Baby never got mad.

Once we saw Wild-Bill-Bailey lean over and say something to the colored guitarman and they both shook their heads and laughed disgustedly. When the set was over, Wild-Bill climbed down and cut out quick. So did Baby and Pops Foster. King Jefferson lingered around the stand, after they were all down, and blew little bleats on that exquisite trumpet as if he were warming up his lip. He would blow a bleat and look around and grin and nod his head and then blow another bleat.

When we came back from Johnny’s Tavern and refreshments, they had already started the fourth set and King was standing in the passageway at Baby’s elbow again. Finally, about the sixth or seventh set, we came back from Johnny’s and he wasn’t there any more.

When the jam session was over and Ryan’s deserted, we crossed the street to Johnny’s Tavern through that almost unbearably melancholy, lonely twilight New York has, to do some drinking and decide where to go for the evening, and to argue some more about the card. We were still sitting at the bar there when King Jefferson came in with his trumpet case under his arm.

He didn’t seem to be any drunker. But he wasn’t any soberer. He remembered us.

“You boys come on and have a drink with old King.”

“Sure,” one of us said. “It’ll be a privilege.”

“We’ll be proud to,” another of us said,

We seemed to kind of fall into it, the way all the rest of them did, except Wild-Bill-Bailey, humoring him. You couldn’t help it.

“Let me show you boys my horn,” he said, after we had been served the drink. He got the case down on the floor and squatted by it and lifted the horn out lovingly. It was a beautiful trumpet, inscribed to him. He showed us the inscription.

“They gimme that horn in France,” he said. “Las year. They know real music over there. That Mr. Panassié, he a fine man.

“You boys heard my band?”

“Just on records, King,” one of us said.

“No, that’s my old band. I mean my new band. I got me almost all new boys.”

“We’ve been meaning to hit the Standish, King,” one of us said. “But we only got in town last night.”

“You don’t want to hear it,” King said. “Don’t come down there. They all good boys, you understand. I like my boys. But they just don’t play old King’s kind of music. And all the people come they want to dance, not hear old King’s kind of music. Have to play dance music. Most all my old boys lef me. They getting better jobs, see? That’s all right. That’s fine. You know I the man brought Buddy Ferrill back? He working in a lime kiln in that great old city of New Leans. You know Buddy Ferrill?”

“Sure. On records,” one of us said. “Bob Rhynolds says he’s the greatest jazz drummer ever lived.”

“No he aint. Baby Dodds is.” The King’s eyes kindled. “You boys know Bob Rhynolds?”

“We just read about him,” one of us said. “We never met him.”

“He my good friend,” King smiled at us proudly. “Bob Rhynolds my old buddy.” He put the horn back into its case lovingly and looked at it and then rubbed the bell with a piece of flannel and closed the case. “I got to go, boys. Got to go to work pretty soon.”

We all stood up. “We’ll be down and see your band later on tonight, King,” one of us said.

“You don’t want to see my band. It a good band. They all good boys. But they aint like the old band, and they never going to be. Old King wouldn’t lie to you. I can tell you boys know good jazz. Don’t you boys come down.

“Boys,” he said, “I’d like to pay for this drink. But thas all the money I got.” He turned his pants pocket out; there was seventy cents in change in it. “I made a lot of money in this town, but I spending it just as fast.”

“That’s okay, King,” one of us said. “We’ll get it.”

“I surely thank you boys,” he said. “You boys write Bob Rhynolds, you tell him old King asking after him. I be seeing you boys sometime.”

We watched him leave, the trumpet case tight under his arm. Then we paid for his drink.

Bechet was off that night and Ryan’s had some other band so we ended up at Bop City. Louis Armstrong’s All-Stars were playing at Bop City, and we had heard a lot about their young bassman, Arvel Shaw. He was as good as they said, too.

I guess it was about a year or so later—anyway, we were all back home, in business—that there was a little piece in
Down Beat
that said King Jefferson was anxious to hear from any of his old friends across the country or people who had seen him play and he would answer any letters faithfully. The address was New Arcadia, Louisiana.

That was the first we’d heard about his not being renewed at the Standish, and it shocked us. We’d always thought of him as a perennial. The five of us who’d met him agreed to write him a long newsy letter, but something else came up before we got a chance to do it, and we figured a lot of other people, people he knew really well, would write him.

It was probably a year after that, maybe two, before
Down Beat
mentioned him again. They gave him a double column spread and used his picture, his best one, the one that was on his first Victor album. It was good writeup. I had read the obits for both Fats Waller and Johnny Dodds, and it was as good as them.

A lot of us musicians felt his death, personally. I remember I was sitting in the Rec Hall poolroom on the Square, when I first read it. It was Tuesday and the new issue had just come in up at the newsstand. I had taken my morning-break-for-coffee at the store and used it to beat it over and get my copy. Tom Myers, our old band’s bassman, and I always took our morning breaks to get our copies when they came out and read them in the Rec Hall with a bottle of coke, where it was quiet. Other mornings, we would go to Adams’s Drugstore and have coffee at the fountain like the other peasants.

Tom came in from his father’s insurance office just as I finished reading it. Tom had already seen it, on his way down from the newsstand. Both of us felt pretty somber, and we sat and talked about him so long we were both late getting back to work. We both felt the world had lost something pretty important, a piece of jazz history. No matter what the critics said, he had been important, a big man, a landmark. He was a great jazzman. Tom said he still had the signed card the King had given him that time at Ryan’s, had it with his music stuff somewhere.

“It ought to be worth something some day, don’t you think?”

“Sure,” I said, “I don’t see why not.”

“You going to be to City Band practice tonight?”

“I don’t know. Marcia’s been having trouble with the baby. She’s been sick. But I’ll try and make it.”

“How’s the other one?”

“The boy? Oh, he’s over it already.”

“You ought to make it if you can.”

“I’ll try,” I said.

“ —You know, we met a great jazzman, when we met King Jefferson,” Tom said, as we left.

“We sure did,” I said. “There won’t be no more like him.”

So now we come to the last batch of four, all done in 1957. This one, the first of these, is probably the least unconventional in its approach and its material. I like the Woolworth scene, the Newsstand scene, and the delivering of the papers at dawn, but particularly I like that last scene with that poor little youngun standing out there with his head hid in the coats, totally destroyed, and nobody in the whole damned world knows about it, or gives a good goddamn. And, in the end, isn’t that the state that we all of us are in, too? give or take a handful?

H
E HAD NOT MEANT,
when he started the whole thing, for it to become such a big operation, such a production. But from the moment he had first stepped inside Woolworth’s with his mind made up and had gone up to the candy counter and silently picked out the box, that was what it seemed to become nevertheless. And now, with it the last day before Valentine’s Day, and Woolworth’s ready to close up in just a few minutes, everything couldn’t have been worse.

In the first place, there were two of the other paperboys from the Newsstand standing there at the candy counter. And the man behind the counter was a man he knew. He was the sort of assistant manager. And he had squinchy eyes and liked to needle the kids. And the other two paperboys from the Newsstand, where he himself John Slade worked too, were both freshmen while he was still only an eighth grader. It couldn’t have been a much worse of a situation to try and buy it in.

And this time he couldn’t go away and come back another time, as he had in fact already done at least three other times during the past week when he had come up and found other people standing at the candy counter. Woolworth’s would be closing in a few minutes, and tomorrow was the day; he either had to do it now, or not do it. Unless he went somewhere else like the drugstore and he didn’t want to do that. He had a distinct uncomfortable hollow feeling that that would be cheating, like. And anyway he knew the box he wanted, had in fact picked it out as long as two weeks ago, and it was, for the money, which was eight-ninetyfive, the best box in town he believed—all hearts that all interlocked with each other within the big heart that was the box shape itself, and with the two small paper cupids in the center of the white paper lace in the middle of that striking, eye-stopping deep deep red. A really beautiful box. And if he didn’t take it now, after having promised himself faithfully that he would, he felt quite distinctly, although he did not word it quite that way, did not word it at all in fact, but nevertheless felt quite strongly, there would be no really moral or justifiable way out of having to face the fact that he was, after all, afraid and a liar to himself, and morally a coward.

It was the first time in his life that John Slade had ever really bought anything for a girl, and he wanted so bad for it to be right, to be really grownup, to be professional as if he was used to doing it a thousand times. Especially since the girl herself, whose lovely beautiful name was Margaret Simpson, didn’t know anything about it at all yet, and wouldn’t, until he handed it to her tomorrow. He wanted it to he a surprise. And he wanted it to be a secret. As far as that went, he was forced to admit, he didn’t have nerve enough to do it any other way. Because he couldn’t just go up to her and mention it to her. She might refuse. And now—

Some secret this would be! he thought desperately. And in the low-key, late-afternoon, February winter light, against which the lights had been turned on in the store without in the least changing its effect or cheerfulizing it, he stood irresolute just inside the door in his corduroy sheepskin-collared mackinaw, full of despair.

What did those guys have to be there for? And why did that sort of assistant manager have to be behind the counter? Any clerk in the store would have been better than him. Hell, John would have been better off if he’d gone ahead and bought it one of those other times before when he’d chickened out. He didn’t want it to be a big operation. But everybody made it that.

There wasn’t any possibility of waiting those two guys out until they left, they obviously weren’t leaving, and there was less than five minutes left till closing. And he knew Woolworth’s well enough to know they weren’t going to stay open one minute after five for any twelve year old kid. Unless he could succeed in covering it up from them some way, and how could he do that with that loudmouth needier behind the counter, it would mean he would take an awful lot of razzing at the Newsstand for the next month or so. The Newsstand was a good place to work, the elite in fact of all the several possible papercarrying jobs in town, much better than carrying for either of the local dailies or the Saturday Evening Post and magazine routes, and was not, in their town at any rate, the kind of poor-people-low-class sort of idea like people thought of paperboys like say in a city for instance. The boys who worked at the Newsstand were a cross section of the whole town, from the very poorest like Otis Cole to the most well off, just as of the two boys at the counter one was a doctor’s son and the other a lawyer’s, even as he himself was the son of a dentist. But that, just the same, did not mean they were not capable of inflicting the most roasting kind of humiliating razzing, especially when it came to anything like girls. Sex was one thing, and everybody talked about that and about screwing girls even though none of them ever really had as yet, except maybe Otis Cole, and they all collected and traded dirty books, but when it came to girlfriends and being in love—! That was something else again and you were liable to get yourself laughed and razzed right out of the back room of the Newsstand in the pre-dawn early mornings where everybody folded their papers before taking off. And if they found out about anybody buying a girl a great big heart-shaped box of candy for Valentine’s Day!