Modern American Memoirs (26 page)

I made no claims that seemed false to me. I did not say that I was a star quarterback or even a varsity football player, because even though I went out for football every year I never quickened to the lumpen spirit of the sport. The same was true of basketball. I couldn't feature myself sinking a last-second clincher from the key, as Elgin Baylor did for Seattle that year in the NCAA playoffs against San Francisco. Ditto school politics; the unending compulsion to test one's own popularity was baffling to me.

These were not ideas I had of myself, and I did not propose to urge them on anyone else.

I declined to say I was a football star, but I did invent a swimming team for Concrete High. The coach wrote a fine letter for me, and so did my teachers and the principal. They didn't gush. They wrote plainly about a gifted, upright boy who had already in his own quiet way exhausted the resources of his school and community. They had done what they could for him. Now they hoped that others would carry on the good work.

I wrote without heat or hyperbole, in the words my teachers would have used if they had known me as I knew myself. These were their letters. And on the boy who lived in their letters, the splendid phantom who carried all my hopes, it seemed to me I saw, at last, my own face….

 

I had done well on the tests I'd taken in Seattle. But not long after my scores came in I got a rejection letter from Andover. Then St. Paul's turned me down. Then Exeter. The letters were polite, professed regret for the news they bore, and wished me well. I never heard back from Choate at all.

The rejections disappointed me, but I hadn't really counted on these schools anyway. I was counting on Deerfield. When I got their letter I went off by myself. I sat by the river and read it. I read it many times, first because I was too numb to take it all in, then to find some word or tone that would cancel out everything else the letter said, or at least give me hope for an appeal. But they knew what they were doing, the people who wrote these letters. They knew how to close the door so that no seam showed, no light glimmered at the edges. I understood that the game was over.

A week or so later the school secretary summoned me out of class to take a telephone call in the office. She said it sounded long distance. I thought it might be my brother, or even my father, but the caller turned out to be a Hill School alumnus who lived in Seattle. His name was Mr. Howard. He told me the school was “interested” in my application, and had asked him to meet with me and have a talk. Just an informal chat, he said. He said he'd always wanted to see our part of the state, and this would give him a good excuse. We arranged to meet outside Concrete High after classes let out the next day. Mr. Howard said he'd be driving a blue Thunderbird. He didn't say anything about wanting to meet my teachers, thank God.

“Whatever you do, just don't try to impress him,” my mother said when I told her about the call. “Just be yourself.”

 

When Mr. Howard asked me where we might go to talk, I suggested the Concrete drugstore. I knew there would be kids from school there. I wanted them to see me pull up in the Thunderbird and get out with this man, who was just old enough to be my father, and different from other men you might see in the Concrete drugstore. Without affecting boyishness, Mr. Howard still had the boy in him. He bounced a little as he walked. His narrow face was lively, foxlike. He looked around with a certain expectancy, as if he were ready to be interested in what he saw, and when he was interested he allowed himself to show it. He wore a suit and tie. The men who taught at the high school also wore suits and ties, but less easily. They were always pulling at their cuffs and running their fingers between their collars and their necks. To watch them was to suffocate. Mr. Howard wore his suit and tie as if he didn't know he had them on.

We sat at a booth in the back. Mr. Howard bought us milk-shakes, and while we drank them he asked me about Concrete High. I told him I enjoyed my classes, especially the more demanding ones, but that I was feeling a little restless lately. It was hard to explain.

“Oh, come on,” he said. “It's easy to explain. You're bored.”

I shrugged. I wasn't going to speak badly of the teachers who had written so well of me.

“You wouldn't be bored at Hill,” Mr. Howard said. “I can promise you that. But you might find it difficult in other ways.” He told me about his own time there in the years just before World War II. He had grown up in Seattle, where he'd done well in school. He expected that he would fall easily into life at Hill, but he hadn't. The academic work was much harder. He missed his family and hated the snowy Pennsylvania winters. And the boys at Hill were different from his friends back home, more reserved, more concerned with money and social position. He had found the school a cold place. Then, in his last year, something changed. The members of his class grew close in ways that he had never thought possible, until they were more like brothers than friends. It came, he said, from the simple fact of shar
ing the same life for a period of years. It made them a family. That was how he thought of the school now—as his second family.

But he'd had a rough time getting to that point, and some of the boys never got to it at all. They lived unhappily at the edge of things. These same boys might have done well if they'd stayed at home. A prep school was a world unto itself, and not the right world for everyone.

If any of this was supposed to put me off, it didn't. Of course the boys were concerned with money and social position. Of course a prep school wasn't for everyone—otherwise, what would be the point?

But I put on a thoughtful expression and said that I was aware of these problems. My father and my brother had given me similar warnings, I explained, and I was willing to endure whatever was necessary to get a good education.

Mr. Howard seemed amused by this answer, and asked me on what experience my father and brother had based their warnings. I told him that they had both gone to prep schools.

“Is that right? Where?”

“Deerfield and Choate.”

“I see.” He looked at me with a different quality of interest than before, as I had hoped he would. Though Mr. Howard was not a snob, I could see he was worried that I might not fit in at his school.

“My brother's at Princeton now,” I added.

He asked me about my father. When I told him that my father was an aeronautical engineer, Mr. Howard perked up. It turned out he had been a pilot during the war, and was familiar with a plane my father had helped design—the P-51 Mustang. He hadn't flown it himself but he knew men who had. This led him to memories of his time in uniform, the pilots he had served with and the nutty things they used to do. “We were just a bunch of kids,” he said. He spoke to me as if I were not a kid myself but someone who could understand him, someone of his world, family even. His hands were folded on the tabletop, his head bent slightly. I leaned forward to hear him better. We were really getting along. And then Huff showed up.

Huff had a peculiar voice, high and nasal. I had my back to the door but I heard him come in and settle into the booth behind ours with another boy, whose voice I did not recognize. The two of them
were discussing a fight they'd seen the previous weekend. A guy from Concrete had broken a guy from Sedro Woolley's nose.

Mr. Howard stopped talking. He leaned back, blinking a little as if he had dozed off. He did not speak, nor did I. I didn't want Huff to know I was there. Huff had certain rituals of greeting that I was anxious to avoid, and if he sensed he was embarrassing me he would never let me get away. He would sink my ship but good. So I kept my head down and my mouth shut while Huff and the other boy talked about the fight, and about the girl the two boys had been fighting over. They talked about another girl. Then they talked about eating pussy. Huff took the floor on this subject, and showed no sign of giving it up. He went on at length. I heard boys hold forth like this all the time, and I did it myself, but now I thought I'd better show some horror. I frowned and shook my head, and stared down at the tabletop.

“Shall we go?” Mr. Howard asked.

I did not want to break cover but I had no choice. I got up and walked past Huff's booth, Mr. Howard behind me. Though I kept my face averted I was sure that Huff would see me, and as I moved toward the door I was waiting to hear him shout, “Hey! Dicklick!” The shout never came.

Mr. Howard drove around Concrete for a while before taking me back to school. He was curious about the cement plant, and disappointed that I could tell him nothing about what went on inside it. He was quiet for a time. Then he said, “You should know that a boys's school can be a pretty rough-and-tumble place.”

I said that I could take care of myself.

“I don't mean physically rough,” Mr. Howard said. “Boys talk about all kinds of things. Even at a school like Hill you don't hear a whole lot of boys sitting around at night talking about Shakespeare. They're going to talk about other things. Sex, whatever. And they're going to take the gloves off.”

I said nothing.

“You can't expect everyone to be, you know, an Eagle Scout.”

“I don't,” I said.

“I'm just saying that life in a boys' school can come as a bit of a shock to someone who's led a sheltered life.” I began to make an answer, but Mr. Howard said, “Let me just say one more thing.
You're obviously doing a great job here. With your grades and so on you should be able to get into an excellent college later on. I'm not sure that a prep school is exactly the right move for you. You might end up doing yourself more harm than good. It's something to consider.”

I told Mr. Howard that I had not led a sheltered life, and that I was determined to get myself a better education than the one I was getting now. In trying to keep my voice from breaking I ended up sounding angry.

“Don't misunderstand me,” Mr. Howard said. “You're a fine boy and I'll be happy to give you a good report.” He said these words quickly, as if reciting them. Then he added, “You have a strong case. But you should know what you're getting into.” He said he would write to the school the next day, then we'd just have to wait and see. From what he understood, I was one of many boys being considered for the few remaining places.

“I assume you've got applications in at other schools,” he said.

“Just Choate. But I'd rather go to Hill. Hill is my first choice.”

We were parked in front of the school. Mr. Howard took a business card from his wallet and told me to call him if I had any questions. He advised me not to worry, said whatever happened would surely be for the best. Then he said good-bye and drove away. I watched the Thunderbird all the way down the hill to the main road, watched it as a man might watch a woman he'd just met leave his life, taking with her some hope of change that she had made him feel. The Thunderbird turned south at the main road and disappeared behind some trees.

Don Asher is a novelist and jazz pianist. Born in Massachusetts, educated at Cornell University, Asher has played both the East and West coasts, including a long stint at San Francisco's The hungry i. He also worked for a year as a research chemist
.

His most recent novel is
Blood Summer.
He and pianist Hampton Hawes together wrote Hawes's biography,
Raise Up Off Me.

“
Shoot the Piano Player” is a short version of his 1992 musical memoir
, Notes from a Battered Grand. Harper's
magazine first published it, subtitled “Tales of an Ivory Tickler
.”

 

Shoot the Piano Player

A
t sixteen I was embarking on a course that would admit me to the preeminent cabarets and ballrooms of Boston and San Francisco—a piano bench my passkey—entering via the back doors of assorted waterfront dives, backstreet saloons, and turnpike toilets. Tiny's Carousel, on Route 9 between Worcester and Boston, embodied the middle reaches of the final category. A sign over the bar said, “Our waitresses are ladies of unimpeachable moral character,” and the band, a quartet, featured a Negro on tenor sax who played rings around everyone in town. I later learned that I acquired the job (following an undistinguished audition) and held on to it by grace of Tiny's having come up before my uncle, a fairly well-known Worcester County judge, on an extortion charge. My uncle had given him a small fine and probation, and Tiny was the soul of deference and congeniality throughout my tenure at his club. “A fine upstanding man, your uncle the judge,” he'd say at the slightest provocation. Tiny hired only strippers six feet tall and over. Glamazons, he called them. I believe the coinage originated with Billy Rose at his Diamond Horseshoe. Tiny's six-footers had names like Belle Adonna, Beryl Bang! (exclamation point hers), Eve Cherry, and Ginger Rhale. They rarely brought in music, simply asking for “some
slow blues” or “any jump tune, medium tempo, 'bout like this”—snapping a thumb and middle finger in a brisk ellipse—or “‘Satin Doll,' medium-slow, couple choruses, stop time on the bridge; when I'm down to the bra and G-string, double time and out.”

Tiny, according to my uncle the judge, was a man “of humble origins and acquired manners.” Short and chunky, with a comical rocking motion to his walk, he intoned in a soft, husky voice expressions of civility such as “Happy to be making your acquaintance,” on being introduced to a new customer, and “Try the veal parmigiana, it'll enliven the palate.” His introductions of the acts were equally florid: “Now for your postprandial pleasure, the pulchritudinous Ginger Rhale…” The second night of Ginger's engagement Tiny changed her billing to “Silverella.” A lissome ebony-skinned beauty (“I grew up on a boulevard of broken lights,” I overheard her tell a man at the bar), she emerged from behind a red velvet curtain in glittering silver headdress and swirling layers of diaphanous mauve and scarlet, tracing a sinuous course between the tables under a pale blue spot to a Fats Waller medley of “Ain't Misbehavin'” and “Keepin' Out of Mischief Now.” Gutbucket tenor and boiling drums propelled the medley through a progression of crescendos, spurring Silverella to impassioned maneuvers—now prancing like a thoroughbred mare, now swinging her head to the floor, legs taut as a stork's, and straightening abruptly with a rapid-fire shimmy of shoulders and switching of hips—all the while loosening strategically placed strings, allowing raiment to spin tempestuously from her body in incarnadine streamers. Thundering tom-toms, mingling with the crowd's raucous exhortations, built to a frenzied pitch, rolling into the climax—the blue spot winking out on a vision that stormed the blood: Silverella, throat arched and arms akimbo, revealed in all her extravagant glory but for a phosphorescent coat of silver paint, collarbone to toes (and this fifteen years before
Goldfinger!
), shining diabolically in the black light. A hollering, foot-stomping ovation followed her regal exit through the swirling red curtain. She colored my dreams, Silverella, the most erotic fantasies I've ever known, and she departed before I could muster the courage to speak a word to her.

Beryl Bang! was equally statuesque but more accessible. She had
recently graduated from Pembroke, was funny and imaginative, and told me she had perfected her supple feline strut by conjuring a metamorphic image of herself as a Persian cat strolling along the top of a fence on a moonlit night. Her legs went on forever (“Do they go all the way up?” inquired a leering businessman as she sauntered past his table; “All the way to heaven, dearie,” came her over-the-shoulder retort), and her raven hair fell like a lace shawl about her shoulders. Toward the end of her engagement I plucked raw courage out of the air:

“How about a bite of supper after the last show, Miss Bang!?”

She wore three-inch spikes; I was five feet six, and her green gaze, which seemed to descend on me from the eaves, was not unkindly. “Honey, look at me and look at you and tell me what we're gonna do together.”

Strippers, I was learning, appropriate for their art the best, bluest, gutsiest tunes of the day, and that year and a half at Tiny's was probably the happiest time I've ever known. Home at two in the morning and up at seven for school; trying to nap in the late afternoons but too keyed up in anticipation of nightfall, the lights, the funky, vibrant club and long-legged glamazons, and the music that sent the blood leaping and bucking in my veins.

 

As it must to all nightclubs, the IRS came to Tiny's Carousel—dispassionate agents armed with padlocks—and I gravitated back to Worcester, a solo spot at Vincent's in the Shrewsbury Street Italian section. This was a shiny and opulent cabaret, incongruously situated among the neighborhood groceries, laundries, and pizzerias, and frequented by members of the thriving Worcester-Boston-Providence axis of La Cosa Nostra. I never learned who Vincent was. The manager, whom I'll call Guido, owned two cocker spaniels, and every night at closing time he'd set out twin yellow bowls of food on either side of the leather-padded door, beneath the zebra-striped awning. Inside was a black marble fireplace and lots of mirrors on the crimson walls; from different angles they glittered and flashed with light thrown from the banquettes' silver and glassware. The bar was separate, a small horseshoe affair called The Paddock, with black glass-top tables and framed photographs of racetracks and horses. In an alcove between the supper room, where I worked,
and the bar was a combination coatcheck stand and cigarette counter operated by a pretty, faded woman attired in mesh stockings, satin corselet, and pillbox hat. This was Guido's sister, and I would soon become overly familiar with a phrase that she invariably appended to her offhand remarks: “It's fairly common knowledge, but for the love of God don't quote me.”

At that time you could distinguish the mob-patronized clubs by the preponderance of good-looking women who appeared to be unattached—it took an immoderately courageous or naïve outsider to find out—and middle-aged men in conservative suits. The younger men dressed more elegantly but still along reserved lines—dark suits of shiny material and monogrammed white shirts and light-colored silk ties, the sole note of ostentation residing in the cufflinks and tiepins that gleamed opulently in the restrained bar lights. The mobsters enjoyed contemporary music and the kindred arts—singing, dancing, comedy. They liked to conduct their business and relax in sleek and animated surroundings and could grow misty-eyed listening to a pretty girl singing a sentimental tune.

 

I backed singer Amy Avallone and played solo segments around her. She was a full-bodied, sloe-eyed woman with olive skin and a marauding walk. (“Honey, I only walk down wide corridors 'cause I bruise kinda easy,” I heard her say to an aging mafioso.) She came in that first night wearing a luxurious fur coat, a monogrammed leather folder under one arm and a blue silk gown over the other; she dropped the folder on the piano. “Let's run over my charts before the place fills up.”

I glanced through the arrangements; they were elaborate and overwritten, dense with notes. My reading skill at the time was rudimentary, and to speak frankly, the notation looked about as decipherable as a spattering of bird droppings across a barn wall.

“I know most of the tunes; why don't we just fake them?”

“I paid good loot for these charts. You can read, can't you?”

“Let's save ourselves trouble. Just write out the order with keys and number of choruses.”

She leaned her elbows disconsolately on the piano and for a moment seemed to be studying her reflection in the polished wood;
then she muttered something under her breath that sounded like a resigned “What a pity.” When I got to know her better I realized the phrase had been “Shit city.”

She opened each of her three nightly sets with “Once in Love with Amy” and closed with some sprightly, maudlin jumper like “Aren't You Glad You're You?” (
Ev'ry time you're near a rose / Aren't you glad you've got a nose?
). The mafiosi ate it up. Part of my job was to boost her to a sitting position on the baby grand à la Helen Morgan, in one of her strapless sheaths (she wore a different one for every set and a week would elapse before I noticed a repeat). A rich and heady perfume came off her throat and shoulders like mist off a still pond, and I'd retreat from these exquisite exertions reeling.

Between her sets I played ballads and show tunes of the day, trying to impress with a lot of gloss and technical display—cross-handed embellishments, two melodies rendered simultaneously (Watch
this
, Alec Templeton), and rhythmic variations on sturdy warhorses like “Alexander's Ragtime Band”—what musicians call flagwavers. I thought it wouldn't hurt to get on the right side of these guys. (Guido's sister had told me he'd tried a pair of strolling fiddlers when the place first opened, “but the clientele wasn't all that crazy about the horsehair shafts poking into their lobster Newburg. They lasted three nights and no one's heard of them since. It's fairly common knowledge, but for the love of God don't quote me.”) What sometimes drifted across my mind as I served up my flagwavers to the blankly pretty women and blunt-featured men was an account I'd read in
National Geographic
of primitive Indian tribesmen in the remote upper reaches of the Amazon displaying “extraordinary emotional responses” to a recording of Beethoven's Violin Concerto.

Guido took me aside one night. Unlike his conservatively dressed clientele, he wore a brown shirt and yellow tie with his pin-stripe suit. Complaints had come his way: people were having trouble recognizing the melody, and a highly esteemed party at a reserved table had remarked that the piano player couldn't seem to keep a steady beat—sadly mistaking my embroideries for rhythmic instability.

“I like you, you're a nice boy,” Guido said. “Amy wishes you'd use her music, but she's happier than she was with the last guy. Now,
you want to make an old businessman happy? My friends are simple good-time Charlies, they don't like a lot of adornment. Knock off the fancy flourishes, cut down the DiMaggios [arpeggios]. Leave us hear the melody,
capisc'?
” And he drove a short playful right to my midriff and slapped my cheek in a friendly but brisk manner.

Later that night an old and battered mafioso approached the piano while I was playing a medley from
Oklahoma
. His face was deeply seamed, and coarse tufts of gray hair sprouted from the backs of his thick hands. They lowered onto mine, at first merely covering them, then gently pressing them into the dead keys as if he were reluctantly squashing a pair of harmless but repulsive insects; “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top” went flatter than a doormat.

“Play ‘Ciao, Ciao, Bambina.' It's for my wife.” His voice was a hoarse whisper. “Play it every ten minutes until I tell you to stop.” He raised off my hands, which involuntarily retained their crushed-bug position, and dropped a five-dollar bill on the piano; it fluttered like an autumn leaf, brushing the keyboard, coming to rest in my lap. To my considerable relief I knew the tune, thanks to my apprenticeship at the Italian-American Social Club two years earlier—and found myself smiling in recollection, thinking “Eat, Eat, Babe Ruth,” which had been an Armenian bass player's designation for “Ciao, Ciao, Bambina.”

Guido wandered in from the bar, grimacing painfully and banging the heel of his palm against his ear like a long-distance swimmer emerging from a heavy surf. “What's with the same song, you're sounding like a broken record.” I told him of the unusual request and pointed out the party who had made it. Guido took a look and said, “Keep playing it.”

 

Now that I was reactivating my Italian repertoire and playing unadorned melody, a steady stream of drinks began arriving at the piano. I was drinking an occasional beer at the time but was not yet into the heavy stuff. I tried to cut off the flow; if a drink was pressed on me or arrived unsolicited I let it stand on the piano until it went flat. Guido noticed this aberration and spoke to me during a break.

“It's not a friendly attitude.”

I told him if I accepted every drink offered me I'd be finished by the time I was thirty. (A piano-bar player I knew in Provincetown handled this problem by announcing at the start of the evening, “As
I'm allergic to both booze and flowers, thunderous applause and the clatter of silver dollars will do nicely. Thanks a million.”)

Guido gave a sad little smile and laid a parental hand on my shoulder. “Always order the drink. The bartender will send up colored water. Order an Old Fashioned, we'll load it with fruit, you'll have yourself a nutritious snack,
capisc'?
”—followed by the right to the midsection and the friendly slap across the face.