The Cool School (6 page)

Now, opening night, the Three Deuces is packed. We ain’t seen Bird in a week, but we’d been rehearsing our asses off. So here this nigger comes in smiling and shit, asking is everybody ready to play in that fake British accent of his. When it’s time for the band to hit he asks, “What are we playing?” I tell him. He nods, counts off the beat and plays every motherfucking tune in the exact key we had rehearsed it in. He played like a motherfucker. Didn’t miss one beat, one note, didn’t play out of key all night. It was something. We were fucking amazed. And every time he’d look at us looking at him all shocked and shit, he’d just smile that “Did you ever doubt this?” kind of smile.

After we got through with that first set, Bird came up and said—again in that fake British accent—“You boys played pretty good tonight, except in a couple of places where you fell off the rhythm and missed a couple of notes.” We just looked at the motherfucker and laughed. That’s the kind of amazing shit that Bird did on the bandstand. You came to expect it. And if he didn’t do something incredible,
that’s
when you were surprised.

Bird often used to play in short, hard bursts of breath. Hard as a mad man. Later on Coltrane would play like that. Anyway, so then, sometimes Max Roach would find himself in between the beat. And I wouldn’t know what the fuck Bird was doing because I wouldn’t have never heard it before. Poor Duke Jordan and Tommy Potter, they’d just be there lost as motherfuckers—like everybody else, only more lost. When Bird played like that, it was like hearing music for the first time. I’d never heard anybody play like that. Later, Sonny Rollins and I would try to do things like that, and me and Trane, playing those short, hard bursts of musical phrases. But when Bird played like that, he was outrageous. I hate to use a word like “outrageous,” but that’s what he was. He was notorious in the way he played combinations of notes and musical phrases. The average musician would try to develop something more logically, but not Bird. Everything he played—when he was on and
really
playing—was terrifying, and I was there every night! And so we couldn’t just keep saying, “What? Did you hear
that
!” all night long. Because then
we
couldn’t play nothing. So we got to the point where, when he played something that was just so outrageous, we blinked our eyes. They would just get wider than they were, and they already were
real
wide. But after a while it was just another day at the office playing with this bad motherfucker. It was unreal.

I was the one who rehearsed the band and kept it tight. Running that band made me understand what you had to do to have a great band. People said it was the best bebop band around. So I was proud of being the band’s musical director. I wasn’t twenty-one years old yet in 1947, and I was learning real quick about what music was all about.

Bird never talked about music, except one time I heard him arguing with a classical musician friend of mine. He told the cat that you can do anything with chords. I disagreed, told him that you couldn’t play D natural in the fifth bar of a B flat blues. He said you could. One night later on at Birdland, I heard Lester Young do it, but he bent the note. Bird was there when it happened and he just looked over at me with that “I told you so” look that he would lay on you when he had
proved you wrong. But that’s all he ever said about it. He knew you could do it because he had done it before. But he didn’t get up and show nobody
how
to do it or nothing. He just let you pick it up for yourself, and if you didn’t, then you just didn’t.

I learned a lot from Bird in this way, picking up from the way he played or didn’t play a musical phrase or idea. But like I said, I never did talk to Bird much, never talked to him over fifteen minutes at a time, unless we were arguing about money. I’d tell him right up front, “Bird, don’t fuck with me about money.” But he always did.

Miles: The Autobiography
(with Quincy Troupe), 1989

Henry Miller was the archetypal drop-out before there were drop-outs, quitting family, job, and the U.S. to lead a bohemian existence in Paris while writing books
—Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, Black Spring
—whose sexual frankness made them unpublishable for decades in his native land. Returning to America in the 1940s, he found himself still at odds with the mainstream culture, as evidenced by the following account of a drunken Hollywood dinner party. Settling at Big Sur, Miller was a liberating father figure to succeeding generations of writers and artists.

M
Y
FIRST
evening in Hollywood. It was so typical that I almost thought it had been arranged for me. It was by sheer chance, however, that I found myself rolling up to the home of a millionaire in a handsome black Packard. I had been invited to dinner by a perfect stranger. I didn’t even know my host’s name. Nor do I know it now.

The first thing which struck me, on being introduced all around, was that I was in the presence of wealthy people, people who were bored to death and who were all, including the octogenarians, already three sheets to the wind. The host and hostess seemed to take pleasure in acting as bartenders. It was hard to follow the conversation because everybody was talking at cross purposes. The important thing was to get an edge on before sitting down to the table. One old geezer who had recently recovered from a horrible automobile accident was having his fifth old-fashioned—he was proud of the fact, proud that he could swill it like a youngster even though he was still partially crippled. Every one thought he was a marvel.

There wasn’t an attractive woman about, except the one who had
brought me to the place. The men looked like business men, except for one or two who looked like aged strike-breakers. There was one fairly young couple, in their thirties, I should say. The husband was a typical go-getter, one of those ex-football players who go in for publicity or insurance or the stock market, some clean all-American pursuit in which you run no risk of soiling your hands. He was a graduate of some Eastern University and had the intelligence of a high-grade chimpanzee.

That was the set-up. When every one had been properly soused dinner was announced. We seated ourselves at a long table, elegantly decorated, with three or four glasses beside each plate. The ice was abundant, of course. The service began, a dozen flunkeys buzzing at your elbow like horse flies. There was a surfeit of everything; a poor man would have had sufficient with the hors-d’oeuvre alone. As they ate, they became more discursive, more argumentative. An elderly thug in a tuxedo who had the complexion of a boiled lobster was railing against labor agitators. He had a religious strain, much to my amazement, but it was more like Torquemada’s than Christ’s. President Roosevelt’s name almost gave him an apoplectic fit. Roosevelt, Bridges, Stalin, Hitler—they were all in the same class to him. That is to say, they were anathema. He had an extraordinary appetite which served, it seemed, to stimulate his adrenal glands. By the time he had reached the meat course he was talking about hanging being too good for some people. The hostess, meanwhile, who was seated at his elbow, was carrying on one of those delightful inconsequential conversations with the person opposite her. She had left some beautiful dachshunds in Biarritz, or was it Sierra Leone, and to believe her, she was greatly worried about them. In times like these, she was saying, people forget about animals. People can be so cruel, especially in time of war. Why, in Peking the servants had run away and left her with forty trunks to pack—it was outrageous. It was so good to be back in California. God’s own country, she called it. She hoped the war wouldn’t spread to America. Dear me, where was one to go now? You couldn’t feel safe anywhere, except in the desert perhaps.

The ex-football player was talking to some one at the far end of the table in a loud voice. It happened to be an Englishwoman and he was insulting her roundly and openly for daring to arouse sympathy for the English in this country. “Why don’t you go back to England?” he shouted at the top of his voice. “What are you doing here? You’re a menace. We’re not fighting to hold the British Empire together. You’re a menace. You ought to be expelled from the country.”

The woman was trying to say that she was not English but Canadian, but she couldn’t make herself heard above the din. The octogenarian, who was now sampling the champagne, was talking about the automobile accident. Nobody was paying any attention to him. Automobile accidents were too common—every one at the table had been in a smash-up at one time or another. One doesn’t make a point about such things unless one is feeble-minded.

The hostess was clapping her hands frantically—she wanted to tell us a little story about an experience she had had in Africa once, on one of her safaris.

“Oh, can that!” shouted the football player. “I want to find out why this great country of ours, in the most crucial moment . . .”

“Shut up!” screamed the hostess. “You’re drunk.”

“That makes no difference,” came his booming voice. “I want to know if we’re all hundred percent Americans—and if not why not. I suspect that we have some traitors in our midst,” and because I hadn’t been taking part in any of the conversation he gave me a fixed, drunken look which was intended to make me declare myself. All I could do was smile. That seemed to infuriate him. His eyes roved about the table challengingly and finally, sensing an antagonist worthy of his mettle, rested on the aged, Florida-baked strike-breaker. The latter was at that moment quietly talking to the person beside him about his good friend, Cardinal So-and-so. He, the Cardinal, was always very good to the poor, I heard him say. A very gentle hard-working man, but he would tolerate no nonsense from the dirty labor agitators who were stirring up revolution, fomenting class hatred, preaching anarchy. The more he talked about his holy eminence,
the Cardinal, the more he foamed at the mouth. But his rage in no way affected his appetite. He was carnivorous, bibulous, querulous, cantankerous and poisonous as a snake. One could almost see the bile spreading through his varicose veins. He was a man who had spent millions of dollars of the public’s money to help the needy, as he put it. What he meant was to prevent the poor from organizing and fighting for their rights. Had he not been dressed like a banker he would have passed for a hod carrier. When he grew angry he not only became flushed but his whole body quivered like guava. He became so intoxicated by his own venom that finally he overstepped the bounds and began denouncing President Roosevelt as a crook and a traitor, among other things. One of the guests, a woman, protested. That brought the football hero to his feet. He said that no man could insult the President of the United States in his presence. The whole table was soon in an uproar. The flunkey at my elbow had just filled the huge liquor glass with some marvelous cognac. I took a sip and sat back with a grin, wondering how it would all end. The louder the altercation the more peaceful I became.
“How do you like your new boarding house, Mr. Smith?”
I heard President McKinley saying to his secretary. Every night Mr. Smith, the president’s private secretary, used to visit Mr. McKinley at his home and read aloud to him the amusing letters which he had selected from the daily correspondence. The president, who was overburdened with affairs of state, used to listen silently from his big armchair by the fire: it was his sole recreation. At the end he would always ask
“How do you like your new boarding house, Mr. Smith?”
So worn out by his duties he was that he couldn’t think of anything else to say at the close of these séances. Even after Mr. Smith had left his boarding house and taken a room at a hotel President McKinley continued to say
“How do you like your new boarding house, Mr Smith?”
Then came the Exposition and Csolgosz, who had no idea what a simpleton the president was, assassinated him. There was something wretched and incongruous about murdering a man like McKinley. I remember the incident only because that same day the horse that my aunt was using for a buggy
ride got the blind staggers and ran into a lamp post and when I was going to the hospital to see my aunt the extras were out already and young as I was I understood that a great tragedy had befallen the nation. At the same time I felt sorry for Csolgosz—that’s the strange thing about the incident. I don’t know why I felt sorry for him, except that in some vague way I realized that the punishment meted out to him would be greater than the crime merited. Even at that tender age I felt that punishment was criminal. I couldn’t understand why people should be punished—I don’t yet. I couldn’t even understand why God had the right to punish us for our sins. And of course, as I later realized, God doesn’t punish us—we punish ourselves.

Thoughts like these were floating through my head when suddenly I became aware that people were leaving the table. The meal wasn’t over yet, but the guests were departing. Something had happened while I was reminiscing. Pre-civil war days, I thought to myself. Infantilism rampant again. And if Roosevelt is assassinated they will make another Lincoln of him. Only this time the slaves will still be slaves. Meanwhile I overhear some one saying what a wonderful president Melvyn Douglas would make. I prick up my ears. I wonder do they mean Melvyn Douglas, the movie star? Yes, that’s who they mean. He has a great mind, the woman is saying. And character. And
savoir faire.
Thinks I to myself “and who will the vice-president be, may I ask? Shure and it’s not Jimmy Cagney you’re thinkin’ of?” But the woman is not worried about the vice-presidency. She had been to a palmist the other day and learned some interesting things about herself. Her life line was broken. “Think of it,” she said, “all these years and I never knew it was broken. What do you suppose is going to happen? Does it mean war? Or do you think it means an accident?”

The hostess was running about like a wet hen. Trying to rustle up enough hands for a game of bridge. A desperate soul, surrounded by the booty of a thousand battles. “I understand you’re a writer,” she said, as she tried to carom from my corner of the room to the bar. “Won’t you have something to drink—a highball or something? Dear me, I don’t know what’s come over everbody this evening. I do hate to
hear these political discussions. That young man is positively rude. Of course I don’t approve of insulting the President of the United States in public but just the same he might have used a little more tact. After all, Mr. So-and-so is an elderly man. He’s entitled to some respect, don’t you think? Oh, there’s So-and-so!” and she dashed off to greet a cinema star who had just dropped in.