Young Man With a Horn (22 page)

‘I’d shoot myself on account of Jeff Williams’s band! Listen, you!’ Phil had his coat halfway off, but Rick simply turned around and walked out as straight as he could.

And that split a combination that had seemed as solid as the earth. Phil Morrison’s Orchestra with Rick Martin, first trumpet. Mention Morrison’s Orchestra in those days and you immediately thought of Rick Martin. Mention Rick Martin and you thought of his horn in Morrison’s records. It had lasted five years, and that’s long.

It was the first time Rick had been out of a job since the truant officer caught up with him at Gandy’s. He could have had fifty jobs the first day, but he didn’t want even one job. His job with Phil Morrison had been a tie with the world, like his job at Gandy’s, and the moment he was free of it, he knew he didn’t want any more of it. By that time, the fewer obligations he had, the better he liked it. Music, for him, wasn’t a business; it was a passion, and he was ready to give up to it.

The upstairs and downstairs places saw a lot of him after he left Morrison. He made records with anybody that asked him, but he didn’t sit behind any orchestra leaders and he didn’t play any more hotel dance music. He simply didn’t take offers. He stayed in the joints with his own kind, the incurables, the boys who felt the itch to discover something. He stayed within the closed circle of the fanatics, the old bunch of alchemists, and there he did his work. One night after another he soaked out the real world with alcohol and, free of it, he played music that could stand up with any music. There were times when a bell rang and he had the pleasure of knowing he was a good man. He knew it once in awhile. The rest of them knew it all the time, every time he played that horn.

When he stopped working for Morrison he stopped making any bones about drinking. It was all the time and nothing to do about it, no reason to have to do anything about it. Drinking was as much of a method as any he’d ever worked out, and it served two purposes for him: it gave him a way out, a means of pushing out beyond the actual, banal here-and-now, and at the same time it kept him on his feet. Something had to keep him on his feet; he was tired in those days, dog-tired all the time, ready to drop. If he’d ever unwound and relaxed, it would have been all over, he couldn’t have lifted a finger. He had to keep shoving everything off-center, not let himself find out how tired he was. He needed to keep himself keyed up and stretched tight to play the way he wanted to. It was work and a way of working.

But it was a drastic means and it worried his friends. It had got to the place where no one could tell how drunk he was unless he hadn’t been drinking for a few hours. When it began to go out you could make a guess about how much it had been. The rest of the time you couldn’t be sure whether he was drunk or just preoccupied. He’d learned to handle the outward signs when he was playing with Morrison.

Smoke Jordan tried hard to get him to take it easier, maybe not play so much, maybe take a vacation, Florida’s nice.

‘Get yourself wheeled up and down like an icky banker?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Smoke said. ‘It’s all right. You wouldn’t haf to get wheeled. Lay on the beach and look at the waves.’

‘No Florida,’ Rick said.

‘If I wasn’t working I’d get out of this town and go somewheres, boy, I’m telling you that.’

But it didn’t do any good. Rick didn’t leave New York all winter long, and he worked harder than he ever had when he had had a job. Every tenth record you’d pick up in those days would have some of that magnificent horn in it somewhere. Apparently anybody could call on him and he’d sit in just for the fun of it, just for the fun of riding along and pulling a whole band with him.

His own recording band, however, turned out to be a lost cause. He got the band together, one of the most exciting personnels anybody ever rounded up. Ten men, four black and six white. It was to be a co-operative, and they were signed by a company that was just getting its start and felt like taking a chance on something good. Rick had Smoke and Davis and Snowden and Jeff from Jeff’s band, and La Porte from Morrison’s, and Cohen from Freeman’s, and Roland from Moss’s, and Barrow and Lake from Deane’s. The band was called Dick Rogers’s Memphis Ten for the sake of anonymity, and it’s too bad the record company went broke before any of their records were issued, because Dick Rogers’s Memphis Ten was shaped like a winner.

But the company went broke. And Rick took it hard, because he had felt right about it. The thing he’d wanted to do ever since he could remember was to get a good band and make records that weren’t held by anything. He got the band, that part worked out.

He showed up, icy-eyed, at Louie Galba’s the night he found out the company had gone under. He pushed through the door and went to a table alone. He didn’t have his trumpet with him; all he had was a flask which he fetched out of a pocket and laid on the table in front of him. It was about two-thirty. At three Jeff came in and Rick told him as much as he could.

‘We ought to have expected it,’ Jeff said. ‘Same thing I told you a year ago when you wanted to try it. Only I thought this really looked good. Too damned bad.’

‘You don’t have to worry,’ Rick said. ‘You’ve got a band and you can make what you want, in a sort of way. Where does a white guy get, though? What can he do?’

‘Do you wish you were playing in a band again?’ Jeff said. ‘Like Morrison’s? Maybe you ought to go back. It’s a good band. Good as any when you played in it.’

‘I don’t want to go back,’ Rick said; ‘but, at that, I wouldn’t mind being regular in a good band, one that was good all the time, not just one chorus in ten. I don’t know. I can’t get along in a band. I used to work for Morrison, did you know that?—worked for him for five years.’

Jeff looked at him closely and didn’t answer.

‘I can’t get along in a band,’ Rick said. ‘It…I don’t know, it sort of weighs me down. I couldn’t get along at Balboa. I worked down there once when I was a kid for a summer, and I couldn’t get along from the first day. No use to try it again. I can’t get along in a band. Gotta go now.’

He stood up, collected his flask, and pushed straight out the door. There was something about the way he walked. It wasn’t stiff-legged, exactly, but it was on that style.

He didn’t show up anywhere for three weeks. The boys were laying bets he was dead. Smoke forced himself through the morgue twice, looked over the whole display, tags and all. Then he called up all the jails. Not the right Martin. But he wouldn’t give it up. He kept trying everything he could think of, and then one morning an old woman gave him a tip and he found him and put him in a cure.

It was one of those cures where they saturate you with alcohol and then pump you full of a preparation that gives you an allergy to alcohol. It makes a conflict. The forces for good do battle with the forces of evil and the patient has a time of it. The patient is expected to remember the conflict as long as he lives, and the assumption is that he’ll never take a chance on another. He’d just prefer not to.

Smoke came to get Rick the day he was supposed to be released. He’d had his suit cleaned and he brought it along for him to wear home. He rang a bell in the waiting-room, and a man in a surgeon’s smock came in and said thank heavens he’d come, they’d been trying every place they knew to get in touch with him or somebody that knew the patient.

‘What’s wrong?’ Smoke said, wide-eyed. ‘Couldn’t he take the cure?’

It wasn’t that. He took the cure fine, at least they gave it to him, but he turned out not to be in such good shape in other respects. He had had a bad cold when he came in, and now it looked like either pneumonia or double pneumonia.

‘You’re a doctor, which do you think?’ Smoke said, and the one in the smock said he was a special kind of doctor; he just gave alcohol and narcotics cures, and he wouldn’t say anything for sure, but his guess was that that boy should be taken to a hospital; they had begun to think so two days before, but there wasn’t anything to identify the patient, after Smoke took his suit, and they couldn’t find anyone to give them an authorization.

‘Why didn’t you authorize yourself?’ Smoke said. ‘You didn’t need to worry. I’d have paid you anyhow.’

‘My own feeling is,’ the cure doctor said, ‘that we’d better get him out of here quick.’

He called an ambulance, and Smoke went in to see Rick.

It was a small room with white walls, one barred window, and a hospital bed. No other furniture, nothing to break. It was simply a cell, a place to suffer in while the conflict raged. The late sun poked through the bars. It was one of the first days of spring, a good day to ride on top of a bus, a rotten day for an ambulance.

Rick’s head lay flat against the sheet; the covers were pinned close by his ears with huge safety pins, so that nothing but his head was outside.

His eyes flicked when Smoke came in. They stayed open for a moment and burned like lighted rum. He twisted violently and the sheet tore a little where it was pinned. Then he lay perfectly still and moaned low, but didn’t speak.

Smoke tiptoed to the side of the bed and whispered: ‘Take it easy, baby; I’m going to get you out of here. It’s a quack joint, and the doctor doesn’t know his business from a hole in the ground. He’s not even a doctor.’

Rick’s eyes came open halfway and the flames jumped out when they caught the draft.

He looked up at Smoke and said: ‘I worked for him, but I couldn’t get along. Can’t get along in a band.’

Smoke couldn’t make out the words. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Just forget it.’

He closed his eyes again. He had a three weeks’ beard, and there was a bright red circle on each cheek. His hair fell in rings over his forehead. The prophet in his homeland is not supposed to be taken seriously. Let him cut loose and go someplace else, or have done with prophesying. What do we know about this young man with the beard and the spots on his cheeks, this young man pinned down in a strange bed in a barred room, out of his head with a fever? What do we know except that he had a way of doing a thing, and that he had a love of the thing so strong that he never in his life compromised it, or let it down, or forgot it?

Rick twisted sharply against the sheet, but this time it didn’t tear. His mouth was scarlet and he opened it and said: ‘I don’t see why we couldn’t. Just call it the Memphis Ten or some name, same bunch all the time, do up a lot of good ones, all the ones we used to play.’

He said it, but the words he used didn’t mean anything, and when Smoke bent down close to try to hear him he only heard sounds—sounds that should have meant: ‘If I had been born into a different kind of world, at another place, in another time, everything changed, the name Martin might have lasted along with the names of the other devout ones, the ones who cared for music and put it down so that it’s still good and always will be. But what chance has a jig-man got? He plays his little tune, and then it’s over, and he alone can know what went into it. This is sad; but so is everything, and in the end there is another thing to say about it. The good thing, finally, is to lead a devoted life, even if it swings around and strikes you in the face.’

Smoke stayed there, close, trying to get anything he could, but the sounds just didn’t mean anything.

The cure doctor came in with two ambulance men wearing white coats and carrying a stretcher between them. They took the pins out and turned back the covers and Rick lay quietly, his arms crossed unnaturally far over on his chest. The thing they had on him was a strait-jacket.

‘Loosen it up and leave it on him,’ one of the stretcher men said. ‘This boy don’t need restraining.’

They rolled him onto the stretcher and carried him to the ambulance. Smoke got in and sat beside him on a jump seat. They drove slowly between streets, but they put on a little speed at intersections and went across with the siren wide open.

The sun was in Rick’s face. Smoke reached up and pulled down the blind. Then he settled back and said, ‘I knew a guy once that took a cure and he said…’ But he stopped it there because he suddenly knew that it wasn’t getting over. He looked down and saw Rick’s face. He watched, stunned, and while he was watching, Rick died. He could tell when it happened. There was a difference.

“T
HE GOOD
thing, finally, is to lead a devoted life, even if it swings around and strikes you in the face.” Rick Martin’s last words might have been Dorothy Baker’s. She was a chronicler of obsession, and of the fluid, hazardous nature of identity as shaped by art, race, gender, sexuality, family, chance, and stimulants—in a word, life. Music figures prominently in all four of her novels, as does suicide or attempted suicide and, to the dismay of her contemporaries, sexual uncertainty in the form of a seductive homoeroticism. Only in her final triumph,
Cassandra at the Wedding
, does gayness emerge affirmatively and hopefully into the light of day. At her best, Baker is essentially a comic novelist, a canny and caustic ironist. Yet reviewers, from the 1930s through the 1960s, often acknowledged her virtuoso technique and disciplined craftsmanship while slighting or completely missing the humor, and the psychological acuteness from which it springs. Many of them cringed at her focus on disreputable subjects such as jazz, blacks, lesbians, and Mexicans. Despite social progress, her critical reputation waned and her novels and uncollected short stories disappeared.

At the time of her death, in 1968, at sixty-one, Baker was remembered almost exclusively for her dazzling debut,
Young Man with a Horn
, which was no longer widely read. In the 1970s, the omnivorous critic Martin Seymour-Smith lamented that Baker “never had her critical due and is absent from most surveys.” The tide has not quite shifted, but her cult of readers holds steady and is evidently building. It’s hard to believe how long
Young Man with a Horn
has been unavailable. It arrived, in 1938, with fanfare, escorted by a $1,000 Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award, the prize that helped to launch an uneven cluster of recipients of whom the most enduring include Robert Penn Warren, Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Roth, and Robert Stone. Baker was the fourth to win and the first to score a bull’s-eye with the critics and the public.