“Florida. Just passing through, but I had to see your club. People keep telling me about it down there, all the big dogs coming to see you — Lips and Trummy and Satch, and you got a new record coming, so I say, ‘Max, go say hello to Cody while he’s red hot.’”
“He says he knew you in Cuba,” Roy said to Cody.
“Right,” Cody said. “Max got me a job in Havana when I needed one and I stayed two years.”
“He packed ’em in, a jazz club in the Vedado called Night and Day. The Cubans loved him.”
George had come over from his table and was standing a few feet off, staring at Cody.
“Get lost,” Roy said to him.
Cody turned and saw George. “Georgie Quinn,” he said. “Damn, how you doin’, Georgie?”
“Don’t tell me you know this dickey-bird,” Roy said.
“More than thirty years. Since I came to this town.”
“Cody,” George said with a large smile, “what’re you gonna do when the shine wears off?”
“Son of a bitch mouth on this guy,” Roy said.
“Shine,” Cody said. “You remember, Georgie.” And then he said to Roy, “Shine’s a song, Roy, you know the song. Mills Brothers and Bing. Lotta people recorded it.”
“Shine’s a song,” Roy said. “Yeah, I did hear it. Shuffle stuff. Coon song.”
“Better than that,” Cody said.
Max pulled over an empty barstool for Cody.
“The piano,” George said. “I got Big Jimmy to lend us his little one. Ben whatsisname Bongo gave me three hundred to rent it for the night. Jimmy says to me, ‘Three hundred? Keep it two nights, keep it all week.’”
“Not Bongo,” Cody said. “Bingo. That was Bing Crosby. Bing.”
“Bing,” George said, nodding.
“That’s the piano he’s talking about,” Max said to Roy, pointing at the wall photo of Cody and Bing.
“Dickey-bird was in on the Crosby night?” Roy said.
“He got the piano and people to haul it,” Max said. “He knew Jimmy, who owned the bar where Cody was playing.”
“My first job up here,” Cody said.
George was looking at Max, trying to bring him back.
“I’m Max Osborne, George. It was nineteen thirty-six. I brought Bing down to Big Jimmy’s with Alex Fitzgibbon. You remember Alex?”
“Alex Fitz. The Mayor,” George said.
“You mean the Mayor was there too?” Roy said.
“He wasn’t Mayor yet,” Max said. “He was still in the legislature. He took us all out to his place that night, Tivoli.”
“Tivoli,” George said. “Greatest house in Albany.”
“I met Alex at Yale,” Max said. “I put him and Bing together on the golf course in Saratoga. They both had horses at the track that year.”
“Mayor Fitzgibbon is a fascist motherfucker,” Roy said.
“Sure he is,” Max said, “but what a nice guy. I told Bing how great Cody played and that he was a protégé of Fats, and Billie’s first accompanist. So Bing said if he’s that good let’s take a ride, and we all came down from Saratoga and found Jimmy closing the place.”
It was one o’clock when they got there, never a late hour in Albany, but Jimmy had been open fifty-six straight hours, serving free beer to all comers, snarling traffic and quintupling the drunk quotient on Green Street. The night squad finally said, okay Jim, enough’s enough. Jimmy had been sharing the wealth after winning eleven thousand in Policy by parlaying his morning hit on an afternoon number and hitting that too. George always thought it was fixed. Nobody hits Policy twice in a day for that kind of money in Albany unless the boys in charge want it to happen. They must’ve been thanking Jimmy for a favor he did them, but what kind of favor is worth eleven thou?
“Last call, people,” Big Jimmy said to the bar. “Party’s over. They’re closin’ me down and nothin’ I can do about it.”
“We just got here,” Bing said to Jimmy. “We came from Saratoga to hear Cody.”
“You got ten minutes, if he’s still up to it. He been playin’ three days and I never see the man sleep.”
“I sleep during the slow tunes,” Cody said.
So Cody played a few minutes for Bing, “Nobody’s Sweetheart,” his good luck theme, and Bing hummed a little. Cody would’ve played all week for Bing, but Jimmy hit the lights and two patrol cars were sitting out front and that was that. Alex the thinker then said, Cody, why don’t you join us out at Tivoli and play awhile. Stay overnight and we’ll get you anywhere you want to go tomorrow. But we need a piano. Cody was wrecked, but this was Bing, so he said okay, I ain’t really dead. George said Jimmy’s got a piano in the back room, and so it began: the coda to Jim’s open house: jazz all night and Cody playing himself into a lucky new day, with a promise at dawn from Bing that he’d try to work Cody into his next movie. Bing had just gotten Satchmo star billing in Pennies from Heaven, a first for a Negro in Hollywood.
Cody rising: He’d never tell it on himself but Max knew Cody when he was still Sonny, when somebody told him to go up to Pod’s and Jerry’s in Harlem where Willie the Lion was playing, but not for long, and see Jerry and tell him you want the gig. Sonny beelined it up and that night the club was thick with main men: James P. Johnson, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Bunny Berigan, and Sonny squirmed. But he sat there like Jerry told him to, watching Willie bust that piano. Did they love Willie? Oh, yeah. Then Willie stood up and he knew Sonny wanted his chair. So you play a little? he asked. A little, Sonny said, and so he did “Nobody’s Sweetheart,” which they liked all right, and then he did “Twelfth Street Rag,” eight choruses, eight variations, no repeats, and they loved it so much he did four more — no repeats — and they couldn’t goddamn stand it. He met all the main men and he felt bigger than he used to and along the way he really got to know Fats. Jerry said to him, all right, fourteen bucks a week five nights and you also play when the girls dance (you know those girls), five of them moving among the tables (you know how they move) and share their tips. So Sonny kept suspense in the tune; and when somebody put folding money on the table and a girl picked it up with her between and kept it, Sonny gave her achievement a little arpeggio. Then the other girls used their betweens, and Sonny’s arpeggios earned him eighty-four dollars, seventy-four more than he’d ever made in a whole week playing piano. Sonny bought a new suit. Great lookin’ devil, one of the girls said.
It was 1935 and Max was a junior at Yale, immersed in the fusion of economic, political, and cultural history, and coming to New York on weekends for some history making of his own, which is when he discovered Sonny. He, and sometimes Alex, hung out, drank, talked music, watched Sonny hold his own (relatively) with Fats and James P. until one night Sonny wasn’t playing anymore and Max couldn’t find out why. He heard some record company had set up a recording date but Sonny didn’t show. You gotta be dead not to show for a record date. But Sonny wasn’t dead. He wasn’t even Sonny. Years later he told Max he missed his train, but everybody knows you don’t miss trains. He turned up in Albany after his no-show calling himself Cody Mason and with a gig at Big Jimmy’s — two shows Friday and Saturday, singers, unfunny comics, and sexy rumba dancers who would drift in from the rooming house next door; and when Cody played for them after hours he found out they had never used their betweens to pick up tips. So he told them how it was done (one girl could do a split to swoop the money off the floor) and he played their mood music. His income went up but that was only money. Cody played alone on weeknights, played like a wild man, you don’t get that kind of talent in Albany, and you never ever got it before at Big Jimmy’s. Within six weeks the bar was buzzing; in three months Cody was a main man and Jimmy’s was jazz central.