My school work was not going well lately. But there was a new kind of exhilaration in writing your name on the top of a mimeographed test sheet, handing it in blank, not having to sit there with your head in your hand. Back to the room. Silas was already there trying to do some phrases on the cello. Get the horn, the taste of fruity silver. Joe comes down at six. Ti-tat-di-ching, dinga, chingding achingdinga-ching, di oomp oomp. To blues and to jazz.
“Like, what we gon call ourselves,” said Joe. I told you he was a corny fool; also a bit of a liar. He said he’d studied at the Texas Conservatory of Jazz, which sounded like a place where cowboys play Glenn Miller.
“Call — man, you can’t name this. This band is too close to the truth to give a name. We are three individuals with a hell of a lot to say,” said Silas.
“Right.” Looking at the cello, you noticed Silas’s huge confident fingerson the neck.
“Well, like, will we phone up to warn them, like? Maybe we should.”
“That would take the sting out of us,” I said.
“We come as a surprise or not at all,” Silas agreed.
Bobby Dove came in at midnight. We musicians were sitting around, tired but merry.
“How’s that Amazon nookie?” Silas asked Fleece.
Fleece was sullen. After they left, he lay disgusted on the cot for a while.
“What does that big farthook Silas do, by the way? He looks like a jock but he doesn’t play sports. I hope to God he doesn’t think he’s playing that cello, either.”
“You wouldn’t know. He has some ideas on cello. I think it’s good, played like a bass.”
“I think you ought to fire Silas, then think about how in-finitely bad you still are.”
“Silas said I was terrific.”
“Well yes, compared to him. Has Silas asked you anything about Bet?”
I lied. Silas had told me he was calling Bet, but I didn’t want to get into this with Fleece.
“He’s telephoning her, you know. I hope you’re not sitting over there being an insect about this, thinking Silas is her secret telephone-lover. Don’t you think she told me? Don’t you know how we laugh over what he says? Tell me this. Has he ever said anything about me? C’mon.”
“Why should I tell?” I must have been smiling.
“I’d like to hear some of that farthook’s wit. Then I’ll leave you alone.”
“He said that you had better marry her quick so she could have some document to prove that you were making advances toward her.”
“You think that cheap little-vision is very funny, dont you?”
The club seemed to be three hundred Negroes, couples, packed up into an old butane gas tank. Perhaps it was a quonset hut of narrow dimensions. The façade was shingles with a peak arch and a Falstaff beer billboard off its stand, lit up by craning lights, waiting for you at the bottom of a hill steep and parallel with the nearby river. The façade looked landlocked, but once in the club, you didn’t know. The thing shook as if on weak stilts, and you could smell fish. The sign at the door mentioned a dollar cover charge. Because the Mean Men were playing. The hotshots and their dates were flocking here from all over Mississippi and even from Louisiana. The Mean Men had made records in Memphis and everybody knew it. All I knew about them was that they had been charmed to have a musician friend of mine back at Hedermansever sit in with them once.
We eased in, Silas and I carrying our cases, Joe hoping to use the traps of the Mean Men. We paid the dollar. The man in the box wasn’t certain about this. He just let the dollars pile up there and didn’t move his hand for them. Silas went right up to the stand after the number and explained to the band — all of them Negroes — how we thought we might take the stand and spell them. I saw him shake hands with the singer, and he seemed to’ve procured an introduction all round. The band had just finished a hot pinpointed arrangement of Negro-Latin jazz, eight instruments full, and my faith was sinking. But the singer took the mike and introduced, named us and our instruments, and we had to step up quickly so as not to seem like immobilized pink hams. The Mean Men broke by us like a school of dark cheerful fish. Joe the drummer proceeds to drag the traps nearer to center stand; I stand there with my horn out. The bandstand is aflame with pink lights, above and below, and I’m looking at the veins of my arms, thinking how bunny-nose pink I am, and how few men we are, above this crowd used to the Mean Men.
The fans were not hostile, but they weren’t going to cheer for just any noise. I looked down at them — restless cocoa pods of their faces, all of them drinking beer in two feet of space per couple. The waiters couldn’t reach the tables and there was some anger over this fact. We three had on our coats and tennis shoes — the I Vee League demands — but the crowd was much more casual than that. We seemed stiff as dolls. I was frozen up and barely made squeaks on the horn tuning with Silas. Silas’s cello clonked like a banjo, and Joe rapped preparatorily with doubt, like the drums were turning to oatmeal on him.
“We are ready. Sting like a wasp,” said Silas. He was sure of us. Good man, Silas. My throat grew warm and wet Joe began sounding like a drummer suddenly. We were standing by for an advent into “Sweet Georgia Brown.”
“Toot,” said a spade voice. So I went right to it.
We’d never been better. Coming in tight, I hit the flatted seventh of what I meant to hit, way up there, and came back “down in a baroque finesse such as I’d never heard from myself, jabbing, bright, playing the pants off Sweet Georgia, causing them to flutter in the beer and bacon smoke of the place. Silas began the dip-thrums and I unified with him while Joe locked the gates on the measures, back-busting that beautiful storm of hides and cymbals. Harry had found it and he began screaming with glee through the horn, every note the unlocked treasure of his soul — and things he had never had, yes, he hit an F above high C! What a bop the three of us were raising in there, what a debut, what a miracle. My horn pulsed fat and skinny. Oh, Harry was stinging them, but stinging them mellow. Didn’t I see out the corner of an eye that some spades were moving to us, see some eyes blissfully shut, heads pumping, grooving, digging us, seeing Sweet Georgia shriek after her panties? I gave Silas the solo bars, seeking that F again. Joe lowered the storm, and Silas, was he coming forward, was he backing the cello up the wall, did he have some ideas? Yes. The pianist of the Mean Men slunk by me with the devil’s own grin on his face. He wanted in on this, must have it.
As I lay out, I glanced over at the rest of the Mean Men, who were lining the bar, a glass of beer in the right hand of each man. I heard the pianist behind me ease in with Joe and Silas, still looking at the Mean Men. When I saw that even line of Negroes it came to me, a vision of Harley Butte’s band. They marched perfectly, those fifteen-year-old kids molded into impeccable musicians. Harley on the side in his white helmet, the years of band-work behind him displayed in the wafer-colored face of the man. The Beta Camina Gladiators dressed in green, as glorious, prosperous, confident, free, and arrogant as they would ever be, under Harley, keeping to that dream of perfect Sousan music for so long, under Harley, the hater of blues for so long; keeping that flame at Beta Camina, rehearsing those black germs without mercy, for the pure joy of having faultless geometry and faultless music at the same time. I did not want to get sappy about this, did not want to think, aw God, but I felt shoddy, unrehearsed. The applause was a fraud, the spades were drunk. I knew I had been at the peak of what I wanted, I might still be on the peak, but I couldn’t, couldn’t. It was my time to play again, but my horn was stuffed up, it was crammed with green uniforms, and I was smiling. I was not embarrassed.