The club was not, to Bud, a big square room with a toilet tacked on the wall opposite the entrance doorway. The streamers left over from the Christmas party did not seem limp or faded to his eyes. The naked light bulb hanging over the piano near the windows might very well have been a blazing sun. The subtle aroma of commingled stale beer and fresh urine was an exotic smell, a worldly smell, the smell you might find in a Chinese whore house. All the color and intrigue of an Oriental bazaar were here in Club Stardust. The magically marked and scarred piano (“Meg loves Bill” carved in a heart on the music rack, directly above middle C), the musty smell coming from deep inside the piano, the pennies dropped between the treble keys making several notes unattainable, the empty beer keg squatting stoutly in the far corner of the room, the “Loose Lips Sink Ships” poster tacked near the bathroom door, the crossed American Hags with the large photograph of Franklin D. Roosevelt under them, the broken window behind Bud with the shirt cardboard tacked against it, the banked snow in the back yard outside the window, and the clothes stiff with winter clinging to taut clotheslines, the cat meowing to be let in, the sound of the wind and the gentle lap of snowflakes against the windows — all these overlapped, overran Bud’s mind and stirred his body. He was aware of being a part of something, aware in a way that only the seventeen-year-old can know.
The club was set between a butcher shop and a delicatessen on St. John’s Place, and it was a “social” club, consisting mostly of married couples who wanted a place for drinking beer and holding parties. Mike’s uncle belonged to the club, and Mike had talked him into letting the newly formed band play at the Christmas party the club was giving for all the children of the members. The band didn’t get paid for the party, but the agreement with Mike’s uncle was that they could use the club for rehearsals from then on, and the band doggedly kept him to that agreement.
This present rehearsal, even though it was still in its slipshod organizational stages, was as exciting to Bud as all the other rehearsals had been.
Frank was in the john, the door open. Tony was pacing the open stretch of floor between the “bandstand” and the tables on the other side of the room, his sax to his mouth, incessantly puffing up and down scales, pacing and puffing, his eyes closed as if the ecstasy of having a mouthpiece between his lips was altogether too much to bear. Vic was sitting at one of the tables, running a chamois cloth over his trumpet, devoting all his attention to the horn, and not noticing anyone else in the club.
Ox, the tenor man, was standing near another of the tables discussing music with Reen, who was not a musician. Reen nodded impatiently and then said, “Yes, but you’re wrong.”
Ox, a small boy with small hands and small feet and a small body, asked, “How can I be wrong and right at the same time?” His narrow, angular face was plainly confused. He always looked confused. He had pale blue eyes and a thin nose which drew his face downward toward his mouth. At the same time his hair was wavy and long, rising from his high forehead in a series of shelf like combings which stretched his face out in the other direction, giving it a perpetually surprised expression.
Reen looked down from his six-foot-two advantage. “You’re right because Barnett did ‘Cherokee’ and ‘Redskin Rumba’ both,” he said, his eyes intense, leaning forward the way he always did when he was pounding a point home. “But they’re not on separate disks. ‘Redskin Rumba’ is on the back of ‘Cherokee.’ Hell, it’s even a continuation of ‘Cherokee.’”
Ox did not seem convinced. He continued shaking his head, but apparently he could think of no suitable argument to give voice to.
“Look,” Reen said, assuming the patient attitude of a father-to-child relationship, “use your common sense. Even the title is a giveaway: ‘Redskin Rumba.’ What the hell are Cherokees if not redskins? Don’t you get the connection?”
Frank came out of the toilet zipping up his fly. “Reen’s right,” he said.
“Oh, what the hell do you know?” Ox asked, turning, thankful for the intrusion.
“I know Reen’s right,” Frank said. “And you should be ashamed of yourself! A tenor man who doesn’t know ‘Cherokee’ from a pole in the totem.” Frank grinned expansively, obviously having devoted his time in the toilet to concocting this delightful pun. As a matter of fact, he’d lingered longer than usual, desperately trying to find a better word than “totem” to complete the parallel. When his witty attempt went unappreciated by both Reen and Ox, he retreated into a sullen silence and walked over to the drums set up near the piano.
“When the hell do we start?” he asked Bud.
“Soon as Mike gets here, I suppose.”
“And when the hell does Mike get here?”
Tony Banner took the sax from his mouth long enough to say, “He’ll be a little late. He has to wait for his brother to come home with the key.”
“For Christ’s sake, let’s chip in and have another goddamn key made for him.” Frank said. “We hold up more rehearsals because his snotnose brother has the only key to his—”
“He’ll be here,” Tony said, and then he immediately put the saxophone to his mouth again, puffing and pacing like an expectant father with a curved, metallic cigar between his lips. Frank listened to the elementary monotony of the scales, absorbed momentarily, absorbed with a drummer’s absorption, listening to the even spacing of the notes as the scales fell from the bell of Tony’s horn. His interest died as suddenly as it had found life. He searched the closet of his mind for a means of interrupting the monotony, and then he asked, “What arrangements did you get, Tony?”
Tony completed a scale before taking the mouthpiece from his lips. “Some nice ones,” he answered.
“Like what?” Frank asked pointedly. A look of muted understanding passed between him and Bud. The band usually went down to Hub Music en masse. They invaded the shop like a horde of locusts, crawling over every arrangement in the place, pawing through the music to make sure it didn’t feature trombone solos or glockenspiel ducts. They also made sure they didn’t pick stuff too difficult for them, or stuff that would make a small band sound sick. Actually, they were only exercising a stockholder’s prerogative. For whereas Tony Banner was legally the duly appointed leader of the band, his leadership was nothing more than a mock post. He had been chosen because he had the nicest-sounding name, the name that would look best on a stand. His duties did not extend beyond calling off the tempo for a tune and generally supervising rehearsals. Any important decision was made by band vote. The band also chipped in for all the arrangements and were now saving for cardboard stands to replace the unsightly metal music racks they were using. (The advertisement in Down Beat showed four musicians with their trousers pulled almost to their knees, their socks falling, their garters loose, sitting behind the metal racks. Beneath that was a picture of the same musicians behind the sleek, folding cardboard stands, a smooth, music-making machine. The pictorial metamorphosis was most convincing.)
So whereas the stockholder’s prerogative was generally exercised, it had not been taken advantage of that morning. The members of the band had all made previous engagements or appointments (some of which had been skillfully spawned by duty-minded parents) and Tony had been reluctantly sent downtown alone. He’d been sent with much misgiving, not because the boys didn’t like him, but only because they’d suspected he’d return with a pile of numbers featuring solos for the alto sax, which, of course, he played. Frank’s anxiety was reflected on Bud’s face as they waited for Tony’s answer.