That’s me: drummer unknown.
Or was, back then.
In ten years a lot of things have changed. In the wake of a well-publicised drug raid, Club Eleven closed down; the only charges were for possession of cannabis, but already there was heroin, cocaine.
Ronnie Scott opened his own club in a basement in Chinatown; Spike Robinson sailed back across the ocean to a life as an engineer; and Dennis Rose sank deeper into the sidelines, an almost voluntary recluse. Then, of course, there was rock ‘n’ roll. Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around the Clock’ at number one for Christmas 1955, and the following year Tony Crombie, whose drum stool I’d been keeping warm that evening at Club Eleven, had kick-started the British bandwagon with his Rockets: grown men who certainly knew better cavorting on stage in blazers while shouting, ‘I’m gonna teach you to rock,’ to the accompaniment of a honking sax. Well, it paid the rent.
And me?
I forget now, did I mention heroin?
I’m not usually one to cast blame, but after the influx of Americans during the last years of the war, hard drugs were always part of the scene. Especially once trips to New York to see the greats on Fifty-Second Street had confirmed their widespread use.
Rumour had it that Bird and Diz and Monk changed the language of jazz the way they did – the complex chords, the flattened fifths, the extremes – to make it impossible for the average white musician to play. If that was true, well, after an apprenticeship in strict tempo palais bands and pickup groups that tinkered with Dixieland, they came close to succeeding where I was concerned. And it was true, the drugs – some drugs – helped: helped you to stay awake, alert, keep up. Helped you to play an array of shifting counter rhythms, left hand and both feet working independently, while the right hand drove the pulse along the top cymbal for all it was worth. Except that in my case, after a while, it wasn’t the drumming that mattered. It was just the drugs.
In a matter of months I progressed, if that’s the word, from chewing the inside of Benzedrine inhalers to injecting heroin into the vein. And for my education in this department I had Foxy Palmer to thank. Or blame.
I’d first met Foxy at the Bouillabaisse, a Soho drinking club frequented by mainly black US servicemen and newly resident West Indians, of whom Foxy was one. He was a short, stubby man with a potbelly beneath his extravagantly patterned shorts and a wisp of greying beard. His ears stuck out, foxlike, from the sides of his head. A scaled-down Foxy would have made the perfect garden gnome.
‘Hey, white boy!’ he hailed me from his seat near the piano. ‘You here to play?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Forgot your horn?’
For an answer, I straightened my arm and let a pair of hickory drumsticks slide down into the palm of my hand.
A bunch of musicians, mostly refugees from some dance-band gig or other, were jamming their way through ‘One O’clock Jump’, but then a couple of younger guys arrived, and Foxy pulled my arm toward him with a grin and said, ‘Here come the heebie-jeebie boys.’
In the shuffle that followed, Tony Crombie claimed his place behind the drums, and after listening to him firing ‘I Got Rhythm’ at a hundred miles an hour, I slipped my sticks back out of sight.
‘So,’ Foxy said, planting himself next to me in the gents, ‘that Tony, what d’you think?’
‘I’m thinking of cutting my arms off just above the wrist.’
Foxy smiled his foxy smile. ‘You’re interested, I got somethin’ less extreme.’
At first I didn’t know what he meant.
The Bouillabaisse closed down and reopened as the Fullado. Later there was the Modernaires in Old Compton Street, owned by the gangster Jack Spot. Along with half a hundred other out-of-work musicians, I stood around on Archer Street on Monday afternoons, eager to pick up whatever scraps might come my way: depping at the Orchid Ballroom, Purley, a one-night stand with Ambrose at the Samson and Hercules in Norwich. And later, after shooting up, no longer intimidated or afraid, I’d descend the steps into the smoke of Mac’s Rehearsal Rooms where Club Eleven had its home and take my turn at sitting in.
For a time I made an effort to hide the track marks on my arms, but after that I didn’t care.
Junkie – when did I first hear the word?
Applied to me, I mean.
It might have been at the Blue Posts, around the corner from the old Feldman Club, an argument with a US airman that began with a spilt pint of beer and escalated from there.
‘Goddamn junkie, why the fuck aren’t you in uniform?’
I didn’t think he wanted to hear about the trumped-up nervous condition a well-paid GP had attested to, thus ensuring my call-up would be deferred. Instead, some pushing and shoving ensued, at the height of which a bottle was broken against the edge of the bar.
Blind luck enabled me to sway clear of the jagged glass as it swung toward my face; luck and sudden rage allowed me to land three punches out of four, the last dropping him to his knees before executing the coup de grace, a swiftly raised knee that caught him underneath the chin and caused him to bite off a sliver of tongue before he slumped, briefly unconscious, to the floor.
As I made my exit, I noticed the thin-faced man sitting close by the door, time enough to think I recognised him from somewhere without being able to put a finger on where that was. Then I was out into the damp November air.
‘I hear you takin’ up the fight game,’ Foxy said with glee, next time I bumped into him. And then: ‘I believe you know a friend of mine. Arthur Neville, detective sergeant.’
The thin-faced man leaned forward and held out a hand. ‘That little nonsense in the Blue Posts, I liked the way you handled yourself. Impressive.’
I nodded and left it at that.
In the cracked toilet mirror my skin looked like old wax.
‘Your pal from CID,’ I asked Foxy, ‘he OK?’
‘Arthur?’ Doxy said with a laugh. ‘Salt o’ the earth, ain’t that the truth.’
Probably not, I thought.
He was waiting for me outside, the grey of his raincoat just visible in the soft grey fog that had drifted up from the river. When I turned left he fell into step alongside me, two men taking an evening stroll. Innocent enough.
‘Proposition,’ Neville said.
I shook my head. ‘Hear me out, at least.’
‘Sorry, not interested.’
His hand tugged at my sleeve. ‘You’re carrying, right?’
‘Wrong,’ I lied.
‘You just seen Foxy; you’re carrying. No question.’
‘So?’ The H burning a hole in my inside pocket.
‘So you don’t want me to search you, haul you in for possession.’
Our voices were muffled by the fog. If Neville knew about Foxy but was allowing him to deal, Foxy had to be paying him off. If what he wanted from me was more back-handers, he had another thing coming.
‘What do you want?’ I asked.
A woman emerged from a doorway just ahead of us, took one look at Neville, and ducked back in.
‘Information,’ Neville said.
At the corner he stopped. The fog was thicker here, and I could barely see the far side of the street.
‘What kind of information?’
‘Musicians. In the clubs. The ones you hang around with. Of course, we know who’s using. It would just be confirmation.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘you’ve got the wrong guy.’
Smuts were clinging to my face and hair, and not for the first time that evening I caught myself wondering where I’d left my hat.
Neville stared at me for a long moment, fixing me with gray-blue eyes; his mouth was drawn straight and thin. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said.
I watched him walk, coat collar up, hat brim pulled down, until the fog swallowed him up.