Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes (28 page)

Gloria screamed. Did anybody hear?

“Very strong voice,” Marnie said. “Are you in pain? I hope so.”

“Getoutgetoutgetoutgetoutgetouuuuuuut!” And she screamed again.

“Excellent,” Marnie said. “I suppose it is time. Be smart. Take that sexy little ass of yours back to Cuba where it came from.”

Her impulse was to call Alex, scream at him, do you know what just happened, my godfather, my love? No, he probably doesn’t know. She would save it till later, relish retelling the pain. Call him anyway, am I his? And she picked up the phone, but it’s tapped, and she put it back in its cradle. She searched the room with the frantic eyes of the trapped fox. Take what?—the good jewelry, the Oshun necklace Renata gave her, the letters from Mama and Max, clothes, makeup, no, leave them, leave them. She couldn’t find the necklace. She put the letters in her purse and abandoned the rest. Alas Oshun. She drove to an outdoor pay phone on Madison Avenue and called him, can they tap City Hall? She got his secretary, tell him Gloria, and he said, Yes? And she said I’m coming to see you now, a disaster, your wife, I’ll be in front of City Hall. No, he said, yes, she said and hung up and double-parked on the corner near his office window. He came down the City Hall steps and bent to her window and she said your wife knows everything and has photos and tapes. He looked over at Academy Park, up toward the Capitol, looked both ways on Eagle Street, anybody could be on a bench, in a car filming this. I can’t talk here, he said, and she said I can’t talk anywhere, where do I go, what do I do? They’re firing me from Holy Cross. How long have you been seeing the nigger, he asked. Is that all you can say? And he said nothing. She stared at his mouth. Handsome mouth, betrayed, betraying, no reverence for what was and which now is without meaning. Sex is death and God is angry with Gloria. In hell you run in the putrid swamp, devils scourge you when you fall, and your blood colors the slime. She smiled at Alex, put the car in gear and turned on the radio. Aretha Franklin. My hero, she said to him, and drove off.

Traffic at the bar in the Havana Club had picked up and Roy was busy. Max was avoiding conversation with newcomers at the end of the bar, and George Quinn and his old friend and newfound blonde, Vivvie, were on their second beer when Cody Mason came through the door. He looked the place over and then walked directly to Max and shook a finger at him, “Hey, Mighty Max, where’d you come from?”

“Roy tells me you’re sick,” Max said. “You don’t look it. Sick—it’s your con, right? Tell ’em you’re sick and it’s a sold-out concert.”

“Yeah, man, and I get to stay in bed all day. Where you been?”

“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.

Max rediscovered Cody when he came to Albany with Alex in the summer of 1936, and Alex knew every saloon in The Gut. Sonny! Max! Alex! Whataya know! This was the summer Max met Bing through Alex in Saratoga and they all played serious golf (Alex’s 18 handicap was not serious) at the MacGregor links in the morning, and serious horses in the afternoon at the track. Max warned Bing that he played for Yale’s golf team and could give fellows who shot in the 70s a run. You’re pretty sure of yourself for a young fella, Bing said, and Max said, well, maybe, if you think twenty-one is young, but it’s all in the short game and the long putt. Bing said if I was a betting man I’d put five on the table says you won’t break 80. Max said you’re on and he shot 75 to Bing’s 79. Bing pressed a fiver into his hand but Max said, no, no, I knew I could beat you. Bing also came to know this, losing six more matches that week to Max the wunderkind, who took to advising Bing on his short game.

Then came the long night at Tivoli with Max, Alex, George, Bing, Cody, and “Shine,” a hell of a night. When Danny Quinn grew older he kept saying he was going to write about it. Doosaday sosadah spokety spone. It happened two weeks after Max had been arrested for cheating a horse breeder out of nine thousand on the golf course. Hustling is all it was, but the Saratoga Keystone Kops (who turned a blind eye to mobsters fleecing the summer population at crooked upscale casinos) called it grand theft by a con man. The victim was a Kentucky aristocrat who wouldn’t miss the nine but was furious that a Pontiac dealer’s son had conned him. Max’s hustle was strictly to raise his Yale tuition, for his father’s car dealership tanked in ’35 and the old man died of grief; but after the arrest Max was expelled from Yale and never went back to school. Bing posted his bail, Max gave the nine back to the horseman, and charges were dropped. Max did not let all this interfere with his social life, and in late August he brought Bing down to Big Jim’s to hear Cody play.