Authors: Glenn O'Brien
One night Jack “Legs” Diamond fell into the joint with scumpteen
of his henchmen and ordered the doors closed, and Jim, it was on. Our music hit Legs’ girl friend so hard, she jumped out on the dance floor and began rolling her hips like she was fresh in from Waikiki, with ball-bearings where her pelvis should of been; then she pulled up her dress till it was more off than on, showing her pretty linens or what she had of them. I nearly swallowed my horn, gunning Legs to see how he felt about it. I was all set to stop the band as soon as he batted an eye. The boss almost shook his wig off giving me the office from behind a post—he knew Legs wasn’t so well liked in the underworld, and the last time this gang was in they almost wrecked the place. But the moment the music stopped this grave-bait ran pouting to her daddy, and Legs motioned to us to keep on playing. Before his finger stopped wagging we were halfway through the second chorus.
We were at the Castilian Gardens for about three months, right through the summer season. While we were out there Tesch left to go with Sam Lannin’s orchestra, and I never did get to see him again before he got killed in 1932. Then, one night after Labor Day, when we all came to work togged in our tuxedos to open the fall season, we found a brand-new padlock on the slammer and we couldn’t get in. The boss showed up and sighed, “Well boys, this is it—I couldn’t pay the rent so the landlord closed me up, and just when I got an icebox full of ducks for the week-end dinner crowd.” He was so bad off he couldn’t even get up our back pay, which was a bringdown to me because my wife and her son had just come in from Chicago. Well, we broke open a side window and climbed in to get our horns, and at the boss’ suggestion we trucked into the refrigerator and loaded ourselves with all the fowl we could carry, and that’s how we wound up at Valley Stream getting paid off in ducks instead of dollars. “We ask for our salary and get the bird,” said Joe Sullivan, but nobody even cracked a smile.
W
ALKING
DOWN
Broadway one afternoon, minding my own business, I was surprised to find the sidewalk heaving up into my face and the buildings beginning to jig and teeter, getting ready to crash-land
on my skull. All mush behind the eyeballs and my muscles turned to jelly, I grabbed a lamppost and hung on. Sweat squirted from my face; my stomach was practising sailor’s knots, there was a pain big as a baseball buried in the nape of my neck, and my scalp stretched so tight I was afraid it would split right down the middle. I held on, frantic, while The Apple melted down to churning applesauce and I bobbed in and through it all. My prayerbones played knock-knock. Jack, I was bad off. One look at me just then would have scared Doc Freud right back into the pill business.
I watched the people fly by. The men all had snap-brim Capone hats pulled down low over their eyes, their coat collars were all turned up, they had their shoulders hunched and their hands buried deep in their overcoat pockets. I could tell that every one of them had a handful of Colt .45. From the way they eyed me, I knew they all meant to get me, now or five minutes from now. That was the reason behind all their scampering and scurrying around; they were laying their plans, getting ready to ambush me. I saw clear that they were one big race of torpedoes, plug-uglies, and murder merchants. They had me surrounded and they were closing in. Any minute now all those automatics would start barking from all those overcoat pockets—in my direction. My stomach started to do flip-flops.
I knew I was more complexy than the whole Bellevue psychopathic ward, and that my nervous system had been building up to this breakdown for a long time. I first began switching to the psycho kick when I landed a job out at the Woodmansten Inn, on Pelham Parkway in the East Bronx. That’s where my neuroses started sprouting neuroses. A drummer named Johnny Powell was leader of the band out there, and Eddie Condon and Joe Sullivan were playing alongside me, in addition to a fiddle player. It was early Fall by the time we went to work but the weather was still balmy, so we played in a very large screened-in open-air café, loaded up with the usual palm trees and Chinese lanterns.
Now you couldn’t ask for a sweeter guy than Johnny Powell—a tall spry French-Canadian, with one of them twirl-away moustaches.
He worshipped the ground we Chicagoans walked on, and he was dying to learn the jazz technique on the drums because he knew that Gene Krupa had come up under our tutelage. But we were allergic to him. For one thing, he drove us crazy with his habit of always using the word “interpolate.” “How can I interpolate that beat?” he would ask, and we all winced. “Do you guys think we ought to interpolate now or later,” he wanted to know. Johnny was a very studious guy, all wrapped up in his drums, but he just didn’t have it in him, interpolate or expectorate, and we suffered the agonies of the damned because his foot was so heavy and he dragged time till it drove me and Joe out of our minds. It was his gimpy tempo that first brought on my nervous indigestion.
The violin player got on our nerves too. He played sweet, with a full round tone, and he had plenty of technique, but there was that inevitable pulling back of the time again. Way back there, Bix and I used to talk about the dragging violins. We often wondered if maybe it wasn’t the large number of them in the symphony that made them lag behind, but here we were playing with only one violin and still we kept getting tangled up in its strings. That violin, added to the straggling drums, began to give us nightmares. Joe would take drink after drink and almost break his fingers on the keyboard, and I would blow until I was blue in the face, trying to get those slow-motion artists in step, but we might as well have tried to budge a couple of hungry mules. It was worse than the Chinese water torture, where they tie you up and let water trickle on your forehead drop by drop. Guys go howling mad and make a meal of their tongues, waiting for the next drop, and that’s just what happened to us every time Johnny debated with himself whether he should interpolate now or later. In that fraction of a second while we waited for those two guys to catch up with our chord, I would sweat a bucket of blood and my ticker just gave up and quit altogether. It was like waiting for the accentuated beat of your heart when you’re on a reefer jag, and you wait and you wait and the beat doesn’t come and you think you’ve stopped living. I swear, after a few weeks I began to wonder if Johnny Powell
wasn’t using my head for a gong, conking me with delayed-action sledgehammers, while the violinist bowed across all my raw nerves with a hunk of jaggedy glass. It was an effort to keep from screaming, It’s all right, beat me to a pulp, cut me to ribbons, only keep time, for Christ’s sake,
just keep in time.
With that waxed soup-strainer of his and that slick hair, Johnny took on some grotesque features in my hot mind. I’d look and look at him and begin to see him as Dirty Dan Desmond himself, cool and suave on the outside but with a heart full of evil and larceny. Sometimes I got to thinking that he was deliberately, cold-bloodedly trying to wear me down, make me blow my top. There was a conspiracy in Manhattan, headed by him, to give all Windy City musicians the heebies until they were ready to be bugged.
He was the kindest, gentlest, most considerate guy alive, was Johnny Powell, and I was beginning to despise him. All day long I shook like I had the palsy, dreading the hour of doom when I would have to face him again. I guess I was a little on the sensitive side just then. It came from being all bottled-up musically, and from seeing the Chicagoans getting lost in the stampede of the squares. I saw nothing ahead for us but yawning oblivion, and Johnny was greasing the way for us with that better-late-than-never beat of his.
To keep one jump ahead of the straitjacket squad, we used to drive down to Harlem after work on the hunt for some decent music, but it was nowhere to be had, even in the world’s greatest Negro community. I missed the South Side plenty; New Orleans-Chicago jazz hadn’t hit New York yet, so in Harlem too we were starved for our musical daily bread, cut off from the source of life and spirit. I felt like an alien here, an outsider who just came along for the ride, because I was advocating and signifying in an idiom that hadn’t yet caught on in these parts. It was a feeling I never got on the South Side, and it didn’t help my morale none. Harlem wasn’t any nerve-tonic for me. What made me feel even more like a foreigner was that most of the Harlem spots we hit were controlled by white hoodlums. The whole area was overrun with fay gangsters who got fat on the profits they
raked in from the big nightclubs and speakeasies and from the numbers racket. I began to feel that the conspiracy against us, the white man’s conspiracy, had reached up into Harlem too.
I’d had a bellyful of gangsters and muscle men by that time. They’d always been luring me on, trying to win me away from the music to their loutish way of life—all of them, from the gamblers and pimps in the Chicago syndicate to Frank Hitchcock’s boys at Burnham and the hophead mugs over in Detroit. Our whole jazz music was, in a way, practically the theme-song of the underworld because, thanks to prohibition, about the only places we could play like we wanted were illegal dives. The gangsters had their dirty grabbers on our music too, just like they kept a death grip on everything else in this booby-hatch of a country. If I resisted their come-on even a little, it was only because of my obsession with the music. Every time I got in trouble, it was because I strayed away from the music. Whenever I latched on solid to the music, I flew right. I was beginning to sense a heap of moral in all this, but my hot instincts to stick with the music and keep straight were all frustrated now. I saw these white gangsters ruling the roost in Harlem, so I blamed them for it. I kept sinking lower and lower. Every night I would wind up in Harlem with nothing to do but wolf down a mess of barbequed ribs smothered in red-hot tabasco sauce and swill terrible rotgut by the barrel. That didn’t soothe my jumpy stomach much either. At first my digestion was just nervous; pretty soon it stopped altogether.
I even made myself lose that Woodmansten Inn job, along with Eddie Condon and Sullivan, but still the jitters wouldn’t quit me. The last night there I was blowing real hard, really reciting out in front of the band, when suddenly I went all shatter-brained. A bunch of ugly-looking gangsters had taken the joint over for a big party, and they were all wobbling around the floor with their floozies, so drunk they could hardly stand. One of these mugs danced right up under the bandstand and just stood there, staring at me. When I swayed, he swayed. When I stomped, he stomped. Suddenly I began to shake so bad I could hardly hold my clarinet. I had just remembered
something that froze my spine. Joe E. Lewis had been working in a Chicago nightclub run by some gangsters, and one night he mentioned to his bosses that he was thinking about changing jobs because he had got a much better offer. Those hoodlums didn’t argue with him. They didn’t bargain. They just smiled, and paid him a visit and slit his throat from ear to ear. It happened in his hotel, just around the corner from where I was living.
I watched that yegg while my clarinet weaved a spell around him, and I thought, Jesus, this music sure has got a hold of him. Suppose he owns some club and likes my playing so much he wants me to go to work for him? Maybe he’s thinking it over right now, while he’s casing me. If I have to work for him I’ll really be under his thumb, and if I try to make a move they’ll just cut me open like they did poor Joe E. Lewis. . . . Right quick I changed the phrasing and meter of my improvisation, fading all the way into the background. The audience felt the let-down and yelled, “Come on, get hot,” but I didn’t feel like reciting any more—I’d lost all voice for it.
That same night I quit the job and rushed home. I sprinted all the way from the bus stop to my house, and took those stairs three at a time. I heard footsteps dogging me all the way, right up the stairs and into the house. They were slow and dragging, in gimp-time. They sounded like Johnny Powell’s drums.
M
Y
MIND
was a cistern, clogged with maggoty memories. I remembered that just before I left Chicago, in the same apartment house where Tesch and I lived, right over my head, some dame had been strangled with a lamp cord. Then came the Saint Valentine’s Day massacre, when a bunch of Capone’s gangsters got dressed up like cops and drove up in a police wagon and lined another mob against the wall and mowed them down with machine guns, leaving the mangled bodies all crumpled up on the floor like some soggy lumber. Then, right after I hit New York, Arnold Rothstein the gambler was strolling down the stairs at the Park Central and came somersaulting down with a load of lead in his hide. And there was that subway
train that got derailed at Times Square, leaving over two hundred bodies of dead and near-dead piled up ready for the dustbins. All that came flooding up in my mind, and plenty more. I remembered the way Legs Diamond wrecked the Castilian Gardens just for kicks one night, and the nightmares I had after that other party of his. I remembered Frank Hitchcock piled in a ditch, and Capone’s wife masquerading out at the Martinique, and Bow Gistensohn on a cold marble slab and Emil Burbacher in Joliet, the frightened girls trying to run away from the syndicate whorehouses and their pimps coming after them, the opium-smoking bigshots of the Purple Gang whose pictures were beginning to pop up in the papers because, one by one, they were being wheeled into the morgue icebox. Ten solid years of murder and riot. Ten years of a bloody showerbath. They kept unwinding in my head.
It looked to me like the whole continent was being drowned in a bath of blood, from coast to coast. The nation was committing mass suicide—it was like a slimy snake blowing its top, writhing and wriggling with the fits, beginning to chew up its own tail. Sure, I was surrounded by a race of gangsters running amuck, a hundred million blowtops, born with icecubes for hearts and the appetites of a cannibal. “They devour one another, and cannot even digest themselves.” Nietzsche said that. “See them clamber, these nimble apes! They clamber over one another, and thus scuffle into the mud and the abyss.” They were sure clambering some in the U.S. of A. Nobody was safe in this funky jungle. It was all one great big underworld, and they’d put their dirty grabbers on the one good thing left on earth, our music, and sucked it down into the mud with them.