The River Queen (16 page)

When Bix was a boy, these steamers docked at night off Davenport and hot music reverberated off the decks, up and down the river. No one knows for certain when Bix Beiderbecke first heard hot music played; if he wandered down to the shore when steamers were there. But one thing is certain. When Bix was fifteen, his brother, Charles, returning from World War I, brought home a recording of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. From then on “Tiger Rag” and “Skeleton Jungle” rocked the sedate Beiderbecke home.

Down in New Orleans, Captain John Streckfus, an amateur musician himself, hired a man named Fate Marable to put together a river band. Searching for talent, Marable paused one day on the corner of Rampart and Perdido, where he listened to an illiterate street musician and hired him on the spot. To play with Marable's band, Louis Armstrong had to learn to read notes, which he forced himself to do, though basically Louis always played by ear. He blew on the trumpet with Marable's band as it traveled as far north as Pittsburgh and Davenport. Some have speculated, based on Bix's sound, that he and Louis Armstrong must have crossed paths.

By listening, Bix learned to play. Though he couldn't read music, he amazed listeners with what he could do with that horn. As a jazz friend once said, Bix played like a black boy, but he was white and the crackers could listen to him and feel okay. It's hard to know just how the music came to him. It just did, though his father never approved.

His parents believed that music was for church and community gatherings and they sent him to the Lake Forest Academy, just a stone's throw in Illinois from where I grew up, so Bix could get some discipline and a good education. Instead, Bix got his education on the South Side of Chicago, where he went night after night to listen and blow on his horn. He started recording and, dutifully, he sent his records to his parents. A few years later when he was dying of alcoholism, Bix returned to his family's home. He found all of his records in a closet. They had never been opened.

Davenport is famous for other things. The first railroad bridge over the Mississippi was built here in 1856 though it was almost immediately struck by a steamboat and collapsed. The first chiropractic adjustment was performed in 1895 in Davenport by D. D. Palmer on Harvey Lillard, who claimed it restored his hearing. And Dred Scott, the famous slave who sued for his freedom, lived on Second Street with his wife, Harriet. In fact there are so many historic buildings that one has a placard that reads
ON THIS LOCATION IN
1897
NOTHING HAPPENED
.

But I'm on a Bix pilgrimage. We dock at the Lindsay Park Yacht Club for fuel and a pump out and I head off on a shopping expedition. At a grocery store nearby I purchase steaks, chicken, bratwursts for the freezer. Green beans and corn. I see that they've got something called hedge balls on sale with the pumpkins and the gourds for sixty-nine cents apiece. It's a weird shade of lime with wrinkled skin and I have to dodge them on my walks through Prospect Park in Brooklyn. My husband likes to smash them into trees. I've been passing up a gold mine.

I drop my groceries back at the boat, then amble through the town of East Davenport. It is a quaint town with ice-cream shops and little cafés. An old-fashioned candy store sells penny candy. When Kate was small and we spent our summers in Vermont, we always bought penny candy from a general store. She'd take a paper sack and fill it with candy on her own. Now I pick out gummy bears, cinnamon balls, button candy, chocolate coins. I buy a pound and have it shipped to my daughter at school.

After the fuel up and pump out, we move the boat half a mile downriver where a friend of Jerry's named Wakim has a boat shop on the levee. Wakim has told us we are welcome to tie up there for the night. The boat shop is filled with huge boats in slings, having their hulls polished, holes repaired. Someone who works in the boat shop is waiting for us. We learn that not only can we tie up for the night but they've left the keys to a pickup truck. We can go shopping.

But I'm going to spend the day searching for Bix and the night at a hotel, which I booked for some reason on the outskirts of town. Tom agrees to drop me off at the hotel. We drive quickly out of town along Highway 61—an ancient American route—now home to strip malls. We pass the Wal-Marts and Walgreens, a Target and Home Depot. One warehouse store after another.

Clearly I'm in the heartland now. Giant billboards loom. One displays a complacent-looking fetus and huge letters that read
LIFE BEGINS AT CONCEPTION
. A big black one says
ONE NATION UNDER ME, SIGNED GOD
. A bumper sticker reads
JESUS DRIVES THIS TRUCK
.

*   *   *

I've always rather enjoyed cemeteries. In fact I'm wishing my father was buried in one instead of sitting in a black plastic box behind my piano, but that's another story. In college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I liked to read in the Mount Auburn Cemetery. In Los Angeles I enjoyed a drive around Forest Lawn and wondered if Gene Autry was really buried with his horse. I've had some good times at the Greenwood Cemetery near my house in Brooklyn. All in all I find cemeteries restful places to be, for the living and the dead.

The Oakland Cemetery is a place of rolling hills and huge plots of old Davenport families. But after walking around in the blazing sun for almost an hour, going up and down hills, past statues of sad little angels and bubbling fountains, I can't find Bix's grave. There is a sign at the office that says if the office is closed I should call Doug. And a number. I guess this means if a loved one dies on the weekend or at night, this is whom you phone.

I call the number and a man with a deep voice answers. I'm immediately embarrassed. I've had my share of funeral operators lately, those who traffic in the dead, and I feel their sacrifice is underappreciated. I want to say, “this is not an emergency,” but then is death ever? Instead I tell the man on the other end that I am looking for a grave. “Bix…” I stumble. “The cornet player. Bix Beiderbecke.”

I fear I am having an “Alas, poor Yorick” moment. Never having spoken to a gravedigger before, I'm nervous and mispronounce the last name as “Biderbeck,” but Doug corrects me. “You mean Beiderbecke.”

“Yes,” I say. Obviously he's been asked this question before. I tell him where I am in the cemetery (at the base of a hill near a large headstone for someone named Davenport) and he instructs me to go past the pond, back up the hill. Look on my right. I follow Doug's instructions and in a few moments come upon the large family memorial Beiderbecke. On the ground the smaller headstone:
LEON “BIX” BEIDERBECKE
1903–1931.

He lived twenty-eight years and became, as so many jazz performers did who died young from drugs and alcohol, a legend. At his grave is a bouquet of plastic purple violets, a small painting of a man at a piano with the word
Stardust
across the painting, and a homemade sign that reads “Bix Bix Bix.” Other than this, the grave is unadorned.

Bix is buried with the same family who refused to listen to his records, beside his mother, father, sister, and brother and dozens of other Beiderbeckes who never listened to his music or cared for him or the life he led. He would be astonished to know that an annual “Bix Lives” July festival is one of the things that keeps Davenport on the map.

I pay my homage, then pass by the old Coliseum Ballroom, where such jazz legends as Bix and Louis Armstrong and Guy Lombardo played. It's a yellow stucco building with high arches at the entryway, and I walk into this dark old ballroom with a wooden stage and balcony of wooden seats. The “Col” has been taken over by a Mexican American organization and a group of girls with long black hair and budding breasts are preparing for a
quinceaños
celebration.

They pay no attention to me as I wander through the wood-paneled ballroom. Posters of great jazz performances cover the walls. The Hispanic girls are lined up with their arms raised. First they form an arch under which the girl being honored will pass. Then they break into dance. Music blares from their boom box. But I think if I close my eyes and pretend the macarena isn't playing, I'll hear another tune.

A big band in full tux plugs away. Someone wild is at the keyboard. A high-pitched trumpet comes in for a chorus or two of “Davenport Blues.” I look up on that stage and see Bix, pants too short, white socks showing, raising his horn. The bathtub gin flows. The cops with cash in their pockets look away. Or lean their backs against the wall to listen. A sweet, sweet sound fills the room.

The Beiderbecke family home, a big white (though now with yellow trim) Victorian, is at 1934 Grand Street and I ask the cab I've hired to take me there. We drive up to an ordinary house on an ordinary street with a public school across the street that Bix attended. Out front a woman tends her bed of annuals. She's got a trowel and she's pulling up weeds. As we pull up, she looks at me and I can tell she is used to this. People make pilgrimages here all the time. I get out and stand in front of her house and she keeps planting her annuals.

How did this happen? I ask myself as I gaze at the tidy home, the front porch swing. How did this house and this street produce this man? I recalled my own rebellions, my desire to get away. I tried to flee when I went to college, but I've carried on my own tug of war with home. I am reminded of a neighbor of mine who broke her arm. She seemed calm as she was taken to the emergency room, but on the forms she wrote down the address of the house she grew up in where she hadn't set foot in forty years.

For years after we moved out of my childhood home, I had dreams of that house. They are always more or less the same. I am walking somewhere—in a jungle, down a Paris street or a country road. Suddenly it starts to snow. In the snow there are footsteps. I follow them and they lead me home.

*   *   *

When my father was born in the fall of 1902, Chicago still had a great deal of prairie. I like to imagine my father playing in empty lots of wheatgrass, blowing as the clouds drifted across the open sky. But once I asked him what it was like and he told me that the prairie was brown, windy, and dry. When his brother, Sidney, was born, he remembered running across it to the next neighbor. Where he ran is now Rogers Park.

As a child I pretended I was a pioneer girl. I had a dozen brothers, never sisters, who were always being wounded or shot. I was the only one who could remove an arrowhead, heal a wound. I found the paths no one could find. I blazed the trail and brought deer meat home on my back. The truth was I never liked being inside very much. I was desperate to get away.

It was not a happy home. But our misery was a private one, nothing anyone ever showed to the world. My childhood was a minefield I navigated with mixed results. To my father everything was a lethal weapon. A pencil, a kitchen knife, a drinking glass could all become the instruments of my demise. If I walked with a sharpened pencil, I risked tripping over some unseen object and stabbing myself in the eye. Kitchen knives could mysteriously be launched. A glass could fly out of your hand and smash into your skull.

It was rare that something—a bicycle, a soda bottle, a baseball—did not pose a threat. My life goal became an obvious one: I had to survive. The problem was that these things not only incited his worry, they also set off his wrath. The house was booby trapped and he was the monster, lurking behind its doors, ready to catch us off guard. I can recall the way his rages came over him. A man of dark skin and dark eyes, it seemed as if a fire was lit from within. His words flew out of his mouth like flames.

His paranoia about the physical world projected itself onto the social order. At any moment one could fall from grace. Table manners ensured against such a fate. The list was a mile long. How pieces had to be chewed, soup sipped, cutlery put on the edges of plates once eating was done. I had to get into the habit of being a lady. Perfection was a kind of norm. But children are not very good at perfection. They are snotty, dirty little beasts, reluctant to fit the mold.

My father's outbursts were confined to our four walls. Only waiters who didn't make his vodka tonic just right or busboys who didn't clear fast enough got a hint of his rages. He called us names. He told us we were stupid or selfish or spoiled brats. Once when I was visiting from college, I came home for dinner half an hour late. The meal was already eaten, the table cleared, and my father began to yell at me. He yelled until my brother stood between us and told him to stop.

But his anger rarely left home. Toward the end of his life, though, my father grew careless. Once he was in the car, driving a friend of my mother's named Scarlet to a concert. Scarlet said something that my father didn't like and he began calling her names. He called her a liar, the worst kind of person, every name in the book.

The next day my mother called me in tears. “A terrible thing happened,” she said.

“What's that, Mom?” I asked.

“Your father lost his temper with Scarlet Leyton. I'm sure she'll never speak to me again. He's never done that before.”

I paused. “What do you mean, Mom? He's never done it before? He did it every night.”

“But he never did it with people before,” she said.

“People,” I said. “Aren't we people?”

“Oh, you know what I mean.”

In the end, looking back, I think that my father was an incredibly anxious person. In fact I think that in this day and age he'd be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and medicated. Shortly before he died, a friend of mine had a serious panic attack. His daughter, thinking he was having a heart attack, called me, and I rushed to his house. I had never seen anyone writhing or screaming in so much pain.

Afterward I went online and read a description of someone who suffers panic attacks. Fear of restaurants, fear of travel. Anxious in situations he cannot control. Nervous, claustrophic. Cannot be hemmed in. Uses temper to control his anxiety, often around seemingly meaningless things. And I found myself reading a description of my father.