New Boy (11 page)

"Thank you, sir," said Charlie. "Have a pleasant evening." He shut the door with a thud and we headed for Jinxie's.

The sign, which was attached to the roof of the club, consisted of one word,
JINXIE'S
, in tall letters outlined with incandescent light bulbs against a dark blue background that seemed to merge with the surrounding darkness. The club itself was a squat, brick one-story fortress, with small windows that seemed to be painted over to block the entry of light from outside. As we walked to the door, I could hear the growl and moan of a saxophone and I tried to contain my excitement. I wanted to act as though going to Jinxie's was something that I did every day. A dark-skinned Negro man with a moon face and wearing a tuxedo greeted us at the door. "Good evening, gentlemen," he said, smiling. "Table for two?"

I let Gordie do the talking.

"Two will be fine," said Gordie, and the doorman led us across the floor to a table right at the side of the bandstand. The thickly shadowed room was crowded with colored patrons seated at a jumble of tables and chairs. Colored men in suits and des leaned back in their chairs with their jackets open and their suspenders
exposed. Others were in sport shirts and sunglasses. A few colored women were wearing fancy print dresses and hats, but most wore blouses and skirts and saddle shoes or loafers. As we were being led to our table, I glimpsed one or two white people in the crowd. A well-dressed white woman sat at a table holding hands with a dignified-looking colored man in a dark suit. A young white man wearing sunglasses and a loud sport shirt sat with his arm around a colored woman, her straightened hair pulled back in a bun. I tried not to stare, but I had never seen anything like it. I had always understood that these relationships were taboo, scorned by both whites and Negroes, and yet no one in the club seemed to be paying any attention to them. I decided not to either.

On the bandstand, perspiring heavily under the spotlights, stood an older, light-skinned colored man with a carefully trimmed mustache and regal bearing. He was elegantly dressed in a dark, tailored suit, a white shirt with French cuffs, and a dark tie, and sported a charcoal gray fedora. He stood at the front of the bandstand playing a gleaming tenor saxophone, his body rigid, his shoulders hunched as if to brace himself against a strong wind, his eyes completely closed. The notes spilled out in bright, intricate spurts at first, his smooth yellow cheeks ballooning with air, his long yellow fingers flying up and down the keys of the instrument until the air in his cheeks was spent and he would take a deep breath and begin again. Eventually the spurts lengthened into one long, seamless stream, meandering invisibly through the forest of the darkened room. Three younger colored musicians were behind him, one hunched over a piano,
running his fingers up and down the keys, another standing, plunking a big bass violin, and the third, sitting amid a dazzling array of drums and cymbals, repeatedly striking a large cymbal with one wooden drumstick to keep time and tapping a snare drum between his legs with another. The drummer's head was turned away from the audience as if he couldn't care less what we thought. Occasionally he would wildly flay his drumsticks against the cymbals and drums in a brief, flamboyant solo. But my eyes kept returning to the older man with the saxophone, wearing the dark fedora with the brim flipped down as though he was about to leave for a business meeting. For one thing, he was the only man in the club wearing a hat, and I had always been taught that gentlemen removed their hats in a room where ladies were present, but it suggested to me an inner confidence, an independence of mind that I admired. What attracted me most, though, was the sound of his instrument, which was, in the shadowy intimacy of the club, immense and mesmerizing.

"That's Coleman Hawkins," whispered Gordie, nodding at the saxophonist. "He's been playing the sax for over thirty years. It's a tough instrument to play. He was the first jazz musician to really master it. Some people even call him the Father of the Saxophone, but in the last few years, there have been so many great sax players to come along, he's been overlooked." With an elaborate flourish, Hawkins finished the piece, rapidly fingering the keys to produce a warm, fluttering sound, then releasing the saxophone to hang free from a cord around his neck, letting it dangle like an outrageous piece of jewelry before tucking it under his
right arm as if for safekeeping. The audience burst into applause. Some people stood as they clapped. Others cheered, but he barely acknowledged any of them, merely nodding and touching the brim of his hat, before picking up a copper-colored drink in a highball glass from a little table at the rear of the bandstand. He drank it down in one gulp and then took a few moments to consult with his musicians, as the audience, which had been silent during his playing, began to chatter freely.

"Can I get you fellows anything?" said a slender, coffee-colored waitress standing over us. She had large, beguiling eyes, her hair was cut in a pixie style, and she was wearing a black turtleneck blouse with a little red skirt and high-heel pumps. Her legs were long and shapely in fishnet stockings. In the darkness, I couldn't make out her features that well, but from what I could see, she looked awfully pretty, as pretty as any colored girl I'd seen since leaving home. She reminded me of Delores Winbush, who lived down the street from our house. Delores was the daughter of the principal of the colored high school and she was a couple of years older than I was. Every boy I knew wanted to go out with Delores, but nobody had the nerve to ask her for a date. We would see her in the hall at school or walking down the street and wave at her or smile with embarrassment if she noticed us, but the mere thought of having a conversation with her was paralyzing. She was tall and willowy, with skin the color of vanilla extract, and she was an excellent athlete. She loved to go to the municipal swimming pool, the colored pool which was always crowded with glistening
brown bodies during the summer. In the neighborhood, it was rumored that on summer mornings, Delores would get up early and show up at the pool to swim when it opened at 7:00, and I sometimes imagined her in a pure white bathing suit, lowering herself into the turquoise pool, which was sure to be empty at that hour, to swim laps by herself, her lean brown limbs in constant motion, slicing the clear, shiny surface of the water with barely a splash, while high above her, seated in a tall ladder chair, a lifeguard, bronzed and naked to the waist, watched her.

"I'll have a Rheingold," said Gordie.

"Make it two," I said, with all the confidence I could muster. My eyes followed the waitress as she disappeared into the far shadows of the room. Although things had gone smoothly so far, I was still concerned about being underage in a nightclub. The musicians were getting ready to play another number. With glassy eyes, Coleman Hawkins put down his drink, placed the mouthpiece between his lips, and launched into a torrent of notes, rearing back and forth with his eyes squeezed shut as the music seemed to explode from inside of him. He was joined immediately by the other musicians, as though all of them had suddenly plunged together into a lake and were being kept afloat by the turbulent force of their rhythms. The audience was elated by the vigor of the music. Several people responded by shouting as though they were in church—"Get away, Hawk, get away!" "Talk to me, Bean! Go 'head now. Preach!"—and Hawk and his sidemen seemed propelled even faster by the shouts. Burns
whispered to me that in addition to Hawk, Coleman Hawkins was also called Bean. The waitress brought our beers and poured each into a glass. Gordie and I pooled our money and paid her. We left her a generous tip, which she didn't even seem to notice, and then she moved away to another table and I lost sight of her. I had hoped to strike up a conversation with her, as I had with Lewis Michaux two days before, but the music was loud and she was busy. It didn't seem possible. She was really good-looking, but I thought she was probably older than I was.

"Well," said Gordie, "what do you think?" By then, like most of the people in the club, he was smoking a cigarette, and billows of smoke were circulating in the spotlights above the bandstand. The musicians were taking a break. The drummer, the piano player, and the bassist were sitting in the audience talking with patrons, but Coleman Hawkins had disappeared. I took a swallow of my beer. It was the first beer I had ever tasted, and I kept waiting for it to knock me for a loop, but it didn't seem to bother me. I reached for Gordie's package of cigarettes, which were lying on the table, and I took out a cigarette and held it between my fingers.

"This is fantastic," I said, "and Hawk is unbelievable! I've never heard anything like this." Gordie was smiling proudly, even a bit smugly.

"What did I tell you?" he said. "You'll never hear anything like it at Draper." With a knowing smile, he held up his beer glass and tipped it in my direction, and I picked up mine and tipped it toward him, and we both took another sip of our beers as though we had just pulled off a great caper. "You'd better figure out what
you want to do with that thing," said Gordie, nodding toward the unlighted cigarette I was still holding between my fingers. I laughed and handed it to him to put it back in the pack.

Coleman Hawkins had now returned to the stage, hat firmly in place, with another drink in hand. He was thumbing through sheet music, with a brooding expression, like a banker examining ledgers. It occurred to me that because he was a man of great presence, everyone in the club was keeping their distance from him, whereas his musicians were seated at tables being lionized by the audience. He seemed sad, as he stood by himself on the bandstand with a drink and wearing that hat, in a roomful of adoring admirers. After a few moments, he looked out into the darkness of the club, searching for his musicians as if he needed company, and, once he had found them, he gave each of them a look that made it clear he was ready to start playing again. We were seated only a few feet from the bandstand, and, when they had all returned to the bandstand, I could hear him scold them gently, in a voice so deep it seemed to rumble up from the underworld. Then the sidemen took their positions, and with several quick stomps of his foot he set the beat for the next tune, and they all took off, soaring, with Hawk in the lead, upward like a rocket, right through the nightclub ceiling, passing the bright lights of the Jinxie's sign and the rooftops of nearby tenements, and on and on, into the infinite darkness. I didn't know the name of any of the tunes they played but it didn't matter I was riding with them, and I was willing to go as far as they would take me but after listening to Hawk for a while I began to recognize snatches of familiar tunes that he was weaving into what he was playing, "Jeepers Creepers" and "A Foggy Day," but mostly there were stretches, especially in the slow numbers, when all I could hear was what sounded to me like loneliness.

I had forgotten all about the time, and when I glanced at my watch I was horrified to discover that it was already 11:00
P.M.
"Gordie," I said, "we're late." But he was still soaring with Hawk, and to bring him back to earth, I put my wristwatch right in front of his eyes.

"Holy shit!" said Gordie, looking at my watch. "We'd better get going."

"I know," I said, "but why can't we stay until the end of this set?"

"It's okay with me, but who knows how long it's going to be?" said Gordie. "It could go on for a half-hour or more."

I imagined my mother standing at Cousin Gwen's living-room window with her arms folded, looking up and down Edgecombe Avenue for any sign of me. And then I remembered I was on my own. "Look," I said, "let's stay for a little while longer. We can always say we got caught in traffic or something." Gordie didn't need a lot of persuading.

"Why not?" he said with a laugh. "And as long as we're at it, we might as well have another beer." He held up his empty glass and motioned to the waitress, and she came over.

"Another round, fellows?" she said. I looked up at her and she seemed amused, although her eyes were cast downward. "Sure," I said, with a grin. With the music from Hawk's sax floating
around us, she wiped the tabletop and picked up the empty glasses, but just before she turned to leave, she looked straight at me, holding me in her gaze, her wide eyes luminous through the smoke and the darkness, as though she had something private to tell me. I didn't know what to do. It was such a long look that it made me think we might really have something to say to each other after all. And then she turned on those long brown legs covered with the fishnet stockings and strode off through the crowd. When she left, I thought about what my mother would say about her. I could hear my mother's voice cutting through the music that filled Jinxie's like a buzz saw. "You say you met her in a nightclub? What was she working there for? And wearing that little skirt and those stockings? You can do a lot better than that, son."

"Not bad," said Gordie, when the waitress had disappeared. He was looking at me with a mischievous smile. "I know," I said. "She's cute."

"She certainly is," said Gordie. Hawk was winding down the last number of the set, leaving a trail of softly diminishing notes punctuated by takes from the piano player. At the end of the tune, everyone in the club was on their feet clapping and cheering, including Gordie and me, until Hawk and the others had left the stage. I was afraid to look at my watch. "I think we better get the check," said Gordie, waving the waitress over to our table, and we watched as she worked her way toward us through the crowd.

"May we have the check, please?" said Gordie when she arrived. She quickly added up the bill and handed it to him, and looked straight at me again. I was nervous. I could feel her eyes on me but I didn't know what to say.

Eventually, I mumbled, "How much do I owe you, Gordie?" as he reached for his wallet, took out a twenty-dollar bill, and handed it to the waitress.

"Don't worry about it, Rob," he said. "We'll settle up later." She took the twenty and started to give him the change, but Gordie said, "That's okay. Keep it," and we quickly headed for the door. I didn't bother to look back.