The Magic Keys Read online

  But what I’m really getting at, he had also made sure to remind me, is doing your thing. Look, here’s what I’m really trying to tell you, my man. You’re not out here to prove that some used-to-be little snotty-nosed kid from the outskirts of Mobile, Alabama, can impress some puffed-up somiches just on some old principles from back during slavery time and Reconstruction. You’re out here to find out what you can make of yourself in this day and age. So don’t give up until you make sure you’re on the wrong track. And on the other hand, don’t get faked out by a lot of applause too early on, either.

  He let me think about that for a while as we went on enjoying our soup and salad. Then he said, So how you making out with these up here splibs, homeboy? You remember what I told you during those rookie sessions I made it my personal obligation to put you through?

  And I said, Never is to forget any part of any days like that, Papa Joe. You being a statemate to boot and all. And even as I spoke I found myself remembering exactly how he had looked when he pushed his bus seat all the way back in reclining position. Because it made him look exactly like a not-quite-middle-aged general merchandise storefront bench Uncle Bud, Doc, Mose, or Remus who might well have been taking a snooze in Mr. Slim Jim Perkins’s vacant barber’s chair number three in Papa Gumbo Willie McWorthy’s Tonsorial Parlor up on Buckshaw Mill Road across the lane from Stranahan’s General Merchandise Store on Mr. Slim Jim Perkins’s day off.

  And as he went on saying what he was saying, I was aware once again of that ever so subtle wisp of his Yardley’s English Lavender brilliantine and of the fact that he, like Jo Jones of Count Basie’s band and Sonny Greer of Duke Ellington’s, was an expert twenty-mule-team skinner who never seemed to work up a heavy sweat, which also reminded me of how redolent of bay rum and the aftershave talcum brush mist along with the cigar smoke and shoe polish the atmosphere in Papa Gumbo Willie McWorthy’s used to be. Then by the time I was on my way through the last year of junior high school, there was the precollegiate atmosphere of Shade’s up on Green Avenue across from Boom Men’s Union Hall Ballroom, where the hair and skin preparations came from the same downtown Mobile haberdasheries that carried the latest fashions you saw in Esquire magazine, which by then had become the sartorial bible of the man about town.

  Man, these up here splibs, he had said one morning on the road. Man, them and us, and us and them. Man, especially when it comes to these up here jaspers. My experience is that as soon as they hear that you’re from somewhere down home they’re subject to come on like the fact that they’re from somewhere up here automatically gives them some kind of status over you, especially if you ask them something about something, and I’m not talking about asking them for something. Boy, but as soon as they find out that there’s a bunch of jaspers carrying on about you, man, that’s another tune. Man, you go from cotton-chopping pickaninny to street-corner hangout buddy buddy just like that! But now, on the other hand, it looks like some of their jaspers might want to get next to you, watch out!

  Because, you see, he had also said during another of one of our early-on sessions, speaking of these up here jaspers, man, the problem with them folks is how many of them can’t tell one of us from the other after all. And these up here splibs figure we’re bound to spot how easy it is for almost any old dog-ass splib to take them in like netting mullets in a goddamn barrel. That’s the big secret. Ain’t nothing a bigger mullethead than a benevolent up here jasper. Man, the hype they lay on these people is a sin and a shame. But the scandal of it is that it’s mostly just about some chicken feed, or some goofy broad that don’t even wear no drawers.

  I dropped some pretty heavy stuff on you, right from the get-go, my man, he said as I chuckled to myself, remembering. You being a college boy and all, he said, and you listened like a bass player is supposed to listen. And I told the Bossman, I can see why we can hang this whole thing on a kid like him. I said he’s not only a quick study, he’s somebody that’s been on his way to getting on our kind of time even before he was old enough to know that he could tell the difference between us and somebody else. Which was a hell of a long time before you realized that for us this stuff is not just a job but a calling. Which is another thing that makes for the great big difference between this man’s band and all the others.

  That was also when he began saying what he was to say about another thing that he along with a number of others, none of them schoolteachers as such, incidentally, used to remind you of in one way or another from time to time back in the days when I was coming of age but also stretching all the way back to as far as I can remember. Sometimes they called it quality. And sometimes they called it class.

  What he had said about that back when he filled me in on “the character of the cast of characters in this man’s lineup” was that it was something more than education, and not a matter of birth and family background and how much money you could live on or get to back you up. All of that might give you some clout of one kind or another. But class don’t need clout. Class is its own clout, young fellow, and it’s pretty much the same with hustle. Because you see the thing of it is that class and hustle don’t really go together. It’s a matter of being on the ball, on the money, on the minute without coming on like an eager beaver. Man, what I’m talking about is also being able to miss the cue, miss the mark, and still hold your own and not lose anybody’s respect and faith in you. In school you’ve been thinking mostly in terms of passing or failing, but out here, in the everyday here and now, it’s also very much a matter of whether you can also lose or fail and still have people betting on you on the next go-round.

  Which reminds me that it was also during those initiation sessions he used to continue between naps as the bus zoomed on and on through the open country that he began telling about what he told me about the big con, which was his word for the confidence games that certain hustlers play. There were two main kinds of con artists or slickers, he said. Most people knew about the first kind. Now that somich is an acknowledged criminal and a cold pro. And when he takes risks, the odds are always in his favor, no blind bets, no coin flipping. The deck is always stacked. But now there is also that other kind of con man. Now this somich begins by conning himself into believing that he can con everybody else. All he’s got to do is get up enough nerve to give it a try with a straight face. He’s like a gate-crasher. In fact, he really is a gate-crasher and a self-effacing flatterer at the same time, and I mean to the point of begging and groveling. And the thing about a somich like that is that he really forgets that he’s conned himself. That he’s a lying phony. Because once he gets his lie started he gets so deep into it that he believes it himself. Which is why he can get all tangled up in contradictions. A cold-blooded somich never forgets he’s lying. This cat just might.

  Along with all of the bus sessions out on the open road during those first months, there had also been all of those backstage tips, and after-hours and off-day rounds of pop calls, introductions, and briefings for future personal as well as professional reference. Not to mention all of the ongoing fill-in data not only on each section, but also on each sideman’s approach to every tune in the book for the current tour. There was also Old Pro’s preliminary technical breakdowns, but once the number was kicked off onstage, he (Joe States), being the mule skinner, was no less responsible for locking things in as the Bossman wanted than the Bossman Himself. You know that old jive about his nose itching and me sneezing, well, you better believe it, Schoolboy, because when I sneeze from now on, you poot—not just by the numbers, my man, but by my numbers.

  Ever so often when he was passing on another personal background clue for somebody’s part on a tricky passage, he would wink and say, Of course you already know what every last one of these cats in this lineup is about speaking in just musical terms. But what we don’t ever let any newcomer to this outfit forget is that we don’t just play music in this man’s band, we play life. L-I-F-E, as in flesh and blood. And me and you and old Spodeody and the man make the differe
nce between metronome time and pulse. Like I told you. Metronome time is mathematics, Schoolboy. Pulse is soul. Talking about the rhythm and tempo of life as the folks came to know it and live it in down-home U.S. of A. Talking about stuff them other folks at first thought was just some more old countrified stuff like talking flat because you cain’t spell and articulate and cain’t write!

  As we came back outside the restaurant and headed along the sidewalk to Sixth Avenue that autumn afternoon in New York, he said, So, now tell me how things are going with them fine people you’re camping with, my man. And when I gave him the old OK fingers crossed sign, he said, The unanimous impression back on the old Greyhound is that she just might have what it takes to make a real man out of our schoolboy. Not that any of us think you don’t know what you’re doing. Man, we’re just backing your solo like jamming on a tune you called. Because we figure it’ll do you good to hear some amen corner backup every now and then. Especially coming from that bunch of thugs we got in that crew.

  Then as we clasped shoulders and stepped back before he turned to head up along Sixth Avenue to Forty-eighth Street, he raised his hands as if about to whisper a last word in the italics of the ride cymbal and said, Daddy Royal, homeboy. Remember Daddy Royal. He’s there for you, homeboy. Get to him fast. Get to him fast. Express time, Schoolboy.

  IV

  On my way up Fifth Avenue from the library to the Gotham Book Mart at 41 West 47th Street about a week and a half after the band had hit the road out of New York that mostly bright blue and mildly breezy autumn, I overtook somebody I had not seen since my freshman year in college. I had not really gotten to know him back then, because he was an upperclassman, two years ahead of me, and had not come back to complete his senior year, by which time I had come to be on fairly casual speaking terms with most of the more advanced students that I was most curious about. I did know that he was enrolled in the school of music and that he often served as the student concertmaster who conducted the band when it backed up the cheerleaders during athletic events in the campus bowl and field house. But I recognized his walk as soon as I saw him moving along up the sidewalk about ten yards ahead of me.

  He was doing his own individual sporty-almost-limp variation of the marching band trumpet player’s parade ground strut. I still don’t remember having thought or wondered about him after I myself left the campus, but suddenly there he was again, posture correct but shoulders a little less rigid than an eager beaver infantry cadet, right leg with an ever so slightly but unmistakable hint of a drag, which added up to not quite the prance and not quite the lope that anticipate ponies posting on the right diagonal, so that in mufti the effect was that of a civilian musician rather than a military band man.

  As I picked up my stride to overtake him I realized that I remembered his name from that long ago although I had never used it to address him person to person. Because the only verbal encounters I ever had with him were when he was on duty as a student assistant checking books in and out at the circulation desk in the main reading room of the library.

  Each time, he looked at my name and stamped my slip and filed the card and pushed the book gently toward me and said, Handle with care. And all I said was, Thanks. Now as I came up close enough behind him on Fifth Avenue that many school terms later, I still didn’t call him by name. What I said in my old roommate’s mock conspiratorial stage sotto voce was, Hey, let that goddamn bucket down right there where you at, old pardner. You know what the man said!

  And as if we were rehearsing the sequence in a theater piece he turned and looked at me, not in recognition, but as if more amused than surprised and said, What say, man! How are things down the way? And I said, Still in process, man, still in process, and told him my name and my class years, and that was when I said, Edison, Taft Edison. Taft Woodrow Edison. And he shook his head and said, What can I tell you, man. What can I tell you. My folks were big on newsworthy names. All I can do is try to make mine mean what I want it to mean so that when somebody drops it in there on me it sounds as if it belongs as much to me as to that son of a bitch Wilson, if you know what I mean.

  And I said, I think so. And then, looking at the attaché case he was carrying, I said, Hey, but man, that don’t really look like no bucket I ever did see either on land or at sea, and no trumpet case, either. Is that some sheet music and your batons or something in there?

  And he said, Man, that trumpet stays in the same case I had back on the campus. Same trumpet, same case. And when I said, So what’s up, man? He said, Man, I really don’t think of myself as a musician anymore. My big thing now is trying to find out what my interest in composition and orchestration can do for me as an apprentice writer, man.

  Which didn’t really surprise me, since I for one had always seen him most often not in the music area of the campus but either in the library or on his way to or from Professor Carlton Poindexter’s survey course in the novel. He had not been a member of either of the two student dance orchestras, but I did remember seeing him and hearing him from time to time in the brass section of the chapel orchestra. So not only was I not surprised but even before he said what he said I realized that he had been an upperclassman who had always come to mind above all others when I thought about advanced reading courses, even after he had left campus.

  What did surprise me somewhat was the way he was dressed. I had also remembered him as one of the upperclassmen who, not unlike my roommate, dressed in the collegiate style that I most admired in the fashion magazines: three-button tweed jacket with patch pockets and welt-seamed lapels, usually with contrasting tan twill or gray flannel pleated slacks and no hat. You stopped wearing hats and caps at Mobile County Training School in those days by the time you became a junior, knowing, however, that if you went to college you were going to have to wear a beanie or “crab” cap during your freshman year.

  Now on Fifth Avenue he was wearing a snap brim brown felt hat, a three-piece Brooks Brothers business suit, wing-tipped shoes (which brought back to mind the two-toned moccasins and plain-toed brown crepe sole shoes back on the campus), tattersall shirt with a solid tie. All of which along with the fine leather attaché case he was carrying gave him the look that I thought of as being post–Ivy League Madison Avenue and/or Wall Street. Not that there wasn’t also an unmistakable touch of uptown hipness about the way he wore it all even so.

  I said, Damn, man, that just might turn out to be old BTW’s freshwater bucket after all. And that was when he said, Man, if I could bring this stuff off that I hope I’ve got coming along in this briefcase, it just might turn out to be not just a bucket of whatever it is but a whole keg of it. Maybe some dynamite, among other things. He chuckled as if to himself and I smiled and waited and then he said, Man, when them people find out what I think they’re up to down there on that campus I just might have to carry myself some kind of automatic weapon around in this thing to protect myself from their network of fund-raisers.

  I didn’t say anything about that, because at that time I had never really concerned myself about the overall educational policies of any given college. Once I realized that Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were out of the question so far as my undergraduate student days were concerned, the main thing that mattered to me was what range of liberal arts courses would be available wherever I was able to go. My alternative undergraduate choices had been Morehouse, Talladega, and Fisk in that order, but once I was all signed up and beginning class sessions, especially with Mr. Carlton Poindexter, and settling in with my polymath of a roommate, I had been operating on the principle that everything was up to me and I was on my way.

  He (Taft Edison) chuckled to himself again and then he said, But man, that’s not really what this stuff in this bag is really about. Not really and certainly not only. In fact, only incidentally. When I cut out from down there that spring, I really intended to go back and finish. But by the end of that summer I had changed my mind not only about music but also about my whole outlook on life. And while I was trying to figure
out what I really wanted to do with myself I fell back on a few things I used to play around with, beginning all the way back in my first classes in the general science laboratory. I guess you could say that I became a jack-legged gadgeteer who became good enough tinkering around with photography, radio and sound system repair to keep enough coming in for room and board and decent changes of clothes. And I’ve also shipped out with the merchant marine from time to time.

  Meanwhile, he said after nodding to somebody waving to him from across the street, I’ve also been doing a little journalism, mostly freelance, that doesn’t add up to enough to live on, but as of now I’m managing by hook or crook to bring in enough to allow me to spend more and more time playing around with notes and sketches I’m lugging around in this thing.

  And as I looked at it again I decided that it was the same type of expensive attaché case that was used by globe-trotting diplomats and that it made him seem even farther ahead of me as an advanced Manhattanite than he had been as an upperclassman back on the campus down in central Alabama.

  Then it seemed to me that when he said what he said next, it was as if he had decided to change the subject because what had suddenly come back to mind was a matter that he had been concerned with time and again and that was no less personal than it was intellectual. People, man, he said. They don’t really see you. There you are, right there in front of them, or beside them and you think they’re looking at you and they don’t see you, close up, full view, multiple takes.

  I was not sure that I knew what his point was, so all I said was, And they don’t always hear you either, man. Then I said, Sometimes they do at least recognize you by name on sight. But let them repeat something you’re supposed to have told them about something and you just might not recognize anything that you ever told anybody about anything at any time in your whole life.