The Cool School Read Free Page A

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-landon 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