Life on Sandpaper Read online

  An apartment on Fifth Avenue and Tenth needed a painter. I went there and said I had housepainting experience from Paris. Following Gandy’s instructions I said I’d painted the home of Baron de Rothschild, because in fact I’d seen, with a friend, the walls and the colors of the Rothschild palace and I’d thought about what Lincoln had said, that if the Lord had money, He’d surely live there. I painted the apartment. I tried my luck with the lady of the house and she said I was insolent and while she didn’t actually punish me she rejected my advances and laughed a bitter selfish laugh whenever I looked at her. In the evenings Gandy and I would go to Birdland to hear some jazz. Jazz was never really popular in America. Years later George Shearing who wrote “Lullaby of Birdland” told me that he was flying someplace or other and the pilot recognized him. They landed for a short layover. The passengers got out for some fresh air. The pilot asked Shearing, who was blind, if there was anything he could do for him. Shearing sat down in the cockpit and asked the pilot to take his guide dog out for a short walk. The pilot took the dog and when the passengers came back they saw a blind man in the cockpit, and ran. I tried to fathom how Gandy managed to make a living but I couldn’t and mentioned to him that my money was running out and he talked to somebody at Birdland and the guy, I no longer remember who he was, sent us to Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem. I met Charlie Parker, I heard him play. He was the world’s first black cowboy. Later I learned that he collected pistols of the kind you see in Westerns, Hopalong Cassidy was his hero. He made a religion of roasting chickens, loved model railroads, and dreamed of driving a gold-plated Cadillac. In the midst of all the filth around us I sensed a primeval shyness in him. He was a huge and intimidating sentimentalist and the first time I heard him I felt like I was seeing God die. When he played a song and his high forehead was covered with sweat, the music searched for itself between his hands playing the saxophone, and I heard the echo of Negro funerals from the place where jazz was born, rejoicing and laughing when another black man had died, and my grandfather’s prayers as well. I told Charlie Parker about the Rabbi of Liadi. I explained that during Napoleon’s siege of Moscow there was a violent debate among the Jews as to whether Napoleon’s victory would be good or bad for their community. Rabbi Israel of Kozienice wanted Napoleon to win while the Rabbi of Liadi did not. It was decided that they both should go to the synagogue at the same time and whichever one of them was first to blow the shofar would be considered the winner of the argument. The Rabbi of Kozienice arrived at the same time as the Rabbi of Liadi but was the first to start blowing the shofar, so the Rabbi of Liadi snatched the notes from the Rabbi of Kozienice’s shofar and thus, from a distance of nine hundred kilometers, decided Napoleon’s fate in Moscow. Bird said that any jazz musician who doesn’t go and turn jazz into some ice queen to be worshipped from afar like that Dave Brubeck guy ought to know how to snatch notes from a shofar. Outside everybody was playing the numbers and losing loads of money to the black pros all dressed to the nines in their flashy suits and magnificent ties. Bird liked to see Jimmy Slyde beating Napoleon in Moscow with his tap dancing.

  One night some time later we were walking down Fifth Avenue. By the Olivetti store, on a concrete pedestal, was a typewriter. Opposite we could see big buildings with the lights on and hundreds of women’s asses, bent over polishing the floors in the neon light. The avenue was empty. We put some paper into the machine and Bird dictated me a letter. A cop came and complained that there were no crimes committed around there. It had been like that every night for a year now, and his wife laughed at him because every other bastard at the station had a few crooks pinned like medals to his chest and their wives were teasing his wife because her husband had nothing. Minton’s Playhouse was on 117th Street, between Lennox and Seventh Avenue, not far from the Savoy Ballroom and the Apollo. Late at night they let musicians whose licenses had been revoked because of drugs play there. A lot of people loved to come listen. Ordinary people off the street. Whites. Blacks. Hookers. Pimps. And police officers. I got a job washing dishes and waiting tables, taking orders from a black man named Andy. They liked having a white boy washing dishes for them. I was young and they dressed me in dark clothes so I’d look even whiter. They bought the clothes at the pawnshop on the corner and for two months I lived in a room just above the club. I had a half-Japanese half-black girlfriend who lived across the street and would make up little voodoo dolls. She’d lay me down on my stomach and walk barefoot over my back, bending her toes, and I felt ashamed at seeing her act like a kind of slave. She was beautiful, but like Flora she was just waiting for me to give her orders. Billie Holiday made up a song called “Yo” for me—that’s what they called me—“Yo’s Blues.” But I don’t want to talk about myself. Jazz flowed into me. The sad humor of the musicians. Billie Holiday reached for notes and sang them as if she were weaving a sad carpet and she’d take me on walks and I talked and she listened or maybe she didn’t, and said she didn’t understand that crap. We kissed. She said she’d had better kissers. I was there and she wanted to kiss somebody and I was nearest and I was talking and making a fool of myself. She was lost and looked like an abused bird. They told me they called her “Lady Day” because when she was a waitress she used to bend over to take people’s money and they’d see her breasts and say: Lady. She was a vanquished queen who refused to relinquish her kingdom, even in the gutter. I met her years later at Tony Scott’s, the clarinet player. She sang “Mein Yiddishe Mama” for me. Nobody could sing it like her. She published an autobiography that opened with the words: “Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen, and I was three.”

  Bird liked me and there was Max Roach and tap dancing, and there was Ben Webster who every week would pawn his sax and Bird and I made him reclaim it and then they’d play together. Crazy Bud Powell would join them. His head was fucked up from all the beatings he’d taken because of the color of his skin. He’d get up onto the piano and crow Cock-a-doodle-doo and then play and everybody would cry at the way his notes would hit you in the gut. Bertrand Tavernier’s movie ’Round Midnight, starring Dexter Gordon—who’d also join in sometimes—was partially based on the life of Bud Powell. Powell went to Europe, climbed trees, came back, went again, wanted love but there wasn’t any. I remember dragging him home but I can’t remember where.

  Lady Day kissed me and hated me because I wasn’t cruel and didn’t hit her or shout or take her money, I was too innocent for her, too clean, not a pimp, I talked to her about Milton’s poetry and other poets I liked and painting, she liked it but it didn’t really interest her. She sang, Hush now, don’t explain, you’re my joy and pain, my life’s yours love, don’t explain; and that’s how it is, she told me, a flower doesn’t explain itself, fire doesn’t explain itself, and love doesn’t explain itself. She loved like she talked, thought I was really just trying to butter her up and wasn’t interested myself in whatever it was I was saying about Rembrandt or Vermeer, back then I was trying to figure out where the light in Vermeer’s paintings came from, what it was about that trick of his that made his work so appealing, and she didn’t really have anything to say on the subject, she thought she was unworthy of talk like that. For her I was a phony from a world she wanted to live in, but she’d missed the boat. And sometimes at four or five in the morning we’d go to a small club, where a fat black man called Slim Gaillard played. Slim would wait for Bird and Lady and told me that I was white trash, but sweet. He played with his huge hands downside-up; he had fingers like frankfurters and his fingernails touched the keys and for an entire hour he sang a song that nobody has ever made sense of, “Cement Mixer (Puti Puti),” and I plunged headfirst into three or four ecstatic months of fast painting, new colors, I started mixing oils and enamels, I learned to paint jazz, think jazz, breathe jazz, feel the beat, the bebop. I’d think of a double bass and feel the rhythm coursing through me.

  Minton’s was one long party. People hardly ate there. They liked to laugh,
cry, and drink. I’d mainly wash glasses. They wanted me to circulate between the tables so that the clients could see the white waiter from Jerusalem—Tel Aviv didn’t mean anything to them. The hookers sat with their arms around each other and ordered Bacardi or scotch with milk and flirted with me. They said I was what was left for Bird between the notes. The cops were mostly drunk. The musicians went wild competing with each other. The whites in the audience sat mesmerized and everybody looked at them as if they were counts doing them the honor of visiting a Harlem whorehouse. I served them and when they thought of it they even paid me. Luckily an ancient black woman across the street made me a meal a day in exchange for my stories about Jerusalem and the Jordan River and there was a kind of a dull golden tinge to this deceit. The musicians gave themselves noble titles, they loved monarchy, pomp, dressing elegantly: Billie was Lady Day, Lester Young was Prez, Ellington was Duke, Basie was Count, and Nat Cole was King. They greeted each other the way they’d seen in movies about English royalty. I was a message sent out to the entire world: Here in the asshole of creation the real flowers bloom, and a white sack of shit from the Holy Land of Jesus, Moses, and Abraham—they’ve got him in their pocket. They are his intimate friends and he makes them beautiful. They complimented me. Their kindness was unconditional save for the fact that they decided I had to serve them drinks devotedly. They appreciated that more than I realized since I thought they were actually doing me a great honor. They didn’t want to see my paintings and drawings, except for Bird who’d come up to see them. Gandy would show up, the hookers wanted me to be their baby, but while the music and the atmosphere were bewitching, the women weren’t, even though they were melancholy. The Japanese voodoo lady found somebody else and left. After the girls stopped kidding around in the club they were dragged out by their pimps, and some time later crawled back inside, all black and blue. Then they would be called “queens” and had drinks on the house and only the cops and the tougher detectives would dare to mess with them. I used to eat with the musicians at Jimmy’s Chicken Shack where we had chicken and coleslaw or a steak that they held with tongs and seared with a blowtorch and I said that one day I was going to write because painting was beneath contempt and Ben Webster asked me what I’d write and I said a book that would be called The Future of God, though I wasn’t at all sure He had a future.

  I had an evening off and went over to Minton’s bar above the club. Ben Webster was there. A tall woman in a green baseball cap who’d arrived in a limo asked him questions about jazz. Her chauffeur was waiting for her in the limo, looking straight ahead though there was nothing to see straight ahead. Ben was drunk and flat broke and for every drink she bought him he answered a question, as if he was some kind of jazz historian. He dropped names like Jelly Roll Morton, Mezz Mezzrow, Fats Waller, King Oliver, he introduced me as a Doctor of Jazz, the youngest professor in Berlin. Then he told her that there was a jam session at the Five Spot and the woman asked Ben—who hadn’t been sober since his baptism and probably not even then—she asked if you had to suffer in order to play jazz. Suddenly he seemed jovial. He looked at and said gleefully, Sure. Suffering’s the only way. You have no idea how much. If you want to play you have to find suffering and use it. He asked her to write all this down because it was important, and she started writing and he said: The first thing you have to remember is that all this jazz stuff is shit. But you have to remember too that we’re all suffering. Just suffering? We’re lost, and you should make a donation so it’ll be easier for us to suffer, because with money in our pockets and booze in our blood, suffering is much more pleasant. We all got into the limo and drove down to the Village. Waiting at the Five Spot were Dizzy and Max Roach and Miles Davis and Bird. Ben introduced the tall woman as an authority on jazz from Memphis, Tennessee. In the corner sat five Italians in yellow camel-hair coats with their guns bulging under their vests, and then the session began. The Italians cried and their tears were so big you could hear them splashing on the floor. They wept and wiped their eyes with handkerchiefs. Then they looked out the window and seemed upset. They went outside for a few minutes and burned the chauffeur’s balls with a blowtorch because they thought he looked suspicious. Then they bought everyone roast chicken, French fries, coleslaw, and Cokes. Ben began playing. Bird admired him, he said, That’s some sound! That’s something! Dizzy charged from the side with his crooked trumpet. Bird said that Dizzy had the best phrasing in the business. Even Max Roach, who earlier had been staring into space, grabbed his sticks, threw them into the air, furrowed his brow, and started drumming. I could sense how they were building a complete and harmonious composition out of improvisation, variation, I could sense what the music was intending to become. Bird started playing opposite Ben Webster and then Miles Davis joined in. The audience was silent. The tall woman said, Jazz sounds like the night. As close as you can get to prayer. Everybody looked at her and she didn’t dare open her mouth again. Dizzy, who Bird said was the architect of the style, stopped playing and so did Max Roach. Dizzy yelled: Now it’s war! There were three saxes left, Bird, Miles, and Ben Webster: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The three of them started sweating and playing with screeching love. They began with “Cherokee” and “A Night in Tunisia” and moved on from there. The Italian gangsters wept, each musician tried to cut the other two but still wanted to be loved by his friends. A war for kisses. Three musicians trying to reach out and touch their own edges over the abyss of their incompetence like dogs sneaking out and risking their lives just in order to piss and mark their territory. This is love, yelled one of the Italians zealously and pulled out his gun and fired into the air and then he turned pale and shouted: Pure genius! And when there was a moment of silence Bird or Ben would take this silence and put it into their sound. Bird seemed angry and kissed Ben and took his notes from him. The tall woman sat there openmouthed and one of the Italians stuck a bottle of Coke into it and she drank up without touching the bottle with her hands and everyone looked at her and she whispered, I’ve got teeth of steel, and one of the gangsters yelled, Just don’t suck my cock, and she laughed and the bottle fell to the floor and broke. Each of the three wanted to beat the others but also to lose the battle. Bird suddenly seemed to move apart from them, everything was forgotten, he hated everyone and their mothers too and he played a long solo until Ben and Miles laid down their musical weapons and seemed astounded and embarrassed and went over to kiss Bird but he pushed them away and went out in tears. There was a difficult silence. The woman got up and put a thousand dollars in Ben’s hand and said, That’s for everyone, thank you, and she drove away. I went outside, Bird was standing there crying. He played “Hava Nagila” for me and said, Miles will win in the end and I’m sorry for Ben, but I’m not sorry for myself.

  For two years I continued going to Minton’s even after I’d stopped working there. Gandy found us a club in the Village called the Village Vanguard owned by Max Gordon. It was there that many American performers got their first break. He owned another club uptown, the Blue Angel, and that’s where the big money and the fame were. Art and beginnings and love were at the Village Vanguard. That’s where you’d practice and get discovered. To get the audience warmed up, Gandy was tasked with bringing a few artists in every evening, we got a meal and a drink and a few dollars for applauding enthusiastically and getting the rest of the audience to join us. I moved into a room on Twelfth Street. I borrowed money, I don’t remember from whom. On Saturdays I’d go up to Minton’s and make a few extra bucks, and listen to Billie Holiday sing “Yo’s Blues.” Sometimes there were fights: people who ran out of white powder tried to steal money. Outside, cold and tough and merciless, stood the pushers. I felt at home in the Village and I realized that there were two New Yorks, one went up to Fourteenth Street and from there, with the exception of Harlem, lay America. Flannel suits. College students with crewcuts. All the Catchers in the Rye. The world. The system. The lie. The money. Down here, below the prime meridian of Fourteenth Street, there wa
s anger. There was the future. People wore dungarees you could only buy at two Army & Navy stores, one on Twenty-third Street and the other on Thirty-fourth. Somebody bought me dungarees or Levi’s, today they’re called jeans. I had to sit in a hot bath for an hour just to get the pants soft enough to move and I spent another few days feeling like I was walking around in a suit of armor. The dancers were there, the painters, the writers, the poets, the bohemians, there was an Italian café on MacDougal Street, the only one in New York then, and there were Italian restaurants in Little Italy, in each of which sat a Don surrounded by hardened young toughs. If the Don liked you they’d feed you pasta for nothing. I became friendly with Robert De Niro Sr. who was a proud handsome gentleman and every now and then we’d walk together from Washington Square to West Broadway and Sullivan Street, sometimes with his little boy who later became an actor. He wasn’t a successful or well-known painter. He was well liked but nobody understood the elegance of his paintings because he had found a way of incorporating the Italian Renaissance into modern art as though Picasso or Pollock had never happened. People refused to acknowledge him as an artist. I liked his paintings more than those by some of the bigger names. Unlike some of them, he wasn’t a sham. He didn’t paint wallpaper like Pollock. De Niro would never decorate his canvases with careless, soulful splashes, making simple decorations like Motherwell and the others. At the artists’ club on University Place I came to blows with Franz Kline whose paintings I didn’t like at all because he’d brutally criticized De Niro.