Marijuana Girl (5 page)

He had been headed, this particular evening, for a quick snack in the Cozy Luncheonette at the corner of Front and Park. Afterward he would reach a decision: whether to go home and read, go to a movie, or drive into Jamaica and take the subway to Manhattan where something was bound to turn up.

It was in the midst of this storm of indecision, this triple-horned dilemma that he saw Joyce.

He said, "How do you like being back on the job this year?"

"Very much," Joyce said. Her face was grave and serious, but registered pleasure, too. Yet, there was a faint redness around her dark eyes and Burdette decided she had been crying. "It's different from last year, though, now that Mr. Harrigan is gone. He was so nice--"

"Well, I'm not exactly Harrigan, but I hope well get along well."

"Oh, we will, Mr. Burdette. I'm sure we will,"

"Are you going to stay with us this time, or are you going back to school next year?"

"I'm through with school now, Mr. Burdette."

"Look, honey," Frank said, "Don't call me Mister. I'm not that old. My name is Frank."

Joyce blushed. "All right, Frank."

"I thought you lived in town. How come you're eating down here?"

"No special reason. I just didn't feel like going home."

"Meeting your boyfriend?"

For a moment that bothered Joyce. What had happened to Tony? Then she said, "No. I hadn't really made up my mind what I would do."

"Let's move over to a table, shall we?"

"Why not?"

She fascinated him. Frank kept trying to remember that this was only a high school kid--or anyway, just finished with high school. But she was beautiful, and it would have been impossible for him to tell her age. Her dark eyes were steady and wise-seeming. Her hair was a little long for the current fashion, and suggested the softness of immaturity, but her dress--a sleeveless brown shantung with a deep V neckline that bared the first swelling roundness of her breasts, and smoothly shaped her body down to the longish, full skirt--was conservative enough for the most adult tastes. He was not the sort of man who referred to attractive girls as "a dish," but if he had been he would have.

Frank had a theory that all girls are beautiful, provided they're young enough. But he had to admit that Joyce had peculiar individuality in her good looks, rendering her unique, putting her in a class by herself. He had trouble keeping himself from staring. After a while, feeling around for a conversational base, he found jazz. There were names to talk about in common, though she had never met the names, never seen them, knew them only from records. There were Art Hodes, Max Kaminsky, Peanuts Hucko, Bud Freeman, Sol Yaged, and the older names, more magical through tradition, Muggsy Spanier, Louis Prima, the old Goodman group, Jimmie Lunceford--names to conjure with; And there were names to be sneered at--names like George Shearing and Nat Cole, deserters from the higher art; names that were too esoteric, names that had deserted the old tradition of fine jazz for music that was beyond them both, names like Gillespie, Parker.

He learned, to his inutterable surprise, that there was a hotbed of Dixieland growing on a sideroad, and the hotbed was called Chester's. She offered to go there with him sometime.

He said, "What about tonight?"

She thought of Tony. Could Tony be there? Now, at this very hour?

He went on, "We can drop by my house and pick up the car and drive out--unless you have something else planned."

And she thought of the triumph of meeting Tony, after his rejection of her, meeting him with an adult and snubbing him. And that would have been all right, but there was something wrong with taking Mr. Burdette--Frank--into a group of kids, something mismatched about it, something that would have detracted from the adult role she meant to play.

"No," she said. "I didn't have any plans, but I'd just as soon not go out to Chester's tonight. Can't we make it another time?"

"Of course," Frank said, wondering why he had asked her in the first place. After all, attractive or not, she was just a kid. And it had been a mistake to ask her to go anywhere with him. Supposing they should be seen? After all, it was a small town, and he was a married man, and this girl, how old could she be? Seventeen? Eighteen? Nineteen? Anyway, just a kid. And he was the respectable city editor of the local newspaper, circulation 13,570. City editors just didn't go out with copy girls!

They finished eating and somehow, mixed in with everything else, he managed to ask her, "How old are you, Joyce?"

"Nineteen." She was proud of the speed of her response.

Then, without meaning to, he found himself inviting her to come into New York with him to visit a very special little haunt of his. A Greenwich Village night club, where he knew all the musicians and they were doing something special with Dixieland--not like bop--but adding to it without destroying it.

And Joyce said, "Gee, that sounds nice. I'll 'phone my aunt and tell her I won't be back until late." She got up and went to the booth,

He watched her as she walked, seeing the slender body, the easy grace of movement, and telling himself, after all, women are supposed to be more mature than men. You don't think of a nineteen-year-old as a kid. Not a girl. Even the state laws recognized that an eighteen-year-old girl could marry without consent.

He watched her in the telephone booth. She was poised and assured as she talked into the 'phone--not like someone asking permission to go somewhere, but someone saying, "I'll be home a little late. Don't wait up for me."

And he thought--dammit, I'm making a fool of myself. But when she came back to the table, smiling and pleased with herself, he suddenly didn't care.

5 ~ Intoxication

The name of the night club known as The Golden Horn was not a reference to the oriental pleasures of Byzantium in the Near East, but bespoke instead the brazen blare of the hot trumpet. Left over from an era when Greenwich Village was still a sinkhole of prohibition iniquity, it had none of the gaudy trimmings of the more modern night spots on Eighth Street. But its dance floor was equally microscopic, its lighting equally concealed.

The chairs and tables ran fanwise in a semi-circle from a small dais and gave an uninterrupted view of six sweating colored musicians. There were no fairies, few intoxicated tourists, and little conversation.

The Golden Horn was a serious establishment, without funny business or sidelines. People who came to the Horn came to drink and listen to the jazz when it was hot.

The air-conditioning was insufficient, the seats wire-backed and hard to the touch of spine or buttock. But the music was the best. Here, from time to time, came Sidney Bechet, Louis Armstrong and other greats of native American music. Here had played such supermen as the immortal Bix Beiderbecke. Here was the temple of a noble art.

Here they came to attend to the important business of drinking, smoking and listening to music.

In taxis and afoot, by bus, subway and private car, they came to have their pulses speeded by the hammering rhythms, their minds diverted by a spectacular run of guitar or piano--to have their attention caught, breathless, by glittering arpeggios.

Here, too, came Frank and Joyce.

Frank parked his middle-aged car on Broadway, empty and deserted at that hour of the night, and led the way into a dim sidestreet where yellow neon formed the outline of a trumpet; and green neon spelled out the name. There was no doorman, but a sidewalk awning shielded a cavernous, artificial stone entrance to a flight of stairs leading down. Sounds poured, in immodest fury, from the opening. Frank took Joyce's arm as they went down the steps. It was a flattering gesture, for her--Tony would never have thought of it. She said, "I'm not really dressed for this."

Frank said, "Nobody ever is."

Inside the lower door it was dim and cool. The dangling chandeliers were dimmed and brilliant amber spotlights, in the corners of the room, caught the brass flare of the trumpet with which a tall, lean, good-looking colored man sporting a tiny black mustache, was desperately trying to blow off the ceiling.

They stood there for a moment, taking in the silhouetted figures of men and women, strangely hushed and silent, leaning on tables in tense attention to the music. A waiter in black trousers and white shirt came over to them, "Good evening, Mr. Burdette." The accent was Italian.

"Hi, Louie. Got a table for me?"

"Of course, Mr. Burdette." He led the way to an empty table near the dais.

It pleased Joyce that Frank was known here. They sat down at the table and ordered drinks, and then Joyce tried to sort out the confusion of her senses. The music seemed, at first, almost, too loud to be distinguishable. A microphone, before the tall trumpeter, caught up the sound and carried it to twin loudspeakers mounted in the corners of the dais, making it louder still. The flaring spotlights seemed blinding on the white linen suits of the six musicians. The dark figures in the room behind their table seemed totally blacked out, so dark and silent were they. Almost, it seemed, she and Frank sat alone in a darkened room with only the musicians before them.

It was an intimate atmosphere, despite the numbers of people in the room.

Then other things began to come to her, as her mind became accustomed to the din. The hushed roar of an air-conditioning unit, the clink of glasses, the soft lights behind the bar in the rear of the room, strange cartoon-like murals on the walls--and over all, an odd smell that clung to everything and damped down the atmosphere.

It smelled, a little, like burning hay--old hay. But there was something else in the odor that made it different. It was a touch of sweetness that made the odor nearly pleasant--as though it were going to be a pleasant smell but had never quite achieved it and had stayed an unpleasant smell.

She asked Frank, "Do you smell something burning?"

"No, honey." He sniffed. "Smells fine to me."

After a while she gave it up and concentrated on the music. That's Jerry Best on the horn," Frank said. "Man on drums is Phil Schuyler. Piano is Don Willis. Clarinet, Frankie White, and the bass is Nutsie Burke. I don't know the other guy."

Joyce said, "Oh," with the proper reverence.

At first the music meant nothing, but then it began to come on her. It was hard, nervous music, underlaid with an exciting rhythm that first touched her lightly and then began to sink in, deeper and deeper, until it touched her pulse.

She looked at Frank sitting beside her, thinking, I didn't even know him until this afternoon, and now he seems so familiar, so close, so nice. He had put on the horn-rimmed glasses he wore in the office. She liked them. They aged his face, a little, but gave him an air of masculine authority. He looked a little like Ronald Colman playing a college professor--or something like that. His hair, she saw, receded a little from his forehead, giving him a widow's peak that added an exotic touch to his features. She watched his fingers, long and square-tipped, tapping cut the beat of the music, and wondered how it would feel to have those hands touching her.

But that was silly, of course. He was an older man, and how could he be interested in a kid. He was just taking you out tonight because he had nothing else to do. And yet, there was a thing she could feel about him--a sort of strength that grew out of his being older, and having an important job, and being a big man in Paugwasset. She started to compare him with Tony, but changed her mind. She didn't want to think about Tony, because she felt that she was doing something wrong to Tony by being here.

Abruptly the music came to an end. Jerry Best put down his horn and drew the microphone close to him. "Now, just take it easy, folks. Give us a few minutes to replace all that air we been blowing and we'll be right back."

Something clicked in the loudspeakers, and the musicians began to leave the stand.

Joyce saw that Frank had risen from his chair. "Hey! Jerry," he called. "Over here."

The lean negro turned, looking about, and then came toward them. "Hiya, man!" he said, thrusting out his hand. He called to the pianist, "Hey, Don. Dig this."

Wilson came over, his brown face and white teeth lit with a smile. "Frankie," Jerry said, "Where you been, man. Had us near flippin'. You get out there in the stix and we don't hear a word. Who's the chick?"

"Don, Jerry, this is Joyce Taylor. She works on my paper."

"Newspaper gal, hunh?" Wilson said. "Gimme five." He shook hands. It startled Joyce a little, seeing the big brown hand close around her small, white one. She had never touched a negro before, and was somewhat shocked that she felt no difference.

"Sit down for a while," Frank said. "Have a drink with us."

"No man. We want to light up."

"So get on in here!"

"Naw. It ain't cool here. Well cut on outside, C'mon with us. Louie'll hold your table."

Joyce said, "It seems cooler in here than outside?"

Frank laughed. "Not like that, Joyce. What he means is it isn't safe in here. All right, Jerry. We'll ask Louie to save the table."

Joyce followed the three men up the flight of stairs to the street. Frank said, "Where shall we go?"

"Over in the square," Jerry said. "Right over in front of NYU. Nobody bothers you there."

Joyce was puzzled. "What does he mean?" she asked Frank. "I don't understand a word he's saying."

"It's jive-talk. Musician's language. It's a sort of a short-hand talking," he said.

Frank was walking on one side of Joyce and Jerry on the other. Suddenly, shockingly, Jerry put his arm around her shoulder. It was so startling that she almost threw it off. Then she caught herself in time. Frank didn't seem to object and it must be all right. But ...

"It's like this," Jerry said. "Musicians like to make all their noise with whatever they blow. Like you get kind of so you don't want to talk with words. So you make everything real simple for yourself? You dig?"

"I don't quite see ..."

"Well, you don't have to look around for words you want. Like, I want to say, you like this? so I say, you dig it?" He hesitated. Then, to Frank he said, "Tell her, man," as though the burden of word-finding had been too much for him.