But before the fall term of my freshman year in college I had never become aware of anything at all about the Commedia dell’Arte as such, although I did know what Harlequin and Pantalone costumes looked like and that both represented stock characters like the stock characters in newspaper comic strips and also like Punchinello in the Punch and Judy puppet shows and like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton of silent moving pictures.
As we stopped at the corner of Tiffany’s and waited for the light to change so we could cross over to the west side of Fifth Avenue, Roland Beasley shook his head and clenched and rubbed his palms, saying, What can I say, my man? What can I tell you? I really do think that we just might be on our way to getting next to something that we can riff on for days, man, and I mean day and night.
And I said, You said it, old partner. I said, All you’ve got to do is start vamping and riffing around stuff like “Drop Me Off in Harlem” or “Echoes of Harlem” or “Slapping Seventh Avenue with the Sole of My Shoe,” and what about stuff like “Harlem Airshaft” and stuff like that. And just watch how variations on old Jacques Callot’s and all that jiveass crew will start turning up stomping at the Savoy and jumping at the Woodside and cooling it at Connie’s Inn just like they did in Picasso’s Belle Epoque Montmartre, and just look at all of those theater and nightlife characters already there in Toulouse Lautrec. And don’t forget Degas and all those dancing girls and scenes.
There we go, he said as we turned into the entrance to Rizzoli’s, no doubt about it. Degas and Toulouse Lautrec and Picasso at Connie’s Inn and Small’s Paradise, at the Lafayette and at the Savoy, the Home of Happy Feet. You know what I mean? Not them, me. Old Rollo! Old Rollo’s visual echoes of Harlem. Old Rollo. Not Miguel Covarrubias and all that old-trouble-I-seen-eyed blubber-lipped, blubber-butt, blubber-foot refugees from the goddamn cotton field out barrelhousing on Saturday night in their Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck Sunday best. Man, talk about square. Man, even the goddamned drummers looked square in that goddamn Covarrubias stuff. I know better. Man, I was right up there. Man, I’m from North Carolina, but I grew up right around the corner from Connie’s Inn and the old Lafayette Theater. Man, remember to remind me to tell you about Big John’s, where they used to serve that Big John Special that Fletcher Henderson’s band made that Big John Special record about. Boy, we used to live right off Seventh Avenue on 131st Street, and the Old Rhythm Club, where most of the uptown hoofers and keyboard ticklers used to hold those legendary cutting contests while waiting for gigs in between tours, was on 132nd Street, right down the block from the Lafayette going toward Lenox Avenue. Boy, if old Covarrubias was ever in there, he must have been blind as a bat and had plugs in his ears.
You got him, I said. And then I also said, He was OK on that stuff in the Balinese islands and the southern part of Mexico, because he was looking at it as something ceremonial, ritualistic, and anthropological. But his down-home, across-the-tracks stuff and uptown stuff is only ethnic caricature that gets swinging all mixed up with being wild and gets being cool all confused with being melancholy.
Then I said, OK, so we know very well that Callot’s Commedia dell’Arte stuff is very much the same stock character stuff as our old minstrels used to be based on. But hell, man, for my money even old Roark Bradford understood the farcical and satirical dimensions and implications of that stuff far better than Covarrubias, who gets it all tangled up with the grotesque. Man, as that tongue-in-cheek director and cast of Green Pastures knew, Old Roark was out to swing that stuff no less elegantly than Old Rabelais.
We didn’t spend the amount of time that we usually spent browsing in Rizzoli’s whenever we were in that part of town, because it was already as late as it was when we got there that afternoon, and I wanted to get on back down to Forty-second Street to the library and the assignment I had planned to finish before going down to Washington Square. And also even as he went on talking about what we were talking about as we came back outside and along Fifth Avenue, I knew that when we came to Rockefeller Center he was going over to Sixth Avenue to take the D train down to Canal Street because he wanted to get back down to his studio and sketch pads as soon as possible.
So when the phone rang as if on cue just as I was finishing my homework that evening I knew exactly who was calling and I picked up the receiver and said,
