Then, when it was time for me to be on my way back across to Fifth Avenue and the library, I said, Man, you and old Taft Edison. You and the Bossman Himself, and Old Pro and old Joe States. I said, Here I am, doing what I’m doing on this goddamn schedule and there you guys are, doing what you’re doing on your own. Because you want to and even as you’re doing it for yourself, you’re also doing it for others. Others here, there, and elsewhere. I said, One of these days, man. One of these days. But as of now I’ve got to be going back to the salt mines at Forty-second and Fifth.
XVII
The next time I had a midafternoon snack with Taft Edison our table was the same one at which I remembered finding Old Pro having breakfast and checking through the final morning editions of the newspapers as the two-way traffic outside along 125th Street rolled east and west between Seventh and St. Nicholas Avenues on that first day in New York. I was on my way with my guidebook to see as much of midtown Manhattan as I could find my way around to alone before coming back uptown by check-in time for rehearsal. So I had come in to have a very quick snack, but when I saw him there by himself I remembered what Joe States had said about getting to the one closest to the Bossman Himself as soon as I could catch him off-duty and alone, I cut back on my sightseeing plans and asked him if I could join him.
I didn’t mention anything about any of this to Taft Edison as we settled into our seats and gave our orders to the waiter that afternoon. Because when he called me that night before about joining him to check out the matinee performance of the band being featured at the Apollo Theatre that week, he had also sounded urgent when he said that there was a personal matter that he wanted to tell me about, and I was still waiting for him to bring up whatever it was, because he had not yet given me any clue to what it was about. Not even during the set changes between the variety acts.
He hadn’t brought it up on our way to the restaurant and as we waited for the drinks he began talking about the music we had just heard, and about the band, which had begun as one of those now-legendary “territory bands” like the old Oklahoma City Blue Devils that he had grown up hanging around, as I used to listen to Papa Gladstone’s Dance and Mardi Gras Marching Band in Mobile and at the Boom Men’s Union Hall Ballroom up on Green’s Avenue in Plateau. The territory bands operated mainly out of Kansas City, which was where the Blue Devils became a part of the nucleus of the world famous Count Basie Band.
Those guys. That music, Taft Edison said as we finished our drinks and started on our snack. That’s something I always have to keep in touch with. Hearing and seeing those guys riffing that stuff like that reinforces my connection with a lot of idiomatic fundamentals that I am not only trying to work in terms of as a writer, but also that I don’t ever want to get too far away from as a person. Man, that stuff plus all of that old church stuff was my raw material even when the music I was trying to learn to compose was concert hall music. Which is why I was all the way down there in Alabama and not at Juilliard or the Boston Conservatory or even Oberlin in the first place.
And that is when he also said, Man, just the opposite of those folks taking owls to Athens, or coals to Newcastle, I’m trying to take chitlins to the Waldorf. And I suspect you’re also up to the same caper. Otherwise why would a liberal arts major with a fellowship to graduate school spend as long as you spent on the road with a band that keeps dipping as deep down into that old gut bucket no matter what else he’s up to. Anyway, the more I think about it the more I look forward to running some of my prose sequences by you even while I’m still fiddling around with them.
Look, he also said, I know quite a few literary experts up here who think they know where I’m trying to go. But I’m counting on you to spot where I’m coming from. After all, since you and I took going to college as seriously as the best of them did we don’t need them to tell us what we’re trying to do. We just want them to be un-condescending enough to acknowledge what we are doing when we do it.
It was not until we were almost through eating and ready to order coffee that he finally got around to bringing up the personal matter that he had mentioned on the phone the night before. And it turned out to be personal not in the sense that
