Nico was sitting in a booth at a diner with his friends, Frank and Tony and Bobby. They loved to walk the streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and talk. They walked for miles it seemed. They especially loved to walk in the rain. The sound of the raindrops pattering on their umbrellas felt good. Their clothes were the uniforms of what they believed the wannabe Writer (with a capital W) wore—the literary intellectual: corduroy jackets over white T-shirts and blue jeans, and of course they sported pipes. When not smoking they placed their pipes in the upper left side pocket of their jackets. Placing the pipe is an art form. Some place the pipe stem down, barrel up; some barrel down, stem up. Nico preferred it barrel down, stem up. This way the nicotine didn’t drip into the stem and give a terrible mouth later when he lit up. They always ended up in Joe’s Diner on Knickerbocker Avenue, and would continue talking and horsing around and eat rice pudding. Sweet.
They thought they knew what was what. They were already reading the New Yorker. Frank even had a subscription. He was the smart one and the real talker. They were all into reading and were would-be writers but the only one who wrote anything was Frank. He already had published in the school paper. And he talked about who he thought was the best of the contemporary writers, Howard Fast. And of course the others had to read Fast in order to keep up with Frank. But he was always ahead of them. Nico thought, but never said, that Fast was great, sure, especially his stories about Washington and Hamilton and the other early founders of the USA, but he really thought Fast was lightweight. Frank said, Sure, Fast was underrated but that’s because he was so easy to read.
When Nico discovered T.S. Eliot and Hemingway and Dostoevsky, Fast was gone for him. And when he tried to speak about them on their walks, Frank would pontificate saying, “Maybe Hemingway was just about OK, but the others—like James Joyce, and Sam Beckett, and everybody else who tries to write like them are the best-unread modern writers of all time, like Shakespeare and Chaucer; and Milton, of course, was the worst.” He said, “When my uncle was in graduate school in a class on Shakespeare, the professor asked all the students in the class, ‘Who’s read the entire works of Shakespeare?’ and nobody raised their hand. ‘How come?’ asked the professor, ‘Shakespeare is the greatest English writer of them all and yet not one of you has read all of his works.’ And Frank said, “So much for the great Shakespeare.”
And Frank was the great chess player. He beat them all. He even beat them together in what he called blitz chess. He’d walk from one board to another and beat them—all. He was smart. And he worked out. He was a short guy, but stubby, a little like a small wine barrel. And he had iron muscles. They all deferred to Frank.
Soon they would graduate, soon go to college, soon they would separate and live different lives. Frank, Tony, and Bobby got into NYU. Nico didn’t have the grades to get into college, and papa, Nico’s father, put it to him straight, “Go to college or go to work.” So he applied to the CCNY extension night classes where those kids who didn’t have the 3.0 average were able to get in. And if they got their grades up they could “matriculate” into the regular day college.
So Nico went to CCNY and to a different world. Now, he rarely saw Frank, Tony, or Bobby. Nico took the subway from Lorimer Street all the way up to the Bronx. The subway car went past the famous 125th Street. He stared at the station when he got there. Stared at the black people who got on and off. He was dying to get off and wander up and down the street. But he didn’t dare. It would be like entering a strange foreign country. His would be the only white face. He knew about the jazz clubs. About the Apollo Theatre, and the Cotton Club. And the train went by and on to the CCNY stop.
The first day at CCNY Nico just strolled around to see what was what. He went to the lounge to get a cup of coffee and saw the chess tables and players. He sat down when a game opened up and played and beat a kid he didn’t know. It felt so good. So from that day, first thing he did when he went to school was to go to the lounge and play chess. Some-times the game was so hot that when his class started he went on with the game and missed the class. He got better and better at chess. And worse and worse at class. He began reading the chess books and working out the puzzles and working out the different openings. He enjoyed chess more than he enjoyed classes. And he wondered if he could now beat Frank.
Then Robbie sat in the empty chair, across the chess table, after Nico won a game. Robbie was black. They were pretty equal. Robbie maybe a little better than Nico. After playing they talked about 125th Street and about jazz. Robbie said he would take Nico to the Apollo. His uncle worked backstage, he said, and they could see everything close. They talked about their neighborhoods. About their girls. About their gangs. About the fights they had. They became friends. Robbie told Nico once in a very serious quiet voice that was almost a whisper that he stabbed another kid. And the kid died. He told Nico no one else knew he had done it. He told Nico he never told anybody about this. Now there were best friends. Now they were brothers. Nico was thrilled with fear, and proud to be the brother of a tough black guy.
Robbie did take Nico to the Apollo. And they did go backstage and watched the performances from the wings of the curtain. What a dream. It was wonderful. There were all the black people. Everybody was happy. Everybody sang with the band. Some people danced in the aisles. When an act was booed by the audience a loud siren like the ones on fire trucks would burst into sound and a long hook would reach out from the side of the stage and yank the poor performer off the stage and the audience would whoop and holler and laugh and clap and have a wonderful time. Nico’s was the only white face. He felt yes, he really was in another country. But he was with Robbie and it was OK. Nobody bothered him. Nobody minded him. And the band and the music and the singers and the dancers excited him.
Robbie introduced Nico to 52nd Street. They went there after their night classes. The Three Deuces, the Front Door, Birdland, and all the other jazz clubs. There were about a dozen or so little clubs on both sides of the street. You could hear the music as you got to the corner. On the south side, it was Dixieland. On the North side, it was modern jazz.
The way it worked was easy. They would enter and go straight to the bar that was always at the far end of the club near the door. And they would order a glass of beer that cost only seventy-five cents. They were able to nurse that one glass through an entire set. The bartenders knew they were kids, and they also knew that they loved jazz and what harm could they do with a measly glass of seventy-five cent beer, when the place wasn’t crowded? After hearing one set, Nico and Robbie would go out to another club and do another set with another seventy-five cent beer. It was wonderful. But on weekends the bartenders kept the bars free for older and higher paying drinkers.
Nico got to hear all the great musicians, like Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillespie, Lester Young, and Billie Holiday. He fell in love with Billie—Lady Day. He first saw her and Lester at the Three Deuces. There was a piano player, a drummer, a bassist, and Lester, on this little platform that was supposed to be a stage. Then Billie walked on and stood before the mike. The musicians started playing. Billie began to slowly and quietly swing her body with the music. Then when it was time, when she was ready, when it felt right, she began to sing. Lester followed her with a solo on his tenor sax that was as sweet and mournful and lovely as her singing. Then another chorus from Billie, while Lester would rif behind and in-between her words, and it was as if they were one body, one sound, one marriage of song. Then each player took a solo, the pianist, and the drummer, even the bass player.
Billie’s singing wasn’t separate from the rest of the musicians. It was one sound. They were musicians and together they made music. It wasn’t like the singer singing the song and the band just backed her up. And Billie listened to the solos of the other musicians and swung with them and smiled and even clapped or put her hands together when someone made a good lick, especially Lester.
There was gentleness and sadness and acceptance and defiance all together in her voice. Her singing proclaimed, “This is me, Billie Holliday and I know who I am!” And Nico loved her.
One night Robbie said “Let’s go up to her dressing room after the set and ask for her autograph,” And they did. They got to her dressing room door and Nico bravely knocked on the door and then they heard that wonderful raspy voice say, "Come on in.” They opened the door and Billie probably was surprised to see two college kids, or maybe they were even high school, because Nico was so small. But, she smiled broadly.
Nico timidly said, “Miss Holliday, we love your singing. Can we have your autograph?”
“Why sure,” she said, “come on over, honey.” And they each handed her one of their school notebooks in which she wrote down her blessed name.
Going home back to Brooklyn that night on the subway was like flying through the air.
Nico learned something very important on 52nd Street. He learned what it meant to swing. It was something that Miles Davis said. The story goes that Miles was standing at a bar and the group playing was the Dave Brubeck quartet. After the set, Brubeck went to the bar and asked Miles what he thought of his group. Miles said, “It’s all head music, man. You play the notes and you play them fast. But the group doesn’t swing. You're the only one in the group that has some swing in you. But not much.” And Nico realized that there was a great divide between white and black jazz musicians. The white musicians made the money and got the biggest gigs. But they didn’t swing. The black musicians swung but they didn’t make the money. Yes, there were great white bands like Woody Herman and Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw and such. And they played great numbers and had great hits. But compared with the bands of Count Basie and Duke Ellington, you could hear the difference. White bands couldnt swing like the black bands. The great Benny Goodman who, at his best with his small groups, could swing a little, but that was because the heart of his early small groups were black—the great Lionel Hampton on vibes, the majestic Teddy (Theodosius, they called him) Wilson on piano, and the genius, Charlie Christian on guitar. They swung. Listen to the early Goodman groups with Hampton and Wilson and Christian and then listen to the later groups without them. Listen to the rhythm sections of the Count Basie orchestra and stack it up against any white band. Glen Miller, for instance, had the most famous and the best-paid band in the country. The story goes that once when he went up the Harlem, to the Savoy ballroom, to hear Count Basie’s band, he shook his head and said, “Why can't my band ever swing like that?”
Nico figured out that swing was heart and guts and soul all wrapped up together. It was something that came from deep inside. Something that was there that nobody put there. Something that you were born with. Something that you can't create and make happen. Something you can’t find and yet it was there, everywhere, and it was everything—everything that mattered.
Nico decided that whatever he was to do with his life it had to swing! Whatever act he did, unless it swung—it wasn’t worth it. His relationships with others had to swing otherwise they weren’t worth it. The guiding inner light for him was to swing. That’s what was great about his friendship with Robbie. It swung. And that’s why when one night Robbie wasn’t in the lounge where Nico and he used to meet, Nico was most distressed. He looked for him all over. He searched the cafeterias. He went to all of the classes he knew of that Robbie took. But Robbie wasn’t there. Nico asked around and nobody knew. What happened? He wondered maybe Robbie got into some kind of trouble and had to cool it for a while? Nico went to the Apollo to Robbie’s uncle. He didn’t know anything. Or if he did he wasn’t saying. Nico went to 52nd Street to the clubs they went to together. But Robbie was never there. Some of the bartenders got to know Robbie, and Nico asked if they had seen Robbie but they all said no, they hadn’t. He just disappeared. Nico waited for Robbie to find him, Nico. Robbie never did. It was strange. It was weird. Like Dante losing his Virgil.
Nico felt lost. Almost betrayed. Without Robbie he slowly slipped away from chess and from 52nd Street. He began going to his classes. And his grades went up, and he matriculated and eventually graduated in English. He went on to take get a Teaching Credential and a Master’s and landed a job teaching English at Clinton High School in Williamsburg. And he went back to walking the streets of Brooklyn with Frank and Tony and Bobby whenever they could.
*
Now they no longer were kids but adults, and they would still get together every so often. When one of them had the yen he would call up the others and say, “Hey let’s go walking.” And they would meet and walk and talk and end up at Joe’s and eat rice pudding like they used to.
Nico looked at Frank and Tony and Bobby and felt inferior to them, like he used to feel when they were kids. They all had their success stories and told them to one another. Frank got his Ph. D, and taught English Lit at NYU. His major subject was the works and life of Howard Fast. He even knew Fast personally and was a frequent guest in Fast’s home in upstate New York. Tony got his Master’s in Business Administration and had a power job with the City of New York. He met with important people and he’d tell everybody about his meetings. And he’d tell about the pressures of his job and his meetings with the Mayor and even sometimes the Governor. Bobby went to med school in Italy. He came back, a doctor, and developed a thriving practice in Scarsdale. He became fat and rich. He married a woman from Scarsdale, not an Italian, and had a big house, and drove a Mercedes. Nico could only boast that he taught English at Clinton High School in a low-income neighborhood in Williamsburg and that he still lived in the same apartment on Lorimer Street where he was born. Some success story. Not only did he feel inferior—he was inferior!
*
Now, many years later—Nico had retired from teaching and still lived on Lorimer Street. But there were changes. Lorimer Street was now in a preferred upper-scale area populated by yuppies and stockbrokers and all sorts of artists who couldn’t afford to live in Greenwich Village.
Now, Nico was once again at Joe’s Diner. He sat in a booth—one of the booths where he used to sit together with Frank and Tony and Bobby. But they weren’t there. Frank died several years ago after having one massive heart attack after another. Bobby also died of a heart attack—probably from sheer obesity. Tony was still alive, but long retired, living in Naples, Florida, blind, and maybe a little confused. Robbie? Where is he? Is he alive? Does he remember Billie? Is he swinging somewhere? Is he dead? Nico wondered. Then he wondered about himself. What happened? Where is everybody? Am I swinging, he wondered? He placed his spoon into the rice pudding, brought it to his mouth, and began eating. Sweet.
June 10, 2009
