Streets of Gold (53 page)

“You can’t even see yourself in action when you’re blind,” Giglio said. “Take a look at those pictures, Al. Go ahead, open the envelope. We had them blown up eight by ten, Ike,” he said confidentially. “Take a look at them, Al. They’re nice pictures, ain’t they?”

Al moved to the desk. He was silent for several moments. Then he whistled softly.

“Listen,” I said amiably, “who do you guys think you’re kidding?”

“Oh, are we kidding somebody?” Giglio said.

“Gee, I didn’t know we were kidding,” Isetti said.

“What do you think of those pictures, Al?” Giglio said.

“Those are some pictures,” Al said.

“You got a nice
shlahng
for a blind man,” Giglio said. “Ain’t that a nice
shlahng
, Al?”

“Yeah, that’s a nice
shlahng
,” Al said.

“She goes down on it nice, too,” Isetti said. “Almost like a pro.”

“I’ll bet your wife and kids would like to see how this girl plays flute, huh, Ike?”

“Maybe we ought to sign
her
too,” Isetti said, and they all laughed.

“This is all bullshit,” I said. “You haven’t got any pictures, and you’re...”

“We’ve got pictures, Ike,” Giglio said, and I knew they had pictures.

“We own that hotel you’re staying in,” Giglio said. “You know that mirror across from the bed?”

“How would he know where the mirror is? The man’s blind.”

“Well, there’s a mirror across from the bed,” Isetti said. “It’s a one-way mirror. Like the cops have. It comes in handy sometimes.”

“You shouldn’t ought to fuck in the daytime,” Giglio said.

“We wouldn’ta got no pictures if you fucked only at night.”

“Unless you kept the lights on.”

“He’s blind, what would he need the lights for?”

“What do you say, Ike?”

“Sixty-forty is the deal,” Isetti said.

I decided to pull rank. If there’s one thing Italians understand, it’s somebody telling them exactly who he is. In Italy, it is not uncommon to hear people in every walk of life indignantly demanding, “Do you realize who I am?” In Italy, this has become a joke. Even a street cleaner will get on his high horse and say, “Do you realize who I am?” Rank was very definitely the thing to pull. Who did these cheap hoods think they were fooling around with here? I was Dwight Jamison.

“Do you guys realize who you’re talking to?” I said.

“Yeah,” Giglio said. “We’re talking to Ignazio Silvio Di Palermo.”

“A
’paesano,
” Isetti said.

“A
’paesano
who’s going to pick up the phone, and call the police, and tell them...”

“A
’paesano
who’ll get his hands broken if he does, that,” Isetti said.

“You won’t break my hands,” I said.

“We won’t, huh?”

“If you break my hands,” I said, taking a cue from my grandfather, “I won’t be able to play piano anymore. And sixty percent of nothing is nothing.”

“So we’ll find ourselves another piano player,” Isetti said. “Meanwhile, you’ll be on the street selling pencils.”

“You won’t break my hands,” I said, but I wasn’t so sure anymore.

“Anyway, who’s talking about breaking your hands?” Giglio said. “What are you threatening the man for, Ralphie? We’re about to enter a partnership here, and you’re threatening the man.”

“I wasn’t threatening the man,” Isetti said.

“What do you say, Ike?” Giglio said amiably. “Sixty-forty.”

“No,” I said, “I don’t think so. I appreciate your interest, but. . .”

“Ike,” Giglio said, “this is not a threat, please don’t take it as a threat. But what we’re going to do is mail those pictures to your wife.”

“And maybe to a few newspapers, too,” Isetti said.

“Nobody’d publish them,” Giglio said, and laughed. “Not
those
pictures. Ike, I got to tell you, those are the dirtiest pictures I ever seen in my life. What do you say? You want to be partners? Or you want your wife to see you lapping that girl’s pussy?”

“If you mail the pictures...”

“Oh, we’ll mail them, all right.”

“Then you’ve got no hold on me anymore. I’ll have nothing to worry about.”

“You’ll still have your hands to worry about,” Isetti said.

“Stop it with the man’s hands, will you, please?” Giglio said. “Ike, be sensible. You don’t
really
want your wife to see those pictures, do you?”

“Look,” I said, “what the... what are you bothering with me for? I’m just a piano player. There must be...”

“We like the way you play piano, Ike.”

“We can make a lot of money from the way you play piano.”

“What do you say, Ike?”

“Mail them,” I said. “I don’t give a damn.”

“Okay,” Giglio said, and sighed. “Ralphie, put the pictures back in the envelope and mail them to the man’s wife. That’s Rebecca Jamison, Old Holly Road, Talmadge, Connecticut.”

“You’re not scaring me,” I said.

“Who’s trying to scare you?” Giglio said. “We want to be partners.”

“Go ahead and mail them,” I said.

“We will.”

“Is that it?”

“That’s it,” Giglio said. “For now. We’ll see what happens next, huh?”

“Take care of your hands,” Isetti said.

They did not mail the pictures, if indeed the pictures existed at all. I kept waiting for an explosion from Rebecca, but it never came. Alice quit the band just before Christmas. She had met a Miami land developer while we were playing down there, and had decided to marry him. She asked me to promise never to tell anyone about the things we’d done together. I told her I never would, and meanwhile I kept waiting for that envelope full of pictures to be delivered to Old Holly Road in Talmadge. By February, I began to think I’d bluffed them out of the post, just the way my grandfather had done back in 1937. An occupational hazard of playing jazz piano is beginning to believe that life is only an echo of jazz. If it had worked for my grandfather back then, maybe it was working for me now. He had played the head chorus, and I was playing the head and out. I was home free.

They caught up with me in March.

I was working in Detroit at the time. I was alone in my hotel room when a knock sounded at the door. It was close to eleven-thirty; the eleven o’clock television news was just signing off.

“Who is it?” I said.

“Danny.”

Danny Sears was my new flute player. I opened the door. Two men came into the room, pushing me back and away from the door. I heard the bolt being thrown.

“Hello, Mr. Jamison,” one of them said,

“Who’s that?” I said. “Who is it?”

“Don’t panic, Mr. Jamison,” the other man said. “All we’re going to do is break your hand.”

I turned immediately and ran for where I knew the phone was. I got almost to the night table beside the bed, when one of them clamped his hand onto my shoulder, and twisted me around to face him, and hit me in the gut. I doubled over. My dark glasses slid halfway down my nose.

“That hurts, doesn’t it?” he said.

“Don’t let us hurt you no more than we have to,” the other man said.

“Sit over here, Mr. Jamison.”

“Look...”

“Sit
down
, Mr. Jamison, this won’t take a minute.”

“Look,” I said, “look, are you guys Italian?”

One of them laughed.

“Hey, come on,” I said, “this ain’t funny, you know? It may be funny to you guys, but it ain’t funny to me.” I suddenly realized I had fallen back into the speech patterns of my youth, the language I had used every day of the week in the streets of Harlem. In a recurring nightmare I’d had ever since that night in Detroit, I dream I am standing on the curb in Harlem, waiting for a taxi. I am dressed in white tie, tails, and a top hat. A woman is standing not fifteen feet from me. As in all my dreams, she is only vaguely defined, a blurred shape, an uncertain presence. But she is a woman, I know this, and she is Italian, I know this too. She is standing on the corner waiting for a bus. I hear a vehicle approaching and, hoping it is a taxicab, I raise my cane to hail it. It pulls to the curb. I hear a man, presumably the driver, asking, “Where you going, Mac?” I answer, in the acquired speech I’ve been using for half a lifetime, “I’m Dwight Jamison, would you mind taking me to Birdland, please?” As I get into the taxi, the Italian woman cackles and says, “Who do you think you’re kidding?”

They were both laughing now. Their laughter was mean, the privileged laughter of people sharing an inside joke.

“Well, come on,” I said, “
are
you Italian?”

They
had
to be Italian, my infallible ear told me they were Italian. But why were they laughing if they weren’t something very far removed from Italian? Were Italian racketeers now hiring black men or Poles or Jews or Irishmen to break the hands of Italian musicians. Ahhh, the American myth realized at last. But they were
my
hands.

“Let’s talk,” I said.

“It’s late as it is,” one of them said. They sounded almost identical. I could not tell their voices apart. They still sounded Italian. But then why had they laughed?

“Who sent you here?” I said.

“Mr. Jamison, it don’t
matter
who sent us.”

“Was it Giglio and Isetti? All right, here’s what you do. Go back to them and...”

“No, we’re not going back to nobody.”

“I’m trying to tell you we can talk!”

“About what?”

“About sixty-forty, seventy-thirty, whatever the hell they want!”

“It’s too late,” one of them said.

“You’re too late, Mr. Jamison.”

“They ain’t interested no more, Mr. Jamison. They got themselves another boy, Mr. Jamison.”

“You’re too late.”

“You missed the boat.”

“You coulda had yourself a sweet deal, but instead you got to get your hand broke. You understand?”

“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. I had put my hands in my pockets. I was trying to hide my hands. “If they’re not interested in me anymore...”

“Yeah, well, lots of things in life don’t make too much sense,” one of them said.

“Which hand?” the other one said.

“You hear him, Mr. Jamison? Which hand?”

“What?”

“Which hand? They told us only one hand. Which one you want?”

Yes. Yes, that was what they had said when they came into the room. They were here to break my
hand
. Singular. One hand. And now they wanted to know which one. That was very considerate of them. They were behaving like gentlemen, inquiring which of my hands I preferred broken, or conversely, which I preferred left intact.

“Look,” I said, “this is my livelihood....”

“This is
ours
,” one of them said.

“Which hand?”

“How much are they paying you for this?”

They both laughed again.

“I’m serious. I don’t know how much they’re paying you, but I’m sure...”

“Forget it.”

“And make up your mind, you hear? Otherwise we’ll break
both
fuckin’ hands and get it over with.”

“The right or the left? Which one?”

The right or the left? Which one, Ike? Which hand do you find most useful to the geography of your performance? Which of these precious appendages do you find essential to the definition of contours and shapes? Which of your eyes would you like plucked out, because those hands in addition to being your source of income are also your eyes, Ike, you have been using them to see with since the day you were born. Which could you most readily do without? Which one will you sacrifice? The left hand that strikes the chords or the more inventive right hand that creates new melodies? Which? Choose.

“Break them both,” one of the men said.

“Wait a minute!”

“Then which one?”

“The... look,” I said, “please don’t break my hand. Please. Please, I...”

“This guy’s gettin’ on my nerves,” one of them said.

“Which fuckin’
hand
?” the other one said.

“The... the... the left,” I said and I began to whimper.

One of them stood behind me, his hands on my shoulders. I heard the other one moving a piece of furniture over to where I was sitting. “Please,” I said, “please,” and he seized my left hand by the wrist and held it firmly to the top of whatever he had moved into place in front of me, and I said, “Please, no, don’t, please,” and I thought of Basilio Silese in the locker room of the Boys’ Club, and I wished my brother Tony were there to rescue me as he had rescued Basilio, wished he would barge into the room and shout, “Hey, what are you doing there?” but my brother Tony was dead, he had been killed in Italy by an Italian soldier. “Please,” I said, “please don’t, please,” and the man standing behind me said, “Shut up, you cocksucker,” and looped a folded towel or napkin or handkerchief over my head and into my mouth like a horse’s bit, twisted it tight from behind with one hand while the other hand forced me back into the chair again. I tried to say please, please, please around the cloth, but the other man smashed something hard down on the knuckles of my hand, and then methodically and systematically and apparently emotionlessly — he did not grunt, I could not even hear him breathing heavily — smashed three of my fingers at the middle joint.

I passed out after the first finger.

The boys did not quite wreck my career, though I’m sure the oversight was unintentional. They left my pinkie and my thumb intact. This allowed me to play shells the way Bud Powell used to play them way back then when I learned to hate his style.

My mother called the day before Rebecca and I were scheduled to leave for Europe. My hand was still in a cast. We had arranged for Sophie to stay with the children while we were gone; she would be assisted by our live-in housekeeper and a college student we had hired to chauffeur the children to their various activities. Sophie had arrived, with three valises, a week before our departure date. She told us she wanted to get accustomed to the routine, learn her way around the thermostats and the garbage disposal unit. I spent a lot of time hiding from her in my studio. It was there that I took the call from my mother.