Evan Hunter: Streets of Gold

Sometimes, when I walk the main street of Rowayton, tapping my careful way back to the old wooden house on the water, I think of all those black ( or white; it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference) people out there who are America’s huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of our teeming shore, tired, poor, and hungry, fighting off rats with one hand while filling out correspondence-course lessons with the other, and I realize they are exactly what I used to be, back then in the thirties, when I was running through the guinea ghetto with my hand in my brother’s. And I realize further (and this is what frightens me and causes me to stop short in the middle of the pavement) that what they want to be, what they are striving to become — is me . Dwight Jamison. And I do not exist. I am a figment of the American imagination. I am the realization of a myth that told us we were all equal, but forgot to mention we were also all separate.

The person I became was someone I did not know. No matter how many times I passed my hands over his face, I could not construct a mental image of who he was. I’m still trying to find out. I do not have the truth yet. But I know that when I said to my grandfather on his dying bed, “You’re the connection,” I was speaking something very close to the truth, unless I was merely denying the lie. He was the connection. He remains the connection between whatever I am and whatever I used to be. At the hospital, when I went back to pick up my grandfather’s death certificate, one of the nurses asked me for my autograph. We began talking, and I recognized that voice, I recognized those cadences, and when she told me she was Irish, I was not surprised. She was twenty-three year old, and had been born in the Bronx — but she was Irish. Well, what else could she claim to be? American? Who or what is that?

An American is not the man I embrace in greeting at the cocktail parties I infrequently attend, but neither is he my Uncle Matt, eager to take me anywhere in his taxicab, for which he still does not have his own medallion. And where is Wonder Woman’s cousin, the Wasp Woman I conjured as a child? She’s not the art director’s wife (is she?), chirpily telling her assembled guests, with appropriate innuendo, that her husband misses the 6:05 from New York too often for comfort. But neither is she my Aunt Cristie, offering me some nice fresh lemonade she squeezed herself. Where are the real Dwight Jamisons? Where, for that matter, are the real Jerzy Trzebiatowskis?

And yet, my grandfather, just before he died, told me he was a rich man, and I know he wasn’t talking about material wealth. Sometimes, in my house on the water, sitting before a blazing fire the housekeeper has started for me, I listen to the crackling wood, and remember the fire Francesco Luigi Di Lorenzo made on Christmas Day in the year 1900, when he decided to come to this country. And I think of what he said to me just before he died - “The streets here are truly paved with gold.”

And I wonder anew.

Although much of the preceding narrative is written in what might be called “first-person personal,” it, too, is a lie. The characters, the events, and even some of the places are fictitious. And whereas the words attributed to real jazz musicians were actually spoken by them at one time or another, they certainly were never said to the fictitious character called Dwight Jamison. Marian McPartland, for one example, did make the comment about disappearing drummers — but it was an aside to an audience who’d come to hear her play jazz at the John Drew Theater in East Hampton in the summer of 1973.

I used many different sources while gathering information that would help me to understand music, and jazz music in particular. But I am especially indebted to John Mehegan — the jazz pianist, teacher, and writer — for sharing with me his own love for the piano, and his vast understanding of this unique art form. In a series of interviews taped over the space of two months, he gave to me tirelessly and graciously of his time and knowledge, and I am humbly grateful.

So, little book... good-bye. I hope you are a big success.

This is America, don’t forget.

Evan Hunter

Pound Ridge, New York

February, 1974