Evan Hunter - Streets of Gold

“Luke, that’s your aunt!”

“So who asked her to come here?”

“ I did!” my grandfather said, and suddenly everyone fell silent. “Is this a family?” he asked. “Is this a family on Christmas?” No one answered. “Victoria, you talk too much, you always did. Luke, apologize to your aunt.”

“What for?”

“Because she’s your aunt.”

“She can go straight to hell!” Luke said, and stormed out of the room and into his bedroom, where I was hiding under the bed. He slammed the door, went directly to the piano, and began playing loudly and angrily. In a moment, my grandfather came into the room and closed the door again behind him.

“Hey,” he said. “Stop the piano a minute. Listen to me.”

“Leave me alone, Pop.”

“Come on, what’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing. Just leave me alone, Pop, okay?”

“You want to go to college?” my grandfather said.

“No,” Luke answered. His hands stopped, the sound of the piano stopped.

“If you want to go to college, I’ll send you to college.”

“I’m thirty-two years old, Pop,” Luke said. His voice was very low. From where I lay under the bed I could barely hear him.

“So? Your brother is twenty-five.”

“He’s a lawyer already. Anyway, that ain’t it.”

“Then what?” my grandfather asked. “Tell me.”

“The hell with it.”

“Tell me.”

“It’s just...” Luke said, and hesitated. I held my breath in the silence. “Pop,” he said at last. “I don’t know where I’m going.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t want to be a presser, that’s for sure. I’m sorry, Pop, but...”

“All right. What do you want to be?”

“I don’t know.”

“You can be anything you like. In this country, you can be anything.”

“Sure,” Luke said. “Do you believe that, Pop?”

My grandfather did not answer. There was another long silence. Then my grandfather said, “What is it, figlio mio , what?”

“You think I don’t try to get girls?” Luke said suddenly and passionately. “Look at me, Pop. I’m a skinny marink, I’m cockeyed without my glasses; you think I don’t try?”

“You’re a very handsome boy,” my grandfather said. “You take after my cousin Rodolfo in Fiormonte, may he rest in peace. He was very tall like you, and very handsome.”

“Yeah.”

“In Fiormonte, the girls would go crazy for you.”

“This ain’t Fiormonte, it’s Harlem. You know what they call me?”

“What?”

“Stretch. They call me Stretch.”

“So?”

“So how would you like to be called Stretch?”

“What does that mean, Stretch?”

“Well... skinny, I guess.”

“You know what they called me when I was young?”

“What?” Luke said.

“ Ciuco . That means donkey. It means jackass.”

“Why’d they call you that?”

“I have big ears. Listen, you see your mother? She was a beauty, even more beautiful than Angelina, may she rest in peace, who was Pino’s wife. Do you think your mother cared about my ears?” My grandfather paused, and then said, “You want to go to college?”

“It’s too late, Pop,” Luke said.

“If you don’t want to work in the tailor shop, you don’t have to.”

“What would I do, Pop?”

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know,” Luke said.

From under the bed, I wanted to shout, “Tell him, Uncle Luke! Tell him you want to have a band! Tell him you asked my father for a job in the band! Please, Uncle Luke, tell him!”

Luke did not tell him. He simply said, again, “I don’t know.”

“All right, don’t worry,” my grandfather said. “You’ll find something. Something will please you. And you’ll find a woman, too, and she’ll love you, don’t worry. Now come in the other room. Make up with your aunt. She doesn’t realize.”

“Do you realize, Pop?”

“Maybe,” my grandfather answered. “Come,” he said. “It’s your family in there.”

They went out of the room, and I lay still arid thoughtful under the bed. Pino began playing his mandolin again, and soon there was laughter.

There are many different ways of approaching the same tune. I usually play it the way I feel it, but I try nonetheless to keep in mind the composer’s intent. I would never, for example, take the outrageous liberties Barbra Streisand took with “Happy Days Are Here Again,” however spectacular the result may have been. Nor would I rob any tune of its emotional content by imposing upon it a technical virtuosity that might be dazzling but essentially false to the mood. It’s one thing to know your tools; it’s quite another to use those tools so cold-bloodedly that they render the tune meaningless. There are thousands of tunes in my head, a veritable catalog of chord charts and melodies. Pick a tune, any tune (almost), and I will sit down at the piano and play it for you in all twelve keys. In fact, I don’t feel I really know a song unless I can play it in all twelve keys. To a jazz musician, that’s not a particularly impressive accomplishment. Once he knows the chart, he can transpose it to any key and tack on the melody in that new key. The melody is unimportant to the jazz musician. When you hear him say, “Oh, that’s a great tune,” he’s not referring to the melody. He is referring to the chord progression. He will, in fact, play the melody in the so-called head chorus only to orient the audience, and then will improvise entirely new melodies in the second chorus and each succeeding chorus. But I’ll immediately turn a deaf ear to those musicians who try to transmogrify a keyboard or a horn into a laboratory. At the piano, I could give you (though it would pain me) a fair demonstration of a coldly antiseptic atonal style, and you might even enjoy it, who knows? But music to me is something quite more than a sterile unraveling. For example, I would never play “Tina in the Closet” in the following manner:

The purpose of this brief experiment was to test the application to human sexual response of the James-Lange Theory, specifically and primarily inquiring into the involuntary visceral and/or skeletal response of a ten-year-old male subject in close proximity with and to a nine-year-old female subject in a controlled space. Toward that end, a voluntarily induced, emotion-provoking situation was created spontaneously. A secondary objective was to have been an exploration of the responses of the nine-year-old female subject. Since the female, however, was unavailable for post-laboratory evaluation, data supplied by the male alone was deemed insufficient basis for objective conclusions.

Both subjects were fully clothed and selected at random. Both were in excellent physical and mental health, the male measuring 142.24 centimeters and weighing 33.11 kilograms, the female measuring 134.62 centimeters and weighing 31.20 kilograms. Neither had previous medical histories of male-aggressive/female-passive frotterism, and exhibited no overt tendencies toward neurotically motivated behavior in these areas, though this was not the concern of the experiment and did not enter formally into either laboratory considerations or post-lab evaluations. Similarly, an inquiry into the nature of prepubescent incestuous exploration seemed inappropriate since male and female subjects were not genetically related, although “family ties” could easily have been presumed (with resultant erroneous conclusions) in that female was the younger sister of the recently acquired bride of male’s uncle. For purposes of the experiment, a game of “hide-and-seek” was proposed, in which male subject’s older sibling was declared “It.” While he counted aloud from one to ten, male and female enclosed themselves in the control space, a recess measuring 182.88 by 213.36 centimeters, adjacent to the entrance door of the externally circumscribing space, and normally utilized for the storage of wearing apparel. Male subject’s mother and sister-in-law were in the kitchen eating cakes and honey.