Evan Hunter - Streets of Gold

“What does that mean?” my grandfather asked.

“Probably nothing,” I said. I went on to tell him there were two writers living in Talmadge, each more famous than the other, and both pains in the ass. “Why do writers want to talk about writing all the time?” I asked him.

“Who knows?” he said. “I don’t know any writers.”

I told him there were two of everything in Talmadge, it was like Noat’s Ark, with everything that could walk, crawl, or fly being summoned to...

“What do you mean?” he said.

“Well,” I said, “in addition to the two writers, we’ve also got a pair of aging actresses. One of them is dying of throat cancer and is supposed to be a dyke. She lives with a twenty...”

“A what?” my grandfather said.

“Una lesbica,” I said.

“ Sì? Una lesbica? Dove? In this town?”

“Yes,” I said. “They say she’s living with a twenty-year-old girl, a Vassar...”

“Che vergogna,” my grandfather said, and clucked his tongue. “What else do you have two of?”

“Well,” I said, “we have two interior decorators, and two art directors who win medals every year, and two ...”

“For what?” my grandfather said.

“For art direction.”

“What’s that?” he said.

“They work for advertising agencies,” I said.

“Ah,” he said.

I was suddenly glad I had not mentioned that the two interior decorators were fags. One of them was named Theodore and the other Thomas, but they were called Tweedledum and Tweedledee behind their backs, or on occasion the Good Fairy and the Bad Fairy, though everyone kept forgetting which was which. A favorite party game in Talmadge was trying to figure out who was doing what to whom. Was Tweedledum the male in the marriage, or was it Tweedledee? All the women staunchly maintained, that Tweedledee was bisexual. If not, why did he dance so close? “Does he dance close when he dances with you?” I once asked Rebecca.

“Of course,” she replied. “He dances close with all the women.”

“Does he get a hard-on?”

“No, Ike,” she said. “Only you get hard-ons.”

“And what else?” my grandfather asked.

“Well, there are also two theatrical producers,” I said, and went on to tell him about a Sunday-afternoon visit from one of them, a thirty-three-year-old pisher ...

“A what?”

“Pisciasotto,” I translated.

“Ah.”

. . . who was enjoying the success of a long-run musical comedy, his first hit in years. He had told me in all seriousness that he had done everything there was to be done with musical comedy (his last four shows had been total disasters), that this show of his, this magnificent entertainment he had conceived, and put together with the right people, and lavishly produced (“I don’t produce cheap, Ike”), was the supreme realization of an art form that was distinctly American, and now it was time to be moving on to more ambitious projects, though America would keenly feel the loss since he and Hal Prince were probably the only true “creative” producers in the country, which by extension meant in the world , since nobody could do musicals like Americans, not even the English. He was thinking of running for the United States Senate. I listened to him, and wondered if he would ever become President of the United States, this thirty-three-year-old pisher stinking up my living room with the smell of his expensive panatelas. He asked me if he could sit in with the quintet one night. We were earning five thousand dollars a week at the time, and every record we made automatically hit the charts; the pisher had once played saxophone and clarinet in a dance band at Yale, and he wanted to sit in with us. “I haven’t played in years, Ike,” he confided. “Do me good to get the old embouchure in shape again.” I told him the band’s instrumentation was set (that distinctive Dwight Jamison sound, you know), and did not include a saxophone or clarinet. But I assured him I would most certainly vote for him when he ran for the Senate.

I laughed when I told this story to my grandfather, but he did not laugh with me.

“Well, here’s the studio,” I said, and I opened the door for him and showed him my record collection (“The ones on this shelf were Tony’s,” I said), and the new grand piano we had purchased, and my recording equipment (I explained that the entire place was soundproofed), and my Braille library, and he stood beside me silently, and then said, “It’s very nice, Ignazio,” and we went outside again.

We stood in the birch forest. He must have been looking up at the house commanding the slope, the house that had cost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to build, the house of glass and stone and wood, the house I now called home.

“È precisamente come la casa del padrone,” he said. “In Fiormonte,” he said. “Don Leonardo. Il padrone. He had a big stone house on top of the hill, just like this.”

He was silent for several moments. I could hear the sound of falling leaves in the woods. He put his arm around my shoulder, and hugged me to him, and said, “So, Ignazio, you are a success now, eh?”

Let me tell you about success. The two are inextricably linked, America and success, the left hand playing that inexorable chord chart, the right hand inventing melodies. I once asked a noted jazz critic, a man who’d written dozens of books on the subject, whether or not he related the improvisational line to the chord chart when he listened to jazz. He pondered this question gravely for a moment, and then replied, “No, no, I’m interested only in contours and shapes, the geography of the performance.” I respectfully submitted that he was perhaps missing the point. I opened at a Los Angeles club the following week, and the critic respectfully submitted that I played lousy jazz. I try to stay very far away from music critics. But if any of you out there are “interested only in contours and shapes, the geography of the performance,” then I respectfully submit that you are missing the point as well.

I reached the pinnacle of my success in 1960, when I recorded an album titled Dwight’s Blues (Victor LPT-X3017). Its popularity was well deserved; the recording session had been inspired, and the quintet never played better. I don’t know why a blues album caught on in 1960; maybe the country was bored to death and needed something to weep about, if only an LP record. The sound as it had been successfully defined on our first record (you do not mess with either Mother Nature or success) spotlighted piano and flute, with muted trumpet and rhythm section in the background. I had changed my personnel again just before we cut the record. On flute, I was using a twenty-two-year-old girl named Alice Keating, whom I’d hired straight out of the New England Conservatory of Music. On trumpet, I was using an old black jazzman named Sonny Soames. I’d had a lot of trouble keeping trumpet players. Their solos in my band were rare, and nobody likes doing donkey work. (A very well-known trumpet player once sat in with the quintet, and said to me afterward, “Well, Ike, it sure was nice not playing with you.”)

I suppose I was spoiled rotten even before the album took off. Success is difficult to resist; it is exceedingly difficult to resist. It has been personified as female, the Bitch Goddess, but I firmly believe it is male in gender and exclusively American in origin. (John Wayne probably thinks of success as a voluptuous full-blown woman; what can I tell you, Duke?) I have seen this hairy male beast (success, not you, Duke) attack and devour the strongest men and women. He stinks of booze and fornication, his breath can knock you senseless for a week. He belches and farts in public, he uses obscene language, he is a braggart and a dullard, and he has but a single ear. Yet when he clutches you in his powerful arms and plants upon your lips a kiss that surely reeks of all things vile (it is the kiss of death, make no mistake), there is nothing to do but succumb. The Beast is too strong, he N can break you in two, he can scatter your limbs to the four winds after he has picked them clean of flesh (he will do that, anyway), and it is better to suffer his crushing embrace (it’s what you’ve wanted all along, isn’t it?) and let him take you where he will.