Evan Hunter - Streets of Gold

David is throwing a rubber ball against the wall of the garage. I sit in sunshine on the patio, and listen to the steady rhythm of the ball thumping against the wooden doors. His brothers are away, there is no one to play with him. So I listen to the solitary game, and I sit in sunshine, and wish for all the world that I could walk out there to him, walk unerringly to where he is monotonously throwing the ball and catching it, throwing it and catching it, and say to him, “Hi, son, want to catch with me?”

I listen to the ball.

The record sales began plummeting sometime in 1965. The drop was sudden and swift, no gradual tapering, no slide from popularity to relative obscurity in a slow descending curve. I was at the time demanding (and getting) $7,500 a week for myself and the quintet, and taking home, from personal appearances alone, somewhere between $3,500 and $4,000 a week for myself, fifty-two weeks a year (if I felt like playing that often). In addition, there were television appearances, and royalties from records and my How to Play Jamison Jazz books (Volumes I through IV) and from sheet music annotating my unique improvisations, and there were European tours, and a guest shot in at least one motion picture — there was, in short, the whole shmeer . I had hit the American jackpot, than which there is none greater. Even after paying four sidemen, and a driver for the band bus, and a band boy to help us load and unload the instruments, and a personal valet, and my manager, Mark Aronowitz, and a publicity agent, and an advance man, there was more than enough loot left to keep Rebecca and me living in the style to which we had become accustomed. (I was to dread the sound of those words every time they came up during the divorce negotiations.) We had the big house in Talmadge, with a housekeeper, a gardener, and a chauffeur, a swimming pool and tennis courts (Rebecca played, and loved the game), and we also had a house in the Virgin Islands, which we visited on those rare winter weekends when I was not out there earning the big buck, and an eight-room pied-à-terre in the city — we had it made, friends. I was earning money by the fistful, and I was investing it wisely, and my investments made more money, and it seemed to Rebecca and to me (and probably to my grandfather, too) that I was indeed digging out gold from the streets, and the vein of ore would never be depleted, I would keep on working with my pick and shovel forever, the supply was inexhaustible.

And then in 1965, the new album came out (I’ve blocked out the title) in the spring sometime, I’m sure it was the spring (I’ve blocked out the month), and it simply refused to move despite a lot of newspaper advertising and radio ballyhoo from Victor. In the next two months, I dropped from number two to number eight in the polls, a nose dive that seemed absolutely inconceivable to me. A month after that, a gig in Miami was abruptly canceled, and a month after that Mark started talking about playing a series of one-night stands across the country — “Get a new audience for yourself,” he said.

“What’s the matter with my old audience?” I asked.

“If you’re talking about your hard-core audience, you’ll always have that, Ike. But the big bread comes from a floater audience, and jazz lost some of those people to folk, and now it’s losing the rest of them to rock. It’s your own fault.”

“What are you talking about? My fault?”

“Not your fault personally. I’m talking about jazz musicians. You guys have become so intellectual, nobody knows what you’re doing anymore. These rock groups get up there and start playing and there’s a gut appeal...”

“Mark,” I said, “you give me any rock musician, and I’ll put him up against his jazz counterpart, and he’ll be wasted in ten seconds flat.”

“The jazz musician?”

“The rock musician! These clowns think they’re making music if they can play two or three chords in sequence. They learn the I, and IV, and the V, and they teach them to another kid down the street, and turn up the amps, and that’s it, that’s supposed to be music. Have you heard some of these guitar players driving a single chord into the ground, playing the same boring lick over and over again? I’ll put a guitar player like Joe Pass up against any one of them, and he’ll kill them in a minute.”

“Ike, what can I tell you?” Mark said. “Am I the arbiter of taste?”

“No, you’re my manager,” I said. “And my manager is supposed to get gigs for me.”

“All I’m trying to say is that you need a new audience, Ike. Maybe you ought to add a folk singer to the quintet. Or fuse jazz with rock, come up with something. . ..”

“I’m not a gimmick musician, Mark.”

“Who said you were...”

“What are you going to suggest next? That I do a light show next time I play?”

“That wouldn’t be such a bad idea,” Mark said.

“I’d rather retire gracefully than . ..”

“Oh, bullshit,” Mark said.

“. . . than corrupt the kind of music I’ve been playing for the past ten years.”

“Okay, so go play it,” Mark said. “Play it in your studio. Get your mother up there to listen to you. I’m trying to tell you it’s impossible to get back an audience that’s drifted away. You’ve either got to get a completely new audience or...”

“Or what?”

“There are other things. Maybe I can get you some work scoring a movie.”

“I’m blind , Mark.”

“So what? You’ll listen to the actors talking, and some stooge’ll describe the action to you.”

“I don’t want to score a movie. I want to play piano.”

“Well, what can I tell you?” Mark said.

I felt nothing but hostility and contempt for rock music and the people who were making it. It seemed to me that most of the rock musicians were barely competent instrumentalists who got together in groups only so they could combine and organize their ineptitude to create a sound which, highly amplified, obfuscated their lack of talent. In 1964, when the intellectuals embraced the Beatles, I analyzed “A Hard Day’s Night” (the tune, not the movie) in an attempt to discover why these four musicians who could not play their way out of a paper bag had suddenly captured the public’s imagination. It was a mix-olydian tune with a double tonic, and mildly interesting — certainly more interesting than much of what the other rock musicians were playing. But it seemed to me that even the Beatles were reducing a highly skilled form to something completely pedestrian.

And besides, they were putting me out of work, they were breaking my rice bowl.

Michael has run afoul of a bully in his class, a boy who constantly taunts him about seeing a shrink, and makes fun of his stutter, which is one of the reasons the poor kid makes the damn trip to Greenwich three times a week. (The analyst tells me the stutter is only a symptom; the real trouble is that Michael feels overpowered by his “famous” father, a not uncommon phenomenon. When I ask him why my other sons don’t stutter, he says, “They may be stuttering inside.”) In desperation, Michael challenges the boy to a supervised fistfight in the gymnasium. The boy accepts immediately; he is twice Michael’s size and certain he can demolish him. That night at dinner, Michael asks me how to fight. He has never had a fist-fight in his life.

I do not know how to advise him.

It is his older brother Andrew who tells him to make sure he gets in the first shot, just hit the other» guy right off and keep hitting him before he can catch his breath. In the playroom, I hear them boxing. Andrew offering encouragement as Michael punches at his open palms. I am afraid for my son, but I cannot help him, I do not know how to help him. The next day, when the other boy asks him if he’s sure he wants to go through with this, Michael punches him squarely and unexpectedly in the mouth, just as Andrew had advised, and keeps punching him across the length of the gym floor until the other boy begs him to stop. He describes the fight to us that night. “He was bleeding from the mouth and from the n-nose,” he says excitedly, and then turns to Andrew and says, “Thanks, Andy.”