"That St. Louis woman
Wid her diahmond rings,
Pulls mah man 'round
By her apron strings--"
A voice screeches above the boom and hurrah of the black and white 35th
Street cabaret. The round tables rock. Waiters careen. Balanced trays
float at crazy angles through the tobacco smoke. Hats flash. Firecracker
voices explode. A guffaw dances across a smear of faces. Congo gleams,
college boy pallors, the smiles of black and white men and women
interlace. A spotlight shoots its long hypotenuse upon the floor. In its
drifting oval the entertainer, her shoulders back, her elbows out, her
fists clenched and her body twisting into slow patterns, bawls in a
terrifying soprano--
"If it waren't foh her powdah
And her stohe bought hair.
The man Ah love
Would not have gone nowhere--"
Listen for the tom-tom behind the hurrah. Watch for the torches of Kypris
and Corinth behind the glare of the tungstens. This is the immemorial
bacchanal lurching through the kaleidoscope of the centuries. Pan with a
bootlegger's grin and a checked suit. Dionysius with a saxophone to his
lips. And the dance of Paphos called now the shimmie.
Listen and watch and through the tumult, rising like a strange incense
from the smear of bodies, tables and waiters, will come the curious thing
that is never contained in the vice reports. The gleam of the devil
himself--the echo of some mystic cymbal note.
Later the music will let out a tinny blaze of sound. Men and women will
press together and a pack of bodies will sway on the dance floor. The
tungstens will go out and the spotlight will throw colors--green, purple,
lavender, blue, violet--and as the scene grows darker and the colors
revolve a howl will fill the place. But on the dance floor a silence will
fasten itself over the swaying bodies and there will be only the sound of
feet pushing. The silence of a ritual--faces stiffened, eyes rolling--a
rigid embrace of men and women creeping cunningly among the revolving
colors and the whiplike rhythms of the jazz band.
* * * * *
"Lost souls," says the vice reports, and the vice reports speak with a
calm and knowing voice. Women whose bodies and faces are like shells of
evil; vicious seeming men with a rasp in their laughter. These are among
those present. Aphrodite is a blousy wench in the 35th and State streets
neighborhood. And her votaries, although they offer an impressive
ensemble, are a sorry lot taken face by face.
Izzy, who is an old timer, sits at a table and takes it in. Izzy's eyes
and ears have learned to pick details in a bedlam. He can talk softly and
listen easily through the height of the cabaret racket. The scene hits
Izzy as water hits a duck's back.
"Well," he says, "it's a good night tonight. The slummers are out in full
force rubberin' at each other. Well, this is a funny world, take it from
me. Me? Huh, I come here every night or so to have a little drink and look
'em over for a while. Ain't nothing to see but a lot o' molls and a lot of
sucker guys. Them? Say, they never learn no better. Tough guys ain't no
different from soft guys, see? They all fall for the dames just as hard
and just as worse. There's many a good guy in this place that's been gave
a tumble by them, see?
"There, I got an idee he'd blow in tonight. He ain't missed a Saturday
night for months. And he usu'lly makes it four or five times a week. That
guy over there wit' the mop o' gray hair. Yeah, that's him. Well, he's the
professor. I spotted him in the district a year or so ago. He had a dame
wit' him who I know, see? A terrible broad. Say, maybe you've heard of
him. His name is Weintraub. I picked it up from the dame he's goin' wit',
see? He ought to be in your line. He was a reg'lar music professor before
he come down. The leader of a swell orchestra somewhere in the east or in
Europe, I guess. The dame don't know for sure, but she told me he was some
baby on music.
"Well, that's him there, see? He comes in like this and sits down near the
band. Look at him. Do you make him? The way he's movin' his hands? See,
he's leadin' the band. Sure"--Izzy laughed mirthlessly--"that's what the
guy's doin'. Nuts, see? Daffy. He comes in here like that and I always
watch him. He sits still and when the music starts up he begins wit' his
hands. Ain't he the berries?
"Now keep your eye on him. You'll see somethin' pretty quick. He's alone
tonight. I guess the dame has shook him for the evenin'. Look, he's still
conductin'. Ain't he rich? But he's got a good face, you might say. Class,
eh? You'd know he was a musician.
"I tell you I begin to watch him the first time I saw him. And from the
beginnin' he's always conductin' when the band starts in. The dame is
usu'lly wit' him and she don't like it. She tries to stop him, but he
don't see her for sour apples. He keeps right on like now, beatin' time
wit' his hands. Look, the poor nut's growin' excited. Daffy. Can you beat
it? There he goes. See? That's on account of Jerry. Jerry's the black one
on the end wit' the saxophone. Ha, Jerry always does it.
"I told Jerry about this guy and Jerry tried it on him the first night. He
pulled a sour one, you know, blew a mean one through the horn and his nobs
nearly fell out of his seat. Like now. See, he's through. He won't conduct
the band any more tonight. He's sore. No sir, he won't conduct such a lot
of no-good boilermakers like Jerry. Can you beat it?"
* * * * *
Izzy's eyes follow a stoop-shouldered gray-haired man from one of the
tables. A thin-faced man with bloodshot eyes. He walks as if he were half
asleep. The crowd swallows him and Izzy laughs again without mirth.
"He's done for the night. That's low down of Jerry. But Jerry says it gets
his goat to see this daffy guy comin' in here night after night and
leadin' the band from the table. So the smoke blows that sour note every
time his nobs gets started on his conductin' and it always knocks his nobs
for a gool. He never stays another minute, but lights out right away.
"Look, there's his dame. The one wit' the green hat, sittin' wit' the guy
with the cheaters over there. Yeah, that's her. I don't know why she ain't
wit' him tonight. Prob'ly a lovers' quarrel." And Izzy grinned. "She's a
tough one, take it from me. I don't know how she hooked the professor, but
she did. She used to be swelled up about him. And once she got him a job
in Buxbaum's old place, she told me, to work in the orchestra. But his
nobs kicked. Said he'd cut his throat before playin' in a roughneck
orchestra and who did she think he was to do such a thing? He says to her:
I'm Weintraub--Weintraub, d'ye understand?' And he hauls off and wallops
her one and she guve up tryin' to get him a job. It makes her sore to
watch him sittin' around like tonight and conductin' the orchestra. She
says it ain't because he's daffy, but on account of his bein' stuck up."
The woman with the green hat had left her table. Izzy's shrewd eyes picked
her out again--this time standing against a far wall talking to the
professor, and the professor was rubbing his forehead and saying "No, no,"
with his hands.
And now the entertainer was singing again:
"Got de St. Louis Blues, jes' as blue as Ah can be,
Dat man has a heart like a rock ca-ast in de sea,
Or else he would not have gone so far away from me."