Читать книгу An Interesting Life, So Far - Bruce King - Страница 6

Gloucester, Philadelphia and Camden 1933–50

I imagine that there is some place, person, incident, or situation from which every person flees throughout his or her life. For me it is Gloucester, New Jersey where I lived during my youth until I left for New York and Columbia College. Gloucester, outside Camden, across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, was a small working class town where no one went on to university or sought further education after graduation unless it were a teacher’s training college, and where my class mates, when not part of warring gangs or beating up homosexuals, would graduate to the local ship yard, work as mechanics in garages, join the police, and get drunk every Friday and Saturday night before going to church on Sunday.

Gloucester was my equivalent of the dry dusty deserted southwestern tumbleweed exhausted inbred otherwise forgotten village from which writers, movie stars, and serial killers flee. When I lived there I had a recurring fear that I would be slipping away one morning when I would be noticed and told I had to throw a party to celebrate my departure. The drink and food would cost everything I had saved and I would need start again and the next time I would be caught once more and still need to start preparing for my departure once more. Every dream of leaving seemed to come to the same anti-climax. I travelled around the world for decades fearing I would be forced to return to Gloucester. When I did return on a visit half a century later I was stunned that it appeared just an uninteresting, seeming harmless small town. There was now even a black bank guard.

I was born in Philadelphia’s Hahnemann Hospital on New Year’s Day, January 2nd. That is correct. Philadelphia was notorious for its “blue laws” and one was that no drinks could be sold and that there could be no public celebrations on a Sunday, and New Year’s Day fell on a Sunday in 1933. So on New Year’s Day, Monday, January 2nd, I was born to the sounds of the Mummer’s Parade, a parade famous for attracting cross dressers, transsexuals, and other gays. Although I am not sexually transgressive, it seems an appropriate start for my life in which things have been often a bit odd. I was also born as Alvin G King, the Alvin compounded of Al and Irving, two of my father’s brothers, and the G for my mother’s family name, Americanized from Goldberg to Gilbert. Before many years I also wanted to change my name to something more American or British and I chose and have stuck with Bruce (sometimes Bruce A.) on the model of a comic strip character such as Clark Kent who was really, like me I wished, Superman. I would spend years seeking my Lois Lane.

I have a few confused early memories beginning with that awful tiny room in Trenton, New Jersey, with the iron pipe bed held up on one corner by a rope or tied together clothes. My mother told me it had existed but I could not have remembered it and must have heard about it. I remember being at her mother’s house in Camden, New Jersey where there was a large brown chow dog in the garden, a memory that merges with one in my early teens of being taken by a family friend to visit a farm and being told to open the front door. A massive dog knocked me over and began licking my face, while people laughed. On my back facing upward all I could see were the dog’s two immense balls and the green fields beyond. Perhaps there were cows or goats but of little importance. That is still my image of farmland, a perspective of greenery with animals seen beyond dog balls. I am an urban dweller.

I had a pet duck which I must have been given soon after its birth and which was attracted towards me as its parent. I understand the correct term is imprinted. It followed me to school. Years later when I felt that I could no longer eat four legged animals I decided I did not want to be a pure vegetarian and should still consume fish and fowl. Ducks, however, presented an emotional problem. I had to harden myself. Even today, living by the Canal St Martin in Paris, I often become excited and exclaim about migrating ducks that are a feature of the canal. I also had a pet turtle that would mysteriously disappear for months and then when it rained reappear. I still regard turtles as creatures of mystery, ritualistic. (A chef I know in California also had a pet duck. Hers was named “Lash Larue”. It must have been when she was older.)

Other kindergarten memories include awareness that the other children had large erector sets and other building materials, often passed down from brothers and sisters. We were middle class and I could read and count, but they already had mechanical skills that I would never master. The boys would mistreat girls in the schoolyard, hitting them, pulling their hair, and demanding the names of their boyfriend. I rescued the two prettiest, and for years thought of them as somehow mine. Then in Junior High School both disappeared. The working class brunette ran off to be a dancer and when she reappeared several years later her older brother, who was a friend of mine, remarked that a woman would always love the man who took her virginity. That left me out. The other one, a blue eyed blond from a middle class family, whom I thought resembled the Norwegian figure skater and movie star Sonja Heine, moved to another town, developed a disease, lost her looks, and married young, by which time I had other women to idealize.

School seemed a waste of time. The teachers were only concerned with getting the others through, who often left as soon as they legally could, indeed sometimes before. I was supposed to educate myself. If the class was learning from one volume of world history during the year, I was told to read on my own the dozen or so volumes in the set. If the others found algebra difficult I went on to advanced mathematics, calculus, and imaginary numbers. Left to my own superiority I learned little and would be stunned a few years later when I met those who had genuinely mastered areas of which I had only a superficial knowledge. It seems to me that I had very little schooling. Latin was the worst. Although we were the elite-stream only one other person would go to on to further education (at a small college in Pennsylvania). There was no pretense of teaching or learning any Latin. How could we? We had never been taught even English grammar, which would trouble me later when I tried to learn French.

Some of my ignorance was my own fault. For Biology I lost the dried frog we were supposed to dissect and assembled instead on a board for display a miscellany of chicken and other bones. I labeled the parts with seemingly appropriate names that I found in my biology book. Faced by this absurdity the biology teacher started laughing and dismissed the class. What else do I remember of Biology except the teacher regularly selling pickled cucumbers from a barrel and a required dissertation which we mindlessly copied from one written decades ago, each year increasing the misspellings, datedness and obscurity of the text.

I indiscriminately read E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, comic books, Major Douglas’ books on Social Credit economics, New Directions annual anthologies, Lucretius, Homer, any books I could get my hands on provided that my high school teachers had not mentioned them. That was easy as they seemed to know nothing. For a time while in high school I subscribed to books published by one of the Classics Editions that had proliferated on the model of the Harvard five-foot shelf of great works that everyone needed to be educated. I wrote a book review (our project) of William Bradford’s history Of Plymouth Colony, which was a Classic Club selection, supposedly the first book written in America, and was told by my English teacher that the book did not exist and I had made it up. She was one of the more lettered teachers in Gloucester; I disliked her intensely. At one point she was trying to teach poetry and did indeed explain the common forms of a sonnet. We were told to write a poem and I produced a not so subtle satire about her that she told me to read before the class; she said some people now write such stuff and consider it poetry. I do not remember whether it rhymed (probably did in odd ways), or its rhythm but it was certainly lineated like verse, and would have shown such influences as e e cummings, William Carlos Williams, and whoever was in that year’s New Directions Anthology. My attempt was no doubt horrible, but yes some people did consider my models poetry.

Most of my teachers were even worse. We were required to take state examinations in some subjects but were never told the results. When I hear complaints of terrible American public schools I feel I was already there, although now they are even more violent.

Gloucester was once part of history, a history recalled by a few old cannons at the city park facing the Delaware River. I cannot remember those Revolutionary War events that I looked up beyond a general who crossed the Delaware into New Jersey in search of clothing and horses. A hotheaded disciplinarian who led his troops into battles he was called Mad Anthony Wayne. Betsy Ross had lived in Gloucester and I made up a story that she was George Washington’s mistress and had used his underwear for material to sew the first American flag. I told the story so many times over the years that I forgot I had made it up as a joke until my daughter said that her classmates claimed it was nonsense. Nonsense? Then I remembered, of course I had invented it. And in my version Mad Anthony Wayne kept crossing and re-crossing the Delaware, a parody of Washington’s famous crossing.

Gloucester was a Jim Crow town with no blacks allowed. Black taxi drivers from over the river in Philadelphia would object when asked to take passengers to Gloucester, and any black with sense would make certain to be out of the town before night fall if not sooner. Teaching The Merchant of Venice, with its emblematic choice between three caskets, the vice- principal, appealing to racial horror of miscegenation, told my class what it must feel like if the Prince of Morocco had picked the one that would have made Portia wed the Negro. A girl with kinky hair who we thought of as Greek was not taken on the school trip to Washington DC because it was feared she might be part-black.

In the late 1930s a KKK cross had burned in front of a Jewish store in nearby Brooklawn. We were one of the few Jewish families in Gloucester and throughout junior and senior high school I was called a Jew whenever someone was angry with or wanted to embarrass or intimidate me. A school friend’s father once asked me whether the world’s troubles would end if “all the Jews were drowned”. The English teacher with whom I had quarreled told my mother that she would not accept such conduct from “one of her own”. During a school argument over a presidential election I was told that all Jews were Republicans (actually our family was divided with my father being extreme left Democrat and my mother loyal to the Republicans because of her sister); a fist fight developed and I was chased home by a rapidly formed mob shouting “get the Jew” or a similar chant. My mother found me hiding and told me to return to school and face the mob. A few years later when I had a close black friend from another city and brought him home, my mother treated him as if this were not unusual although I knew that some of the customers in our drug store were making comments.

We were not practicing Jews and being called one felt strange, as it would often seem when it occurred later in life. The Irish and German Catholics who made up most of the town appeared like inhabitants of another planet with their punch ups, warring gangs, drunken evenings, worship of sports, and lack of study. A short period of memorizing what needed studying was bound to get me an A, while they hung out in gangs on street corners or were seeing available girls. I felt that I would have more and better girls later after I graduated school. There were often bitter territorial battles between the Catholics who went to the Catholic school and those who attended what Americans term public (state) school. Some battles were with chains and knives in the local park at night. To go to a dance at the wrong school was risky, punishment included being forced head down into a filthy toilet bowl. I tried to walk the thin line between the two groups but there were times I had to defend myself against louts, usually including at least one of my classmates.

In Junior High School new students arrived by bus from Brooklawn and other suburbs. They were less violent and I became friends with a small group that had a sense of humor. We mocked the platitudes of popular songs. “I love you for seventy mental reasons”. We sang to the tune of the “Blue Danube”

I like Rival Dog Food,

ARF ARF,

ARF ARF

Such parodies were common to an era of Spike Jones and his City Slickers. During the 1990s my wife taught a student from Montreal who could also remember singing to the melody of “Jealousy”

Leprosy, my god I’ve got leprosy,

There goes my eye ball into your highball

Leprosy, my god I’ve got leprosy

I still cannot keep distinct the original lyrics of some songs from their parodies. “Laura, the face on the bar room floor” has long ago become the original in my mind.

Our sexual jokes were signs of anxieties and inexperience. A group of male students are late for class and say that they were outside “blowing bubbles”. A female student arrives and announces that she is “Bubbles”. A girl is driven further and further outside of town in her boyfriend’s car and when told to “put out or get out” says that’s her “legs are her best friend”. Eventually she is driven so far away that she decides “even the best of friends must part.”

I was good at sports, although disappointing at track and field meets where, instead of living up to my practice records, I performed terribly. I still shy off from competitions. In high school I even had a doctor’s excuse to avoid Physical Education although I played as a guard on an amateur football team that included the best players from the school’s team. I hated the culture that sports involved. There was always something homoerotic going on in the shower room after practices. Team members thought it amusing to step on your running shoes with their own spiked shoes. I remember once being selected to box with the class bully, someone larger and several years older. I hated boxing and expected to be murdered. Instead he whispered to me that he had sinus problems and “please do not hit my nose. Could we just pretend to fight?” It is sometimes true that freedom is to be free of fear itself.

My alternate life was in literature. I found such journals as Atlantic and Harper’s in the magazine shelves of my father’s pharmacy. When I was ten or eleven I asked for a two volume edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s works for a Christmas present. I progressed to borrowing books from the public library. My tastes were at first limited, mostly middlebrow, but I was impressed by any sophistication, wit, or clever malice. Later I would discover Saki and Ronald Firbanks, but in my early teens I thought the novels of Thorne Smith highly amusing and loved the Mr and Mrs North crime stories of Frances and Richard Lockridge. I tried to write my own but after hearing a gun shot while drinking many cocktails at a country club I did not know what my characters were to do next.

I discovered a book shop in Philadelphia—was it called the Ben Franklin?-- where someone kindly explained that when I was older I would prefer Stendhal to Kenneth Patchen’s The Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer and The Journal of Albion Moonlight, and Henry Miller’s The Air Conditioned Nightmare. Other books I bought and read included Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, translations of Albert Camus’s The Stranger and The Plague, and such works of Jean-Paul Sartre in translation as The Respectful Prostitute, No Exit, The Flies, Nausea, and Being and Nothingness (of which I could make little sense)

Meanwhile I hung around with my friends at a garage at night and discussed how members of the local police force were related to the criminals who held up the gas station recently, how the police told us that the way to handle the situation was to get the criminals in an alley and dump them in the river afterwards, and how someone had died in an automobile accident and was revenged by his friends through trick driving that forced the guilty one off the road and left him a physical wreck near dead. I sometimes carried during those nights a pocketknife as a form of self-protection. I also sometimes carried a copy of a book of works by Friedrich Nietzsche that I had found among my father’s four or five books. This was another kind of self-protection. I knew little of the world outside Gloucester except what I read; I assumed everyone lived by trying to avoid being beaten up, knifed, insulted. I was surprised when I met the son of one of the other three Jewish families who was visiting after they had moved to New York. In Gloucester he played center in the high school football team; he told me of his school in New York where there was a chess club (no one in Gloucester played chess) and classmates read books and discussed ideas. I was stunned. There was life elsewhere without constant assertions of manhood, threats, anger, rudeness.

I did have another life in Gloucester besides reading. Being an only child with parents usually working in their pharmacy I drifted to other homes like a stray dog. Wanda Morrison had been at school with my mother in Camden and also moved to Gloucester. She was from a Polish immigrant family and married a Scots. Cheerful, amusing, outgoing, gossipy, she was connected to local civic life and such celebrations as Easter and July 4th; he was a caricature Scots, withdrawn, quiet, serious. He worked in Philadelphia as a printer, she usually had a professional link with the schools in Gloucester as would her daughter Pat. From Wanda I learned bits of my family’s history, of the relationship between my mother and father, and gossip about others. She spoke to me as if I were an adult and told me that as X’s wife was frequenting bars he made her pregnant to stay at home. Y had her tubes tied which shocked the other teachers, but why should she not enjoy herself? It was at Wanda’s I learned to garden (an interest that was useful in Nigeria where I grew European vegetables for my family as well as teaching; I was the mad white man out in the afternoon sun), had my wartime Victory Garden, and learned how to color and decorate Easter eggs, for which I won a few prizes. Around her life seemed normal and after I married I several times took Adele to meet Wanda and then Pat and her husband as if I wanted to show that I had a real family.

By then the Schroeders had left. I did not know where they had gone. I was told that he had had a stroke and Betty gave up her New York trips to care for him. My mother, who had protectively bought the property after the Schroeders claimed they could not anymore afford the rent, felt that she had lost the opportunity to expand the pharmacy to make it more appealing to buyers before she retired.

They were our next-door neighbors and where I first wandered seeking family. The husband worked as a mechanic in Philadelphia where the two daughters, Betty and Jean, worked in offices. The wife stayed home, cleaning house, baking, preparing evening meals. Every New Year she made a delicious orange cake, moist and intensely flavored, for my birthday. People remarked that she used natural ingredients including fresh oranges. The husband had a dartboard in the basement where I brought my friends. He built the large folding table with legs on which I mounted annually a prize winning train and lighting display in our apartment for the Christmas season. Although I stopped having model trains before I left school, I still feel attracted when I hear of a display. I understand the story about the famous jazz trombonist Jack Teagarden who carried a train set in the trunk of his car when touring. A tall handsome man of American Indian origin he attracted women who when invited back to his motel room found they were expected to watch model trains.

Betty Schroeder, the elder daughter, introduced me to jazz music. She had been a Gene Krupa swing band fan and graduated to following jazz in New York where she would visit for weekends once or twice a month to hear musicians on 52nd Street and later, after she had become part of the scene, in Harlem. An attractive, dark haired and dark eyed slender woman, Betty was about ten years older than me and had an erotic charge. Whenever she returned from work she would be greeted by approving wolf whistles from the war vets who seemed perpetually to mill in front of our drug store at night. Although she had no interest in them I could see her appreciative smile. She knew that she was a desirable woman. She had, however, no one in Gloucester with whom she could share and brag about her prized photographs taken in New York with such famous black musicians as Buck Clayton, Teddy Wilson, Roy Eldridge, Don Byas, Big Sid Catlett, and Jo Jones. No one else, besides me, listened with her to her increasing collection of 78 rpm jazz records, discussed the difference between Dixieland and Swing and the new Be Bop. There was no one else to whom she would recount her musicians’ gossip about this drummer being heavy footed, that drummer appearing always relaxed and unperturbed on stage. Once she returned from New York with stitches above an eyebrow from an automobile accident and I assumed her relationships had progressed beyond being a listener and fan of black jazz music.

I used to listen with her family to Superman, The Shadow and other radio series. I spent Christmas nights with them listening to radio announcements of Santa’s coming arrival. Betty quizzed me on my readings for school tests. She had taught me such mnemonics as “A rat in Tommy’s house may eat Tommy’s ice cream” as a way of spelling “arithmetic “. For a history test I learned “Columbus sailed across the ocean blue in fourteen hundred and ninety two”, which rapidly was parodied as “Columbus sailed the deep blue sea in fourteen hundred and ninety three”. I progressed with her from Gene Krupa to a knowing jazz fan. Her skin darkened as she spent more time in New York. Was she taking some pill, was it her make up? I assumed that even in New York a pretty young white woman in the company of older black musicians might bring police attention. I was by then reading Down Beat and knew of the arrests of many musicians for using drugs and the brutal pistol-whipping of musicians, such as Miles Davis, with little cause. Police were enemies to be avoided.

Although jazz was a minority taste there was a continuing audience for big bands and renewed interest in small combos. In school we danced to Artie Shaw, Stan Kenton and Woody Herman. There were interesting arrangements by such bands as Claude Thornhill on the jukeboxes. The jazz world was dividing into traditionalists and Be Boppers. The rediscovery of older jazz was as much a revelation as the strange chords and choppy rhythms of the boppers. A weekly radio show began called “This is Jazz”, which broadcast live jam sessions that I recorded on a machine I acquired for just that purpose. Because of ‘This is Jazz” I travelled to New York one weekend in April 1948 to hear Kid Ory’s Creole Jazz Band at Carnegie Hall during its short visit from California where it broadcast regularly on a radio program introduced by Orson Welles. I went to Stuyvesant Casino, then a jazz venue, and I went on a “river boat” jazz concert where I spoke with Pops Foster about his slapping the strings of the bass. I returned to Philadelphia and to Gloucester with a suitcase just in time to go to school. I was then 15 years old and in tenth grade. I had been out of my depth in the hotel one night when a crying woman began banging on the door mistakenly pleading to be let in. She had left her man over an argument and was trying to return. If she had wanted to discuss jazz I would have known what to do.

I can see now that jazz significantly shaped my life. It led to an interest in black American and then African art, music and culture that took me to Africa and the new African writing and eventually into Commonwealth and postcolonial literatures. If I became a literary critic and scholar of Indian, African and Caribbean literatures, it was partly an extension of my interest in American jazz. Jazz also led to dancing to live music, the source of many acquaintances over the decades. My first publications were reviews and articles in jazz magazines.

I was discovering that there was plenty of good jazz to be heard in Philadelphia. (Even around Camden there were good jazz clubs although I did not know them.) Besides touring groups like Louis Armstrong, and a few bars for jazz fans (one of which was owned by Red Rodney, a well-known white bebop trumpeter), there were occasional big modern jazz concerts at the Academy of Music where I heard Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Tatum, Billie Holiday, Tiny Grimes, Slam Stewart and other living giants when I was 15–16 years old. More often on Sunday afternoons there were Dixieland concerts in the Academy’s Foyer with such musicians as Sidney Bechet, Danny Barker, Wild Bill Davidson, Muggsy Spanier, Willie the Lion Smith, Sammy Price, Jimmy Archie, Baby Dodds, Pops Foster, James P Johnson, and Danny Alvin. I even sat in one time with the Wilbur and Sidney de Paris brothers’ band when their drummer was late getting on stage. I had no idea I was listening to and meeting musicians who when I was older would be legends.

Through the Foyer concerts I met Walter Bowe, a black trumpet player my age who lived in Camden, and through Walter I came to know other musicians in the Philadelphia area, several of whom would figure in my life during the next decade or more. There was the clarinetist Dick Hadlock already modeling his playing on the eccentric great Pee Wee Russell, and a trombonist Norman Finkelstein, both studying in the business school at Penn. Dick’s father, a jazz fan, worked for an American company in Brazil where Dick was brought up and studied saxophone. Hadlock drove an antique chain-driven Rolls Royce in which we once made a trip to Bridgeport, Connecticut where he had lived until he was 12. He still had friends there in, was it?, the White Eagle Jazz Band.

He would move to New York, live in a Greenwich Village loft owned by the black painter Beauford Delaney, made famous by Henry Miller, would buy and edit The Record Changer, a then obscure jazz publication to which I contributed from Europe. Like much that he did, The Record Changer became part of American cultural history. The complete run was republished some years back by the University of California Press

Dick studied clarinet or saxophone at various times with Sidney Bechet, Garven Bushell and Lee Konitz, three greats. He wrote the often republished Jazz Masters of the Twenties and for decades had radio jazz programs in California while he continued to play clarinet in or lead different groups. Although as a critic and broadcaster his range was wide his personal tastes were limited mostly to the white Dixieland of the so-called Chicago school of the twenties. He admired Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Trumbauer. He intensely disliked the New Orleans jazz revival that started in the late 1930s and which had a strong influence on many, including Walter Bowe and myself.

He travelled to Paris one year and was given a demonstration of over-blowing and other “free jazz” post-modern reed techniques by Steve Lacy, whom he knew in New York during the 1950s and who had also taken lessons with Sidney Bechet. Lacy had famously been asked by pianist Cecil Taylor around 1955 “why such a young man as you should be playing such old man’s music” and followed Taylor into the free jazz movement, although the main influence on Lacy’s evolution as a musician and composer was Theolonius Monk, in whose group he worked for a time. Lacy was now a famous avant-gardist and composer, who lived in Paris since 1970 until in 1992 he was awarded a five year MacArthur “genius” Fellowship. The French government’s attempt to tax the money eventually drove him back to the USA. The meeting between the former students of Bechet was not a success. Hadlock told me that he was not impressed by what Lacy showed him on clarinet, and Lacy told me he was surprised that his old friend had changed so little in his music.

Another of our jazz circle was J Norton-Smith, the son of a wealthy industrialist and conscious of his genealogy. The family house on Philadelphia’s Main Line was large; outside old stables were converted into a garage to hold many automobiles. Norton played banjo and piano very well, and was then attending Haverford College, the elite men’s college often paired in one’s mind with nearby Bryn Mawr College for women, Swarthmore making the third of the exclusive colleges in the Philadelphia suburbs. Norton was brilliant, eccentric, learned, impossible. He lead his own traditional jazz band consisting of musicians from good colleges who lived or had been raised in or near Ardmore, and was proud that they included no Jews, until he decided that I had a much better press roll than his usual drummer. I remember once we auditioned for the Paul Whiteman TV show. I had not realized that Whiteman was still alive. Norton was a follower of Ezra Pound and dressed as eccentrically—he had a belted tweed Norfolk jacket that buttoned high in front, a black velvet cape—while making malicious comments on the clothing of others. He had a nervous breakdown directing Sartre’s Huit Clos in French at Haverford. Between his third and fourth year he went to New York, had a French mistress, and supposedly played professionally at Stuyvesant Casino to support himself. I sometimes wonder could he really have been accepted into the New York musicians union so effortlessly.

After Haverford he studied with C. S. Lewis at Magdalen College, Oxford, and with Lewis’s backing moved through various English departments in England and Scotland before being made Professor at Dundee University. He was a famous mediaevalist; besides editing texts he was series editor for several publishers.

He had also become a parody, said to be more British than the British. He did not drive an automobile but had an ex-colonial wife who did. Few academics in England and Scotland seemed to know much about his past except that he had once been a professional jazz musician who played in New York with Sidney Bechet and other greats. When I was a visiting Professor at the University of Stirling (1979) it was thought possibly amusing to have Norton and me meet, but this was not to be. A pity. I really would have like to see him again. We need not have talked about old times. He died during 1988.

Walter kept meeting and introducing me to other musicians from the area and we would often jam at Walter’s mother’s house in Camden. One, Tony (I can never remember his other name), a pianist from beyond the area, came through the black section of Camden asking if there were any old 78 rpm recordings in the attic or basement he could see and perhaps purchase. Following the tradition of older jazz record collectors he had a black bag filled with bananas to eat when hungry as you could peel the skin and have a clean fruit even if your hands were filthy from the dust. I remember a very good, somewhat older trumpet player from Pennsylvania who introduced me to Surrealism and who claimed to himself be a surrealist. I did not know that there were surrealists in small Pennsylvanian towns.

This was the period when the New Orleans jazz revival had even reached some high schools. We were envious of the Scarsdale High Band led by clarinetist Bob Wilbur. Wilbur studied with Bechet, and the band made commercially sold recordings of their music. There was also a group in Baltimore with a good trombonist, but it was surprising when Walter heard on the radio the Pennsauken Ramblers of Merchantville, New Jersey, where my Aunt Florence lived, playing “Stumbling” on a Saturday afternoon Horn & Hardart (a quick food chain) talent show. He soon made contact with them. They were indeed high school students, their leader was an accordionist, and I even played drums for them at one of their high school dances. We sometimes borrowed their string bass player, although that required my mother being willing to pick him up and drive us to Walter’s.

Walter lived in an old wooden house in what was thought the black part of Camden. His mother was one of those blacks who still voted Republican because “Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves”. She was a nurse or medical officer at, was it, RCA Victor or Campbell’s Soup, both major employers in Camden. Old fashioned in dress and appearance she had a quiet dignity although Walter once told me that she had twice been raped returning from work. There was an up-right piano in the small living room where we had jam sessions. One time Walter returned with a well-known white revivalist ragtime pianist from the Pacific North West. Portland? We made an acetate duo of “Maple Leaf Rag” on which I played on my wood block and cowbell throughout. I was proud of my six-stroke roll that I had copied from Baby Dodds and which I liked to use behind piano solos. I had long forgotten about the evening until decades later when visiting San Francisco Hadlock played the recording for Adele.

Another acquaintance was “Jazz” Friel, a clarinetist in Philadelphia who held radical libertarian views. We jammed sometimes at his apartment in Philadelphia where through Walter I briefly met Richard T Gibson, the controversial writer who according to some was a black radical and according to others worked for the CIA. He would be co-founder of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, to which Walter would belong.

When I was at Columbia Friel came to New York where with Walter we sat in one night with the pianist Champion Jack Dupree. I felt honored but Friel complained that Champion Jack was musically illiterate and impossible to play with, as he was inattentive to the length or structure of a composition (his 12 bar blues could be 11 or 13 as he felt like it and he changed chords as erratically).

Drafted into the Army Friel was sent to Japan where he became famous for recordings of his own compositions and married a Japanese woman from an aristocratic family who followed him to Levittown Pennsylvania where he worked for the Army as they were the only employers who would accept someone unwilling to join a union. To make matters worse he demanded that his wife only serve meat and potatoes and he took no interest in her kimonos and tea ceremonies that fascinated their neighbors.

Walter and I would attend films that had scenes with jazz musicians, such as New Orleans, a real cornucopia with Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Kid Ory, Zutty Singleton, Woody Herman, Meade Lux Lewis and many others. We would go to movie houses in Camden and Philadelphia that still had touring black swing bands on weekends. We would pretend to be of drinking age and go to jazz clubs in Philadelphia; I remember once meeting Mercer Ellington, Duke Ellington’s son. I sat in with banjoist Elmer Snowden’s band one afternoon and he told me that similar to many younger drummers I played behind the beat as I was used to practicing to records. He was probably right, but I could have replied that I purposefully entered late as I was imitating Baby Dodds, whose drum rolls filled space between beats and the phrases of the horns.

Baby Dodds was my hero. He had been one of the early jazz musicians and played on classic jazz recordings by King Oliver and Louis Armstrong in the 1920s. He was still playing regularly in New York, Philadelphia and was on some of the Bunk Johnson records made in New Orleans trying to recapture early jazz styles. I had asked him about his tuning of his drums; he had showed me “nerve beats”, a technique of holding two drumsticks together so that they rattled as the arm’s nerve muscles are made to contact and tremble. I could have cried when he had a stroke and could hardly hold his drumsticks in his hands. I wanted to offer to assemble and carry his drum set. Decades later in Paris I would be stunned by an aging, smiling Art Blakey, going deaf, playing drums badly in the wrong tempo while supposedly leading his Jazz Messengers.

It was partly because of Walter I transferred for my final year of high school to Camden. There were other reasons as well. Most of my Gloucester friends had already graduated. One punched a teacher, was expelled, and joined a travelling circus. During my junior year I had found another family with which I could take refuge, the Salines in Camden.

I do not remember how I was related to or met them, but I became indebted to their friendship and used their address as my home when I changed schools. If I missed a day and the truant office came he would be told I was upstairs ill and could not be disturbed. Through the Salines I met an educated middle-class Jewish community of people my age or a bit older who went to good universities, read books, and were not part of warring gangs. Through the Salines I learned not to always blame “the ref” for the defeat of the team I supported (the father was a “ref”), not to brag about fights and toughness, not to speak like a thug.

Joyce, the younger of the two daughters, was the main influence, and I probably had a crush on her. She was pretty, dark haired, dark eyed, romantically thin and flat breasted. She was a year or two older than me and I looked upon her as civilized when she spoke of Edna St Vincent Millay and the then popular American-Lebanese mystic Kahil Gibran, who wrote The Prophet. At a place where her friends congregated we listened to the juke box and she pointed out some passage in a Glenn Miller recording where a trumpet without a break continued a phrase started by a clarinet. She was not an intellectual like my cousin Mimi in Philadelphia, but she was much prettier and closer to my age and I was enchanted by her and the normality of her family, although my mother with unexpected prejudice claimed that they were Southern European Jews of Italian origin.

Joyce’s older sister Molly studied speech therapy at Syracuse University and tried to soften some of my rougher edges, including a tendency to lisp as my tongue had not learned to go where it should when making S and th sounds. She told me that she would never say she loved a man before she married him—