RJURIK DAVIDSON
Rjurik Davidson is a writer, teacher, researcher and activist. He has travelled widely and now lives in Melbourne. He speaks crippled French with a perfect accent, which can cause all sorts of mix-ups. Rjurik has published short stories, essays and reviews. He has recently completed a PhD titled. Paradises of the Reborn Sun: Science Fiction and American Radicalism in the Sixties. He is currently working on a novel and a science fiction script (with filmmaker Ben Chessell).
‘Bones’ is based on real historical details. The Communist Party did run the Uptown Club and introduce jazz to Australia. Since then Australian jazz has retained its progressive politics.
* * * *
Each night for the last forty years I have listened to the rhythmic dissonance and strange ragtime of Lester Green’s Blue Nights. Sometimes I get the urge to dance, to feel the ecstasy and jubilation of that smoky room, long ago on that summer night, when we finally reached that feverish and hallucinatory state and took off our skins and danced around in our bones. How I remember the heat of the night, and Lester Green on his piano, thumping out odd clusters and brilliant yet strangely dislocating runs with his right hand. How I remember the band as they reached the state of grace, swaying to the music like reeds in a gentle wind. And how I remember Carmody Reece, as she stood there by the piano with her porcelain beauty, smoking a cigarette, unaware of the disaster that she and Green and all of us were headed towards. Even now I can feel the magic of that night, and the horror that was to follow.
I first heard of Lester Green and his band on a humid summer night, the sort that is rare in Melbourne. Around me the pub was filled with the bustling bodies and booming voices of the workers from the wharves. The room had the slightly damp, almost tropical smell of sweat and humidity and cigarette smoke, and although the crowd had begun to thin out, it was still hard to hear yourself over the background noise. Jack O’Grady sat opposite me, his hair slicked back like a movie star and his teeth yellow and crooked.
“This Lester Green is from New Orleans,” O’Grady said to me, the sweat running down his forehead before he dabbed it with an already stained handkerchief. “And I hear he can play the piano like no-one else - so well that you lose yourself in it, like a snake charmer.” Jack puffed on his cigarette and breathed out slowly so that he was enveloped in a little cloud of smoke.
Jack O’Grady worked down on the docks where no one cared that he was a bludger. You came across people like him - who were so over-excited by their latest scheme, or their most recent revelation, that they were more concerned about sharing it with the rest of the workers than getting on with the job. O’Grady was a thin little Irishman who wore dapper suits that were old and ragged, smoked pungent cigarettes that stained his fingers a deep yellow, and talked constantly. He was universally liked, except when he went on about the oppression of the Irish Catholics, and the virtues of communism. Then everyone just took the mickey out of him, and he got all hurt and serious while the others laughed.
To me he was always full of energy and enthusiasm, like when he spoke of Lester Green.
“He’s that good you reckon?” I asked.
“A genius, and I’m going to bring him out. Me and a couple of others in the Party. Care to be involved?”
“What do you want?”
“A few bob, for starters. But you’re an educated man, a cultured man -” O’Grady started his spiel, but I wasn’t taken in.
“Don’t give me the smooth talk,” I said, shaking my head, an ironic smile creeping onto my face.
“Sam, Sam, Sam,” he said, as if shocked, “I only wanted your help, you know, publicity. You can get some of your mates along, build it at the University, in the eastern suburbs.”
“I’m not really connected with those people.” I said.
“C’mon Sam,” he said, grinning. “They’re your people.” By this he meant that I was middle-class, originally.
“I rejected all that, that’s why I’m working at the wharves, Jack.”
“C’mon Sam, I need you, I need a front man, I need Sam Berman, the captain of style, the chief of suave. I need the magic Sam - you’re the man.” And he grinned persuasively.
* * * *
We organized it from the Uptown club at 104 Queensbury Street, sitting there in the corner of the hall with its cracking wooden floorboards and grubby interior. It was quite a different place during the day. At night it was the pre-eminent jazz venue in Melbourne, run by the Eureka Youth League - the Communist Party’s youth group. When the bands came on the hall was transformed; it filled slowly with smoke as a hundred cigarettes glowed in the shadows. The stage rose to twice its height and the musicians grew in stature until they were larger than life: giants blowing through their horns all the colours of the moon and the sun and the language of the motion of stars. It was the music that first brought me there against the urgings of my parents.
“Don’t go, son.” My father used the word ‘son’ as if it had the very meaning of condescension inscribed within.
“No, don’t go, love,” my mother reiterated. “It’s black music.” she said, as if that was an argument, as if, as an argument, it held the most compelling force.
Through their words I could hear all the fear and hatred of white Australia, with all its racist connotations. They expected their young son to be drawn in by these dangerous natives - into an orgy of writhing to the jungle music, that might lead to the total victory of the body’s urges, that might lead to orgies of an entirely different sort.
These views were prevalent in 1928 when Sonny Clay’s Colored Idea came to play in Melbourne. Shortly into their stay police raided their flats and discovered six of the band with six white women in various stages of undress and sobriety. One of the women escaped by jumping out the window, while the others were arrested and charged with vagrancy: they were aged between seventeen and twenty-three. There was one god-awful scandal - white girls with blacks, no thank you very much. The six band members were deported on the first steamer.
My parents would have approved.
To my parents I said: “What’s wrong with black music?”
For a moment they sat there, and in those uncomfortable moments they felt the weakness of their argument. Their minds would not allow the feelings to surface. Instead they held them down in the deep unconscious, and there let them struggle feebly and drown.
My mother sniffed and my father’s eyes tracked across the room but refused to meet mine.
I stood up and walked away, and walked away from more than the argument. I left my parents’ home because I couldn’t bear their straitjacket world of tea and cakes and walking the dog along the beautiful boulevards of Malvern amongst the quiet parks and lush plain trees, and I broke their hearts by dropping out of university and working on the wharves. And I went to the Uptown club, even though it was run by Communists, and I listened to the jazz.
* * * *
Now it’s commonly thought that after Sonny Clay, it wasn’t until 1954 that another complete American band led by an African-American was allowed into Australia. But it’s little known that one was smuggled in without fanfare in the summer of ‘48, under the veil of secrecy: Lester Green’s.
The fist sniff I caught that something was wrong was a week before Lester Green was due for arrival. O’Grady and I were at the pub. O’Grady was bursting with energy and enthusiasm.
“We’re talk-of-the-town matey,” he said.
I gulped at my beer. It was almost closing time; in those days it was still illegal to serve alcohol after 6 pm, though it was a law that the Uptown Club regularly flaunted.
“It’ll make us celebrities, Sam. You know, this might just open the doors for us. We could start a business, you know, touring people, leave the wharves, have a little office. Make a bit of dough. It could all start from here.” O’Grady got to his feet, about to go to the toilet. “What’ya reckon?”
“Get me another beer on your way back will you.”
O’Grady shook his head, disappointed, and then headed off to the toilet. I wondered about him and his strange contradictions: a communist who wanted to make money. I guess he was Irish, through and through.
A round, slightly bloated, man slipped into the vacant seat opposite me.
“Hello,” he said. His skin was smooth and rosy like an overripe fruit. “Hi.” I introduced myself: “Sam.”
“Hot weather.”
“They say it’s the start of a heat wave,” I answered. “It’s gonna get hotter before it breaks.”
“Ah,” the man nodded earnestly. “Where’s Jack?”
“In the toilet,” I said, wondering why he didn’t introduce himself.
“He should be careful, he’s small enough to get lost in there.”
I didn’t say a word.
“Yep, he’s a little man, a little man.” He spoke the words viciously and stood up, began walking away before turning back and saying: “Give my regards to the little fella will you?” And he was gone.
O’Grady was back as excited as ever and my discomforting thoughts dissipated.
The next day O’Grady didn’t come to work. He was missing the day after, also. When he returned his eye was black and yellowing bruises ran over his eyebrow to his forehead. Occasionally he grasped his side, as if pained.
* * * *
A few nights later we returned to the Uptown Club. There were perhaps fifty people when we arrived. O’Grady and I joined a couple of young men from the Eureka Youth League. One of them, a young ruddy-faced man called Johnno, was puffing vehemently on his cigarette and trying desperately to recruit me to the cause. Most of them had already given up on me, assumed I was a fellow traveller and left it at that, but Johnno refused to give up. Whether he just couldn’t calculate the odds, or simply didn’t care, I don’t know. Personally I thought him not just over-zealous, but not particularly bright. No matter what I said, he just kept coming back.
“But it was Russia that beat the Nazis, comrade.”
“Yeah,” I said, “how’s that?”
“They took the brunt of the Nazi’s attacks. Already by the time we went in, the fascists were losing on the eastern front. Stalingrad… when was that Ray?”
“1942.” Ray added.
“1942. We didn’t land until 1944. By then the Comrades were already in Hungary. Yep, it was Communism that beat the fascists. Not us.” He nodded to his own satisfaction as if impressed himself by his own logic.
“I’d still rather live here than in Russia,” I said, “it’s too cold there.”
“But that’s not the point,” he said earnestly. “The point is to bring it here.”
“It’s cold enough in Melbourne, thank you very much.”
“No, Communism” Johnno said, as if I hadn’t understood, and I had to admire his perseverance.
I nodded again, unable to tease him any more, and noticed O’Grady looking across the room. I followed his line of sight: she stood there, calm like the night, a cigarette being smoked through a long cigarette holder that she held in her gloved hands. The gloves reached her elbows. Hair that seemed sculpted rolled down over her shoulders, framing her porcelain face.
“I think Jack’s been distracted.” I said to the others.
O’Grady turned his head and in that moment I realized he was captured by the woman whom I came to know as Carmody Reece.
If you hit an animal or a person on the head hard enough, there’s a moment when they are motionless, except perhaps for the blinking of the eyes, a moment in which motion and speech are impossible. The strange thing is that in every other way they seem entirely normal. This was the effect Carmody Reece had on Jack O’Grady.
“Why not go and talk to her,” we suggested.
“Oh, couldn’t.”
“Why not?” Even while suggesting it I realized that O’Grady would have as much chance as breathing underwater - for that was the issue, he was out of his element. Carmody Reece was a water creature and O’Grady walked on the land. They would be foreigners to each other.
O’Grady understood this instinctively. Yet, like all of us, he possessed humanity’s greatest failing: hope, that emotion that keeps us going whether we are floating alone in a sea of sharks or freezing to death on the dry plains of Antarctica; that emotion that defies logic and sanity: hope.
I convinced him to come with me and we walked over to the tall woman.
“Hello,” I smiled calmly while O’Grady fidgeted beside me.
She smiled, revealing teeth that seemed smooth and polished.
“This is Jack, and I’m Sam.”
“Carmody Reece,” She turned her head inquisitively, and looked at O’Grady as if he were an oddity. He shifted on his feet uncomfortably.
I can’t recall that conversation. I remember there were pleasantries and comments on the band, and all the while I was caught in her eyes as if in a dark whirlpool, struggling to keep afloat. All the while O’Grady was speechless next to me; he stared and moved as if not quite sure what to do with his hands and body.
I do remember though, our parting words.
“Jack and I are bringing out Lester Green, a pianist from the states, if you’re interested in coming.”
“Oh, you’re the men.” She reacted with interest. “I’ve been wondering where I could find you. I was hoping to help you.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, you know, with the trip.”
“Ah, of course,” I nodded.
“Of course!” O’Grady yelled, the sound erupting in an embarrassing bleat.
“Well, we’re meeting here on Wednesday for the last arrangements, but we’d welcome anyone.” I spoke calmly.
“Yes!” yelled O’Grady, “Anyone, anyone!”
“Six o’clock, after work.”
“Six o’clock.” O’Grady grinned awkwardly and I could have kicked him.
“I’ll be here.” Carmody spoke softly and smoothly.
“We’ll see you then.” I grabbed the little man.
She agreed and I dragged O’Grady over to the bar where he took a couple of shots of whisky.
* * * *
When Carmody Reece graced into the club heads turned and conversations fell into the silence of distraction. Maybe Carmody was oblivious to her effect; I believe she knew exactly what it was that she was doing. She came in, hair glistening raven-black, a crimson silk dress clinging to her body like a spiderweb, great black glasses like insect eyes covering almost half her face. How could she have not known? But then again, children of the ruling classes live in worlds of oblivion. What was certain was her effect on little jack O’Grady, who broke into the shiver of a nervous animal, his little legs twitching beneath the table.
“Hello Jack,” she said leaning forward and kissing him on his cheek. The poor fellow startled with fright.
Ray and Johnno looked at each other from under their alarmed eyebrows. They sat bolt upright as they received their kiss like a vaccination.
I was used to such affectations and smiled at Carmody’s emotionless face as it came close and brushed my cheek.
The meeting was a disaster.
O’Grady sat silent.
Ray and Johnno spoke haltingly, addressing themselves only to me, as if Carmody Reece was not there.
Meanwhile Carmody interrupted while others spoke, dominated the agenda and, in a phrase, got her way.
It ended with the plans to pick up Lester Green and his band from the steamer down by the docks.
“So Jack and I will pick them up.”
“But they won’t all fit.” Carmody said.
“We’ll take the party van.” I said.
“But then some of them will have to sit in the back - there’s no seats.”
“It’s only a short ride.”
“Oh, it just won’t do. I’ll take the band in my car and Jack can take the equipment.”
“But it’s already arranged,” I protested.
“Johnno?” Carmody turned her head sharply towards the young man, indicating that behind the giant sunglasses, she was glaring at him.
“Well, I guess it would be better if they could sit on seats now, wouldn’t it?”
“Ray?” Carmody turned to him, and he nodded in agreement.
I could have killed them.
“Well, that’s settled then.”
* * * *
Perhaps O’Grady felt that we were now bound together, in friendship, or comradeship. Whatever the case, he came to me after the meeting and said, mysteriously, “Come on, come with me.”
He took me to a little alleyway between Elizabeth and Swanston streets, one of those tiny cobblestoned alleys that you pass everyday, barely noticing them. An alley that held overflowing rubbish bins and stray cats eking out an existence on the refuse. The kind that shows all the backs of buildings, each decayed, dilapidated, with peeling paint and windows with broken panes. These were the sort of buildings that symbolize the mendacity and deceit that is modern life - that behind the facade of freshly painted signs and neon lights and glistening displays lies another world. As I look back on it, I picture it with a jet of steam being periodically let off from a tangle of pipes along the alleyway - pipes like intestines wrapping around each other. But that may be just the romanticism of a hundred and more Hollywood movies.
We climbed up some old wooden stairs. “Watchit here,” Jack told me, as we passed several slippery, slightly green, stairs that obviously soaked up the Melbourne rain. The rail was rusting, with strips of yellow paint peeling off it. Behind me I could hear the noise and the traffic of Melbourne. I had left the world in which I lived and entered the shady one in which O’Grady moved. I knew he did not control it, that he existed in it like a small fish in a powerful river, darting from rock to rock along the bottom where it was safest, where the current was weakest and only battered him on occasion.
Despite my misgivings I did what I always do, I followed him.
Jack pulled the door open and I heard music in the background.
A number of cries came over from the group that sat around the one table: “Jack-o,” and “Ah, here comes the little Irishman.”
There were three of them, suited men with that look about them - the one I came to recognize as a warning sign. One introduced himself as Neil, all pock marks and protuberant bones; another was a toothless chap, huge, bulking, but with gentle movements, called Len. And the third I had met before, a middle-sized man with smooth and glistening skin as if it were ripe fruit. He didn’t say a word.
“Back again ‘ey Jack?” Neil said, lifting a glass to his ruddy face.
“This is my spiritual home,” said Jack O’Grady, grinning.
“I didn’t know you Irishmen had spirit,” Neil poured himself another.
“That’s because you’re a proddo-dog,” Jack snapped back, by which he meant that Neil was Protestant.
To my right the nameless man brooded. I could feel his absence from the whole conversation.
“How much is it to go in?” Len asked.
“Two pound! How many times do I have to tell you - Jesus - anyone’d think you’re a moron Len,” Neil glared, his ruddy face becoming even redder.
“Fair go,” Len mumbled sadly.
“Leave Len alone,” O’Grady said calmly, “you know his memory’s shot from the footy.” He turned to me: “Len played a few games for the Magpies before going back to the country league. He’s been cleaned up a few too many times.”
“C’mon, let’s play,” said the man without a name, as if the conversation was boring him.
We each threw two pounds into the middle and the cards were dealt.
From the very first hand Jack forgot caution, threw in twenty pound, which was five times as much as the biggest bet, and I knew he was headed towards disaster as surely as he was towards death.
The table sat stunned.
Neil, Len and the nameless man put in the money. I folded.
And so it went around until it reached two hundred pounds.
“He’s bluffing,” Neil said adamantly.
“Of course he is,” Len agreed.
“We’ll go on, call him,” said Neil.
“You call him,” Len said throwing his cards down on the table as if to say, I’m out.
Nobody moved.
“He’s bluffing.” Neil repeated. It was his turn.
We waited quietly.
Don’t call him, I thought to myself, please god, someone, don’t let anyone call him.
“Well c’mon,” Len said, getting impatient.
“He’s bluffing, he’s definitely bluffing.” Neil repeated, and each time he sounded less confident, each time he said it as if to convince himself. Still he didn’t move.
“Hurry up!” said Len.
Neil scratched his head.
“Hurry the fuck up.”
Eventually, he broke. “I’m out.”
“You know what happens to a rat when it’s poisoned?” The nameless man spoke the first words emotionlesslv. “Its guts liquefy in its stomach. It just sits there, quivering, while its guts turn to blood and shit, and then it leaks blood and shit. Just like you, Neil,” he ended vitriolically, and his words meant violence. “That’s your fucking problem, isn’t it, Neil,” said the nameless man, “you’ve got no fucking guts have you? You knew he was bluffing but you wouldn’t call it, would you, no you wouldn’t, instead you sat there shitting your pants like a poisoned rodent. Didn’t you?”
And at that moment I realized that the nameless man was going to call the bet. I knew at that moment that Jack O’Grady had made one more mistake in his already mistake-ridden life.
It happened in an instant, rapid-fire:
“See you and raise you my savings, that’s two-thousand pound,” the nameless man spat.
“See that with my car and bet my house.”
“See you my house.”
“Whoa,” Neil eyes boggled while Len beside him grinned nervously.
One moment the game was for a few pound. Next thing it was cars and houses.
“Alright then, if you two are serious about this, you’re gonna have to write out contracts,” Neil said.
“Sure,” said O’Grady.
They brought out the pen and paper, and I cursed O’Grady for having such pride that he didn’t pull out of it then and there.
They wrote it down, all of it: the savings, the car, the houses.
“What have you got?” O’Grady asked.
“A full house,” the nameless man showed three aces and a pair of sevens.
Jack stared at the cards as if he couldn’t believe it.
“Someone must have cheated,” Jack said, holding his cards tightly in his hands.
The nameless man smirked.
“Ho-ho-ho, you’re fucked son, you’re fucked.” Neil said with relish, “You’re…”
“Four of a kind.” Jack put his cards down triumphantly, to silence. “Now who’s fucked?” he asked leaning to the nameless man, “I’d say it’s Terence Gibbon over here, Terry the monkey hey? Isn’t a gibbon a monkey, Neil?” Jack asked. No one responded so he continued, “Sure sounds like one.”
Jack certainly had a sense of drama.
He took the sheet that promised him the house and the savings.
We left quickly after that.
“Will he pay?” I asked.
“Maybe.”
“But can you trust him?”
“Of course not,” O’Grady grinned, “He’s a copper.”
A few streets away O’Grady slipped me the agreement. “You’d better hold this for me mate. It’d be safer.”
Somehow I found myself taking it, and stashing it in a secret place at home, and as I slipped into sleep that night I heard O’Grady’s voice and saw his crooked smile after I had remonstrated with him.
“How could you have done that? How could you have bet your house?”
He grinned impishly, shrugged, and said: “Luck of the Irish.”
* * * *
Jack was supposed to meet me at the Uptown Club at one o’clock. From there we were to drive to the docks before the steamer’s arrival at 2.15pm. I waited in the van out the front of the club, smoking cigarettes as the time passed. The heat wave had been building each day, and sitting in the car was unbearable.
Jack was not there at one. By quarter past I was getting fidgety and began pacing along the sidewalk, but the sun was searing and I moved beneath a sad and drooping tree, its leaves brown. By half past I was downright worried. At quarter to two I had reached another level, alternating between furious anger and anxiety. One moment I was cursing O’Grady. How could he do this? He knew that Lester Green’s band was arriving. He knew how important it was that we arrive on time. The next moment my mind was troubled with dark thoughts full of fear. Where was O’Grady? Would he arrive at all?
About two o’clock, just as I was preparing to leave, Jack rushed around the corner, blood gushing from his nose, a dirty handkerchief held ineffectually against the flow.
“Jeez mate, I’m sorry,” he said. “I got caught up.”
“Come on, let’s go.”
We jumped into the van, blood dropping on the seat and Jack’s pants as we sped off.
Along the way I said: “What happened?”
“I think it’s broke.”
“But what happened?”
“Jeez, I really think it’s broke.”
“How could you do this? You know we’ll be late. You know they’ll be there any moment, don’t you?”
I sped along the streets, overtaking traffic when I could, through the city, down towards Port Melbourne and the passenger terminal by the docks. Despite having my foot pressed to the floor, despite squealing around corners and cruising through lights as they changed to red, it was two-thirty before the passenger terminal rose before us. A lone black man sat on a suitcase surrounded by musical equipment.
“Hey man, lucky you arrived because I was gettin’ worried, you weren’t never gonna arrive.” He introduced himself as Malcolm Harvey. He was of the build that could be called generous: large bones and heavy muscles, all of this without being fat.
“Where are the others?” I asked.
“Oh, they went off with Miss Reece. Hey what happened to your nose, brother?” Malcolm asked O’Grady.
“I think it’s broke.”
Malcolm and I loaded the equipment in the van, while O’Grady wandered around, holding his bleeding nose.
We then headed to the hotel on Queen St, where we dropped Malcolm off.
The rest of the band had settled into their rooms. Lester Green was already in his, with the door closed.
Jack insisted on meeting Lester Green. He walked grandly up to the door, his nose still bleeding, though not as heavily as before, but enough that he still needed to hold his handkerchief up against it, and knocked loudly.
“Lester, Lester are you in there?”
No one answered him.
“Perhaps he’s gone out,” I suggested half-heartedly.
“Lester, Lester, it’s Jack O’Grady, I just wanted to have a quick word.”
“C’mon Jack,” I urged, already halfway down the hall.
“Lester…”
The door creaked open, and I heard the voice of Carmody Reece: “Oh hello darling, listen Lester’s just having a little rest. You don’t mind if you have that chat a little later, do you?”
The door closed while Jack O’Grady stood expressionless, blood running in little lines along his handkerchief and hand before dropping silently onto the floor.
* * * *
Carmody kept Lester Green to herself, and I had no doubt that she presented herself as the organizer of the tour. It was not until the evening of the first gig that, when the band arrived, Jack and I introduced ourselves.
Lester Green simply nodded and looked at us with intelligent eyes, and in that gesture lay, I believe, the key to his character. In the brief time I knew him, he barely spoke, except through music. Despite this silence, he emitted such charisma that people orientated their words to him, as if he were the only one present. In a crowd, it was he who silently dominated. Sometimes other members of the band seemed to speak for him. For example, Malcolm King would say: “Lester needs a drink, could you get one for him?” And all the time Lester Green would be standing silently.
When we introduced ourselves, Lester Green simply nodded.
O’Grady was encouraged to ramble on about the secondary logistical details of the tour: the train to Sydney and then Brisbane, the times that it left, the expense of the hotel, the various sandwiches one could order from the bar. Meanwhile Lester Green caught my eye and held it for a brief, intense moment, and I felt rooted to the spot. My heart skipped a beat and my left leg began to tremble. In the background I heard Malcolm King say: “Lester likes cucumber sandwiches. Could you arrange some cucumber sandwiches?”
Lester glanced away at O’Grady and I was released from his gaze. I could breathe again.
O’Grady rushed off to see if he could arrange some cucumber sandwiches.
“It sure is mighty hot here in Melbourne, ain’t it Lester,” Malcolm said. “Is it always this hot, Sam?” As he spoke he wiped the sweat that was beading on his broad forehead.
“Sometimes, but this is about as hot as it gets. The unusual thing is the length of this heat wave. It’s more like Sydney weather though, all this humidity. I suppose it will rain sooner or later, and then things will probably cool off.”
“Can’t wait for that rain. It’s too hot to play,” Malcolm said.
At that moment that Carmody Reece cut through the crowd like a breeze.
“Hello Sam,” she kissed me on the cheek.
O’Grady arrived with a couple of sandwiches, which Malcolm took and began to eat. O’Grady seemed not to notice, instead he stared briefly at Carmody Reece, before looking at his feet.
“Sam and Jack here are the chief organizers of the tour, Lester,” Carmody spoke and her voice was cool, almost soothing in the heat. She gave us the credit. I had misjudged her earlier. It would not be for the last time.
Later, when the night had passed into early morning, Lester left with Carmody on his arm, dark glasses hiding their polished faces, leaving Jack and I and others behind as if we were mere mortals.
O’Grady drank in the dark corner of the club, at the very end of the bar, as it joined with the wall. He was brooding.
Eventually I approached him. “Holding up the bar, eh?” I joked.
O’Grady glanced at me, squinted, and then took another gulp.
I ordered a drink and sat beside him, and watched as the crowd slowly thinned. I watched couples leave, arm in arm, young men laughing and drinking, older men holding cigarettes that trailed smoke - tiny thin lines that slowly dissipated into the haze of the club.
For fifteen minutes I sat next to Jack O’Grady and watched and waited.
Finally he turned to me and spoke.
“Why… why did god make me so ugly?” O’Grady moaned, slipping momentarily, as he sometimes did, from his communist persona back to his Irish Catholic one. “Look at this, look at this body,” his eyes widened with desperation. “Look at this: legs and arms spindly like a spider’s, my face gaunt and thin, my teeth crooked and yellow, what kind of a man is this? Look,” he took off his hat, “see how my hair thins? See how the scalp is visible through the hair, see? Sometimes I think god has put us on the earth to suffer, and we die old and meek. Submissive, yes quiet, those of us who aren’t amongst the chosen. There’re two kinds of people in this world - the lucky and the condemned, and the very thing that we want is taken away from us and given to the blessed. The very thing that could salve our wounds.”
* * * *
The next day the hot north wind blew hard through the streets of the city, picking up the dust and throwing it in great clouds so that I had to shelter my face with my hands. But later the wind eased and the humidity set in again, a thick grey roof covering the sky and releasing a number of misty showers that swirled down softly, lasting only a few minutes and bringing no release from the heat.
That night the band played in the crowded and sweaty club and people downed the illegal alcohol as respite against the weather.
It was some time after the last set, as once again the club began to empty, that Carmody grabbed my arm firmly and said: “C’mon, we’re going.”
I sat in the back of her polished sedan with Lester and Malcolm and O’Grady. We drove out eastwards, the windows down to let in the air. Above us I could see the moon as it broke intermittently though dark clouds that kept the heat and the humidity. Sweat trickled ceaselessly down my neck and face.
As we drove, Malcolm leaned back to me: “Hey, when’s there gonna be a change in the weather, man?”
I just shrugged. Everyone was asking the same question. None had any answers.
We approached the hills, dark smudges against a dark horizon, and then passed through the little valley that housed the little town of Upper Ferntree Gully, and then Belgrave and Monbulk, and from there I lost my sense of direction. Perhaps we travelled onwards through the hills, towards Emerald, or maybe we doubled back in the direction of Ferny Creek. On those windy roads, unlit as they were in those days, direction can be a tricky thing. All I recall were the shrouded houses scattered here and there amongst the hulking shapes of giant tree ferns and the towering trees like giants stretching their arms above us. The mansions that loomed occasionally out of the darkness, great wooden and stone constructions, were beautiful, with balconies overlooking the green valleys, and great glass windows, and little turrets climbing towards the sky. I wound down the window, and leaned out, feeling the air, cooler as we drove through it, in my hair. Above me I saw the stars occasionally break through the lumbering clouds, and I saw the forest dark and silent all around, and it seemed to me that I had entered the world of Gods, some Garden of Eden, a primeval forest. And that beside me, in the car, rode the gods and it seemed that Malcolm was the God of Pleasure, and that Carmody was the God of Love and that O’Grady was The Messenger and Lester the King of the Gods or, of course, the God of War.
The sight of the mansion broke my reverie. It towered before us, its great windows bright with light and cars parked beneath its eaves and under the surrounding trees like animals asleep. We entered and it was splendorous, with brass fittings gleaming like gold and chandeliers like hanging plants of glittering jewels. The floor was of polished wood and all about were purple and gold and blood red flowers, sprouting from vases of delicate china and crystal.
A waiter whisked by and handed me a glass of champagne, which I sipped as I followed the others into a grand ballroom now filling up with people. O’Grady stayed close to me, for now he was really out of his depth, while the band members flitted amongst the patrons who were all dressed in their black suits or tuxedos, or flowing gowns with deep emeralds and rubies glittering.
In one corner a grand piano stood, polished, gleaming, and beside it a drum kit, and a double bass against the wall.
Even I, who once had some connections with this world, was overwhelmed by the opulence. Even I felt that I did not belong amongst these people.
The waiter came and went and each time filled my glass with sparking wine and each time he seemed to come a little sooner, though perhaps it was the distortion of time and space that came with the alcohol. At some point a reefer was passed from hand to hand, and I remember breathing in its pungent fumes and my head becoming light and my vision blurred. My thoughts came slow and calm and everything seemed to take on a whiteness as if a cloud surrounded me. From that moment the sequence of events and their causal links fell apart.
I stumbled to the toilet and Malcolm, who was coming out, spoke to me: “It’s just like performing for the folks back home.” And I thought I could hear bitterness in his voice.
The waiter came by, or perhaps it was another one, and I said to him, “Excuse me, what’s your name?”
“Pierre,” he answered, smiling.
“French?”
“Australian.”
I nodded and he winked and with that, was gone.
The stairway loomed before me, and I didn’t recall for what reason I was there.
“Sam!” A voice called my name.
I turned around and there was O’Grady, smoking a cigarette. I turned towards him and found myself back in the ballroom, but the little man was not beside me. There in the ballroom stood Carmody Reece, leaning against the piano, dressed in a silk gown of deepest crimson, the colour of blood, and in her hand the cigarette in its long holder, burned a vicious orange as if it was the heart of the night.
Suddenly I was beside her, and she was lighting the cigarette I had in my mouth. Our cheeks brushed, hers was smooth next to mine, a marble wall.
“How has your evening been, Sam? You seem to be swaying on your feet.”
I smiled and puffed on the cigarette and the acrid smoke burned my throat and my lungs.
“My father would pray for you. He’s a preacher you know. Each morning he wakes and lies prostrate.” She gave a little laugh. “Before God, it’s supposed to be. He’d pray for you communists.”
“I’m not a communist.”
“Well, you know what I mean. You practically are. He would pray for you.” She stopped a moment, and then continued in a soft voice: “And for me.”
“Really,” and though I understood, I kept it to myself. I didn’t want to talk of families or their expectations.
“But this here, Sam, this is my life, this is my freedom. This is the where I want to be, with whom I want to be.” She stopped again, thoughtful. “Lester’s an amazing man, don’t you think, Sam?”
“Remarkable.” I answered softly, for I too was in thought.
I left her then, at the first moment I could, for I could not stand her intensity. I took another drink, and I remember brushing my way through a crowd of bodies and making my way to the open window where it was slightly cooler. Another drink found its way into my hands, another reefer to my mouth and things became quiet for a while, as if the voices from the crowd were muffled, or from far away. I grabbed the windowsill for a moment and regained my balance. Once again the sounds of the party burst violently into the air around me.
“Oh,” the woman said, “are you going to do that forever?”
“Do what for ever?” I asked, wondering who she was.
“Work on the wharves. Haven’t you been talking to me about it for fifteen minutes?”
“Oh, right,” I nodded.
She looked away annoyed and adjusted the tiara, which had slipped sideways, back to its position on her head.
A moment later I heard the first note on the piano, and she said, “Oh look, they’re playing!”
Seconds later the bass and the drums burst forth and a trumpet and we started to dance.
As if everyone had waited for just this moment, the ballroom filled with the crush of hundreds of bodies, jostling for position on the polished floors, and the music seemed to emanate from the very air around us, like a fine mist caressing us with its soft touch. Each of us entered the world of music and motion and the stomping of feet recalled to me the legendary circle shouts of Congo Square in New Orleans. I lost sense of time and space and swam amongst the dazzling notes.
We danced and danced. Legs and arms moving at crazy angles as if we were puppets being jerked by young children. It was a jalopy, a powerful and mesmerizing ritual, with the heat and the lights and the music pounding with odd clusters of chords and rambunctious runs. For a moment it seemed that I was the music, that a strange and disturbing fusion had occurred, and my body was filled with ecstatic rapture.
No longer did I have control of my snapping and waving limbs, but instead I surrendered myself to Lester Green and his dreadful momentum. How he crouched over the keys like some demented sorcerer, conjuring beats from nowhere, how the beats came from the percussionists with primeval rhythm and fury. How the bass pounded along with my heart, filling my head with the sound of blood and heat. And in those moments I gave myself fully to this music, I surrendered myself with all the willingness of a junkie falling into the dreamless reverie of those spaces between life and death shortly before the heart stops beating.
I felt the heat of the lights and the sweat as it rolled down my forehead and into my eyes. My skin tingled, and then the tingling became an itch, and still I danced, maniacally, like the inmate of an asylum hearing the music only in my head. My skin burned, and still I danced, despite the pain, as if acid had been splashed upon me. I suffered and I danced, and then, just like that, it happened. In the fog of the pain, in the jubilation of the music and the dance, I reached, as if it were the most natural thing in the world and, along with a hundred and more people, I peeled off my skin and left it below me as I danced around only in my bones.
Around me came the sound of a great rattling that beat to the sound of the music like a multitude of syncopated percussive instruments. Bone clattered on bone. Feet struck the floor in one great symphony of joy and madness. Each of us was stripped to our essentials, laid bare to each other.
Then, sometime later, just as it had happened, without fanfare or hoopla, we stepped forward once more and slipped back into our skins, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened at all.
Was it the strange delirium that I was in? Could it really have happened? Even now I wonder if it was but a hallucination, some consequence of my fevered mind, some consequence of the reefer that I smoked, or the alcohol that had been mixed with it.
I wonder if I had not just dreamed it, in the moments between the motions of my body and the striking of the musical notes.
Later I remember fragments and snatches: lying on the cool grass behind the house as someone passed me another reefer; someone laughing as they led me to a car; the journey back through the hills and the moon far off on the horizon, sallow and huge. I recall falling onto my bed, which seemed soft and comforting, and falling into a deep and dreamless sleep.
* * * *
The next day has faded from memory, but this I remember: we came the next night to the Uptown Club with expectations fluttering within us like moths in a jar. We came, and pushed through the line that crept out the front of the Uptown bar, along the road, and around the corner. Jack, who had met me earlier in the pub after work, edging his way inside first, and then I, all the memories and feelings of the night before tingling in my head distractingly.
I didn’t notice at first that there was something wrong. At first I wandered around unknowing and uncaring.
I chatted to a few of the comrades, before I noticed that the members of the band leaned up against the bar, while Carmody sat alone, smoking at a table, her marble face revealing nothing. Alone, as if it were the most natural state in the world. Sometimes when I think of her, and the events that were to transpire, I think that was the most symbolic moment of the whole story, for she was ever alone, even in that brief time that she was lying in Lester Green’s arms.
Jack took the opportunity to sit next to her. By this time his jealousy had conquered his fear. Even then I could hear the waver in his voice as he tried, while Carmody sat emotionless answering in monosyllables, if at all. I moved away for I could no longer bear it. Had I been kinder I would have told him the truth: Carmody Reece would never see anything in him, other than a little man who would buy her drinks. Had she been kinder she would have told him herself.
Slowly the crowd built up, greater than the night before. I had not spoken a word about the previous night, and I sometimes believe that no one had, for perhaps it seemed too ludicrous a thought, too absurd a notion, for us to speak of. Perhaps we gave in to the belief that others would think us mad.
And yet from the very first note, from the very first chord, Lester Green and his band were a disappointment. Was it the drain of the travel, and the ceaseless playing?
Whatever the case the band played and people watched, or swayed, but I remained unmoved. The night dragged on and I fell to daydreaming.
I was shocked, then, when Lester Green appeared before me, and in that quiet, husky voice, asked me for a lift home.
We spoke little as I drove through the quiet streets, and I didn’t mention the big black sedan that followed us. At first it seemed a coincidence, but as I drove my eyes were drawn ever to the rear-vision mirror and ever it was behind us, with lights bright enough to burn themselves onto the back of my irises, leaving there the imprint of worry and fear.
Lester simply hummed to himself oblivious and I thought it best not to mention the sedan.
When we arrived, Malcolm was leaning against the balcony of his room. He came out to greet us, following us into Lester’s room where we drank whisky and talked.
“Harvey,” he explained to me, “was the name of that son-o’-bitch that owned my grand-parents. My daddy told me all about that man, how he treat my old folks, how he was always’a touchin’ ma grandma where she don’t wanna be touched, and how one day the old bastard was rolled on by his own horse.” At this Malcolm laughed heartily. “Guess he got what was comin’ to him. Right Lester?”
“Guess so,” said Lester pulling at his goatee.
Suddenly Malcolm leaped up and said: “See you then.” And off he went, smiling to himself.
For a long while Lester and I sat in silence.
Eventually I stood up, rather awkwardly, and Lester stood up with me.
“I’d better go,” I said quietly.
“Guess so.”
And he took a step towards me, and touched my face with the tips of his fingers and I felt the tingling on my skin that I had felt the night before, my heart leaped in my chest and I felt my left knee tremble. A second later it gave way and I fell to my knees and in a moment his penis was in my mouth with the taste of salt and sweat.
* * * *
I come now to the events of the final night, and these I recall as if it were yesterday, as if it was the only night in my life. It is burned into my memory like no other. It stands as the nadir on which all else is built.
It was like a parody of the nights before, where all things were turned on their heads, where light became dark.
The crowd was restless from the first, as if waiting for something to happen. They shuffled from one foot to another, whispered under their breaths irritably, and only seemed to listen to the music in order to heckle and mutter.
The crowd seemed to have some in-built dynamic, some trajectory that I feared was sending them from frustration towards murderous rage.
At least Carmody was not there, and in that I took comfort, for I don’t think I could have faced her and her bulbous glasses and enamel skin.
And then, from the crowd, a projectile flew towards Lester, over his head, and crashed against the back wall. In a second a hail came down upon the band and shouts drowned out the sound. The band stopped for a break and things calmed down for a while.
The second set was worse. It seemed that the band were shaken, and they dropped beats, struggled through solos as if they’d never played the tune before. I noticed Malcolm at the rear, sweat beading down his forehead and occasionally grimacing. Only Lester Green seemed oblivious to it all. Playing as if there was no one at all around him, as if the audience was nothing but rocks upon which he could break his waves of music.
I knew it would happen, in the way that you know of your coming death: with that mixture of disbelief and deep repressed horror.
And so it took me by surprise.
The band messed up the ending of a tune. On and on they played, trying to wind it up. And yet they couldn’t, each time a member of the group would slow down, or stop, the others seemed oblivious. The problem was Lester Green, who was oblivious to all this, and continued to play the groove, adding little frills and variations, so out of the feel of the rest of the group that they didn’t know what to do. They tried to follow his lead. But he wasn’t leading anywhere.
There comes a moment in a crowd where one tiny action, one step forward, one raised fist, one tiny imperceptible action starts the flood. More often than not you do not notice it, and the mass which has been waiting for this action as the solution to its desires, seems to act as one. And at that point, one tiny action can turn the tide.
I saw the action that broke the crowd: a large juicy apple flew from the front in a smooth arc, spinning in the air, before it smacked into Malcolm’s forehead with an audible ‘tock’, before bouncing onto his drums.
The crowd surged, and I was carried forward with them.
I knew this would be the end of Lester Green and his band. Madness had gripped our minds, feverishly swallowing our rational thoughts with something savage and primeval. I was caught in the surge and carried onto the stage, fighting to keep my feet. I pushed myself sideways, wedging myself against the piano, and then I suddenly pirouetted on the spot, driven by some unknown force. I gripped the piano with my arms, and one of my legs lost all feeling. Looking down I saw gushes of blood pouring from my leg and somewhere on my torso.
Only then did I hear the two explosions of sound. The mob stopped dead in their tracks, looking back over their shoulders.
This is madness, I thought. What’s happening? It was as if everything had broken loose, like refuse floating randomly on the sea. Why was I bleeding?
I raised my head and saw Carmody Reece, gun pointed at me. Her face was like a cracked plate, all warped and distorted, cold and steely eyes offsetting the tendons that bulged in her neck, the chin askew. I saw the agony on her face and knew that she had been the one following Lester and I in the black sedan. I knew that I was lost.
She would not miss with the next one.
“Drop the gun,” I heard and, glancing behind her, I noticed Gibbon and two other cops. Only Gibbon was armed, his gun pointed at her back.
Jack O’Grady stepped in between them, shielding Carmody from Gibbon’s line of fire.
There was, for a moment, a dreadful silence, and I felt my leg give way and I fell onto my knees. Around the four of us the crowd formed a circle, a cloud of shadowy faces and arms and legs, silent, watchful, menacing.
Carmody’s hand didn’t waver, and I closed my eyes, in disbelief.
“Get out of the way, Jack.” Gibbon said.
“Don’t shoot her, please.”
“Get out of the damn way.”
O’Grady didn’t move.
It happened in a split second. I heard a volley of shots. Fire spurted from Carmody’s gun. Behind her Gibbon fired and O’Grady went down like a falling leaf, all sidewards. Before me Carmody kept pulling the trigger, but she was out of bullets.
“Die,” she said to me, and I blacked out.
I came to as they wheeled me out to the ambulance and I felt the wetness on my face. Someone’s crying over me, I thought, but I was wrong. Outside it was raining, and a cool southerly breeze was sweeping over the city.
* * * *
Occasionally I meet people who were jazz fans. Sometimes the forties come up. Sometimes I think that there, in the flash of an eye, or a word slipped into context, they hint that they had been there on that night. With a brief meeting of eyes nothing more need be said. But always afterwards I begin to doubt.
Gibbon kept quiet because of the signed agreement that O’Grady had won from him in poker. He didn’t want to ruin his career by the contract coming to light. The Communist Party kept quiet because they had been illegally serving alcohol. They preferred not to have the police investigating their organization. And in that conspiracy of silence the story of O’Grady’s death and Lester Green’s tour of Australia was lost. In the minds of many the memory slowly faded. The gigs at the Uptown Club became nothing but another barely remembered night from years before: ‘Who was it that played?’ It became common knowledge later that Lester Green’s tour had been cancelled in ‘48, and then, in time, it was forgotten altogether.
At first I thought of Carmody Reece as responsible for those events, but later, after the women’s liberation movement of the seventies, I learned to think of things differently. Hers was the greater tragedy. She had tried to walk the lines of independence in a world that had no space for that. Things and events bore down on her and trapped her and turned her confidence and power into something mangled and broken. They took her away to the Kew Asylum, and there she stayed an embarrassment I think, to her family. I visited her once, in the late fifties, in that cold establishment. She didn’t recognize me, and I sat awkwardly beside her. The drugs and lack of exercise had broken her beauty. I felt I was sitting beside a middle-aged woman with straggly hair and pasty skin.
After about half an hour someone put on a record of Billie Holiday and Carmody immediately put her hands on her ears and screamed “stop it, stop it,” over and over, her wail piteous and disturbing.
The nurse stepped quickly in, a syringe glistening in the light.
“I’m sorry sir, you’ll have to go.”
I left to the sound of Billie echoing down the hallway; and after I left that house on the hill I ran and ran, through the park, down the street, trying to concentrate on the air against my cheeks, but I could not get away.
I joined the Communist Party, of course, and left later as Kruschev’s speech broke like a tidal wave against the parties across the world. Later, also, I returned to University and my parents were finally relieved as I gained a degree and started life once more in the decent and respectable vocation of teaching. Somewhere in those days though I lost the will to struggle and fight and resigned myself to the quiet life. For that reason I am at one with my generation who watched the sixties come and, though I supported those kids with their talk of freedom and liberation, I watched from afar as I have done for the rest of my life. I am only a chronicler.
Many times I searched for the mansion amongst the hills, heading up driveways to find only little houses, apologizing to owners irate at the intrusion, or entering some of the mansions that have become bed and breakfasts, or function centres, and realizing that this was, in fact, not the one.
You know, of course, that Lester Green’s career was tragically short and that he never made it into the studio. It seemed he lost his spark sometime after his trip to Melbourne, and that from there his life was a descent so common amongst his contemporaries. He has dropped almost out of jazz history. As you know, a reference can be found to him in Gaoa’s Jazz History, and that line in Jilian Smith’s otherwise superlative Jazz in Australia: ‘It was around this time that it was rumoured that a talented young pianist named Lester Green was to tour Australia.’
It was some fifteen years later, as I was perusing one of those little second hand stores, among the tree-lined streets of Carlton, amongst the ancient terraces and the plane trees just dropping their autumn leaves, that I found a battered old phonographic record with a dusty and stained cover. The cover showed the outline of a trumpeter leaning back and blowing hard, and several spots, intended, I think, to be lights in the background. But what interested me was its title: Lester Green’s Blue Nights.
From where could this have come? Was it some record from America that I was previously unaware of? Had Lester Green in fact made it into the studio?
I turned the record over with a beating heart and squinted at the writing on the back, that proudly proclaimed it: ‘The definitive recording of a selection of Lester Green’s three gigs in 1946.’
The details were wrong; surely this wasn’t Lester Green.
I rapidly bought it, and rushed home.
From the moment I heard the tight clusters and the intensely disturbed runs I felt a shiver down my spine. And as I put it on, even now, I sense the drawing power of that man, Lester Green. And I feel my legs begin to raise themselves all jagged and awry, my arms, all odd angles and jaunty motions, and I feel a strangle tingling on my skin as I begin to dance.