So you could say that things were changing, but they weren’t changing fast, and if you wanted to get into what it was like outside New York—take, for example, Miami, where a black man couldn’t be on the streets after nine at night without a note from a white man explaining—
And that was just the sort of lecturing that would put Lorena in stitches. Yes, Professor, she would say. I am taking notes.
As for this Martin Dempsey, Hooper couldn’t tell if he was a joker or just plain simple. Like when Hooper asked him about quitting Chester Kingsley and Martin said, Then you take it. Here. It’s yours, like that was something that could happen in this world. Like the worst-paid seat in Kingsley’s outfit wouldn’t be the best payday Hooper had ever seen. If Dempsey knew what he was saying, then he was cold-blooded. And if he didn’t—if he hadn’t caught on that the brownest guy in the Kingsley band was maybe half Italian—then he was flat-out ignorant. Or maybe it was because he was Irish. America was a strange land, and it could take a man a while to figure out just how strange.
A bullet-headed white man snapped Hooper out of his mental ramblings. He shouted, “Hey, go, daddy-o!”—trying out the hep-cat slang he had likely read about in Life magazine. In his Sears and Roebuck shirt and fresh-pressed trousers, he laughed at his own joke and looked from side to side for a smile or nod or a You got that right. Around him, a sea of white faces squinted into the sun and the sun kept right on burning.
Hooper could only shake his head. These folks might bring a taste of the Savoy home with them to New Haven or Pleasantville or White Plains, but they would never see the Savoy for themselves. They didn’t know that they were getting but a keyhole view of what Willie and Dolores could really do—and that if you gave them a dance floor and a full band to fuel them, they could do more than dance: they could fly. Sure, Lindbergh had hopped across the Atlantic but these dancers did him one better. They did it without wings.
When Hooper had landed the pavilion job, he thought of it as a foot in the door, but he had been playing in that ramshackle jug band since April and no one had mentioned him sitting in at the Track, no matter how he blew his horn. It was a long way from Flushing Meadow to Harlem and even Hooper’s sound couldn’t carry that far. Just the other night, after they had run into Martin and his brother at the bar, he told Lorena that maybe he should think about quitting the fair. “Some days I feel like I’m a monkey in the zoo,” he said.
Lorena rolled her eyes and gave him that laugh. “Monkeys gotta eat too,” she said.
Still, there were times when his mind didn’t wander, when he kept body and soul together, shut his eyes, and wrapped himself in the music. Then he wasn’t playing outside in the hot sun for sweating tourists who stared and moved on. He was following the bass line like it was a bright path through the darkness and every drumbeat another step forward. The piano was another traveler on that path and sometimes they raced, sometimes they danced, sometimes they walked and told stories—joyous, sorrowful, and shades of blue in between. He wanted to stay in these moments, but these songs had a logic of their own. The Savoy Pavilion had to stick to its schedule: twenty minutes of music and dancing and then the fairgoers had to move on. To the Aquacade or the Music Hall, Penguin Island or Sun Valley, Old New York or Merrie England or, Lord help them, to Jungleland.
THE BOWERY
DON’T STARE, LILLY. IT’S not polite. Lilly could still hear her mother’s voice whenever she caught herself looking—no, staring—at another person. It wasn’t polite, but it was necessary. She walked through the city, patient as a coiled spring for the right gesture, glance, or convergence of bodies and objects. Moments before, on the street outside the Automat, she had found just such a convergence—the fruits of staring, she would happily admit.
She had photographed the man on Houston Street straight on. He’d caught her eye because of the simple irony of his situation: a man with an extravagantly unkempt, almost Prussian mustache, holding a sandwich board for a shop that trafficked in electric razors. Stubble like iron filings clung to his cheeks, chin, and neck. He resembled a penniless officer in a nineteenth-century novel, one of those fat books by some brooding, Christ-mad Russian. The picture was funny, in a quick, droll sort of way, but as she continued to stare at the man, the simple irony began to fade. The sandwich board obscured his body from his Adam’s apple almost to the tops of his shoes. There was no visible evidence of arms, hands, knees. Those parts that made him a man—his heart, his gut, his cock—all of it had to be inferred. Which was always true, to some extent; didn’t trousers, a shirt, and a jacket require a similar leap of faith? And here was the part that Josef would love: the man had erased 95 percent of his visible humanity in service to a product he either chose not to use or could not afford—but just as the sign rebuked him, he, in turn, undermined it. The photo could be a statement about the ways that industrial capital co-opted the soul while the self sought the means to sabotage—or at least make a mockery of—the terms of its own imprisonment.
Then again, it might just be a funny picture of a man in need of a shave, possibly even a man who couldn’t read the words he’d been paid a nickel to promote.