A Song In His Pocket

My girl millie has this nutty idea sometimes that we should just go around singing one of these songs I write until somebody notices. She's addicted to little pep-up things like: "How many drug stores you think Lana Turner sat around in before they got the idea she had to be discovered?" What had to be discovered there, I tell her, you could at least see with the bare eye.

I've been writing songs now for a couple of years, as a hobby; it has to be a hobby -- I might as well try to make a living selling pterodactyls. There's an old proverb which says of a certain sort of person, "If he started to sell hats, babies would be born without heads." I've always thought that was about me. I have a sheaf of songs as fat as the score of Handel's Messiah -- nobody will look at them. Here's my theory: to get all the way inside a music publisher's office you have to have long silky legs and a well-plunged neckline, and as it turns out, all I've got to recommend me is a pretty nice Adam's apple. What do you suppose it's like in there, where they buy the music? Cigarette trees and soda-water fountains? I guarantee there's not a music publisher in New York who would hesitate to set fire to his building rather than listen to me. It's mysterious. A big girl, sort of a receptionist at one of these places, tried to explain it to me once, while I stood under her bust where it was shady. "You look exactly like twenty minutes of wasted time," she said. So I figure, you know, the hell with it -- if you don't have any pull, let it go. But Millie has this deep simplicity -- she wants people to stand up for themselves. She thinks I can't stand up for myself because I'm spineless. "Well," I tell her, "how can you stand up if you don't have a spine?" But fooling around only makes her rabid.

"The songs are lousy, Mil," I say.

"That doesn't make a bit of difference. All the songs you hear nowadays are lousy. Are yours any more lousy? I mean, how lousy is lousy?"

I have to admit she has a point there. "Look," I say, "you probably haven't noticed, but I work five days per week." I sell fire insurance, you see, so naturally I don't have time to plug songs like the boys in the business.

"There's Saturday."

"Nobody in on Saturday."

"OK, how about your lunch hour?"

"Same as everybody else's. What do I do, sing to them in Liggett's?"

"Sure, why not, if that's the only way? But you could get an hour off sometime! You haven't even tried with Zulu Hitchhike!" Zulu Hitchhike, that was the latest product -- it might have had a chance, with the right connections, Mitch Miller or somebody. It was pretty noisy, anyway. But I've given up so many times I don't even bother to copyright the new ones as they come along. I just sing them once, softly to myself in the john, before I lay them to rest.

"You can't sell a song on a street corner," I tell Millie.

"It's a good song," she says, to give me ambition.

"Sure, it's great," I say. "It's terrible: everybody would love it if they happened to hear it. But shut off that crazy beam in your eyes, kid -- no accordion, no hat for the pennies: that's where I draw the line!"

But you know how women are, once they get hold of a Truth they can't sit still. And what happened to me, Millie actually talked me into advertising a song at random -- not on the street corner, you know, but in bars and such where professional music people are supposed to hang out. It was a thing called Got a Song in My Pocket. How we did it sounds crazy, but is there an uncrazy way to just burst out with a song in a public place, if you're not part of a movie, I mean?

We'd go into a restaurant where some of the bodies belonged, we'd been told, to song-sellers and pushers and players, and when we had maybe a sandwich and a glass before us, Millie would say, very loud: "Honey, what was that lovely song you were singing to me the other day?"

"Oh," I'd reply -- we had all this worked out -- "you mean that little thing? You mean Got a Song in My Pocket, the one I wrote?"

"Yes! The one with music and lyrics by you. Why don't you sing it?"

"Here?"

"Yes, I like it."

"You want me to sing it? Now?"

"Please."

So off I'd go, a cappella:

"Got a song in my pocket,

Fish it out 'n sing it,

Jus' a li'l song about m' baby and me:

Don't rightly know if it got a melody

But the lyric's

Panegyric

And empiric

As can be ..."

And on like that. We'd go from place to place until Millie got tired. It takes her a long time to get tired. Most people stay alive on food and air, but she does it on optimism.

Calmly, at intervals, I'd repeat: "Millie, this is crazy."

She'd speak the one word: "Advertising." And on we'd go.

During this period I still went to work every morning, white shirt and tie in the subway, but in the evenings I'd change to a bohemian sweater and muss up my hair and start to skiffle out Song in My Pocket in some bar or other to a couple of drabs and a washed-out Dalmatian. I got pretty tired of singing that song. What was worse, I started to pick up delusions about it, seemed to hear it on everyone's lips, as if they were mumbling the lyrics to themselves. A couple of times I actually imagined I heard people singing it, or trying to -- very painful, since they usually had the second chorus wrong. By the end of a week, considering the number of renditions I had given, the song should have been as well known as the national anthem. "OK," I said, "enough. Now, we've advertised -- you happy?" As far as I could see, nothing had been accomplished. But Millie was undeterred. "The next step," she said, "is to find somebody to buy it."

"Right! That's not only the next step, it was also the last step!"

"Well, then I guess we just keep singing ..."

But I'd really had enough, and for a while she left me alone. I think she left me alone for four days. Then she came at me like this:

"We make a record!"

"Wha-at?"

"A record."

"What type of record, pal?"

"The type of record you give to a disc jockey. Pal. And once a disc jockey plays it we have a publisher!"

"Down comes the publisher in a golden car held by almost invisible wires from above the stage -- very nice effect."

"Always joking, Winkeler -- where will that get you?"

"Don' know," I said, "Ah'm wukin' on it."

"Look, honey, if you made a record at one of those booths and took it to Don Bateson or Jenny Gebhart Vance or somebody and got them to put it on the radio ..."

"You mean one of those little places like a closet where you put in a half buck?"

She nods.

"With not even accompaniment?"

"I'll chord for you on the harmonica."

"You? The harmonica?"

"Now sweetie ..."

"No!" I cried, "No! No! No!"

So after the record was made -- a tight squeeze, since Millie has one of those moving-parts harmonicas -- we started looking for a kindly disc jockey. You'd think that would be a snag, wouldn't you? For Millie?

"Look them up in the phone book," she said.

"Millie, they don't list disc jockeys in the phone book."

"In the yellow pages they do."

"Kid, they don't."

"Oh," she stamped, "you're a damned defeatist!"

But there is a program in the eerie hours coming out of Newark, where you call the crazy nut up and talk to him on the phone over the radio. Sometimes people sing -- I guess he holds the phone to the mike and grabs some hashish in the interlude. Nobody's listening anyway, except Millie and me. My eyes feel like desiccated watermelon seeds. It's late. It's three a.m. This guy is talking on the phone to an old lady who says she can only sleep on Tuesdays -- it's something happened in her youth, she says. This is Tuesday, but even so she can't get to sleep. What should she do?

"Cats, cats, what should she dooooo?" the jockey shouts. "This poor little lady can't sleep, sore-labor's-bath, buns-forhurt-minds ... so let's help a little, let's suggest a little, the world keeps turning, O Sophonisba, what shall we do for this fair lady?"

"He's insane," Millie says. "Call him."

"Never!" I cry. "Pour!" The bottle is no more than half empty.

"Call," she says, "and then the two of us" -- she drops her eyes -- "can horse around."

So, considering the prize I've been offered, I find myself on the line to the jockey character and all the whiskey-courage has suddenly gone out of me.

"So?" he says.

"Got a song," I breath. "Nize song. Name Winkeler. Trafalgar 4-7291."

"Hey cats" -- his shout comes at me from the phone and the radio -- "Got a guy here got a song called Winkle, Trafalgar 4-7291. Guy can't sleep on Tuesday, what should he dooooo?"

I wait, figuring maybe he'll come out of the fit. There is that awful silence you (continued on page 100)Song in his Pocket(continued from page 88) get on the radio. Then he screams at me, "So sing already, Winkle! Sing, sing!"

Millie is right there with the record and the player and we pipe Song in My Pocket all the way to his crazy ear in Newark, and in a second it's coming back to us through the air -- we're connected to the mike! It sounds tinny, muggy, distant as a cloud, but it's there, all right, right on the radio!

"He mentioned the phone number," Millie cried.

"Nize, Winkle, vedy nize," says the jockey -- I'd hung up the minute the record eased out, but he was still getting at me from the radio -- "Look, old hound, next time you start feeling that bad, just mutilate yourself!"

But Millie snaps off the radio. She has tears in her eyes. "Honey," she says, "you're in, you're in! That's advertising!"

"Fine," I say, "but naturally, with all the music publishers in town trying to get to me at once there is of course a crossing of the lines and busy-signals and that's why the phone doesn't ----"

"Ring."

"The phone," she says.

"Ring."

"Want me to get it?"

"Ring."

"It's your phone," she says sweetly.

I smile at her, cutting the next ring neatly in two. "Hello?" I say.

"This is Gold of Gold and DeGroat, Songs. You the guy just on the phone?"

I signal wildly to Millie. "I'm just on the phone now."

"Before," insists Gold, "on the air."

"That's me!"

"You come in tomorrow, you hear?" He mentioned the address.

"Sure, sure, what time tomorrow, Mr. Gold?"

"Any time. You tell the girl. Tell her your name. What is your name?"

"Winkeler, sir. James A. Winkeler. I'm ----"

"OK, you tell her, she'll shoot you in. Tomorrow, hear?" And he's gone.

Millie looks up in casual inquiry. "Appointment for tomorrow?" she asks.

I nod, stumbling toward a chair.

"Well, well," sings Millie, sarcastic. "Well, well, well." Then her eyes soften. "Come over here, you big dope."

By the next morning, though, she had dropped the irony and was all pep and propaganda. "When you go in to see him, don't sneak back into your shell like a frightened rabbit," she said, pushing me off. "Blow your trumpet, play the piano -- you know, stay awake and push!"

I flicked up one eyelid delicately between thumb and forefinger. "Awake and push," I repeated. I understood then why the old lady on the radio usually got some sleep on Tuesday night -- so she wouldn't feel the way I did on Wednesday morning. My blood just starting to circulate, my face held up by after-shave lotion, I started to hum the song in the subway, for practice, and my ears insisted that all the people around me were singing or humming or whistling it too. But after talking a lot with Millie and singing Song in My Pocket for a straight week and, well, horsing around until nearly six o'clock in the morning, you reach a stage where you no longer trust things like ears. One thing, I thought -- Millie was right all along. I was going to see Gold of Gold and DeGroat (I'd never heard of that one) simply because of advertising. Before I found the building I'd even convinced myself I had some chance of selling him an option on the song. Full of push, I bounded clumsily through the door of his office and hit sharply against a desk. The room was no bigger than a good-sized closet. There was no girl to tell my name to, I realized with disappointment. "Speak, son," said a voice from behind a cloud of cigar smoke, "I don't have all day." It was Mr. Gold -- he was built like a flour sack. Pretending to be alive I sat down immediately at his vintage upright and struck out the opening bars of my masterpiece. There was a definite stirring behind the fog of cigar smoke. I pounded away on the instrument in careless rapture, thinking that if a man couldn't sell music there was still a great future tuning music publishers' pianos.

But Gold was listening. He was still interested. It wasn't just a crazy three A.M. impulse gone sour. He even heaved himself to his feet -- obviously, with his build, a thing he wouldn't do for just anybody. He stepped across to the piano and placed his hand on my shoulder. I sagged but boldly struck up the lyric a second time. "Look, that's enough," said Gold. "I know it already."

"Sure, you've heard it on the radio!" I shouted, doing two complete revolutions on his revolving piano stool without a trace of my usual inhibition.

"And elsewhere," says Gold.

"In restaurants, in bars, at your family dentist!"

"Here in my office. About four days ago. Sung by the guy I took an option from. I also since heard it from three more guys tried to sell it to me. What's so special about this song every gonof in town should try to sell it to me?"

"It's ubiquitous," I said, my heart having bounced down near my shoes. Some crook had jumped the gun. No copyright, no protection ... Millie had advertised me right out of a hit tune! I would have hung myself if only there had been room to do so in Gold's office.

"Let me talk to your partner about this," I said, thinking I'd take a stab at the other guy -- I could tell I wouldn't get any justice out of Gold. "Where's DeGroat?"

"Sonny, I love you," Gold said, rocking his head from side to side. "You got the highest level gall I ever seen! I'm thinking I'll sue you, and you try to sell me the song which I already got an option on it! There is no DeGroat," he added, "I just put the name in the firm for class. It's the brand of cigar I smoke. Here, take one, you're a good boy, you got push -- I appreciate that."

So, to show you how things happen, we talk awhile, and he offers me a job, and before I can catch up with my pituitary gland, there I am with him in a new office, the size of a double-closet. I'm Gold's song pusher. But it isn't all that great. One consolation, Song in My Pocket flopped, after rising all of two inches from the ground in less than a month -- it would have killed me if the guy that picked up my uncopyrighted masterpiece had made out! I realized from this that the only difference between thieves and other people is that the thieves steal things and end up broke and the other people don't steal things and end up broke.

"Hell, the song doesn't matter," Gold insists, just like Millie. "Over a certain level, like does it have some music or a little lyric, after a point one song's as good as another. So big deal about Song in My Pocket -- we take one of those jingles of yours, we put in a harmonica solo, maybe a wind machine, plus a singing group they go habooble-la, habooble-la in the background, and you got a hit, boy, a hit!" A beam lights up his face and he has a mystical moment. "You can sell anything," he whispers, "anything. This is a crazy country." So when I complain things are moving slowly, his arm comes down across my shoulder like a side of beef, and he says: "All right, so we got to keep the firm going peddling fire insurance -- soon, boy, with you pushing, we'll have a hit!"

But I don't know. I've got troubles. One thing, I'm making less on insurance with Gold than I did before. Then there's all the crazy phone calls. Ever since I was on the radio from Newark, I've been getting these phone calls, mostly in the middle of the night. There are guys who want me to write a song about their life story and split 50-50, and jokers who -- God forbid -- want to sell me insurance, but the problem comes in with the babes. All these women keep calling me, with late-at-night in their voices, sometimes when Millie and me are sort of too involved for her to appreciate competition. She's getting a little disturbed, you know? I mean, maybe a touch of jealousy or something?

"Look," she says one night, "why don't you move? Or change your phone number?"

"I can't move, Mil," I say, "it's too expensive -- you should see the windy places in my wallet."

"Well, that fire insurance just doesn't sell fast enough, Winkeler."

"What do you want me to do, go out and start fires?"

"Big joke! You know, Winkeler, you're back where you started from? Horsing around is all right, but, you know, a girl wants other things now and then? Nice restaurants, liquor, a little giftie ..."

"A sable stole, a Ferrari ... Millie, you're nuts!"

"Look, I have an idea -- why don't you just forget about the music ..."

"Great!"

"... take out the lyrics and be a poet! I bet if you sent some of them off to the magazines, why ..."

So what I'm looking for now is an editor. You know, an editor with a sense of humor? I have this ode here, for example, cute little thing entitled Zulu Hitchhike. And if I don't find a guy soon who's willing to print it, I'm scared stiff Millie's going to come up with another idea.