Jazzing in A-Flat

it was out of sight, that twelve-bar solo iggie played on susan

Back in 1937, Susan Koenig had gently patted my hand and told me my Moonlight Sonata was the most beautiful thing she'd heard in her life. In December of 1943, we were both 17 years old and I was itching to get into her pants (or anybody's, for that matter). I had no real idea what she looked like, but I had formed some tactile, olfactory and auditory impressions--I had touched her a little, smelled her a lot and hardly listened to her at all.

Every Friday afternoon, Santa Lucia's held a social for its juniors and seniors, and I had been dogging Susan's tracks for the better part of a year, seeking her out in the school gymnasium while the record player oozed Harry James's I Had the Craziest Dream, Dinah Shore's You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To or Freddy Martin's I Look at Heaven, a popularization of the Grieg concerto upon which I'd worked so long and hard. I was working equally long and hard on Susan, who--unless my senses were sending absolutely haywire messages to my brain--looked something like this:

1. She was approximately 5'4" tall. I reckoned this by subtracting six inches from my own height, because, according to my Braille ruler, that half foot was the distance between the top of my head and the tip of my nose. The top of Susan's head came to just under my nose. Subtracting six inches from my own height, which was 5'10" in 1943, I got a girl who measured 5'4".

2. Her eyes were brown. She told me this. She wore shades all the time. So did I.

3. She wore her hair very long, almost to the middle of her back. It would brush the top of my hand as we danced. The style was unusual for 1943, when girls were wearing shoulder-length pageboys, with or without high pompadours. But Susan later told me it was simpler and neater for a blind girl to wear it long and straight.

4. Her brassiere size was 36C. I pressed against her chest a lot and based my estimate on empirical knowledge, having handled many such garments in my Aunt Bianca's corset shop and having been intimately involved with Michelle's bras during the 13-month period of her extraordinary growth. Michelle's bra size, when she moved away in 1941, was a 35D.

5. The top of Susan's head smelled of Ivory soap. Her ear lobes smelled of Worth's Je Reviens. She later identified this brand name for me while my nose was nestled between her naked breasts, where she also dabbed a bit of that intoxicating scent.

6. Her voice, angelic back there in 1937, when she'd praised me for my performance, had lowered in pitch to a G below middle C, was somewhat husky, always breathless, even when she wasn't whispering in my ear as we endlessly circled that gymnasium floor and tried to avoid collisions.

Did you know that blind people can detect the presence of an object by the echoes or warmth it gives off, and even by changes it causes in the air pressure, which are felt on the face? A little-known fact, but scientifically authenticated. I once detected the presence of a short, fat lady standing on the corner of White Plains Road and 217th Street and asked her if the approaching trolley went to Fordham Road. When she did not reply, I asked the question again and discovered I was talking to a mailbox. The mailbox did not answer me. But then again, neither did it answer the Martians when they insisted it take them to its leader. Which reminds me of what Django Reinhardt, the gypsy jazz guitarist, said when he first came to America, in 1946: "Take me to Dizzy."

Susan Koenig made me dizzy.

We did not talk very much as we danced our way around the world, preferring to sniff each other and rub against each other and derive whatever small erotic pleasures we could while the eagle-eyed nuns watched our every fumbling move. But in our brief, breathless conversations over the course of countless Fridays spent in that room lingeringly reeking of dirty socks and Jockey shorts, I learned that Susan's father had been born in Munich and that he'd gone back there in the fall of 1934 because he wanted to be in on the big resurrection Mr. Hitler was promising. Mrs. Koenig, an Irish-American lady born and raised in Brooklyn, chose not to accompany her brown-shirted mate on his return to the fatherland, and so the two were separated when Susan was eight and her older brother was ten. Her parents were legally divorced in 1938, by which time Herr Koenig was probably smashing the plate-glass windows of Jewish merchants--"Good riddance to him!" Susan said. She had no idea where he was now and no desire to find out. Her fear, before her brother was drafted, was that he might be sent to Europe, where he would meet his own father on a battlefield and put a bullet between his eyes. Not that she cared about her father. But suppose the reverse happened? The thought had been too dreadful to contemplate and she'd been enormously relieved when her brother was sent to the Pacific, even though she was terribly afraid of all the awful things the Japs did, like burying prisoners up to their necks in anthills and then covering their faces with honey and letting the ants eat them to death--urggh, it was disgusting. She could not wait for her brother to get home from the war. They had had such good times together.

The thing that interested me most about Susan's autobiographical meanderings as we meandered the length of the gymnasium and back again in time to Ellington's Don't Get Around Much Anymore (which I'd heard on one of my brother's Duke records as Never No Lament, before lyrics were added to it) was the incidental information they provided on her mother's occupation and hours of employment. Her mother had never remarried and she now worked as a saleslady at Macy's downtown. Normally, she worked only five days a week, Monday to Friday, from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., except on Thursdays, when the store was open till nine p.m. But Thanksgiving had come and gone and the annual Christmas rush was on, despite the fact that a war was raging in Europe and the Pacific, and her mother had been asked to work a full day on Saturdays as well until the holidays were over. Counting off a steady four/four beat, shuffling around the gym floor, sniffing in Susan's Je Reviens and pressing against her as discreetly as I knew how, I made a lightning calculation: On Saturdays, her father was in Germany, her mother was in Macy's and her brother was on a censored atoll. This meant that Susan would be alone in the Koenig apartment any Saturday I decided to drop by to discuss jazz and the weather while inadvertently and accidentally taking off her pants. This was a discovery of no small importance to a 17-year-old blind boy. For, whereas normally sighted youngsters of my age were being granted licenses to drive in 1943, and thereby had access to mobile bedrooms, we underprivileged blind adolescents, possessed of the same overriding sex drives, could find no appropriate spaces for the unleashing of those furious urges, it being December and quite cold in Bronx Park, where, if you took down a girl's drawers, she might suffer frostbite rather than delloration.

Two weeks after the Friday dance at which I'd learned that Susan was alone in the apartment virtually all day every Saturday, I found my way to White Plains Road and asked a mailbox whether the approaching trolley went all the way to Mount Vernon or stopped at the Bronx border, as many of them did; Susan lived just a block over the city line. The mailbox turned out to be a short, fat lady who told me it did, indeed, go all the way. Determined to do the same, I hopped onto the trolley and rode it uptown, and then walked down the short street to Susan's block and found Susan's address with a little help from a kindly neighborhood yenta who led me into the lobby of the building, and summoned the elevator for me, and told me it was the fourth floor, and wanted to know if she should come up with me and show me the exact door, little did she know what was on the mind of the Mad Blind Rapist, Ignazio Silvio Di Palermo!

"Who is it?" Susan asked when I knocked on the door.

"Me," I said.

"Iggie?" she asked, recognizing my voice at once.

It was exactly 12 noon.

I lost my virginity an hour later.

I started by telling Susan I just happened to be in the neighborhood and thought I'd drop in. This was an outrageous lie that might have been swallowed had Susan herself not been blind. Being blind, she knew that none of us just happened to be anyplace. We took ourselves where we wanted to go, and normally we prepared ourselves in advance with detailed mental maps of the exact transportation systems we would use, and the exact number of streets we would traverse after we got off a trolley, train or bus, and the exact number of doorways to the dentist's or the fishmonger's. (Actually, we could smell the fish store and didn't have to count doorways.)

But she let the lie pass, which I thought was an encouraging sign, and she told me she was delighted I'd dropped in, or stopped by, or whatever it was she said, because she found it terribly lonely sitting here all alone in the apartment from eight in the morning, when her mother left, to sometimes nine or ten at night, when her mother got home. It was so cold this month that she hardly went outdoors anymore, and just sitting here listening to the radio or reading Braille got terribly boring, though now that her brother was gone and there was no one to help her with the selection of her clothes, she had begun occupying herself by marking them according to color and style, using little French knots on the red dresses and sweaters, or cross-stitches on the blue ones, or a single bead sewn into a green skirt, where it wouldn't show when she was wearing it, and hanging color-coordinated belts with their proper skirts, and making little Braille labels for drawers containing different shades of nylon stockings or different-colored panties and brassieres. I cleared my throat at the very mention of these unmentionables and said that I myself paid little attention to my appearance, sometimes going to school wearing different-colored socks, or a green tie with a blue suit, or black shoes with tan trousers. My mother kept telling me I looked like Coxey's Army, whatever that was. Susan giggled. She didn't know what Coxey's Army was, either, but it sounded very funny. She told me it was different for a girl, a girl had to look attractive even if she was blind, and I told her I thought she looked very attractive, and she said, Why, thank you, Iggie.

Blind people, if you haven't realized it by now, accept the words see and look without any feelings of self-consciousness or embarrassment, except when some well-meaning dope says, "Just look at that rain, will you?" and then immediately and fumblingly adds, "Oh, for-give me, please, I should have realized you can't... I mean, I know I shouldn't have . . . that is, I meant . . ." as if we hadn't heard the rain and smelled the sudden scent of dust riddled on a summer street, as if we hadn't seen the goddamn rain. Susan said if I were truly serious about becoming a jazz piano player (and I assured her I was), well, then, wouldn't that mean I'd have to perform before audiences? Sighted audiences? So maybe I should begin paying a little attention to the way I dressed, because whereas a suit with an egg stain on it didn't mean very much to us, it did offend people who could see and evoked the sort of pity none of us encouraged and all of us resented.

I told her maybe she was right, and since Susan had provided the perfect opportunity for further conversation, having mentioned jazz, I told her about all the exciting discoveries I'd been making, all of which I'm sure thrilled her to the marrow. I had figured out all by myself, for example, that a great many of the songs I was listening to and trying to learn had the identical sequence of chords in the first two bars and that the progression, in the key of C, at least, was C six, A minor, D minor and G seven. Susan would probably recognize these as the underlying chords of We Want Cantor--if she tried it, she'd see what I meant. Susan tried We Want Cantor in her husky, breathless voice and admitted she'd never realized such an amazing thing about that particular tune. Well, it's not only that tune, I said. Songs like I Got Rhythm and These Foolish Things (Oh, I love that song, Susan said), yes, I said, and Blue Moon and dozens of other songs I'd been learning, all started with those same chords in the first two bars.

That's really interesting, Susan said, would you like to see how I've arranged my things?

She led me into her bedroom and told me that because all her bobby sox were white, she had them all in this drawer here, but when it came to nylons, they were difficult to tell apart because there were her best stockings, for example, which she wore to the socials on Friday, and her everyday stockings for less special occasions, like when somebody was coming to the house to visit, and also they came in so many different shades (though she tried to buy neutral shades that went with any color) and she usually identified the pairs by tying them together after she'd rinsed them out and let them dry and immediately putting them into drawers marked with Braille labels--here, Iggie, these are my good stockings, feel them, they're much better than the ones in the other drawer.

When it came to garter belts, she had only two of them, a white one and a black one, and she identified the white one with a tiny button sewn here near the catch, can you feel it, Iggie? The brassieres were another problem, because if she wore a dark brassiere under a white blouse, it showed through the fabric, and if she wore a white brassiere with a black dress, say, and one of the straps showed, it looked positively horrible. She'd never had any trouble with her clothes when her brother was home, because he'd helped her choose colors and styles and was kind enough and honest enough to tell her when something looked dowdy or shabby. Well, as a matter of fact, he'd begun helping her dress when she was seven years old and her father left the family and her mother had to take a job and left for work early each morning. Here's one of my drawers for panties, she said. These are my favorite ones, they're a pale blue with lace around the leg holes, can you feel the lace, Iggie? They're rayon, I don't usually wear rayon panties for everyday, I've got a drawer full of cotton panties, those are here, Iggie. Like, for example, when I'm just wearing an old skirt and a blouse, like today, I'll just wear a half-slip and cotton panties under it, that's what I'm wearing today. My brother used to kid me a lot about wearing cotton panties, he said only snot-nosed little kids wore cotton panties, if I was as grownup as I thought I was, I'd be wearing rayon, he always used to kid me that way. Well, I'm sure you're not interested in my under things.

We sat on the edge of her bed and I told Susan I'd known her for, gosh, how many years was it now . . . ?

Six, Susan said.

Yeah, six years, I said, wow, that's a long time to know somebody. And whereas I had some idea of what she looked like, because, you know, we'd talked a lot and all, and naturally, I knew a lot of things about her . . . but I'd never in all that time explored her face with my hands, which was possibly the only way I'd ever really get to know what she really looked like, ever get to form a mental image to augment the other impressions I'd. . . .

You can touch my face if you like, she said, and very softly added, Iggie.

I touched her face. Gently, lingeringly, with both hands, I touched the wide brow below the delicate hairline, and then gingerly explored the arched eyebrows, and then lifted the dark glasses onto her forehead, away from her sightless eyes, and touched the lids and the lashes, and while the glasses were still raised, I touched the bridge of her nose and felt along it to the delicately curved tip, a fine film of perspiration on it, and then moved my hands outward toward her cheekbones. I have freckles, she said, and I answered, You never mentioned that, and she murmured, Yes. And then I gently lowered the glasses over her eyes again and ran my hands lightly over her cheeks and the line of her jaw and her chin, and explored her mouth, touched the bow of her upper lip where it curved away from her teeth, and the fleshy lower lip, and then the moist inner membrane as she parted her lips and I said, You're beautiful, Susan.

Sitting on her bed, my hands in my lap again, we began talking about the nuns at school, the ones we particularly loved or despised, and about kids we'd known for God knew how long, and how we would miss them after we graduated next June, though I said it wasn't necessary to lose track of people you really liked or admired, it would be a shame, for example, if she and I lost contact after we'd known each other such a long time. Susan quickly said, Oh, no, we mustn't let that happen, and I agreed, No, we certainly mustn't, not now that we were really getting to know each other even better. Susan said there were some kids, though, she wouldn't mind seeing the last of. Kids like Donald Hagstrom, who was always using being blind as an excuse to go feeling around, did I know what she meant? No, I said, and Susan said, You know, he puts his hands out in front of him and goes feeling around, you know, hoping he'll, you know, bump up against someone, you know, like in the coat closet or someplace, just feeling around, do you understand what I mean, Iggie?

Oh, I said.

He's done that to me a few times, Susan said. I slapped his face for him one time. I know he can tell I'm there, and it's not only me, it's lots of the other girls, too, he knows we're there, he just makes believe he's groping around, it's really (continued on page 192)Jazzing in A-Flat(contibued from page 92) humiliating and embarrassing. Girls don't like to be grabbed that way, Iggie. I mean, if they're going to be touched at all, especially there, where it's so personal and private, they want to be touched gently. The way you touched my face. That way.

This way? I asked, and I reached out and touched the soft skin of her neck, and she said, Yes, that way, but of course he touches lower. Donald. I mean, When he touches. And not as gentle as that. A little lower, though.

Here? I said.

Yes, she said, but you'd better stop. Iggie, because we're all alone here and my mother won't be home till very late tonight, so I don't think you should be doing that, do you?

I guess not, I said.

Though it feels very nice, she said, you have nice hands.

Thank you, I said.

You're welcome, she said, but please stop. OK? My brother has very gentle hands, too, did I tell you he used to dress me when I was very small? Well, actually, he used to help me dress right until the time he left for the Army. He'd sit here right on the edge of the bed. right where we're sitting, and I'd be putting on a pair of stockings and fumbling with the damn garters. Iggie. I really don't think you should be doing that, do you? and he'd say he hoped I wasn't planning on wearing those stockings with the red dress or the green one or whatever it was, he was really very helpful, I miss him a lot.

The buttons are different, you know, she said. On a girl's blouse. They're the reverse. I mean, from a boy's. Lots of boys have trouble unbuttoning a girl's blouse, because the buttons are turned around. I remember once, will you promise not to tell this to anyone. I was fifteen, I guess, and I'd gone to a party at a girl's house up the street, she can see and everything, she's not blind, and they had a keg of beer there. I think it was a party for some boy who was going into the Army. I'm not sure, it was right after Pearl Harbor. And I drank a lot of beer, and I got very, well, not drunk, but sort of tipsy, you know, and when I came home, my brother was lying here on my bed. reading, my mother was out someplace, he took one look at me and said. Oh-oh. I couldn't even unbutton my own blouse. would you believe it? he had to unbutton it for me. And even though he'd had lots of practice dressing me when I was small, he still had trouble getting my blouse off that night, I guess because I was weaving all over the room, oh. God. it was so silly. I finally passed out cold and didn't remember a thing the next morning, my clothes were on the chair there, Iggie, you're getting me very hot.

I am now going to attempt something that might frighten even the likes of Oscar Peterson. I am going to demonstrate what it is like to play a jazz solo, and I am going to do so in terms of what happened with Susan Koenig in her bedroom that day after we got through the basics of taking off her blouse and her bra and her skirt and her half-slip and finally her cotton panties, and after she unbottoned my fly and helped me off with my undershorts and fell upon me with blind expertise and unbridled passion. I am going to prove to you not only what a great piano player I am but also what a unique and marvelous writer I could be (if only I had the time), and I am going to do so by demonstrating what jazz would look like if you were reading it in the English language instead of hearing it in a smoky night club. An impossible feat, you say? Stick around, you ain't seen nothing yet.

To keep this simple (look, he's already copping out!), I'm going to use a 12-bar blues chart with only 21 chords in it, as opposed to a more complex 32-bar chart with as many as 64 chords in it. If I were playing a real blues chorus, the chords I'd use most frequently in the key of A-flat, let's say, would be A-flat seven, D-flat seven and E-flat seven. But we're not concerning ourselves with chords in what follows: we're substituting words for chords.

This, then, would be the chord chart for Jazzing in A-Flat. as it is known in England (a pun, Mom), or, as it is known to American blues buffs, simply, Up in Susan's Womb (another one; sorry. Mom).

Bar 1: Susan

Bar 2: Me

Bar 3: Susan

Bar 4: Bed

Bar 5: Me

Bar 6: Me

Bar 7: December and Afternoon

Bar 8: Hot and Gold

Bar 9: Afternoon and Evening

Bar 10: Afternoon and Evening

Bar 11: Susan and Bedded and I and Myself

Bar 12: Limp and Dusk and Bed

Each bar has four beats in it. but the last two bars combined have only seven beats and are called, traditionally and unimaginatively, a seven-beater, the last beat understood but not played. If you count all the capitalized words in all the bars above, you'll discover there are exactly 21 of them, just as promised. Their selection was determined by the actual incidence of a conventional set of chords in a typical blues chorus, with which I've taken no liberties. For example, the word Bed in the chart represents an A-flat dominant chord, whereas the word Bedded represents an A-flat dominant inversion--Bed, therefore, becomes Bedded, the same notes but in a different order.

The first chorus of the tune will consist of these chords' being played in the left hand and the composer's melody's being played in the right hand almost exactly as he wrote it. I'll add a swing to it that did not exist in the original sheet music; but for the most part, I'll play it almost straight, in order to identify it (solely as a courtesy) for my audience. The choruses following the head chorus will be improvised, invented on the spot, and will bear no resemblance to the original tune, unless I choose to refer back to it occasionally, again solely as a courtesy. I am interested only in the chord chart. And the chart consists of those 21 words listed previously. The rest is all melody--my melody, not the composer's. In fact, the melodies I improvise in each succeeding chorus may have nothing whatever to do with sex per se, except as sex defines the over-all "mood" of the tune. In short, the blowing line I invent to go with the chord progression doesn't need to make an emotional or philosophic commitment to the composer's melody. I can use all sorts of musical punctuation in my running line--eighth notes, eighth-note triplets, 32nd notes, 64th notes, runs--the way I would use commas, semicolons, periods or exclamation points. I can repeat sequential figures, augmenting or diminishing licks as I see fit. or I can utilize silences if I choose. (A jazzman listening to J. J. Johnson once said. "I sure like those notes he's playing." and another cat replied. "I like the ones he isn't playing.") I can do whatever I want with whatever melody I invent. I am entirely free to create.

But I cannot deviate from the chart. Once the chart is set in motion, it is inviolable, it is inexorable, it is inevitable. I am locked into it tonally and rhythmically. I cannot change Susan to Alice, nor can I hold that chord for longer than the four beats prescribed in bar one, though I can, of course, repeat it four times in that measure, if I like. At the end of those four beats, Me must come in for another four beats: the chart so dictates. When it comes time for me to play Afternoon for two beats in bar seven, I'd better not be lingering on December. I can use substitute chords, or passing chords, or what are known as appoggiatura chords--Shot to Hot or Blimp to Limp--but only to get me where I have to be when I have to be there. Jazz is a moving, volatile, energetic force that is constantly going someplace. Each chord exists only because it is in motion toward the next chord and from the chord preceding it. It's pure Marxist music, in a sense, utilizing the dialectic process throughout. I can take the chord Evening and break it into an arpeggio if I choose, transforming it into a linear Eve, En, Ing, or I can play it diatonically E, V, E, N, I, N, G, as a mode, or I can play it as a shell. Evng, but I have to play it: it is part of the chart and the chart is the track upon which the express train of my improvisation runs.

So--in the first 12 bars, I'll play Jazzing in A-Flat as the composer wrote it, mingling and mixing right-hand melody with left-hand harmony, because we're doing prose here and not musical notation, and anyway that's exactly as you'd hear it. In the next 12 bars, I'll improvise a jazz solo with a blowing line unrelated to the original melody except where brief reference may be made to it, the entire improvisation based on those 21 chords in the relentless chord chart. Then, utilizing whatever bag of tricks I possess, I'll take us into the final 12 bars, where I'll play the head again almost as straight as I did at the top, and then go home ("head and out," as it's called). All of this will be enormously abbreviated, you understand. A jazz solo, especially on a blues chart, can go on and on all night. This solo will consist of only three choruses.

Ready?

Ah-onetwothreefour. . . .

Susan spent six hours with/Me, who soon learned that/Susan was not a virgin, that her/Bed had been shared with her brother, who, like/Me, had desired her, but, unlike/Me, had been humping her for years./December was my turn, that Afternoon apartment/. . . Hot radiators clanging, Cold wind rattling the windows./Afternoon waning. Evening on the way, Oh, that Afternoon! Coming four times and, in the Evening, once again in/Susan's mouth. Bedded still, she asked that I let Myself out. lying there Limp, still wearing dark glasses, as Dusk shadowed the rumpled Bed.

Susiphany Su Su whispering/Me, and oh, andering, Meandering. browneyed/Su-San flam-boy-ant, optimum/Bed! a dead hollow vesper, a con-spir-a-see/Me-eyed poinciana, Me-eyed,/o solo Me-eyed poin-/Dee-Cem-Ber. all white, and A-F-T-Ernoon all all all un-ending./Hot musky Hot mustard. Cold stinking Cold thurible,/After-sun and Noon sinking. E,V,E, Ning fuck and tongue, an/Aftertaste, but Noon gone, After-Noon screaming, screening Even-ing/Sususan, Su-Sanitary seas, Bedazzled by moonlight and I . . . I . . . coconut-fronded, My-camelsel Fconsciousness slinkily slumbering/Limpingly stuttering. Duskily darkening, deepening daisies and violets in Beds.

Susan six hours with/Me all astonished, for/Susan's no virgin, her/Bed was her brother's!/Me she fucked royally./Me she taught brotherwise, all through/December, or all Afternoon, at least./Hot dizzy licks, Cold chops but warm cockles,/Afternoon heat begat cool Evening's expertise./Afternoon practice for Evening's fel-ay-she-oh/Susan! oh Christ! how she Bedded and wedded and urged that I be Myself./Limply suggested she'd best be alone now, Dusk softly shrugging and hugging her naked and leaving her lying in shades on her Bed.