Viper's Dream, page 10
“Mr. O was having his way with me. For two years. I hated it, Clyde. Every minute of it. But Mr. O was obsessed with me. And that last day, when I told him I was quitting for good, he started screaming and sobbing. Then I told him that I had spent the night with you. That’s when he really went crazy. He was strangling me. Said if he couldn’t have me, nobody would. Least of all, a thug like you. I thought he was gonna choke me to death, Clyde. That’s when I grabbed hold of the, the whatchamacallit.”
“The letter opener.”
“Yeah. I was fighting for my life, Clyde. But the law would never have believed that. They’d have sent me to the electric chair. I know what you and Peewee and Pork Chop did to save me. Matilda told me everything. I don’t know how I can ever thank you enough, Clyde.”
When Yolanda said those words, Viper thought he would melt. But he couldn’t show her that. He wanted to get the lowdown. He played it hard-boiled.
“So, what did you do when you got back to New Orleans?”
“I moved back in with my parents. Then, something else bad happened.”
“What?”
“I learned I was pregnant.”
“Mine?”
“No, Clyde, that would have been wonderful. But I was already pregnant that night we spent together. I just didn’t know it yet. And I couldn’t bear to have Mr. O’s baby. I just couldn’t do it. I had a … procedure.”
“I’m sorry, Yo-Yo.”
They stopped walking and sat down on a park bench.
“My parents were so ashamed,” Yolanda said, fighting back tears. “They’re good people. Simple, honest. They’ve worked their whole lives at the post office. Devout Catholics. I felt like such a disgrace. Anyway, I eventually took a job as a file clerk at an orphanage run by the Church. So, I didn’t become a nun. But I did try to make up for my sins.”
“You were more sinned against, Yo-Yo.”
“Thank you for saying so.”
“And what about your singing?”
“I gave it up.”
“But why?”
“It was just a silly kid’s ambition.”
“No, no! My trumpet playing was a silly kid’s ambition. You are gifted, Yo-Yo! Everybody at the Apollo heard it that night! You need to sing.”
“No, Clyde, I am devoted to Paul’s career. I’m here to support his singing.”
“Pretty Paul’s good,” Viper said. “I heard him last night. But damn, Yo-Yo, you’re at least as talented as he is. More so.”
“I’m here to serve him, Clyde. That’s my role.”
“How did you two meet?”
“He’s from New Orleans. Our parents are friends. I hadn’t seen him since I was a little girl. But he was touring with his band last year. Came by the house, charmed my parents. He swept me off my feet, Clyde. But sometimes I think I was just desperate to get out of my parents’ house. And to get back to New York. Paul proposed marriage, I said yes, next thing I knew, I was back in Harlem and pregnant again.”
“You and Paul have a child?”
“No, Clyde, I had a miscarriage. About three months ago.”
“Aw, Yo-Yo, I’m so sorry.”
That was when he put his arm around her. He thought she might pull away from him, but she leaned in, snuggled into his shoulder. The scent of her brought back an intoxicating memory of the night they’d made love four years earlier.
“Paul doesn’t know about the abortion. My doctor at Harlem Hospital says the procedure might have been botched by the person who did it down in New Orleans. I might not ever be able to carry a pregnancy to term. But Paul doesn’t know that. He just desperately wants to have kids. And I just want to make him happy.”
“It sounds to me like you’re trying to punish yourself. For the sins you think you committed. You want to give up singing. Devote yourself to a less talented singer who treats you like dirt.”
Viper felt Yolanda’s body stiffen in his embrace. “When did you become Dr. Freud?”
“And Paul’s a junkie. What have you got yourself into, Yo-Yo?”
Now she pulled away from him, sat up straight on the bench.
“I don’t like your tone.”
“Listen, Peewee, Pork Chop, and me, we’re gonna reopen Mr. O’s nightclub. Gonna call it Peewee’s. And we’ll be dealing marijuana outta there. We’re gonna make a lot of money, Yo-Yo. You say all you want is to make Paul happy. Well, all I want is to make you happy. What can I do to make you happy?”
“Is that what you really want, Clyde, to make me happy?”
“Yes.”
“Then give Paul work. Singing at the club and dealing gage.”
“All right. If that’s what you want, I’ll do it.”
“Thank you, Clyde. And thank you for saving my life.”
“Anytime, Yo-Yo. Anytime.”
CHAPTER
7
OF ALL THE HUNDRED OR so felines slinking, purring, climbing, prowling, scratching at the furniture, rolling about the floor and licking themselves, only one at the Cathouse approached the Viper as he sat on the couch in the baroness’s sprawling living room, contemplating the third of his three wishes on this night in November 1961. He had gotten quite stoned on the joint he had treated himself to earlier. This was the product everyone at the Cathouse was smoking tonight, a superb breed of marijuana, imported—or smuggled, if you prefer—from Thailand. He slowly looked around the room. There were still roughly twenty jazzmen scattered about, talking, drinking, eating, smoking, fiddling with their instruments, riffin’ while relaxin’. Pork Chop Bradley sat in a far corner, plucking his bass, his eyes closed. He looked almost like a man at prayer. Thelonious Monk hadn’t moved since they arrived at the Cathouse—Viper, Monk, and the baroness—in Nica’s Bentley. Viper didn’t know, but he could have guessed that Nica had been driving around Harlem specifically to find him, the reefer man. She had a houseful of musicians waiting back across the bridge in New Jersey, and she was running low on weed. Now Monk sat as still as a statue in his armchair. He clearly didn’t feel like conversing or playing the piano. He just continued to sit there in his silk Chinese beanie, glowering benignly.
The baroness stood before one of the Cathouse’s huge picture windows, immersed in quiet conversation with Miles Davis, the Manhattan skyline glittering across the river. Nica was smoking, her trademark cigarette holder clenched between her teeth. Miles was still wearing his pitch-black sunglasses. He pulled on the joint Viper had given him free of charge. Viper had so much respect for Miles. After he’d managed to quit his heroin habit, and once he’d formed his own bands, Miles could not abide the musicians he worked with abusing junk. Not even the great John Coltrane.
“I didn’t have no moral thing about Trane and all of them shooting heroin,” Miles once said, “because I had gone through that. But I couldn’t stand them showing up late for gigs and nodding off on the bandstand. I couldn’t tolerate that.”
Miles actually fired John Coltrane—the greatest saxophone player since Charlie Parker—from his band. That was the sweetest gift he could have given him. Coltrane was forced to get his act together. Like Miles, he quit heroin cold turkey. And now, like Miles, his music was thriving. But they were both incredibly strong. For every Miles and Coltrane, there were a dozen other jazzmen who had lost everything—their music, their loved ones, their lives—because of heroin.
“Yow.”
Viper heard the piercing sound at his feet. He looked down to see the one four-legged creature at the Cathouse that dared to come close to him. She had shiny beige fur that resembled cashmere, and sparkling green eyes. She looked straight up at the Viper and greeted him again.
“Yow.”
Yes, Viper thought, if Yolanda DeVray were transformed into a cat, this is what she would look like. The honey-toned, emerald-eyed cat rubbed its neck against Viper’s ankle. His nose started quivering. Viper had just enough time to pull a handkerchief from his breast pocket before letting go a torrential sneeze.
“Achoooooo!”
The Yolanda-cat scurried away.
“God bless you, Viper,” a chorus of jazzmen said.
Viper heard a telephone ring in the distance.
“Gesundheit, liebe Viper,” the baroness said in a perfect German accent as she walked past him, on the way to her bedroom. Nica nimbly tiptoed through the writhing carpet of cats lounging between the bedroom door and the rattling telephone on the nightstand. She picked up on the fifth ring.
“Good evening.”
“Baroness? This is Detective Red Carney.”
“What can I do for you, Red?”
“I’m going to ask you this question once. And do not lie. Is the Viper at your house?”
“Yes.”
“Put him on the line.”
* * *
“I am your master of ceremonies,” Peewee crowed into the microphone onstage. “Welcome to the slammingest, jammingest, bebop bammingest joint uptown. I know it’s cool to party with the white folks on 52nd Street, I dig that scene too, but if you really wants to get down, you gots to be uptown. So welcome to my house! It’s Peewee’s, y’all!”
By the fall of 1948, Peewee’s had indeed become the hippest club in Harlem, rivaled only by Minton’s Playhouse. And just as the partners at Mr. O’s law firm, Schneider, Miller, and Bloom, had predicted, the demand for marijuana was expanding. The deliveries from the California pot farm arrived every two weeks, and Viper Morton managed a network of dealers out of the business manager’s office in the back of Peewee’s.
As for the man who gave his name to the club, Peewee had been furious when he found out three years earlier that the stay-at-home wife Pretty Paul Baxter was always braggin’ about was, in fact, Yolanda DeVray.
“That bitch never once sought me out,” he had fumed to Viper. “Not you or Pork Chop neither, to thank us for savin’ her life! Instead, she sneaks back into town with her high yella faggot husband. Fuck these fucking inbred Creoles!”
Peewee was so angry, he married his Greenwich Village girlfriend, a blond-haired, blue-eyed heiress named Sally Anne Whitman. At least, she was an heiress when he married her. Once her parents learned she had eloped with a Negro, Sally was promptly disinherited. She was a Bohemian, an abstract expressionist painter. She and Peewee bought a loft and quickly produced two beautiful little kids.
“When are you gonna settle down, Clyde?” Pork Chop asked on a regular basis.
Viper’s oldest friend in Harlem was the leader of the house band at the club. And he had finally found a wife. It was Athena Carson, who ran Lady Athena’s, one of the top beauty parlors in Harlem. She and Pork Chop had known each other for years. He was godfather to the two children she’d had with Pork Chop’s close buddy Dick Carson. Dick was in a black combat unit, died in action in Germany in the final weeks of the war. Pork Chop comforted Lady Athena, then wound up marrying her. She was a regular at the club.
“You lookin’ real good tonight, Lady Athena,” Peewee called out from the stage on this October night. “You better tell Pork Chop to watch out!”
“Yeah, Peewee,” Athena shot back from her table on the nightclub floor. “You short men is always long on talk, ain’t you?”
The crowd roared with laughter.
“All right, ladies and gentlemen,” the pint-sized emcee announced, “let me introduce one of our regular acts here at Peewee’s: we love him, we hate him, all you women want him, and so do half the men; and as for what he wants, well, name your price—I give you Pretty Paul Baxter!”
The ginger-toned baritone bounded onto the stage and launched into a high-speed scat, Pork Chop and the house band backing him with bebop brio.
Pretty Paul was not only one of the most popular singers at the club. As a marijuana dealer, he was one of Viper’s biggest earners. Before his performance that night, as the club was opening for business, Paul had stepped into Viper’s office and handed him a document-sized envelope stuffed with cash.
“Here you go, boss, this weekend’s take.”
“Thanks, Paul. How you been?”
“I’m in a good groove, Viper. I’m headlining on 52nd Street next week, at the Onyx.”
“I’ll be there. You heard about Bill Henry?”
“Yeah, that’s a cryin’ shame. But you know I don’t shoot up anymore, Viper. Look!” Pretty Paul rolled up his sleeves, showed his veins. “I’ve been clean for a year. Yolanda finally got me to quit.”
“How’s she doin’?” Viper asked, trying to sound less curious than he felt. “Nobody ever sees her. Except Lady Athena, when she goes to the beauty parlor.”
“Yolanda’s all right. She’s just a homebody.”
“Give her my best. Paul, you say you aren’t shooting heroin. That’s good. But I don’t allow anyone working for me to be dealing heroin.”
“I ain’t dealin’ junk, Viper.”
“I hope that’s true, Paul. ’Cause if you are, there will be consequences.”
“Trust me, Viper,” Paul said, flashing his starry grin. “Trust me.”
* * *
Heroin was spreading wider and faster. Buttercup Jones’s whorehouse had become a major center of distribution. Things had got so bad that Viper, Peewee, and Pork Chop organized a sit-down with Buttercup at five o’clock one Monday morning, at the breakfast party at Hutch’s Hideaway.
“I feel like you gentlemen are urging me to bankrupt myself,” Buttercup said, nibbling on a thin slice of crispy bacon. Flamboyant as ever, he wore a finely tailored pinstriped suit and a silk turban.
“Lemme explain, Buttercup,” Pork Chop said. “You were a dancer before you became a pimp and a drug dealer. I’m a musician. And I love reefer just about as much as I love makin’ music. But I don’t love it more than I love makin’ music. Jazz and marijuana evolved together, they go hand in hand. Heroin ain’t like reefer, Buttercup.”
“Is that right?” Buttercup said. “You don’t like bebop, Pork Chop?”
“I love it. I play it. And I hire beboppers to play in Peewee’s house band. But they’re missin’ gigs. They’re disappearing for days. They’re selling their instruments. Why? Because they come to love junk more than they love makin’ music. I don’t know how many of his clarinets Bill Henry pawned for a fix. Finally, he wasn’t makin’ music at all. He lived for junk. And died in the gutter.”
“Now come on, Pork Chop, Viper, Peewee, you know as much as I do, this is all about supply and demand. Musicians demand junk, somebody’s gonna supply it to them. If it ain’t me, it’ll be somebody else.”
“Why can’t you just sell your Mexican locoweed?” Peewee asked.
“Because everybody prefers your California grass!” Buttercup said. “You bastards are putting me out of the reefer business and tellin’ me now to get out of the heroin business.”
“What about your whorehouse?” Peewee challenged. “You must be makin’ money from that.”
“Yeah, some, but I haven’t seen any of you there lately. At least Pork Chop and Peewee are married. What’s your excuse, Viper?”
“Buttercup,” Viper said, “we’re here to talk business.”
“Good, then let’s talk business. Who do you think is supplying me?” They knew the answer, but Buttercup paused for effect: “I’m backed up by the Sicilian Mafia.”
“Meaning what?” Viper said.
“Meaning I ain’t scared of you niggas,” Buttercup hissed. “As long as there are junkies in Harlem, I’m gonna be sellin’ ’em junk.”
“Charlie Parker is a wreck,” Pork Chop said. “Fats Navarro just wound up in the hospital again. Slim Jackson is at death’s door. Junk is killin’ jazz by killin’ off its artists.”
“I’m a drug dealer!” Buttercup said. “Just like you motherfuckers. Heroin is a booming business. Rather than trying to fight me, if you niggas had any capitalist sense at all, you’d be joinin’ me.”
“Well, we’re not joining you,” Viper said. “And we won’t try to put you out of business. But we employ a network of dealers who understand that we don’t approve of sellin’ junk. If we find out that anyone who’s dealin’ weed for us is also dealin’ junk for you, we’re gonna consider that a conflict of interest. And we’re gonna hold you responsible for instigating it. And we’re gonna come around to inflict a penalty.”
“I invite you boys to come around anytime,” Buttercup said evenly. “I’ll be waiting for you.”
* * *
Viper felt a twinge of bitter satisfaction as he entered the Onyx, one of the hippest of the 52nd Street jazz clubs, and saw that the place was less than full. Pretty Paul Baxter and His Orchestra were headlining tonight. Viper walked in the door just as the first set was ending. He spotted Yolanda sitting alone at a table for four, sipping a Coca-Cola.
“Clyyyyde.” Yolanda said his name liltingly, lovingly. “I hoped I would see you here tonight. Join me, please.”
“Yo-Yo,” he said, taking the seat directly across the small round table from her, “this is the first time I’ve seen you in a club since … since …”
“The Savoy. The night of my twenty-first birthday. I think of it often. That was almost seven years ago.”
“So Pretty Paul let you out of the house for some special reason?”
“As a matter of fact, we’re celebrating. Don’t tell anybody, but I’m pregnant.”
Viper felt a catch in his throat. “Congratulations, Yo-Yo.”
“We’ve been trying for three years. Paul was starting to give up on me.”
“What a guy.”
“Don’t start, Clyde. Can I ask you a question? You’ve been back from the war for three years, you’re makin’ good money. Why haven’t you gotten married?”
“Maybe I’m waiting for you.”
They stared hard into each other’s eyes. Viper wanted to kiss her. He felt that if he leaned over the table and dared, she would let him.
“Well, look who’s decided to grace us with his presence!” Pretty Paul shouted as he walked up to the table. He slapped Viper on the back. “Too bad you missed the first set, man.” Paul sat down, gave Yolanda a big, noisy kiss on the cheek. “How’s my girl?”
