Read Online Funnymen by Ted Heller - Free Book Online Page B

Hippodrome—and Roy's now gotHarry Bacon's pants down and then he pulls his boxers off. Well, the applauding stopped on a dime, believe you me. I say, “Gee, Harry, uh, you're hung like a tick.” “I ain't hung at all,” Harry says. “I'm a broad. Get a load of this . . .” And then she unbuttons her shirt. We were all of us, to a man, astounded. Harry stands up and says, “You tell my wife about this, I'll cut yours off too.” And after that, she was just one of the guys.
    But poor Roy, when he got an eyeful of that crotch or lack thereof—the fact that he'd made a pass at a broad! —it really sickened him.
    This guy over here, behind Harry . . . Sid Gibson . . . he blew tenor sax. A hophead. This bald head belongs to our trombonist, Cueball Swenson . . . he did a couple of years for something but he straightened out his act somewhat. This is the guitarist, Pip Grundy. Look at his hands. Seven fingers on his left hand, about nine on his right. Anne Boleyn with a geetar. I tell you, the Pipster didn't always hit the right note but he could hit more wrong ones at one time than any other guitarist around at that time.
    And this is Floyd Lomax. Looks just like Humpty Dumpty, don't he? He was from some town outside Detroit, he played trumpet. Kept a pearl-handled Colt in his trumpet case for absolutely no reason whatsoever. Ypsilanti, that's it. Six foot seven, weighed 350 pounds jaybird naked. Could he eat? He'd down more sausages in one meal than Warsaw does in a year. And the man loved cooze. Craved it. If he couldn't score it was a nightmare—he'd just break down and cry his fat heart out, Floyd would. You ever see a six-foot-seven, 350-pound whale in boxer shorts holding a trumpet and weeping like his puppy just got run over by the ice-cream truck? Christ, on all his undershorts he had sewn in gold threads—and you could've moved a family of ten into Floyd Lomax's boxers—the words “'Tis all pink on the inside.”
    The kind of music they played . . . Floyd was aiming for the High Society-sound, sort of like Eddie Duchin or Griff Williams; it all sounded like you'd just chowed down on a Vassar sophomore, which are Floyd's words, not mine. Now, we knew we could never crack that market. It just wasn't gonna happen. So we aimed lower, a lot lower. Billboard even called it “the Low Society sound.”
    We'd play a set and then we go back to our hotel and Floyd gets his fix of you-know-what, and I got to make sure that [vocalist] Dick Fain is all tied up in his bed with manacles so he don't electrocute himself, and the boys are playing pinochle and drinking and just playing their horns . . . and that's what we did. It was a hard life, it didn't pay too good, the hours were lousy as hell, but, boy, did we have a ball.

    â€¢ • •

    SALLY KLEIN: It was at the Mohican Club in Teaneck when Ziggy broke the news to us. Harry and Flo and I were in the dressing room and Ziggy walked in. He pulled a chair up, loosened his tie. It was a jokey tie, orange and a yard wide.
    â€œI been thinkin' about the act,” he said. He's got that impish face on—you've seen it a million times in the movies—what Arnie called his “Uh-oh, I think I may have driven your Mercedes off a cliff” look.
    Harry asked him, “What about the act?”
    Ziggy just comes out and says, “I think Flo should cut a song or two from the act, maybe drop the number at the end.”
    Now, I'd sensed this coming. Because Flo always ended with a song and Ziggy was always interrupting it. But for the last couple of shows he was barely allowing her to begin it. The act ended with Ziggy being Ziggy and the audience loving it.
    Flo said, “You want me not to sing? This is what my son is telling me?”
    â€œThis is what I'm telling you, Flo,” Zig said. By now he didn't call them Pop or Mom anymore except when they were onstage.
    â€œBut I got my start