Read Online Young Man With a Horn by Dorothy Baker - Free Book Online Page A

talk. They played one tune after another. As soon as they’d pull one through to the end, somebody would call out another and they’d be off again. The bottle went around only once more, a very short one for everybody, and Rick only going through the motions. The gin didn’t really affect them much; they were young and so healthy that no toxin could bite into them. But it gave them the feeling that they could push out farther than usual, and so they did.
    They began to weaken a little when the hall started to turn gray with morning light. When Hazard saw it he said ‘My God,’ shook his trumpet, and put it in the case. The rest of them got up, one after another, stiff-legged and bewildered. Jeff, folding down the keyboard cover, said, ‘Looks like it sort of got late on us.’ Rick looked at him and said, ‘It’s been,’ but he didn’t say what it had been. He very evidently needed a word that he didn’t have with him, and so he only shook his head in that wondering way he had, and it turned out to mean the thing he wanted to say.
    Hazard and Davis gave the bunch a general good night and left together, the first out. Then Ward and Snowden came up to Rick and said good night, and not only that but come around again some time.
    And then there were only the three of them, Smoke, Jeff, and Rick. They walked out together and stood by the back door while Jeff locked up. Rick, who was picking up a feeling for night life faster than you’d think, said: ‘Let’s go someplace and have some breakfast before we go home. I don’t have to go to work until one.’
    ‘Can’t do it,’ Jeff said; ‘I got to get me some sleep.’
    ‘How about you?’ Rick said to Smoke. And Smoke tightened his belt with a large, carefree gesture and said, ‘Don’t care if I do.’
    So they parted company with Jeff Williams, but not before he and Rick had arranged to meet at the Cotton Club the next Sunday to talk over problems connected with playing the piano.

BOOK TWO

1
    I COULD put it under a thick lens now, the way they show seeds in the very act and petals curling out in those educational movies. It would be a matter of the voice deepening, muscle toughening, and beard sprouting, phenomena which are of little interest in themselves, and serve only to indicate that the whistling-post of childhood has been whistled for and passed up and that the erstwhile child is now in the clear and going, single-track, full steam, to become one kind of an adult, the best kind or the worst kind or any combination in between.
    It was inevitable for Rick to become what he became. Jeff Williams taught him to play the piano; Art Hazard helped him pick out a trumpet when he got the money together, and having gone as far as that, showed him how to play it. The rest of it was a compulsion that kept him tirelessly working. To play the piano, to play the trumpet, to make music. It was with him constantly the way fads are with the rest of us. He couldn’t quit playing; it was the way you can feel about solitaire; as soon as you see it won’t come out this time you scoop up the cards, shuffle them, and start laying them out again; try it one more time, and if it doesn’t come out this time you’ll call it off and go to bed. But if you’re an old solitaire player, or a new solitaire player, you don’t go to bed. You try it again, and again, and if it comes out you wonder if maybe it would come out two times hand running, so you lay them out again just to see. And if it does it would be something of a record three times hand running, and if it doesn’t, why it seems sort of a shame to quit when you’re beat, so you keep it up until some outside influence like the telephone or simple exhaustion stops you. So with Rick. The fascination of making music was on him like a leech. He’d sit at the Cotton Club piano and practice until his fingernails ached from being sent the wrong way, and he’d play his trumpet until his lip crumpled up on him and shook