Where’s the hotboy going tonight?
Jim Cory
“This thread would be 1,000 times more interesting if some of you old fucking queens did more than just list a bunch of old bars. Tell us stories, cunts!”
—Anonymous
In the late 1970s, on the 1500 block of Spruce Street, in the City of Brotherly Love, there was a bar so raunchy, seedy and disreputable that it seemed less a commercial establishment than a cave for miscreants licensed, probably by means of the usual Philadelphia payola, to serve drinks. A sign—“Roscoe’s”—alerted those unfamiliar with the neighborhood to its presence, but if the purpose of a store sign is to call attention to the business, this one was discreet to the point of timidity. It was as if only a select few were to know the bar was there, and since obviously they already did, the demure marquee existed mostly to satisfy some ordinance requiring liquor licensees to post signage.
To call what was served in Roscoe’s “drinks” is a stretch, since almost no one who went there ever ordered an actual mixed drink. In that bar, wine was highbrow and all beverage of foreign manufacture pretentious. It was a place where a jigger of whiskey dumped in a glass of Rolling Rock and quaffed in a half-dozen gulps between cigarette puffs was considered righteous consolation for an unfair existence.
I offer the cave metaphor for two reasons. In the first place it was always dark. Sunlight spilled in only when someone opened the front door, which happened infrequently until about 10 at night. Rumor had it that a window existed adjacent to that door until a body went through it, after which the opening was bricked in.
And then there was the smell, an odor of Neanderthal leavings, of unventilated space with its own special atmosphere of alcoholic exhalations, discreet farts, indiscreet burps, cigarettes alive and dead, the funk of wet coats on rainy days, the whiff of unwashed masculinity.
That this was a male establishment was clear enough on entering. It’s doubtful that actual women would bother coming in. Even fag hags never went in to Roscoe’s. So the drinkers consisted of drag queens, hustlers, vintage drunks, horny pensioners, spiritual has-beens and bar circuit regulars, including suburbanites who wandered in out of curiosity. There among the meth-addled prettyboys from Kensington or South Philly you might meet Hustler Johnny or, among slummers, High Speed Jimmy, a barrel-chested blond from Cherry Hill across the river who would’ve been sexy except that he was always half in the bag, known for his trademark of exiting the bar, after a certain number of drinks, to stand in the middle of the street screaming STELL-AAAAA!!!
Still, even with all that testosterone flowing, some ingénue watching the nightly proceedings from the Drake Hotel across the street—that’d be me before I worked up the courage to go in—might’ve imagined the place as a seraglio for particularly noisy and overly made up ladies, until it became clear that these were transvestites. Roscoe’s attracted a dozen or so “female impersonators” (o dreary term!) and was a regular stop on the nightly rounds of drags who did shows at Center City bars. Their size, scent, splendor, wit and especially the ingenuity of their names—Brandy Alexander et al.—fascinated. Among these, the most well-known and self-possessed was someone called “Sarah Vaughan.”
*
“Where are you going?” my mother wants to know.
“The city.”
“The city?”
In Philadelphia’s Main Line suburbs, where I trained in from, “city” was code for certain things. It meant crowding and crime, crime meaning (but not stating) black crime, the sort of unpleasantness that causes petty bourgeois sensibilities to rear back in extreme fright. And there was also—not as often articulated but no less present—the notion of vice, which I equated with a kind of joyous squalor. It was that, primarily, that drew me. I wanted all I could get of it. Drunkenness, exotic drugs, squalid sexual adventures no doubt leading to exotic friendships.
On the 1100 block of Filbert Street one night a friend and I stumbled through the doorway of a tappy where three quarters of the stools were occupied but only a single person was conscious. The bartender. The rest slumped, foreheads on forearms. Wiping a glass with a moist rag, he looked us over.
“You guys sailors? Whuddaya having?” We told him we were—lies were thrills attached to vague risk—and he served up shots of Scotch and Schaeffer on tap. The beer was flat but for a quarter, who cared? What magic, I wondered, had transported me onto the set of The Iceman Cometh in real time? A month or two later I felt a kind of triumph at the sight of a man in his 40s, thoroughly sozzled, toddling up the sidewalk on Broad Street in the middle of the afternoon, fly open and a thumb-long dick bouncing side to side while passing eyes shifted to avoid the sight. It never occurred to me, of course, that I could be looking at some version of my own possible future. I had arrived!
Of course once Roscoe’s was located, I rarely went elsewhere. It served as a one-stop shop for urban entertainments. It was a place where lines of coke were vacuumed off the acrylic tops fastened to wobbly tables; where the Ladies Room had been repurposed as a blow job chamber and where, who knew, love might saunter through the door any minute. Why go anywhere else?
One night, in blond form, it did. Love that is. His name is Rick and he’s from one of the South Jersey river towns which all seem to be named Penn-something-or-other. It’s a first love, full of letters, gifts, whispered phone calls, soulful tete-a-tetes among beer and infinite cigarettes. Being first love it takes the form of prolonged distraction, a phenomenon the Great American Songbook described and defined so well. We consummate this torrid affair in the Mom-and-Pop motels on I-95 where we arrive around midnight with a large cheese pizza and a six-pack and where we can hear the moans and howls of lovers through the walls and floors as easily as they hear ours. This goes on for some months. Years later time’s erased all those motels and I’m sitting in the rotunda at Penns Landing by the Delaware River listening to the singer Chris Connor, a Big Band songbird (with Stan Kenton) who went out on her own and stayed there. She’s thin, a bit weathered, short blond hair, wears a white linen pantsuit. Her voice sounds like an entire warehouse of tobacco has passed through it, but carries unshakeable conviction:
If you were on my mind, all night and day,
Blame it on my youth
If I forgot to eat, and sleep and pray,
Blame it on my youth…
“Chris! Chris!” someone in the crowd yells. “’You don’t know what love is’!”
I’m there with a boyfriend who wasn’t a fan of jazz. We’re the only ones under 40. Maybe under 50.
He leans in and whispers: “Blame it on Vermouth.”
The fans are all pushing 60 and Chris is well past it.
“Chris! Chris! ‘These Foolish Things!’”
“’Ten Cents A Dance’, Chris!”
Standing at the mike, nearing the end of a long set and what must be a long day and an endless career, a breeze pushing at her clothes like a tailor making adjustments to the cut, Chris Connor takes a sip of water and bows her head slightly, better to make out what they’re yelling. She nods, smiles and looks to her left. The bass player thumps a note. Confidence contains a grace that vanquishes every disqualifying detail.
*
Roscoe’s was one of those places you go to meet the people who’ll change your life, without knowing who they are or that they will.
Still, anyone under 25 is assumed to be wearing a sign that says: Ass For Sale.
“Are you hustling?” an older man asks one afternoon, out of politeness, I then supposed. It was one of those occasions where flattery and embarrassment occupy the same emotional space until evicted by confusion. I shake my head. He nods to the barkeep, Russell, and buys me a Rolling Rock anyway.
My status as suburban interloper is evident to all but me. I look, sound and act like Bryn Mawr, Radnor. And green? There must be a particular shade of it that equates to my naiveté then. “My sense,” a friend said the other day, when one of us raised the subject of John Dos Passos’ mysterious passage from virulent leftist circa 1932 to John Birch crypto-Nazi and Goldwater supporter in 1964, “is that the more naïve you are, the more conservative you become.”
If that’s the case, I’m grateful to be an exception to the rule. Actually, my utter lack of life experience translated to an intellectual vanity stunning in its arrogance and vacuity. Was that little half-in-the-bag poseur babbling about Celine or Hart Crane or Henry James really moi? On more than one occasion I was shoved out the door of some party or bar (but never Roscoe’s) for being a pain-in-the-ass drunk, the type who insists on attention without even the possibility of delivering anything in the way of wit or conversation. It made a certain sense, even then, but later, when the drinking days receded, I wondered from time to time why no one had ever tossed me in front of a train for the Anna Karenina death I had, at that point, probably earned?
The reason, I suspect, was that the life I was living didn’t differ much from anyone else’s on that frenzied circuit. Bedding hotties was the object, youth the currency, liquor or drugs the marital aids of choice. Every other activity or ambition—family, work, hobbies, career—was on maintenance.
“See that one there,” says Russell, nodding toward a dreamy little blond who came in nights, looking for clients. “He’s trouble.”
Russell knew “trouble” from troubled. He was an Italian from South Philly with a lust for wounded innocence. One after another he fell for the rent-boys, often giving them keys to his apartment so they could crash between tricks. Later I wondered if it wasn’t a chicken (no pun intended) and egg situation. Was this obsessive pursuit of rough (rumpled?) trade the byproduct of his job or was he working at Roscoe’s to facilitate this passion? His was a generous nature joined to a sympathetic disposition, distinct disadvantages in that little world. Select clientele hit him up for free drinks and soon enough came to expect them. They borrowed money with no thought of repaying it and turned to him in every emergency. Some I don’t think he even had sex with. A medieval saint, in flannel—he could’ve sat for Fra Angelico—who wanted to shepherd his flock past all the many wolves lying in wait.
Soon enough he befriended me. Age—the fact that I was in my early 20s—overrode various considerations. Besides, we had something in common, namely a passion for rock ‘n’ roll and classical music. In his spacious apartment overlooking 11th and Spruce at least 500 LPs leaned against the wall. You could spend a few hours going through them, begin in ecstasy and end in exhaustion. He kept the fridge stocked with bottles of Budweiser to quench the thirst of strumpets who visited. Big apartments in lovely old buildings were cheap then. But he had been too free, trusting and less than careful.
On a certain afternoon, one of his loveboys, with accomplices, parked a van at the curb and emptied the apartment, including the refrigerator, of everything but the butcher block kitchen table—likely too heavy to bother with—which is where they left the empties. Meanwhile up the street, Russell poured beer, rinsed glasses, emptied ashtrays and lent an ear to someone’s tale of woe.
*
Nature’s movements tend to bend to the logic of beginning, middle and end but at Roscoe’s the beginning was somewhere in the middle and the end could be anywhere or anything, a fiery finale or just a disappearing act. Russell’s was the latter. He vanished immediately after the burglary. High Speed Jimmy vanished too, only his disappearance took place in increments.
Jimmy left the bar one night at closing, bellowed STELLA!!!! three or four times and lurched a block north toward the Locust Street entrance to the PATCO (Port Authority Transit Corporation) high speed train line running between Philly and the Jersey suburbs. On the train he was arrested and run in for public intoxication by PATCO cops. No big deal, except that the following night, with half a load on, Jimmy chose to make it one, boasting of his arrest in terms alternately defiant and indignant. By the end of the evening he was High Speed Jimmy. Instead of fun, or derring-do, the bar crowd viewed his escapade as a textbook example of Dumb Things Drunks Do. The nickname took hold. The “Stella!” thing ceased. Jimmy became quiet, appeared less frequently, then not at all.
People came, hung around a few months, and went, which is always the way it is with a dive bar. The dramatic finales were few, but being few grew to proportions of legend. There was that late afternoon when Hustler Johnny, in mid-slouch, elbows on bar, beer in hand, lost his mind in a kind of Primal Scream seizure. He sat up straight, glanced left to right, lifted his empty beer glass and hurled it at the barkeep. The glass smashed, then silence. Face stricken with rage, Johnny grabbed another glass and flung it at the queens watching from the end of the bar. Everyone dove for the floor. When he ran out of glasses Johnny grabbed bottles and when the bottles were gone he went for the ashtrays. Mirrors shattered, the falling shards knocked bottles off shelves and on to the floor.
It happened like a holdup and was done just as quickly. Johnny snapped to. He looked around like someone waking up. Then he ran for the door.
*
You’d think drag queens would take the lead when it came to outrageous and profane behavior but if anything they were a stabilizing force. Roscoe’s regulars offered a broad sampling of dysfunction, and all of it flowed from identity, or its lack. Drag queens, on the other hand, knew who they were and what they were about. They comported themselves with a dignity drunkenness would’ve obliterated. Some did drag for money on raucous stages but most were not so much performers as guys daring to live the life they wanted at a time when the tweaking of gender roles, deliberate or inadvertent, triggered annoyance or fury in many, especially straight males. This was the age of fag-bashing, when a half dozen suburban 20-somethings would pile in the family station wagon and cruise Center City on a Friday night looking for someone drunk, alone and obviously queer. I had a friend, Richard S., later lost to AIDS, who, one unfortunate evening, got beaten bloody by just such a posse. He described how they’d circled the vicinity a time or two, parked, and divided into teams that appeared suddenly at opposite ends of the block where he was walking.
“Hey faggot!”
They knew not to fuck with drag queens. A man in drag had nothing to hide and less to lose. Some I knew opened purses to show me Bowie knives and stilettos. To say that, when crossed, they ‘had their knives out,’ is not making metaphor. They also came equipped with the kind of anger that’s been tamed to the point where it can be unleashed and directed on command. It made them seem downright bipolar. One minute sweet as punch, the next minute ready to punch your lights out. They were angry satirists, characters without a proper stage. But all satire begins in sincerity. You have to have desired something or someone to lampoon it effectively, which explains why no contempt can measure up to the hatred between enemies who were once close friends.
In the casbah of Center City’s back streets and colonial alleyways the drag queens of the day had constructed a demi-demi-monde, and in that world “Sarah Vaughan” held the apex position. She got respect, even deference. Why was apparent. A certain poise, an imperturbable demeanor, explained it. With ram’s horn bouffant and pale blue-green eyeshade, her entrance was always news, her movement from bar to tables and back tracked by every eye.
What puzzled was the name. Others of less renown invented monikers steeped in irony and pun. Helen Damnation. Tara Dactyl. Jenny Talia. But Sarah Vaughan? It sounded like the housewife who’s just won the Lotto.
Everyone knew who she was. She’d been around a decade and a half, at least. A poem in a gay magazine from 1965, “remembrances of rittenhouse square,” by Adrian Stanford, describes how in Philadelphia’s premier public space, that jewel of a park, “black sarah ruled.”
A decade and a half after the poem’s occasion her reign continued, though her scene’s shifted, a nightly tour of watering holes such as The Allegro, The Westbury or Steps where she’s about the only black person who comes and goes unchallenged by the racist protocols of doormen charged with screening people of color via chickenshit demands for i.d.
I knew her only as one who admires style from afar until the evening she sidled up to the table in Roscoe’s where I was seated.
“Sarah Vaughan,” said Sarah Vaughan, extending a human paw moist in the pressing. The sort of gesture you’d expect from a new colleague at the office or someone running for one. Now we’d acknowledge each other with a nod, even a wave, from opposite sides of the room.
Roscoe’s in the afternoon and Roscoe’s in the evening, same dive but different. In the afternoon, squandered disability checks and devil-may-care wisecracks among drinkers who’d survived every stage of disgrace. At night, sexual telepathy and cutting for advantage.
At night the door swings back and forth as suburbanites, bands of yacking falsettos and various wrecks push their way in and through while the bartender, now the genial but street smart Woody (later to open a different sort of oasis four blocks away called, what else, Woody’s) quietly keeps an eye on who’s where and doing what, via the mirrors behind the bar and on the opposite wall. Sometimes the place was shoulder to shoulder, toasting in its own heat, and the Continuous Time Weighted Average Noise felt like 120 or 130 decibels. On a Friday or Saturday night you screamed to be heard.
On that sort of night once the door opened and a pair of Marines in Dress Blues—pressed white slacks, deep blue jackets, gold braid delineating white hats from snappy black brims—presented themselves. They step inside. In five seconds the place goes silent, which is about how long it took the Jarheads to figure out the trap they’d marched into. Unlike that bar in San Diego I once entered, packed with shaved heads who only had eyes for each other, this pair had different ideas about what might constitute entertainment in the City of Brotherly Love. They stand there, taking it all in. Their eyes dart back and forth.
And then, having exchanged baleful glances, the Leathernecks turned and beat a retreat even as Roscoe’s resumes its nightly roar and the door closes shut behind them.
Jammed, it was easy to pick someone up. Crowding and the ticking clock forced a decision. Around the corner from Roscoe’s at Steps the final 15 minutes before the place closed, its bartender told me, was known as “the Funeral March.” Past two o’clock you could repair to The Penrose or the DCA—after hours clubs oozing hormones and bumps of cocaine—checking caution and all sense of propriety at the door. “I saw you in the DCA last weekend,” spat some queen on the street, whom I didn’t know and had never met but who nonetheless had arrogated to himself the role of not just judge and jury, but prosecutor and embittered eyewitness. “There you were, DRUNK AND MAKING OUT with some guy in the corner! TWO WEEKENDS IN A ROW!”
I had no memory of it but it sounded in character. I waved him away thinking: if only it could’ve been three.
Of course if you were too soused to be admitted to either of those venues—which would be approximately at the delirium tremens stage—there was always The Merry Go Round, AKA The Block, AKA The Carousel, bounded by Spruce and Pine north and south, 20thh and 21st east and west, where cars circled, slowed and circled again. After midnight it became a river of brake lights, a place so notorious that the Philadelphia Streets Department had posted a sign consisting of a black, left-turning arrow encircled in red with a red line through the center. Under the circle it read: ‘MIDNIGHT to 5 AM Daily.” Forbidding left hand turns from Spruce onto 21st Street during posted hours might have put a stop to the cruising circus except that the Philadelphia Police Department had no more desire to enforce that law than they did, or do, any other.
Odd creatures turned up there. Someone I knew once performed an unauthorized exit from the substance abuse rehab in West Philly where he was then in residence, commandeered a cab on Market Street and directed its driver to 21st and Spruce. He was standing there, in hospital gown and boxer shorts, hoping to cop drugs, get laid or—jackpot!—both. A car door opened and closed. Poof! Gone. Another acquaintance, known to the demi-monde as Crazy Bill, showed up there one night, wildly ogling drivers of every other vehicle while he propped himself up with a stop sign. Livid with lust and pills, he staggered up to a blue BMW. The driver leaned out the window, looked Bill over and hissed: “Keep walking, sister!” It became his mantra and punch line, repeated in any situation of frustrating circumstance. My roommate, Tim, arrived back at our apartment late one night to relate how a car had slowed as he crossed 20th Street at Pine, the driver regarding him with unconstrained desire. A block later, crossing 21st, the same car, window down, comes to a near-stop.
“Where’s the hotboy going tonight?”
“Home,” Tim said.
“So why didn’t you get in?” I asked.
A shrug. There were more suitors then than you could shake your dick at.
*
One night, before things have gotten crowded, I take a seat at the bar. I don’t see anyone I know, which is probably for the best, since I haven’t slept in two days. Some kind of nerve cell clusterfuck consisting of seven nights of blackout drinking sits in the middle of my brain, wrapped in insomnia and emitting toxic vibes. I’m working on Night Eight, but beer after beer, nothing. “Had enough to sink a battleship, but the ship won’t sink,” is how Jamie puts it in Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
Meanwhile after three months of bliss my country bumpkin boyfriend Rick has given me the gate. (“I think I need to see other people.”)
Now I slide without resistance into that state of mind where separation from all humanity is not so much desired as preferred, even insisted on, a first prescience of old age and its inevitable misanthropy. I’m alone. I feel alone. I look alone.
I sit at the bar, smoking a Lark. Richly rewarding, uncommonly smooth.
When you get thrown over, everything in life is reconfigured into terms of hopelessness. Nothing gets you anywhere. Jobs, for instance. Between unloading trucks in a warehouse (day job) and bugging people on the phone with market research surveys (night job) I “can’t keep two cents” in my pocket (how my mother would’ve put it). I’ve published a few poems, but re-reading only reminds me of how turgid and obvious they are. Forget about a mid-life crisis, what about a pre-life crisis, the one you have before you’ve seriously entered adulthood and can’t seem to find the knob on the door that admits? And now I can’t even get drunk?
Someone leans onto the bar adjacent. I don’t bother to glance. It’s a troll looking for sexual hired help or some delusional letch who believes you can see through the wreckage and waste to the beauty he once was. Then I notice gold, bangles and baubles bunched and gathered at the narrow wrists of dark arms.
Honey, you’re lookin’ a little peaked tonight,” she says.
Oddly, it’s exactly the word—pee-kid— my mother would’ve used.
I nod.
“You look like you could use some rest.”
I tell “Sarah Vaughan” that my lover had dumped me two days before, that I hadn’t slept, couldn’t sleep.
She slides onto the barstool adjacent.
“That blond number?”
I nod.
“Lovers come and go. You’ll find someone else.”
She frowns.
“Now how come you can’t sleep?”
Frantic, overlapping streams of doubt and dread get activated the instant I awake, I more or less explain.
A scent. What is it? Promise her anything, but give her Arpege. Sarah Vaughan leans closer. This presence I knew as simultaneously regal and flip became in an instant brotherly and empathetic.
“Honey, I got just what you need.”
A wallet appears and in the instant it splits into halves I glimpse a driver’s license with a name that is not the name “Sarah Vaughan.” Sarah Vaughan sees that I see. I say nothing. I had less sense than a bowl of soup but I knew enough to shut up.
She snaps the change purse open. Three yellow pills spill on the bar.
“Take these,” she says. “You’ll sleep.”
*
Some months later, around 11 o’clock on a Saturday night, a troupe of middle-aged white men with flipped up collars and cashmere arms languidly draped across shoulders come flying through the door.
“I’ll take a Vodka Tonic!”
“Make mine a Manhattan!”
“Gin Fizz! TANQUERAY, MARY, IF YOU’VE GOT IT!”
I’m seated more or less in the same spot I was the night three Valium finally doused the coalmine fire in my brain. How much time has elapsed? In your 20s time stops, starts, sputters, leaps, and every now and then takes a nap. The sweater queens, already tipsy, had squeezed in around to me.
Why are they here? I think.
“We were just at the Academy of Music,” Gin Fizz turns to me suddenly and explains.
“Who was there?” I say.
“Sarah Vaughan.”
Seeing the dumbfounded expression on my face, and no doubt believing he’d made an impression, he begins to convey details of the performance. But I’m hardly listening. You mean all this time that drag queen was famous and no one ever told me?
*
“Wherever I am,” Maria Callas once said, “it is hectic.” Ah, the frenzy that issues from a star’s imperious presence. Such tumult may characterize the atmosphere around operatic divas, but I can tell you now that it’s not normally to be found in a venue where jazz is performed. There, cool’s the rule. Hectic would come across as out of control, unseemly. Unless the diva you’re talking about “outshines every star.”
Fast-forward a decade, if you will. I’m standing on the steps of the aforementioned Academy of Music with the aforementioned Rick. Two blocks away, Roscoe’s is now JP’s. Still a bar but the new owner’s gambled on respectability, without realizing that being a dive is what the place has to offer and all it has to offer.
Rick and I have dated, parted, made up and somehow stayed friends. “Just friends, lovers no more…” I’ve stopped drinking. I have a job with benefits and commute to the suburbs each morning, sometimes with buddy Devon. I live in a ‘20s apartment building on Center City’s western fringe, a fun, friendly place where upstairs neighbor Doug is forever on the fire escape smoking as his boyfriend won’t let him light up in their apartment. Daily we wave and exchange pleasantries. The neighborhood at 23rd and Pine is two blocks from the Merry Go Round where, within yet another decade, the BMWs, instead of circling the block, are parked in its parking spots and their owners walking designer dogs on once super-cruisy Delancey Street at 11 PM. They look up as they round the corner of 21st and Spruce, wondering why in the world that sign is there.
But tonight I’m at the Academy of Music because Devon has told me I have to be. “She rules!” he explains, as we’re training in to the office. Devon, six or seven years my junior, is cute, though straight. Besides toiling at this dreary suburban publishing company where we both work, he plays trumpet and reviews jazz for the weeklies. Not to hear Sarah Vaughan, he says, is tantamount to committing intellectual suicide.
“They don’t call her The Divine One for nothing.”
The fervid crowd surges through and past the doors of this fabled opera house, modeled on La Scala, that opened before the Civil War. It’s utterly unlike a crowd at the Philadelphia Orchestra, which also performs here, and hardly resembles anything I’ve seen in a rock palace, when there were rock palaces. Working class black folk from North and West Philly, jazz snobs, queens, intellectuals, intellectual queens, gay black jazz intellectual snobs, this strange human brew is in and of itself entertainment. Is “Sarah Vaughan,” the faux Sarah Vaughan, here? I don’t see her. Queens blow kisses and wave or, spotting enemies, sneer. One gentleman who writes dog food commercials and from whose embraces I had drunkenly and deliberately departed in mid-coitus some years prior, lifts his lip’s corner in the perfect if unwitting imitation of an angered canine’s snout. You? Here?
A crowd is to performance what water is to swimming: the force against which strength, energy, strategy, presence— ‘talent’ is a given—are deployed, then continually tested. This one means business.
Actually the vibe is hectic. It’s the place—equal parts pomp and poetry— as much as it is the performer. Imagine Tchaikovsky or Mahler conducting on this stage; or Horowitz in its center, offering his marvelous Chopin to a similarly long-sold-out crowd. Picture Walt Whitman tucked in some velvet box here, shedding his own secret tears over “Una Furtiva Lagrima” in Donizetti’s Elixir of Love.
If you’re up there in the amphitheater, where the sheer verticality makes you believe you’re about to pitch forward into the abyss, what you see are tiny creatures on a platform, bathed in kliegs. But we’re not in the Nose Bleed section. I’ve wrangled tickets in the Parquet, 30 or 40 feet from the stage, where now sits a drum kit, a vintage double-bass leaning against a chair, a grand piano with its bench and, in front of the piano, a barstool with a box of tissues on it. A few feet away from all these is the mike stand from which The Divine One will slip said mike and drag its cord across the stage all night like some wayward and infinitely extending tail.
Every seat has a body in it.
On my left, Rick, already craving a cigarette, and my right an African-American woman in late middle age. The purse on her lap’s so big that if she were trying to board a plane today they’d make her check it.
There are performers for whom the audience is a necessary inconvenience. Glenn Gould, for instance, who grew to loathe the fascinated crowds that came to hear him play until he quit live performance at 31. Betty Carter, the Be-Bop Lady, would be his opposite. Her career disappeared in the rock ‘n’ roll wave of the ‘60s, when jazz became passé. She performed one night in the Village Vanguard when every table in the room but one was empty. At that one sat owner Max Gordon. Carter still sang like the place was packed. She launched her 1975 comeback in the same venue, which got the ball of her career rolling again. I heard her at a club in Germantown maybe 15 years later. Her vocal stylings, which suggest musical cubism, make her not an easy singer to get right away. At intermission she came down off the stage in a floor length blue gown with sequins that caught every stray ray of light in the room and plunged through the packed house, bowing, shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries.
“Miss Carter, your dress!” said my friend Ron, as she arrived at our table and we, all of us, stood. He extended a hand and, if I remember right, uttered a small gasp. Her raiment was as fabulous as the performance, but neither was as fabulous as her response to the compliment: that magnanimous, unforgettable grin.
Sarah Vaughan will be somewhere in between.
Now her trio takes the stage. The tension feels like the moment before a significant exam or maybe the aftermath of something dreadfully expensive tumbling off a shelf. It’s in the air. You can’t escape it. The room quiets.
“Ladies and gentlemen, tonight we bring you, the divine Sarah Vaughan! MISS SARAH VAUGHAN!”
*
It would take a quarter-page dictionary entry crammed with adjectives and similes to describe Sarah Vaughan in performance. And if you were reading it, you’d think whoever wrote it was describing five people, not one. Her stage patter between songs is girlish, even coy. When she’s not those she’s composed, commanding, sometimes even regal, but when regal, also peevish, like a monarch handed an imperfect martini. She appears on the edge of pissed off. She wants to be funny but she’s only funny because she’s a distracted person going about some serious business. If you had to pick one word, the word would be tough. And a woman that’s tough is twice as intimidating as a man.
I saw a man trying to escape from a woman who clearly would’ve killed if she could’ve gotten to him. They were in the middle of Lombard Street, at about 3 o’clock in the morning, Between the two of them was a bicycle. Gripping the frame, he wielded the bike horizontally like a lion tamer uses a chair, for distance, and it was barely doing the job. A crowd circled them. Crowds in Philadelphia are usually of a piece with the hooting, jeering mobs at sporting events. This one wasn’t making any noise. They were waiting for whatever would happen.
Sarah Vaughan had inside her something of that woman’s fury. You sensed it. Her springy Afro wig, eyelids shaded bluish-green, the frown—that stamp of permanent dismay that arrives in middle age—the whole take-no-prisoners affect she gives off. She shares with drag queens that same touch of the bipolar, an ambiguity that says: keep your distance. She’s equally capable of innocence or cruelty. Still, it’s hard to prepare for the contradiction between her demeanor and what happens when she opens her mouth to sing. The moment a note sounds, complete concentration ensues. If you’re in the room, her voice pulls you into the center of that energy, whatever it is she’s doing, because nothing short of a missile strike could compete with it.
Then, the song over, she’s yucking it up, giggling like a schoolgirl busted for passing notes.
“Requests?” she says. “Requests?”
“BODY AND SOUL!”
The Divine One looks up toward the Nose Bleed section. She scowls, snorts and rolls her eyes. Later I realize it’s just not on the set list. If you’ve ever seen or heard video of her singing it—the best version was recorded in 1969—what she pulls off makes this impudence from the chandelier region totally understandable. She turns this 1930 lament—message: “take me I’m yours”—and transforms it into something so sensual and intimate that hearing it is more like eavesdropping than performance. But you’re not going to hear it on the Academy of Music stage this afternoon, this song that launched her career at 17.
What performer gets away with this sort of imperiousness? No matter. The woman to my right extracts a tissue, dabs her eyes, drops the Kleenex in her open purse, and reaches for another.
I might’ve prepared myself by listening to a few of her records, but I had no knowledge of her repertory, even its most polished gems—“Misty,” “Tenderly,” “Send in the Clowns” or “Body and Soul” for that matter—the songs she’d staked out as her own at varying points. Before Sarah Vaughan I had never heard jazz singing in performance and no one had briefed me about the three-octave range, her infamous vibrato, the coloratura attack that’s unlike anything, anything.
My ignorance deprived me of the opportunity to weigh each song against recordings, or compare her performance to that of others. I had neither context nor specifics. I knew only that she was famous enough to be emulated by a drag queen who was no doubt present but had the good sense not to show up looking like Sarah Vaughan.
That, however, held a certain advantage. Arriving with zero expectations left me fully exposed and vulnerable to the effects of her artistry, which leans toward the emotional rather than the intellectual. Had I known more, the experience would’ve been different. Not necessarily better, just different.
Did she sing Shania Twain’s “From This Moment On?”
From this moment life has begun
From this moment you are the one
Or am I only remembering the excitement of the versions I’ve watched on video? Was “Time After Time” in the line-up, or am I thinking about a documentary I’ve watched probably 50 times (Live at the 1971 Monterey Jazz Festival) in which The Divine One introduces the next number by telling the audience, “I haven’t sung ‘Time After Time’ since time after time,” a typical faltering effort at comedy, then proceeds, of course, to kill it.
The woman next to me lifts another tissue, dabs her eyes, drops it in the purse.
By the fifth or sixth number, Sarah Vaughan is sweating like a fighter in Round Ten. Her body is at pains to contain her. Onstage, she’s back and forth to the Kleenex box, mopping her face, neck and forehead. She shuffles over, plops the box on the piano and hoists herself onto the stool, giggles, and soon slides off again.
The open purse to my right is piled with crushed and wadded tissues.
Jazz critic Leonard Feather called Sarah Vaughan’s a “once in a lifetime voice” which he says, (in his Jazz Encyclopedia), is “completely different from that of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald or any of the other great jazz stylists before her.” He might’ve added “or any of the great jazz stylists after her.” Listen to the live sets she recorded at the Tivoli club (Sarah Swings the Tivoli) in Copenhagen in 1963, where she’ll have you running for some Kleenex of your own (though not to mop sweat) reprising that Sammy Fain/Irving Kahal weeper, “I’ll Be Seeing You,” or, marveling at the depth in her bag of tricks as she turns every word in the title/line “Fly Me To The Moon” into its own short sentence, a technique she reprises from time to time. She wasn’t just a singer of tunes everyone knows and just about everyone at some point performs, she built them out into independent and incomparable constructions, hers alone.
I found this out later when, in the aftermath of that performance, I set out to hear every jazz singer that I could, live, starting with the most famous. Comparing one to another is like comparing a warbler to a whippoorwill. Yes they all sing but that’s not the point. The Tivoli Club live sets make something else clear as well. Among the distinctions separating Sarah Vaughan from her peers was her power to set a room on edge with one note, an asset you can hear on live recordings but which being in the room rendered transcendent.
*
“No one cruises anymore,” Doug says. “On the street. Even in Rittenhouse.”
As the BMWs began to fill every available parking spot we all eventually got crowbarred out of that apartment building at 23rd and Pine and were scattered in different directions. But I run into Doug at a party after a half-dozen years and we start making these road trips to the backwaters of the tri-state area in search of colonial iron forges, modernist architecture and Revolutionary War battlefields, plus birds—which love battlefields—if they’re around.
We’re driving back from one of our expeditions, talking about our storied youth.
He wasn’t saying they don’t cruise us. With our gray (his) and white (mine) hair and fishing vests (mine), pressed khakis, cameras and binoculars slung from necks, we look like old queens who went out on safari and landed in a tea party.
Where exactly would be the temptation? What he meant was that hot guys don’t even cruise each other. Dating sites do it all. Why bother with eye contact when you can text someone a dick pic and be fucking 20 minutes later?
Doug’s stopped smoking but only after a scary episode that happened a year or two before. I’m moving along a trail at a fair clip in deep woods somewhere and hear him call my name. Serious alarm. I turn. He’s nowhere. I bound back down the path to find him leaning against a tree struggling for breath.
Doug’s exactly my age and moved to the city six years before I did and it turns out we slept with some of the same guys, most of them dead. You forget that being old means people you know die fairly regularly. Soon, he would as well.
No, he never went into Roscoe’s, it was “a little too skeevy.” We both laugh at this interesting turn of phrase. By straining for politeness, the two adverbs that qualify the adjective effectively negate themselves. Skeevy’s like scumbag. You’re either a scumbag or you’re not. He wasn’t about to set foot in the place.
Meanwhile, on the phone, Rick remembers the tables that wobbled and the acrylic sheets and that under the acrylic were photos of the period’s porn stars in every compromising position.
“I forgot about that,” I say.
“Ass under glass,” he says.
He’s on his cell in the break room at the nuclear plant where he’s worked for what, three decades?
“Were you there when that hustler went berserk and started throwing ashtrays?” I ask.
He was not. At this distance, what happened and who witnessed it are slipping from testimony into myth.
“A lot of outrageous shit went down but I don’t remember anybody ever getting thrown out,” he says.
“Of course not,” I say. “They never had a bouncer. Besides, what exactly would constitute out of line behavior at Roscoe’s? There was no line.”
“My mom lived on the next block when she was in school,” he says. “Her apartment was right across the street from the Allegro, where the Kimmel Center is now. She told me when she was there Roscoe’s was a Rexall drug store. She used to go in all the time.”
“For what?”
“Shampoo. Conditioner. Feminine needs.”
“A good thing she didn’t come in 30 years later. She would’ve found you there instead of Tampons and Prell.”
I pass that address once or twice a week. It’s a Rita’s Water Ice at the moment and always empty, even in July. Its next incarnation will probably be a yoga studio for pets.
Everything material changes all the time, so our lives change whether we want them to or not. Sometimes they change by not changing, which is to say we find ourselves suddenly bypassed by the forward motion of events. Sometimes things change the way we want them to change, even when we want them to change, but what you find is that that’s slow and usually a lot of work. More often they change in ways we’re helpless to control or avoid. A loved one leaves not just you but the city you both live in. Your new boss is a scheming monster. A close friend’s dying of AIDS.
“What did you do?” I asked Richard S., when he told me he’d been diagnosed after the bathroom mirror revealed Kaposi’s lesions on his back.
We were both 35 then.
“I cried,” he said. And the way he matter-of-factly stated it told me that that was exactly what he needed to do to find the strength to get through what came next, which was dying, and a hard dying. In those days, before ‘the cocktail,’ people were gone within a year or two.
One of the things that changed, and not because I willed it to, but because it just did, was my taste.
If on that night I’d heard not Sarah Vaughan but some second tier singer, I never would’ve spent the next decade trying to replicate the thrill of it. My compulsive nature meant that after experiencing her performance I had to hear all the singers and then all the pianists and then all the tenor saxophone players of note and the alto players and the trumpet players and the trombone people until finally it became clear to me, via six and a half minutes of uninterrupted bliss delivered in the form of a solo by Ray Brown in the Jazz Showcase in Chicago (when it was in the back behind the lobby of the old Blackstone Hotel, a place so old Sinclair Lewis mentions it in Babbitt) that the double-base, that lowly, cumbrous object, that bloated lyre that cannot ever, somehow, be made glamorous, an instrument I had conceived of as useful only for background noise, keeping time, was capable of divinities every bit as exquisite as Miss Vaughan’s. She’d delivered me to the threshold of a world I knew existed but had neither emotional or intellectual access to. She was one of those artists who not only make you feel glad to be alive, which is what art should at the very least aim to accomplish, but grateful to have lived when they did.
Of course that didn’t stop me from taking her for granted, like you take love or prosperity for granted.
I was in Chicago, August two years later, and saw in the paper that The Divine One was booked for a four-night run at a local club. How not to go? By this time I owned a shelf of her recordings. But I was in the city on business, a job that required me to be on my feet all day. In the evening I’d taxi back to the hotel exhausted. The first night of her gig passes. I resolve to go the next night. That goes by too. The day of her last gig I’d been walking or standing for 12 hours. Fuck it, I thought, I’ll catch her the next time she’s in Philly.
Less than a year later—April 4, 1990—it’s a sunny spring afternoon. I’m driving in a suburb close enough to the city that the car radio picks up WRTI, a college radio station that plays jazz. Ladies and gentlemen, we have some very sad news to report today and…” There immediately followed her up-tempo version of “I’ll Remember April.” The song was introduced in a 1942 Abbott and Costello comedy called Ride ‘Em Cowboy. Everyone from Eydie Gorme to Red Rodney recorded it. Sarah Vaughan spits out the first line of the second verse one syllable at a time. That old trick.
Be. Con. Tent. To. Love. You. Once. In. A. Pril…
As I was leaving the Academy of Music that afternoon, I looked around again for the drag queen known as Sarah Vaughan, hoping to see her so that I could wave. It was later that I realized that of course she’d never appear in drag at this concert. Someone dressed and moving like the singer, an impersonator in the same wig and eyeshade, risked danger from this crowd, which, in spirit, was in equal parts The Apollo Theatre and Our Lady of Fatima. It would be like shouting blasphemies at a human sacrifice. Guess what, you’re next!
But I wondered then how The Divine One might’ve responded had she slipped into a bar near her hotel for a quiet glass of brandy (her preferred beverage, a preference she shared with poet Jack Spicer) and found there the faux Sarah Vaughan. Would rip the imposter’s wig off and backhand her across the bar?
Actually, it occurred to me that The Divine One would probably have laughed and lit another cigarette. Being all too aware of the scope of her talent, my guess is she would’ve viewed this doppelganger as sheer flattery, if not adulation, which is what it was. We’re not talking Diana Ross or Cher, drags anyone with a will can do. We’re talking Sarah Vaughan. That must’ve taken work. And love.
“Oh yeah, she’s still around,” announces Daryl, who’s cut my hair for two decades now. “Woody gave’er a job working in the kitchen.”
“In drag?”
“Oh yeah. She’d be back there makin’ sandwiches for those queens. But she wasn’t always in drag. You know Joe C____?” he says.
Snip. Snip.
I tell Darryl I do. He pauses.
“Well, he’s in there one night in the bathroom at the urinal. And suddenly there’s this black man standing next to him. And honey, she whips out this monster meat. And Joe’s eyes are all popping out of his head. ‘Joe?’ she says. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘You don’t know me?’ she says. ‘If we’d met before, I’d remember that,’ he says, looking at the monster meat. ‘Actually, we’ve met a number of times,’ she says, raising her eyebrows. And then, getting all coy, tongue tip flicking her lip, she says: ‘Sarah Vaughan?’”
__________
Jim Cory has published 10 chapbooks of poems. His most recent publications are Wipers Float In The New Of The Reservoir (1918, The Moron Channel, New Orleans) and 25 Short Poems (2016, Moonstone Press, Philadelphia). He has edited poetry selections by contemporary American poets including James Broughton (Packing Up for Paradise, Black Sparrow Press) and Jonathan Williams (Jubilant Thicket, Copper Canyon Press). Poems have appeared recently in Apiary, unarmed journal, Bedfellows, Capsule, Fell Swoop, Painted Bride Quarterly, Skidrow Penthouse, Cape Cod Poetry Journal and Whirlwind. Recent essays include “What makes a queen a queen?” in the Gay & Lesbian Review, and “What do you think about concrete?” and “Are birds spies?” in the New Haven Review. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Pennsylvania Arts Council, Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony.