“At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music. Not enough night.”
—Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Jack Gelber remembers being fifteen or sixteen the first time he heard the word “cool.” “If you were a black musician, wore a certain kind of clothes, had a certain kind of attitude,” he explained, “you were cool.” The good-looking blond son of an alcoholic Jewish tinsmith, a hipster from the South Side of Chicago who’d been listening to jazz since he was a kid, Gelber put himself through the University of Illinois, then moved to San Francisco in 1953. He worked on the docks when he needed money and hung out at Jimbo’s Bop City, in the Fillmore, cool ground zero, listening to tenor players like Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray. If there were a cool hall of fame, Jack Gelber would already be in it for painting the gold inside the lettering of the original City Lights Bookstore sign.
After drifting to New York in the mid-fifties, as he reminisced nearly a half-century later while relaxing on a couch in his comfortable West Eighteenth Street loft, Gelber “got involved with a group of junkies” on the Lower East Side, and one day the cops kicked down his door. Though he claims to have been just making cocoa, they busted him for possession of heroin, and he spent the next several weeks in the Tombs. When he got out, his pregnant wife supported the family by working as a secretary while he wrote The Connection, a play he says is based on people he met hanging out in a “shooting gallery” over a Chinese laundry in North Beach.
In April 1958, Gelber, then twenty-five, ran into a friend on the street who’d just seen a Living Theatre production. “He told me they ought to do my play,” Gelber remembers, so Gelber dropped off a script at Judith Malina and Julian Beck’s apartment. Within hours, the way Malina remembers it, Beck burst into their bedroom, waving Gelber’s script and screaming “We’ve got to do this play!”
The Connection is about eight sick junkies in a dingy downtown Manhattan loft, waiting for a dealer named Cowboy to come back with the “horse.” Featuring nearly identical casts, both the Living Theatre production and the 1961 movie version directed by Shirley Clarke (who in 1964 would make a documentary-style feature about Harlem street kids called The Cool World) open with Sol (Jerome Raphael)—who looks like a kind of ragged, scholarly bum, wearing a ripped sweatshirt and in need of a shave—squinting into a pair of binoculars at a day-world filled with squares, far, far away on the other side of a grime-streaked window. A second white guy, Ernie (Garry Goodrow), wears white sneakers and a trench coat and is passed out, face down on the only table in the raw loft, much to the disgust of his host, Leach, played by a third white guy, Warren Finnerty, with an extremely cool walk that has him bobbing on the balls of his feet, shoulders hunched like a boxer’s, as he scurries around tidying up the pad.
Sam (Jimmy Anderson), junkie number four, pads around the loft in a grimy T-shirt and torn flip-flops. In contrast to Sol, who can read Greek and Hebrew, Sam probably can’t even read and write English. Still, Sol, who is white, and Sam, who is black, are two of a kind: they live to get high, rubbed by the awful simplicity of their lives down to a nub of pure yen. A quartet of real-life bop musicians enter, hauling their instruments up the loft stairs, led by pianist Freddie Redd and alto saxophonist Jackie McLean. All-too-real drug problems had cost all the band members their cabaret cards, which is why they became very available to work at the Living Theatre for thirty-five dollers per week. They too have come to Leach’s to score, and they utilize the waiting to rehearse some of Redd’s tunes.
As the most down junkie in the room, the man with the least, the closest to the street, Sam is the ultimate arbiter of cool. He can’t stand Leach, who gets his dope free in return for letting the other junkies use his place. When Leach produces a pineapple out of his old wood-burning stove, then only offers slices of it to the musicians, Sam comments that Leach is “queer without being queer. He thinks like a chick.”