IT IS A FUNNY THING. A man can make a promise to his God, break it five minutes later and never think anything about it. With an idle shrug of his shoulders, a man can also break solemn promises to his mother, wife, or sweetheart, and, except for a slight, momentary twinge of conscience, he still won’t be bothered very much. But if a man ever breaks a promise he has made to himself he disintegrates. His entire personality and character crumble into tiny pieces, and he is never the same man again.
I remember very well a sergeant I knew in the Army. Before a group of five men he swore off smoking forever. An hour later he sheepishly lit a cigarette and broke his vow to the five of us and himself. He was never quite the same man again, not to me, and not to himself.
My vow of silence was much harder to maintain than a vow to quit smoking. It was a definite handicap in everything I did. I read through the want ads three times, studying them carefully, and there wasn’t a single thing I could find to do. A man who can’t, or won’t, talk is in a difficult situation when it comes to finding a job in the city. Besides, I had never had a job in my life—except for my two years in the service.
Of course, during my year of college at Valdosta State I had waited tables in the co-op for my meals, but I didn’t consider that a job. Growing up in Georgia, I had done farm work for my father when I couldn’t get out of it, such things as chopping cotton, milking a cow, and simple carpentry repair jobs around the farm. There were a good many things. I was capable of doing around a farm without having to talk. But the want ads in the newspaper were no help to me at all. Unwilling to use my voice, I couldn’t even ask for a job unless I wrote it down. The majority of the situations that were open in the agate columns were for salesmen. And a man who can’t talk can’t sell anything. I wadded the newspaper into a ball and tossed it into the wastebasket.
One thing I could always do was walk and condition cocks for another breeder. There were plenty of chicken men in the South who would have jumped at the chance to pay me five dollars apiece for every game fowl I conditioned for them. But for a man who was still considered a big-time cockfighter throughout the South it would be too much of a comedown to work for another cock breeder. I had never worked for anybody else in my thirty-two years on this earth, and it was too late to start now. By God, I wasn’t that desperate!
Sitting in that hotel room, with only a few loose dollars in my pocket, I was beginning to feel sorry for myself. My eyes rested on my guitar case.
My guitar was an old friend. During the first few months of my self-enforced silence, the days and nights had almost doubled in length. It is surprising how much time is killed everyday in idle conversation. Just to have something to fill in time I had purchased a secondhand Gibson guitar for thirty dollars in a Miami pawnshop. The case wasn’t so hot—cheap brown cardboard stamped to resemble alligator leather—but the guitar was a good one, and it had a strong, wonderful tone. The guitar served as a substitute for my lost voice, and I don’t know what I would have done without it.
I opened the guitar case, removed the instrument and ran through a few exercises to limber my fingers. I hadn’t played the guitar for five or six days but the calluses on my fingers were still hard and tough. The Uncle who sold me the Gibson had also thrown in a free instruction booklet, but I had never learned how to play any regular songs. After learning most of the chords and how to tune and pick the strings, I had tossed the book away.
I only knew three songs, and they were tunes I had made up myself, sitting around picking them out until they sounded like the mental images I wanted them to resemble. One was Georgia Girl. This was a portrait in sound of Mary Elizabeth, my fiancée. The second tune I had composed I called Empty Pockets. My pockets had been empty many times in my life, and in making up this song I had discovered a way of getting a hollow sound effect by banging the box near the hole and playing a succession of fast triplets on the lower three strings at the same time. Despite the hollow sounds, this was a gay, fast tune and I was rather fond of it. The remaining song was merely my impression of an old patchwork quilt Grandma had made many years ago, and that’s what I called it: Grandma’s Quilt. I had tried to duplicate the colors and designs of that old patchwork, faded quilt in chord patterns, and I had been fairly successful.
My repertoire, then, consisted of three highly personal songs. If it was music, it was reflective music made up for my own personal enjoyment, and not for the general public. But I had to get a few dollars together, and soon, and maybe my guitar was the way? I could have pawned the Gibson for twenty dollars or so, and this sum would pay a week’s rent, but if I pawned the guitar, where would I be then?
I decided to take a chance and temporarily invade the world of music. As a last resort, when push came to shove, I could pawn the instrument. I removed my wristwatch, waited until the sweep hand hit twelve, picked up my guitar and played my three songs in succession all the way through. Time elapsed: seventeen minutes, fourteen seconds. Not a lot of time for a guitar concert, but I had nothing to lose by trying, and the songs were all different. Perhaps some bar owner would put me on for a few dollars in the evening.
I shucked out of my black cowboy shirt, which was getting dirty around the collar, even though it didn’t show very much, and changed into a clean, white shirt. I retied my red silk neckerchief, slipped into my corduroy suit and looked at myself in the dresser mirror. I looked clean and presentable. The red kerchief looked good with a white shirt and my gray-green corduroy suit. The cheap straw cowboy hat pushed back from my forehead was just the right touch for a would-be guitar player. I had burned my name into the yellow box of my guitar with a hot wire two years before, so all I had to do was write something simple on a piece of paper and get going.
I took a fresh sheet of paper out of my notebook, sat down at the desk and looked at it, trying to figure out a strong selling point for my slender abilities. At last it came to me, a simple straightforward statement of fact. In large capital letters I wrote JOB on the page, and put the slip of paper in my shirt pocket. If a prospective owner was interested in the word JOB he would give me an audition and my guitar would have to talk for me.
I checked the little square felt-covered box inside the case, and there were plenty of extra plastic picks and two new strings wrapped in wax paper. As I started toward the door, carrying my guitar, I caught a glimpse of my grim, determined expression in the mirror. I almost laughed. I made an obscene gesture with my thumb at my grinning reflection and left the room.
The time was only ten thirty. There were dozens of bars, cabarets and beer-and-wine joints in Jacksonville, and I decided to cover them all, one by one, until I found a job.
I entered the first bar I came to down the street and handed the slip of paper to the bartender. He glanced at it, gave it back and pointed to the door.
At the bar on the next corner I tried a different tactic. I had learned a lesson in the first bar. Before presenting my slip of paper to the man in the white jacket, I made the sign of the tall one, and put change on the bar to pay for the beer. Beer is the easiest drink there is to order, whether you can talk or not. No matter how noisy a place is you can always get a bartender’s attention by holding stiff hands out straight, the right hand approximately one foot above the left. This gesture will always produce a beer, draft if they have it, or a can of some brand if they do not.
“Sorry, buddy,” the bartender returned my slip of paper, “but I don’t have a music and dancing license. I couldn’t hire you if I wanted to.”
I finished my glass of beer and returned to the sidewalk. A license for music and dancing had never occurred to me, but that simple requirement narrowed my search. I decided to become more selective. After bypassing several unlikely bars, and walking a half-dozen blocks, I came to a fairly nice-looking cabaret. There was a small blue winking neon sign in the window that stated Chez Vernon. The entranceway was between a men’s haberdashery and a closed movie theater. To the left of the bar entrance another door opened into a package store, which was also part of the nightclub, and there was a sandwich board on the sidewalk announcing that the James Boys were featured inside every night except Sunday.
There were four eight-by-ten photos of the James Boys mounted on the board, and I studied them for a moment before I went inside. They wore their hair long, almost to the shoulder, but they had on Western style clothes. They were evidently a country music group. In the smiling photos two of them had Spanish guitars like mine, one held an electric guitar and the remaining member peeped out from behind a bass. I entered the bar.
The bar was in a fairly narrow corridor—most of the space it should have had was crowded out by the partitioning for the package store—but there were approximately twenty-five stools, and a short service bar at the far end. Only one bartender was on duty, and there was only one customer sitting at the first stool. The customer sat with his arms locked behind his back glaring down distastefully at a double shot of whiskey. At night, with a fair-sized crowd a bar this long would require at least two bartenders.
Beyond the bar there was a large square room with a small dance floor, a raised triangular platform in the corner for the musicians and two microphones. There were about thirty-five small circular tables, with twisted wire ice-cream parlor chairs stacked on top of them. The walls of the large room had been painted in navy blue. Silver cardboard stars had been pasted at random upon the wall and ceiling to simulate a night sky. The ceiling was black, and the scattered light fixtures on the ceiling were in various pastel colors.
Between the bar and nightclub section there were two lavatories, with their doors recessed about a foot into the wall. A crude effort at humor had been attempted on the restroom doors: One was labeled SETTERS and the other POINTERS. After sizing the place up, I sat down at the far end of the bar and made the sign of the tall one. As I reached for the stein with my left hand, I handed the bartender the slip of paper with my right.
“I only work here,” he said indifferently, eyeing my guitar. “The James Boys are supposed to play out the month, but the boss is in the back.” He pointed to a curtain covering an arched doorway near the right corner of the bandstand. “Go ahead and talk to him if you want to.” His face colored slightly as he realized I couldn’t talk, but he smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “His name is Mr. Vernon. Lee Vernon.”
As soon as I finished my beer, I picked up my guitar, dropped a half dollar on the bar and headed for the back, pushing the curtain to one side. The hallway was short. There was a door leading to an alley, and two doors on either side. I opened the first door on the right, but it was a small dressing room. I knocked at the door opposite the dressing room and didn’t enter until I heard “Come in.”
For a nightclub owner, Lee Vernon was a much younger man than I expected to meet. He was under thirty, with a mass of black curls, a smiling well-tanned face, and gleaming china-blue eyes. There were three open ledgers on his gray metal desk and a few thick manila folders. He tapped his large white teeth with a pencil and raised his black eyebrows. I removed my guitar from the case before I handed him the slip of paper.
Lee Vernon laughed aloud when he saw the word JOB and shook his head from side to side with genuine amusement. “A nonsinging guitar player!” he exclaimed, still smiling. “I never thought I’d see the day. Go ahead”—he looked at my name burned into the guitar box—“Frank, is it?”
I nodded, and wiped my damp fingers on my jacket so the plastic pick wouldn’t slip in my fingers. I put my left foot on a chair, and cradled the instrument over my knee.
“Play anything, Frank,” Vernon smiled. “I don’t care. I’ve never turned down an excuse to quit working in my life.”
I vamped a few chords and then played “Empty Pockets” all the way through. Mr. Vernon listened attentively, tapping his pencil on the desk in time with the music. This was the shortest of my three songs, but it sounded good in the tiny office. The ceiling was low and there was a second-listen effect reverberating in the room, especially during the thumping part.
“I like the sound, Frank,” Vernon said. “You’re all right. All right. But I don’t think I can use you right now. I’m trying to build the Chez Vernon into a popular night spot, and the James Boys pretty well fit the bill. I pay them eight hundred a week and if I pay much more than that for music, I’ll be working for them instead of for myself. Do you belong to the union, Frank?”
I shook my head. The idea of any free American male paying gangsters money for the right to work has always struck me as one of the most preposterous customs we have.
“Tell you what,” Vernon said reflectively. “Do you really need a job?”
I nodded seriously.
“Okay, then. The James Boys play a forty-minute set, and then they take a twenty-minute break. They play from nine till midnight, an extra hour if the crowd warrants it, and till two a.m. on Saturday nights. In my opinion, a twenty-minute break is too long, and I lose customers sometimes just because of it, but those were the terms I hired them under. If you want to sit in by yourself on the stand to fill the breaks I’m willing to try it for a few nights to see how it goes. I can give you ten bucks a night, but that’s the limit.”
For a few moments I thought about it, but ten dollars was too much money to give me when I only knew three songs. I held up five fingers.
“You want fifty dollars?” Vernon asked incredulously.
I shook my head and snapped out five fingers.
“You’re a pretty weird cat.” Vernon laughed. “Not only do you not sing, you’re honest. Five bucks a night it is, Frank. But I’ll tell Dick James to clean out his kitty between his sets, and any tips you get on the breaks belong to you. You’ll pick up a few extra bucks, anyway.”
I nodded, shook hands with my employer and returned my guitar to its case.
“Come in about eight thirty, Frank,” Vernon concluded the interview, “and I’ll introduce you to the James Boys.”
I returned to the hotel and stretched out on my bed for a nap. Although I had taken a lower figure than the ten he offered, I still felt a little uneasy. After Lee Vernon heard me playing the same songs all evening he wouldn’t be too happy about it. But during the days, maybe I could make up a few more. If so, I could ask for a raise to ten. The immediate problem was remedied. I could pay my room rent of three dollars a day and eat on the other two until I could work my way out of the hole with an ingenious plan of some kind.
A few minutes later I was asleep.