[Meeting of the BOP at Louis’ Place: A Songbook] Oh baby it’s another night at Louis’ place and look who’s meeting in the corner by the jukebox it’s the Butch Piano Player’s Union, it’s the BOP! It’s Louis herself and Sammy her best piano player and some empty chairs and who’s coming now? It’s Sammy Silver! What’s that in her hands? Oh baby it’s a pile of papers hot off the press. Sammy holds the papers in her arms piled up under her chin and she uses her chin to hold them as they wobble about and she wiggles under them it’s the IWW the Butch On Piano faction it’s all the piano players in town who wear their hair short and their shirts pressed and who the ladies love it’s the BOP. “Enough song sheets to fill a concert hall” plunk, puts the pile in the center of the little round table in the corner by the jukebox. Now Louis is calling the meeting to order. Louis: “I said shake rattle and roll” everybody else: “I said shake rattle and roll” Louis: “It’s the dance sensation” everybody else: “That’s sweeping the nation” “And talking of nation—” “Imagination?” “No!” “Assassination?” “No!” “Consternation?” “NO!” “Indoctrination?” “Discrimination?” “Domination?” “No no no. Understand! The formation of peoples into nations is an objective law of social development. A nation is an historically constituted stable community of people based on THREE main characteristics: [SHAKE] a common territory [RATTLE] a common language [ROLL] a common character manifested in common features in a national culture. Since the development of imperialism, the liberation of the oppressed nations has become a question whose final resolution would only come through proletarian revolution. Get out in that kitchen and rattle those pots and pans” everybody else: “Get out in that kitchen and rattle those pots and pans.” What’s cookin comrades? Oh here’s a late comer, it’s Harry, the butchest piano player in town always strolling in late and asking what’s cookin comrades. Harry made the girls melt like tears into a pillow. This week in the newsletter Sammy’d interviewed Harry about the current touring production of Porgy and Bess whose final staging would be in Leningrad. “I think we should talk” Sammy said “me being a Jew I mean sort of and you being a Black butch in America about Summertime” “You don’t think we should talk about Sportin Life? Us being queers?” “Queers being what we have in common I thought maybe we could talk about our differences instead, me being an anarchist—I mean totally—and you being well, a different sort of revolutionary” “War sure is cold” “Sure is. When we play a song like Summertime are we as Jewish and Black Americans collaborating? and can we ever collaborate when Jews can be white in America when to be white in America is to be safe and to have opportunity which is the opposite of what it means to be Black in America, I mean constitutionally you understand, I mean as it is written you understand.” This would be edited out of the final interview to be printed in the newsletter of the BOP, distributed to its twenty to twenty-five fluctuating members with updates on which bars were allowing access to a piano for practice and when, a song sheet of the latest hit, who was looking for a partner to compose with, calls for auditions, a tear away for annual membership fees to be posted, and any other business. It would be printed: Sammy Silver: When we play a song like Summertime, are we, as Jewish and Black Americans, collaborating? There in the moment when they’re talking, Harry would reply after sitting and thinking, chewing at her lip a little and stroking her chin. Harry was square, her shoulders were a long line and she wore a suit jacket and suit trousers in dark blue with her Communist Party membership details typed on silk and sewn into the lining. Harry came from a long line of Harrys but no one knew where Harry came from. Harry’s shoulders were a long line. When Harry licked her lips the girls melted “You think Gershwin and you think assimilation” “There are rumors he’s a Bolshevik” “I never heard them and don’t you think I would have?” “Everybody’s listening” “Sure. But you hear Gershwin you hear rhapsody in blue, an American symphony” Harry said “Gershwin thought that because he was an American he could use Black bodies like a real American man” “There are rumors he’s a homosexual” “There’s plenty of American homosexuals” “They call it unamerican” “They call it lots of things, in fact you name it I’ve been called it” “So you’re saying it isn’t a collaboration” “You ever use Sophie Soap?” “Sure” “You know that soap on the soap box? Ok she’s a pink block of soap and o-kay she’s got suds in all the right places, but the way she’s holding her own little Sophie Soap in her Sophie hand like it’s a mitt? I mean that Sophie Soap is a dyke no doubt about it. But heterosexuals use Sophie don’t they?” “Sure” “So I can play Summertime if I like” “You’re saying you can use Gershwin the way Gershwin used you?” “I’m saying what was Gershwin’s isn’t Gershwin’s anymore, you can mimeograph off the whole score, his whole American rhapsody and paste your house with it, is it collaboration then? No it’s repurposing. It’s the redistribution of wealth that’s what it is” “But what do you think it sounds like Harry? Like jazz or like, like my uncle Herschel?” “A whole lot of music in America sounds like your uncle Herschel Sam. Gershwin shouldn’t say he’s making American music. He shouldn’t sell his music like that. America doesn’t deserve it.” “America doesn’t deserve you either Harry, you play piano like it’s playing itself.” That’s how the interview would end, printed in the newsletter, followed by a couple of lines on each of the union members involved saying something like this interview was conducted by Sammy Silver (stage name) and Harry Harlem (stage name). Harry Harlem is a founding member of the BOP. Harry plays piano solo and composes. Harry was for a time the secretary of the BOP, now replaced by our current secretary Louis Brooks. Sammy Silver is the newest member of the BOP, she plays piano in a duo and is responsible for the printing of our monthly newsletter.
Of course there was the stage which allowed you to act how you liked and to dress how you liked in costumes which Frankie did, though she looked like Frankie whatever she was wearing. “I’ve seen you.” “Yeah?” “Yeah I’ve seen you.” “Where?” “I’ve seen you do [blank]” “Yeah I’ve done [bang bang bang went the trolley]” “Yeah I’ve seen you do [ding ding ding went the bell]” “Yeah that was me” “Hey you were good!” “I was good?” “You were good!” “Oh I’m good?” “Yes you are!” “Who me?” Frankie pointed a thumb into her chest at the bar after her show with a free bottle of beer and her face freshly washed. She’d been [blank] tonight. Everybody’d clapped and laughed with her and Sammy Silver [give it up for Sammy over here] and they gave it. “Whaddyu think about give, Joanne?” “About give?” “Yes. About give” “You mean giving Frankie Gold?” “No not giving not necessarily, I mean give like how your pants give or your pajamas” “My pajamas?” “Yes how they give whaddyu think” Frankie said “about that?” “I think it’s kind of them to let me in, don’t you think it is?” “Yes! Yes I do Joanne I think give is terribly kind.” Frankie is a soft butch in soft shirts and soft leather shoes. Frankie’d been an anarchist before she’d been a butch and now she was both she couldn’t see the difference anymore. Frankie had been born an anarchist like people are born Catholic. She’d learnt the word OPPRESSION the way other children learn mnemonics for planets—One Person Picks Roses Each Sunny Sunday In Omaha Nebraska One Person Picks Roses Each Sunny Sunday In Omaha Nebraska—so when it came to meet her she recognized it, bending to pick roses in the sun. Hey I saw you! Who me? Yeah up there! Up there? Yeah! You’re the singer shake hands clap backs. Interrupting what she was about to say which was where the boys are my true love will be he’s striding down some street up town and I know he’s waiting there for me she did that one, the hits and standards and stage show skits. She did Annie Get Your Gun tonight. Asking the audience “Are there any Annie Oakleys out there this evening who’d like to come up on stage?” picking a girl (One Person Picks Roses Each Sunny Sunday In Omaha Nebraska) and they sang anything you can do I can do better I can do anything better than you Annie from the audience: no you can’t Frankie: yes I can / no you can’t / yes I can and the crowd thought it was a riot. It was a song which spoke to the heart of its audience, those prone to strutting to prove they could walk. Frankie had felt ecstatic when she’d heard that song. She knew that if they put it in their act that it’d be a hit because the butches would know that it was about them. Frankie had been able to see the stage lighting and the set and the way it was dressed before she’d ever stepped into it. To her it was obvious, she wore cowboy and top hats and other American props and the crowd laughed, sometimes some of them cried. But Frankie wanted them to see what she could see, how easily it could topple down if they only realized it was theirs to reach out and touch. Can’t you see it? No you can’t, yes I can! No you can’t, yes I can! The crowd loved it, they howled. They did the high bit—any note you can sing I can sing higher—and got higher and higher and Frankie hit all the notes and they did the softer bit and Frankie sang softer and softer and the bar went quiet and Sammy pressed the keys on the piano so gently they slipped barely out of time, a delay between touching the keys and the hammer hitting the strings. And when they did the bit about clothes Frankie sang it alone, really meaning it, feeling it suddenly more acutely in the place where her heart actually was—Anything you can wear I can wear better—Frankie touching the lapels of her jacket—in what you wear I’d look better than you—just to touch the knot in a tie which she did or tip a hat to put your hands in your pockets it took your breath away to do that to put your hands in your pockets. Applause! Applause! And somebody standing ready by the jukebox who knew it was time to start it playing again and Frankie touching Sammy on the shoulder on the way off the stage to go back to a little bathroom the staff got to use, to wash her face off, slick her hair back, to change her clothes. And the lights on the stage going down and in the bar going up: “I think give is relaxing” Frankie said “don’t you Sammy?” “Sure” “I think if we’re going to change the world we have to pay attention to the way the world is made.” No one in the bars wanted this type of chat, most people didn’t want to talk at all but Frankie kept talking anyway Sammy was listening she’d heard it all before of course but she was and Joanne’d get a kick out of it maybe while polishing glasses. “I’ve got the sun in morning and the moon at night, it’s such an American thing to sing, you aren’t lucky because you’ve got the sun! Fuck! Everybody has the sun sometimes!” Thinking lucky was to do with sunshine was what kept people thinking there was no need, no need to talk about it, no need to think about it! Everybody in the goddam bar had nothing but this! And there was no way the sun could get into this basement or any of the other bars all in the basements, all with one way in and no way out you know, you’ve heard, you know about that about how there was a way in and that was hopeful but it was the same way as the way out and sometimes you couldn’t. You didn’t. “The world’s made of plates right?” “Made of plates?” “Tectonic plates and what do they do?” “You gonna tell me?” “They move about don’t they?” “Do they?” “Yes they move, they shift about because things change Joanne, things change and we can’t stay rigid through that pretending they don’t, haven’t you had a bad back before?” “Before? How about now?” “Exactly it’s because you didn’t bend properly isn’t it? Because you stayed too rigid bringing the boxes of beer in, because the world put too much pressure on you, that’s why you’re hurt, because you got tired and stiff and it’s all changing all the time isn’t it Jo? You can’t just stand still and take it you’ve got to, we all have to think more about give.” Frankie talked and talked and Joanne felt the touch of somebody recognizing she was hurt. It’s not insightful, Frankie would have said if Joanne had said it aloud, everybody’s hurt. It’s not the exception, Joanne, it’s the rule, pain’s the rule and we’re all under it. The next night in a different bar they do it again. Frankie walks onto the stage to Sammy playing there’s no business like show business like no business I know and she takes the mic singing lets goo oonn withh the shhoowww. There’s no people like show people they smile when they are low, she sang and smiled. “We aren’t show people Sam, we’re no people.” She thought that people must look at them like Jews and she hated that, a couple of Jews named Silver and Gold. Sammy’s surname wasn’t Silver of course, but it could have been. Frankie thought that if she was up on stage and someone came into the bar looking to punch a queer or failing that a communist or failing that a Jew she’d be a real prize, a jackpot, three fruits all in a line. Someone like Laur would worry that thoughts like that might somehow summon a violence they were all trying their hardest to avoid. Laur having still a faint feeling of the lord and of the devil but Frankie didn’t have an ounce of that. Any room could change into any room. Really it was the barstool that stayed the same and everything else which changed around it. And Frankie sat on a barstool and let the other parts move, a curtain drawn to let the light in so now she’s at the deli and it’s morning and the jukebox is still over there, Frankie waved to it, it waved back. And the bar stayed too, only what was behind the bar changed, somebody came on and rolled the booze away and replaced it with jars of pickles. And replaced it with jars of pickles. Frankie thought if she ever left this scene they’d simply pick her up and put a jar of pickles in her place. And the pickle jar sings anything you can do I can do better, I can do anything better than you.
[Friday Night: Butch Night Out] Dinner at Marg’s before hitting the bars. “If I could pass mustard Laur, I’d be a millionaire” Marg jokes and laughs with her hand on her belly. “Thanks Marg, hey you sure are a wise cracker” says Laur. “Yeah Marg” says Vic “No one’s heard that one before.” Vic looks like a motorbike. She’s so butch the steak is hard to swallow (this phrasing is common in butch crowds: so and so’s so butch she showers in a raincoat, so and so’s so butch she won’t even flip her records, so and so’s so butch she …) “This steak is swell and the potatoes too, I can’t get enough of the potatoes” Laur is the type of boy you bring home to your parents. Teddy agrees “Yeah Marg this is really something. Just how I like it. Do you get fed this well every night, is Suzy really that good?” “She’s the best” says Marg. Whole table in unison: “Don’t we know it.” They go quiet. [Humming starts up, low and constant and continues through the whole dinner: you say potato and I say potahto you say tomato and I say tomahto] Teddy speaks finally “Heard about Louise? She went home to her mother’s” “Oh she went home but she’ll be back” “Well I hope she doesn’t find hellfire at home with her mother” Laur says. “Her mother’s not so bad since her father died and her brother married off, hell I think she might be a little bit of bull herself the way we get along” “My mother was definitely a bulldyke, she just never got to know it” Teddy says. “How do you make that out?” “She was as big as me!” They all laugh, even Vic. Teddy is big and soft, he has on a brown suit instead of a leather jacket. He’s older than the rest of them, more Marg’s age and they’re friends mostly because they’ve been around the bars so long. Teddy likes the younger guys more, they’re less depressed than he is and they seem so, so he can’t put his finger on it. Teddy’s too tired to think too much about it but it’s something like going to a good movie and going to a bad one, no no like going to an old movie or going to a new one, the new movie reminds you you’re not dead. Teddy spikes his steak on his fork and takes a bite. “Sure is tender” he says. Whole table in unison: “Sure is.” [potato/potahto/ tomato/tomahto] Laur’s here for the food first and the company second because Laur is hungry. You can see Laur’s ribs but she’ll never take her top off for you. Laur’s fine at conversation, needs a meal every Friday, fills in silences, asks questions, makes jokes, lets the gravy from the steak stay in her mouth a little longer and licks mustard off her knife real slow. Laur’s body, and she’s never been able to say this out loud, never tried, just once or twice so drunk she couldn’t speak so it came out slurred which is really how to say it most clearly: Laur’s body has always felt like a slur. Like it started at one point but spread out and reached over to another. At best it is misunderstood but mostly it is incomprehensible. It made her feel as if she hadn’t spoken at all but she had, she had spoken she had slurred and slurring is a part of speech isn’t it? Didn’t it come outta my mouth? she thought to herself, storming about in her mind, stomping down its hallways and slamming its doors being angry and butch in her head and it showed. She was a toaster butch, she was butter-side-up butch, how do you like your eggs in the morning butch, meet me by the kitchen sink better than your man but like your man butch, your sweetheart, your heartbreaker, your baby. Laur was worried that sometimes she didn’t feel anything at all. Taste was a sense she clung to. She prayed: if I must be numb all over, please god, leave me my tongue. “You’re quiet over there Vic” Marg says “what’s eating you?” Vic keeps chewing. “How’s the bike Vic?” asks Laur “She’s a beauty” Vic’s heart races at Laur’s attention, she swallows down “Did some work on her this weekend, don’t get to take her out much in all this rain.” Vic has a sharp jaw and a pristine leather jacket, her hair is slicked back and her t shirt is white and all the butches whose t shirts are all white and even Teddy in his white shirt and black tie for all occasions have tucked paper napkins into their collars to eat. “You need a lady to ride with, that’ll warm you up” says Marg. It wouldn’t seem out of place if Marg started beating her chest like a gorilla, she is upright, shoulders bulky and back. Vic just eats. “What you not interested in girls anymore Vicky?” Marg says. They lock eyes. “She just knows all the good ones are taken. Right Marg?” says Laur. “Keep your mind off my Suzy slick—” “—Who me?” Laur holds her hands up, backs her chair away from the table. “She’s a catch isn’t she Marg? We meant nothing by it” “What else could we have meant, Margy?” Vic says. Marg stands up. “Pass me back those potatoes will you Vic?” Teddy says. No one moves. “You think you’re the biggest bull around here or something?” says Marg “What’s big without brains?” Vic says. Marg stands up but more. “Cool it kids” Teddy says “we haven’t even hit the bars yet.” “Yeah slick. Gotta hit the bars first.” No one moves. “Sure we do” Marg says, she takes the pack of cigarettes from the inside pocket of her jacket, sits back down at the table and smokes. “Hey Laur, pass me a beer.” “Sure thing boss. Who’s for another beer?” Whole table in unison: “Sure thing.” Steam traps below the cloud of cigarette smoke and settles above them and Marg’s Suzy serves seconds of [you say potato. I say potahto] Vic looking across the table, through the steam at Laur [potato/potahto] Laur passing Vic the salt [tomato/tomahto] Vic using her knife [potato/potahto] Vic licking her fork clean [tomato/tomahto] Suzy serving thirds of [
The bar’s a horse and Frankie wipes it with a rag in the same spot round and round and the bar’s delighted and shakes its mane for her. Frankie was the closest thing they had to staff that night when Joanne didn’t show up. Please, the owner had pleaded, please Frankie you know where everything is don’t you? I’ll pay you performer’s price not tender price I promise please Frankie I gotta go I gotta be somewhere I can’t close the bar, you know the ropes don’t you? Frankie’d agreed. “Ganuf” Frankie spoke to the bar-prop “was treated like dirt by everybody, the people who used him to drag their cart about, the kids who saw him tied up and vulnerable, the rider, whoever” Frankie rubs the bar with a rag and the bar nuzzles her hand which is full of peanuts and its big wet lips are gentle. “Everyone treated like shit thinks they’re being treated like an animal, exterminated like rats, worked like dogs, caged like lions wouldn’t it be better if we just admitted that what we were actually being treated like was men! That man has been treated like shit by man for millennia and still is and will be if we keep imagining that it’s only animals that man despises and not the poor or the queers or anybody else who can’t prove he’s a man as if being a man is what’ll save you from all the other men well (Frankie might’ve paused to spit then) being a man won’t save you from anything, certainly not from being a horse. You know what I mean?” “Um” the barprop says. Frankie wanted to hear opinions, she was desperate to be challenged, to hear notes that didn’t go together, melodies that clashed something, anything. “If” says the person at the bar “if there were a horse in New York” she says “I’d line up like all the other kids who grew up in a city and wait my turn riding him about” “Yes!” Frankie says, she loved that answer! She patted the bar heavily and it shook its behind and whinnied pat pat pat firm nearly setting off into a canter “Yes! You would! And I would too! Of course! because we, you and I, comrade we are the little boy in the book who doesn’t beat the horse but steals sugar from his mother’s cupboard to feed the horse whilst it’s made to wait still harnessed after a long day’s work in the street and who the horse shakes its mane for and makes sweet horse sounds” Frankie was excited by the idea of a horse in the city and of young people lining up to pay their respects to it and of the mutual exchange that could happen between a large animal (who reminded her of Roz) and that line of people each one of them getting something different from the horse, some sort of love or kindness or thrill and the horse getting to meet all those people who loved it. At the bar now she imagined the horse as the bartender. The horse on its hind legs with a rag under its hoof making clean circles in the grease, the horse free pouring whisky into a heavy bottomed tumbler and clipping it across the bar into somebody’s hand. The horse laying out a square napkin and placing a bottle of beer on it, and clacking coins into the till. Frankie made a crack about giving tips to a horse and the barprop drank up and went. The bar was empty. No one to talk to. The piano was set up and soon Sammy’d come in and play a little. Finished from her day job working as a typesetter at the anarchist newspaper, still with the old gang. Not Frankie though, who never saw any of them and nobody talked about Frankie with Sammy and Sammy and Frankie didn’t talk about anybody. Sammy had been a typesetter for the anarchist papers since she was a kid and she’d never left. “Did you know they call it that?” Sammy’d say to girls when they asked her about her work “that stuff between all the letters you can’t see? That’s called furniture, I always liked that about the job” she’d say dreamily. Sammy was a dreamy type of guy, like a low note on a piano. All she did was keys, keys to type with keys to play piano. She had recurring nightmares about losing her fingers: someone accusing her of something and a judge ruling she’d have each of her fingers chopped off at the guillotine up on the stage in the bar, or worse still she was on stage with Frankie it was the finale a big number and she’d press a key and the finger would spuk pop right out of her hand and Frankie’d be singing alone. I need to diversify she’d wake up thinking, shaking her head, clammy, sweat on her forehead the big flop of her hair stuck to her skin, tangled in her eyebrows. “Delores” shaking Delores awake “Delores, Delores, how many fingers am I holding up?” holding her hands out to show Delores and Delores rolling over, grumbling “Fuck off Sam” grumble. Yeah here she is “Hey Sammy” “Hey Frankie” “Turn the sign round will ya?” [closed] and the lights go down over the bar on Frankie Gold cleaning glasses and up on the stage showing Sammy Silver practicing after hours.