FORMATTED FOR READING ON CELL PHONE ONLY

We Will Soar Into The Air As If Lured By The Sun.

Jazz Age New York,1920-29

To be published in 2011.

The Dazzle

1

The dazzle of the sun.

The blinding white light dissolves everything away.

Dissolving one thing into another until everything is immaterial and formless and gone.

I believed in a limitless future then.. I believed in the roiling energy of the new youth.. In the cloudless sky. I believed in the roaring jazz and the bathtub gin and the satiny shimmering girls with their hair bobbed like fine-featured boys. Their long necks so pale and soft and graceful. Girls modern and streamlined, like sculptures made for art museums. Flapper girls caught in flight, their dresses loose and shimmying. So wild and hopelessly romantic that we men could scarcely keep up with them. So sweet and fresh they could stop your heart when they smiled or laughed or even just stood loose by a dance floor, their hips swaying curves to the rushing beat of the hot jazz..

Scott closes his eyes against the dazzle of light as the taxicab turns the corner and catches the sun low on the horizon. Everything disappears for a moment and reappears again. The crazy bustle of people hurrying on the sidewalks, the rushing energy of Fifth Avenue in midtown with the fashionably dressed people hurrying along the sidewalks in great thronging crowds. Purring limousines gliding by, carrying the rich and elegant. Scott watches entranced from his passing cab window, drifting by as if in a dream. He loves it all. It is so unlike the Midwest which he has so recently escaped, it is New York. It is the center of the world.

Already he knows he will never tire of the sight of it.

I had never seen anything like it. This great city of New York in 1927. The world had never been as fast or as careless as it was now. Skirts were higher and so was the market, up and up into the clear blue sky. Banknotes fluttering down upon us to the wailing jazz horns in the mad speakeasies. Alcohol was illegal but there had never been as much of it around before as there was now. And for the first time the young girls were drinking it too, drinking and dancing and flying to the moon on girlish laughter. And taking us all flying along with them.

I had never seen anything like it before and I wanted to drink it all in. All of New York, all of this great timeless, exuberant party. All the way from colored Harlem down to bohemian Greenwich Village. One great, golden booming city, roaring with money and optimism. An entire metropolis under perfectly clear blue skies..

It was a world of sheer becoming.

When Scott looks out from the taxicab window he sees a metropolis roaring towards a peak of greatness. An exuberant city which is the throbbing heart of a soaring nation which has only just awakened to recognize its industrial might, awakened to the certain realization that it is ruling the world for the first time in its history. What Scott sees on these dazzling, shimmering streets of Manhattan is his own great future adorned in riches and glory.

He has not forgotten the suffocating smallness of his hometown in Minnesota, the feeling of the sheer lack of possibility that something wonderful might happen in his life. The desperate numbing. He remembers it as a force of crushing grayness that sent him scurrying away to Princeton and then, as soon as he could find a job in New York, away from the Midwest forever.

Now what Scott longs for most is to be a New Yorker. A man totally unlike himself and all the people he has at last left behind in the Midwest, unlike everyone in St Paul, Minnesota, unlike everyone in all the state of Minnesota. He is young enough not yet to be fully formed as a man, and he has come here willing to entrust this great city to form him. To define his fate and his fortune. Scott believes in the possibility of the re-creation of a man when he is willing, and he believes he will be re-created here in New York. This great dazzling city will make him into a celebrated writer of fiction novels.

And most of all I believed it was time for a new generation to step forward and remake everything anew. We all did and we were ready to grasp the world. Ready to revolt against everything that had gone before. They had squandered an entire generation of men in the Great War and now it was time for them to step aside for a younger and better generation. With or without them, we would lead the way. We would shake off the past. We would take the world and make it modern.

And my voice would be a true voice to lead the way. I would write such a book as would make old men regret their wasted lives and young women swoon with romantic desire. Right here on Fifth Avenue, heads will turn when I stroll by. There he goes now.. So young and so celebrated a writer. His divine prose kissed by God.. A distinguished man showered with crested invitations to drawing rooms, with gifts of silver and ivory and pearl, with softly murmured entreaties to silken and perfumed bedrooms..

But this was before I lost my way.

When I still believed in a past that could be escaped and a future that could be created by force of will. When it all seemed so innocent and full of promise..

This was before I knew a darker New York and the people who made it so. Before I understood that there is a desperate flaw at the very heart of America, woven into the fabric of the dream itself..

A darkness which contains its downfall.

Perhaps I was naive but I never believed it could come to this.

The times were wild and unruly and drunken, and the girls were wanton like demons but still..

The situation simply didn't seem to contain the possibility that something like this could happen. There seemed only to be a liberating exuberance in the air. Nothing more corrosive. Nothing so utterly corrupting.

It all seemed so innocent and full of promise. Like the country itself, the great new America and its dream of the future, with the buildings scraping the sky clean..

It all seemed so gloriously youthful.. Stretching out to the limitless horizon before us.. Cloudless and free..

Like the very beginnings of the world..

2

Scott Longmartin turns enthusiastically away from the blinding light gushing in the taxicab window to address his older cousin Nick, who is riding beside him in the cab and reading the newspaper, indifferent to the crowded morning streets of New York rolling past outside.

‘I simply adore this city!’ Scott says, brimming with happiness, ‘It’s magical, like the beginning of the world. It was damn decent of you Nick to put me up while I get myself established.’

Nick doesn’t look up from his newspaper, he is beginning to tire of Scott’s unreserved enthusiasm for everything in the city. The buildings, the cars, even the tradesmen’s ragged horses.

‘What else are cousins for?’ he says without looking up, ‘If not that? The Carraways are always glad to be of service to the family.’

Scott laughs and when he does, his smile dazzles like the smile of a motion picture star, a matinée idol. He is tall and sandy-haired and fine featured, and with his soft eyes and long eyelashes, women often turn their heads to look at him as he passes in the street. Scott thinks nothing of it, he is twenty seven years old and he is used to it, he knows how imposing he looks and that it offers him many advantages. But he takes pride that he has never used his looks to deceive women, generally finding them willing enough to deceive themselves over him. He has been careful never to promise love in order to seduce. In any case he would much rather be liked for his wit and personality, which is sincere and warm and guileless. With his good looks and his easy manner he has never been short of friends and it has finally given him the confidence to move alone to New York with only a distant cousin as an acquaintance.

‘You won’t be put upon for much longer Nick, I swear it. If my interview today goes well I should be able to afford my own place at last.’

‘You can take my apartment over if you’d like.’

‘What do you mean? You don’t want it?’

‘No. I’ve decided to go back to St Paul. I’m going to marry Irene and settle there.’

Scott cannot imagine anything so foolish, ‘You’re kidding? But why on earth would you leave all this? All of New York, and go back to the dull Midwest? It’s dead as hell there. I’ve just practically killed myself getting out.’

Nick keeps reading his newspaper, he isn’t that interested in Scott’s opinion on anything. Scott is only a young provincial cousin he has taken in as a family duty to please his father. Scott mainly reminds Nick of the young man he himself was five years ago, when he first came East, fresh faced to take up his job as a bond salesman.

‘I can just as well be in the bond business in Minnesota as in Manhattan. It won’t be nearly as cutthroat there.’

Scott cannot conceive of anyone going back home voluntarily. ‘I don’t understand that Nick, why a man would leave all this? Is it Irene, won’t she move East after all? Don’t let her hold you back man!’

Nick finally lowers his newspaper, ‘In a way it is her, and even you too. You being here made me realize how damn decent the people are back home. They’re not like that here. Here there’s something missing in them that people ought to have. I’m thirty now and that’s time for a man to know what he is and what he is not.’

Scott can’t grasp Nick’s cynical attitude, ‘I think the people here are absolutely marvelous. They’re glamorous and sophisticated. I doubt even Paris itself could be more so.’

Nick sighs, ‘I used to think so too but that nasty business down on Long Island last summer has finished me off on them completely. The people here are too damn careless for my taste. They make you hard and uncaring.’

‘You mean that fellow you knew who was shot in the swimming pool?’

Nick has told him about it once before, after he had a few too many beers in an Irish speakeasy around the corner from their apartment, about his rich friend who was shot dead in a jealous misunderstanding over a worthless woman.

Nick folds his newspaper and puts it down on the seat, preparing to talk some sense into Scott. ‘Yes. And the rest of it. You should be careful Scott, you’re very innocent still by New York standards. It’s generally a good thing to be guileless but not here, this city brings out the worst in people. If it’s in you, New York will bring it out. It will show you exactly what you are.’

Scott is delighted at the idea, ‘Well, that’s precisely why I’m here.’

Nick sighs, ‘I think there are probably some things it’s better for a man not to know, not to find out about himself I mean. Sometimes some illusions can be merciful.’

‘Rarely,’ Scott says, ‘At least not for a writer. Not if he’s going to be a good one.’

Nick fleetingly wonders if Scott really is a writer, if the publishing of a few trivial newspaper articles means that much.

‘Some things are more important than the truth,’ Nick says, ‘People aren’t always what they seem, you cannot divorce people from their circumstances.’

Scott is unconvinced, he thinks Nick a fool to choose the safety of Irene and St Paul over the adventure of a lifetime.

‘Well if that’s the way you feel about things you’re probably better out of it. But I know for myself that I shall never feel that way. This is where my life is going to begin. And as soon as I have New York conquered with my first book, then it’s off to Paris to conquer Europe too.’

Nick laughs, he likes Scott and doesn’t wish to dampen his enthusiasm for his new life, ‘Good for you. You go get them kid..’

Scott laughs too, unconcerned at being mocked.

‘Algonquin Hotel,’ the taxi driver tells them as they turn right into 44th street and pull up outside the hotel. Scott moves to get out, but he can’t resist another try at saving Nick from the dullness of St Paul.

‘I mean, have you any idea how long you could wait in St Paul for a chance to meet the greatest jazz clarinet player in the world? Leon DeLongpre isn’t hanging around Minnesota, I can assure you.’

‘I hear he’s a drunk and can’t play any more,’ Nick scoffs.

Scott gets out the cab and leans to the window, ‘That’s nonsense, he’s still almost every bit as good as Bix Beiderbecke, if not Louis Armstrong himself. The sound comes out of his horn like a girl saying yes. That’s what someone wrote about him, and I’m going to write it too. And then pretend it’s mine,’ Scott says, laughing.

The cab drives off as Nick yells out the window at him.

‘Tell him your cousin doesn’t think he’s as good as he used to be!’

Scott laughs, he likes Nick and he will be sorry to see him go and leave him alone in the city.

Scott turns and looks up at the Algonquin Hotel. He smiles happily, impressed by the discreetly luxurious building which is famous for its literary patrons. He feels a longing rise up in him, rising so strongly that it is almost like the first stirrings of sexual desire.

Here we are at last, he thinks, I am finally arriving at the center of things..

3

Inside the Algonquin it is breakfast time and the Rose Room restaurant is noisy and busy with customers. As he follows a waiter towards a small side booth, Scott looks around at the proceedings, hoping to spot a famous face that he will recognize from the literary magazines and gossip columns he has been reading religiously for years, perhaps Benchley or Dorothy Parker, Kaufman or perhaps even Fitzgerald, any one of them will suffice, and all are reputed to lunch together here.

It is all so desperately glamorous, he thinks. What I wouldn’t give to be one of them..

The waiter takes Scott to a booth at the side of the room where a young man is sitting alone. He’s wearing an inappropriate and expensive tuxedo and it seems certain that he has been up all night in it. Nevertheless the man is handsome and appealing, honey blond, looking most of all like a drunken aristocrat gone slightly to seed.

‘Your guest Mr. DeLongpre,’ the waiter announces.

‘Thank you George,’ Leon DeLongpre says, as if addressing his valet.

Leon DeLongpre is young, rich, talented and very famous. He is the premiere jazz clarinetist in the country and he is easily handsome enough to make female fans swoon over him. Everywhere he goes he causes a sensation and people admire him relentlessly, believing he embodies the very spirit of the age, the spirit of hot jazz and flowing booze, of elegant style and youthful dissolution. Leon has effortlessly defined the decadent edge that the youth of the country aspires to. Sometimes the newspapers call him Golden Boy, for he seems never to have had to struggle for anything in his life, not for looks or money, not for talent or success.

To Scott, Leon’s face is as familiar as those of his college friends. Although he is only a couple years older than Scott, Leon has been famous almost since Scott was in high school.

Now that he is standing here before him, Scott feels intimidated, Leon looks to him like a photograph that moves. He is everything that Scott has ever wanted to be, rich and sophisticated, a respected genius of the arts.

As soon as Leon DeLongpre turns and smiles hello at him, Scott is in his thrall. They shake hands and Leon doesn’t rise when Scott sits opposite him. Scott can feel his heart pounding.

‘Thank you so much for allowing me to interview you Mr. DeLongpre. I can’t tell you how much it means to me, I’m such a great fan of your music.’

Leon waves it off casually, Scott can immediately tell he’s drunk, even though it’s barely nine o’clock.

‘Call me Leon for God’s sake man. Any friend of Teddy W is a friend of mine. How is old Teddy anyway?’

When Leon speaks his accent is softer than Scott expects, it is Alabama southern but barely so, as if it has been deliberately tempered until the South is only an echo inside it, like faint music off in the distance.

Scott feels he might blush, ‘I haven’t seen him since Princeton in truth, I’m afraid. I just knew that he knew you at one time so.. I thought you might approve an interview with me for the newspaper. I’m afraid Teddy could be dead now for all I know.’

Leon laughs unconcerned, ‘Well if he’s dead, at least he once had a sister who was hot stuff. You must be the last honest man in the city, certainly in this part of it. I can’t tell you how disarming it is.’

Leon takes out a silver hipflask and takes a deep swig from it. Prohibition has made alcohol illegal in the entire country for the last eight years, and nowadays everyone is carrying hipflasks full of bootleg gin, even women have them in their purses and concealed under their clothes. Leon offers it to Scott, he takes it and he drinks too, even though he never drinks this early in the day. But now he drinks deeply, this is a shared sacrament of friendship between men, and it is not to be refused when offered.

The liquor tastes so rich and fine that Scott can barely recognize the flavor, ‘Is that real Scotch? Not bathtub gin?’

Leon nods, ‘The real McCoy. You should never drink anything but, if you can afford it. Bathtub hooch will kill a man almost as fast as sobering up will.’

Scott laughs, Leon is far more pleasant and charming than he expected, more than decent for someone so famous.

Just as Leon takes another swig, a small attractive woman passes close by their table.

‘Can you play me a tune on that flask Leon?’ she asks without stopping, ‘I’d imagine so by now.’.

Scott turns, he is startled to recognize Dorothy Parker strolling right past their table, a face made famous in literary magazines, a brilliant woman whose mordant wit and theater criticism he has admired in the years since college.

‘Oh hello Dottie,’ Leon says casually, ‘I’m afraid all it plays is glug, glug, glug.’

‘Oh my favorite tune darling, I often dance to it with naked strangers, ’ Parker says, continuing on her way and making Leon laugh.

Scott is wildly impressed, Dorothy Parker is one of the most famous literary figures in New York. As famous in her own way as Leon is in his.

‘Was that Dorothy Parker the writer?’

‘No, that was Dorothy Parker the drunken tramp,’ Leon says smiling. ‘I don’t know Dorothy Parker the writer.’

Scott isn’t sure what he means but doesn’t want to ask just in case he appears naive.

‘I’m a writer too you know,’ he says, keen to impress on Leon that he is not just a tabloid newspaper hack, ‘I mean not just for the newspaper, I’m working on a book too, a novel.’

‘Maybe I should introduce you to her?’ Leon says roguishly, ‘I’m sure you’d be her type. Young and handsome and fit. That’s her type of novelist.’

Scott isn’t sure if he is joking about the invitation, but it’s clear enough what he means in regard to Dorothy Parker’s loose morals. This is something he’s never read before in the magazines, the insider gossip.

Scott takes out his notebook and a pen, ‘So where would you like to begin? Would you like to talk about your plans now you’ve left the Paul Whiteman Orchestra?’

Leon sighs wearily. Interviews bore him, in fact most things bore him. He has experienced too much too soon and it has made him jaded and no longer young.

‘I plan to get drunk and stay drunk.’

‘Ah..’ Scott sees that Leon doesn’t care much to be interviewed and he must tread lightly, ‘Do you imagine you’ll be doing any playing between drinks?’

‘As much as possible. But not necessarily on my horn. Perhaps I shall follow Sidney Bechet to Paris and drink there.’

‘Is it true that Bechet is in jail in Paris now?’

Scott wants to display his knowledge of the most fashionable style. Bechet matters to people who know music.

‘It’s not impossible, although I haven’t heard confirmation of the rumor..’

Scott nods, seeing the chance to impress Leon, ‘A journalist friend told me there were reports that he shot four people in the street in a gunfight in Montmartre. And was sent to prison for it.’

Leon laughs, ‘Bechet is a wild man.. He frightens me.. Although I’d shoot a man too, if it would make me play like Bechet.’

Scott quickly notes down Leon’s answers while he is still giving them, sensing it would only take one wrong question to turn him away.

‘People always say you can slink a little flapper out of her clothes with the sound of your clarinet?’ Scott asks, keen to keep the momentum going.

Leon laughs, ‘I do alright with the ladies I suppose. They love a smooth horn..’

Scott smiles, ‘I also heard that if you play certain high notes, your own pants drop to your ankles. Is there any truth to that?’

Leon laughs heartily, he likes Scott, he likes the cut of him.

‘What did you say your name was?’

‘Scott Longmartin.’

‘You seem much too fine a fellow to be writing for the New York Evening Graphic.’

‘Oh I surely am,’ Scott laughs, ‘But you’ve got to start somewhere. At the paper we always say; Don’t tell my mother I’m writing for the Evening Graphic, she’ll be devastated. She thinks I’m working as a piano player in a whorehouse.’

Leon laughs and companionably offers him another swig from his smooth silver hipflask.

‘You’re a funny fellow Scott.’

Before Scott can answer, a very attractive young woman arrives at their table and pulls the flask clean out of Leon’s hand. She smiles at Leon and takes a deep swig.

Scott watches her, she’s young and fashionable, with her hair bobbed short and dyed raven-black in the current style, with bangs almost to her eyebrows, styled after the new movie actress Louise Brooks. She is voluptuously rounded, with a yielding feminine softness that suggests a tenderness in her. Her face is perfectly heart-shaped, a little too broad across the eyes which gives her an air of honesty, her cheeks rounded and fleshy like small fruits. Her eyes too wide-opened, as if only a moment ago she witnessed something astonishing.

Scott is taken with her immediately, she has a light in her eyes that attracts, a sense of liveliness and zest that promises laughter and interesting things will soon happen. The air around her seems to vibrate with her spirited insouciance.

Leon smiles fondly at her, they are close it seems, perhaps lovers.

‘This is my sister,’ he says, ‘Virginia DeLongpre. Better known as Lolly.’

‘Oh Christ I needed that sweetie! I’m so sick of gin,’ says Lolly in relief, offering the flask back, ‘You didn’t get back from the party yet?’

‘Alice Masterson needed quite a bit of work done on her. A full orchestration I’d say.’

Lolly laughs, her eyes crinkling, ‘I’m sure she did. With extra fiddles no doubt. Who’s this?’

‘This is Scott Longmartin, he’s a journalist interviewing me about the ruins of my career.’

Lolly looks disapprovingly at Leon, ‘Don’t say that in front of a journalist sugar. You can’t trust them.’

Scott smiles sheepishly at her, desperate to seem trustworthy, ‘Oh you can trust me, I’m a Princeton man.’

Lolly laughs brightly, ‘I’m too much of a lady to tell you what happened the last time I heard that corny line. But I will say I couldn’t hardly sit down for a week.’

Scott likes her, he likes the way she lights up when she laughs, easily and brightly, full of dazzle, as if her life is filled with laughter.

‘Call me Lolly,’ she says pleasantly, flirting with Scott.

Lolly is vivacious and famously personable company. She is one of the most celebrated jazz babies in all New York, known wherever wild drunkenness and carefree dancing through the night is entertained. In the Ivy League and up and down the Eastern seaboard Lolly is considered incurably romantic, irresistibly sexy and untameably wild.

Lolly is considered practically the definition of sex appeal, and nowadays there is no higher accolade.

When she speaks Scott notices she has a similar southern accent to her brother, suppressed, but containing that same echo of heat and faint plantation music in the distance. On Lolly it is hypnotically soft and lulling, low and full of sex and molasses. Her accent is as fleshy and inviting as her body.

This is a woman made for seduction..

‘Scott’s going to write a long article for Vanity Fair about me being the voice of today’s youth,’ Leon says, with an unmistakable sneer in his voice.

Lolly smiles pleasantly, ‘Make sure he mentions me. I have a much better voice than you do honey.’

Scott is embarrassed to have his position as a journalist inflated, in truth Vanity Fair have never heard of Scott except in his dreams.

‘Well they haven’t quiet commissioned it yet..’ he says sheepishly.

Lolly looks Scott over, he is very appealing when he looks embarrassed. She flashes him a seductive smile.

He is almost as handsome as a girl, she thinks.

She turns to Leon with a mischievous grin, ‘He looks much too handsome to be a journalist. He looks like he could be a matinée idol in the moving pictures.’

Scott laughs nervously, Lolly is devastatingly charming when she flirts. It is not the first time he has heard this comment but it embarrasses him, and never more so than when it is said in this teasing manner by a woman so sensual and attractive.

‘You’d better watch out Scott,’ Leon laughs, ‘My older sister Lolly is something of a vamp.’

‘Younger sister Lolly. Thank you,’ Lolly says brightly.

Leon laughs, ‘Either way, she eats men for breakfast.’

‘Thank heaven it’s almost lunchtime then, I’m beginning to feel a little insecure,’ says Scott, suddenly realizing it is true.

‘Oh I already ate darling,’ Lolly says sweetly.

Those liquid eyes, she thinks.

‘So I noticed,’ says Leon glancing across the room to where a rich looking gray-haired man is standing waiting patiently on her. Leon hates the way she cheapens herself with older men, just because they are powerful. She thinks of nothing but her Broadway career as an actress.

Lolly turns to look too, remembering her companion. ‘Oh balls! I must go and sing for my supper darling. I’ll see you tonight at the speak? Bring this one with you, I’m so bored with all the same old faces.’

Lolly blows Leon a kiss and hurries back to the older man waiting disapprovingly for her across the dining room. She smiles at him flirtatiously as she approaches and he immediately softens and takes her arm. Lolly is an expert at getting her way with men.

Scott and Leon watch her go. Scott can’t help notice that her bottom traces out voluptuous swaying curves as she moves.

‘Is that her father? Both your father?..’

Leon quietly smiles at his naivety and lets it pass. ‘So.. I guess you’d better come and spend the evening with us tonight. We’re throwing a little party for one of our crowd who’s turning twenty-eight. They’re a fine crowd, we’ll be at The Cat’s Pajamas speakeasy on 64th St. East.

Scott agrees with delight, ‘I’ll be there.’

‘Knock the basement door and ask for Lolly.’

‘She works there?’

‘She owns it.’

Scott nods, impressed. He’s already fascinated by these marvelous people and thrilled to be invited out socially with them.

‘I’ll bring Dorothy Parker along for you,’ Leon says without smiling.

Scott isn’t quite sure if he is being kidded, Leon really might bring her, he seemed to know her fairly well. Perhaps all the famous of New York are acquainted, Scott has no way of knowing. Finally Scott answers noncommittally to cover up his uncertainty.

‘Okay.. In that case I shall bring my dictionary.’

4

Outside the offices of the New York Evening Graphic, Scott is on his way back from interviewing Leon at the Algonquin when he runs into William Winchester, the tabloid newspaper’s gossip columnist. In the short time Scott has been at the paper, Winchester has taken a shine to him and has helped him find his feet in the world of big city journalism, which has proved to be a substantially rougher world than Scott expected.

Winchester is in his mid-thirties but looks older, he is always gregarious and loud, as if his body cannot quite contain his large personality.

‘Scotty my boy!’ he yells at him, making passing people turn to look at them, ‘How did your lunch at the Algonquin go? Were you trading quips at the round table with the big shots?’

‘Hello Winchester, it went very well I must say.’

Scott likes him and appreciates his help and guidance at the newspaper which is filled with unscrupulous journalists who will do and say anything to secure their own career over another man's.

‘I think I made a good impression.’ Scott feels a glow of deep satisfaction when he thinks of the evening’s party invitation.

Winchester shrugs, ‘Don’t worry so much about making a good impression. These celebrities are only stories and nothing more, they’re all just little paper gods. We make ‘em and we break ‘em. This isn’t Iowa now kid.’

‘Minnesota.’

‘Exactly. So did you get any juicy scuttlebutt for my gossip column?’

Scott nods proudly, for the first time he has a tidbit to give Winchester, ‘Apparently Dorothy Parker has been known to go out of an evening having neglected to put on underwear.’

‘I can’t use that! Good God. Not unless you can confirm it for me?..’

Scott laughs, unsure whether Winchester is serious, ‘Well what about this then, Leon DeLongpre is going to put together a small group of musicians and play some concerts at halls across the country. And at Carnegie Hall too he hopes. It’ll be the first time jazz has ever been played there.’

‘Oh that’s good,’ says Winchester with interest, ‘I can use that on my radio show. Jazz at Carnegie Hall? That’ll be the day hell freezes over.. Is he still drunk all the time?’

Scott shrugs noncommittally, Leon was certainly drunk but Scott feels he should protect him. Winchester has a new gossip show on the radio which is beginning to attract a lot of public attention, and he is ruthless when it comes to rumor.

‘Hard to tell..’

‘A half hour of radio needs a darn endless amount of gossip Scotty, I’m always desperate for anything.’

‘I listened to the show last weekend, why are you talking so oddly on it?’

‘Oh that’s for the kids, that’s what they like. Jargon. It’s the style, the patois. They eat it up.’

‘It sounded pretty silly to me, I must say. All that ‘Here we are in the Big Apple with the Prince Of Broadway, chatter..’

‘It’s going to be big Scotty, I’m telling you now, radio’s the future. You’d better get yourself into it, because newspapers have had it.’

‘I just got into newspapers.’

‘Well it’s time to get out. I gotta go. Get me more on that Dorthy Parker underwear thing.’

Winchester rushes off without warning, hailing a passing cab in the roadway. Off to meet a gangster or an important Broadway singing star. Winchester knows everyone in town from his years spent hanging around the speakeasies of Broadway, buying drinks and making friends in preparation for his future at the gossipy center of things.

Scott turns and heads into the newspaper building where he has a tiny office barely larger than a closet. At the newspaper he is made to feel so insignificant as to be almost invisible.

5

Later in the evening, as Scott strolls through the Upper East Side looking for the address of the Cat’s Pajamas speakeasy, he notices how clean and wide the sidewalks are.

He hasn’t had much occasion to come up here in the two months he has been in New York, but now that he knows the city a little he can recognize that this is where the wealth resides, what is not down on Park Avenue at least.

By the way that passersby nod good evening to him he can tell that he fits in well enough, he’s dressed in his best clothes, his hair slicked back and brilliantined in place, wearing a fine tuxedo which was given to him by his father as a graduation gift. It is a better tuxedo than his father ever owned and it makes Scott look distinguished and rich.

Up ahead he notices a group of well-dressed people going down some stairs leading into a cellar. The door briefly opens, throwing a shaft of light and music out on to the dark sidewalk. The people enter noisily and the door quickly closes behind them, shutting out the street once more in silence.

Scott goes down the few steps to the shiny black painted door and knocks on it. A peep hole at eye level opens and a gruff doorman eyes him.

‘Is this the Cat’s Pajamas?’ Scott asks in his friendliest tone.

‘Who wants to know?’

‘Lolly sent me.’

The door opens immediately, offering him shelter, as if by magic. The doorman is a dangerous and tough looking man, but now he’s smiling and welcoming. Suddenly Scott feels as if he belongs. He steps into a small lobby backed by a thick curtain.

‘Good evening Sir. Welcome to the Cat’s Pajamas. The cloakroom is down there to the left.’

‘Thank you..’

Scott goes through the thick black curtain and is enveloped by a roar of music and heat and drunkenness. He looks around, drinking it in. He feels welcomed into the arms of a new world, as if the secret city is opening itself up to him. Just saying Lolly’s name aloud seems to have opened up the city to him.

It is a lively cellar club with a dance floor, stylish and expensive and dizzying with the exuberance of the crowd which is youthful, fashionable, drunken and rich. Everyone is wearing evening dress, men in tuxedos and girls in loose and flowing flapper dresses made of lamé and silks. Scott feels the wild energy of the club making his head fizz like champagne.

Across the dance floor he spots Leon, sitting with a group of people at some tables pushed together and roped off exclusively from the rest of the club. Scott heads over, strolling around the dance floor filled with bob-haired girls madly dancing the Charleston to a small jazz band.

As soon as Leon spots him, he shakes his hand warmly,

‘Glad you could make it Kid.’

‘Yes,’ Scott says. Thrilled to see that famous face smiling at him again.

Leon puts his arm around Scott’s shoulder and turns him towards his friends sitting at the tables in a loose group.

‘Ladies, we have another man for you at last. This is Mr. Scott Longmartin, he’s a writer of books.. And also a journalist so you all had better watch what you say..’

They all laugh, Leon appears to be very well-liked and respected among the group. Scott notices that the women are all drinking booze and smoking with long cigarette holders. Their dresses are loose and short and sexy and their hair is bobbed and showing their long necks. Their eyebrows are pencil drawn arches, their faces rouged and powdered, their breasts strapped flat, their lips bee-stung and pouty, as if longing for kisses. They are all the height of fashion and desirability. Scott immediately realizes this is a fast crowd he has fallen into, fast and rich and very glamorous indeed.

Money.. All of them.. Swimming in it..

Copyright Lee Vidor, 2010. All rights reserved.

We Will Soar Into The Air As If Lured By The Sun.

Jazz Age New York,1920-29

To be published in 2011.

Next Page / Previous Page