Young Man With a Horn (1938) by Dorothy Baker

Author:Dorothy Baker [Baker, Dorothy]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Jazz, Music, Fiction
ISBN: 9781590175774
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Published: 1938-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

2

It turned out precisely the way the man at the soda fountain had said it would. Schools began to close down at the end of the first week in June and then Balboa was a hive, but not of industry. The beach was a solid half-mile of striped canvas umbrellas, and each umbrella functioned as base for a group of boys or girls or boys and girls held together by some tie or other, friendship, love, fraternity, chance, or plain sodality. The wonderful thing was that a man could leave his base and go down to the sea to swim and cool off, and find his way back, apparently, to the same umbrella and the same people he had left. You wouldn’t believe, just to look at all those striped umbrellas and all those bare legs stretched out like spokes in the sand below them, that there could be differentiations, that it would matter much whether a man found his way back to one or to another.

At night it was much the same thing except that the center of things was not the beach but the Rendez-Vous ballroom. At night, instead of lying prone on their stomachs in the sand, the youths and maidens stood upright on their feet and danced to the music. Two-bits per capita admission, and five cents a dance; sailors, but no holds, barred. The Rendez-Vous had not been let out an inch too much by that real-estate man from Los Angeles; the Collegians played to a capacity crowd on Saturday nights, Sunday afternoons, and Sunday nights, and they got a good crowd on week nights too after the first of the season. They got Monday night off, and needed it.

It was a good-looking band; not a bald head in the bunch, not a paunch in the lot. They wore white flannels and blue and white blazers and black and white shoes, and they looked, individually, right in them, which is a hard thing, as a rule, for any ten men to do at the same time. Their pictures, singly and group-shot, were put up beside the entrance, retouched until you could scarcely tell Jack from Rick or Phelps from Long.

Their music was what Jack wanted it to be, smooth and expressive of collegiate emotion. Maybe it was better than that; it was good enough, in any case, to draw an occasional party from Hollywood. The rumor went that Buster Keaton came down to dance almost every week end, and with that for a lead rumor ran rife. The Rendez-Vous became, less than three weeks out, a famous place to dance. Some of the rumors may even have had a basis in fact.

It was sometime around in here that Rick began to turn out his famous solo work, and it got started in a strange way. The boys in the band, most of them, had established romantic liaisons with girls on the beach early in the season, and every night as the night’s work wore on, all of them would get unbearable inclinations to jump ship and go dance.

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