MILTON “MEZZ” MEZZROW & BERNARD WOLFE – Really the Blues. Random House, hardcover, 1946. Reprinted several times since, including Dell D118, paperback, 1953, and Signet, paperback, 1964.

   â€œTo all the hipsters, hustlers, and fly cats tipping along The Stroll. (Keep scuffling.) To all the cons in all the houses of many slammers, wrastling with chinches. (Short time, boys.) To all the junkies and lushheads in twobit scratchpads, and the flophouse grads in morgue iceboxes. (R.I.P.) To all the sweettalkers, the gumbeaters, the highjivers, out of the gallion for good and never going to take low again. (You got it made, daddy.)”

   Mezz Mezzrow was a Jewish dude who longed to be a black jazzman. He lived a life that had him in the orbit of Louis Armstrong (he was Armstrong’s marijuana dealer), playing jazz with Sidney Bichet, Bix Beiderbecke and Gene Krupa, he played the clubs of Al Capone and Legs Diamond, he got hooked on heroin, jailed at Riker’s, lived in Harlem married across the miscegenation lines and lived to tell the tale.

   He was convinced to partner up with a writer to get the story down, “talking to me about writers I never heard of, Andre Gide, B. Traven, Céline, Henry Miller and guys like that, and reading parts of their books to me. He says, ‘Mezz, you’ve got a story to tell just like those writers did, and it deserves to get down on paper. watching the screwy kaleidoscope of American life jiggle and squirm over your head. Not very many people have gotten a good look at their country from that bottom-of-the-pit angle before, seen the slimy underside of the rock. It’s a chunk of Americana, as they say, and it should get written. It’s a real American success story, upside down: Horatio Alger standing on his head. It’s the odyssey of an individualist, through a land where the population is manufactured by the system of interchangeable parts. It’s the saga of a guy who wanted to make friends, in a jungle where everybody was too busy making money and dodging his own shadow. If I’d known I was being significant, instead of just hungry and beat, I sure would have changed my ways. This is the book. If it got in your mouth, don’t fault me. Like I said, it’s a story that happened in the U.S. of A.’

   At Riker’s, Mezz insisted on being classified as Black because “colored cons were different; almost any colored guy can land in jail, not just the soulless zombies who have already shriveled up and died inside and are just postponing their date with the undertaker’s icebox. Some of the finest, most high-spirited guys of the race landed in jail because of their conditions of life, not because they were rotted and maggot-eaten inside –far away from all this grimy, grating white underworld, up in Harlem where people were real and earthy.”

   Jazz, to Mezz, was the soundtrack of Roaring Twenties America: “jazz was only a musical version of the hard-cutting broadsides that two foxy studs named Mencken and Nathan were beginning to shoot at Joe Public in the pages of The American Mercury — a collectively improvised nose-thumbing at all pillars of all communities, one big syncopated Bronx cheer for the righteous squares everywhere. jazz, making itself heard above the rattle of machine guns and the clink of whisky bottles. The sprawling outside world, they found, was raw and bubbling, crude, brutal, unscrubbed behind the ears but jim-jam-jumping with vital spirits; its collar might be grimy and tattered, but it was popping with life and lusty energy, ready for anything and everything, with a gusto you couldn’t down. And jazz, its theme song. These kids went for that unwashed, untidy world, and they made up their minds to learn its unwashed, untidy music –all the decent, respectable citizens who were home in bed having decent, respectable nightmares instead of braying through their horns at the stars –jazz music was, in a way, practically the theme-song of the underworld because, thanks to prohibition, about the only places we could play like we wanted were illegal dives…..turbanned Hindus, ramrod-spined Englishmen balancing monocles, swarthy cattlemen from the Argentine, sugar planters from Batavia, sabre-scarred Prussian officers, bullfighters from Madrid, college kids with crew haircuts from Wilkes-Barre and Des Moines”.

    The book has a host of great hardboiled one-liners:

          ● He had more music in him than Heinz has pickles.

         ● It takes a long, tall, brown-skin gal to make a preacher lay his Bible down.

         ● Don’t look for no chitlins before you kill your hawg.