"Showtime!" people would start hollering about the last hour of the dance. Then a couple of
dozen really wild couples would stay on the floor, the girls changing to low white sneakers. The
band now would really be blasting, and all the other dancers would form a clapping, shouting
circle to watch that wild competition as it began, covering only a quarter or so of the ballroom
floor. The band, the spectators and the dancers would be malting the Roseland Ballroom feel like
a big, rocking ship. The spotlight would be turning, pink, yellow, green, and blue, picking up the
couples lindy-hopping as if they had gone mad. "Wail, man, wail!" people would be shouting at
the band; and it would be wailing, until first one and then another couple just ran out of strength
and stumbled off toward the crowd, exhausted and soaked with sweat. Sometimes I would be
down mere standing inside the door jumping up and down in my gray jacket with the whiskbroom
in the pocket, and the manager would have to come and shout at me that I had customers
upstairs.
The first liquor I drank, my first cigarettes, even my first reefers, I can't specifically remember. But
I know they were all mixed together with my first shooting craps, playing cards, and betting my
dollar a day on the numbers, as I started hanging out at night with Shorty and his friends. Shorty's
jokes about how country I had been made us all laugh. I still was country, I know now, but it all felt
so great because I was accepted. All of us would be in somebody's place, usually one of the
girls', and we'd be turning on, the reefers making everybody's head light, or the whisky aglow in
our middles. Everybody understood that my head had to stay lanky awhile longer, to grow long
enough for Shorty to conk it for me. One of these nights, I remarked that I had saved about half
enough to get a zoot.
"Save?" Shorty couldn't believe it. "Homeboy, you never heard of credit?"He told me he'd call a
neighborhood clothing store the first thing in the morning, and that I should be there early.
A salesman, a young Jew, met me when I came in. "You're Shorty's friend?" I said I was; it
amazed me-all of Shorty's contacts. The salesman wrote my name on a form, and the Rose-land
as where I worked, and Ella's address as where I lived. Shorty's name was put down as
recommending me. The salesman said, "Shorty's one of our best customers."
I was measured, and the young salesman picked off a rack a zoot suit that was just wild: sky-blue
pants thirty inches in the knee and angle-narrowed down to twelve inches at the bottom, and a
long coat that pinched my waist and flared out below my knees.
As a gift, the salesman said, the store would give me a narrow leather belt with my initial "L" on it.
Then he said I ought to also buy a hat, and I did-blue, with a feather in the four-inch brim. Then
the store gave me another present: a long, thick-linked, gold-plated chain that swung down lower
than my coat hem. I was sold forever on credit.
When I modeled the zoot for Ella, she took a long look and said, "Well, I guess it had to happen."
I took three of those twenty-five-cent sepia-toned, while-you-wait pictures of myself, posed the
way "hipsters" wearing their zoots would "cool it"-hat dangled, knees drawn close together, feet
wide apart, both index fingers jabbed toward the floor. The long coat and swinging chain and the
Punjab pants were much more dramatic if you stood that way. One picture, I autographed and
airmailed to my brothers and sisters in Lansing, to let them see how well I was doing. I gave
another one to Ella, and the third to Shorty, who was really moved: I could tell by the way he said,
"Thanks, homeboy." It was part of our "hip" code not to show that kind of affection.
Shorty soon decided that my hair was finally long enough to be conked. He had promised to
school me in how to beat the barbershops' three-and four-dollar price by making up congolene,
and then conking ourselves.
I took the little list of ingredients he had printed out for me, and went to a grocery store, where I
got a can of Red Devil lye, two eggs, and two medium-sized white potatoes. Then at a drugstore
near the poolroom, I asked for a large jar of Vaseline, a large bar of soap, a large-toothed comb