By the end of the dance, Freddie had let me shine the shoes of three or four stray drunks he
talked into having shines, and I had practiced picking up my speed on Freddie's shoes until they
looked like mirrors. After we had helped the janitors to clean up the ballroom after the dance,
throwing out all the paper and cigarette butts and empty liquor bottles, Freddie was nice enough
to driveme all the way home to Ella's on the Hill in the secondhand maroon Buick he said he was
going to trade in on his Cadillac. He talked to me all the way. "I guess it's all right if I tell you, pick
up a couple of dozen packs of rubbers, two-bits apiece. You notice some of those cats that came
up to me around the end of the dance? Well, when some have new chicks going right, they'll
come asking you for rubbers. Charge a dollar, generally you'll get an extra tip."
He looked across at me. "Some hustles you're too new for. Cats will ask you for liquor, some will
want reefers. But you don't need to have nothing except rubbers-until you can dig who's a cop."
"You can make ten, twelve dollars a dance for yourself if you work everything right," Freddie said,
before I got out of me car in front of Ella's. "The main thing you got to remember is that everything
in the world is a hustle. So long, Red."
The next time I ran into Freddie I was downtown one night a few weeks later. He was parked in
his pearl-gray Cadillac, sharp as a tack, "cooling it."
"Man, you sure schooled me!" I said, and he laughed; he knew what I meant. It hadn't taken me
long on the job to find out that Freddie had done less shoeshining and towel-hustling than selling
liquor and reefers, and putting white "Johns" in touch with Negro whores. I also learned that white
girls always flocked to the Negro dances-some of them whores whose pimps brought them to mix
business and pleasure, others who came with their black boy friends, and some who came in
alone, for a little freelance lusting among a plentiful availability of enthusiastic Negro men.
At the white dances, of course, nothing black was allowed, and that's where the black whores'
pimps soon showed a new shoeshine boy what he could pick up on the side by slipping a phone
number or address to the white Johns whocame around the end of the dance looking for "black
chicks."
Most of Roseland's dances were for whites only, and they had white bands only. But the only
white band ever to play there at a Negro dance, to my recollection, was Charlie Barnet's. The fact
is that very few white bands could have satisfied the Negro dancers. But I know that Charlie
Barnet's "Cherokee" and his "Redskin Rhumba" drove those Negroes wild. They'd jam-pack that
ballroom, the black girls in way-out silk and satin dresses and shoes, their hair done in all kinds of
styles, the men sharp in their zoot suits and crazy conks, and everybody grinning and greased
and gassed.
Some of the bandsmen would come up to the men's room at about eight o'clock and get
shoeshines before they went to work. Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Cootie
Williams, Jimmie Lunceford were just a few of those who sat in my chair. I would really make my
shine rag sound like someone had set off Chinese firecrackers. Duke's great alto saxman, Johnny
Hodges-he was Shorty's idol-still owes me for a shoe-shine I gave him. He was in the chair one
night, having a friendly argument with the drummer, Sonny Greer, who was standing there, when I
tapped the bottom of his shoes to signal that I was finished. Hodges stepped down, reaching his
hand in his pocket to pay me, but then snatched his hand out to gesture, and just forgot me, and
walked away. I wouldn't have dared to bother the man who could do what he did with "Daydream"
by asking him for fifteen cents.
I remember that I struck up a little shoeshine-stand conversation with Count Basie's great blues
singer, Jimmie Rushing. (He's the one famous for "Sent For You Yesterday, Here You Come
Today" and things like that.) Rushing's feet, I remember, were big and funny-shaped-not long like
most big feet, but they were round and roly-poly like Rushing. Anyhow, he even introduced me
tosome of the other Basie cats, like Lester Young, Harry Edison, Buddy Tate, Don Byas, Dickie
Wells, and Buck Clayton. They'd walk in the rest room later, by themselves. "Hi, Red." They'd be
up there in my chair, and my shine rag was popping to the beat of all of their records, spinning in
my head. Musicians never have had, anywhere, a greater shoeshine-boy fan than I was. I would
write to Wilfred and Hilda and Philbert and Reginald back in Lansing, trying to describe it.