Now it's jazz. The place is roaring. All beautiful girls in there. One mad brunette at the bar, drunk with her boys.One strange chick I remember from somewhere wearing a simple skirt with pockets, her hands in there.Short haircut, slouch, talking to everybody. Up and down the stairs they come.The bartenders are the regular band of Jack and the heavenly drummer who looks up in the sky with blue eyes, with a beard.He's wailing beer caps of bottles and jamming at the cash register and everything is going to the beat.It's the beat generation. It's be-at. It's the beat to keep. It's the beat of the heart.It's being beat and down in the world and like old-time lowdown and like in ancient civilizations the slave boatman rowing alleys to a beat.And servants spinning pottery to a beat.The faces. There's no face to compare with Jack Mingers who's up on the bandstand now,or the colored trumpeter who outblows them wild and dizzy but Jack's face overlooking all the heads in smoke.He has a face that looks like everybody you've ever known and seen before.Seen on the street in your time. Sweet face. Hard to describe.Sad eyes. Cruel lips. Expectant gleam. Swaying to the beat. Tall, majestical.Waiting in front of the drugstore. A face like Hunky's in New York.Hunky whom you'll see on Times Square, somnolent and alert. Sad, sweet, dark, holy.Just out of jail. Martyrs. Tortured by sidewalks. Starved for *** and companionship.Open to anything. Ready to introduce a new world with a shrug.The colored big tenor with the big tone.His blowing sunny stits clear out of Kansas City roadhouses.Clear, heavy, somewhat dull and unmusical ideas which nevertheless never leave the music.Always there. Always far out.The harmony too complicated for the motley bums of music understanding in there.But the musicians here.The drummer is a sensational 12-year-old negro boy who's not allowed to drink but can play.Tremendous. A little lithe, childlike Miles Davis kid.Like early Fats Navarro fans used to see.An Espanholam. Hep. Small.He thunders at the drums with a beat which is described to me by a near-standing connoisseur with beret as a fabulous beat.On piano is Blondie Bill. Good enough to drive any group.Now Jack Minger blows out and over his head with these angels from Fillmore.I dig him. Now he's terrific.I just stand in the outside hall against the wall.No beer necessary with collections of in-and-out listeners.With Bernie and now here returns Bob Berman.Who is a kid from West Indies.Who barged into my party six months earlier with Dean and the gang.And I had a Chet Baker record on and we hoofed it at each other in the room.Tremendous.The perfect grace of his dancing. Casual. Like Joe Louis. Casually hoofing.He comes now in dancing like that. Glad.Everybody looks everywhere. It's a jazz joint and beat generation mad trick.You see someone. Hi.Then you look away elsewhere for something someone else. It's all insane.Then you look back. You look away around. Everything is coming in from everywhere.And the sound of the jazz. Hi. Hey.Bang. The little drummer takes a solo.Reaching his young hands all over traps and kettles and cymbals and foot pedal.Boom. And a fantastic crash of sound.Twelve years old. What will happen?
