The Magic Keys Albert Murray (read novels website TXT) 📖

indulged. Neither one of us said anything at all about the down-home music of the blues and jazz at that time, but when I got around to saying what I said about it sometime later on, he said I was on to something basic and that I should consider some sort of graduate school paper on it just for a start. No telling what else would turn up, he said. Just remember the old Hemingway principle and stick to what it has really meant to you over the years and not what somebody else thinks it should have meant. Hell, they were not there, you were.

I said I was all for his suggestion about getting together. And then I also said that I would also be ready for my noon break in about thirty minutes, and he said in that case he would wait in the periodicals room, which was downstairs on the first floor, if I had time to have a snack with him. And I said I would and when I came downstairs he was just putting a magazine back on the rack. And we came outside and east along Forty-second Street to Vanderbilt Avenue and the Oyster Bar downstairs in Grand Central Station and ordered New England clam chowder, and what we talked about that time was what we both remembered about some of the students and members of the staff and faculty on the campus down in central Alabama. He began by asking about some of the old campus slickers who used to hang out in and around the main entrance to the very same upperclassmen’s dormitory to which my roommate and I were assigned, in a somewhat atticlike fire-escape room on the third floor as freshmen and where I remained for all four years, two by myself after my roommate left for Yale.

Old Daddy Shakehouse, he began by saying. And I said, the Lord High Chancellor of the Outlying Regions of the after-hours juke joints. And he said, Did that old bear chaser finish whatever it was he was supposed to be taking down there in the trades school area? Hell, he must have already been down there on that campus at least three or four years before I got there. Man, he was a notorious campus operator of long standing when I was trying to get used to being a freshman. And I said, He was there on one of the work-your-way programs and he finally did get his certificate in industrial arts at the same time that I got my degree in a course of study that amounted to liberal arts. And that he then got a job in the maintenance department and was probably still there. We were both aware that we were talking about a place with a standard of living that was much higher than what most of the student population was used to in those days and perhaps most would settle for as graduates, as most faculty and staff members obviously had.

Old Daddy Shakehouse, he said chuckling to himself as he ate several more spoonfuls of the Oyster Bar New England clam chowder that he had not only recommended over the Manhattan recipe but also as being unsurpassed by any other around town, including Gage and Tollner’s over on Fulton Street over in Brooklyn. Old Daddy Shakehouse, he said again.

Then he said, What about old Jay Gould, old Jay Gould Weddington? Man, you had to know who old Jay Gould Weddington was. Everybody who was down there when I was there knew about him. And I said, old Jay Gould, old Jay P., John D. Weddington, the wolf of Wall Street. Business school. Man, when I graduated he was still running them floating card games and crap shoots, and was still the number one campus loan shark and pawnbroker. I think he must have hit that campus about the same number of years ahead of me as you did, but he was another one of those special work-plan students on a part-time academic schedule because his background in clerical work was such that he already could take care of several kinds of office jobs well enough so that sometimes he worked full-time during the day and took classes during the early-evening sessions and at other times he took a full class load during the day and did part-time office hours at the end of the day or for a few hours at night.

I didn’t really know him, I said, but during my junior and senior years he did hire me to help him tidy up a term report and also to look up something in the library for him from time to time. And, of course, with him it was always cash on delivery. But as for borrowing money from him, man, not me. Man, that was for the ones who were getting those monthly or quarterly checks or money orders from home. Which old Jay was promptly collecting on because he had somebody in the campus post office keeping tabs on when each one of his debtors’ letters from home arrived.

Which was when Taft Edison said, Well, I knew him well enough to bet that he wasn’t going to finish all of his courses and end his student status until he had accumulated enough capital to go directly from college into business on his own. Because I did know that he already had enough money to take a regular four-year course of study and that he wasn’t dependent upon any support from whatever family he had. Anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that he’s running his own business by now or even his own bank of some kind. Or that he actually is up here with something going on for him down on Wall Street.

And when I said, Where the hell was he from?, he said, Florida, boy, and then he said, Somebody else that everybody probably remembers from those old bull sessions is old Freeman