Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,88
he did sing some jazz songs. [Sings:] “I left my HAT in HAI-ti! In some forgot—” But no. That’s not the one I want. The ones we loved most were the ones we could dance to, very slowly, with the girls, holding them as close to us as we could, because that was the only thing approaching sex that we had, there on the basement dance floor. The girls were virgins and they would remain virginal right through college. But on the dance floor you could press your groin against your girlfriend and if she loved you she would press back, and if she was suspicious of you she would dance with her ass backing away.
INTERVIEWER: This is a family program.
EZRA BLAZER: I beg your pardon. With her tuchis backing away.
INTERVIEWER: And Eckstine?
EZRA BLAZER: Eckstine used to wear suits called the “one-button roll”: the lapels were long and narrow and held together below the waist with a single button. He wore his tie in a wide Windsor knot and there was a big rolled collar on his shirt—a “Billy Eckstine collar.” Wednesday nights and Saturdays I worked in the Monogramming Shop at Kaufmann’s and what with my employee discount I saved enough money to buy a pearl-gray, one-button-roll suit. My first suit. And when Billy Eckstine came back to Pittsburgh to sing in the Crawford Grill my friend and I sneaked in wearing our suits, and, oh, bliss was it to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!
INTERVIEWER: Second record?
EZRA BLAZER: “Somehow.”
INTERVIEWER: Billy Eckstine singing “Somehow.” After graduating from Allegheny College, Ezra Blazer, you too went into the service. What was that like?
EZRA BLAZER: I was in the army for two years. I was drafted, in the Korean War draft, and luckily I wasn’t sent to Korea but to Germany, along with something like a quarter million other Americans bracing themselves for World War III. And I was an MP. A military policeman. At Lee Barracks, in Mainz. Before age and illness laid waste to my frame and reduced my proportions to what you see now, I was six feet two and two hundred pounds. A big muscular MP with a pistol and a billy club. And my specialty as an MP was directing traffic. We didn’t have World War III, but we did have traffic. I was taught in MP school that the key to directing traffic is to let the traffic flow through your hips. Would you like to see?
INTERVIEWER: It sounds like dancing.
EZRA BLAZER: It sounds like dancing, yes! Do you know that joke?
INTERVIEWER: I don’t think I do.
EZRA BLAZER: A young rabbi-in-training is about to get married and so he goes to the wise old rabbi with a beard down to the ground, and he says, “Rabbi, I’d like to know what’s permissible and what isn’t. I don’t want to do what’s forbidden. Is it all right,” he asks the old rabbi, “if we get into bed together, and I get on top of her, and we have intercourse like that?” “Fine!” says the rabbi. “Absolutely fine.” “And is it all right if she rolls over on her stomach and we have intercourse that way? With me on top like that?” “Fine!” says the rabbi. “Absolutely fine. Poifect.” “And if we sit on the edge of the bed, and she sits on top of me, facing me, and we do it like that?” “Fine! Absolutely fine.” “And what if we do it facing each other standing up?” “No!” cries the rabbi. “Absolutely NOT! That’s like dancing!”
INTERVIEWER: Next record.
EZRA BLAZER: Well, it often happens to young fellows in the army that you meet someone who becomes your teacher, someone who knows worlds unknown to you. In Germany, I was stationed with a guy who’d gone to Yale, and at night—he had a phonograph with him, in the barracks—he’d play Dvořák. Dvořák! I didn’t know how to pronounce it, never mind spell it. I was ignorant of classical music. Ignorant of it and hostile to it, in a coarse kid’s way. Well, one night I heard him playing something that stunned me. It was the cello concerto, of course. I think it was Casals. Later on, I’d hear Jacqueline du Pré play it, marvelously of course, but it was Casals’s that I heard first, so let’s play him. What I liked was the electricity of it, the drama that was like voltage entering your veins . . .
INTERVIEWER: That was Pablo Casals playing Dvořák’s Cello Concerto