From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [273]
It was a story of Telegraph Hill, Andy’s story. Or was it Knob Hill, in Andy’s one and only story. It was a story of steep-streeted Chinatown and the Chinese tonks and tourist nightclubs, and of a green recruit from the Mississippi Valley who looked in awe and wonder. It was a story of the fabulous Eddie Lang, and of the mythical Django the Frenchman the “Greatest Guitarman In The World” whose last name, something German, Andy could never remember.
A rich queer had picked Andy up in one of the Chinese nightclubs, a slightly effeminate, very sad, quite rich queer. And learning that Andy was a guitarman, had taken him up to the very expensive and exclusive apartment house that he derided, but still lived in, to hear the “Greatest Guitarman In The World.” It was a lovely bachelor apartment, so lovely Andy had felt transported to some unreal other earth, because surely Andy had never seen an earth like this earth before, a place so rich and beautiful and harmonious and clean. It even had a den, and the den even had a bar, and the bar even had pyramids of glasses under colored lights, and the dark wood panelled walls lined from floor to ceiling with books and record albums. Oh, he remembered all of it, every last detail.
But when it came to describing for them who had never heard it the poignant fleeting exquisitely delicate melody of that guitar, memory always faltered. There was no way to describe them that. You had to hear that, the steady, swinging, never wavering beat with the two- or three-chord haunting minor riffs at the ends of phrases, each containing the whole feel and pattern of the joyously unhappy tragedy of this earth (and of that other earth). And always over it all the one picked single string of the melody following infallibly the beat, weaving in and out around it with the hard-driven swiftly-run arpeggios, always moving, never hesitating, never getting lost and having to pause to get back on, shifting suddenly from the set light-accent of the melancholy jazz beat to the sharp erratic-explosive gypsy rhythm that cried over life while laughing at it, too fast for the ear to follow, too original for the mind to anticipate, too intricate for the memory to remember. Andy was not a jazzman, but Andy knew guitars. The American Eddie Lang was good, but Django the Frenchman was untouchable, like God.
They were all foreign recordings, those of this Django, all made in France or Switzerland. Andy had never heard of him before, and never heard of him again, until Slade. He tried, but the record clerks had never heard of Django, they did not handle foreign recordings, and Andy could not tell them his last name. Just that one night remained, a half-dream half remembered, that he was not even sure any more was real. He had told and retold it so often, elaborating this or that, that he no longer knew where memory stopped and imagination started. He was glad to prove by Slade that it really had existed.
The queer said he was a real gypsy, a French gypsy, and he only had three fingers on his left hand, his string hand. Incredible. They had sat almost all night, Andy and the queer, playing them and replaying them, and the queer expanded and began to talk, how he had seen him once in the flesh in a Paris bistro, how Django had quit without giving notice, leaving a thousand francs a week to go off with a third-rate gypsy band that was touring in the South, the Meedee, he called it. The queer thought that was wonderful. The queer did not offer to proposition Andy. Either he forgot all about it in the excitement of the music, or else he wanted to keep his real love and his business separate. It was as if this queer only propositioned men who were too dull and insensitive to appreciate guitar,