Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [27]
I wasn’t even getting my thirty-five dollars a week at the Uptown House, and I guess from one trip to Montreal I thought traveling would be one big romance like that, so fourteen dollars a day sounded real great.
Nobody bothered to tell me I’d have to travel five hundred to six hundred miles on a hot or cold raggedy-ass Blue Goose bus; that it would cost me two or three bucks a night for a room; that by the time I was through having my hair fixed and gowns pressed—to say nothing of paying for pretty clothes to wear—I’d end up with about a dollar and a half a day. Out of that I had to eat and drink and send home some loot to Mom.
Whenever I had a couple of bucks it was always so little I was ashamed to send it home, so I would give it to Lester Young to invest. I hoped he could shoot enough dice to parlay it into a bill big enough I didn’t have to feel ashamed to send home.
The first time out we had been riding for three months, and neither Lester nor I had a dime. Both of us were actually hungry. Jimmy Rushing, the blues-singing “Mr. Five by Five,” was always the only one who had any loot. We went to him once and asked him real nice for a buck to buy a couple of hamburgers. He wouldn’t give us nothing but a lecture on how he saved his money and how we petered ours away.
When we were on the bus coming back to New York from West Virginia, I couldn’t stand the thought of coming home to Mom broke. I had four bucks when that crap game started on the bus floor.
“You’re not shooting these four,” I told Lester. “I’m shooting these myself.”
I got on my knees, and the first time up it was a seven. Everybody hollered at me that the bus had swerved and made me shoot it over.
Up came eleven. I picked up the four bucks right there and won the next three pots before someone said something about comfort.
I thought they said, “What do you come for?” I said, “I come for any damn thing you come for.” I didn’t know the lingo, but I knew Lester did. So I told him I’d do the shooting and he could be the lookout man.
I was on my knees in the bottom of that bus from West Virginia to New York, a few hundred miles and about twelve hours. When we pulled up in front of the Woodside Hotel everybody was broke and crying. I was filthy dirty and had holes in the knees of my stockings, but I had sixteen hundred bucks and some change.
I gave some of the cats in the band enough loot to eat with and for car fare. But not Rushing. I didn’t give him back a dime. I took what was left and split on uptown to Mom’s. When I walked in she looked at me and like to died, I was so dirty and beat up. I just waited for her to say something, and she did.
“I’ll bet you ain’t got a dime, either,” Mom said.
I took that money, over a thousand dollars, and threw it on the floor. She salted a lot of it away and later it became the nest egg she used to start her own little restaurant, “Mom Holiday’s,” something she always wanted.
Basie did a wonderful job with the band, but he just wasn’t his own boss. He was just out of Kansas City. A big booking agency was backing him and trying to sell the band. We’d play a whole string of riffraff joints, rough Negro dance halls in the South where people were sneaking in corn whisky from across the tracks, and then boom in the middle of this grind we would be booked into some white hotel.
We didn’t have the right uniforms, clothes, equipment—the cats in the band didn’t even have the right horns they needed—we’d all be beat from traveling thousands of miles with no sleep, no rehearsal, and no preparation—and yet we’d be expected to be real great.
After each crisis on the road we’d end up back in New York. Then there’d be a big strategy meeting, figuring what was wrong