By high school Lefty had grown into a welterweight and was training for the Golden Gloves at Gonzo’s Gym on Kedzie, where the mostly lighter-division Mexican fighters boxed. He’d taught himself to play the sax almost as proficiently as he’d once faked playing it. With a few buddies from Farragut High, he started the Bluebirds, which Lefty described as a bebop polka band. They played taverns for parties and weddings with Lefty on sax and vocals. It was difficult to imagine him singing because of the raspy whisper he spoke in, but my mother said when he was young, Lefty could croon like Mel Tormé, a singer known as the Velvet Fog. Lefty had returned from a Korean POW camp and a subsequent yearlong detour at a VFW mental hospital in California with a chronically hoarse, worn-away voice. It was a voice a rock singer might have envied, but rock and roll wasn’t the music Lefty grew up playing. When he shipped out for Korea, the music from World War II had still hung in the air. His war didn’t have its own music, and years later, when he stepped back into America, the country’s allegiance had shifted to another beat. The raspy voice was the only voice of his I heard live, but I once listened to a scratchy 45 rpm record he’d sent to my mother from San Diego while on leave before his troopship sailed for Japan. Lefty crooned an a cappella “I’ll Be Seeing You,” and even on that disk of flimsy acetate, when he hit the words “I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing you,” I could hear the velvet foggy vibrato of his voice and turned to say so to my mother, but she’d left the room. It was the last I ever saw of that record.
My mother had made me promise never to ask Uncle Lefty about the war — a promise I kept — not that I wasn’t curious, but I didn’t want to do anything that would jeopardize our outings together. Now that he’d finally returned home from Korea, everyone expected he’d resume playing in a band, but the only thing Lefty seemed interested in playing anymore were the ponies. My parents would never have allowed him to take me to the track, so sometimes on Saturday afternoons Uncle Lefty would tell them we were going across town to a Cubs game. Instead, we’d head for Cicero, where the sulkies were running at Sportsman’s Park. And after Sportsman’s we’d celebrate our winnings, whether there were any or not, by taking our singing routine to the taverns of Cicero.
Later, we’d empty our pockets on the drumskin-tight army blanket of the neatly made bed in Lefty’s bare, rented room with its marbled blue linoleum floor. We’d count our take, and Lefty would say, “We’re in the peanuts and caramel now, champ,” the same phrase he used when he’d hit a long shot.
Even my mother had never been to his one-room, third-floor flat on Blue Island Avenue — a street that failed to live up to its name. I’d imagined the lake visible at the end of the block, gulls mewing, and water lapping the wooden back porches as if they were docks. It was a vision Lefty had prompted when he told me the street was named for a ghostly island that sometimes still rose on the horizon of the lake, an island once inhabited by the Blue Island Indians that sank from sight when the last warrior died. Maybe my lifelong longing for islands came from the promise of that street name.
Pigeons, not gulls, paced the window ledges. One of Lefty’s Mexican neighbors kept a pigeon coop on the roof, and the birds’ constant cooing seemed like a cool windless breeze wafting through Lefty’s room. A few times, Lefty took me up through the trapdoor to see the pigeons. “Welcome to Dreamsville,” he’d say and pull me up onto the hot, pebbled tar roof that looked over Blue Island and beyond to a city of holy spires. I recalled overhearing my mother talking in a worried way to my father about Lefty drunkenly staggering up to the roof at night to play his sax. The cops had been called to get him down.
“You can’t feel guilty about not taking care of your nutcase brother,” my father said. “He’s living his own life and won’t listen to nobody anyway.”
I didn’t understand what was so crazy; it made perfect sense to me that he’d go up to Dreamsville to play a duet with the pigeons.
Except for an audience of pigeons and neighbors whom he woke from a sound sleep at three in the morning, Lefty no longer played in public. His old combo, the Bluebirds, had broken up when he’d left for Korea. Lefty’s best buddy from the Bluebirds, a guy we called the Bruiser, still drummed in a local band that played for weddings. You could hear the Bruiser from a block away, his bass beat a sonic boom, his rimshots carrying like gunfire. We’d follow the beat to the open side door of a tavern hall and stand watching the dancers whoop around the dance floor while the Bruiser thundered behind a wheezy, sad-sack polka band.
“See that drummer,” Lefty told me, “his god was Gene Krupa.”
There was an amazing recording of the Benny Goodman band’s “Sing, Sing, Sing” on the jukebox at the Zip Inn, with Krupa exploding on tom-toms. Lefty played it whenever the Bruiser joined us there for a drink. They always set a shot of Jim Beam on the bar for Deke, the Bluebirds’ guitar player who’d been killed in Korea. I wondered who drank it after we left.
It was one of those Saturdays in summer when we’d gone to Sportsman’s — I’d hit a winner with a horse named You Bet Your Dupa — and we were in Lefty’s room on Blue Island, listening to the Cubs lose to the Giants so I could report on the game, when he told me he was thinking of moving back to California. I’m glad we weren’t at a tavern, because before I could stop myself, I began to cry.
“Hey, come on, champ, don’t feel that way. I’ll be back. Look, I got something special I been meaning to show you. Check it out.” He slid a beat-up case from under the bed and let me pop the latches. It opened with a whiff of brass and another scent, one that later in life I’d recognize as a mingling of cork grease, bamboo, and dried saliva. There was a note of perfume from a black slip stuffed in the bell of the horn. The bell was engraved with cursive I couldn’t read, the keys were capped in mother-of-pearl. The saxophone gleamed from the plush emerald lining like pirate treasure in an encrusted chest. Like a piano on an empty stage, it seemed to emit silence. I pressed the keys, and the felt pads resonated against the holes. Just thumping the keys made a kind of music.
“Try it on.” Lefty fit the neck strap over my head and attached the sax to the little hook. The weight of the horn pulled me forward.
“Too big for you,” he said. “Here’s one more your size.” He reached beneath the bed and came up with a compact little case and snapped it open to reveal a disassembled clarinet cushioned in ruby velvet. “Learn to play this and the sax will come easy. You like that Benny Goodman’s ‘Sing, Sing, Sing,’ don’t you?”
I shook my head yes, afraid I’d blubber if I tried to talk.
“Know why this has your name on it?”
“Why?” I wasn’t sure if he was really giving me the clarinet.
“Because you can hear it, right?” He held up a finger like a conductor raising a baton.
I listened. All I heard were pigeons. “What?” I asked.
“The phantom music, you know, like Zip’s right arm. It’s there even if no one else hears it.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, but I nodded yes. I wanted that clarinet.
“I can hear you feel it when you sing. Who taught you to whistle so good?”
“I taught myself,’ I told him, which was true. I’d learned to whistle by practicing under an echoey railroad viaduct at the end of our street.
“That’s what I’m talking about. It’s there all the time. It kept me company when I was in.” He didn’t say in the army or in the war or in Korea or in the POW camp or in the VA hospital. Just in, and that was the only time he even mentioned so much as that.