Anyone Who Had a Heart Read Online Free Page A

together by bus and train to do shows in military wards and hospitals in places like Martinsville, Virginia, where the audience consisted of guys who’d had half their faces shot off in the war.
    Before I went on the road, I persuaded my mother to let me take the braces off my teeth. She agreed on the condition that I put them back on when I got home again, which of course I never did. The one time I really needed my mother to tell me what to do, she didn’t, and as a result, I’ve had problems with my teeth throughout my entire life.
    The highlight of the tour for me took place one night when this older woman who was a singer took me to bed. Even though I pretended to know what I was doing, she knew the truth. But she was very kind to me and that was the first time I ever got laid. I couldn’t wait to tell my few friends what had happened, but when I got back to Forest Hills, none of them seemed all that interested. When I showed my younger cousin the condom I was now carrying around in my wallet, at least he was impressed.
    In addition to the jazz I’d heard on Fifty-Second Street, I had also started listening to the French Impressionists. I really liked Debussy, and Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé , Suite no. 2 was a big favorite of mine. Even though I still wasn’t a very good musician and wasn’t doing anything to advance my career, I did like listening to Freddy Robbins, a really good deejay my parents knew who played jazz on WOV.
    One day, I heard him announce a piano competition. The first prize was fifteen lessons with Teddy Wilson, who had played with Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, and Billie Holiday. The second prize was fifteen lessons with either the great boogie-woogie piano player Albert Ammons or with Joe Bushkin, who played jazz piano in the hottest clubs in the city. So I decided to enter the contest.
    Because there were a hundred and fifty contestants, I wasn’t sure I would even get past the first round, so I didn’t tell my parents about it. I just went in to the radio station by myself and played “Laura” and “How High the Moon.” I was told they were going to pick fifteen of us to continue on into the next round.
    When a telegram came to our house notifying me I had made the cut, I had to tell my parents what I’d done. When I went in to the radio station to play again, I made it to the finals along with two other kids. The three of us had to play onstage in Town Hall in front of an audience that included my parents, all of Freddy Robbins’s radio listeners, and a panel of eight judges.
    I was competing against a white kid from New Jersey and a really nice black kid named Warren Vaughan. When the judges came back to announce their decision, they said it was a tie between Vaughan and me and we would each have to play one more song to decide the winner.
    By this time I was so nervous that I just kept licking my lips so I could get some saliva going in my mouth. While I was waiting to play, Joe Bushkin came over to me with his girlfriend Nellie, a hot-looking blonde who seemed kind of drunk. When she said, “Show Joe what you were doing to your lips,” this made me even more nervous. But when I started talking to Joe, he turned out to be an enormously cool guy and a very free and wild spirit who was unlike anybody I had ever met before.
    Just before I had to go out onstage again to play, Mary Lou Williams, the great jazz piano player who wrote and arranged for Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, walked in. I don’t know if Warren Vaughan played better than me, which he probably did, or whether the panel felt they had to vote for him because Mary Lou Williams was there, but he won and I came in second.
    After they announced the decision, I picked Joe Bushkin to give me lessons. I probably would have learned a lot more about music from Teddy Wilson, but Joe Bushkin taught me about life. A skinny Jewish guy who had grown up in a tough neighborhood in Manhattan, Joe was still in high