Anyone Who Had a Heart Read Online Free Page B

school when he had started playing with Benny Goodman. When Joe got drafted into the Army in 1942, they sent him to Fort Hood in Texas, where he began growing weed behind the barracks. The commanding general knew what Joe was doing but looked the other way because he liked Joe’s piano playing so much.
    Whenever I would walk into Joe’s apartment on the West Side of Manhattan after getting out of school in the middle of the afternoon, he would only just be getting out of bed. Although I never got high with him, Joe did show me how to roll a joint. He also told me how to go down on a girl. Whenever I would ask him about music, Joe would say, “What can I teach you? You gotta learn the music business yourself, man. Go out on the road with someone like Boyd Raeburn and travel all over the country with a band, in a band bus, because you’re not going to be anything until you’ve had that experience.”
    A lawyer who owned a hotel in the Catskills who had either seen or heard me play in the competition offered me a job the following summer playing with a bunch of guys at the Shandaken Manor. We weren’t going to make a lot of money but we could eat for free, and the guy who ran the place let us sleep across the road in an old converted chicken shack that still had feathers on the floor. There were five guys in one room, and I was the youngest, but I thought it was all great.
    We started out making four hundred bucks a week, but because his mother was sick and we didn’t want to lose him, we gave most of the money to Eddie Shaughnessy, a terrific drummer who later worked with Doc Severinsen on The Tonight Show . The hotel wasn’t all that successful to start with and it became less and less successful as the summer went on, so the guy who owned the place kept dropping our salary. Every week he’d say, “I’d love to keep you guys, but I can’t afford you anymore.” Pretty soon we were down to sixty bucks a week for the whole band.
    Getting out of the city for the summer was a big deal back then, so I didn’t want to go home. None of us did, because if you had a chance to work somewhere and came home early, that was a real loss of face. I was giving part of my salary away so my dad started sending me money, which I would use to buy Mounds and Almond Joys. I didn’t need much because the food was free.
    We were asleep in the chicken shack one night and at four in the morning we heard all this noise and then the sound of fire engines and sirens. We walked outside and looked across the road and saw the whole hotel was burning down. When we got over our shock, we realized we were free. Now we could all go back to the city and say, “You know, we had a really good job but the place burned down so we had to come home.” I was okay with that, because I already knew I was not going to be living with my parents in Forest Hills much longer.

Chapter
    2
    Night Plane to Heaven
    I have no idea how I ever actually managed to get out of Forest Hills High School. My grade average was 69.74, and in a class of 372 kids, I ranked 360th. What I do know for sure is that I didn’t bother to attend graduation.
    I really wanted to go to either the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, or the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music in Ohio, but my grades were so bad that both schools rejected me. The way my dad liked to tell the story, he and my mother had heard glowing reports about the music conservatory at McGill University in Montreal, so they had me apply, only to learn there was just one opening left for the upcoming semester. We all flew up for my audition, and according to my dad, I was halfway through a piece by Debussy when the dean I was playing for stopped me and said they had to have me there.
    The truth is that I went to McGill because I didn’t know what else to do and I had nowhere else to go. The reason they welcomed me was that they were short of students. The music department at McGill is brilliant now, but back