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tune I didn’t know and transpose it into another key as I read it. My heart sank. I thought he was aiming to shoot me down and not give me a permit.
    â€œLook, I can transpose a piece that I know,” I said. “But if I have to sight-read and transpose it at the same time I can’t keep a tempo.”
    â€œThat’s all right,” he said. “I just want to see if you know how.”
    â€œO.K., Mac. But this is going to be the groping method.”
    After a couple of tortured bars, he told me to stop and waved me back to the rear of the hall. I shot a despairing glance at my erstwhile employer and followed after the union man. To my immense relief, he wrote out a permit and handed it to me.
    â€œThat’ll be five bucks,” he said. Then he noticed my greenish pallor and said, “Hey, cheer up. You did fine. Your transposition was accurate, and that’s all I ask.”
    The Florida sky looked bright again when we got outside, and I felt fine.
    The job was with the Willard Robinson Orchestra in a plush nightclub on Palm Island called The Silent Night. Willard Robinson was a fine pianist himself, but he had a lot of personal problems at the time and was drinking heavily. After he fell off the piano stool a couple of times, the management told him he could keep leading the group, but he’d have to hire another piano player. His divorce and selling his house on Long Island (which he memorialized in his hit song of the day, “A Cottage for Sale”) and his resultant drinking problem were to my benefit, of course. One man’s famine makes another man’s feast, and it’s an ill wind that blows nobody good and all that. But subconsciously I felt a bit guilty about my good fortune at Willard’s expense. I was happy to see him come back strong in New York a few years later. His Deep River Orchestra was featured on the original Maxwell House Showboat on radio, bringing his music the national audience it deserved.
    The music we made at The Silent Night wasn’t so bad either. Soon I was averaging $110 a week—good money in those days. At last we were able to move out of the rooming house into a three-and-a-half-room furnished apartment in a terrific new building.
    My first night of playing at The Silent Night made quite an impression on me. The place itself was fabulous—gorgeous, glamorous, and illegal. The owner was a rum runner who brought the illicit booze he served from the Bahamas. A great hedge surrounded the place, and a doorman was posted at the entrance gate to screen guests as they arrived. Before opening the gate, I was told, the doorman would push one of two buttons. One would ring a bell that would bring the maître d’ bustling out to meet the patrons. The other button would sound an alarm that meant revenue agents. The doorman would delay the federal agents as long as he could. By the time they got inside there was no evidence of liquor in the place, except for a few drinks sitting in front of individual customers. If they tried to confiscate those, an angry argument would ensue about whether the prohibition law meant it was illegal to drink liquor or simply precluded its sale.
    The bandstand was in an elaborate, rococo pavilion. The dance floor was of marble, surrounded by Grecian columns. One of the other guys in the orchestra pointed out a huge yacht tied to the dock and told me that it had once belonged to the Emperor of Japan. In inclement weather, the dining and dancing shifted to the yacht. I was astonished by the place and a bit cowed by the suave urbanity of the patrons. The drinks were a dollar each for anything you wished, champagne, brandy, bourbon, scotch, whatever. I didn’t drink at all back then but the fixed-price drink menu and the stylish simplicity of the food service made a lasting impression on me. They had no printed menu because there were just three entrees: Maine lobster, steak, and roast duckling. Years later