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THE BITTERS WITH THE SWEET |
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like Negroes. He always said they would mess up your business. And Negroes didn't like him. I guess they were jealous.
He was all in diamonds, those days. He wore a ring with a diamond as big as a dime and a diamond horseshoe in his tie. He carried a locket with diamonds set all around it. His watch was circled in diamonds. His belt buckle was in gold and studded with diamonds. He even had sock-supporters of solid gold set with diamonds. Then you could see that big half-carat diamond sparkling in his teeth. That year they called him the diamond king.
Jelly loved to dress so well that he used to pay fifteen and twenty dollars at Kaplans for his pajamas and underwear. When I met him, he had about one-hundred-fifty suits, and overcoats of all kinds—some out of this 'melton5' material, one of beaver, one lined with muskrat and several more. He had fifteen or twenty pairs of shoes and too many shirts and socks and ties to mention.
We stayed at the best hotels and ate the best of food. Jelly liked the best. He would always tell me, "Never mind tomorrow. Tomorrow will take care of itself." So anything I wanted, I could have. He knew all my sizes and he would go downtown and, anything that he saw, irregardless to what it cost, he would have the saleslady put it on, walk around in it, and if he liked it, he'd have it sent. Al the years that I lived with him, I never knew what it was to do any shopping. He was marvelous, just marvelous.
Anytime that a person can get up out of bed in the middle of the night and just plunk his hand on a piano and begin to write down something and have a tune, he's wonderful to me. And Jelly used to do that all the time. He made himself one of the greatest musicians by his own ideas. He used to wake up at two or three o'clock in the morning and an idea would strike him and he'd get right by that grand piano. He wanted it to be completely quiet. He'd begin whistling and then go to dotting it down, dotting it down—just an idea in his own creative style. And I've watched him sit up all night there |
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