[...]4
The girls came down and we started out on our big night, once more pushing the car down the street. 'Wheeoo! let's go!' cried Dean, and we jumped in the back seat and clanked to the little Harlem on Folsom Street.
Out we jumped in the warm, mad night, hearing a wild tenorman bawling horn across the way, going 'EE-YAH! EE-YAH! EE-YAH!' and hands clapping to the beat and folks yelling, 'Go, go, go!' Dean was already racing across the street with his thumb in the air, yelling, 'Blow, man, blow!' A bunch of colored men in Saturday-night suits were whooping it up in front. It was a sawdust saloon with a small bandstand on which the fellows huddled with their hats on, blowing over people's head, a crazy place; crazy floppy women wandered around sometimes in their bathrobes, bottles clanked in alleys. In back of the joint in a dark corridor beyond the splattered toilets scores of men and women stood against the wall drinking wine-spodiodi and spitting at the stars - wine and whisky. The behatted tenorman was blowing at the peak of a wonderfully satisfactory free idea, a rising and falling rift that went from 'EE-yah!' to crazier 'EE-de-lee-yah!' and blasted along to the rolling crash of butt-scarred drums hammered by a big brutal Negro with a bullneck who didn't give a damn about anything but punishing his busted tubs, crash, rattle-ti-boom, crash. Uproars of music and the tenorman had it and everybody knew he had it. Dean was clutching his head in the crowd, and it Was a mad crowd. They Were All That tenorman urging to hold it and keep it with cries and wild eyes, and He Was raising Himself from a crouch and going down again with His horn, looping it up in a clear cry above the furor. A six-foot skinny Negro woman Was rolling her bones at the man's hornbell, and he just jabbed it at her, 'Ee! ee! ee! '
