The Roy Stories Read Online Free PDF

chipped in and gave T nineteen dollars and seventy-five cents.
    â€œThat’s great of you guys,” he said. “Old man Poznanski gave me ten. Now I can buy a better horn than the one I had.”
    The next day, Marty the T bought a used trumpet at Frank’s Drum Shop on Wabash Avenue for thirty bucks. He was playing it in the office at the Sinclair station three weeks later when the police called and told old man Poznanski they had found the ’59 Impala that had been used in the hold-up abandoned in an empty lot on Stony Island Avenue. It had been stolen, then dumped. Marty the T’s trumpet was on the back seat.
    T went down to the precinct house across the street from City Hall to claim it. Roy and Tommy Cunningham went with him. When the claims officer handed the trumpet over to T, he laughed and said, “Look what they done to it.”
    The bell had been bent up at a forty-five degree angle.
    â€œThis is how Dizzy’s horn looks,” said Marty the T. “Whichever one of the stick-up men did it must know that.”
    â€œCan you still play it?” asked Cunningham.
    Marty the T put the trumpet to his lips and squeaked out a few notes.
    â€œNo trumpet playin’ in here,” barked the claims officer.
    â€œThat’s the intro to ‘Night in Tunisia’,” T told him.
    â€œYeah, well, it’s late afternoon in Chicago,” said the cop. “Take it outside.”
    Years later, when Roy saw Dizzy Gillespie perform in a nightclub in New York, he told this story to the people he was with.
    â€œDid Marty the T become a professional musician?” asked one of them.
    â€œI don’t know,” said Roy. “I never saw him again after I graduated from high school and left the neighborhood. But Tommy Cunningham told me he heard that T had married a girl from Africa named Happiness Onsunde. I said that would be a good title for a song, ‘Happiness On Sunday’, and Cunningham reminded me that Marty the T told us when we were outside the police station that he was going to write a tune called ‘Late Afternoon in Chicago’ and send it to Dizzy.”

 
    Unspoken
    Walking home together on Ojibway Boulevard, Roy and his grandfather passed Litvak’s Delicatessen, and Roy, who was twelve years old, said, “I like the young guy, Daniel, who works behind the counter in Litvak’s. He’s always telling jokes and makes the best sandwiches.”
    â€œDo you know where the name Litvak comes from?” asked his grandfather.
    â€œNo, Pops. Where?”
    â€œIt was a name given to certain Jews from Lithuania, in Eastern Europe. These Jews were inclined to doubt the so-called magic powers of the Hasidic leaders, so Litvak came to connote shrewdness and skepticism.”
    â€œWho were the Hasidic leaders?”
    â€œThe Orthodox Jews.”
    â€œTommy Cunningham told me that Daniel’s father hanged himself.”
    â€œNathan Litvak, yes. Two years ago.”
    â€œWhy’d he do that?”
    â€œIt’s a long story, Roy. An unhappy one, although there is a good ending, too.”
    â€œCan you tell it to me?”
    â€œI didn’t know Nathan Litvak but my friend Herman did.”
    â€œHerman who wears the hearing aid and always has a runny nose?”
    â€œYes, the jeweler on Minnetonka Street. He told me that Litvak came to Chicago after the war ended, almost seventeen years ago, in 1945. He was a Jew, of course, a survivor of the Holocaust, when the Nazis attempted to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe. He and his wife, Sarah, were arrested in Lithuania. She died in a concentration camp.”
    â€œWhat about Nathan and Daniel?”
    â€œDaniel was five years old when his parents were able to get him out of the country, just before the Nazis invaded. He was sent to live with relatives here in Chicago. Nathan managed to stay alive and was eventually liberated by the Allies. He emigrated