My first professional job had been at the Claremont, performing in the house orchestra. I was seventeen, though at the time I confessed with faked chagrin to being only twenty-four, which sounded old as the hills to me.

My classical training, combined with my total enslavement to Dixie (the music, not the province), made me a strong utility player, which compensated for my being, as Ernie Shumaker used to call me, an absolute babe in the woodwinds.

I told Gail that I remembered the Claremont best (and my conscience remembered it worst) for being where I spent the last big drumroll leading up to the cymbal crash of Prohibition, which marked for most Americans the day when the locating and partaking of booze became our national pastime.

“Was the Claremont very different then?” she asked.

“The god-awful part, Gail, is that I remember very little of my stay out here in Oakland, except the music itself, and being astounded by what I could pour into my body and still function.” I confessed to her—or she drew out of me—that the most thrilling revelation for me had been how effortlessly a teenage musician could attain sexual congress with a realm of women even more intoxicated and impressed with him than he was. With what staggering (literally) ease were achieved those conquests of mine.

Gail nodded with profound understanding.

“You were a trollop,” she said.

I pleaded my losing case. “I was seventeen, there were six months left before the United States went dry forever, I was playing jazz for a living—imagine being paid to do something you’d gratefully pay to do—and girls who wouldn’t have given me the time of day a year earlier were now admiring me on the stage of one of the swankest hotels on the West Coast. What would you have done in my position?”

Gail smiled. “But plenty, I suppose.”

“Unforgivable,” I reprimanded myself. “And the most shameful part of it is I don’t even remember the faces or names. Admittedly, all the girls that hung around with us aspired to the same identical look: cinched-down bosom, carmine lips the shape of Louise Brooks’s, penciled eyebrows drawn on a blank canvas, rolled stockings that got lost in the parking lot behind the hotel—” I stopped myself. “Not much of a portrait to paint for you, I’m afraid. You shouldn’t have gotten me started.”

She shrugged gracefully. “I appreciate your honesty if not your behavior, and as you say, you were very young.”