Free With Billie by Julia Blackburn

unless somebody flustered her, and then she was a bitch and she’d raise hell. She had a very good sense of humour and a big smile. When we got high, everyone wouldbe telling stories because it was really good in those days and everybody used to laugh, and she had just a belly laugh when she really laughed. There was a big black boy with great big white teeth and a great big broad smile. We called him High Jivin’ Smiley and he used to make everyone laugh because he was so
unfunny
, and Billie used to pass out when he started, she used to die laughing.
    In the tea pads they’d say, ‘Lady Day’s in the house!’ and they would play all her records and she used to sing along. This is where they sold marijuana. There’d be fifteen or twenty of us, passing the pot around with the door wide open, and the cops didn’t bother us. There were four or five tea pads uptown. One was called Kaiser’s, and then there was Reefer Mae’s on the corner of 143rd Street and 7th Avenue. Mostly show people were there and they’d say ‘We’re crazy and we’re happy’ and we used to have a ball.
    You could get anything at that time: booze, cocaine, and some used to drink ‘top and bottom’, gin and wine mixed together, but no one would really get drunk because we had marijuana. We got it from Texas and Mexico. We found out we was getting happy on this marijuana. Oh yeah, we were getting happy! Oh my God! You could see the black gum of the marijuana coming out of the end of the cigarette.
    Lester Young used to come into the tea pads and he carried a brown leather zipper bag, this big, full of marijuana. But Billie and Louis Armstrong made marijuana popular. They were the idols of the marijuana people. You could say they were King and Queen. But once they got really big they kind of waned away from public smoking, because they could get all the dope they wanted and only once in a while they came uptown.
    When Billie wanted to blaze it, to get drunk and have a ball, she would check into a hotel with Dexter Gordon. After Dexter Gordon she fell in love with Lester Young. She used to change boyfriends like youchange your pants, but Lester Young was the boy she
really
loved, and after he died I don’t think she lived more than five months. †
    There was a place called the Daisy Chain ‡ on 141st Street, between Lenox and 7th Avenue, and we all used to go there. It was just a cat house, owned by a very, very pretty girl called Hazel Valentine, an ex-chorus girl who died five or six years ago. You’d go up to this big railroad flat house and you had to pay five dollars a piece and everybody would get buck-naked. I used to go up there quite often. I was quite young. Everyone was doing everything, but you don’t care, you just have a ball. Billie used to frequent it, just to look and see what was happening.
    There were these rooms over here and rooms over there and a long hall, and you’d be going from room to room and you’d see people on the floor getting their thing. Fantastic! Women going with women. Men going with men. They had a girl called Sewing Machine Bertha and she went down on all the girls. All the lesbians used to go up there, but I couldn’t quote names because some of them was real big-time stars, so it was husha-husha. Entertainers went up there and it was half-coloured and half-white. Hell, yeah!
Real
integrated! Nobody paid it any mind. The public didn’t know anything about it. It was only show people. Everybody was gay and having a lot of fun, twenty-four hours a day.
    * ‘A white person … common Negro use since
c.
1925’ (
Dictionary of American Slang
).
    † ‘When she died they wanted to have her funeral at St Patrick, but Cardinal Spellman wouldn’t allow it. This is the truth. I know it. So I never did like Cardinal Spellman after that. Billie was a real Catholic and she gave the Catholic Church a lot of money, and Cardinal Spellman knew her.’
    ‡ ‘The act or an instance of several persons having