Chubby Mason

Every boy needs a mentor — maybe several mentors, one for each stage of his evolving development. One of mine, back in the early Sixties when I was a blossoming teenager, was a forty-something singer and baritone sax player named Chubby Mason. No, that wasn’t his real name. I can’t remember his real name: it was something very Sicilian, and I’m sure Chubby stopped using it long before we met.

Chubby taught me plenty, and not just about Count Basie and Duke Ellington big band arrangements. I was a sixteen-year-old piano player working underage in a Catskill Mountains hotel show band, and from Chubby I learned the “suave” way to light a cigarette for a “lady;” how to order drinks (especially which drinks to order); how to engage in “persuasive” conversation; and much much more, including certain obscure carnal delicacies and practices better left undescribed.

My parents sent me away to the Catskills every summer to play in bands and earn money for my college education; if they had known what kind of education I was getting from Chubby…

I’m older now than Chubby was then, and I can’t tell you why I thought of him specifically today after so many years of hardly thinking about him at all. Maybe it’s because he had a purposeful disregard for the allegedly “important” things going on around him, which attitude I would do well to cultivate in our often-exasperating times: for Chubby Mason, life consisted of summers in New York, winters in Miami, the horses, the dog track — and, literally, wine, women, and song. If he were still alive he would laugh at me, with my Ph.D. and my seriousness. “Hey Red!” he used to call me all the time. “Hey Red!” he’d yell, driving his ‘57 Caddy up the Palisades Parkway between Manhattan and the Mountains, “light me up a smoke…always seem to smoke a lot on a trip, ya know?” I’d light one up with him, listen to him expound on the ponies, or the fillies (human, not equine), or the seduction value of the Brandy Alexander or the Side Car, and for a few moments I too would be suave, forty-something, and a connoisseur of fine spirits and finer women.

Sometimes, especially on a day when Rachael Ray gets pilloried for wearing the wrong kind of scarf in a Dunkin’ Donuts commercial and the US Senate is about to consider some goofy carbon-credits bill that will cost us all an arm and a leg, it’s good to reflect on something happy. I see in retrospect that I learned a lot of useful things from Chubby Mason — much more useful than most of the stuff I learned taking a doctorate at the University of Michigan.

Chubby, I miss your kind. And you would have loved the iPod.