“’Lo, Lew.”
I returned his cool regard. We were all into cool those days: cool regards, cool threads and music, cool affairs. Hand-slapping, tribal handshakes and high fives hadn’t yet quite caught on.
“You got it,” I told Sloe Eddie. “Sometimes low, other times high.”
One night, ten years ago at least, Eddie had gone sailing on sloe gin fizzes and not hove back into port for almost a week; he’d earned the nickname for life.
“You get high enough you’n see all the shit.”
“So they tell me. Like we don’t see enough of it down here.”
“Got that right.”
“You coming?”
“Going. Two young ladies and a new bottle of Cutty waitin’ for me. Your man’s hot tonight, though.”
I went on inside, sat at the end of the bar, and ordered a Jax.
The club, like most of them, smelled of mildew, urine, beer, and edgy, cheap alcohol. Twenty or thirty years ago someone had scraped together enough money to buy the place, nailing down his piece of American dream, turning the gleam in his eye momentarily real. He’d hired a crew of workmen. They’d begun fixing it up: excavated studs preparatory to tacking up prefab panels, laid new Formica along part of the bar, soldered temporary patches on bathroom plumbing. But then the money ran out, a lot quicker than Someone had anticipated, and his crew jumped ship.
Most of the club’s patrons had jumped ship too, from the look of it. A scatter of couples at the tables, a teenage hooker dropping shots of Smirnoff’s like clear stones into beer.
The TV over the bar was on, some show about a paraplegic chief of police, the premise of which seemed to be that a cripple, a woman and a young black man, together, made up a single effective human being. The young black guy pushed the chief’s wheelchair around, and the show was set in San Francisco. I kept on waiting for YBM to push the damned thing to the top of one of those famous hills and let go. There’d be this gorgeous minute or so of “Blue Danube” or “Waltzing Matilda” as the wheelchair plunged ever faster down hill after hill into traffic, doom, the bay.
Against the back wall, in the light of a portable spot, Buster was giving it everything he had. He always did. There’d been nights the bartender and I were the only ones around, and even then I couldn’t tell a difference.
Light spurred off the sunburst finish of his Guild as he leaned back in the chair and threw his head up. The steel tube on his finger glinted, too, as it slid along the strings. Both feet struck the floor, levered up on their heels, struck again.
Sun goin’ down, dark night gon’ catch me here.
Said sun goin’ down, mmmmm night gon’ catch me here.
Don’t have no woman, love and feel my care.
Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm, mmmm
Those last mmmm’s on the two-bar turnaround: E, E-7th, A-7th, B-7th.
I’d learned a lot about the blues from Buster Robinson.
I’d learned a lot from Buster, period.
He’d cut a couple dozen sides for Bluebird and Vocalion in the early forties when they were called race records and sold at grocery stores for a nickel apiece, and they’d done all right. But then Buster got in a fight over a woman at a rent party he was playing, the other guy got dead, and Buster went up for a stretch at Parch-man. And by the time he got out, musical tastes (he told me) had just plumb left him behind.
For the past thirty-six years Buster had worked as a barbeque cook up in Fort Worth, at a take-out joint off Rosedale near the hospitals there, an old Spur station with pumps still standing out front. Then the folk revival came along. Some enterprising college kid from back East decided he might not be dead after all, as everybody assumed, and somehow had managed to track him down. Buster didn’t even have a guitar, hadn’t played one in over twenty years. So the kid and his friends chipped in and bought him one. Then one Saturday they all came over to Buster’s place, put a bottle of Grandad and a tape recorder on the kitchen table, and let the recorder run for the next hour while Buster played, sang, got mildly drunk (“cause I’s a Christian man now, you see”) and talked about old times.
The kids pressed it just the way they recorded it and it sold like Coke.
But orders kept coming in, and Kid and Friends weren’t prepared, financially or by temperament, to tack into this new wind. They wound up selling all rights to BlueStrain. Strain (as everybody called it) had had remarkable success issuing live-recorded jazz on a label previously known for classical recordings. The recovering beats and MBAs who ran BlueStrain were convinced that Buster Robinson was a shoo-in as the next Mississippi John Hurt.
It took them about two months to decide that what money they were going to make off B.R., they’d already made. The new pressing didn’t sell. Everyone who wanted it had it. And no one came to the live concerts in Boston, Philly, Gary, Des Moines, Cleveland, Memphis.
So BlueStrain cut Buster loose.
Sometime I live in de city,
Sometimes I live in town.
Sometime I takes a great notion
To jump into de river an’ drown.
“In-to-the” a perfect suspended triplet.
The teenage hooker peered out from the crow’s nest of her solitude, saw land heaving up nowhere in sight, and ordered another boilermaker. Outer Limits with its monster-of-the-week, animal, vegetable, mineral, appeared onscreen.
How I met Buster is a story in itself, I guess.
I’d been working collections freelance at a straight percentage. I was big enough and looked mean enough to get most people’s attention, which was all it really took. And after a while I started getting something else: a reputation. I saddled it, rode it, never put it up wet. But a reputation cuts both ways. Recently I’d had to step on a couple of guys feeling their balls and not about to be told what to do by no jive-ass nigger. One of them got hurt kind of bad. I went to see him on a ward at Mercy afterward but he didn’t have much to say to me. Fuck you, as I recall, being pretty much it.
Boudleaux amp; Associates was turning a lot of work my way those days. B amp;A operated out of a sweltering, unpainted cinderblock office on South Broad across from McDonald’s and the Courthouse and consisted of a P.I named Frankie DeNoux who lived off Jim’s fried chicken. All the years I knew him, I never saw him eat anything else. Always a cardboard tray of breasts and thighs on the desk, grease spreading out from its base onto various legal documents, invoices, paperback spy novels, check ledgers; always a cooler of Jax to wash it down. Undrunk coffee forever burning to sludge on the hotplate alongside.
Frankie weighed a hundred pounds in eight-pound shoes. Despite his diet and the fact that he never saw sunlight and hadn’t so much as walked around the block in forty years, he was fit and trim and probably could have picked up the office and carried it down the street on his shoulder. He was already three times my age and, I was sure, would outlive me. “Don’t matter what jew eat, what jew do or don’t do,” he said frequently. “’S all genetics.” He pronounced it gene-etics.
“Want some chicken?” he asked one day when I dropped by to see if he had anything for me. Collections, papers that needed serving, whatever. Jobs were getting scarce. People had suddenly stopped acting like they had money they didn’t have, and my own strictly-cash economics showed the wear.
Frankie picked up the greasy carton and held it out.
I shook my head. “No, sir. But thank you.”
He redocked it.
You didn’t often find a white man offering to eat after a black one those days, even in New Orleans.
It made me remember my father and me back in Arkansas ordering breakfast through a window to the kitchen of Nick’s (where the cooks were all black, the customers all white) and eating it on the steps of the railroad roundhouse by the levee at five A.M. It was godawful cold, forty degrees maybe, with wind shouldering in off the river. My father’s breath, when he spoke to me of the life I could expect there, plumed out and mixed with the steam rising off grits and eggs.
“You sure?” Frankie said, r drawn out, New Orleans-style, to wuh.
“Yes, sir.” My own r carefully sounded.
“Don’t know what you’re missing.”
He fingered a drumstick out of the tray. Bit into it, rotated, bit again. Put the bone with its cap of browned gristle back.
“Best dam’ food ’n the world.”
“You’ve got something for me, Mr. Frankie?”
“Sure I do.” Shu-wuh. “I ever not had something for you?”
“So: what? I have to guess? That it?”
He grinned. “Two hundred a week.”
“Okay. You got my attention.”
“First week guaranteed, possible re-up for two more. Could be a lot longer.”
“Mm-hm.”
“Man called, tells me he needs a bodyguard. Says he’s heard good things about B amp;A, the service we provide, wonders if I might know someone could do the job.”
“And it just happens you did.”
“Yep.”
“Me.”
“You.” He picked a wing out of the carton, pulled off the skin and ate that, then nibbled away till bone was again glistening.
“I wouldn’t even know how to start.”
“What’s to know? You walk him aroun’. Swing your dick, give anyone the eye gets too close, pick up your money.”
I could probably do that.
“You know an easier way to bank a few hundred?”
I didn’t know any other way at all.
That first client was a local city councilman being groomed for national elections. Though he sat high on public-opinion polls, grievous differences between him and his wife’s family persisted. For one thing, that was where his money came from, and her old Creole family grieved at seeing Greatgranddaddy’s wad used to nurture unseemly liberal causes. Neither were they sympathetic to the mistress who’d been his student in Poly Sci at Loyola or the one who lived over Gladfellows Lounge with its neon martini glass (where she worked) on St. Charles.
Threats had been voiced, more serious ones implied.
Councilman Fontenot, as it turned out, made one of those clear choices he was always talking about in campaign speeches and took the Hollywood high road: true love over career. Two weeks after I joined the troupe he jumped ship and moved in with his coed.
Fontenot had a passion for old black music and young white women. Two or three nights a week, myself in tow and doing my best to look suitably dangerous, he’d tour the Negro clubs along Dryades and Louisiana. He especially liked listening to Buster.
So did I, and long after the councilman tucked himself away in his coed’s drawers, I went on showing up wherever Buster was playing. There wasn’t any work for a while, and since I was around every night, Buster and I started getting friendly. I’d sit sipping beers during his sets, then afterward we’d crack a bottle there at the club or back at Buster’s. He’d play and sing this incredible stuff I never even knew existed. Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton, Willie McTell, Sonny Boy Williamson.
Eventually there was no reprieve from it, I had to get back to work. Off and on I’d still drop by clubs where Buster was playing, as I did that autumn night, but it was never the same. When’s it ever the same once you’ve left?
The night I told Buster I wouldn’t be around anymore, we got so drunk that toward morning he fell out of his chair and smashed the big Gibson twelve-string he’d just bought. I woke up hours later on the levee, with my legs in the water. I remember raising my head and looking at them just kind of bobbing about down there in the wake from ferries and tugs, bobbing along with the candy wrappers, paper cups and other flotsam that had collected around them.