whatever parties might prove responsible for this “horrendous outrage.”
Then on Wednesday, with a Loyola adjunct instructor dead in the street outside an apartment complex undergoing restoration on Jefferson, John LeClerque and Monica Reyna, hosts of WVUE-TV’s six o’clock news (his toupee, her lisp and impossibly red lips in tow) blossomed to life onscreen before a headline in two-inch letters, stark black on white: ROOFTOP KILLER STRIKES AGAIN.
Chapter Two
“’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
“So they tell me. Like we don’t see enough of it down here.”
“Got
“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.
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
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
So BlueStrain cut Buster loose.
“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.
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.
