A terrible wine snob, Ran took a chance. “Damn!” he said approvingly. “God damn!” Lusty, spirited, full of youthful insubordination, fat as hell and wholly indiscreet—it had his name all over it! The label rang no bells, and when he saw the tag he blinked in disbelief—IGA: $1.99.
“Holy shit! Remind me to get some more of this,” he said, forgetting his resolution. “Hell, let’s buy a freaking case!”
And what was that smell? Now it had drifted down the stairs. As Ran inhaled, he suddenly flashed back to a hot September night in Killdeer almost thirty years before…. Seventeen, nursing a Colt 45, he was standing on the stoop of a small brick house, staring through the screen at a woman working in her kitchen.
It was Friday, payday at the mill, and behind him, Ran could hear Bagtown hopping with sounds of harsh and not-entirely-joyful revelry. Carrying his malt in a brown paper bag, he’d walked from seven blocks away, the corner of Bane and Depot, where he’d gathered with some friends beneath the light to listen to the new Stones album and to admire the Earl Scheib paint job on Tommy Hicks’s candy-apple-red Trans Am.
At home, Mel would be breaking ground on his second bottle of Old Screwtop or Chateau Shotgun Shack—whatever Friday special Earl’s happened to be running—getting worked into a lather over the editorial in the Socialist Worker and ready to lash out at Herbert Kincannon or the first convenient capitalist who came his way. Kincannon, however, hadn’t run the mill for thirty years without the savvy to stay the hell away from Bagtown after dark, and Ran and many of his friends had also found it politic to steer clear of home on Friday nights till after ten.
The first place Ran found to go was that streetlight on the corner where his friends still were. The consensus of the crew was that Exile on Main Street was pretty good, but Tommy nailed it when he added, “But it ain’t Let It Bleed.” They’d put the older album on the eight-track, and the music followed Ransom on his ten-minute stroll, floating, airborne, over an unmarked border that on the ground was as fraught as that dividing East and West Jerusalem.
Not in Bagtown anymore, Ran could still hear it playing on Delores Mills’s stoop. Even distorted by distance, challenged by the notes of tree frogs and cicadas, by the rumble of cruising muscle cars and the clack of freights uncoupling in the yard, there was no mistaking what it was. The song was “Gimme Shelter,” the first piece of music he ever knew, reliably, as great. On the hundredth listening as on the first, Ran marveled at Mary Clayton’s Valkyrie-like harmonies and, still more, Keith Richards’s mighty licks, which seemed to him, at seventeen, as fundamental, as always-so, as the opening motif of Beethoven’s Fifth, a symphony first opened up to him by the woman frying chicken at the range in her nude hose, the old-fashioned kind with seams, whose flesh tone, Ransom noticed—as he sipped his beer, afraid to knock—was not the color of her flesh.
The organist and choir director at the New Jerusalem Church of God in Christ, Delores Mills had taught music at Killdeer High since integration. By the time they met, Ransom had been studying guitar for three years on his own. He bought his first electric at thirteen—a solid-body, sunburst Teisco single pickup, mail-ordered from Chicago for $49.99.
While other boys dreamed of touchdowns and winning buzzer shots, Ran tuned to open G and dreamed of playing Shea and Fillmore East, mounting the stage and letting them get a little nervous, letting them begin to sweat a bit—especially those girls in halter tops and braided hair bands, with the keys of their daddies’ BMWs outlined in the pockets of their poured-on jeans. Then he would hit the riff, that one impossible riff that would be, to rock guitar, like Bannister’s first sub-four-minute mile, like the triple lutz that Donald Jackson landed on the ice in ’62…. Ran’s inability to read music had begun to seem like a potential obstacle to this future by the afternoon he stopped by Mrs. Mills’s office to see if she could help. Her suggestion: join the band.
“The band?” Ran looked over his shoulder, as though this might be addressed to some more credulous individual who’d stolen up behind him in the hall. “You’re kidding, right?”
Delores Mills’s expression made clear her lack of comic intent.
“Yeah, well, thanks a lot.” Tossing his hair, Ran raked his fingers after it and started out. “See ya round.”
“Mr. Hill…”
He turned back.
“Close the door.”
Two weeks later, he was back. Forced to choose an instrument, he picked the most preposterous one he could think of in an effort to preserve his fifteen-year-old dignity and revolutionary credentials: the slide trombone. And he had to pay for his humiliation, too. When he asked Mel for a loan to buy his uniform and instrument, the old man laughed and gave him a playful smack up ’side the head. Mrs. Mills came to his assistance. So instead of wailing on his ax at Shea like Keith or Jimmy Page, Ran spent his Sunday nights at New Jerusalem, mopping up the banquet hall after a bunch of niggers for a nigger teacher at a nigger church. And that’s exactly how he thought of it.
Musical notation, time signatures, scales, intervals, and forms—without regard for
