Nighthawk Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  “Oh, I knowed where it was all right,” she said. “Roosevelt told me how to get it, and I—”

  Hawk glared at her. Roosevelt! thought Jerry. He had never heard anyone but Mattie call Hawk by any part of his Christian name. Theodore Roosevelt Jefferson, one of a generation of children named for the Rough Rider, born shortly after the charge up San Juan Hill. “Named for two presidents,” Hawk always said. “And my mother didn’t even know about one of them. That was because I was the seventh son, born on the seventh day, I ain’t gonna say what month, but you can figure that out for yourself. I guess that’s why I’m blessed with second sight.” Which was a lot of shit, even discounting the second sight, because Hawk was no more likely to be a seventh son than Jerry was himself, and Jerry had only a sister. Plus he was born in December, “just around Christmastime, the first real snowfall my mama ever seed,” he liked to recollect sometimes to other interviewers when it suited his purpose.

  “Have you known Hawk long?”

  “Oh my, yes,” she said, pursing her lips.

  “Oh,” said Jerry, waiting to see if anything else would be forthcoming. “Well, Hawk and I go back a ways ourselves. But I’ve been listening to his music all my life—well, for twenty years anyway—”

  “Isn’t that nice?”

  Hawk glared some more. He didn’t like people talking about him in his presence, or behind his back either for that matter. Well, fuck Hawk, if he wouldn’t say anything for himself. “You need anything?”

  “Sherry,” said Hawk.

  Jerry had a momentary twinge—was this a dying man’s last request?—but he resolved to remain firm. “Come on, Hawk, you know I can’t do that. These people’d bust me for sure if I started bringing in liquor. Since when have you started drinking sherry, anyway?”

  Hawk looked at him disgustedly. “Sherry,” he repeated with greater emphasis this time.

  Jerry was perplexed. He didn’t want to push the issue. “He want ice cream,” said the woman in her cracking voice. “Sherry ice cream.”

  “Oh sure,” Jerry said with some relief. “Cherry ice cream.”

  Hawk nodded.

  When he came back, Hawk was strumming a little more audibly, bent grimly over the guitar while the woman hummed patiently along to his laborious accompaniment in a cracked and tuneless voice. Hawk gobbled the ice cream down. “I needs the sherry for my throat,” he explained between spoonfuls. It reminded Jerry of their earliest meetings, all the unnecessary misunderstandings (were they willful on Hawk’s part, or his own?) in their long and complex association.

  “Oh sure,” he said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world—which it was. “No problem.”

  Everyone else in the ward was staring at them. A nurse started over but then thought better of it. She had probably approached Hawk once already. Hawk licked his lips and picked up the guitar again. This time the chord resounded throughout the room. His fingers still stumbled over the strings and he hit a lot of wrong notes, but he and the woman began to sing “Jesus Wears the Starry Crown,” softly at first, then with increasing volume, as Hawk’s guttural voice swelled from a whisper and took on the conviction of the song. Jerry was both moved and embarrassed. He wished, as he had so many times in his life, that he could retreat to the status of unobserved observer or at the very least surround them with a soundproof glass booth. It was touching, but the other patients were not so much moved as startled. One sat up straight and started to reach for the nurse’s buzzer. Another turned over and groaned.

  “Will you stop that caterwauling?” said the drawn, bald-headed white man in the bed beside Hawk’s. Hawk just glared at him, looking through him, not even so much as acknowledging his presence. The man pulled the cord for the nurse, yanking at it angrily until he pulled it free from the wall. The old woman’s wavering cries formed an antiphonal wail behind Hawk’s gruff lead.

  “Jesus, Jee-zus, Jesus is coming soon. . .”

  Jerry tried to attract Hawk’s attention, getting up from his chair, pointing at their apopletic neighbor, touching his finger to his lips. At last he touched Hawk’s sleeve timorously. Hawk stopped singing as if he had been shot and stared at Jerry as the old lady kept on heedless for a couple of bars. “Maybe we can find a room,” said Jerry pleadingly. “I mean, there are other people who are sick, you know, and maybe they don’t necessarily appreciate the music. Hawk, they’re going to throw us out of here if you don’t stop.”

  “Well, maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad idea,” said Hawk meaningfully. “Maybe they just kick my old black ass out of here now, set my things out on the street, I’ll tell you something, man, that would suit me just fine.”

  The nurse never came, though, the other patients subsided, and Hawk set his guitar down. Later the woman left and Hawk said he was tired. Or at least he grunted when Jerry tried to talk to him about what the doctor had said, about how he would have to take it easy for a while. Hawk just lay there staring inscrutably off into the distance, his hooded eyes mean and hard as a snake’s.

  “Who was your lady friend anyway?” Jerry said as he got up to go. “I thought you liked ’em younger than that.”

  “At my age it don’t make much difference. At my age, in my condition—ain’t that what the doctors say?”

  “She an old friend?” Jerry persisted.

  Hawk stared at him contemptuously. “That were Bertha Johnson.”

  “Bertha Johnson,” said Jerry, humoring an old man. “You don’t mean—” Then he realized that that was exactly what Hawk meant. This was Bertha “Cool Mama” Johnson, who sang “I take pigmeat to Sunday school,” and who in a famous test pressing circulated among collectors had declared, “I got nipples on my titties big as your right thumb/ I got something between my legs make a dead man come!” Bertha Johnson, who had sung duets with Hawk in the ’30s, played piano with such driving force that some thought it was Cripple Clarence Lofton, even though Lofton clearly could not have been in the studio on that day. “I didn’t even know she was still alive.”

  “Well, now you do,” said Hawk.

  Jerry sat there, plainly waiting for more.

  “Will you get away from me now, boy? You heared what the doctor said. I needs my sleep.”

  Back in the dreary hotel room Jerry couldn’t help being depressed. He knew he wouldn’t be able to stick around much longer. Bouncing back and forth between hospital and hotel. Eating up twenty dollars a day in taxi fare and tips alone. Hanging around the lounge bar with all the other middle-aged hookers, drinking, brooding, feeling sorry for himself. It wasn’t fair. Hawk had always been perfectly capable of taking care of himself. He had never needed anyone like Jerry in his life before. He could probably still get along, hobbled perhaps, a little slowed down, but still as mean as ever. That was one voice. Another voice argued that anyone could have seen this day coming, Hawk had to get sick and old sometime, who was going to take care of him, protect him, if it wasn’t his manager? Shit. It was the same relationship they had had since day one, when Hawk grudgingly, amid threats and imprecations, at last accepted the help that Jerry proffered him—only it was never enough, and Jerry was never quite sure it was really helpful. He had never managed to overcome Hawk’s initial suspiciousness nor even erase his own guilt. What was the strange bond that held them together? What, Jerry thought, for the thousandth or ten-thousandth time, had he unknowingly gotten himself into?

  He looked at himself in the mirror. There was gray in his hair, gray in his beard. Was this what he really wanted to do? Shepherd a flock of illiterate old black men decrepit with age and whiskey, manage the career of a woman whose destiny he would all too willingly link with his but who had other ideas about her life? In college he had envisioned himself a media person, and for a brief moment he was—even if he was only writing sports and advertising copy for a series of limited-market television stations in the Midwest and Northeast. Précising local news, matching text to visuals, boiling down the details of games for a nation of games-watch
ers—not players, watchers. He was a voyeur then and a voyeur now, only then he was helping people to avoid reality. Now, he thought, he was trying to lead them toward it. For three years he had never missed a big game on TV, his Sundays were constructed around football, telling Lin as he sprawled in front of the screen that on this one day of rest he wasn’t just wasting time puttering around, he was acquiring proficiency in his chosen profession. She didn’t understand. She wanted children, he didn’t. He didn’t understand anymore. He still watched football for relaxation, but he couldn’t believe it was the same person who inhabited his body, a smaller body, the same person Lin had walked out on in the middle of Rose Bowl, 1964. She had kids now, her husband, who was a computer analyst, seemed like a nice guy, he had had dinner with them once, a suburban ranch house in Reading, Massachusetts. The kids had thought his beard was funny. Lin asked him, when her husband went out of the room for a moment, if he was happy. “I’d feel better if I knew you were happy.” He nodded. “I’m happy.” “We were just too young—you know?” “Sure,” he said. He supposed that was it. “I’m happy for you,” she said. “The life you lead seems so—different.”

  Different? Different? He supposed she couldn’t think of any other word. Sometimes he imagined himself Howard Cosell at the Super Bowl—there wasn’t any Super Bowl then, nothing was super as far as he remembered it, super had come in with the Beatles, hadn’t it, around that time, when John F. Kennedy was murdered. A super-tragedy. Another spectator sport, another media event, tragedy for the masses. Maybe. Sometimes he wished he could wish it all away, television, satellite broadcasts, telephones, go back to an age of local heroes, neighborhood celebrities like when you were a kid. Someone who, when he walked down the street, could elicit admiration for the way he carried himself, for the way he hit a baseball, for the way he had stood up to old Mr. Murphy, the principal. That was what Hawk had been when he first met him, a local legend, not an international celebrity, not even someone who made the newspapers, just someone who was recognized for what he was, what he did, a man who sprang from his surroundings and could blend back into them if need be, someone who knew who he was. That nobody could ever take away from Hawk, but, Jerry reflected, if anyone could be said to have tried, it was he, who, in calling attention to the very qualities which made Hawk what he was, had taken Hawk out of that self-same environment in which he was comfortable and made him into another Sunday-afternoon hero.

  In a gloomy frame of mind he dialed the first number Lori had given him and was surprised when she actually answered. “Oh, I’m really glad you called,” she said in that breathless, fresh tone of voice which promised so much and was as indiscriminately dispensed as her sexual favors. “How’s Hawk?”

  “Oh, he’s all right,” said Jerry. “Guess who was in to see him today.”

  “I don’t know. Who?”

  “Bertha Johnson,” said Jerry flatly.

  “Bertha Johnson? Oh wow, you’ve got to be kidding. Cool Mama Johnson? Oh shit, what was she like? I’ll bet she was just smashing, this funky old lady, I mean this fantastically bawdy person who’s really alive and upfront about things. What’d she look like? She was really a beautiful lady when she was younger, you can just tell. Wow, I’d really like to meet her. Oh shit, Jerry, I wish I was there with you. I just can’t get away right now. There are things that are important to me here. I mean, if you say I should come I’ll come, but in another few days every-thing’ll be cool, and then I’m gonna fly up. It must be awful for you there all alone.”

  It is.

  “Oh, I’m really sorry. Do you want me to come up?”

  “Yes, I do,” he found himself saying. “But not for Hawk, for me.”

  She laughed her skittish little laugh. “Oh, Jerry, you know it can’t be that way. I wish it could, but you know it can’t.”

  “Why can’t it?”

  “Oh, you know—” Lori’s voice trailed off. Whenever she got stuck, her voice diminished to the point of inaudibility. Sometimes, on stage, she would mumble to herself, it could go on for minutes sometimes, as her audience, which was always polite, well dressed, above all sensitive, sent out sympathetic vibes, never grew restless, never yelled “Boogie!” and shushed anyone who raised his own voice above a whisper, and applauded warmly whenever she got herself together enough to come back to the mike. It was uncanny, Jerry thought, the very incoherence and confusion which made her personal life such a disaster and would have wrecked anyone else professionally only endeared her all the more to her fans.

  “Don’t you understand, Jerry,” she said at last, “we’re just not that way.”

  What did she mean, we’re just not that way? He was that way. He thought she was that way. Why shouldn’t they together be that way? “I don’t know,” he said. “I wouldn’t make any demands. I think you could be happy. It wouldn’t have to be just me. I want to get married.”

  He could picture Lori’s face, blond, pure, clear-eyed, soft but not easy. She might feel sorry for him, but she couldn’t very well act surprised. Men were always throwing themselves at her. She accepted it with a curious kind of formality, a grave reserve that seemingly enabled her to put a distance between herself and these tributes to an allure which she firmly believed she did not possess. Maybe it was that distance which allowed her to approach a music which should by rights have been no more accessible to her than to Jerry, a music which she approached just as much from the outside, but sang, Hawk said, “from the inside out, just like a woman squeeze you.”

  “You know you’re just feeling sorry for yourself,” she said softly.

  “I’m not,” said Jerry. “I am. But it’s not because of what you think. It’s not because of me. It’s not because of what’s happening inside of me. It’s because of what’s actually happening—that’s what’s shitty. Ah, I don’t know, you’re probably right.” He said this last with a tooth-grating effort. Then he told her about Teenochie and what he had observed of Bertha Johnson, and they had a good laugh. She promised to come up in a day, two days at the most, he didn’t believe a word of it. And be sure to tell Hawk that she would be there, and she expected to pick some guitar with him, he would like that, he had always liked Lori and Lori alone. By the time they finished the conversation Jerry had almost forgotten what a fool he had made of himself tonight. That was for Lori to remember.

  II

  DOWN IN THE FLOOD

  WHEN HE got to the hospital in the morning, Hawk was gone. He walked into the ward carrying a cup of melting cherry vanilla ice cream, which he had gone to some trouble to get at ten A.M. The first thing he noticed was the empty bed.

  For a moment he experienced panic. Tears started to form. He looked wildly to right and left, as the grizzled old men stared at him, and a nurse, matter-of-factly emptying a bedpan, eyed him with cool contempt. Then he thought, no, Hawk couldn’t be dead, Hawk wouldn’t give his enemies the satisfaction, and, armed with this momentary reassurance, he asked the nurse if she knew where Mr. Jefferson was. Perhaps he had been taken somewhere for tests? She was a sullen-looking black girl with hair fanned out in a dark aureole. Hawk probably would have joked with her, made fun of her hair, coaxed a smile from her, sung her a song. She said she didn’t know anything about any Mr. Jefferson, she was just on duty herself, go ask the floor supervisor at the nurses’ station. He did that, and she knew just as little.

  He was becoming increasingly concerned and, perhaps to mask his concern to himself, increasingly indignant. “Well, I mean he couldn’t just vanish into thin air. Someone must know what’s happened to him.” They tried to calm him down. He checked with the young resident who had introduced him to the older doctor, but Hawk had been there when he made his rounds early that morning.

  “Sleeping with one eye open,” the doctor said. “I took a reading, gave him a shot, he muttered something and went back to sleep. He couldn’t get very far in his condition. He’s probably somewhere wandering around the corridors looking for the John.”

  But
he wasn’t anywhere in the corridors. Nor in the men’s rooms. Nor in the ladies’ rooms (at Jerry’s insistence they checked). Finally they found a maintenance man, idly pushing a broom, who claimed he had seen Hawk. He was a black man with a pencil-thin gray mustache, and his green janitor’s uniform hung loosely on him.

  “Oh sure. Hawk,” he said good-naturedly with a wave. “I knowed him the moment I seed him. I seen him play when I was a kid. I would’ve knowed him anywhere. Course he wasn’t walking so good. But I imagine that’s just the whiskey or some such. And he still got that same old big guitar. And same old heap parked outside. Course it couldn’t have been the same, least I don’t think it could, but one just like it anyway. Don’t know how Hawk gets them to run, he must talk to ’em or something. Ain’t seen Miz Johnson neither in quite some time, man you wouldn’t believe what them two sounded like down home.”

  Jerry nodded. The doctor was speechless with rage. “You mean you just watched them drive off?”

  “He told me he was discharged,” said the old man in an indignant voice.

  “At seven o’clock in the morning?”

  “What I know about these things?” said the old man, fooling with his broom.

  I should have known better, Jerry thought to himself as he walked rapidly down the long hallway, listening to the young doctor’s lecture on the risk he was taking, the guilt he must feel, the hospital’s freedom from legal or moral responsibility in this matter. He didn’t stop jabbering until Jerry signed the release form and paid the bill. “You ever hear Hawk sing?” Jerry said to the young resident. The other man shook his head. “Well, then, you don’t know anything, motherfucker.”

  He felt pretty good about that, but that was all he felt good about as he checked out of the hotel, thinking, wasn’t it just like Hawk to do something like this, knowing that Jerry would be obliged to follow him, knowing that it would just make things harder on Jerry, doing it perhaps only to get his own back at this pimp dressed up in philanthropist’s cloth, who had persuaded an old man to forsake a comfortable life-style merely to satisfy the world and give it one last glimpse of a so-called great art form. Great art, my ass. All it was was bile.