White Tears

by Hari Kunzru

  The next day I got in to work early, asked round in the newsroom. Did anyone know a Chester Bly? We smoked in those days. Some afternoons the newsroom looked as if dry ice was billowing through it. Rows of men, hunkered down over coffee-stained desks, battering at ancient typewriters in the haze. These men worked in a slum of spiked paper and cigarette ash, and I had to run between them, taking paper from one to another, from writer to editor and back and forth and over to a sub to write a headline and downstairs to be set. A monkey could have done it but they had me, and it was hard work. To get a break, you had to devise strategies, get yourself sent on long errands, that kind of thing. It was late before I had a moment to myself, a moment to walk through the haze to the jumble of desks where the copy editors sat. Mister Bly? A gaunt man looked up at me from under a green celluloid eyeshade. In front of him was a blank sheet of paper, and an empty wire basket. Otherwise the desk was completely clear. That was not normal. I introduced myself. If he was surprised, he didn’t show it.

  —I have a lot of corrections to do, he said, but if you’re available this evening, perhaps you would care to come by and listen to some music.

  Of all the people in the building, we two were the most alike.

  WE RODE THE SUBWAY into Brooklyn, getting out in a neighborhood I’d never been in before. As I followed him down a block of dingy tenements, I saw how tall he was, how thin. He was dressed with a sort of threadbare immaculateness. His suit jacket was shiny at the shoulders, but still appeared perfectly pressed, even in the heat.

  We entered a hostel for single men, of a class just a hair above the flophouses on the Bowery. No chow line, no dormitory rooms, but when you opened the front door your nostrils were hooked by that bread-line smell of urine and disinfectant and the first thing you saw was a chapel door with some oppressive motto about repentance written over the lintel. Bly was living in a room like a cell. He had nothing in there, not a thing but three wooden crates under his bed filled with records. No pictures, no personal objects. A plate and a knife and a fork on the dish rack. A pair of metal chairs pushed under either side of a card table. A turntable, an amp and a speaker. The man lived like a monk.

  He offered me a chair and took the other. We sat, looking over at the turntable.

  —So, he said. What do you want to hear?

  —I don’t know, I said. I don’t know what I want to hear.

  —Firstly, I’m going to fix up. If you faint easily or have a phobia of needles, I’m happy to go down the hall to the bathroom.

  I’d never seen anyone use narcotics before, never been around it, but in the moment his reasonable tone carried me. At nineteen, you can be very accepting, if something is presented to you as normal. You don’t know, so you pretend you’re experienced, you play along. He produced a little wooden box, rolled up a sleeve and started to cook a shot of heroin. He had some sort of medical-looking rubber tourniquet, which he tied expertly to his upper arm. Chester Bly’s madness was deep and fast-flowing but he was a very organized man.

  I waited for something to happen, something dramatic like in the “mature adults only” pictures at the Rialto, a spasm, a widening of the eyes, but he just stared glassily at the turntable. After a pause that seemed to stretch for hours, he reached into his box and pulled out a record.

  Blues ain’t nothing but a doggone dirty feel

  Got no money in your pocket to buy yourself a meal

  An amazing record I’d never heard before. Though I begged, he wouldn’t tell me what it was. I was to find out that this was a habit of his—to play things but conceal their identity. I was forever squinting sidelong at spinning labels, hoping in vain to read them.

  It was an exquisite record, near mint and as clear as if the performer was in the room, a guitar blues with a vocal that occasionally climbed into a tremulous falsetto. It was followed by other exquisite records, record after record to which Bly listened with his hands steepled and a frown of concentration on his face. When each one ended, he whipped round to lift the needle off the platter. It was as if he snapped out of a trance.

  I feel that is very good, he would say. Or, that is a recording of exceptional quality. Always with this measured judicious tone. And I would nod. After four hours, I said I needed to go home because I had work the next day. My head was spinning, round and round, seventy-eight revolutions per minute, and I was finding it hard to hold everything in mind, all the things I’d heard, the flow of recondite facts and opinions. He looked at his watch with an air of disappointment, and showed me to the door.

  WATCHING CHESTER BLY walk in to work the next morning, his jacket folded over one arm. Watching him in short bursts, as I raced from desk to desk. Chester Bly coming out of the bathroom with two wadded handfuls of wet paper towels. Chester Bly bent over his desk, carefully wiping the surface, the seat of his chair, its back rest, each of the four wooden legs.

  I could not stop to wonder. I had people shouting at me. Copy! Copy! I had to run. Later, when I brought something to one of his neighbors, Bly acknowledged me with a barely perceptible nod. That was as much communication as we had for the rest of the week. I wondered if I’d failed in some way, if I’d said something gauche, mixed up Lonnie Johnson with Robert or Tommy or Willie Johnson. Lonnie Johnson was “molasses,” in Chester’s opinion, along with more or less anyone who ever played in a nightclub. Molasses was syrup. It was for the herd. The connoisseur knew the corner was the place for blues. The corner or the porch.

  Chester’s silence was frustrating. I was in orbit, running ellipses round his immaculately sanitized desk, aware at every moment of my proximity to—not to Chester Bly himself, but the thing that had hold of him, the obsession. I was like a child edging closer to a waterfall, wanting to feel the force of it, to stand beside the thunder and the spray. At night I would play my music, the few “good” records I had, and I would listen as hard as I could, but they seemed like minor pieces of a much larger puzzle, meaningless segments of blue sky. All I could think of were those boxes under Bly’s bed. Those little spinning labels, the unreadable text, the hands steepled in a posture of prayer.

  One day he sent me a letter. Instead of calling me over or stopping me at the watercooler, he chose to write to me at my home address. No preamble, not much you could call personal. Just a couple of lines, an invitation to a listening party, to be held in his room the following Friday.

  Five of us were crammed in there. Five collectors, all men. I was the youngest, Tom and Hal perhaps ten years older. The oldest was Mr. Pinkus, who didn’t seem to have a first name and was probably in his sixties. Each one had a specialty, string bands or Scottish reels or Flamenco or Javanese court gamelan, but each also loved the blues. None were naturally social, and Chester made no attempt at hosting, beyond providing the paper cups that we filled and refilled with cheap California jug wine.

  I’ve not seen a second copy of this, Chester would say, pulling out yet another incredible record, another forgotten performance by a lost genius.

  Laid down last night just trying to take my rest

  My mind got to rambling like wild geese in the west

  Sometimes, if one of the collectors knew the right question to ask, Chester would reveal the name. But if pushed, he could push back. He had a sharp tongue. He kept us in a state of cowed admiration. Sometimes, one of us would have heard something before, and would signify his claims with an outward display of appreciation, nodding or tapping his knee or gesturing with his pipe.

  —What is that, Chester? It’s Mississippi, right? It’s got to be Mississippi.

  —Jesus, Tom, if you can’t hear Texas you’ve gone deaf.

  —Texas. Right, Texas.

  —Yes, Tom, like Chester says. Listen to the guitar figures.

  —Pipe down, Pinkus. People are trying to listen.

  —Sorry, Chester.

  The next week, he invited me again. Some new things had come in the mail, he said. I didn’t need a second invitation. Bly did not shoot heroin in front of
his other collector friends, but whenever we listened to music alone, as we began to do at least once or twice a month, he would fix up at the kitchen table, then brood over his record boxes for several minutes, caught in whatever was happening to him, whatever message the drug allowed him to receive. He never offered heroin to me. It was never even a question. The drug ritual was no more than a bodily function, just something he did, and I grew to think of it as a banality. Bly seemed to have no family, no ties to the world. As he freely admitted, all his spare money went on music. He owned little else, and lived in the most frugal manner. His room was always spotless, the kitchen shelf stacked with cans, but outside the hallway smelled of urine and bacon grease and the bathroom on his floor was often swimming in dirty water. He didn’t seem to notice these hardships. It was as if his whole soul was directed towards the carefully wrapped packages that he picked up, sometimes daily, from a box at a post office on the next block. I think this was why he lived in that place, to have the post office close by.

  Ten-inch cardboard squares, sandwiched around precious shellac. Brown paper parcels tied up with string. I wondered if Bly had been in prison. How else could he make do with so little of the world? By any standards, I was a serious collector, but he seemed to have nothing else, no need to go to the park or the movies or walk round a museum. He was just a vehicle for his obsession, what the Haitians call a cheval, a mount for the spirits to ride.

  I don’t know why I was invited into his solitude. It seemed he wanted to share something of himself. He told me, for example, about his filing system. It was his belief that a man could only properly hold “around four hundred” records in his mind. A collection should be no larger. He had no time for anyone (which was almost everyone, as he well knew) who amassed thousands of records “without regard to quality or importance.” There existed what he called a golden number. About this number he could grow quite mystical, but he would never tell me exactly what it was. He would audition many records, but if he wanted to keep one, another had to go. Each new star had to deserve its place in the constellation. It had to be, in a word he always used with great gravity, “worthwhile.” For me, who found it wrenching to let go of anything, even music I never listened to and didn’t really like, this was impressive. Because of it, Bly was constantly buying and selling records, sometimes stringing together complex deals, acquiring material in which he had no personal interest to use as bargaining chips in some drawn-out game with another collector.

  He answered my musical questions, but I knew not to ask too many. It was important to him to keep something in reserve. Some topics he considered public knowledge, part of every collector’s basic education. These things he freely told me: how a record lathe worked, how changing the width of your stylus could draw more music from a worn disc. Others, he offered in the form of clues or hints. He had, he said, once met a man who saw Robert Johnson alive during the war, serving as a cook on board a ship in the Pacific, but he would say no more about the man, or Johnson’s cooking.

  There were certain topics he would only allude to, or rather, there was a mood in which he would intimate darkly that there were such topics, “areas of research” he was not prepared to name. There was some music he’d play and put straight back in its sleeve, refusing to name the players, refusing to discuss it at all.

  —Now, now.

  That’s what he’d say if I was forward enough to ask. Admonishingly, as if I’d brought up something risqué, obscene.

  —Why don’t we move on?

  ONE AFTERNOON IN THE NEWSROOM, I was taking a break, smoking a cigarette and listening to some sportswriters argue over who was the better pitcher, Lefty Gomez or Whitey Ford, when Bly appeared, looming over me, his eyeshade like a great green beak. There was something violent about his sudden arrival. The sportswriters could feel it; they turned away and continued their conversation elsewhere. Without hello or any other preamble Bly asked if I knew how to drive. I said yes. He said he too knew how to drive but did not care for it. He found driving stressful. It was good that I could drive. I agreed that it was. He looked at his hands for a moment, examining the nails. So did I think I could get hold of a car?

  I asked him where he wanted to go.

  —Mississippi.

  I suppose I ought to have known something like that was coming. It was the next step. I could hear the roar, the power coming down. You have to understand, it was July and hot and they were talking, we were all talking, in the coffee bars in the Village, in church halls, in the (inside) pages of our own paper, about The Problem of the South. They were killing Negro boys down there. Still killing Negro boys, despite all the so-called advances. Reckless eyeballing was the name of the crime, and it could get you hung or burned alive or tied to an engine block and thrown in the river. The NAACP were saying something had to be done. The White Citizens Councils were threatening blood and fire. And Chester was proposing to go into Negro neighborhoods in the Delta and knock on doors to ask if they had old records. It did not seem wise.

  I was not what you would call a political person. There were plenty around, the earnest folk fans, the gloomy girls with the turtlenecks and the French books, but I wasn’t part of all that. I couldn’t look anyone in the eye, let alone speak at a public meeting. Don’t get me wrong, I believed in civil rights. I thought every man ought to be able to live his life. But handing out flyers and signing petitions didn’t seem to make much difference. Sure, I spent all my time listening to the blues, but one of the reasons I liked those old songs, those disembodied voices rising up out of the past, was because they were a refuge from the world. I didn’t want them contaminated by current affairs. I had no idea what Chester thought about it. He never passed comment on the condition of the American Negro.

  But I also knew I had to say yes. Some things are just fate; you can’t step out of their path. I told my boss I was taking a week’s vacation and borrowed a car from an aunt on Long Island. It was an old wood-paneled Ford wagon, the kind everyone called a “woody.” It looked like a tool shed on wheels, but it ran OK and the old lady didn’t mind me borrowing it. I’d drive, Chester would pay for gas, and we would split other costs. That was our arrangement.

  When I picked up Chester from his building, I was surprised to find him dressed in his suit, as if he was on his way to work. I thought he was crazy, but as it turned out, like so many things with Bly, his appearance had been carefully thought through. In the places we visited, he was often taken for a minister of religion, an assumption he encouraged by carrying around a large black Bible. People would address him as Reverend and let him into their houses. Chester didn’t have much you could call a sense of humor, but he promoted this deception as a huge prank, a cunning and hilarious practical joke. He wedged his suitcase in the trunk, alongside a portable record player and a crate of vanilla seltzer, brought along because he “didn’t trust the drinking water.”

  We drove out of the city, heading south.

  WE DRIVE OUT OF THE CITY, heading south, Leonie a passenger in her own expensive convertible, me running my fingers over the soft white leather trim on the wheel as the New Jersey Turnpike slides by. Walnut and lacquer. Adjusting the tone on the eight-track. I’m a man, yes I am. Crossing into Pennsylvania, then Maryland. The low sun dazzling me as we barrel into the heat of a long-ago summer evening.

  —So, I say. What do you want to hear?

  There is only so long you can feel afraid before something cracks. We laugh too hard at things that aren’t funny and she tells me another story about how people don’t see her, just her name. I understand, I say, as if I too have a famous family name that obscures my reality as a person. It does not seem important what I say. I can be as daring as I like. I am in the moment. What surrounds that moment is fuzzy and I don’t feel like looking at it directly, but I am inside completely and it is beautiful. This bubble! Our reconciliation!

  How long ago? With each mile we are heading further into the past. This is what I made her understand, that ni
ght in her apartment. That we had to repeat something, to go back to meet the force that is reaching out towards us from history.

  —It’s the only way.

  —The only way to what?

  —To save Carter. To save ourselves.

  We already did this. We already traveled down this road. Now we drive on, laughing, forgetful, and only when we pull over do we touch reality, set foot on the land we are skimming over. Truck stops and little roadside settlements: post office and diner and general store. Early in the evening we cross the line into West Virginia and pull in for dinner at a Chinese buffet restaurant, a great barn off the highway with Formica tables and steaming metal trays of food. A family walks in. The man is a peacock, with long hair trailing over his shoulders, the brim of his camouflage cap carefully shaped. He is trailed by a stout brown wife and three kids. Down from the mountain for sweet and sour pork, white people as exotic to me as any Papuan tribe.