for Mark
GOIN’ DOWN SLOW
Saturday night, there’s always a woman in a red dress. Looking over at me when my hands are down—harp in one hand, mike in the other.
I drop my hands when Big G takes a keyboard solo. Most people, their eyes go to the man with the front music. Junior does vocals, Melvin plays slide—they get most of the looks. They both play the crowd too, working them.
But when I solo, I get lost. My eyes are always closed. It’s not a stage thing—that’s the way it happens. So, if a woman’s looking at me when I don’t have my harp up and running, I know why.
But if the woman’s there with a man, I know better than to look back. Woman like that, the red dress is a signal. She’s a fire-starter. In the joints we play, it’d most likely be a knife, but a pistol’s always a possibility.
And even if her man walks off, you can’t be sure he won’t be back. Slick and quiet. And maybe your next drink will be the same kind that sent Robert Johnson off to pay that debt he ran up at the Crossroads.
But if that red dress is full of juice and there’s no man next to it, that’s another signal. And it ain’t “Stop!”
You have to play hard in these joints. I don’t mean loud—noise won’t get it. Hard enough, maybe that’s closer to it. Sometimes we get to play big places. Even a stadium once, behind a band with a label deal and all that. In big places, you don’t have to play hard. The people in the crowd make most of the sound themselves anyway. But in the clubs, you better bring it. Or they’ll take you right off the stage.
That’s the way I started. Tuesday nights at the Ice Pick. The house band opens up, one slot at a time, the way a flower opens, petal by petal. That’s to see if anyone wants to sit in. Like, the slide man, he’ll make a gesture, then take a seat off to the side. And anyone who thinks he can make steel sing, well, he can just step up and try and take the man’s place for that piece of time.
It was a long time before I was ready. Longer than I thought, actually. ’Cause, the first two times, I didn’t make it. It wasn’t like the people booed me or nothing. They don’t do that. What they do is . . . they talk. To themselves, I mean. Just go back to their conversations like they’re in an elevator.
They do that, you’re done.
The third time was the charm, like the people say. I just filled in behind at first. Then I put in a few figures. And when the leader stepped off and pointed at me, I made the crowd quiet right down. Most harp men, they can juke you to death, but they can’t go slow. The great ones—Jimmy Cotton, Butterfield, Musselwhite—they can go either way, of course. Sonny Boy, Little Walter—they could go wherever they wanted.
I always modeled myself after Blind Owl Wilson. I must have listened to him on “Goin’ Down Slow” a million times. I wanted to make people feel what I felt when I heard him. And that night, I got it right, bending the notes over slow and soft . . . clean, not cheating off the feedback from the mike.
After that, I sat in a lot with different bands until Junior picked me for permanent. I’ve been traveling with them ever since.
I can’t read music, but I can hear it perfect. I told Honeyboy, and he said it was okay—he said he wouldn’t trust no preacher that had to read his sermon from a script.
I’ll never be the king of anything. My ambition is to be one of the thousand great harp men. Not to be in no arguments, just to be. Like the blues. That’s one of the first things Honeyboy told me. “The blues is always going to be here. Like a convict run off from a chain gang who the Man never find. Oh, he have to lay low sometime—disco made the blues lay real low for a while back—but he always going be around. Always be running, though. Never be on top for long, but never be gone neither. Remember that part, son—never be on top to stay. Lotsa white boys, they made that mistake. The ones who come up in the late sixties—it was good then. College kids loved it. Record deals for everyone. Stadiums, TV, everything. Then the sheriff called to the hounds, and the blues had to get back in the woods. Those white boys, the ones who expected it to last forever, they stayed out in the open—and they got cut down. So what you got to remember is this one rule: They can’t hang you while you running.”
I never forgot that. But I don’t know what to do now. It was a Saturday night. It was a woman in a red dress. It was a man I didn’t know she had.
A young man. A white man. A rich man’s son who crossed the tracks one too many times.
Now he’s in the ground and I’m on the run.
I’ll be all right if I don’t go back to the clubs. I’m nobody . . . as long as I don’t pick up my harp again.
I wonder how long I can go without.
I wonder how long I can go.
for Peter
WORD PLAY
1
Cigarettes killed my wife. She ran out of smokes late one night while I was out, working, so she went to the bodega to get some. A couple of guys in ski masks wanted to get some, too. It was just money until Lorna walked in, then they wanted to get some of her, too. Lorna was a fine-looking woman, but I know that wasn’t it. The guns in their hands made them hard, and they wanted a place to put it. We had talked about it once. What she should do if it happened. I told her the truth. Fight. There’s no way it makes them madder, like some of those idiot books say. If they didn’t hate, they wouldn’t do it at all.
Lorna tried. She let one get close, even took her top off, and then she went for his gun. The other guy panicked and started blasting. Shot his partner in the back. Got Lorna in the face. Then he sprayed the place and got the owner, too, and ran out the door. Without the money.
His partner talked—they have the death penalty in this state. So they found the other guy. He had all the weight that was left, so he took it. He’s on the Row, over in the next building.
I’m not in here for killing the partner—the guy that lived and told about it. I mean, I did kill him all right. Right in here. But he came in here with a rat jacket, so it could have been anyone. That’s the way the Administration looked at it.
I went in after Lorna. After Lorna, that’s when they thought it all started to unravel for me. But that’s really when it all began to make sense.
Words, that’s what I mean. I mean, words always mean two things. At least two things. See, I wasn’t going after Lorna, not like I was chasing her or anything. What I mean is: It was after Lorna got killed that they dropped me. When they come for you, they scream for you to get down—drop to the floor. Then you go to court and the judge drops you in here. Even in here, you can drop more. And if you drop enough, you can drop out.
That’s what it really is, you know. Not suicide. Just dropping.
It was just bad luck, me being arrested—I’d planned the job for a long time and it should have worked. But coming back, that’s an occupational hazard. So, here I am.
Words. Lorna went after smokes and she got smoked.
I do a lot of reading in here.
I’m in business, and you have to stay current. But you know what? Things don’t change. Fads, fashions, styles . . . sure. But the real things stay the same. The principals change, the principles don’t. The words sound the same, but they don’t mean the same. Words are tricky. See what I mean?
One law puts you in here, but once you are locked down, another law rules. Higher law. Like Darwin’s. Supply and demand, too. Some things are very hard to get in here. But not so hard that convicts can’t buy them. What would be the point in that? Having a diamond worth a million bucks and no buyers with cash?
So, like with drugs. In here, it’s Talwin. The best-seller. Bigger than heroin and coke together. You know why? Because they grow it here. Not “grow” like from the ground, but it grows right out of the shrink’s office, on those Rx pads they all have. The prison pharmacy is the warehouse. They order enough to get the whole joint medicated, then they dole out just enough to set the hook. Supply and demand.
So there’s money. But you need partners to make it work. A network. Even when they h
ave you in the net, you work. Words, right?
I used to see the shrink a lot. They told me I was schizoid. Not one of those paranoid loons, or a split personality, or anything. Just . . . a lot of words. That’s when I found out about the Rx pads.
I wasn’t the only one. They started killing each other soon after. The blacks wanted the whole traffic for themselves, so they offed a bunch of Italians and sold to the Latins. But the Latins, they figured they could get stuff, too. For themselves. The whites use, but they don’t control. The real whites—you know, the Aryan nuts—they don’t do much dealing. They’re getting ready for the big revolution. I listen to them sometimes. Always talking about forming cells when they get out. They’re in a cell and they’re talking about forming one. Words.
The real reason they say I’m crazy is because I understand. And that’s crazy. See what I mean?
It’s only other convicts talking like that anyway. The Administration doesn’t think I’m crazy. They have special places for guys who are truly crazy, and I’ve never been in one of them, not even for an evaluation. They keep me here. They give me the meds. And they make me see the shrink. That’s all.
I study words. I need to be in business, and it’s very hard to be in business here.
Words are very good. Good friends. I write letters. I put a lot of work into them. I only write to women. I am very careful about that. I never ask them for money. Most women who write to men in here, they have something . . . missing. Maybe in their lives, maybe in themselves. Everybody tries to game them. That means, play a game on them. A con game. A game cons play, see? I don’t do that.
I am very sincere. I am looking for a relationship. Like I had with Lorna. I tell them the truth—I am a widower. And I have no children.
It took a long time to find the right one. But time isn’t a problem here. Some guys have typewriters. I could buy one, but I wouldn’t. Women like the handwritten letters the best. They know it takes more work to do that. The women work—I would only want a woman who works—and they want the man to work too. I don’t mean work like in the license-plate shop or in the cafeteria. Prison jobs aren’t work. They don’t pay you, not really. The only reason cons take those jobs is to impress the Parole Board or so they can steal stuff.
I don’t have to worry about the Parole Board. I only have another two years to go. In here, they say I’m “short.” It means I only have a short time to go. Some of the ones doing life sentences, they’re short too. Only they don’t know it. Like the guy who killed Lorna. Not the one on Death Row. I can’t get to him. But it doesn’t matter. If the State doesn’t take him, they’ll put him back here. Then he’ll be short just like his partner was.
The Administration doesn’t know about me and Lorna. We weren’t married on paper, so our names aren’t the same. I wasn’t a suspect when she got killed, so the cops never even talked to me. About that, I mean. If they had known, they wouldn’t have let one of the guys who killed her lock in the same wing as me. Or maybe they would—they do that on purpose sometimes. The Administration likes to game too.
I have been practicing. Not writing. I know how to do that. Practicing with words, talking them out loud. I have to get it perfect, because the woman is coming to visit. It will take a lot of visits before she starts bringing in stuff for me. But I have plenty of time for that. First I have to practice.
The one to practice on is the guard who runs the Visiting Room. Tomorrow, I’m going to try it.
2
“I’ve been here a long time, right?” I asked him.
“A long time? There’s guys in here got more time on the toilet than you got locked up total,” the guard said. He was a hard one—I don’t mean tough, I mean difficult—because he had no friends.
“I never bothered you, right?” I said. “I never caused any trouble?”
“What’s your point?” he asked me. He had piggy eyes.
“I never even talked to you before today,” I told him, quiet and mild and nice.
“So?”
“My girlfriend is coming on Sunday. Visiting Day. It’s going to be a wonderful visit, do you know why?”
“Why?” he asked. But he wasn’t really asking, it was just a word.
“Because you’re not going to stare at her chest. You’re not going to put your hands on her. And we’re going to sit at the real nice table—you know, the one in the far corner.”
“You threatening me?” That’s what he said, but I knew what he meant—what was I going to pay him?
“No, of course I am not threatening you,” I told him. “I would never do that. I have empathy. You know what that is? It just means you can feel what other people feel. I know how I would feel if somebody hurt someone I really liked. So I would never threaten you. I would never threaten anyone. Especially not here. It’s not safe.”
He gave me a strange look. But I didn’t mind. People are always giving me strange looks. Not strange like I am a stranger, but . . . well, it’s just more words.
“What makes a place safe is the neighborhood. My neighborhood, well, you know where that is. On the tier. It’s not like your neighborhood. It’s safe where you live, isn’t it? At 325 Maple Drive. That’s a beautiful house you have. And a nice car, nice kids.”
He moved real close to me, dropping his voice. “You want to see what pain is really like?” he whispered. “Just even say my wife’s fucking name and I’ll—”
“Oh, I’d never say her name,” I told him. “I’d be afraid Suzie B. would hear me. You know Suzie B., locks over on 4-Left? She probably doesn’t even know you’re married. She might get jealous and . . . well, who knows what that outrageous queen would do . . .”
Everything went fine on Visiting Day.
I’m very close now.
As soon as I learn how to play all the words, I’ll be ready.
for Zak
STEPPING STONE
It’s nine-forty-five. The bus is supposed to leave soon—the ten-fifteen to St. Louis—and Jasmine isn’t here yet.
I wonder if maybe she had trouble getting a cab, with all the rain coming down. Or maybe it was taking her longer than she thought to get to the money. I was thinking maybe even the cops . . . But then I stopped. It always makes my head hurt, trying to figure things out.
“Leave that to me, baby,” Jasmine always said. It was easier to do that. And that’s what I always did.
I never could have figured it out by myself. I mean, they keep a lot of cash in those gambling joints, everybody knows that. And everybody knows they have to move it out of there sometime. But only Jasmine could have figured out how they do it.
The first floor of the joint is for the wheels and the dice games and blackjack. Where you play against the house. The second floor has poker and pool. That’s where guys play against each other, and the house takes a piece.
Jasmine said it comes down to the same thing.
There’s girls on the third floor. Jasmine says, even if you walk out a winner, if you walk up, you’re going to go home with a lot less money.
That’s where Jasmine works, on the third floor. She’s a supervisor, she told me.
I was never there myself. Everything I know about the place is from Jasmine.
I met her by accident. I was drinking in this bar. I’m not a drunk. I was just looking for someone to talk to. A woman, that’s what I really wanted. Sometimes it works out pretty easy. Sometimes it don’t. I can never figure out why that is. So all I can do is go to the bar and see.
I don’t go much. ’Cause I don’t make much on my job. I mean, it’s not bad, moving furniture. Sometimes the people give the crew boss a tip. And sometimes he splits it with us too.
The first night I met Jasmine, I told her all about my job. She was the first woman who ever wanted to know about it. She asked me, going in people’s houses all the time, didn’t I ever see stuff worth stealing? I told her, sure, it happens all the time. But I would never take stuff.
She asked me why. And I had to
think about it. I mean, everyone knows you’re not supposed to take stuff that isn’t yours, right?
And Jasmine told me I was right. But, she said, that was only true if the people worked for it. If the people stole it, then taking it from them, well, that wouldn’t be stealing—’cause the money and stuff, it was already stolen.
I didn’t understand it the first time she said it, but she didn’t get mad or make fun of me the way other people do sometimes. She was very nice, Jasmine. Very pretty too. I told her that, and she smiled.
Jasmine was my girlfriend after that. My secret girlfriend. She said it had to be that way, because she was married. Her husband was a jealous man.
I told her I could take care of her husband. I wasn’t afraid. And I wanted Jasmine for myself.
She said, no, that wouldn’t be smart. She said they would be getting a divorce soon, but she couldn’t get caught with another man before that, or her husband would get all the money.
I knew Jasmine liked money. She was always dressed fancy. And she had a beautiful car. I felt bad I didn’t have money so I could buy her things she wanted. But Jasmine said not to worry about it. We wouldn’t need any money once she got her divorce.
But then things went bad. Jasmine told me her husband found out about me. He knew everything about me: where I worked, where I lived, even. He knew I had been in prison too, she said.
I was scared for Jasmine. She told me she was more scared for me. Her husband had a real bad temper, and he had a lot of connections, too.
I couldn’t figure out what to do.
That’s when Jasmine told me about the vacuum tube. It’s this plastic tube that runs from the counting room of the club all the way up to the roof. That’s how they get the money out, Jasmine told me. There’s a little house on the roof. Not really a house, more like a shack. When you open the door to it, you’re on the stairs. There are six floors. But when they put the money in the tube, it gets sucked right up to the top.
Everybody Pays Page 12