Not Fade Away

by Jim Dodge

  The color of his stingy-brim hat might’ve stopped me by itself: a screaming flamingo pink, about three decibels short of glowing in the dark, and hardly muted by a satin band of neon lavender. The hat might not stop you, but not because you didn’t see it.

  He was tall, six-one or -two.

  Not hitching, or no sign of an upraised thumb or flagging arm. Standing tall and straight.

  Holding a squarish, shiny, mottled-white object, which on closer examination was a King James Bible bound in the hide of some South American lizard.

  Slender, but without any sense of being skinny.

  Black. That alone would’ve stopped me for sure, a black man hitching on a Texas freeway at 2 A.M. in 1965, because he was either fearless, magical, desperate, or seriously dumb – and which, or what braid of those strands, is the kind of question I find intriguing.

  I suspected it was fearlessness, the sort that springs from a deep personal sense of heavenly protection, for he was dressed as a clergyman, and though Double-Gone Johnson was indeed a minister of the faith, he was also, as his vestments revealed, a man of the cloth in the sartorial as well as the ecclesiastical sense. A frockcoat of black velvet, its severe cut gracefully tailored into sleekness. Black velvet pants, modestly pegged and impeccably fit. Black alpaca sweater. A clerical collar, but with a color variation: instead of a starched white square at the throat, a patch of glowing lavender satin cut from the same electric bolt as his hatband. To the ecclesiastical basics he added a black velvet opera cape lined in a silk the dyer’s hand had tortured into the same shade as his hat. A pair of snakeskin cowboy boots completed his wardrobe.

  I rolled to a stop and reached across to open the passenger door. ‘Houston bound or anywhere in between.’

  Double-Gone stooped to look me over with his dark brown eyes – not wary or nervous, but languidly alert. He had wide, fleshy lips and, when he smiled, an expanse of stong white teeth. He reached in and gently placed his lizard-bound Bible on the front seat, but he didn’t get in himself. ‘One moment please,’ he requested in a caramel baritone, holding up a long finger.

  I thought he was gathering luggage I hadn’t seen or was going to take a leak, but instead he circled the Eldorado, touching the hood and front grille, running his hands along the chrome and the roof line, over the twin-bullet taillights, nodding rapidly, crooning to himself as he made the circuit, ‘Yes. Solid. My, my. You long and sweet. Oooh baby, yes. Fo’ real and fo’ sure. Much, much, much, far and away truly too much.’ All the way around and back to the open passenger’s door. He slid himself in, picked up his Bible, gently shut the door, and bestowed onto me a full-force smile. ‘The Holy Spirit must love yo’ act to lay it on sooo thick.’

  ‘Actually,’ I confessed, ‘I stole it.’

  ‘Well all right, yes,’ he blinked, ‘sometimes yo’ forced to gather the Heavenly Bounty with yo’ own two hands, I dig that, but it makes fo’ a bad situation, catch my riff? Means the Law be looking fo’ it. Means they find it, they gonna find me in it, and that’s a hard five in the slammer if yo’ black and in Texas, both of which I am, and those are conditions that don’t allow for much innocence and no justice. And since I do truthfully enjoy fresh air and wide open spaces and woman’s sweet flesh and all the Holy Manifestations of the Almighty Light, I do not have the time fo’ the time, you dig it? So bless ya fo’ offerin’ a pilgrim soul a boost along the way, but man, y’all best be getting on without me, sad to say.’

  ‘Good enough,’ I said, and waited for him to get out.

  Instead, he sank back in the seat, rolled his eyes heavenward for guidance, then closed them as he sighed to himself, ‘Double-Gone, you be long gone if honky Law comes down on yo’ ass; jus the nigger to make their night. White man and a black man in a stolen cherry Cadillac with California plates, who they gonna believe stole it? Man, even if this righteous white cat next to you confesses all the way to the fucking Supreme Court, yo’ ass is down fo’ five. Count on it.’

  ‘Stolen,’ I interrupted his reverie, ‘may be too harsh. Legally, I have a pile of illegal documents that explain I’m merely transporting this car to a memorial service. I’ve been stopped once already, just out of Frisco, and the paper stood up. And––.’

  ‘Yes,’ Double-Gone swung in eagerly, ‘talk that talk.’

  ‘And morally, I’m actually delivering it as a gift of love from a spinster woman who was awakened by the music.’

  ‘Oooeeeee! More!’ Double-Gone clapped his hands. ‘Pile it on!’

  ‘But it’s only straight to tell you that early this morning a sheriff, in hot pursuit of a car real close to matching the description of this one, ran off the road, though he might feel he was forced off.’

  ‘Thas ugly news. Kind of thing might be misunderstood as attempted murder or some such bad shit.’

  ‘However,’ I went on, ‘that was in the mountains of New Mexico, and like I say it was early this morning, and time is distance.’

  Double-Gone nodded, but without conviction.

  ‘And you’ll notice in the backseat a box of about two hundred rock-and-roll records and a funny-looking sound system so powerful it’ll cave in your skull.’

  Double-Gone brightened. ‘Thas better, yes, now we’re back in the groove; thas the kinda music I like to hear.’

  ‘And––’

  ‘Do it to me!’ Double-Gone urged.

  I did. ‘And in the glovebox is a bottle of maybe nine hundred amphetamine tablets, factory fresh.’

  ‘Great Lawd God o’ Mercy!’ Double-Gone shouted, palms raised heavenward in jubilant surrender. ‘We best eat ’em up ’fo the Law seizes ’em as evidence.’

  This struck me as enlightened strategy. Houston was still somewhere over the horizon, and I could feel exhaustion creeping in. Besides, as Double-Gone had astutely noted, there’s no call to leave incriminating evidence lying around. We both took a small handful, though Double-Gone had big hands.

  I lifted the box of records off the backseat and handed them over. ‘You’re the deejay.’

  ‘A wright! I dig it! And now get ready fo’ KRZY brain-blasting radio, the Reverend Double-Gone Johnson keeping the beat and whipping some o’ that sweet gospel on yo’ ears.’

  ‘Well, Reverend Double-Gone,’ I said, swinging the Caddy back onto the road, ‘you’re riding with Irreverent George: glad to have you aboard.’

  ‘Five,’ he laughed, extending his hand.

  I took it. ‘Now maybe between cuts you might explain your religious affiliations and the exact nature of your ministry, because I’ve never in my life seen such downtown vestments, nor a clergyman who gobbled bennies for communion. It’s always been my understanding, and certainly my experience, that amphetamines are the Devil’s work.’

  Double-Gone snorted. ‘Lord made the Devil to play with. Made it all, every thing and every being; is it all; and will be long past that blast on the clarion horn that lifts us up into the Unending Light. What you gotta dig from the jump is there ain’t no salvation lackin’ some sin to salvage yo’ ass from. Otherwise, we all be bored shitless and I’m outa work.’

  ‘I’m ripe for conversion. What’s the name of your church?’

  Double-Gone groaned – at the forlorn hopelessness of my spiritual state, I thought at first. ‘Man,’ he sighed heavily, ‘my whole life been a trouble with names.’

  He elaborated as we ripped down the road, his baritone beating back whatever song was blaring from the speakers as I jammed the white lines together, thinning them into a shimmering string, still happily unaware that it led into the labyrinth, not out.

  Double-Gone was going home to Houston after nine years of scuffling in LA. He’d taken off at fifteen, when his parents split up; Momma could no longer abide Daddy’s drinking, and Daddy couldn’t stand his nighttime janitor’s job at the Texaco building without some lush. Double-Gone was the youngest child by six years; three older sisters were married and gone by the time his folks called it quits. ‘No reason to hang anybody up,�
�� he explained, ‘Momma, Daddy, or me.’

  Double-Gone wasn’t his given name. ‘“Clement Avrial” is what they hung on me – after my granddaddy – but with all due respect fo’ tradition, Clem jus don’t make it. Sounds like yo’ ’bout half a jump ahead of a dirt clod, with an IQ ’round room temperature. So when I cut for the coast I changed my name to Onyx … and dig, man, I was fifteen, wanted a little flash in my life. No sooner make LA than I latch up with this white hooker chick grabs her own kicks from tender young black boys like me. Right after we make it – and this is my first piece we talking about; my cherry, right? – and I’m still collapsed there on top, fuck-stunned and gaspin’, she start up giggling like girls do and her giggling jus keeps growing till it’s some crazy laughing. Ask her what it is, she laughs so hard it takes her a minute to strangle it out. “Onyx,” she howls, and that really cracks her up. So there I am, can’t figure my toes from my nose, my dick from a popsicle stick, but I do got one thing covered fo’ sure, and that’s that I don’t want no name that’s a joke I don’t get. So I slid on out, got dressed, and found my way to the door. She’s still laughing. Ah, women is a wonderful grief. Learned early on jus to love ’em and not worry on figuring ’em out. Different species. But how it is, you see, is the Lord don’t make mistakes, just mysteries – and man, he made one fo’ sure when he made women.

  ‘Anyway, what I done was have no name. Hacked it back to plain Johnson. Decided if I couldn’t dazzle ’em with bullshit, I’d hit ’em with mystery. Worked, too – snagged a bunch –’ course it mighta had more to do with my natural good looks and smooth moves. Tried to put a coupla girls to work, but LA is tight turf and mean streets, you understand? I stepped on some big toes inside hundred-dollar shoes and got my sixteen-year-old ass thumped good … or good enough to spend a few weeks in LA General eating through a straw. No fun, but it sorta opened my eyes by swelling ’em shut, you might say.

  ‘When I limp outa General, I decide I be doin’ it the American way. Got on at Denny’s washing dishes graveyard. Rented me a room was so small you couldn’t spring a decent boner without getting pressed up against a wall. Bagged enough plate scraping to keep my guts from greasing my backbone. Start at the bottom and work my way up – that’s the plan, man. Read them Help Wanteds like a map to the City of Gold, and I took me a smile an’ shoeshine to every interview, but they don’t call it nigger work because there’s a bunch o’ white folks lining up to do it, I know yo’ hep to that. I worked my way sideways, one shit job after another, till I looked in my wallet on my twentieth birthday and didn’t have the jack for a free blowjob and a bottle o’ Ripple both. Life’s a groove, and thas the truth; but man, the bullshit can break ya down.

  ‘So I start workin’ the street again, real careful this time, penny-ante hustling. You know the gig: weed by the matchbox, numbers and nowhere cons, fencing stuff so hot it’s third-degree burns jus lookin’ at it. And when yo’ margin’s ten percent of alley discount, yo’ lucky to get high fo’ a night on what you clear on a diamond ring. I was being bad. Small-time bad. Loser bad. I was goin’ down like one of them dinosaurs in the tar pit. Started lushing and joy-popping and sleeping where I fell. Couldn’t get my soul up off the ground.

  ‘But the evening of January seventh, jus last year,’ bout as down drunk as a man can be, I get lost going ’round the corner to the liquor store and end up right in front of this concrete building with a bitty purple neon cross ’bove this slab-oak door with a sign says BESSIE HARMON’S CHURCH OF ENDLESS JOY. I turn right around to make me a fast getaway from that shit but my lush feet get all tangled up and I go lurching ’gainst the door. And man, that door’s pulsating. I press my ear on it and what do I hear but a hundred human voices rocking high up in the gospel. Push open the door into a room musky with rapture and full of shiny black faces all lifted heavenward in song, eyes closed, singing fo’ all they worth, and right now, wham! the singing stops and Bessie Harmon grab the pulpit and cries out in that raw crystal trumpet voice, “Do you want to feeeeellllllll the mighty, endless joy?”

  ‘A hundred hearts shout yeah with a single voice – a hundred and one,’ cause I figured it wouldn’t hurt me none to feel a little myself, seeing as how I’d been short some lately.

  ‘Bessie let the silence work a second, then say soft, matter o’ fact, “Well, it’s easy.” Then she leans out over the pulpit, her sweet face shinning like a black moon, and whispers, ‘All ya gotta do is open your heart.’

  ‘I do like she said, opened up my ol’ raggedy-ass heart, and the Light came pouring in, flooding me so full I overflowed on the spot. When the singing started again I was right up there with ’em, and I was dancin’ in the aisle like a man who’d never be empty again.

  ‘I went home with Miss Bessie herself that evening fo’ some of her personal ministry, and she laid it on me as I laid her down: “I seen ’em gone on the light and gone on the music, but yo’ double-gone, Johnson, and I can’t wait to get next to ya.” I didn’t hang her up, ya dig? And when she moaned out “O Lawd, Lawd, Lawd!” in that deep springwater voice, you knew He heard our human prayers, loud and clear.

  ‘Bessie brought me into the Church and kept me at her place to continue her personal ministry. She started me reading the Bible and learning the hymns and jumpin’ her bones when the spirit moved her – and she was a woman full of spirit, my-oh-fucking-my. You ever get a chance to hear that Bessie woman sing “Amazing Grace” lying naked on silk sheets, yo’ liable to have yo’self a religious experience that whups the shit outa talking to angels.

  ‘Bessie got me going on the preaching gig. Jus seemed to come to me on the natch, like it was waiting there all my life, lying low in the weeds. Bessie taught me high and godly preaching’s one-part Bible, one-part style, and ninety-eight-parts heart and soul. I hear what she laying down. In five months she made me Assistant Minister of True Witness and cut me ten percent of the plate.

  ‘End of the year we’re packing ’em to the rafters. My job was warm-up… get the hellfire lickin’ at their heels. I’d bring that powerful need down like a hammer, smash the lid open on all their sin and sickness, get ’em squirming with guilt and failure, and then Mama Bessie’d come on and vault they po’ souls into heavenly bliss. But man, even though we raking in the bucks, I can’t stand making ’em sweat like that, playing the heavy. I wanted to lift ’em up, but Bessie wasn’t hearin’ none of it. I wanted to add some electric guitar, a little bass, a taste of drums to the hymn singing. Bessie say no way and never happen. Plus she being a restless woman, she laying the hot-eye on this pretty-boy mulatto. I come home the other night, she says why don’ I make myself triple gone fo’ the evening, she had some emergency salvation work to do on Sammy – this mulatto cat, dig? – who was having some spiritual crisis in his pants. Now I’m a man who knows that when it’s got to the point where yo’ just standing in the way, it’s time fo’ somebody to make a move, so I hit the petty cash box on my way to the door.

  ‘So here I am in downtown LA, old threads on my frame, nothing but this Bible Bessie gave me on my twenty-first birthday and three hundred and change to get me clear, standing on some nowhere corner at midnight with the bad blues in my heart and no clue what to do, when the Lord tells me plain as I’m telling you, “Go home, Double-Gone; go home and flourish.” Now when the Lord speaketh, you heedeth – and pronto, my man. I’m choosing between a used car and some new threads, and I figured I couldn’t get much of a short for three bills but I could boss up my wardrobe good, so I go for the clothes – Lord likes his evangels to be lookin’ sharp, not like some low-rent Yankee philosopher or some such shit.

  ‘So now here I am, almost there. What I got in mind fo’ my old hometown of Houston is the world’s first rock-and-roll church. Bring the Light down strong on the young so they know their bodies and souls are one, and joy ain’t no sin, or not in my gospel. Should rack me some healthy in-come once we get rollin’. Maybe branch out with a couple of rib joints. Lord put me on it, so you know
it’s got to be good. Got that can’t-miss feeling. I mean, there’s three things at least that black folks do better than you whiteys ever dreamed of, and that’d be sing the blues, do ribs up right, and go to church.

  ‘Which brings me smack-back to my troubles with names. “Double-Gone” got my personal handle covered, but now I need a name fo’ my church. Something says what it is – you dig it? – and hooks ’em solid. Something wild, but cool too. Been twirling some around in my skull between rides. Let me whip out a couple, see what ya think. Dig this one: The Holy Writ Church of Awesome Joy. Too much, huh? Then let me lay down something else: The First Church of the Monster Rapture Hits. “Monster” too down, ya think? Scare the kiddies? Well, here’s something more quiet and smooth: The Full Soul Church of Pure Joy. How ’bout Soulful Church of Rocking Joy? The Rocking Joy Church of Atomic Gospel? You know, something modern.’

  I stepped in with a suggestion. ‘Why not keep it simple? Something like The Church of Faith?’

  Double-Gone was offended. ‘Thas too tight-ass white. No pop to it, man. You Unitarian or something?’

  ‘All right, how about The Rock Faith Church of the Wild Shaking Light and Wall-Blowing Glory?’

  ‘Now yo’ at least breathin’.’

  That encouraged me. ‘Okay now, hang on: The Whirlpool Church of Undreamable Felicity.’

  ‘Hey now! Whoa up, mule! What’s this “Felicity”? That the same chick I knew in Watts with them tight pink shorts spray-painted on an ass guaranteed to make yo’ heart stand still?’

  ‘Just another word for happiness,’ I explained.

  ‘’Deed she was, but I don’t want no congregation where you gotta put a motherfuckin’ dictionary in the hymnal.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you should look for a name in what you actually feel. It’s your church, right? Something like The Open-Heart Church of the Flooding Light.’