Dark End of the Street

I knew he’d just raided the back of his closet for something clean. But here, he was vintage and hip. A few people stopped him at the door and shook his hand but then he quietly found a seat next to a small lounge table topped with a glowing red candle. I could tell he didn’t want anyone to pay him any attention. He sat down and intently watched his son finishing out his song about animal crackers and foul-tasting beer.

“Look like he stole them pants off a dead man,” Loretta said.

I laughed and walked over to Cleve, tapping him on the shoulder and pointing out our table. As soon as he saw Loretta, he got up off his ass and came over and gave her a huge hug. Laughing, no longer paying attention to his son, and holding on to her like he was asking forgiveness.

She held his hand and pulled him down in the seat next to her. She did it almost regally. Like he had his honored time to sit beside the queen of the blues. Loretta took out a silk show handkerchief, probably JoJo’s, and dotted her brow.

I could make out a few words of the conversation, trying to hang back and be cool. Let her take the lead to relax Cleve. If I was leaning over the table watching his every breath, he’d repeat the same story, drink up on our tab, and we’d be wasting more time. I wanted to find Clyde. We had to find Clyde.

“So Cook told you he was dead. That was the last you saw him?” I heard her ask during the intermission, Junior sitting at the table now.

Senior nodded. Junior drank two Buds on our tab. I’d had two also. Enough to make me contemplate some cheesy movie poster by the stage about juvenile delinquent drag racers and its deeper meaning to the Hi-Tone. I leaned in closer and joined the conversation.

Loretta asked questions I’d already asked. Sidetracked onto some pretty good stories I’d never heard. Real gems about playing gigs in the segregated South. Black and white musicians trying to sleep in the same hotel.

“You remember that li’l ole sissy man in Atlanta?” she said. “That man actin’ all funny when you said you and Eddie Porter were stayin’ in the same room. What did Eddie say? Somethin’ about not lovin’ you?”

“Yeah, that man asked us if we wanted one bed or two,” Cleve said. “Guy grinnin’ like he’d gotten ole Eddie. Eddie didn’t hesitate; he said, ‘Listen mister, I like this white boy, but I don’t love him.’ “

We drank into Junior’s next set, the light reflecting off the mirrored shards on the disco ball, white squares crossing over Loretta’s face. Felt odd being in Memphis with her and without JoJo, outside our French Quarter patterns. I wanted to be back in that far corner of JoJo’s, next to the back exit, a mess of Dixies before me, listening to Felix hum as he emptied the night’s ashtrays.

Cleve and Loretta’s conversation finally left Clyde altogether and settled into family and life and Cleve’s new belief system he’d acquired after watching a cable television show on Hinduism. Loretta was getting tired, too, and her conversations lapsed into a lot of Mm-hmm, honeys, and I know what you means.

I helped Junior break down after his set and carried his guitar out to his green Pinto. He told me about this cool Dukes of Hazzard episode when Beau and Luke go to Atlanta to participate in some government conference to find a substitute for gasoline.

“It was Uncle Jesse’s moonshine. It was awesome.”

But a few feet away, there was another conversation going on with Cleve. Just caught a bit, something about Bobby Lee Cook being a criminal.

“A criminal?” I asked. “You mean with the strip clubs?”

“Shit, he’s always been a criminal,” Cleve said, smoking a clove cigarette and pulling his hair into a ponytail. “Bluff City was nothin’ but a Laundromat for the Dixie Mafia. You knew that, Loretta. Didn’t you?”

Chapter 39

WE FOUND BOBBY LEE COOK in a back booth at the Golden Lotus playing Boggle with three strippers. A little girl, looking about fourteen and wearing a gold bikini, shook the bubble and plunked down the game removing the plastic lid. A black woman, who looked as if she’d been stripping since Earl Long’s days on Bourbon Street, was the first to yell out a word from the dice-like letters, “There it is: Cooch.”

The other two girls, identical blondes with bobbed hair and rhinestone-studded halter tops, squealed with laughter. The young one in the gold bikini protested, “That’s bullshit, Tiki. That ain’t no word.”

Always seemed strange to me when such beautiful people can have such guttural accents. The little girl looked like she should be shopping at some midtown mall with her daddy’s credit card, but instead talked like a featured part of an Appalachian documentary, the kind with snake handlers, brother-sister marriages, and kids who thought toothpaste was a rare but tasty treat.

“Sure it is, cooch,” the black woman said. “Like as in coochie.”