Nighthawk Blues Read online

“You looking for a girl, mister?” said the old man, his glance flickering back to the youthful images on TV. “Now I don’t know about that sort of thing—”

  Jerry didn’t have much better luck explaining himself to the taxi driver, who was black. He was looking for the black part of town, the old Naptown, he tried. Taxi driver nodded. He wasn’t looking for a girl, he was looking for a place, maybe it was somebody’s house, the kind of a place that had a jukebox, an old piano, maybe featured live entertainment two or three times a week, not soul music, not disco, blues music. The driver just looked inscrutable. He nodded his head and pointed the cab in a certain direction and drove for what seemed like hours, as Jerry got his first extended glimpse of Indianapolis. They drove and drove as neighborhoods deteriorated, vacant lots and boarded-up buildings replaced crumbling row houses and factory sites, white faces disappeared, and Jerry had the impression more and more that they were making their way into a trackless jungle from which the very idea of retreat was foreclosed. Finally the cab came to a halt. The meter read $14.80, and Jerry gave the driver a twenty-dollar bill. “Don’t know if this is what you want, mister,” said the cab driver. “These last couple of blocks, they got quite a few of the old joints. Used to be a whole lot of music in Naptown. Music, women, seem like the music bring out the women, sometimes they was so many you could shake a stick at ’em, but it ain’t like that now. Don’t know if you going to find what you looking for here.” Jerry nodded, tried to keep his teeth from chattering. He had, he reminded himself, been in lots of jungles. He thanked the driver and watched forlornly as the cab sped off.

  The first bar that he tried he didn’t even get in the door. It was called Duke’s, and there was a woman with an ill-fitting black wig behind a scarred Plexiglass partition who shook her head ominously as Jerry edged down the stairs. Not a word was spoken, but Jerry didn’t hear any music either, so he just turned around and went back up the stairs. He didn’t fare much better with the second or third joint either. There was just the noisy crush of people, laughing, chattering, slapping hands, having a good time. Then he heard it. From down the street, across a litde alley, he heard the unmistakable sound of a piano, of the piano—the walking bass and right-hand triplets, the eerie dissonance and unsynchronized rhythms, the sense of stepping back into another time which had first struck him the very day he had discovered Hawk. Above the door in hand-painted letters it said “Johnny Twist’s Hurricane Lounge.” There was a rope across the entrance held loosely at one end by a big man whose one good eye gleamed sadly in the dim light. The cover charge was a quarter, and Jerry reached into his pocket to pay it. Without a word the man let the rope trail on the floor, and Jerry stepped carefully over it.

  Inside it looked like a bombed-out site from some forgotten era in Indianapolis’ undocumented history. Once his eyes became accustomed to the murky light Jerry could make out the dangerous bulge of the walls, the precarious slope of a floor which had to be negotiated carefully to begin with due to the crater-sized holes with which it was pitted, and the upturned wooden crates which substituted precariously for tables. The stale smell of sweat and urine filled the room. Over to the left was a bar and to the right a small bandstand of misshapen boards raised a foot or so off the floor. There, sitting dignified at the battered upright in a silk vest, red suspenders, and his habitual derby hat, was Teenochie.

  As he looked around, Jerry became aware that every eye in the room was on him. This didn’t surprise him, as he himself could hardly understand what wayward impulse had brought him here. As he stood uncertainly, unsure of what to do next, a small man with a dapper mustache and a wicked glint in his eye came up behind him and touched his elbow. Jerry jumped at his touch. The man just smiled. “Allow me,” he said with a flourish, “to show you to your seat.”

  “Oh no,” said Jerry, flushed and acutely aware of the perilousness of his situation. “I didn’t, I mean—”

  “No, no, please—” The man’s wide white muttonchop sideburns gleamed in the darkness.

  Teenochie sang, “How long, baby, how long, must I keep my watch in pawn?” The piano rolled out its swelling, out-of-tune melody, supple bodies shivered and swayed in place, there was the constant sound of boisterous good times as men and women shouted over and in response to the music.

  The little man showed Jerry to a table which sat by itself in a corner. Jerry thanked the gentleman and sat down. “Please allow me to buy you a drink,” said the man. Jerry didn’t feel like a drink but didn’t feel like saying so either.

  “Well, sure, thanks,” he said gingerly.

  “Well, if I could holler like a mountain jack, I’d go up on the mountain and call my baby back. … For how long, how long, baby, how long?” Teenochie looked drunk. He flung his great shaved head back and roared out the words. He was, he had proudly proclaimed to Jerry the first time they met, the oldest living blues singer in North America. Jerry didn’t know if that was true or not, but it was close enough. Huge, hulking, slightly menacing, and in the end almost foolish.

  Of course, Jerry hadn’t known it at the time he was putting the package together. When he told Hawk, he got what he took to be Hawk’s perpetual scowl, no more, no less. “You know him, don’t you?” he said to Hawk.

  Hawk nodded. “Sixty years I been knowing him. Don’t like him no better now than the day we met. It was in a fancy house him and me was playing back in the turpentine camps, wasn’t nothing but a funky old whorehouse. Course he don’t like to be reminded of that, but that’s why I call him a barrelhouse man, sporting man, he play and the whores jump, that’s what it was all about.”

  Jerry never found out just what it was that Teenochie had done wrong in Hawk’s eyes. Probably made the mistake of trying to steal a girl away from Hawk. Or he had insisted on soloing while Hawk was singing. Jerry didn’t know, he just couldn’t imagine what it had been like for them then. All he saw now were two cantankerous old men. What about the young Screamin’ Nighthawk? What about Teenochie, when he had hair on his head? Their tales of those times were legion—the pimps and whores and mobsters that they had known, Honey Man, the numbers boss of Mobile who had taken a fancy to Hawk and employed him for almost two years, seeing men get cut and shot and blown away, almost nightly by their account, doing hard time at Parchman and Angola. Jerry no longer knew what he believed was true. But it was certainly, undeniably true that Hawk and Teenochie hated each other’s guts, they had scarcely even spoken from the time that they had started on the tour, using Wheatstraw—good-hearted, simpleminded, now-dead Wheatstraw—as their hapless go-between, grunting commands and instructions in a guttural language that Wheatstraw alone could make sense of. By the time Jerry realized just how tense the situation really was, there was nothing he could do about it anyway. The tour was booked, it was a natural, Jerry just hoped that one of them didn’t get killed. And now one of them had. Only it wasn’t either Hawk or Slim.

  “What are you drinking?” said the old man amiably, staring at Jerry as if he were an archaeological exhibit.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Jerry with another nervous flutter. “I’ll tell you what, let me buy you a drink.”

  The old man would hear none of it, though. “You our guest,” he said in honest surprise. “I mean, I’m happy to make your acquaintance, man. I’m glad to make your acquaintance.” He pumped Jerry’s hand again.

  Well, I’m going, going away, baby

  And I won’t be back till fall

  I’m going, going away, baby,

  And I won’t be back till fall

  If I find me a good gal

  Then I won’t be back at all.

  Well, Tee-na, tee, nana …

  Teenochie was singing his theme song, that must mean his set was just about over. Jerry looked at his watch. It was after eleven-thirty. They would probably be going on all night if he knew Teenochie. He had a drink set up on the piano. Jerry was always warning him about his diabetes, but he insisted, “Sugar ain’t got nothing to do with drinking,
” and so far he had not been proved wrong.

  The mike was pushed away from the piano. His big voice boomed through the tiny room, dispensing with amplification, cutting through all the smoke and clatter and noisy conversation. Teenochie would sing as long as there was one person to listen. He would pay to sing if he had to, just to have the opportunity to get up in front of a crowd and be somebody. Away from his piano he was an almost contemptible old man, sneaking, suspicious, always plotting for some obscure advantage, a mean drunk. He had no friends that Jerry could discover. Other blues singers distrusted him, and since his wife had died he seemed to wander more and more, visiting college campuses or run-down little bars, singing in back-country juke joints if he could find them or in any tenement apartment that still had a piano. Like Hawk, like Wheatstraw, like all the ones that were left, the last of a dying breed.

  ’What I wonder,” said the old man, “is what brings a gentleman of your persuasion to these parts.”

  Jerry stared self-consciously, but there was no hostility in his expression, there was no sarcasm in his voice. “I mean,” said the old man, “it isn’t often that we see a gentleman of your light complexion down here.”

  Jerry touched his springy hair. Did the old man think he was really black, did he think Jerry was trying to pass—that was crazy, he supposed it was a compliment of sorts. “Well, you see, I’m a friend of Teenochie’s, I’m a booking agent who represents him and a number of other blues singers. I guess I’ve always loved the blues—”

  “Oh, I see,” said the old man helpfully. “Well, I wonder what it is that draws a member of the Caucasian race to this sort of music. I mean, do you like Tom Jones?” Jerry shook his head. Teenochie was playing a fast boogie, taking an encore in the face of a smattering of applause. Couples were dancing in the narrow aisle which led to the gents’ and ladies’, big padded women and small angular men, big-legged ladies scrunching down in tiny skirts which showed off their tree-trunk thighs, bright splashes of color and movement in the otherwise dark room. The bartender gazed on imperturbably. Over at a table by the bandstand a woman picked up a bottle and shattered it noisily on the table, going after another woman in a shocking-pink suit with the broken bottleneck. Chairs and tables were knocked over, but she was quickly restrained, her wig the only casualty of the struggle as it rested askew on her head, revealing the close-cropped nappy hair underneath. Slivers of glass gleamed wickedly on the floor. “Because it seems to me if I were of the Caucasian race,” said the man with no seeming hostility, “I don’t think I would go any further than that. Do you ever watch that Tom Jones on television1? Now he’s somebody that seem to me to have a lot of what we call natural soul, do you know what I’m talking about?” Jerry nodded helplessly. “Personally speaking, he’s my favorite.”

  Now when I say jump

  You jump

  And when I say stop, you stop!

  Stop!

  Now don’t you bip another bop …

  “Well, I like Tom Jones, too,” Jerry said, sweating and wishing that he were invisible or at the very least could take on the proper protective coloration for his surroundings. Then Teenochie spotted him. He leaned back from the piano, keeping up a steady rolling left hand while trilling with his right. “Hey, man,” he said with a big grin, waving expansively as he slowed the tempo down and made the typical bandstand announcement. “Well, I see by the old clock on the wall that old Slim’s got to pause for a cause. But I’ll be back, jack, to party hearty for you and your party, because the blues never die, if you don’t dig that you gotta have a hole in your soul. Ain’t that right, people? Ain’t that right?” His big shit-eating grin never diminished even in the absence of any kind of response; the dancers just kept on grinding away, the drinkers kept on drinking and the talkers talking, seemingly oblivious of this slice of history which Jerry transported from college campus to college campus to teach a new generation something about the blues.

  “Aw, put it in the alley, Mr. Slim,” said Teenochie, half standing over the piano and moving his torso in a slow grind that had prompted one reviewer to write, “Jerry Lee Lewis must have learned at the feet of the great Teenochie Slim.” “And while I got y’all’s attention,” said Slim, “I just want to introduce a friend of mine in the audience, my personal manager and an international promoter, he gonna send me to Europe next, ain’t you, boss man, this here is Mr. Jerry Lipschitz. I want you to give him a nice hand, which is what he deserve, because this cat has paid his dues, if you can dig what I’m saying. This cat have put old Teenochie Slim back in business. So put your hands together, please, and let’s hear a nice round of applause for Mister Jerry.”

  Jerry turned beet-red and only gradually worked up the nerve to take his eyes off the floor. It seemed as if only the old man he was sitting with had paid the slightest bit of attention to what Teenochie was talking about; he alone in the entire room was patting his hands together and beaming at Jerry proprietarily. “Ain’t that nice,” he said proudly. “That’s nice. You almost a celebrity, like Tom Jones.”

  Teenochie joined him at the table. Off the bandstand he was an old man once again; the entertainer’s grin which creased his face from ear to ear was replaced by the crazy expression, sly and a little bemused, as if he were always peering beyond you toward some jackstropper no one else could see, that Jerry had come to know so well. He had put his coat on, and still he seemed chilly. The bright-red suspenders caught the light every now and then, like the gold tooth in his mouth. Teenochie had brought his drink with him, but he didn’t need it, really; he was already as drunk as he could be. “So how you doin’, how you doin’, man?” he said, pumping Jerry’s hand over and over again. Jerry looked at him balefully. Someone had plugged in the jukebox, and the sounds that filled the club were the sounds of twenty years ago—Elmore James, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, all acquaintances, all students at one time or another of the Hawk.

  “How’s Hawk?” Teenochie said, as if jogged by an unpleasant memory. A slight sneer which was probably intended to convey sympathy crossed his face.

  Jerry nodded. “All right. He’s all right.”

  “Wasn’t all right last time I seen him,” Teenochie said half to himself. “That motherfucker couldn’t even wipe his own ass. He couldn’t move nothing.” Teenochie’s face tried to assume a doleful countenance, but there was no way of hiding the almost spiteful satisfaction he obviously felt at surviving his long-time tormentor. “Doctors say he gonna be all right?”

  “They didn’t know,” said Jerry. Then, thinking better of it, he added, “They’re pretty sure he will be.”

  “Oh yeah?” Slim cocked a doubting eye. “Oh yeah? You could’ve fooled me, man, I thought he was done right there. Man, he was acting crazy. I been telling him since the beginning of this tour, Let me do some of the driving. Why don’t you turn over the wheel to Wheatstraw?—God bless the dead. But you know that stubborn-ass old man, him and that damn machine of his, ain’t no use in talking to him about nothing. Never was. Vida Mae say to me from the first, What you want to ride with that damned old fool for? He ain’t got nothing you ain’t got, you hear what I’m talking about, man? And he treat me like I’m some kind of country clown, when he the one that the times passed by. Many’s the time that these white boys and girls come out and say to me, What you carrying that poor old man for, seem like to me you should have been out on your own. And I says, Yes, sir, yes, sir, I just does what the man tell me to. Ain’t no sense in it. Wasn’t no sense from the beginning. Midnight, Mississippi, where we first met. Shoot, man, he couldn’t play nothing with me then, can’t play with me now, never could make the proper changes, you dig what I’m saying, Jack? And he getting old, too. Had to get the white boys to tune his guitar for him. Sorry-ass old nigger with his sorry-ass old guitar. I’m telling you, man, I could make it better on my own. You know, if the truth be told, most of these boys and girls, they don’t know nothing about no Screamin’ Nighthawk, man, they coming out to see me, Teenochie Slim,
I been in the public eye for sixty-three years now, ever since my daddy set me down at the piano out in back of his still. Shoot, that’s why the young people come out to see me, cause I got a colorful record, and I knows how to present myself to the public nice. They don’t care nothing about no sorry, no-account old man, can’t even tie his own shoelaces, can’t even wipe his own asshole, that ain’t even had the experience entertaining the public—do you know when my daddy hired him he wasn’t but eighteen years old and hadn’t even been off the farm, that’s how green he was, and my daddy, he say, Why don’t you try playing with Slim here? And it was a joke, man, the people just up and laughed, it was so pitiful. You put me out by myself, man, you ain’t gonna be sorry. I give you a bigger cut, bigger piece of the action besides, what you say about that?”

  Jerry nodded wearily. He had heard this monologue many times before. Everyone had. That was why no one wanted to see Teenochie, he had just been added as an afterthought. Oh, they liked him at first; and sometimes his interviews showed up well, as he made up one story after another, mixing fact and fantasy, past and present, until you had no idea where one began and the other left off. But he overdid it. He tried too hard. And he insisted that everyone love him when he had no love in his heart, except, possibly, for his often-invoked and dear departed wife, Vida Mae, who entered nearly every conversation with advice she couldn’t have given for the simple reason that she had been dead for ten years and had, according to Hawk, kept Slim so pussy-whipped that he didn’t dare look at, let alone speak to, another woman, while all the while she was popping it to every musician that Slim brought home for a meal or to board overnight.

  “What happened?” said Jerry.

  “It was a truck,” said Slim, snapped back into a factual account. “I seen it a mile along. Wheatstraw seen it. I thought Hawk seen it. He driving along just like he always is—” Slim put his hands to grip an imaginary steering wheel as if he was going to choke it. He peered over the wheel the way Hawk always did, with the intentness of a man who regarded everything in his path as a potential enemy. “He hugging the center line just like he always do, not giving an inch to nobody. We getting closer and closer. Then Wheatstraw, that simpleminded fool, he start in to hollering. And I kind of give Hawk a little nudge, but he naturally don’t even blink, just keep that wheel heading straight. Truck go off the side of the road. Scarcely even touched us. What caused the commotion I still can’t figure out. Hawk just keep right on going. And when the road curve he keep on going straight. Next thing I know there’s a whole lot of people around us and steam coming off’n the hood and a big hole in the windshield where that nigger go sailing through.” Teenochie shook his head. “He getting too old. I mean, he ain’t in full command of all his faculties. You know for yourself for a fact Night-hawk was always strange. But he getting stranger and stranger Won’t talk to nobody. Getting angry over nothing. Sometimes I wakes up in the middle of the night, catch him just standing by the bed staring at me whilst I’m asleep. I say, What you looking at, fool? But he don’t answer nothing. Not one word. Just look at me like I’m crazy when you and I both know he the one that crazy—”