Friday August 20th, 1999 @ 8:35 PM
When it came time to get paid, the promoter told us to come to a restaurant across the street in the morning and he would pay us. He told us how much money they had lost on this convention due to police harassment. We felt a tremble of nausea sweep through us. We asked what time and he said he’d be there at eight, but we could come by any time in the morning. It was three o’clock. My face was sunburned like a freshly spanked behind and I was so tired I felt like letting out a baby’s wahhhhhhhhhhhh! The promoter told us he had reserved the Holiday Express. We drove around until we found it. The night manager told us he’d never heard of any such reservations or us. Now we knew we were getting stiffed.
The convention had filled all the motels. We searched for a room. My head looked like a boppin’ dog on the dash of a redneck teenager’s channeled Chevy. I dreamed that I fell asleep driving then woke up to find out it was true. Finally we found a vacant room. I fell asleep on top of my covers and it seemed like seconds later that the alarm went off at seven-thirty. We intended to be standing at that promoter’s door before everybody else came for his money or he scooped up what he had and ran.
The restaurant was closed. No one was anywhere around. We peeked in the windows and paced the sidewalks. We conjured up evil deeds to exact our revenge. We stood there for an hour, then went up the street to eat breakfast at the diner mentioned in the last Harptalk’s Yondering story.
When we came back, there he was. Should we be diplomatic and coax it out of him, or should we just get mad and beat it out of him? It is easy to picture yourself beating a guy into submission, but when you step out to do it, you start thinking about not being in your hometown and how lots of guys pack a weapon. Your body parts start talking to you. The stomach says “don’t let him gut shoot you, it will take you hours to die.” The groin says, “Remember, you haven’t worn a cup supporter since Little League baseball.” The eyes warn you of pencils, and the teeth remind you how much you like to eat food.
We tried diplomacy. He just shrugged and went about his business like we were vacationing under some palm trees with a tray of Mint Juleps and a copy of Leisure World. The anger rekindled and I started talking back to my body parts, “Listen up you cravenly conglomeration of wiseguys, we’re goin’ in, all of ya’, gird up for battle.”
Just then, the promoter very calmly said, “Well, fellas, let’s go over to the whore house and get paid.”
We shuffled off behind him down the infamous *”Venus Alley” the avenue of yesteryear’s soiled doves. Big question marks resided over our heads as life was taking a puzzling turn. We entered the front door of a building constructed in 1890 for the express purpose of being a whorehouse. It wasn’t closed until 1982 making it the longest running whorehouse in America. The Dumas Brothel.
We were ushered to a second floor suite where we were greeted by Norma Jean, a real life madam who looks the part. She sat at a computer surrounded by a collection of pornographic dolls that she made for both a business and a hobby. Graphic pornographic!
“How much do I owe you fellas”, she asked smiling?
“Eight hundred dollars,” we said. Our demand sounding more like a suggestion in her charismatic presence.
Now we have been conned and lied to and stiffed by important businessmen in our career, many times. We’ve learned how to spot it coming. We’ve learned how to stay assertive and to ferret out whatever we can salvage. We’ve learned how to collect. But now we faced a pro, someone who had to collect herself over the years, from the tough, the talented, and the troubled. A woman who could cause more grief among men than all their wives put together.
But that’s the twist to the story. She viewed us as the man with no legs had, who knew what it was like to be vulnerable and outcast. She was probably the one person above all who would make sure we got money we had been promised. It was while she was counting out our money that I realized whores are people too. She may be beyond reclamation by the righteous in our churches, she may be despised by the virtuous of our bourgeoisie, and snubbed by the aristocracy, but she was good to her word even though society had managed to damage her convention and finances.
I guess each human being breaks down into character categories, in some we are strong and in some we are weak. I’ll take a person who’s word is good over someone squeaky clean on the surface, but whose highly developed rationalization and self-deception allows him to justify cheating a poor band out of its money. With the former we can step out on faith, but with the latter we can only look over our shoulder. Norma Jean has taken money for physical favors, but treachery is a whoring of the soul. I have seen a lot of soul whores in this business.
She gave us a tour of the whorehouse. It is being refurbished top to bottom. Artists are contributing their work; writers their words, photographers their vision. The top floor of suites and four poster beds was for the elite whores, young and pretty and sensually powerful. Those with thickening bottoms, crows feet, and hard habits went to the first floor, and those with no youthful vestiges or virtues resided in the basement. The frills were gone and desperation hung in the dankness.
Tunnels ran under the entire City of Butte and the aforementioned bourgeoisie could slip through the dark to enter the Dumas Brothel, dally with the bawdy girls who they condemned on Sunday, then steal away back to their office to maintain their proper image.
Norma Jean was a gracious host, an intelligent woman of forceful character; an author of several books, and a human being with vision and dreams, desiring to eventually restore all the historical buildings of downtown Butte, Montana.
I don’t know whether or not she has a chance. Certainly she bucks the odds. My purpose here is not to moralize, or condone her, or condemn her, but only to unveil still another glimpse of this volatile mixture of good and evil we call mankind and deduce from it that I’d prefer to have the world peopled more with those old farmers who found us in a blizzard, and the Mexicans overjoyed to be in America, and the man with no legs who was unafraid of four disheveled men on a roadside, and a whore who kept her word.
As for the masses of self-absorbed who pass us by when we break down, perhaps they could learn that the lessor among us sometimes have more to offer, simply because they will.
Carl
*Look for a song from Blinddog Smokin’ about a lonely whore relegated to the room looking out at Venus Alley on our next CD due out this December.
Posted by Carl
Monday August 2nd, 1999 @ 8:34 PM
The famed Western writer Louis Lamour coined a phrase called “Yondering” which I interpreted to mean: seeking the far horizons. It differed from wandering in that it was not aimless, but rather focused on what adventure or intrigue lay over yonder.
The lifestyle afforded me in Blinddog Smokin’ allows for much yondering as we travel about the world often on back roads and by-ways, winter and summer, forest and plains, city and village. I learned my own way of yondering more from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle than anyone else. My father read his tales of Sherlock Holmes to me while I was still in grade school. Holmes, with the precision of the English, always differentiated between seeing and observing. Everybody sees things, but few observe what secrets lie within the vision, thus his knack for concluding the perpetrator of crimes and their methods.
I have always noted whether or not a man shaves unevenly and can therefore deduce the light patterns of his bathroom. I look at the direction of his belt to see which handed he is. The hands are always full of details about the person’s lifestyle: condition of fingernails and what is under them; calluses or lack thereof; missing digits, scars, writer’s warts, crooked fingers, size, atrophy, powder burns, liver spots, sun spots, ink spots, all contribute to tales told about the person I’m subtlety examining.
Holmes’ head was replete with ways to observe. I take this practice into reading a town and its people. I carry my bicycle on the bus and whenever we hit town I hit the pavement pedaling. I go yondering. I try to cover the town in a reticulated pattern so as not to miss anything. I note the architecture and see how it changes historically. I find the early town and try to decipher how it grew and spread and why. I talk to old people and characters. I especially like to cruise alleys and see how the people live in their back yards as opposed to the “front” they put on for the passersby. I am fond of parks and baseball fields.
I treasure the individual creativity of someone’s special home built over the years with love and craftsmanship. I pity the “straight lined commonplace” that reveals people in banal existence without pride and without hope and without work ethic. I wish that mankind, rich or poor, could at least plant a single flower or sign their signature upon their life in some distinct way. If they do, I will observe it.
Recently we played in Butte, Montana over a weekend. My yondering took me up and down the steep inclines of this mountainscaped mining community that was once the richest city in the West. The Victorian mansions sit amidst shanties. The synagogue adjoins the Catholic church and the Korean Shriner’s Temple. Such an eclectic hodge podge of historical evolution makes for delightful dalliances in Doyle detectivism. The old town simply haunts the observer with ghosts and specters from its heyday a century ago. Every other building lies vacant with sad windows and crippled doors not unlike the old miners who shuffle along the streets mumbling of tales from the reckless and dynamic past when whores and gamblers beckoned them from the same buildings that now only echo the sounds of another era.
A 24-hour diner sits among the brick architectural giants, built when gold, silver, and copper were as common as beer bottles and avaricious men vied to outdo each other in their vain building of monuments to themselves. A salty redhead minds the counter and seems to always be there no matter when you happen in. She takes no guff off the crusty blue collar workers, winos, and punks who drift in off the main street. “You don’t like the special?” she scolds. “Then get the hell out and leave a seat for the next guy.”
The men sheepishly obey. It is a conditioning they accept and a newcomer such as myself realizes immediately the futility in bucking a woman who has “hard life and sorrow” written all over her features.
The cook stands behind her with sleeves rolled up and a curious smirk on his face. He hears each of us order as plain as if we were Jimminy Cricket standing on his shoulder, but the woman screams the order into air for his hearing anyway. He too is continuously there. And like her, he always looks the same, his clothes having absorbed the grease and smoke of the grill until he somehow becomes as much a part of the diner as the linoleum countertop.
One afternoon during a thunderstorm, I took refuge in this gathering place for eclectic personalities, and sat down by an author whose balding forehead bespoke his intelligence while his laundered clothes suggested success. On my right was a huge man whose clothes smelled of earth and horses. A few seats away a quiet woman mothered her small daughter, both wore dresses with frayed edges and sipped the soup of the day, chicken rice.
On the main floor which contains no tables, just serves as a walkway to a back room of poor man’s slots and poker tables, wavered a forlorn octogenarian miner. His once powerful body could be seen only in his bent fingers that hung idly from sunburned wrists, his buttoned sleeves being several inches too short. That he had mighty stories to tell I had no doubt, but his ability to tell them had faded as his mind had become the dim flicker of a miner’s lantern. He was a lonely man it was plain to see. Like a decayed, oak, drilling rig he stood bent and lopsided examining the floor. Back and forth he combed the dirty tile squares and said nothing.
The cook with the smirk, pulled out a penny. The smirk twitched a little as he looked toward the old man. When the man turned away he tossed the penny out on the floor. The cook turned back to the grill and chuckled silently. I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that at all. What good was a penny going to do for this miserable but once proud man? Obviously he was looking for lost change so he could by a bottle of cheap wine, that was what he had been reduced to. The cook was mocking him.
After several minutes he found the penny. He bent low to retrieve it and had to put one great hand on his protruding kneecap. Slowly the dangling fingers of the other hand dropped to the penny. They hovered over it taking a trembling aim. He could not pick it up. His fingers were stiff with arthritis and the knuckles were enlarged. They had never been fingers made to pick up pennies anyway. These were hands that had set timbres in shafts and had swung a single jack into solid rock, probably for decades.
I watched with mixed feelings. I wanted to help him but I had already judged him for a proud man. The cook looked again and the smirk grew and he chuckled out loud this time. I bit my tongue. He still hadn’t served me my eggs yet and ugly things can be done to eggs by irritated cooks.
Finally the old one gathered the penny up and placed it in his giant weather-beaten palm. A hundred and fifty more labors like that and he’d have enough for a bottle of 20/20 I thought. He began to shuffle again. His soles flapped against the tile. He made his tortoise way to the little girl eating the chicken soup.
He hesitated for a moment at her side hoping not to scare her, then nudged his trembling hand in toward her face. He held out the penny. For a moment her large brown eyes, glistening with the sparkle of youth, stared at his recessed and wrinkled ones which held no return glow, yet somehow conveyed his wishes.
Suddenly her heretofore-listless little face beamed with gratitude. What that smile did to that poor old man’s face simply melted my heart. It was as if a lifetime of woes and cares were momentarily lifted and the beauty of his fine human spirit shown through for anyone to observe if only for a moment. He hadn’t the energy even to smile, but a thousand subtle changes shimmered through his withered body and he was truly happy in the presence of that precious little girl. My desire to just hug them both to pieces was overwhelming, yet I remained frozen as to not spoil the moment.
I glanced back at the cook. He was biting the lip that always held the smirk. The tears in his eyes spilled over unto his unshaven cheeks and he wiped them with his soiled sleeve and quickly turned to hide his emotion and all of a sudden I just loved that man. I had happened upon a little daily ritual known only to the cook. Everything fell into place and I realized how he had found a secret way to give the old man some joy. And the very finest kind of joy it was. Pure, beautiful, precious, and in so doing he had given himself joy as well.
Now I’m a strong man who prides myself on how tough I can be, but I confess that I had to go out into the pouring rain and let the raindrops bury my tears to save my macho image.
In our quest for glory and fame and fortune as we tour the world, every now and then I go a yondering and find out that perhaps the treasure is right there in the streets of your town. There is a beauty in the human spirit that when it shines supercedes any status and makes fortune seem irrelevant, after all look at the value I found in a penny?
I have many friends from the places I lived in the past: business, religion, the military, college, and various careers, who can’t understand how I can find purpose in singing the blues. Perhaps it is because they’ve forgotten the real beauty of life and don’t realize that the pure and honest blues man observes that beauty and gives it a forum with proper emotion and tells it in a story. A story told well enough to exorcise our demons and bring out our nobler qualities and make us like ourselves again.
If a bluesman is nothing else he is a storyteller. He first observes life in all its pain and suffering and ugliness and then puts it in perspective so we can understand it and find our own healing, our own beauty, our own soul. That is why the blues connoisseurs treasure the old black guys, because of the lack of pretense, the sincerity, and their ability to tell a story the way it is supposed to be told.
Whether it is in the timbre of the voice, the haunting call of the blue note on guitar or harmonica, the deep groove of the rhythm section, or the look in the eye that lets the heart jump right into your lap; the blues man seeks to remind us that life is not credit cards, VCRs, business deals, and partying until you puke. It is much more than that, and needs to be felt and felt deeply. If he cannot convey that, then he is not a real bluesman, but a pretender.
A society without its storytellers is sterile and cold in my opinion. Those of us in Blinddog Smokin’ don’t have much status in society because status is measured by wealth, power, and accumulation of material goods. But we can go a yondering and bring back much wealth for those who don’t just see, but actually observe. I think that’s a pennysworth at least.
Posted by Carl