The Slaying of a Doppelganger*

Monday November 8th, 1999 @ 8:38 PM

Filed under: Everything, Tales Told Well

Is there an apparition stranger than a man within a man, one the creation of the other, one seen and one not seen? This I wondered as I saw his eyes. Bright eyes, black and eerie in the smoky pall. Rings adorned his every finger and thumb. The stance was proud, the visage was stone, the smile–slow and chilling.

The eyes again, turning toward me under a flat-brimmed hat, focused from their corners now, piercing the haze to meet mine. Did he know me? Uneasy, I leaned forward to study the dark figure slow-stepping in the interior dusk. Something familiar limned into my memory, then vanished. The gray cloth of his suit hung elegantly from the lank frame. An aura was distinctly about him as he moved like an old panther, sure of its lair. I knew him, yet I did not. “Who is he?” I thought. “What is he?”

Suddenly I knew. I was beholding a doppelganger. Were doppelgangers like vampires, I wondered, with peculiar rules to govern their slaying? I knew that people sometimes feared these doublegoers and often tried to kill them. Society, as a whole, tries to kill them at birth, yet paradoxically celebrates them if they survive to maturity. But fear them, or glorify them, they remain a fascinating study.

I had met D.C. Minner in the day lit interior of his home from birth, also known as the Down Home Blues Club in Rentiesville, Oklahoma, a tiny black community, hidden from the main roads. A gaunt figure with a nappy gray head and stringy goatee, he mumbled through toothless gums trying to wake himself into sociability. He appeared many years older than his official sixty-two. It was hard to detect where the worn upholstery of his chair melded into his disheveled clothes, so homogenous were the artifacts of his life throughout this old jukejoint he called home.

D.C. is a storyteller, one of the two best raconteurs alive in my empirical knowing. It was he that introduced me to the doppelganger: “I put a hat on him and a fine suit,” he announced in third person narrative. “I put in his teeth–the ladies don’t want no gummy man singin’ to ‘em, and I git his rings ‘n shit, shiny shoes, an’ a red shirt. He a struttin’ man when I bring him out…”

What the hell was he talking about? Bring who out? I hadn’t fully understood until that night of the doppelganger when I hadn’t recognized the transformation of D.C. Minner himself. So concerted had been the metamorphosis that I had to percolate my vision in order to change my preconception. Was it really the tired and dusty old man staring in defiance and triumph as he galvanized the night air with his electric guitar and marched about in a soul-strut born and raised on a thousand stages like this one? “I’ll be damned,” I had muttered.

I knew that the doppelganger I saw that night was a survivor, not of wooden stakes and silver bullets, but of other torments, specific to these rare and beautiful doublewalkers: jealousy, conformity, fear, and envy.

Originating in Germanic literature, the doppelganger is said to be a spirit double, inherent in all people, but developed more in some. They can live apart or parallel to each of us. For my purposes it is the glorified self, honed and polished by fierce ambition, relentless drive, and torturing self-sacrifice. It takes years to create the mature doppelganger of my definition: years of rejection and adjustment, rejection and adjustment, rejection and adjustment–over and over again, throwing out what doesn’t work, keeping what does, but always innovating in a mind-frame of undaunted faith.

Once unleashed in their refined and burnished luster, they are hard to kill and march forward in an accolade reserved only for their kind. When their creator dies they often live on, and in so doing they shed all vestiges of human vulnerability. Look at Stevie Ray Vaughn, forever cast as the Texas gunslinger: spangled hat and serape straight out of a spaghetti Western–the mighty Stratocaster poised like a Winchester Rifle on his hip, all in confluence to a face drawn to dignified rapture through the mastery of his art and the conquering of his demons.

People fall in love with doppelgangers, not knowing that they only live when performing, and then as D.C. explains, “….I put him back away until it’s time to bring him out again.” Oh, the doppelganger loves to live and at times fiercely resists being “put away”. The more he lives, the more he loves to live, because the doublegoer lives in a rhapsody. We forgive the great doppelgangers almost any deed because they have vaulted above reproach, above the commonplace, and have secured a seat in Valhalla, and we live through them vicariously. As the high priest is said to be a vicar of Christ, these doppelgangers are the vicar’s of human exhilaration, and we love them for it.

To what is base and displeasing about human living, the doppelganger is no longer subject. We don’t see our image of Cher straining at an arduous call of nature. We don’t picture “Old Blue Eyes” humping the hostess like a mangy dog before he regurgitates his alcohol and passes out snoring. No, we forget the creator and immortalize the creation on stamps and paintings like the sequined Elvis. The doppelganger is an exclusionary vision, conceived as a dream, whetted by a million strops of scorn, and ultimately presented in an empyrean descent–and only the strong survive.

The Blues world is replete with doppelgangers in varying echelons of incandescence. At a festival one can observe all levels, from doublegoers freshly conceived in the minds of their creators, to vaunted stars, immutable and supremely confident. There are also the wannabes, who lust deeply for the glory, but are as yet unwilling to pay the price to unleash and sculpt their greater nature. They perform with a cool hat or a dangling cigarette and dump their shallow exhibition on us while lost in a daydreamed lie, in no way the great dynamic of the doppelganger.

As wonderfully mesmerizing as a fully developed doublewalker can be, we squelch that development all along the way. Think back to your childhood when you first tried to sing a song or dance in your classroom, or recite a poem or act in a play. Children laugh and scoff at each other–sometimes to the point of humiliation. Most teachers encourage conformity. It is rewarded, while individualism is punished, except by rare and courageous teachers. Parents want their children to be like all the other children, except for rare and courageous parents.

The slaying of a doppelganger can begin the day a child voices a dream, seeing himself or herself, as a glorious adult, in a state of being far beyond the parent who is listening. “Let’s be realistic, says the parent, we’ll put money aside for your college education so you can become an accountant. You can work your way through school at McDonalds, don’t you see?” Or the less sensitive parent who bellows: “Just git a fuckin’ job…”

Many parents fear the horrible disappointments that accompany the creation of a doppelganger. They wish to protect their precious child and nurture it. They don’t want to see their child rejected and crestfallen. They remember the scorn and ridicule they encountered before they gave up their quest to create the supreme configuration of themselves. Doppelgangers always walk uphill through a gauntlet of disbeliever’s who castigate them with clubs of doubt.

Maybe this is as it should be. I am not judging right or wrong here, only telling you what is and why. My friends of yesteryear, who knew me as I struggled to raise a family of four children, wish to slay the doppelganger. They see me as poor and bohemian, gathering no moss, and living an illusion. One wrote me a letter asking when I was going to quit hiding behind my stage persona and become the real me. He said I had come to a crossroads in my life and had chosen the wrong road, and implied that the world of blues was a false world, and veiled, a haven of self-deception, where I was slipping into darkness, and wherein dwell the doppelgangers. The implication was spiritual or religious: the creation of the doppelganger is vain and self-serving, ungodly and dark.

Have you ever lay awake at night and wondered if there was a better you trying to get out? As you look back on your life does it seem that at some indefinable point, circumstances took over, and the person you dreamed of becoming just vanished? Have you wondered whether the vanishing was the coming of reality or that perhaps the preferred someone lies dormant in your labyrinthine id?

When you hear yourself described by your occupation, do you ever ask yourself, “so that’s who I am? That’s what I’ve become?”–then feel a twinge of angst because you know that it doesn’t represent the pure and true definition of who you really should be? Then do you wake up in the morning and accept your role in life and for the next few months forget that you even questioned it? I have, and I know I’m not alone.

This mortal and mysterious life we have all happened upon has something a life governed openly and daily by a revealed God would not have: risk. Obvious risks like death, dismemberment, blindness, disease, poverty, war, rape, and subjugation. And subtler but equally vital risks, like humiliation, defeat, embarrassment, ridicule, and the despair from lost hope. Risk is what causes fear and therefore produces the need for courage, and the by-product is exhilaration. If you knew the roller-coaster could not wreck and that even if it did, you were immortal and couldn’t be hurt in any way, it wouldn’t take any courage at all to ride it, and it follows that the exhilaration would be greatly diminished.

The doppelganger, as I describe him, is a person who has laid himself bare to the judgement of others, has taken chances with his character and personality. One who has weathered the storms of criticism and ridicule and repeatedly pushed on, improvising, adapting, growing. A person who has demonstrated courage and faced his fears, and crafted a finer version of himself than he who is left to his own appetites, and the decisions of others, security, and the pulls of mundane materialism. The doublegoer can only exist where there is risk. He who constantly protects himself from his fears cannot go where the doppelganger goes or share the glory.

I submit that mankind needs the doppelganger. Mankind needs a vicarious vision of what is possible in human dimensions of emotion. We need the example of courage and self-sacrifice. We need the creative phenomenon. We need to be able to crawl inside the soul of our fellow man and experience ultimate exhilaration. That is why thirty thousand people will sardine themselves onto a levee every year at the King Biscuit Blues Festival and behold the doppelgangers everyday from noon ’til midnight, rain or shine.

One of the brightest doublegoers I ever personally witnessed was the late Luther Allison. I stood before him at the aforementioned blues festival in 1996 and was impaled by the puissant force of his shining spirit. His eyes shimmered with intensity. I don’t recall seeing such focused energy in a human being before. Wave after wave of adrenaline surged in my veins as he tore into the night air with vicious guitar attacks and vocal tone born in his deepest essence. A normal man could not do this. A normal man could not have guessed this kind of output was even possible. It was the unique quality of a doppelganger lost in song. It was song defined as the human plight, a crying out to the universe for understanding. Those humans who deny themselves access to this kind of passion are missing a trenchant dimension in their development.

I have never been the same since. I reached inside myself for renewed vitality. I saw a new path that lay open a vision of human vivacity that I’d never seen. I went away more alive than I knew was possible before that night, but Luther went away to die. Even as the doppelganger burned like a dazzling shooting star on the stage before us, his creator was dying of brain cancer and the end would come suddenly.

I have a tape from long ago, before his self-imposed exile in France, of Luther Allison playing drunk in a bar. I was amazed at the lackluster performance, characterless voice, and lifeless guitar work. The doppelganger had not yet formed. His subsequent rejection in America, and his years overseas, and his multitude of life experiences where he refused to give in, refused to conform, refused to stop believing and growing, had forged the fabulous product I saw decades after the tape had been made.

The doppelganger, though, needs us. Luther fed off the power and adulation of the audience. That is what a doppelganger eats–not food, but human animation and devotion. The more he receives the stronger he gets. Without us he cannot live, cannot exist in the first place. We have the ability to destroy him or empower him. Without the doppelgangers we cannot know what is possible nor feel the exhilaration of it all. We can ride them to places high and beatific, and we can follow in the steps laid down by the greatest of the doublewalkers. They are the trailblazers of the soul.

Now, of course, there are no doppelgangers per se, only we humans wanting to rise above our earthy nature. Some of us do despite the obstacles. A preacher I once heard, a doppelganger if ever there was one, said we all find ourselves on this earth and begin running the race, the human race I guess, and we go along comfortably until we trip on an obstacle and fall flat on our faces. At that point we realize it is an obstacle race. We get back up and run again trying to spot the obstacles, and once again we fall flat on our faces. It is then that we learn the obstacles are the other people in the race.

As a performer, I ignore those who tell me what I can’t do and shouldn’t do and didn’t do and will never do. Some people vitiate and invalidate, while others empower and elevate. I choose to revel in personal growth–my own, and that of my fellow man.

Last August Blinddog Smokin’ arose at the crack of dawn for the first time all year, and drove to the hay fields outside of Salmon, Idaho, where we met a sweet couple in their mid fifties, who decided to start life over together. They’d both come out of unhappy marriages with negative mates who made it their mission to devalue the other’s life, and squelch their dreams.

They had found each other and decided to become balloonists, par excellance: a far-fetched dream for a 300-pound man and his new wife afraid of heights. But they believed, and they committed, and they got married in a balloon. They took us soaring high above the dew-laden fields with only the occasional sound of flame breaching the pure quiet of a blue morning sky. We were a brilliant zephyr, resplendent in bright colors, musing above the muck and muddle of stressed-out humanity.

Our captain was in his glory, he torched the balloon to great heights, while he beamed in ecstasy, and roared on occasion with cheerful tales and adventures. We figuratively rode the back of this doppelganger like four monkeys on a stallion, and value the memory like gold.

I couldn’t help but wonder after my marvelous morning, what the world would be like if the doppelganger in all of us were allowed to live. What wondrous adventures we could share. But the call to material conformity is strong, fear of failure is deeply embedded, and indebtedness keeps a stranglehold on most of us. Perhaps worst of all, there are many among us, some in whom the doublegoer was once strong, then languished, who are envious, jealous, and scared, eager to slay the doppelganger.

*Footnote: I use the term Doppelganger within a framework of my own interpretation. If there be German literary scholars among my readership who would take exception to this or that inaccuracy, I urge them to lighten up and enjoy the read.

Posted by Carl