The Pic-a-Rib Cafe
Thursday April 12th, 2001 @ 8:50 PM
Filed under: Everything, Tales Told Well
Prologue:
It is my habit in the summertime to ride my bicycle about my hometown of Laramie, Wyoming, in a casual fashion, letting the sights conjure up memories. I imagine the voices and laughter of old neighbors now long dead. Laramie originated with Trappers, miners, lumberjacks, cowboys, and railroaders, hardly the makings of a blues haven–which of course, it is not. But the blues planted a seed in Laramie, once upon a time.
I often ride along the railroad tracks on First Street, and as I come to a certain house there, as I did a few summers ago, I enter a time warp as though gravity has increased and all sound fades into utter stillness. This particular time I was awakened from my trance by a ruddy “granola type” lady asking me rudely what I wanted.
“Oh nothing,” I replied. “I was just reminiscing about your house.”
“Did you live here? She asked suspiciously.
“No, it was once a restaurant. Not like any other restaurant in Laramie. I had some meaningful experiences in there many years ago.”
She scoffed at me, “Nothing like that ever happened. I know the history of this house, and you are mistaken. It was never a restaurant. Check the records at the courthouse.”
“But you’re wrong,” I said. “It was before you were born, I would guess.”
“Please go away,” she said. “I don’t like you being around here. My husband will be home any minute. Believe me, you have the wrong house, nothing like you’re saying ever happened here.”
The Pic-a-Rib:
I looked at the clock above the teacher’s head: 1:15 P.M., the funeral would take place in forty-five minutes. I hadn’t wanted to confront the principal for an excuse. He wasn’t an understanding man where I was concerned. I had skipped a lot of high school that year and this would seem like just another connivance. I decided instead to inform the teacher and slip out informally. But I hadn’t thought it through. To address the teacher at this point would mean stopping his lecture and having the focus of the class on my request. I decided to wait until the last minute, about 1:45, the cemetery being only blocks from the school.
I thought back to the first time that I’d seen her, so big and lovely and colorful, standing in her doorway, smiling through glossy red lipstick, and laughing. I was immediately attracted to her in the fashion of seeing a lioness or some other exotic creature. It was midnight and men were about her as they always were. I glanced down the long hallway behind her and could see silhouettes of people dancing in a large room with a jukebox.
Most of all I remember the smells. Her strong perfume mingling with the smell of barbecued ribs wafting out the front door into summer night air drenched in the aroma of blooming lilacs. The breath of the men added beer and whiskey and cigarettes to the eclectic bouquet, and through it all I could smell Wild Root Cream Oil in someone’s hair.
Her son Ricky had brought me to meet her. There was something about me she liked and she forgot the goings on about her and focused on me and smiled broadly. She took my hand after my introduction and pulled me down the hall. “Ricky,” she hollered at her son. “We got to fatten this poor boy up. Willie, get this skinny little thing some ribs.”
Willie was the cook and wore an apron over his white cotton tank. His beard was a series of disconnected cotton balls, and his head was cotton too. Eyes and Adam’s apple bulging, he spoke painfully slow in a deep voice: “Miss Peggy think everybody skinny.” He chuckled, which bobbed his Adam’s apple up and down.
Willie was a man of many past wives, two of which had shot him, one in the leg, one in the butt. A cigarette stuck to his lower lip and didn’t fall off when he spoke. I couldn’t imagine how his wives had hit him, as thin as he was. His apron was an abstract painting in barbecue sauce.
This was 1962, at the Pic-a-Rib Caf. Miss Peggy opened the doors in the late afternoon, although few patrons would show up until respectable bars and restaurants closed down for the night. She actually had no license to operate or sell food and liquor, but this was First Street along the railroad tracks. Black people lived here, and the white establishment gave them autonomy. Not out of respect, but from indifference.
The blacks made a living off white hypocrisy. Here was a city block containing the Pic-a-Rib, and next door a private dance hall called “The Everybody’s Club,” and then Myrtle’s Chicken Inn where shady ladies were said to be found. In the dead of the night they would come; white businessmen, frat boys, doctors and lawyers. A man could bring a mistress here and it was as though it didn’t count. First Street activity never officially happened. When gray appeared in the Eastern sky it began to erase the events of the wee hours and when the sun rose over the Laramie Mountains on a Sunday morning, it unveiled men arm in arm with their wives going to church, followed by sweet children in suits and dresses.
Over cookies and coffee in the church basement, no one ever mentioned that they’d seen each other on First Street. If Miss Peggy happened on to one of her patrons in the grocery store, no greeting was passed. Whites didn’t associate with blacks in those days. In a few years discrimination would erupt into vicious conflagration, but as my story unfolds black people were still just freed slaves living off the crumbs under the white folk’s tables.
Miss Peggy loved color. She wore bright yellow and purple. She liked glossy wigs and exotic eye shadow and lipstick cherry red. Most of all she liked perfume. Passing by her bedroom was an olfactory adventure. Colorful dispensers lined her dresser and reflected in the great mirror that dominated her intimate domain. Like costumed eunuchs in a queens court, they stood about on every flat surface, their shaped glass glowing in the lamp light, their ornate squeeze bulbs and stems glistening like tawdry jewels.
The tables where couples sat whispering and eating barbecue were candlelit. The jukebox had a blue light that glowed into the dark, painting its color into the halos around the candles. The shadows flickered on the walls, creating distorted profiles of clandestine lovers. It was where I first heard the blues.
I felt them calling me, because like the atmosphere in which I stood, blues were sensuous and passionate. Unlike white people’s music, blues were raw, visceral, and brutally honest. Instead of squeaky clean sounds like Pat Boone’s “April Love,” or Lawrence Welk’s bubble machine music, I was hearing the apocalyptic haunt of Little Walter’s harmonica in “I Just Want to Make Love to You.” Excitement rushed through my veins like a drug. I found myself in a nether world: exhilaration in slow motion–when nothing matters, and the past and future disappear, and every sense is focused on the moment, and the moment has nowhere to go.
Blues were my window to the black people’s spirit. Nothing was hidden, nothing taboo, nothing prevaricated. More than that, blues seemed to strip a human being of the prejudices and hypocrisies that contrived his conscience and soiled his soul.
That next Sunday in Saint Matthew’s Episcopal Church I studied not religion, but people. The building is a beautiful stone fortress towering over downtown Laramie with its majestic cross in the sky like a beacon declaring the righteousness of those within the stain glassed walls. No black people ever attended. I remember a poorly dressed hobo came one time and sat in the back pew and was immediately asked to leave. I guess the Episcopal god didn’t like a person without status.
I studied one man’s pious face and remembered it from the depth of a recent night when it was leering and profane. I pictured his arm around the black whore with whom he and his friends had been dancing. I began to see the church as a mighty rock decorating a manicured lawn, which when uprooted, reveals a colony of squirming white maggots.
But somehow, this duplicity was accepted and understood in those days. No one was trying to change it yet, black or white. The Pic-a-Rib Caf was a birthplace for me, of my alter ego: the performer. I loved it there because I could be who I wanted to be without schoolteacher’s reprimands, parental restrictions, society’s expectations, and the narrow moral confinement of the church. I danced with Ricky and Miss Peggy: loose and cool and uninhibited. It was an era of many dance crazes: the twist, the swim, the mashed potatoes, pony, continental, fly, Popeye, yo-yo, U.T., bop, jerk, Watutsi, locomotion, monkey, hully gully, hand jive, and a few more I’ve forgotten.
It was exhilarating. Until then I’d only learned to waltz and polka at the VASA lodge where ancient Swedish ladies baked pies and did the Bunny Hop to accordion music with their drunken old husbands. Miss Peggy had heavy breasts that jiggled to the music of the jukebox. Ricky had big feet and wore long pointed Italian shoes, which made it easy to watch his steps and learn the dances. One time we traveled to Denver to see James Brown, who was thirty-two years old and in his prime, but still playing to all-black audiences. I was dumbfounded. That a human being could move like he did was incredulous. I spent hours trying to “camel walk” and copy his marvelous repertoire of moves.
Those were languorous days and I thought in my provincial navet that nothing would change forever. But we were nearing the end of an age. The fifties had seemed so carefree and immature and the doo-wop music reflected the puerile self-indulgence of a post-war nation at play. The turbulence of the mid-sixties was boiling just beyond the horizon of my innocence.
The bellwether of those changes in my life occurred in the form of Miss Peggy’s sudden and untimely death. Undiagnosed sugar diabetes struck her down one night in her sleep. I awakened the same night with horrible cramps in my calves, a co-incidence to be sure, but none-the-less, I have ever after associated cramps with her dying.
There is much I haven’t said about what went on at the Pic-a-Rib and much more to which I wasn’t privy, but it left it’s mark on my life, and yours too in a small and indirect way. I would not be a blues man this day–but for that day, and Blinddog Smokin’ would not exist.
In my classroom the big hand on the clock ticked onto the nine–a quarter ’til two. The teacher’s voice droned on and I knew I must raise my hand. The other kids, bored into zombie land, would welcome any break in the monotony. They would stare at me and all would be deathly quiet as I asked permission to leave. I knew the teacher would make me explain. Everyone knew Ricky’s mom had died, but Ricky was black, and white people didn’t go to black people’s funerals.
Having learned to dance at the Pic-a-Rib, I found that only the few black girls we had at the high school could dance like I could. After dancing with them a few times and raising some eyebrows, some white girls would no longer dance with me. I remember one sneering this reply to my invitation: “What’s the matter, aren’t there any niggers to dance with?”
I couldn’t raise my hand. The clock hand that had moved so slow up until now began to race to the top of the clock. I filled with anxiety. Emotion welled up like surging water. I loved this woman who had been so good to me and had released my inhibitions and my Caucasian cultural restraints. And then it was over. When the bell rung and I drudged down the hallway, crestfallen. I felt like Peter who denied Christ three times. I had forsaken my friend. Whatever grim tug I needed to complete this education in pathos, I received from the horror of my betrayal. Her life was left unrecognized and unhonored and I left myself unforgiven.
Weeks later I went to First Street and stared at the Pic-a-Rib. Already it was someone’s residence. Ricky had moved away to live with his aunt. It was as though it had never happened. Remember–that’s the way things were on First Street.
Epilogue:
From that day long ago until now, I have missed very few funerals of people I know. If it is at all possible for me to attend, I will go out of my way to do so. I even attend the funerals of my enemies. Anyone who has shaped me positively or negatively gets my salute. It hurts me when a life departs unrecognized. Of course in part every funeral is Miss Peggy’s where I should have been, but it never salves the betrayal. I hated the weakness in my character that allowed peer pressure and societal ignorance to dictate my judgement of a matter. I loathed the fear that I felt then and despise the fear I still feel in wondering how strong I really am.
All I can do is to let her live when I perform. For hers is my ability to feel rhythm, to let myself go, to ride the exhilaration like a winged horse, and most of all: to sing my blues, not to be cool, but because I was there–in 1962, at Miss Peggy’s after-hours Pic-a-Rib Caf.
They asked my name again: “Guftason, Gusterson, Guftuffson…” They settled on Flufftason because I had my hair in a fluffy pompadour at the time. This soon shortened to “Fluff” and that was the only name I was known by from then on in that house. Miss Peggy drug me around introducing me to people eating in her establishment, which was known as the Pic-a-Rib, “Look at this little white boy my Ricky brought home!” She’d exclaim and then would hug me hard, smothering me in bosoms. So fascinated was I by this flamboyant woman that I could only stare dumbly with an idiot’s smile.
One year later, in the summer of 1962, I ran away from home, taking with me a toothbrush, a sleeping bag and a football. After a month in the home of a neighbor kid whose parents were gone, I was evicted by their return and had no place to go. I ended up at the Pic-a-Rib.
Carl
Posted by Carl