•••
Back in the hotel, two hours before the show, I’m barbering Ben. I only know one haircut, a straight baldhead administered with clippers, but neither of us ever spends much time without a brim on—porkpies and fedoras usually—and Ben started losing his hair in the seventies. Not that hair loss bothered him. Going bald spared his having to get a jheri curl like Bobby Bland and the other B.B. and damn near everyone else.
Ben’s eyes open when I cut off the clippers. “That’s nice,” he says, rubbing the top of his head. Silver and black hair falls as light as cigarette ash. “Razor it for me, too, Pete. Fear I got a shaky hand.”
I blow stubble from the clippers’ teeth into the pile of hair on Ben’s sheet-covered lap. In a voice not unlike Sonny Boy’s, I sing, “Razor my head for me. I fear I got a shaky hand.”
“Sounds good,” he says. “Been practicing?”
Been practicing? Man, I’m always practicing, my harp, my Delta accent, trying to make it all sound true to the blues. But Ben doesn’t need to know. “Naw,” I say. “Just trying to make you realize you’re talking in twelve bar cadence.”
“Occupational hazard. Two weeks ago at the Waffle House I said, ‘Two strips of bacon, na-na-na-na, nice and lean, na-na-na-na, put it on an English muffin, na-na-na-na, or you’ll see a man get mean.”
“Waffle House doesn’t serve English muffins,” I say, lathering up his head with aloe-scented Barbasol. “And I’ve never seen one strip of swine on your plate.”
“The pig is an unclean animal. Part dog, rat and cat and not fit for eating or even to touch,” he says, affecting the stern and clipped speech of one of Reverend Louis’s boys.
“How much for a copy of Muhammad Speaks, Brother Shabazz?”
In the mirror, he looks me up and down. “I’ll give you a two for one, ‘cause you look like you need all the help you can get, brother.”
Here in the Ramada, it’s fine to laugh like Mrs. Owens’s boy. Razor in hand, I have to wait a minute. Don’t want to lop off Ben’s ear. Bollinger might have someone nearby to bust in and snatch it. When I’m composed enough to razor a clean stripe through the white foam, I catch a tiny glimpse of myself in the mirror and look away. On tour, I depend mostly on Ben’s eye to measure if I look the part of Silent Sam. Or I’ll concentrate on one feature at a time. Mustache ok? Any sleep in my eyes? Hat tilted at the most rakish angle? But I never go out of my way to examine a head to toe reflection. Like now: Even though I’m in my underwear with my stage clothes sprawled on the bed, I don’t risk another glance.
•••
From backstage, the crowd looks ok, maybe three, four hundred. Definitely more than I expected. Problem isn’t that they’re all white—I expect that kind of crowd. What we’ve got tonight are young, Soloflex types, tanned and dressed in bright colors and eager to toss each other around a dance floor. The blues faithful come to exalt in the presence of an authentic artifact of some quasi-southern, quasi-African past. Tonight’s crowd would make Jimmy Buffet happy. Backstage, I’m tugging at my clingy shirt, which is less the color of motor oil, and more like a pigeon’s neck, when Bollinger comes over, asking if we want anything to eat or drink. I shake my head and Ben says no. “You sure?” Bollinger says. “Chef Davis’s catfish just melts in your mouth.” Disappointment lines his forehead a minute, but he wipes his hand across his face and comes up smiling. “Say, do you remember the series of diaper ads that featured ‘Born Under a Bad Sign?’” he says.
“Sho, sho,” Ben says, seated in the folding chair he’ll remain in during the show. “Had them dancing babies in them, didn’t they?”
“That was one of mine,” Bollinger says, the gold buttons on his blazer rattling as he touches Ben’s arm.
While my hands part the stage curtains, I remember those commercials like a bad night of drinking. I was in my last bar band, Jack and the Dull Boyz, in East Lansing then, and everybody wanted to hear that song and flail around like the babies in the commercials. One night I got so agitated I yelled, “Albert fucking King. Know who he is?” Someone tossed a full can of Stroh’s at me. I ducked just in time.
“Anyway,” Bollinger says. “I wanted to get one of your songs, Brother Ben. For GM. Either ‘Old Black River’ or ‘Leavin on My Mind.’ But Mr. Mabry and I couldn’t agree on a price.”
I pull back from the curtain, pleased to hear Ben, in his managerial guise, said no to the commercial exploitation of our music. At times, I feel his attitude is that after all those years of bluesmen getting shafted, including him and Bucketmouth, the only color that matters now is green. His saying not to a sure-fire profit reassures me somewhat.
“Well,” Ben says. “He won’t give up nothin’ to nobody ‘less he get what he want. But he a good man.”
“A good businessman, sure.” Bollinger bends down for a face to face with Ben. He clutches Ben’s wrist and says, “But you don’t mind the money for tonight was transferred to his account in Jackson?”
Which explains why he brought up Mabry in the first place. Most people think he’s ripping us off, Mabry, which is expected from managers, but made even more mean in our case because he’s a brother. Though Mabry is the name on Ben’s birth certificate, he’s as much a fictional character as Uncle Remus or Bigger Thomas. Ben thinks our dependence upon him makes us seem even more pathetic, which he uses to his advantage. Bollinger’s present gesture seems gracious, though his schemes to acquire some object of ours for his wall are shameless, and he has no clue that the man he’s talking to with such admiration and deference is also the scoundrel he mistrusts and couldn’t agree to terms with all those years ago. Kind of funny, you ask me.
Ben says, “Doan you worry none. Mr. Mabry, he take good care of us. Ain’t that right, Sam?”
I nod, stick my harp in front of my mouth and play, “Take Your Hand Out of My Pocket,” to warm up, watching to see if Bollinger knows the tune. He stares at Ben, nods, then backs away. I look toward the audience again and note their restlessness as well as their uniform lack of anything that signals we’ll be among devotees of Delta blues. A team of security guards takes up places before the stage, and I’m pleased that of the six, two are black, ensuring there will be four living African Americans present in this building constructed in part to honor the musical contributions we’ve made to this great nation of ours.
•••
Eight months is a long time to go without playing with your partner. Still, after we hit the stage—no James Brown-length intro, just Ben’s backwoods one liner about smoking dynamite and drinking TNT to explain the lack of a warm up act—I feel I’m in the one place in the world I belong. I don’t expect us to sound as good as when we were bringing last year’s tour to a close, when our hearts practically beat the same time. But Ben hasn’t varied his set list since I came on, and we catch up with one another like old friends who know each other’s stories. Anyway, I’m not here to draw much attention. No Blues Blaster amplified glissandos from these ten holes. I’m here for sweetening, my harp like Henry Sims’s fiddle for Charley Patton or Washboard Sam with Bukka White. I echo his turnarounds, punctuate a phrase or two, shape train sounds, and on “Back to Jackson” and “Mind Me Woman,” rip solos you can time with a second hand.
About six songs in, my lips stop tingling and I’m feeling good. After a dozen, I’m sweaty under the lights, my G harp warm in my hands and my eyes shut with the effort of so many concentrated breaths. Meanwhile Ben slides that brass pipe on his pinkie over the strings, syncopated, sharp and stinging. Every backstage glance at Bollinger reveals a man clapping his hands together in ecstasy, but the Las Vegas Jump and Jive Juke Joint’s first concert is lost on the