The music business was corrupt back then. Disk jockeys took payola and people who got to the top were either humps for the Mafia or signed deals that left them with chump change. A black guy in Jennings, Louisiana, put out an R&B record that sold a million copies and netted him twenty-five dollars. Even the Greaser paid his manager fifty-one percent of his earnings.
When you got in trouble with the wrong people, you took up bottleneck guitar on a street corner or punched out your eyes and joined the Five Blind Boys. In our case, the wrong people was Cool Daddy Hopkins, a six-foot-six mulatto who wore three-piece suits, a yellow fedora, and popped matches on his thumbnail to light his Picayune cigarettes. He not only carried a nickel-plated, pearl-handled derringer, he shot and killed a white man in Mississippi with it and wasn't lynched or even prosecuted.
Northerners always thought the South was segregated. Wrong. Money was money, sex was sex, music was music, and color didn't have squat to do with any of it. Some people said Johnny Ace might have gotten in Cool Daddy's face one too many times. I didn't know if that was true or not. But when we got back from our gig in Arkansas, the Houston cops questioned us about Johnny and his relationship with Cool Daddy. Our names ended up on the front page of two Houston newspapers. In the world of R&B and rockabilly music, we had become the certifiable stink on shit.
Kitty Lamar and Eddy Ray had called it quits, even though you could tell neither one wanted to let go of the other. I wanted to blame the Greaser for busting them up, but I couldn't forget the fact it was me who told Eddy Ray that Kitty Lamar was probably bumping uglies behind his back.
That's what I did for the guy who had carried me three hundred yards across a corrugated rice paddy while bullets from Chinese burp guns popped snow around his bootlaces.
We played at a carnival up in Conroe and at a dance in Bandera and didn't clear enough to cover gas and hamburgers and the tire we blew out on a cattle guard. The boys in the band started to drift off, one by one, and join other groups. I couldn't blame them. We'd been jinxed six ways from breakfast ever since Johnny had died. Finally, Eddy Ray and I admitted defeat ourselves and got jobs as roughnecks on a drilling rig outside Galveston.
He wrote one song he called "The Oil Driller's Lament." We recorded it on a 45 rpm that cost us four dollars in a recording booth on the old Galveston amusement pier, with Eddy Ray singing and me backing him up on harmonica and Dobro. This is how it went:
Ten days on, five days off,
I guess my blood is crude oil now,
Don't give your heart to a gin-fizz kitty
From the back streets of Texas City,
'Cause you won't ever lose
Them mean ole roughnecking blues.
It was a song about faded love and betrayal and honky-tonk angels and rolling down lost highways that led to jail, despair, and death. Some of the lyrics in it even scared me. It was sunset when we made the recording, and the sky was green, the breakers sliding through the pilings under the pier, the air smelling of salt and fried shrimp and raindrops that made rings in the swells. A lot of country singers fake the sadness in their songs, but when Eddy Ray sang this one, it was real and it broke my heart.
"What you studying on?" he asked.
"I messed you up with Kitty Lamar," I said.
He spun our four-dollar recording on his index finger, his face handsome and composed in the wind off the Gulf. "Kitty Lamar loved another guy. It ain't her fault. That's the way love is. It picks you, you don't pick it," he said.
The sun was the dull red color of heated iron when it first comes out of the forge. I could feel the pier creak with the incoming tide and smell the salty bitterness of dried fish blood in the boards. I watched the sun setting on the horizon and the thunderheads gathering in the south, and I felt like the era we lived in and had always taken for granted was ending, but I couldn't explain why.
"Hey, you and me whipped the Chinese army, R.B. They just haven't figured that out yet," he said. "There's worse things than being an oil-drilling man. I'm extremely copacetic on this."
I mentioned to you that we were jinxed six ways from breakfast? The next morning, with no blowout preventer on the wellhead, our drill bit punched into a pay sand at a depth where nobody expected to find oil. The pipe geysered out of the hole under thousands of pounds of pressure, clanging like a freight train through the superstructure. Then a spark jumped off a steel surface, and a torrent of flaming gas and oil ballooned through the derrick and melted the whole rig as though the spars were made of licorice.
Eddy Ray and I sat on the deck of a rescue boat, our hair singed, our clothes peppered with burn holes, and watched the fire boil under the water.
"Does Cool Daddy Hopkins still have his office in the Fifth Ward?" he said.
Houston's black district was its own universe. It was even patrolled by black cops, although the department gave them only dilapidated squad cars, usually with big dents in them, to drive around in. There were bars and barbecue joints and shoeshine stands on almost every street corner. You could hear music from radios, jukeboxes, church houses, old black guys jamming under an oak tree. Dig this. In the black district there were no record stores. Both 78 and 45 rpm records were always sold at beauty and barbershops. The owners hung loudspeakers outside their business to advertise whatever new records had just come in, so all day long the street was filled with the sounds of Gate-mouth Brown, Laverne Baker, and the Platters.
Cool Daddy Hopkins had his office in the back of a barbershop, where he sat in front of a big fan, a chili dog covered with melted cheese and a bottle of Mexican beer on his desk. Cool Daddy had gold skin with moles on it that looked like drops of mud that had been splashed on him from a passing car. His coat and vest hung on the back of a chair, along with a .32 derringer stuffed in a shoulder holster. His silk shirt was the color of tin, pools of sweat looped under his pits.
He kept eating, sipping from his beer, his eyes never blinking while he listened to what Eddy Ray had to say. "So you think I'm the guy keeping you off the circuit?" he said.
"I'm not here to make accusations. I'm just laying it out for you, Cool Daddy. Johnny was my friend, but I don't know what happened in that dressing room," Eddy Ray said. "We told the cops that. Now we're telling you. We're eighty-sixed and shit-canned all over the South."
"Sorry to hear that. But life's a bitch, then you die, right?" Cool Daddy said. He reached into a cooler by his foot and slipped a beer out of ice that had been pounded and crushed in a cloth bag with a rolling pin. He made a ring with his thumb and index finger and wiped the ice off the bottle onto the floor. There were a couple of glasses turned top-down on a shelf above his head. I thought he was going to offer us a beer to split. Instead, he cracked off the cap with a bottle opener and drank from the neck.
"Johnny and me was both in the United States Navy, ammunition loaders, can you dig that?" he said. "You know who was loading right next to me? Harry Belafonte. That's no jive, man."
But Eddy Ray wasn't listening. "Our agent says he doesn't want trouble with you. So if you're not the problem, why is Leon telling us that?" Eddy Ray said.
The sunlight through the window seemed to grow warmer, more harsh, in spite of the fan, the air suddenly close and full of dust particles and the smell of hair tonic from the shop up front. "'Cause Leon is like most crackers. If he ain't got a colored man to blame for his grief, he got to look in the mirror and put it on his own sorry-ass self."
Eddy Ray leaned forward in his chair and stuck an unlit Lucky Strike in his mouth, fishing in his jeans for a match. His hair was uncut, wet and combed straight back, curly on the back of his neck. "Give us another R&B gig."
"The train went through the station and you ain't caught it, man. Wish it'd been different, but it ain't," Cool Daddy said.
Eddy Ray found a book of matches but lost his concentration and put them away. He took the Lucky Strike out of his mouth and brushed at his nose with the back of his wrist. "I'll put it another way. If you cain't see your way to hep us, just stay the hell out of our sandbox," he said.
"You still don't get it, do you?" Cool Daddy replied, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
"Get what?"
"I ain't the power in this game. Who you think screwed you on the circuit, boy? Who got that kind of power?"
Eddy Ray's eyes blinked, but not in time to hide the glow of recognition in them.
"Yeah, that's right," Cool Daddy said. "The word is your lady friend been bad-mouthing you with certain people at Sun Record Company. The word is they don't like you, motherfucker, particularly a certain boy from Mis-'sippi don't like you."
Cool Daddy pinched his temples, like he was struggling not to hurt the feelings of dumb white people such as ourselves. "Let me strap it on you, boy. I thought maybe she was leaking info about me to the cops, so I had a detective get ahold of her phone records." Then he mentioned the name of a powerful man he said Kitty Lamar had phoned repeatedly at Sun Records. "I don't know what you done to her, but I think she fixed yo' ass good."
The only sound in the room was the vibration of the electric fan. Eddy Ray's eyes looked like brown pools that someone had filled with black silt.
"He was lying," I said when we were outside.
"You're the one who told me Kitty Lamar was a Judas. You cain't have it both ways, R.B."
"I'm going out west," I said.
We were in traffic, headed toward Eddy Ray's house in the Heights section of North Houston, oak trees sweeping by us on wide boulevards, where termite-eaten nineteenth-century houses with wide galleries sat gray and hot-looking in the shade. I couldn't believe what I'd just said and the implication it had for my friendship with Eddy Ray. He finally lit the cigarette he'd been fiddling with since Cool Daddy's office.
"Am I invited?" he asked.
"Nobody can help you, Eddy Ray. You don't think you should have survived the war and I think you're aiming to take both of us down."
"Sorry to hear you say that." He flipped the dead paper match into the traffic.
I got out of the Hudson at the red light and went into the first bar I could find. Lone Star and Jax beer might seem like poor solace for busted careers and lost friendships, but I figured if I drank enough of it, it would have to count for something. And that's exactly what I did, full-tilt, for the next six months.
I also spent some time in the Houston City Jail for my third arrest as a public drunk. I picked watermelons in the Rio Grande Valley and rode a freight train west and cut lettuce in El Centro. I played Dobro for tips in bars on East Fifth Street in Los Angeles, followed the wheat harvest all the way to Saskatoon, and ended up on Larimer Street in Denver, where I met Cisco Houston and played as a guest on his syndicated radio show, right before he got blacklisted.
I saw the country from the bottom side up. I may have married a three-hundred-pound Indian woman on the Southern Ute Reservation, but I can't be sure, because by the time I sobered up from all the peyote buttons I'd eaten, I was in an uncoupled boxcar full of terrified illegal farm-workers, roaring at eighty miles an hour down Raton Pass into New Mexico. And that's what led to me to one of those moments in life when you finally figure out there are no answers to the big mysteries, like why the innocent suffer, why there's disease and war, and all that kind of stuff. I also figured out that what we call our destiny is usually determined by two or three casual decisions which on the surface seem about as important as spitting your gum through a sewer grate.
The sky was still black and sprinkled with stars when I crawled off the boxcar at the bottom of the grade in Raton. Then the sun broke above the crest of the hills and the entire countryside looked soaked in blood, the arroyos deep in shadow, the cones of dead volcanoes stark and biscuit-colored against the sky. I could smell pinion trees, wet sage, woodsmoke, cattle in the pastures, and creek water that had melted from snow. I could smell the way the country probably was when it was only a dream in the mind of God.
I found a bar by the railway tracks but didn't go in. Instead, I walked down to a café built out of stucco, networked with heat cracks, where a bunch of Mexican gandy walkers were eating breakfast. I had one dollar and seven cents in my pocket, enough to order scrambled eggs, a pork sausage patty, fried spuds, and coffee, and to leave a dime tip.
While I sipped coffee, I thumbed through a three-day-old copy of an Albuquerque newspaper. On an inside page was a story about none other than the Greaser. I had read enough stories about the Greaser's career to last me a lifetime, but in the third paragraph was a statement that was like a thumbtack in the eye. According to the reporter, the Greaser had left Sun Records at least a year ago and had signed a managerial deal with a guy who used to be a carnival barker.
"You okay, hon?" the waitress said to me. She was a big redheaded woman with upper arms like cured hams, and perfume you could probably smell all the way to Flagstaff.
"Me? I'm fine. Except for the fact I'm probably the dumbest sonofabitch who ever walked into your café," I said.
"No, that was my ex-husband. There's some showers for truck drivers in back. It's on the house," she said. She winked at me. "Hang around, cowboy."
Life on the underside of America could have its moments.
Five days later, I climbed down from the cab of a tractor-trailer and walked four blocks through a run-down, tree-shaded neighborhood to Eddy Ray's house. He had scraped up a pile of black leaves and moldy pecan husks in his side yard and was burning them in an oil can, his eyes watering in the smoke.
I dropped my duffel bag on the gallery and sat down in the glider and waited for him to say hello.
"It's me, in case you haven't noticed the man sitting about ten feet to your rear," I said.
"I got your postcard from the Big Horn County Jail," he said, fanning smoke out of his face.
I didn't remember writing a card from jail, but that wasn't unusual considering the number of organic chemical additives I had been putting into my brain. "Remember when I told you Cool Daddy Hopkins was lying about Kitty Lamar?"
"I do."
"Know why you wouldn't believe me?" I said.
"Not interested."
"'Cause Cool Daddy fooled me, too. I thought Kitty Lamar had stuck it to us. Know why I thought that?"
He leaned on a rake handle, shutting his eyes, maybe hoping I'd be gone when he opened them again.
"'Cause I had a grudge against her from the first time we heard her sing," I said, answering my own question. "'Cause I didn't want her coming between us."
I felt a little funny saying that and I let my eyes slip off his face. He picked up a huge sheaf of compacted leaves and dropped them into the flames. Thick curds of yellow smoke curled into the tree limbs overhead. "So what's changed?"
"When Cool Daddy told us Kitty Lamar had been bad-mouthing us at Sun Records, the Greaser had already been gone from Sun. Kitty Lamar didn't know anybody at Sun. The only person she knew there was the Greaser. Besides, why would people at the record company want to hurt us? Sun doesn't do business like that."
"You're sure about this?"
"I read it in the newspaper. Then I called the reference lady at the public library to check it out. The Greaser has been managed by this carnival barker or freak show manager or whatever he is for the last year."
Eddy Ray sat down on the steps, his back to me. His face and arms were bladed with the sunlight shining through the trees. He rubbed the back of his neck, like a terrible memory was eating its way through his skull.
"What's wrong?" I said.
"The Greaser called up and asked me to send him a demo. He said he'd take it to a studio for us. He said he'd always thought my voice was as good as Johnny Ace's."
"What'd you do?" I said.
"Told him he was a hypocrite and a liar and to lose my phone number."
At least I wasn't the only one in the band with a serious thinking disorder.
"Seen Kitty Lamar?" I said.
"I heard she was singing in a lounge in Victoria."
I pushed the glider back and forth, the chains creaking, the worn-out heels of my cowboy boots dragging on the boards.
"I'm not gonna do it," he said, looking straight ahead at the yard.
"Do what?"
"What you're thinking. She can ring or come by if she wants to, but I ain't running after her. Will you stop playing on that glider? You're giving me a migraine."
"You got that 45 rpm we recorded on the amusement pier in Galveston?"
"What about it?"
"I paid half of the four dollars it cost to make it. I want to take my half to Victoria and let Kitty Lamar hear it. Then I'm going to send my half to the Greaser."
I said that to piss him off good, which sometimes was the only way you got Eddy Ray outside of his own head. He went inside the house and came back out with the 45. It was wrapped in soft tissue and taped around the edges, and I knew that Eddy Ray hadn't given up his music.
"Does Kitty Lamar still paint her toenails?" I asked.
"Why?"
"'Cause I always thought they were real cute."
He stared at me as though he'd never seen me before.
And that's how our band came back together and that's how "The Oil Driller's Lament" went on the charts and stayed there for sixteen weeks. But Eddy Ray Holland and the Gin Fizz Kitty from Texas City were never an item again. That's because she married R. B. Benoit, Dobro player extraordinaire, also known as myself, in a little Assembly of God church in Del Rio, Texas. The church was right across the river from the Mexican radio station where, on a clear night, the Carter Family and Wolfman Jack beamed their radio shows high above the wheat fields and the mountains, all the way to the Canadian line, like a rainbow that has nowhere else to go.
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