| FALL 2002 |
flashquake Fiction |
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In 1975 I spent a month driving the country with Blind Lemon in a '62 Ford Falcon. The car was sick, Blind Lemon was dying. We blew a tire in Albuquerque. I got in a fight in Hooker, Oklahoma. The clutch went out in Liberal, Kansas, and that's where we heard about the Blue Grass Festival. 
Blind Lemon could play anything with strings -- guitars, violins, Ozark mouth bows, pianos, fishing line, bridge supports. As long as you could stretch it and pluck or hammer at it, by God, Blind Lemon could play it. He could play horns and drums and who knew what. I gave Blind Lemon his insulin in a hopeless Motel 6 while he tapped a tune with his white cane. "Do you want to go? To the Festival?" I asked. "The car is fixed. We just go south of Wichita. To Derby?" He was playing with the trashcan. He tore off a square of garbage bag and said, "I'd surely like to hear the music." There were thousands there. Thirteen-year-olds won fiddling contests. Old men sat on the steps of white motor homes and played banjo and sharp-nosed women sang sad Carolina tunes with lonely voices that sounded like Irish pipes, or Welsh harps and I could hear red dragons and crashing armor on chalky cliffs. Through this Anglo swamp I led black Blind Lemon with his white cane tapping a New Orleans beat, while I ignored stares not hostile, but curious until we came to the holy booths of the guitar makers, the luthiers. Those sacred men of hands who bent and shaped maple, inlaid ebony, decorated with abalone, painted with sound. They gave him treasures to test and a green folding chair where he mumbled to himself, "Yes, that's nice," and he would play slide guitar with a borrowed fountain pen until they trimmed and sanded a bottle neck and slipped it in his hand. Sometimes he was sick, but he played until hunger and thirst overcame him and then he'd break while white women brought him food and white men asked his name. "Blind Lemon T-bone Walker," he would say, adding "Esquire," after a pause. He licked his dry lips while I prepared the insulin. "I wanted to come here," he said. "To hear the music played." The main stage was a long walk for Blind Lemon, but he'd been asked. "We got to go, chile," he said and he tilted forward on stick thin legs until they gave us a golf cart and we rode like Jesus-in-checkered-pants into Jerusalem amid palm fronds of sound. We... they, helped him climb the steps. For all he knew it might have been a gallows or the hill at Calvary, but up he went, stopping to catch his breath and whisper hello to shrouded voices in the crowd. "What you gonna play?" he was asked and I saw men unsling their guitars. They took his hand and placed it on the necks of instruments so fine they must have felt like gold or generous women. "No need," he said reaching into his pocket. "Y'all just play what you know." They played "The Burning of the Piper's Hut" and he stood aside until the rhythm filled his heart and when it did he put to his mouth a small square of plastic garbage bag with a tiny slit and stood before the microphone. He hammered and piped. He became a drum, a whistle, a singing nun and no one had heard anything like that garbage bag, that plastic piece of trash. Yet there he was, in his last days, playing to a roaring, cheering, all white crowd and me smiling with the siren's medicine in my pack. They played quick Irish reels where Blind Lemon was a fiddler from Innisfree, walking the wee five miles to Red Will Danaher's and they played "Under the Double Eagle" and songs he couldn't know and he was like a proud black stallion, a hunter, jumping over Celtic walls. I drove him home after the festival. The summer of '75 was mild and you could sleep outside under the stars and if you listened quietly, the sky played music anyone could share. "We're at the Louisiana border," I said and looked into the back seat were he was covered in an old khaki blanket. I stopped at the hospital in Baton Rouge. "I've a musician in the car," I said. "His name was Blind Lemon T-bone Walker," and after I cleared my throat, I added, "Esquire." The title art for this story was adapted from a photograph of an art doll by Selkie Whitebear taken by Roger Paris.
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