Don't Start Me Talkin'. Tom Williams
inhale the soft dust, I think of what Ben demonstrated earlier: It is too sturdy. Plus, it’s in the middle of Las Vegas, and I doubt you could order a fried bologna sandwich here, even with Dijon and a tapenade instead of pickles and Plochman’s. Then again, I recall from my marketing classes at State that there’s no need for the genuine if your clientele believes what they’re getting is real. I’ve learned that same lesson from Ben, who could have been tenured in the business and music departments and taught the best black studies class you could take.
But here’s what I can’t figure: Will we go over tonight? I want to believe we’ll have a huge crowd of converts to Brother Ben and Silent Sam. The other B.B. lives here, though I suspect his horn-heavy shows haven’t prepared anyone for us. Even played by impostors, true Delta means acoustic guitar and unamplified harp, minimal solos and some songs that will depress the shit out of you, like our version of “Stones in my Passway” and Ben’s “My Mother’s Crying Face.” Here at the Jump and Jive, I suspect Buddy Guy could kick ass, as could some of the skinny white boys with three names and long hair and tiresome solos. But us? Shoot, if I were visiting Vegas with my fellow ophthalmologists or oral surgeons and had a choice between strippers and two preservationists of some obscure and ancient musical form, I’d be folding tens into g-strings and telling Lexus I loved her.
“Admiring the décor?” Bollinger says, clamping a hand on my shoulder, his grip so firm and sudden a “What the fuck” almost rolls out of my mouth. I chew my mustache instead. Beside him, Ben has shrunk an inch shorter than his customary slouch. “I was just telling Ben here how much we paid for that.” His gesture is vague and I don’t know if he’s talking about Ray Charles’s sunglasses or Mance Lipscombe’s false teeth. It’s a little dark, too, but soon I see the acoustic guitar encased in glass. Its plaque reads, “Once played on the streets of Atlanta by Blind Willie McTell.” It is a twelve-string, yet—and this could be the play of shadow and my own poor vision (who would know Silent Sam wears Bausch and Lombs to correct his myopia?)—it doesn’t look played enough. No nicks and scratches that would inevitably result from playing on street corners. The guitar Ben will play tonight was purchased from a pawnshop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, near the end of last year’s tour. It has a nickel-sized hole in the body and a pear-shaped patch beneath the sound hole where somebody’s pick wore away the lacquer. Nonetheless, when I turn to Bollinger and see his reverential eyes and fingers tapping the glass, I keep quiet my doubts about its original ownership. Man probably paid a grand for the guitar. “Purty,” I say. Bollinger says, “I told our designer that no matter what else he did, put that guitar up in a prominent place.” He turns to both of us, beaming. Only way his smile would be bigger is if Blind Willie’s corpse lay in that glass, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn Bollinger had a hired man prowling the south’s unmarked graves for that acquisition.
“Folks still listening to Blind Willie?” Ben says.
Wicked. Pretending he doesn’t know the answer, which is of course no. Unless you’re David Evans or Robert Crumb and your office is full of 78s that you never take out of their original sleeves, you might know the name McTell from the Bob Dylan song, but not the man or his music. I maintain a good collection, mostly CD’s now, and I bought Blind Willie’s entire works on a German import last year. I liked it the first time I listened, as I did with Gary Davis, Blind Blake, and Blind Deacon and the Professor, but I never connected with that Piedmont stuff, always sounded too bright and busy for my ear, nowhere near as lowdown as I like.
But why’s Ben digging Bollinger about Blind Willie’s obscurity? I shoot him a look, but he keeps his eyes on Bollinger, who stammers and says, “I don’t know.” Then he rallies and rubs his hands together, saying, “Upstairs? Two more levels to go, the smoking and non-smoking dining rooms.”
Now Ben looks at me, and his eyelids droop while he yawns and shows off those sleeves he wears to give the appearance of gold teeth. He claims his Biloxi dentist took a photo of him smiling, to display to patients the fruits of good hygiene. But unless they’re dentures, a full set of pearly whites doesn’t correspond with songs about evil-hearted women and good old gin. Now he says, “I doan know bout my partnuh, but us old folks thinkin’ ‘bout a little piece a nap.”
“Right, right,” Bollinger says. “Wouldn’t want to keep you. ” Either the man knows his stuff or just finished reading a chapter on Ben in an encyclopedia of the blues. I read The Blues’s Who’s Who back when I was a college sophomore and never dreamed I’d know the man, and it re-told the legend of young Ben and the judge and how Ben’s asleep before his head hits the pillow, any time, night or day. Once he’s asleep, boy, you’d better not trifle with him. It went on to detail the famous incident where he found Sleepy John Estes in his cot backstage at the ’68 Ann Arbor Festival. Mississippi Fred McDowell and Big Joe Williams had to pry Ben’s fingers from Sleepy John’s thin neck. In that same book, though, Sleepy John was reported to possess the ability to sleep standing up. Right now, Bollinger’s probably worried Ben might fall asleep standing up. He says, “Sure you don’t want anything to drink?” He reaches behind the bar, pulls out an ice-covered bottle of Bud and jabs it in Ben’s direction. At no time has Ben even pretend to drink what he calls that St. Louis swill. He shakes his head. “Sure?” Bollinger says. “On the house.”
“Thank you but no,” Ben says. “I be tired enough already.”
Head down, Bollinger leaves the full bottle on the bar, then sticks his hands in his jacket pockets and escorts us toward the exit.
Ben tries to push open the door, but winds up coughing, so I finish the job, which hands me an eyeful of glare and heat tightening the skin on my face. We walk to the porch and don shades, then shake hands with Bollinger. Bollinger says, “Show starts at seven sharp, just as Mr. Mabry requested.”
“We be here at six then,” Ben says.
“You’ll need to do a sound check?”
Ben shakes his head, takes his time to wipe his lips with a slow-moving tongue. “No suh,” he says. Bollinger waits a moment, as if expecting some salty axiom after all the lip-licking preliminaries. He gets nothing, only Ben walking slowly toward the steps. Bollinger rushes forward about the time Ben grips the handrail and positions his body to descend. I start in that direction, but wait, as Bollinger says, “No warm up act, right? I remember that from the show in Buffalo.” He pauses, his eyes gaining the reverence he had inside. “What did you say then? ‘I smoke dynamite, drink TNT. I can do all the heating up myself.’”
Bollinger smiles as though he made up for his sound check gaffe. Then again, how would he know the schemer of schemers doesn’t really need a sound check because of his near-perfect ear and because he doesn’t want people to think, after forty years of performing, that he’s become too professional? Sideways, Ben maneuvers down the steps, pretending to slap away my aiding hands. When we reach the bottom, we turn and wave, then make it inside the car and get it and the AC cranked up.
“Bet he tells everyone that shit,” Ben says.
“What shit?”
“Best concert ever. I don’t think I even played Buffalo in ‘72,” Ben says, steering us into the flow of traffic. “Maybe that’s just me growing old, though.” He sighs. “Getting forgetful.”
I wave my hand near the brim of his hat. “Who you trying to kid?” I say.
Behind the wheel, Ben faces me and grins, showing off the gold sleeves on his upper and lower teeth.
“What about that guitar, though?” I say. “Think it’s real?”
“Pardon?” he says.
“Don’t go pretending you’re deaf.”
“I didn’t understand what you meant.”
“Blind Willie’s guitar,” I say. “You think that’s the real thing?”
“Hard to tell, hard to tell.” He unwraps another protein bar and tugs at it with his teeth. “But I doubt it.”
“You watch, though,” I say. “Bollinger won’t let you leave