“They wonder if we saw a certain guy in Johnny’s dressing room.” Then Eddy Ray mentioned the name of a notorious promoter in the music business, a Mobbed-up guy who operated on both sides of the color line and scared both black and white people cross-eyed.
I felt my mouth go dry, my stomach constrict, the kind of feeling I used to get when I’d hear the first sounds of small-arms fire, like strings of Chinese firecrackers popping. “We’ll go to California. You know what they say, ‘Nobody dies in Santa Barbara.’ How far is Needles from Santa Barbara?”
But it wasn’t funny. We’d had it and we both knew it.
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