Mister Satan's Apprentice: A Blues Memoir

6. Roaming

C H A P T E R S I X ROAMING Come, Let us roam the night together Singing. . .. LANGSTON HUGHES, "HARLEM NIGHT SONG' KNEW THAT SOONER OR LATER, if I stuck around Harlem, a woman was bound to come along. I hoped she would. I was always secretly happy to see black men dating white women and a little jealous of white guys who'd found companionship across the tracks. Catchphrases like "across the tracks" were part of the problem . Where were the tracks, finally, except in our minds? I was a principled amalgamator: anything to dissolve the myths and misunderstandings that kept us from enjoying each other's company. I'd read Malcolm X; I understood his rage at white slaveowners who had raped their black female chattel. This was loathsome stuff, a legacy bequeathed on younger white guys—even nonslaveownerdescended half-Russian/Lithuanian Jewish,half-Dutch/Scotch-Irish mongrels like me—by generations of dead white fathers. Fathers weren't our only burden: you had idiot sons like Jason Ladone and Scott Kern doing their best to start a race-war out in Howard Beach. All the more reason, then, why redemptive action was required. Racial violence disgusted me. Why not try a littletenderness? My passion was deeper than sex, although sexual hunger was 97 i Mister S a t a n ' s A p p r e n t i c e one way it expressed itself: I was fiercely, helplessly in love with the voices of singers like Denise LaSalle, Ernestine Anderson, Marlena Shaw. There was a swaggering vulnerability, a husky girlishness, a raging laugh, a despairing faith, in every belted note. They knew where to find that sweet shivery pitch between minor and major— how to tease it out of hiding, hurl it down my throat, make it swell until it choked me. Were they trying to choke me, or pull me deeper into their world of feeling, or both? Did they even know I was listening ? I sang along with their records, shadowing their voices, struggling to make their sound mine. I imagined, in my fever, that I had something new to add to the mix—a certain tensile sweetness, innocence audibly surrendered. Others had done it: Michael McDonald, David Sanborn, Kenny G. No doubt the dead slavemaster was lurking somewhere, hovering behind the pain of an ancient lament passed from mother to daughter to he-who-would-be-son-in-law. I was strong enough to sense his presence and destroy him in my own flesh. Beginning today, the women and I would dissolve our differences in song and go forth to create the uncreated conscience of our troubled family. If our bodies came together along the way, that would merely incarnate the spiritual kinship I already felt with my sisters-in-blues. This was my creed; it seems surreal and a little dangerous to me now, but desperate times breed desperate solutions. Certain elements of it, in any case, seemed to be shared. I'd already drawn scattershot female notice in the four months I'd been working 125th Street. One day, standing at the counter of the pizza place just down from the New York Telephone Company, I noticed a fragile older woman perched on a stool, eyeing me through spectacles. "You the white boy who plays with Satan?" she said. "Yes ma'am." She dabbed the pizza oil in the corner of her mouth with a paper napkin. "I like the way you move your feet." I sang five or six songs an afternoon, a determined kid who had somehow found his place among people with a knack for finding entertainment-value in talents of all sizes. The older men who idled around us couldn't get enough of "Sweet Home Chicago"—"Sing 98 P r e t t y Girls that Chicago song," they'd chuckle. "Take me back to Chi-cago !"—but I lived for the days when women would pause, shrewdly appraise my pitch placement and commitment, and call out, "Sing it, baby." One day I devoted the better part of half an hour to wooing , so to speak, a woman whose gold tooth and swirly chocolatefrosting wig reminded me of blues belter Koko Taylor. She knew what I was trying to do, she heard me, and she let me know how she felt. She disappeared before the set was over. Duke limped up...