Mister Satan's Apprentice: A Blues Memoir

7. Downhearted Blues

C H A P T E R S E V E N DOWNHEARTED BLUES I've been downhearted, baby . . . ever since the day we met. —B.B. KING ISTER SATAN WASN'T the only guy with a new girlfriend that spring. I'd lucked into one of my own as March blew through. Robyn was thirty-three to my twenty-nine— shrewd, tender, with a hoarse sweet voice that caught at me and held. She'd grown up in New Orleans and Guyana. She disliked Harlem; the men up there "challenged" her. Her previous boyfriend had been a blue-eyed blond. It pissed her off when black guys on the street gave him shit. A mixture of American and West Indian black, Scotch, Indian, and Chinese, Robyn was proud of her French last name. It confused people. She lived with her aunt at a rooming hotel near Macy's and poured drinks at an African bar in the Bronx where they didn't understand her. She had a mass of slippery black plaits—"platts," she corrected me—that rustled when I nuzzled her ear and felt deliciously clean sifting through my fingers. Her sparkling dark eyes reminded me, hauntingly, of Helen's. She was in recovery; she'd smoked crack only a couple of times, none recently. She gave blood once a month and was certifiably healthy. She showed me her 1 19 M Mister Satan's Apprentice donor's card. She had a trim dancer's body and dark smooth skin, which she babied with an exotic homemade lotion rich with jojoba and other essential oils, stroking upward from her bruised shins. The morning after we first made love she showed me a jagged scar twisting up the inside of her left arm. We were comparing bodies. Robyn's was gym-hardened and a battleground. When she was ten—a tomboy—she'd somehow gotten hooked on a fence. This was in Guyana, where the two attacks had happened. Local men. She smiled ruefully, shivering as my lips brushed the raised purplish welt. "My aunt had a fit when I came home bleeding. 'Other girls play with dolls,' she told me. 'You had to get hooked on a fence.' " WE'D MET AT DAN LYNCH one night back in January. She was sitting on a barstool as my friend John and I came in for a nightcap: cool and self-contained in her horn-rimmed glasses, nodding in time and munching on what turned out to be a very highly spiced lobster roll from an Indian restaurant down the block. John and I were drinking Glenfiddich—single malt, the real stuff—and talking blues as the band shuffled through "Bright Lights, Big City." Nat's ghost lingered as a sense of glittering late-night possibilities in the dusty beveled glow of liquor bottles rowed against the long mirror, the sharp sour smell of beer-soaked wood, yellowed publicity photos of black and white musicians taped to the walls—Harry Holt, the Holmes Brothers, Little Mike, Bill Dicey,guys with beards and balls and soul, guys I'd jammed with. You could plunge deep into the groove here, become what you'd always been. I pulled my harp out, tooted to make a point about Nat's tongue-blocking technique. The self-contained young woman leaned toward me, backhanding her mouth for volume, smiling. "Don't stop." She was wearing a jeans jacket over a sweater, both pushed up, and had strong hands with beautifully defined wrists, like a tennis player. "We both play," I explained loudly,nodding at John. The music surged and rolled. The young woman and I shouted happily at each other. She had the most adorable way of fanning her 1 20 P r e t t y Girls mouth between bites of lobster roll before dousing the flames with Cuervo Gold. After every song she glanced stageward and Indianwhooped , patting her small full lips: whoo whoo whoo whoo. "You look like you read a lot," she said when I took off my glasses. "I'm working on a novel." "Really?" The silvery daypack at her elbow was filled with sci-fi books— cover pictures of immense sprawling burrowing worms, brain lobes exposed as solid-state hybrids, orbiting space stations with bulbous pods. I drove her home later, after John had taken off. We sat in my car across the street from the Herald...