Mister Satan's Apprentice: A Blues Memoir

13. A Gentle, Fumbling Thing

C H A P T E R T H I R T E E N The wind was trying to whisper something to me and I couldn't make out what it was, and so it made the cold shivers run over me. —MARK TWAIN, THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN UST AS THE SHOW HAD become routine, I got a nasty cold sore on my lower lip. Every six months this particular curse hit, a harp player's nightmare: first the faint scratchy tingling erupting into a small cluster of pus-filled blisters, then, after two or three days, a scab easily ripped off by anything more than the gentlest playing. Gail was cool; Westlake was not. I'd told him I could do everything except the Boys' Song, the Entreacte, and the Chase for the next couple of days, during our stay in South Bend. He smiled tightly. "You can't sit those out," he said. "They're part of the show." "Just those three—there's no way of playing them softly and if I hit them hard I'm gonna have blood running down my chin." "It can't be that bad." "I'll do the Boys' Song," I pleaded. "You can have Ernie take two choruses on the Entreacte." "I can't do that." "I'm gonna scar myself, for chrissake." "No." 236 A GENTLE, FUMBLING THING J Big River We stared at each other. The small amount of real concern in his eyes was masked by frozen astonishment at my chutzpah. Desperate, I went out and bought a small bottle of New-Skin, a toluene-based liquid bandage. You were supposed to paint it directly on your open sore with the tiny applicator brush, like clear nail polish. It certainly stopped the bleeding. For the next few days, as my lip struggled to create a workable scab out of dried platelets mixed with airplane glue, every ragged solo I blew was a curse directed at the conductor's podium. Slavedriver!I was picking tiny shards of plastic out of the mangled shrinking wound for weeks. Mister Satan, harsh as he could be, had never told me I had to do anything—except rid my vocabulary of words like "fuck" and "shit." I'd made a deal with the devil, taking this gig. The streets were beginning to haunt myimagination as the most delicious sort of freedom, which for some foolish reason I'd surrendered. 1982. SUDDENLY IN MAY, after six endless months in a monoand -pot cloud, I'd blossomed back into the world. I was working at the Curtis Brown Literary Agency now, biding my time. In September I'd be entering Columbia's English Ph.D. program, two years behind Helen. The academic theorists were in trouble. Malcolm Cowley and I were coming after them. Shortly after leavingVikingin March, I'd dared to send Cowley a long essay I'd written over the winter of my discontent. "Whatever Roots We Had in the Soil: Malcolm Cowley and the American Scholar" was a fan's impassioned defense, an exploration of Cowley 's insistence on anchoring his critical vocabulary in rhetoricalfigures drawn from the American landscape. It also reflected the fact that mono and pot had messed up my head. I missed nature. The thing came back a few weeks later with a hand-typed letter, signed by God himself. "Thanks for sending me your essay," he'd written, "which is, I think, about the best one that has been written about my work." I flipped. Every freelance review I'd sent off—to The Village Voice, The Soho Weekly News—had been rejected. Suddenly I'd been baptized, sanctified. Cowley's heir! My ambitions were infinite and unquenchable. Life had begun again at twenty-four. 237 Mister S a t a n ' s Apprentice I'd grab a harp in the morning as I headed off to work, rilled with a careening joy my tweed jacket and tie couldn't hold back. People stared, white and black. Messing with heads was my secret pleasure. You thought you knew me by my skin color and clothes? Here was this other thing I was—this spring song in my brimming heart—and I was givingit away for free. Instead of getting off the subway at Columbus Circle and walking across Fifty-ninth Street, I'd get off at Lincoln Center and cut past Tavern...