Mister Satan's Apprentice: A Blues Memoir

17. Billed Out

C H A P T E R S E V E N T E E N BILLED OUT / got the key . . . to the highway Billed out, I'm bound to go I'm gonna leave here running because Walkings most too slow —BIG BILL BROONZY, "KEY TO THEHIGHWAY" NE THING MISTER SATAN and I did as the streets began to heat up was set our sights outside the neighborhood. Harlem was the source of our sound and would always be home; the open road, in whatever form, remained a teasing possibility , a vacation from the racial pressure cooker. "It's hard to get me out of Harlem," he'd insisted more than once, but he'd told me stories that suggested otherwise. Such as the time he'd jumped in his '59 Cadillac at six o'clock one morning—in Harlem, this was—and showed up at his mama's front doorstep in St. Petersburg, Florida, at five the next morning. "Thirteen hundred and eighty-five miles in twenty-three hours," he'd laughed. "I was drinking vodka, too. Liquor will make you a very good driver, Mister. You can't afford to be stopped by no police." New York's Finest had been surprisingly supportive during the past few years; more than once they'd given us a smilingthumbs-up as they swaggered by.We'd developed, by this point, a profitablecir3 1 0 o Hot Town cuit of sidewalk stages spread out across the city. First choice after 125th Street was One Times Square, corner of Forty-second and Broadway. We'd played there on St. Patrick's Day—a balmy postparade afternoon—and had been recognized by several people as "those guys in the U2 movie." Tips had been heavy; thirty-eight seconds of worldwide exposure give you the juice. Second choice was the corner of 145th and Broadway; a bus stop out-front, a liquor store to your right guaranteeing a receptive crowd. Third choice was Columbia University: either the Chemical Bank on 113th Street or Broadway Presbyterian Church one block up. Ann Douglas, my former graduate advisor, always seemed to wander by and pause, transfixed at the sight of Mister Satan and me joyfully flogging each other in public. Willowy, with a fixed hard smile and a brilliant voracious mind animated by Marilyn Monroe's breathless Yes!, she'd scribble a note to herself and pocket it, drop a dollar in our bucket, wave goodbye, float away. I found out later she'd been working on her magnum opus during those years—Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s—and evolving a theory of black-and-white American art. One day in 1993 I called her up. Ten years earlier we'd read Kerouac, Poe, Dickinson; I was thinking of coming back to school to work out my own ideas about interracial apprenticeship. "Adam!" she said breathlessly. "We do need to talk. I'm working on Sonny Boy Williamson." BIT BY BIT OVER THE LATE EIGHTIES, Mister Satan and I had eased into another lucrative Manhattan hustle, the weekend street fair scene. Late spring and early fall were high season; the Upper West Side was particularly fertile territory. An organization called Mort & Ray Productions had the franchise. I spent more than a few Saturday mornings chasing down Mort Berkowitz, who patroled each week's ten-block domain in a chauffeured golf cart, bearded and irritable, barking into a cellular telephone. Mort was no more ham-fisted and arbitrary than the job—as he defined it—required. New York was a loony bin; people who spent their weekends frying up zeppoli and peddling Five-in-One Sheer Dicers probably had a 31 l Mister S a t a n ' s Apprentice nut loose somewhere and needed to be watched closely. And the street musicians! Meshuggener, the whole bunch, and they didn't even pay you rent. Mort tolerated us. He'd give us a spot if we showed up at exactly the right moment, after every last trinket peddler and funnel cake sugar-powderer had been allocated space and duly charged. Immediately after the right moment came Too Late. Mort would shrug: the few remaining feet of unleased macadam had just been given away to a bunch of thumping and pennywhistlingPeruvians or some disco-dancing kook wrapped in aluminum foil. Or, more likely, to Russell Scott Donnelon, the god of gutter-funkyclassical guitar. Russell owned...