- Near Mint
Your second paradise, brother—the first one lost or locked up years ago—is a record shop where you haunt the back room,flick through crates of new arrivals in search of first-press singles from before our parents were born,
sonic miracles made in the shadow cast by the statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest astride his war horse,standing guard over the klansman's dissolving bones sealed inside the marble pedestal
across the street from Sun Studio where Ike Turner committed to an acetate plate the strutting odeto the Rocket 88 that carried him and the Kings of Rhythm from the amnesiac mud of Clarksdale, Mississippi,
up Highway 61 to Memphis, and thereby invented rock and roll while Elvis was still learning how to drive, how to stealthe sound you're searching for, sealed in the groove's coiled ribbon, decades unplayed, sound so sound you can see
the sweat pearling on Jackie Brenston's upper lip when Ike leans back from his out-of-tunebarrelhouse piano and shouts, Blow your horn, boy, blow!; can feel the walking guitar line buzzing
because the road up was cracked and torn, and the amplifier got busted on a bump, but they couldn'tafford a replacement, so they stuffed the housing with wads of newspaper to hold the cone in place,
and because they only had one shot at the recording, and because it almost workedbut didn't, because you do the best you can until you can do better, the flaw, the fingerprint of current
driving the sound downhill like a river of magnetic light, became—in its buzzy rawness, in the distortionthat perfects the pure—beautiful, and if you can find just one copy that isn't bottomed out and crackling,
even if it isn't dustless and shining under unbroken shrink wrap you know how to clean it up well enough to tastethe sound shot from the needle, let it lick your skin raw like a mother-cat's rough tongue. When they put your first love [End Page 169]
away for what happened to her mother, for what she did or didn't do that night with that knife, you learned to live withnot knowing, with knowing and not knowing why our mother still went to visit her every month, why she
still sent money, why she wrote and read those acres of letters the story carried across, echoed backuntil the signal half-drowned in fuzz, lungful of static the suggestion of a tune breaks through, last gasp
from a far radio tower. Down here, when the women say la otra, they're talking about the kind of womanyou're always looking for, the kind who knows music is locked in all our bones and it has to come out somehow
no matter who gets hurt by the sound. When I see you again, I'll know it's you by your scent—oiled leather, the charinside whisky barrels—at once exotic and familiar, like a postcard from next door or a new group
covering an old song. You can forget the second love who left you; if you let the memory play outenough times, you won't be able to hear the signal over the noise, and sure it's lying but it's the way
to teach yourself the truth you don't know you know. When the summer rains come hardit puts me back in that room in Chattanooga again, down the street from Bessie Smith Hall, where you played
Anne Peebles for me that first time, the liquid pizzicato backbeat of "I Can't Stand the Rain" intruded upon midmeasureby the nighthawk of her voice rising a sudden updraft to a falsetto fragile enough we know she isn't singing
about the weather. You have five copies. You save and store, but you neverkeep track of any of it; you've got a hundred more keys than locks, and half the time you can't
open the door in front of you, but I'm just as guilty and we both know when the...