In this setting, two unlikely people proclaimed their everlasting love for each other in front of an amazed assemblage.
With a few reminders from Barbara Jean and me, Clarice managed to hold on to her smile, even as she played the piano during the blessing of the rings. Clarice is an extraordinary musician. She had already begun winning ribbons and praise for her piano playing when we met as five-year-olds. But after a midlife resurgence, she was no longer Plainview, Indiana’s secret. She was making recordings and traveling the country, performing for bigger audiences every year.
Clarice’s handsome husband, Richmond Baker, served as Forrest Payne’s best man. As always, Richmond radiated charm and goodwill. But it was hard to know if he was genuinely happy about having a role in the proceedings or was putting up a front for the sake of his wife.
In the fifth year of a separation, Clarice and Richmond’s marriage had finally hit smooth sailing. For Clarice, anyway. Life as a semi-single woman fit Clarice better than marriage. She was happy living in her own house and entertaining Richmond only when she saw fit. For nearly all the years they’d been together, Richmond had been as proficient an adulterer as Clarice’s father had. Yet Richmond was still trying to comprehend why Clarice had decided she couldn’t stand living with him anymore.
Decades of watching him break Clarice’s heart had seen me alternating between fantasies of taking a hammer to his head and visions of using a cleaver on his private parts. But even I had to admire the hard work he’d put in to demonstrate to Clarice how much he’d changed since she’d left him.
It was especially tough for Richmond to show that he’d given up his old ways on the day of Miss Beatrice’s wedding. The groom’s side of the sanctuary was populated with women who knew Richmond from a time before he became enlightened. Five years into his non-promiscuous existence, these ladies still remembered him quite fondly. From the front to the back of the church, top-heavy dancers from the Pink Slipper Gentlemen’s Club and other extravagantly dolled-up women waggled their fingertips at Richmond and mimed phones at their ears, mouthing, “Call me.” Even as he did his best to ignore them, I was certain that Richmond’s already oversized ego was expanding every second that he stood alongside Mr. Payne up at the altar.
After Clarice finished playing—the wedding program said the piano piece was “Clair de Lune,” by Debussy—she took her place beside her mother again. Miss Beatrice gave her daughter a kiss on the cheek, and the pastor gave the assembled guests one more warning to repent from our evil ways before moving on to the vows.
If Richmond didn’t take notice of the behavior and appearance of the folks on the groom’s side of the room, the Calvary Baptist regulars filling up the bride’s side certainly did. Miss Beatrice’s family and friends reacted to the exposed cleavage, gaudy jewelry, body piercings, and general raucousness of the Pink Slipper folks with a combination of open-jawed gawking and loud clucks of disapproval. Miss Beatrice’s grandchildren seemed to be the only members of her family having a truly good time. Clarice’s daughter and three sons, who had all come from their homes out of town to witness their grandmother’s surprising coupling, could barely contain their amusement. Clarice’s children were all over thirty, but the occasion had them giggling and whispering into each other’s ears like schoolkids. They stopped only when Clarice gave them the stink eye from the altar.
After Miss Beatrice and Forrest Payne were pronounced man and wife, their guests stepped outside into brilliant sunlight. In another week or so, the weather would be hot and humid, but on this day, the skies were cloud-free and there was just enough of a breeze to make the men feel comfortable in their suits and ties. The air smelled faintly of freshly mown grass and of smoke from charcoal fires in nearby backyards.
Mama would have adored everything about this day. She’d have witnessed an infamous purveyor of indecency and a woman who had devoted herself to stomping out, or at least pointing out, sinfulness profess their love for each other. She’d have seen the upstanding members of Calvary Baptist Church looking like their heads were going to explode as they played host to a crowd of people they’d have preferred to burn at the stake. And Mama would have had herself an annoyingly gleeful time, humming along in her wandering pitch with “The Happy Heartache Blues.”
As the guests tossed rice on the newly married couple, the flower girl, Clarice’s seven-year-old granddaughter, excited and happy in her lilac taffeta dress, ran circles around her ring-bearer cousin, leaping up into the air and trying to touch that glorious blue sky. Mama, never one to restrain herself in the presence of wild exuberance, would likely have shared in the rejoicing by jumping right along with the flower girl, and then scrawling an entry into her book.
Weeks after the wedding, I would look back and wonder if things might have turned out differently if Mama had seen or heard the old blues man that afternoon. Just a few words from her might have changed the outcome, or at least given James and me a chance to brace ourselves. But that’s how this journey works. We can’t prepare for the calamity heading our way, because it never looks dangerous until it’s right on top of us. We’re always too busy singing our sweet love songs and jumping for joy to realize that our teeth are about to get kicked out.
CHAPTER 2
El Walker told himself that once he was back at home, even though he wasn’t certain where home was anymore, he would see the humor in the latest turn his life had taken. He would cash his check, buy a bottle of whiskey, and have a good laugh about having spent two weeks in Plainview, Indiana, the one town on earth he’d sworn he would never visit again. But right now, his only laughs came from watching the ongoing slapstick routine performed by the patrons as they walked past him. One after another, they stumbled over a deep dip in the floor a little more than an arm’s length from El’s barstool. When he’d walked into the Pink Slipper Gentlemen’s Club earlier that day, he had surprised himself by smoothly sidestepping that depression in the slatted wood as if it had been just a few days, instead of decades, since he’d last entered the place.
He’d warned Forrest not to let Leroy build that floor back in 1949. Leroy was a hell of a bass player, but he had already disappeared into the heroin hole by then. He was the first of the bandmates to get hooked, and he couldn’t be trusted to do anything other than bang out a bass line. But Leroy’s father was a local handyman with a good reputation, and Leroy had looked like such a natural when swinging a hammer that Forrest had foolishly let him loose on the floorboards of his new emporium, where Leroy did just the kind of job a junkie could be expected to do. The floor he constructed rose and fell drastically every few yards. Now three generations of the club’s patrons owed twisted ankles and spilled drinks to that strung-out mess of a bass slapper.
El, along with Leroy and the rest of his bandmates, had helped build the club in ’49. Forrest had run out of funds halfway through construction, so he’d promised El’s band a regular weekend gig if they would pitch in to finish the place. They’d been children, most of them too young to legally enter the club. And they’d had no idea what they were doing. But together they’d scavenged, begged, or stolen every stick of lumber and each nail, and they had assembled something that still stood.
The juke joint they’d cobbled together as teenagers had been repurposed a number of times and had become the cornerstone of Forrest’s ten-acre complex of spectacularly lucrative enterprises. Now the rickety shack had been declared fashionable by a new generation. Restored to its original mission as a haven for blues lovers and drunken fools, it was more popular than ever.
El thanked the bartender for his second whiskey. All those years of traveling and playing at clubs small and large—well, mostly small—and the best thing about the traveling life remained the free drinks. Alcohol calmed his nerves. Nearly seven decades of performing, and El still felt a tingle of fear each time he moved toward a stage. That was a fact the boy who had helped build this place would never have believed.
Booze also dulled the pain in hi
s foot. Numbness had been the problem before El had lost two toes to complications from diabetes a year before. Now sensation had returned with a vengeance. The discomfort had grown worse over the last couple of months and had spread past his ankle. He turned on his stool and faced the stage on the opposite side of the room. With his back pressed against the bar, he swung his right leg back and forth several times, hoping that improved circulation might rush the healing alcohol to his sore foot.
The ache had subsided somewhat since he’d performed at Forrest’s wedding one day earlier. And now the whiskey had begun to warm his spirit as it anesthetized his foot. With each sip, El silently thanked Jim Beam for his infinite mercy.
The band onstage was a five-piece group, just like El’s had been in the early days. Sax, keyboard, string bass, guitar, drummer. They weren’t half bad for a bunch of college kids. Most of them were classical players from the state university on Plainview’s east side. Like a lot of the young ones El ran into, they had gravitated to the blues because they wanted to wear fedoras and talk like hepcats from a 1950s movie. The kids could play their instruments, though. They had chops to burn. It wasn’t their fault that having chops wasn’t enough. And, of course, they didn’t have Lily. Nobody sang or pounded those piano keys like Lily.
El was astounded to see that the sax player was sipping from a bottle of water. Water. Who ever heard of a blues man drinking water? Blues men drank whiskey and, occasionally, coffee or Coca-Cola to recover from the booze they’d consumed the night before. But never water. After the show, the kids would surround him as they always did nowadays, seeking advice and asking questions about every cut on El’s one album, bootleg copies of which they all seemed to own. El would tell them that the first step to being blues men was to spit out any drink that wasn’t some shade of brown.
Bubba, the sax player with whom El had shared the stage across the room half a century earlier, wouldn’t have been caught dead drinking water. At thirty, Bubba had been the only real adult in the band at the beginning. He had claimed to have been playing with the same reed since he was twelve years old, a feat made possible because both he and that thin slice of bamboo had been preserved by repeated soakings in cheap liquor. El knew that Bubba had been exaggerating. But the man’s saxophone had sounded great, and at thirty, Bubba looked like a schoolboy. So maybe there was something to it.
Bubba had a long face that reminded El of the large and exceptionally ornery horse El’s foster mother had owned. And Bubba had been nearly as brawny and tough as that horse. El had seen Bubba put away two fifths of Old Crow in a single evening and still have enough coordination and confidence to ask the finest women in the joint for a dance. It was Bubba who was usually left with the job of picking up the less experienced drinkers from wherever they’d collapsed at the end of the night. The sight of Bubba hauling limp drunks, draped over his wide shoulders, two at a time, through the club’s doors was something El would never forget.
Bubba was long gone now. Done in by his unquenchable passion for quick-tempered and well-armed women. Unfortunately, they had loved him right back. He’d died in 1972 in a hospital bed, where he’d been recuperating from a gunshot wound inflicted by his final poorly chosen girlfriend. The bullet wound had been a minor injury, and he’d been due to leave the hospital the day he died. But then he got caught in the crossfire of a gunfight that broke out between his girlfriend, who had come to apologize for shooting him, and his wife, who had been keeping a vigil at his bedside. At his memorial service, the police had to be summoned to contain the brawl that broke out among a dozen of Bubba’s women. El knew of at least six blues songs that had been composed about Bubba’s funeral. He’d written one himself.
Tonight, there was one more act before El was supposed to go on. The emcee, a round little man in a maroon sharkskin suit, trotted up to the microphone and asked the audience to show their appreciation for the band. Then he announced the next performer. “Our man El Walker is back at the Pink Slipper after a long absence, folks. And he’ll be taking the stage in just a minute. But first, we’ll see some dancing and get the Good News from sweet Charmina. Y’all put your hands together for our favorite servant of the Lord. And dig deep in your pockets to help this little lady put a new organ in her church’s loft. Here she is, the Pink Slipper’s own pole dancer for Christ, Miss Charmina.”
An attractive young woman strode onto the stage. Charmina had a lovely face. She had full lips, large brown eyes, and round cheeks. Her black hair fell onto her shoulders in glistening ringlets that bounced with each step she took. Her Kewpie-doll dimples gave her an air of innocence even as she strutted in front of the band toward the pole at the end of the runway at center stage.
El liked that she had some meat on her. Most dancers were so skinny these days, but not her. Back when he was part of the original house band, the girls were bigger. Much bigger. No one talked about firm abs or well-defined arms back then. Any woman who took the stage without jiggling a little couldn’t hope to be handed any real money. More likely, she’d be handed a ham sandwich.
Charmina was in no danger of wasting away. Her generous curves were outfitted with, and accentuated by, a bodysuit that perfectly matched her skin tone, making it appear from a distance as if she were nearly naked. Over her bodysuit, she wore a bikini made of dozens of green felt fig leaves. In one hand, she carried a large white wicker basket.
With her free hand, Charmina flung aside a curtain that covered an easel. Her grandly theatrical gesture revealed a sign that read, “Eve’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden.” When she thrust a hip toward the band, they began to play “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”
Charmina had already been working for Forrest for several years when, after leaving the club one night, she had staggered, drunk, into a revival meeting. Once saved, she immediately ceased performing most of the services that had made her the most popular dancer at the Pink Slipper, opting instead to hand out Scripture verses and to interpret biblical scenes through pole dancing. At first, her new act didn’t go over well with the club’s regulars, and Forrest came close to firing her. But her sincerity and her polite reminders to Forrest that, being an elderly man, he should get right with the Lord while he still had the opportunity moved him to allow her to dance for the glory of Jesus on Sundays, his slowest night.
To Forrest’s surprise, the faithful began flocking in to see Charmina. Her Sunday Gospel Dance soon rivaled Saturday nights in popularity. And Charmina’s fund-raising proved so successful that her pastor’s wife, who had once been among her most vehement critics, was now her biggest supporter. The first lady of Calvary Baptist Church had converted from foe to fan the moment the tally of Charmina’s donations from her opening month at the Pink Slipper was announced. It was a habit of the pastor’s wife to jot down multiple money-raising suggestions on Post-it notes during the church finance committee’s meeting and pass them along to her husband. When she learned the amount of money Charmina’s theological pole dancing had brought in, her only note to the pastor read, “Recruit more whores.”
The Scripture-based stripping paid off in ways Forrest hadn’t imagined. Charmina got to spread her message. Forrest developed a new customer base and inched nearer to heaven. Calvary Baptist Church acquired a new roof and was on its way to a new pipe organ. And when the nature of Forrest’s relationship with Beatrice took its dramatic turn, he was able to offer up Charmina’s performances as evidence that he was redeemable. Everybody won.
Now Charmina moved fully into the lights of the stage and set down the basket. She reached inside and extracted a snake. Six feet long, El guessed. A pale yellow-and-ivory albino python. Draping it across her shoulders and down the length of both arms, she began to dance. The snake’s name, El would later learn, was Percy.
El couldn’t abide snakes. It was a lingering effect, he believed, of the years he’d spent with a foster mother who was as nutty as hell and obsessed with snakes. When she was angry with him or any of the other kids, she would fo
rce them all to assemble in the kitchen. She would plant herself at the head of the table and, opening her Bible, tell them just what happened to misbehaving children when they received their punishment in hell.
“First, you get cast into a pit,” she’d say. “Then the snakes come for you. Big snakes. And you can yell all you want. Just gonna be more snakes comin’. Squeezin’ and bitin’ to beat the band. Then you’ll know the wages of sin for sure.” After she’d made her point, she would use her Bible to deliver a slap to the backside of whomever she was angriest at that day. Then she would leave them in the kitchen to contemplate their penitence.
El had been his foster mother’s favorite, so he hadn’t gotten the closed fist, the hickory switch, or the extension cord as often as the other children. Still, she had regularly whacked him with her Bible until he was fourteen and had grown so big that she worried he might hit her back. From that point on, she would simply touch her index finger to the corner of one eye to let him know that she was watching him. “Snakes, you little bastard,” she would say. “Snakes.”
El took another swig of whiskey to drive away thoughts of that foul woman, but Charmina didn’t make it easy. She and her snake were slithering toward him through the crowd. As the band played, Charmina strolled from table to table. Whenever she received a tip, she exchanged the bills for one of her fig leaves, so her felt-foliage bikini disappeared as she collected donations. By the time she worked her way over to El, the top of her bodysuit was uncovered. Not wanting to be any closer to Percy than he had to be, El practically tossed two dollar bills at her to get her to go away. When he looked at the fig leaf she’d left with him, he saw that it had an inscription on it. He held it up high where the light was a little better. When El read the words on the foliage—“His Forgiveness Awaits You”—he shook his head and muttered to himself, “Tell me God ain’t got a sense of humor.”
The Supremes Sing the Happy Heartache Blues Page 2
