need to do a sound check?”
Ben shakes his head, takes his time to wipe his lips with a slow-moving tongue. “No suh,” he says. Bollinger waits a moment, as if expecting some salty axiom after all the lip-licking preliminaries. He gets nothing, only Ben walking slowly toward the steps. Bollinger rushes forward about the time Ben grips the handrail and positions his body to descend. I start in that direction, but wait, as Bollinger says, “No warm up act, right? I remember that from the show in Buffalo.” He pauses, his eyes gaining the reverence he had inside. “What did you say then? ‘I smoke dynamite, drink TNT. I can do all the heating up myself.’”
Bollinger smiles as though he made up for his sound check gaffe. Then again, how would he know the schemer of schemers doesn’t really need a sound check because of his near-perfect ear and because he doesn’t want people to think, after forty years of performing, that he’s become too professional? Sideways, Ben maneuvers down the steps, pretending to slap away my aiding hands. When we reach the bottom, we turn and wave, then make it inside the car and get it and the AC cranked up.
“Bet he tells everyone that shit,” Ben says.
“What shit?”
“Best concert ever. I don’t think I even played Buffalo in ‘72,” Ben says, steering us into the flow of traffic. “Maybe that’s just me growing old, though.” He sighs. “Getting forgetful.”
I wave my hand near the brim of his hat. “Who you trying to kid?” I say.
Behind the wheel, Ben faces me and grins, showing off the gold sleeves on his upper and lower teeth.
“What about that guitar, though?” I say. “Think it’s real?”
“Pardon?” he says.
“Don’t go pretending you’re deaf.”
“I didn’t understand what you meant.”
“Blind Willie’s guitar,” I say. “You think that’s the real thing?”
“Hard to tell, hard to tell.” He unwraps another protein bar and tugs at it with his teeth. “But I doubt it.”
“You watch, though,” I say. “Bollinger won’t let you leave tonight without something he can tack up next to Solomon Burke’s conk comb or Big Joe Turner’s shoeshine kit.”
Ben laughs, puts down the protein bar. “Practically stuck that bottle down my throat.” He pulls out a tape from his inside pocket, plugs it in the player. Miles Davis: “Kind of Blue.” We lean back and let the frosty AC bathe our faces, forgetful of all else for the moment. Then, at a red light, Ben raises his hand to his mouth and works it there until he says, “Think he’d like these?” and shows me the gold sleeves in his palm.
•••
Back in the hotel, two hours before the show, I’m barbering Ben. I only know one haircut, a straight baldhead administered with clippers, but neither of us ever spends much time without a brim on—porkpies and fedoras usually—and Ben started losing his hair in the seventies. Not that hair loss bothered him. Going bald spared his having to get a jheri curl like Bobby Bland and the other B.B. and damn near everyone else.
Ben’s eyes open when I cut off the clippers. “That’s nice,” he says, rubbing the top of his head. Silver and black hair falls as light as cigarette ash. “Razor it for me, too, Pete. Fear I got a shaky hand.”
I blow stubble from the clippers’ teeth into the pile of hair on Ben’s sheet-covered lap. In a voice not unlike Sonny Boy’s, I sing, “Razor my head for me. I fear I got a shaky hand.”
“Sounds good,” he says. “Been practicing?”
Been practicing? Man, I’m always practicing, my harp, my Delta accent, trying to make it all sound true to the blues. But Ben doesn’t need to know. “Naw,” I say. “Just trying to make you realize you’re talking in twelve bar cadence.”
“Occupational hazard. Two weeks ago at the Waffle House I said, ‘Two strips of bacon, na-na-na-na, nice and lean, na-na-na-na, put it on an English muffin, na-na-na-na, or you’ll see a man get mean.”
“Waffle House doesn’t serve English muffins,” I say, lathering up his head with aloe-scented Barbasol. “And I’ve never seen one strip of swine on your plate.”
“The pig is an unclean animal. Part dog, rat and cat and not fit for eating or even to touch,” he says, affecting the stern and clipped speech of one of Reverend Louis’s boys.
“How much for a copy of Muhammad Speaks, Brother Shabazz?”
In the mirror, he looks me up and down. “I’ll give you a two for one, ‘cause you look like you need all the help you can get, brother.”
Here in the Ramada, it’s fine to laugh like Mrs. Owens’s boy. Razor in hand, I have to wait a minute. Don’t want to lop off Ben’s ear. Bollinger might have someone nearby to bust in and snatch it. When I’m composed enough to razor a clean stripe through the white foam, I catch a tiny glimpse of myself in the mirror and look away. On tour, I depend mostly on Ben’s eye to measure if I look the part of Silent Sam. Or I’ll concentrate on one feature at a time. Mustache ok? Any sleep in my eyes? Hat tilted at the most rakish angle? But I never go out of my way to examine a head to toe reflection. Like now: Even though I’m in my underwear with my stage clothes sprawled on the bed, I don’t risk another glance.
•••
From backstage, the crowd looks ok, maybe three, four hundred. Definitely more than I expected. Problem isn’t that they’re all white—I expect that kind of crowd. What we’ve got tonight are young, Soloflex types, tanned and dressed in bright colors and eager to toss each other around a dance floor. The blues faithful come to exalt in the presence of an authentic artifact of some quasi-southern, quasi-African past. Tonight’s crowd would make Jimmy Buffet happy. Backstage, I’m tugging at my clingy shirt, which is less the color of motor oil, and more like a pigeon’s neck, when Bollinger comes over, asking if we want anything to eat or drink. I shake my head and Ben says no. “You sure?” Bollinger says. “Chef Davis’s catfish just melts in your mouth.” Disappointment lines his forehead a minute, but he wipes his hand across his face and comes up smiling. “Say, do you remember the series of diaper ads that featured ‘Born Under a Bad Sign?’” he says.
“Sho, sho,” Ben says, seated in the folding chair he’ll remain in during the show. “Had them dancing babies in them, didn’t they?”
“That was one of mine,” Bollinger says, the gold buttons on his blazer rattling as he touches Ben’s arm.
While my hands part the stage curtains, I remember those commercials like a bad night of drinking. I was in my last bar band, Jack and the Dull Boyz, in East Lansing then, and everybody wanted to hear that song and flail around like the babies in the commercials. One night I got so agitated I yelled, “Albert fucking King. Know who he is?” Someone tossed a full can of Stroh’s at me. I ducked just in time.
“Anyway,” Bollinger says. “I wanted to get one of your songs, Brother Ben. For GM. Either ‘Old Black River’ or ‘Leavin on My Mind.’ But Mr. Mabry and I couldn’t agree on a price.”
I pull back from the curtain, pleased to hear Ben, in his managerial guise,
