Dark End of the Street - v4 (4 page)

I loved the music. It was Memphis.

But most people, even feverish fans, didn’t know Clyde. Still he managed to be a cult figure in Britain and some critics believed he was the best soul singer who ever lived. Desperate. Almost operatic. One critic said, “Clyde sang sad songs not like his life depended on them, but like what his life depended on was gone and these songs were what was left.”

It was pretty close to the truth. Just as James was getting national attention, his haunting version of “Dark End of the Street” topping the charts, James started suffering from some deep mental problems. His wife and a member of his band had been killed in south Memphis, and in the time that followed, articles said James had suffered more emotional problems. Sometimes he even climbed onto the roof of the old movie theater that served as a recording studio and dared anyone to pull him down.

I read that there were rumors James ended up in a mental institution and that his new record company tried to keep it quiet. He reappeared briefly in the early ‘seventies and did an unreleased album for Willie Mitchell at Hi. Then he was gone again. Some say a prison in Florida. Others say they saw him singing in the early ‘eighties in Germany.

About the best thing ever written on James was in a four-year-old issue of a British music magazine called Mojo. The writer threw out a lot of theories from James’s contemporaries about what happened. The accepted story was that he killed himself about a decade ago. Broke. Forgotten. The man who could’ve been the next Otis, still a shadow.

I replaced the tire and tossed the dirty flat and oily jack into the back of the truck. No cars passed. The cotton stretched all around me in silence.

I started the truck and headed north to Memphis.

I could do this quickly. No bars this time. No jukes were needed to find the answers. I would treat this like an academic exercise and return back to NOLA.

That’s what I told myself as I saw the loose outline of Memphis just over the Tennessee border, already tasting a sandwich from Payne’s and a cold forty on Beale. My heart began to pound in my chest like a child first seeing the rides of an amusement park form in the distance.

BY 2:15
A.M.
., I was dancing with the largest woman I’d ever seen in my life. She had double-wide hips, ham-sized arms, and breasts the size of watermelons. Right in the middle of Wild Bill’s Lounge, she held me close to her chest, shakin’ her big ass as the band tore into a nasty, up-tempo version of the Johnnie Taylor classic, “Who’s Makin’ Love.” The singer was about as large as my dance partner, in a tailored pin-striped suit and Jheri Curl hair, preachin’ the gospel of Memphis soul. Driving drum beat, that spooky ‘sixties organ, almost country and western guitar, and a small horn section punctuating every emotion. The singer stopped in the middle of the song, drum and guitar carrying on the rhythm, bragging to a woman in a plastic snakeskin coat, “Ain’t nothin’ short on me but my mustache.”

Wild Bill’s was a straight shot of a bar with long tables where everyone smashed together commune-style, a place where three dollars and fifty cents would get you a forty ounce and a clean glass. The room was narrow, painted orange, and decorated with Christmas lights, Polaroids of drunken patrons, and posters of black women in bikinis.

A juke house usually meant an old clapboard shack or storefront in some tired Mississippi town. But Wild Bill’s lived in a strip mall occupied by a dry cleaner, a deli, and three beauty shops. One offered no-lye relaxers and body weaves.

I seriously didn’t come to party or dance or act like a complete fool. Actually, I had just been sipping on the last of my forty and working on a plate of spicy chicken wings when she’d pulled me out onto the floor. Soon I was bumping, shaking, and strutting at her side. Didn’t want to offend anyone.

I even tried to move with her, but she kept on bumping me with her butt and about knocking me out on the street. So I planted my boots hard to the floor and tried to hold my ground, even smiling a bit when the band finished out the tune.

Felt like Travolta when he stayed on the bull in Urban Cowboy.

But as I began to walk away to my beer and wings, the band took it down a notch with a slow ballad. The woman grabbed my hands, locked them around her waist, and took me for a slow ride around the small dance floor.

She twirled me all around — my boots barely skimming the floor — and I felt like something stuffed with sawdust that you’d win at a county fair. I finally returned to my seat, chewed the remainder of meat off the last wing, and drank in the whole scene.

She watched me from the other side of the room and sent me another beer. I nodded at her, careful not to get too close. She looked like she wanted to keep me as a pet.

All around me, people were passing about bottles of Canadian whiskey, screw-topped bottles of champagne, and more quarts of beer. They sweated into plastic hotel ice buckets, hooted with laughter, and unwound from the hard week.

Besides the rhythm guitar player, I was the only white boy in the house.

I took a sip of warm beer and watched the man work his guitar. He was skinny and kept the kind of beard you’d expect to find on a character from the New Testament. Wore a T-shirt advertising Atlanta blues mecca Blind Willie’s, Wranglers faded almost white, and Birkenstocks.

Man’s name was Cleve Mack and thirty years ago he’d created the nerve center for some of the greatest soul music ever recorded. Always worked that way. Didn’t matter if it was Stax, Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, or Bluff City. The greatest soul music was a blend of white and black artists, a pure Memphis melting pot of country, gospel, and blues.

I pushed away the skeletal remains of the wings and the last of the amber beer in my glass. My thin notebook was in my back pocket and I was ready to get some leads. That big woman had worn my ass out. No more hip shakin’ tonight.

I found Cleve out back behind the strip mall smoking a joint beside a rusting Dumpster that smelled of sulfur and shit. His face wrinkled like old parchment around his blue eyes. His body so thin, he looked as if he were sick or on a hunger strike.

I walked over, introduced myself, and told him about Loretta and her desire to find her brother. Cleve sucked on the joint and kicked at a paper basket of wings. He toed at it for a few moments but wouldn’t knock the messy bones on the asphalt.

“Man, ole Clyde James, best there ever was,” Cleve said in a drawl crossed between a black from south Memphis and a white Delta farmer. “Too bad that poor motherfucker is deader than a choked chicken.”

Cleve took another hit off the joint. He offered it to me, but I shook my head, pulling out a pack of Marlboro Lights. The smell of Cleve gave me a sudden rush of growing up in lower Alabama, blaring Led Zeppelin and the Stones, and eating handfuls of M&Ms under blacklit posters.

“How’d you know he’s dead?”

“Bobby Lee Cook told me a while back. Said Clyde finally done and shot hisself.”

“How’d he know?”

“Bobby Lee Cook, man. He ran Clyde’s label, Bluff City.”

I remembered Loretta mentioning his name.

Everything was wet in the back alley. Trash. Chicken bones. Somewhere in the distance a child screamed, and then starting laughing.

“Goddamn! What the fuck was that?”

I peered beyond a high fence, but could only see endless rows of dilapidated houses occasionally shining with yellow bug lights.

“Man, that scared the cat shit out of me,” Cleve said, with a touch of anger in his voice. He laughed and held on to his chest in a Fred G. Sanford move. “Dude, you said you write about music?”

“Yeah.”

“How’d you find me?”

“You know Tad Pierson?”

“Yep.”

“He’s the one.”

“Well, listen,” Cleve said. “Me and the fellas in there are puttin’ out a CD in a few months. You got a card or somethin’?”

I handed him one embossed with the Tulane logo, not bothering to tell him I was a researcher and did little reviewing. “What was he like?”

“Oh, that was like another lifetime ago,” Cleve said and sighed, playing with the loose ends of his long, greasy hair. “I don’t know. Man kept to himself. For most of the time I knew him, he wouldn’t say shit. He’d play cards alone in the back of his tour bus or make these weird little drawings of heaven and hell. Real strange. The devil he drew was always a good-lookin’ woman. . . . I guess the only time I saw him come alive was when his manager or handler or whatever would put a suit on him and push him out on that stage. He never had that holy rollin’ kind of thing like Otis or Sam and Dave, and that’s probably why he wasn’t a big star. But just for pure singin’, man could sing clear as a church bell. Makes the hair raise on the back of my neck to think about it.”

I finished the cigarette and ground it under my boot. The front of my T-shirt was soaked in sweat and the cold wind began to make me shiver. Cleve kept on sucking on the joint until it burned his fingers and he dropped it to the wet ground.

“So what happened to him?”

“Everything got crazy for us when Eddie died,” he said. “We were changin’, the music was gettin’ rougher. No one wanted to hear “When a Man Loves a Woman.” People wanted to hear “I’m Black and I’m Proud.” About that time, Clyde gone and got this new manager, just a kid, really, who didn’t know how to handle his problems. I mean Clyde had always been crazy, but after his wife and Eddie died and all those rumors started . . .”

“What rumors?”

“That the baby was Eddie’s. You know she was pregnant when she got killed?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, Clyde just kind of split. You know in these slivers. You had happy Clyde, sad Clyde, mean Clyde, all in about five minutes. We couldn’t deal with it anymore and he was gettin’ freaky on stage, too.”

“How?”

“Forgettin’ words. Talkin’ to himself. You name it, brother.”

“Did you know his wife?”

“Lord, I was never too much into black women. But if you talk to Tate, that country ass will tell you another story. But me, not that I was prejudiced or nothin’, it just didn’t appeal to me. But Mary — wow. She had this beautiful dark skin and these wide almond-shaped eyes and these legs never did end. I still don’t know how Clyde got her. When he wasn’t on stage he was just plain weird. She treated him like he was a little boy or somethin’. Like this one time we were playin’ this hotel in Montgomery. Clyde just started cryin’. We were all havin’ a good time listening to this football game on the radio and drinkin’ vodka martinis, ’cause we thought we were pretty hip in our mohair suits and all. But Clyde all of sudden has these tears fallin’. His face wasn’t messed up and he wasn’t makin’ a sound. It was just the eyes. Man was carryin’ some dark things.”

Cleve shook his head, used a guitar pick to scratch his bearded chin. You could tell he was back in 1968. He was in his twenties, the women were dancing with loose hips, and he was living in the center of a cultural explosion.

“You see him much after you guys split?”

“I haven’t seen Clyde James since ‘seventy-three,” he said, staring down the long stretch of alley. His eyes closed for a moment and then opened as if waking from a lengthy nap. “But you know what? Whatever I do, I’ll always just be Clyde James’s guitar player. Only played with him for a couple years. Be on my tombstone, though.” He nodded to the back door of Wild Bill’s. “You hear those cymbals?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Bill doesn’t go for long breaks.”

I asked him for his number in case I had more questions. I was already thinking about my nice, warm bed at the Peabody and maybe getting up early enough to have breakfast at the Arcade. “Go talk to Cook,” Cleve said.

“You know where to find him?”

“Hope you like eggrolls and pussy.”

I looked at him.

“Find the Golden Lotus down by the airport and you’ll understand just fine, my brother.”

OFF HIGHWAY 7 near Oxford, Mississippi, Abby MacDonald stared at the house that once held her entire world. Seemed like another lifetime ago when she lived there with her parents. The old house was one-story, broad and white, with a tin roof and wraparound porch. On the corner by the driveway, a wooden swing hung from metal chains. Her mother’s plants and flowers — that had withered and died since late summer — lay by the front door.

Behind the house stood the stables, but the horses had already been taken away. She guessed that her cousin Maggie had picked them up. Their dogs Hank and Merle, too. She remembered what the cop had said about Merle finding them. How he stayed at their side. Whimpering.

From the shoulder of the two-lane, she could just make out the crumbling plywood of her old playhouse in the magnolia tree. A knotted rope hung loose below.

She wished she could climb through its twisted branches, through the white, fragrant flowers, and into the safety of a world she’d created for herself. Up there, she never had any worries. True evil never existed. Only the sweet voice of her mother calling her to dinner, making her leave tins full of mud pies and discarded toys.

Her scarred knees and broad grins were all gone now.

She pulled the keys from the old F150’s ignition and took a deep breath. It was about 5:00
A.M.
. Loose traffic blew past her on the way to Holly Springs and Memphis as she looked at herself in the rearview mirror. A weak, predawn light crept around her.

Dark circles rimmed her brown eyes. Her curly blond hair was limp and dirty and her face flat — washed of any color. Any life. Twenty-two years old and already tired of living.

Maybe it was that she was tired of being on the run. For the past two months, she’d existed in a hazy fog in roadside motels and truck stops. No one knew where she’d disappeared. She only wanted to be left alone and for the pain to stop. The days had passed with bottles of cheap wine and a blur of blacktop and scattered yellow median lines.

Being anonymous could be reassuring.

Abby gritted her teeth and got out of her car, a black duffel bag in her hand. The silence was almost too much. Each step she took on her lawn, as she looped to the back of the huge house, was pain.