Travels with Barley (31 page)

I hit Clarksdale as the sun broke from the clouds and followed signs for downtown for a look around, driving past the Riverside Hotel, a ramshackle building once housing Clarksdale's black hospital and famous for being the place where blues diva Bessie Smith died after a car accident in 1937. The hotel was still open with rooms at $25 a night, no bath included. I was tempted to check in but decided a beer scribe didn't want to be stumbling down dark halls in the middle of the night looking for the John.

Shotgun shacks may have disappeared but pockets of Clarksdale indeed looked impoverished; the lovely if faded old downtown had the feel of a 1950s Southern movie set. There were a few gorgeous, rehabilitated old buildings, one housing a fancy bar owned by actor and Clarksdale native Morgan Freeman, and another holding the Delta Blues Museum, interspersed with lots of lovely but abandoned ones. On first glance, the prosperity of the mighty casinos hadn't made the forty-mile trip here.

I parked in front of an inviting little restaurant called the Delta Amusement Co. & Café and went in seeking a real Southern breakfast and, hopefully, beer knowledge. In my Northern dweller/healthy-food reincarnation, I breakfast solely on fruit smoothies and vitamins. But I come from a long line of bacon-eggs-and-grits eaters on my Arkansas side of the family and I sometimes crave the stuff. I'd clearly picked the right spot on all accounts—I ordered eggs, bacon, grits, toast, and coffee, all for about $3, and struck up a conversation with the loquacious and plain-speaking Bobby Tarzi, the owner of the place.

When I explained my mission, Tarzi, a Clarksdale native with a pleasing Mississippi accent, looked at me doubtfully. “Hmm, damn,” he said. “Monday night in Clarksdale, the beer pickins are gonna be slim. The juke joints around here operate on Friday and Saturday nights and a lot of places—well, we don't have a lot of places, but some of the other places such as we have—are closed on Monday.”

He thought this over for a second, then said, “Hell, come back here tonight around suppertime. We've got food and Monday Night Football and cards and people come in and shoot the shit and drink beer. I guess that makes us a beer joint. Why the hell not?”

I thanked Tarzi for his offer and said I'd take him up on it. I told him I'd come from Tunica and wanted, either now or later, to talk to him and others about the casinos. Tarzi said bluntly, “We can talk about it more tonight but it's definitely a mixed bag for us.” But he did know of one startling success story: a local guy who had the Bud distributorship and, pre-casinos, essentially stored beer in his garage and delivered it out of the back of his station wagon, so parlous was his business. “The casinos moving in were like ten or eleven superstores opening up for this guy. Now, eight out of ten beers sold in this whole area is one of his beers and with the casinos, that's a helluva lot of beer.” Tarzi gave me his name and I called him as soon as I left the restaurant. But an assistant told me, after a couple of conversations, that he wasn't interested in sharing his garage-to-riches story.

I went to lunch at Abe's, as Richard and Mary suggested, and had world-class ribs. Then, undeterred, I went looking for other Delta beer connections and found an interesting if oblique one. It was near Tutwiler, about fifteen miles southeast of Clarksdale, in an overgrown and hard-to-find Baptist church cemetery (the church having long ago fallen down) where blues harmonica legend Aleck Miller, aka Sonny Boy Williamson II, lay buried. The grave, unmarked for years, might still be impossible to locate except for a stone that had been put up by Williamson's record company a few years back. But the grave has become more than a blues shrine; it also seems to have become something of a popular beer-drinking spot—a development that would have hardly offended Sonny Boy, who, though he went off to England for a spell and did a recording session with British blues imitators the Yardbirds, spent a goodly part of his life in juke joints. (For the record, Sonny Boy didn't think much of the British blues knockoffs, who couldn't keep up with his chord progressions.) Many of the visitors leave behind beer cans (or bottles) or even full beers, plus harmonicas. Grumpy purists clean up the place from time to time (taking the cans and bottles but leaving the harmonicas). Based upon a strictly unscientific survey of the cans I counted in my brief visit, I concluded that most of the beer drinkers attracted to Sonny Boy's grave were Bud people.

I made a couple of more detours before heading back to Clarksdale, driving another ten miles so I could cross the Tallahatchie Bridge made famous by Bobbie Gentry's 1967 number one hit song, “Ode to Billie Joe,” her mournful ballad of teenage suicide. The hook of the tune comes from the observation of its storyteller, who furtively spies Billie Joe tossing some mysterious object off the bridge before throwing himself into the muddy, swirling, catfish-rich waters of the Tallahatchie River. Gentry has never said what that object might be. A movie, for which she got a screenwriting credit, portrayed Billie Joe as a put-upon, repressed homosexual (but still didn't say what he threw off the bridge). And even on the Web, which is rife with speculation about almost everything that's ever happened at any time to anybody, real or imaginary, I couldn't find the suggestion that had always occurred to me: that Billie Joe, doing what teenagers have done since the beer can was invented, was tossing his empties into the river so his old man wouldn't find them.

By stopping at a country store for a soft drink, I'd also heard about a place near Clarksdale called Hobson's Plantation where, if the guy at the store had it right, a person could check into something called the Shack Up Inn. This was said to be a collection of remodeled shotgun shacks that some enterprising entrepreneur had salvaged from nearby fields and operated as a hotel. I drove to Hobson's Plantation and, sure enough, found the shacks, lined up in a kind of gentrified shantytown, but there was no innkeeper about, otherwise I could have no more resisted checking in than I could resist checking into the Heartbreak Hotel back in Memphis. But it did help confirm my notion that the Delta's shotgun shacks had moved from poverty emblem to tourism kitsch.

I showed up at the Delta Amusement at around 7:30. There were about fifteen, maybe twenty, people there, including Tarzi and a cook. Almost everyone else was engaged in a couple of rambunctious and reasonably high-stakes card games in a side room, which I decided to stay out of, poker player though I sometimes am. Then Tarzi called supper and started laying down big plates of steaks and mashed potatoes and other fixings at tables facing a TV tuned to the football game with the sound turned down; a rock station, at the moment playing Don Henley, provided the audio. The platters were $10 and beer—Bud—was a buck. After the first one, you were expected to fetch the beer out of the cooler yourself and leave your dollar on the counter.

“This ain't Burger King,” Tarzi told me as he handed me my food. “At Delta Amusement you
cannot
have it your way.”

I liked Tarzi and realized he was one of those Southerners whose style took a little getting use to. He talked loud and peppered his speech with Southern aphorisms and not a few profanities. He offered a running and usually blackly comic commentary on pretty much everything. My Arkansas grandfather would have said that Tarzi was the kind of man who could talk a ham off a hog and he would've meant it as a compliment. He was busy, too, between hustling the food out to his regulars and a constant stream of telephone calls from people wanting to place bets on a football pool. I dug in to my steak and potatoes, which were tasty, and sipped my Bud.

Before I knew it, the football game was winding down and people were starting to file out; just the structure of the evening, with people absorbed in food, football, or cards, hadn't exactly provided the interview opportunities I was hoping for. Tarzi, sensing this, suggested we could go on a nighttime walkabout of downtown and look for another beer joint. Well, actually, there were only two possibilities, he said, both places nearby. We could see if they were open.

I'd managed to get some basics from Tarzi himself during the football game. He'd bought the place in 1988 after getting tired of being in the wholesale tobacco business. Plus, as a native son, the Delta and Clarksdale were in his blood and he thought that investing in a business downtown would be the most productive way to join forces with other business and cultural folks who were trying to keep Clarksdale from being totally swept aside by the economic forces of history.

It hadn't been easy since the fall of King Cotton and he seemed to alternate between cautious optimism and moments of testy defeatism. Blues tourism, and an annual Tennessee Williams Festival honoring the playwright who had also lived here for a while, had helped, but these things mainly brought people to town in big slugs. Generally, Tarzi would order extra beer and food for such events but he never quite knew how much of a splash-over he was going to get from them. As for those casinos back in Tunica, he said, “Hell, they've pretty much killed my card game. As far as I can tell, they're not doing us a damn bit of good.”

Out on the darkened streets, Tarzi gave me the lowdown on the straits of downtown. Gesturing, he said, “back in the '50s and '60s, all this street and all down that street was Cotton Row. We had five or six cotton traders downtown. There's one left. And everybody's become an Inc. or Co.—it's all corporate shit now. It wasn't that long ago that a guy with 150 acres could support a family well on cotton. Now, with 1,500 acres you'd be lucky to make it, and only if you get government help.”

He went on: “See that three-story building there? That was the Alcazar, a really nice hotel. It's empty now. A doctor just bought the building. This was the movie theater. It's closed, too. You realize that Clarksdale once had six bookies in town and it wasn't all that long ago, either. There was more action here than in Vegas, I'm not lying. Now there's just one. We had six bars down here—now it's a couple.”

Tarzi said he couldn't give me an accurate count but he figured about a third of the downtown buildings were now empty. “It's fucked up,” he said, “but it's nobody's fault. The world keeps changing and moving on. Sometimes I think that if it weren't for the government money that flows into this town [in the form of agricultural supports, public housing subsidies, and the like], you could take a bulldozer and just push the sumbitch over.”

I told him it seemed to me that he'd actually had a pretty lively crowd for a Monday night, given my experience thus far on the River of Beer.

He laughed and said, “It was all right but c'mon, Ken, there are 20,000 people in this town. You'd think on Monday night a lot more fellas would say, ‘Hey, Momma, it's guys' night out. I'm gonna go out and drink a few beers and play some cards and watch some football and I'll service you properly when I get home' Hell, I should be doin' better than what I did tonight. It's kinda sad, don't you think?”

I recognized this little soliloquy could be described by a term that, on the face of it, seems like an oxymoron but is common down South—self-deprecating Southern hyperbole.

Tarzi got distracted by two things: the rain that had started to fall in big splatters and his surprise that at least one of the two other beer joints he had in mind was actually open. It was the bar owned by actor Morgan Freeman called the Ground Zero Blues Club.

Tarzi seemed shocked. “Damn, they're never open on Monday night. Let's go check it out.”

On the way in Tarzi allowed that it was gratifying that somebody like Freeman used his Hollywood money to help revivify Clarksdale, saying the local scoop was that the actor had spent a veritable fortune without much chance, short-term, that he'd actually make any money. But maybe that wasn't the point. And as soon as we entered, I knew Ground Zero wasn't exactly a beer joint. It was a spacious and gorgeous watering hole and live music venue slipped into a tastefully restored turn-of-the-century building. And you could get, if you wanted one, a Sam Adams from the bar.

Tarzi didn't hang around long and I ended up in conversation with a group of beer-drinking locals. In the nicely lazy way things get talked about in the South, especially as the beer flows, the conversation ambled among several vital topics: the notion that Coors Light seemed to be making a real run at Bud, at least in Clarksdale; the temperamental differences between water moccasins and rattlesnakes; and whether there was some truth to the notion that people who often think about snakes see them a lot more often than people who don't. (As a person who'd been an ardent live snake collector back in Louisiana in my youth, I believe snakes can sometimes be conjured. That is: on snake hunts, I would often get a feeling I was going to encounter a certain kind of snake and shortly thereafter I often would.)

I was diverted from these pleasant ruminations by the appearance of an extremely large man at a table over by the door. I noticed a couple of things beyond his size: that he sat in his chair with his head cocked back, as though he might be staring at the ceiling, and that he had a beer in each hand. As I had not encountered any two-fisted drinkers since the short-order cook back in Al Capone's old bar in Dubuque, I decided to go over and investigate.

He told me his name was Jeff. He had thinning hair and a bear's head, a bullfrog-deep voice, and large, protruding eyes that looked like they had been frozen in pleasant surprise. He said he managed a trailer park and that the only beer he would ever consider drinking was Bud, which is what he was indeed clutching now. He had once been a more catholic beer drinker but converted to Bud-only when he learned what Budweiser stood for.