Guitar Man
(Or Robert Johnson Was Probably Lying But You Never Know)
by Kim Hartsfield
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Hey, I need to tell you a story. But first, let me tell you another story.
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It was 1977. I was a 17-year-old kid, running dope down on 34th and 83rd in Jackson Heights. I was pretty high myself this day. Who am I kidding, like most days. So take this with your grain of salt. Anyway, I’m hustling down 34th, holding probably a quarter, when who do I see but Rod fucking Stewart just strolling down the road, these two chicks with him, one under each arm, and a pair of dark sunglasses on, high as giraffe pussy. It was like something out of a dream, ya know? I mean, I had seen lots of famous people growing up in the city, but just bumping into Rod Stewart at 11 o’clock on a Wednesday night was unreal. So I walk over to him and say, “Hey man, I like your stuff,” and he smiles and says back in that crazy British accent, “I like your stuff, too, mate,” and I say back to him, “Mate. I’m gonna start using that,” and he laughs real loud and starts to walk on and out of nowhere. I have no idea how I got the balls to do this, but I ask him if he's high enough or wants some more fuel and he turns back and says, “What you got?”
I flash the quarter at him and he laughs again and throws a few hundred dollars at me and takes the bag and walks on. A quarter was going for about twenty-five bucks then so I was fucking rich. And that’s the day my nickname became “Mate.”
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My name is Leonard McEntire, but my friends call me “Mate.” I’m dying in the next few days, but before I do, I need to let the world know some stuff. Which is why I need to tell you this story. ‘Cause you ain’t gonna believe it.
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It was the mid-80s. Marsha and I had been married a few years, but it wasn’t working out. She was a bitch and so was I. Just kids. I was fucking a friend of hers named Debbie, or maybe Donna, I’ve smoked a lot of weed since then. I’m pretty sure Marsha was fucking a girl named Linda. Marsha is a lesbian now. I guess she was then, too. I like to think my big dick scared her away from men, but that probably ain’t true since I don’t have a big dick. I had been playing guitar with this group of guys for a few years. My buddy, Bryan, could play. He was the rhythm guitarist. I played lead. Just so you know, rhythm guitarists are usually in more high demand than lead because they are technically more sound and there’s less of them. Everyone wants to play lead. If you really want a shot at getting in a band, learn to play bass. A good bass player is hard to find. But I digress.
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I’m on the stoop of our apartment one afternoon, strumming my guitar. I was trying to get this Ramones song down, which should have been easy because those guys were shitty musicians (but a brilliant band), but I was having trouble. I hadn’t been sleeping well and my friend Rover gave me some sleeping pills and they had kind of carried over to my daytime. I’m moving my fingers up the fretboard, picking at the chords to try and make it sound right when I feel a shadow over me. It was late in the afternoon, but somehow that shadow was like a tree in front of you on a sunny day. I can’t really explain it. I look up, and there’s this Black dude standing there, watching me. He had to be in his 80s, maybe older. He was wearing a suit that was too big for his small body. He had a hat on, the kind people wore back in the 50s and 60s. It was cocked on one side of his head and pushed back. In one hand he held a fat cigar, the smoke rising up in a trail that led to heaven. In his other hand was an old acoustic guitar that had seen better days. He was barefoot. I remember thinking how odd that was.
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“What’cha playing?” he asked me. His voice was soft and gravelly, but with a tone that sounded like your mom talking to you on Sunday morning, asking you what you wanted for breakfast.
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“It’s called ‘Humankind.’ By The Ramones,” I said back to him. “You play?” I nodded to his guitar.
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“Yeah, I play.” He sat down on the stoop beside me. “It’s the F chord that’s getting you. That transition from F to G is tough. You can do it, though. Watch.”
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He put his guitar on his knee and put his bony fingers in a perfect F chord. If you don’t know how to play a guitar, F is really hard to make. I was playing up until a few years ago and still hated that F chord. But this old man just nailed it. Like he’d been playing his whole life. He strummed it a few times and I’ll be goddamned if that old acoustic didn’t sound better than my Gibson. I paid $500 for that guitar in ‘79. I probably had some Rod Stewart money left over. Then he switched to the G, then back again. He could have been doing it while sleeping. He wasn’t even looking at his fingers, he was looking at me.
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“See? Just that smooth transition. F… G. You try.” He slurred his words just a little. Not from drink, he’d just been saying them so long he’d worn the edges off of them.
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I tried but failed. The note was way off. It would have made a nun cry. He just chuckled.
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“That F is a real poke sometimes. Just keep going, you can make it.” As he talked, his fingers were dancing over the fretboard like they had a mind of their own. He was making music just sitting there. It was soft, you could barely hear it, but it was loud, too.
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I tried again and again. I was getting there, but it’s a tough transition to make. It was passable, most people wouldn’t have really heard it, but I did. And he did.
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“What’s your name, son?” he asked.
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“Mate. Well, Lennie, but my friends call me Mate,” I said back to him, but more out of habit than conversation. I was starting to get the move down.
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“Mate, like them boys from England say.” He affected a British accent and said, “I think I’ll have another shot of heroin, mate,” and chuckled at his own joke. “Them English boys are crazy, I tell you what.”
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“Yeah? I met a few, but never hung out with any.”
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“That’s good. That one boy that plays guitar in that German band. Whew. He can play the shit out of a guitar, but he’s really gone over. Talks about the devil and shit. Crazy. And dangerous.”
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I stopped playing and looked up at him. “The devil? What do you mean?”
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“Keep playin’, son,” he nodded down to my guitar. “That’s the only way you can get better. The only way that counts.” He turned his head to look down the street. There were some Mexican kids playing ghetto baseball against some Black kids.
“See that boy there? The one in the brown t-shirt? That boy is good. He’s got talent for the game. He got an eye for what to do and the muscles to do it.” He turned back to me. “But it’s the eye that’s the key. Knowing what to do, how to do it, that’s important. Hand that guitar to anyone and say, ‘Now put your fingers here. Okay, now here. Okay, now move them here,’ don’t make ‘em a musician. That English boy, he had it all. Know-how and ability. Still weren’t enough for him.”
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I was moving from F to G pretty good now. It sounded right. Just for kicks, I added in a little tremolo off the G. It felt right. The old man’s eyes widened, then he smiled.
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“I think you got it now, Mate. See if you can do the F, G, D-minor run they do in the second chorus.” As he was talking, his hands were already making the move.
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I tried to follow, and did a pretty good job of it, but not like him. I could have passed for Johnny Ramone, but I realized that wasn’t good enough.
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“So what do you mean German band? I thought the guy was English,” I asked. I liked to hear him talk.
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“The name of the band was German. What do you call them big balloons the Germans used in World War Two? Americans called ‘em something else,” he said, looking down at his fingers for the first time.
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“Zeppelins?” I said. Then it hit me. “You mean Led Zeppelin? Jimmy Page? You met Jimmy Page?” I was excited now.
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“There it is. Yeah, Zeppelin. I met that English boy that played for them. Back in the day. He showed me how he played. I was impressed. Told him he needed to work on his showmanship. He was shy. Guitar players ain’t shy. Not the good ones.” That last part he said as he leaned into me, like it was our secret.
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“Jesus, you met Jimmy Page. That’s cool. How’d you meet him?”
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He scrunched his face up in a grimace and turned away from me. I heard him cough deep in his chest. To mollify the cough, he took the cigar off the stoop and drew on it. It seemed to calm him. He blew the smoke out of his nose as he turned back to me.
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“I was in England back in ’65. This boy was playing for peanuts at studios around London. I hung out there, in them studios, just walking the halls with my guitar.” He raised his guitar off his lap and looked at it. Something akin to affection rose in his eyes. “I saw a lot of them boys then. I knew the fella that owned the studio, so he let me in. I remember telling this Page kid he was the best I’d seen in a while. He didn’t seem to care much, just nodded. He knew he was good.”
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“Did you jam with him?” This was the coolest thing that had happened to me since Rod Stewart.
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“Yeah, a little. He had some reefer and back then I didn’t turn that down too much. So we played. I taught him a few things, just a little. I saw him in concert ten years later and he did this thing with his pinky finger when he played the C where he bounced it off the two top strings that sounded nice. I taught him that. I turned to the girl with me and said, ‘I taught him that’ and she just smiled at me.”
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“That’s fucking cool, man. You meet anyone else?” I had stopped playing and just watched him, waiting for another gem to fall out of his mouth.
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“Oh, yeah. There was a big scene about to explode then. I was around it all. I remember when the blues was the Black man’s music. They even called it 'Race Music' and White people didn’t want anything to do with it. Hell, even some black folks didn’t. White people didn’t like it because it was Black music. Black people didn’t like it because it was the devil’s music. But in the 60s in London, these White kids started playing the blues like they was born to it. I was there.”
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“Damn, you are a unique dude. What’s your name, anyway? Maybe I heard of you?” I listened to a lot of music growing up. I knew a lot of musicians.
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“Oh, you ain’t heard of me. I did a lot, but ain’t none of it written down anywhere. I played small joints in Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama. Should have moved up to Chicago when I got good. But ain’t nobody really listen to me but Black folks. And we didn’t write much of it down. But my name is John.”
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“John what?” I almost whispered it.
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“John Delaney. John Pierre Delaney. My momma wanted me to have a fancy name like Pierre but my daddy wanted me to have a man’s name like John. They both got what they wanted, but Daddy won I guess. Ain’t no one ever called me Pierre.” He chuckled and something rattled in his chest. His laugh turned to a cough and he went for the cigar again.
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I let him get his breath back. Once he did, he raised his guitar back up and played a little. It was amazing watching him play. If I closed my eyes, I could almost hear two people. He started singing, real low. To himself almost. I couldn’t understand the words, but I liked them. It made me calm and raised the hairs on the back of my neck at the same time.
“Want me to show you how to do that? That’s called the twelve-bar blues riff. My style.” He was still playing as he talked.
I had heard of the twelve-bar blues, all good musicians had, but I had never heard it that way. His way. I hunched over my guitar and started putting my fingers like his and nodded my head. “Yeah,” was all I said.
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Just about that time, Debbie (or Donna) came out of the brownstone. She was wearing short shorts and a halter top and a pair of mismatched socks. Her red hair was tied back away from her face. She had a bottle of Pepsi in her hand. The drops of water from the bottle dripped onto her white halter top.
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“Hey, Lennie. What’cha doing?” She sat down right beside me and leaned in, pressing her shoulder against mine, sliding her knee under my guitar.
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“Not much. Just jamming, ya know.” She was already fucking me, but I still had to play cool around her. Women don’t like it when you stop playing cool. Even if they know you’re not cool and are just trying, they still like it. I think maybe they like it more. “This is John, a friend of mine. He met Jimmy Page. He’s showing me some stuff.”
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“Who is Jimmy Page?” she asked. I was crestfallen. I thought learning some moves from a guy that taught Page some moves would probably translate to a blow job later. But she didn’t even know who Jimmy Page was.
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“He weren’t nobody special, young lady. Just another guitar player, like me. And Lennie. He just got famous,” John said, a smile playing along his face.
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“Oh,” she said, taking a drink of Pepsi. “I like Huey Lewis.”
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John and I both gave her a tight smile.
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“So, are you gonna stay out here and play, or do you want to go inside? And play,” she said, rubbing her knee against mine. Her eyes almost closed as she spoke.
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“I, uh… John is, well. He’s good and he has some cool stuff to show me. And, uh…” You can see my dilemma.
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“I got some cool stuff to show you, too.” She stretched her back like she was yawning but she wasn’t yawning.
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“Well, Lennie, I’m gonna keep walking. You kids have fun. Keep practicing, boy. You probably got it.” He stood and shoved the cigar in his mouth.
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“Got what?” I asked him.
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“It.” And with that, he left.
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And that was the day Donna (or Debbie) saved me from the devil.
My name is John Delaney, though when I played back in the 30s in Mississippi, people just called me J. P. Delaney. After a while, it just became Jeep. This was before the car called a Jeep, I was the first. I played blues from when I was about seven to when I died at twenty-seven. Weren’t but about twenty years, but I did a whole lot of living in them twenty years. A whole damn lot. Some people whispered around that I got my skill at the guitar from Old Scratch, but naw. I just practiced all the damned time. Well, I practiced, played, slept, drank and messed around. So it wasn’t all practice. I doubled up on a lot of them doing two or more at the same time.
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This one girl I was seeing by the name of Betty was plum crazy about me. She’d heard that I ran with the devil, so she thought I was kind of scary. I was just a skinny kid from Eutaw, Mississippi, but I acted all mysterious around Betty. She liked it. I liked that she liked it. Her husband, he ain’t like it at all.
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So one night, after a show in some podunk place in the Delta, Betty comes up to me with a bottle of whiskey and a big ol’ smile. Her shirt was soaked through with sweat, it was July in Mississippi, and her skirt hung down just above her knees. Above her knees, not below. They didn’t make skirts in 1938 that stopped above the knee. She did that herself. There was a reason she was wearing a skirt that ran up that high.
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“Noah gone to Greenville for the weekend, John. We got the house to ourselves if you like. I fried up some catfish and Noah bought some whiskey from Bob Lawson. Bob makes whiskey in his cellar. And I made a jug of iced tea, just how you like it. You want to come over?”
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She was getting too excited, so I gave her that look to shut her mouth. She did, thankfully. Noah Robeson weren’t no joke. He got ran out of Vicksburg by a White lynch mob for trying to get a better deal on some land. Legend says he snuck back into Vicksburg a week later and killed three of them white boys. It wasn’t if you believed it or not, it was that you could believe it. Noah Robeson would kill a man and not even think about it. I didn’t want to end up on his killing list.
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“Jeep! Boy, you sure know how to make that goddamn guitar talk. Is it true what they say about you? Done sold your soul to the devil to play like that? Because I’d like him to come on down and make that deal with me. I’m going to Hell anyway, might as well get something out of it!” This from a big guy with a shaved head. He was shirtless but wore suspenders over his bare chest. His canvas pants stopped just below the knee, but a pair of boots started about there. His name is Elijah Brookside, but everyone just called him Brook. It took a lot of whiskey to get ol’ Brook drunk. Tonight, he’d had a lot.
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“You really think I’d sell my soul, Brook? Just to do this?” and I ran my fingers up and down the fretboard, making them strings sing. When you got down near the bottom of the frets, you just wiggled your fingers like crazy and they would make a sound that’d make your momma wet. Brook just whistled; Betty moaned a little.
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“Let me see that thing, Jeep,” Brook said, reaching for my guitar.
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Now, I need to tell you something. Ain’t nobody got a right to touch another man’s guitar. That’s your baby. That belongs to you and nobody else. Women? It ain’t right, but go right ahead if you think the risk is worth it. She ain’t belong to no one. But that guitar right there? That’s mine. She only sings for me.
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I pulled it out of his reach. “I can’t let you touch her, Brook. Don’t nobody touch ol’ Bea but me. Go over to Spuddy’s and get you one you want to learn. I’ll teach you some.”
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“Man, let me see your guitar. I just want to play it,” Brook said. He wasn’t used to people telling him no. Did I mention he was a big ol’ boy?
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This time he grabbed it. I wasn’t ready for him to be so quick. He tried yanking it out of my hand.
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“Brook, goddamn it, let go. You can’t have her,” I said. The crowd got a little quieter as they started noticing.
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“Jeep, I’ll whoop your ass if you don’t let me play your goddamn guitar,” Brook said as he pulled with all his drunk strength. I let go on account I didn’t want her to break.
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Brook turned and looked out in the audience and made a clumsy strum on my guitar.
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“I’m a blues man now, everybody! Listen to this.” Brook started mauling Bea in a way that made me madder than I’d ever been. I grabbed a bottle of whiskey sitting there on the stage and knocked the shit out of Brook, right across that bald ass head. He faltered but turned to me, drunk and dazed and I walloped him again, right across the face. The bottle broke. Brook wobbled but took a step at me and I shoved that bottle in his gut, broken side. He made an odd sound and dropped the guitar, but I caught it before it hit the ground. He clutched at his stomach, getting blood all over his hands.
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“Ain’t nobody touch my guitar, dirty motherfucker.”
The room was quiet. Nobody said nothing. Brook wasn’t anyone’s favorite person, so nobody rushed to help him when he hit the floor. And I think they was afraid of me a little. That devil talk made everyone think twice.
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The owner of the place, Ed Harron, finally spoke up.
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“Boy,” he said, “you better git.”
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I got.
It was Debbie, I remember now. A nurse came in to check on me and her last name was Lombardi. That was Debbie’s last name. Debbie Lombardi. I even remember her middle name, too. Corine. I don’t know why I remember that, though. Strange how things just come back and hit you in the brain for no reason. They leave like that too.
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Nurse Lombardi smiled the way nurses are supposed to, fake but still compassionate. She adjusted my pillow and checked my vitals. I remember when I was a kid, nurses wore those white dresses and that weird hat that only nurses wore. My mom was a nurse. Now, they wore scrubs. It seemed like another way we’d just gotten lazy. I knew it was more comfortable, but goddamn those white dresses and funny hats just meant something, ya know? Maybe I just missed my mom.
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“How are you feeling, Mr. McEntire?” she asked me while writing on a chart.
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“Like a tumor is growing in my brain,” I said. I tried to smirk, but the smirk side of my face had been paralyzed for a while.
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“Well, there’s a good reason for that, Mr. McEntire.” She stopped writing and looked at me. “Because you do.”
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I had to laugh. So many of these damned nurses were sweet like those pink packets of fake sugar on the table at Denny’s. Not Nurse Lombardi. She was that weird brown packet.
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“You see many people like me, Mrs. Lombardi?” My words came out kind of crooked.
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“Sometimes, yes. You can call me Vicki.” She was walking around the room, opening curtains and moving that little table you eat off of when you’re in the hospital.
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“What’s the prognosis for us?”
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She stopped doing busy work and looked at me. I could tell her brain was working on an answer. Finally, she said, “What would you like for lunch, Mr. McEntire.”
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“That bad, huh?”
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She continued to stare at me.
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“You can call me Mate. And I’ll have a sandwich.”
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“We have ham, turkey and—” she said, popping her fingers out as they listed them off.
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“Doesn’t matter, Vicki. I’m not going to eat but a few bites and I can’t really taste anything anymore.”
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“Ham it is. Water to drink?”
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“Sure. Can I get lots of ice? I can eat ice.”
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“Of course you can, Mate.” She took my hand and looked at the wrist band I was wearing. I guess it lists dietary information on it. She was checking to see if I could have ham and bread and water. My fingers tried desperately to move, but to no avail. That side of my body had checked out.
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“I used to play guitar, ya know. Those fingers were magical.” I felt a tear well up as I remembered moving my fingers up and down the neck. Now they wouldn’t even move for a pretty girl.
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“Oh? My dad played in a band for years. Played bass. He met my mom backstage in 1986. She was a groupie. They both deny it, but why the hell would a seventeen-year-old girl be backstage at a rock concert in 1986?”
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“You’re probably right. Nothing wrong with that, though.” I remembered the small cadre of groupies we had. There were three of them, two of them sisters. Ugly as sin. I guess the groupies got better looking the more famous you were. “What was your dad’s band?”
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“The JH5. The JH stood for—” she started.
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“Jackson Heights, yeah. I remember them. The lead guitarist died, didn’t he?”
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“Yep. The band pretty much broke up after that. Dad got a job as a subway operator. Mom became a nurse after I was born. I always liked it, so here I am.”
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“My mom was a nurse, too. And here I am.”
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“Is she still around?”
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“Nope.” It still hurt me to answer that question with a nope.
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We stopped talking and just let the conversation rest. She squeezed my hand. I couldn’t really feel it, but I saw it in her eyes. “I’ll go get that ham sandwich for you, Mate.”
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About an hour later, an orderly came in with my sandwich. I don’t think it was ham, but it didn’t matter. It was soggy and looked like shit, so I didn’t even take my customary two bites. I just chewed on ice and watched the TV.
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The next morning, Vicki came back wearing her pink scrubs. She looked happy. That made me happy.
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“I asked my dad about you; he remembered you. Said you were a pretty good guitar player. Was your band really called the Purple Dicks?” She said it with a smirk on her face. She could still smirk.
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“Yeah. Magnificent, isn’t it? The Purple Dicks.” I hadn’t thought of that name in years. It still made me smile.
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“What was your logo?”
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“Surprisingly, a giant purple dick.” Paulie had drawn a big purple dick and taped it to his bass drum.
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“Like an eggplant?”
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“More like a dick.”
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A sly smile ran across her face and her eyes crinkled just a bit. “I bet you were a handful back then, Mate.”
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“Still am,” I said without thinking. I wasn’t a handful anymore. Not by a stretch. I knew it would change the tone we had. She would feel sorry for me. An old man still not aware that he was old.
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“No, you aren’t. You’re old.”
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Goddamn, she was good.
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“Why did you quit playing, Mate?” She had taken a seat next to the bed and scooted up near me. I’m sure she had other patients, but fuck ‘em.
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“A girl named Debbie, actually. Debbie Lombardi. I was about to learn to play from the Devil himself when she saved me. I never really got back into it. I drifted away.”
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“That sounds like a story worth hearing. What did the devil look like?” I couldn’t tell if she was humoring a dying old man or actually curious. I didn’t care, though.
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“An old Black dude. Barefoot. Carrying a beat-up acoustic. Oh, and smoking a cigar.” I remembered John’s smell. One of those things that just sprint back to your brain. Mud and smoke.
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“You’re full of shit, Mate McEntire.” She started to stand.
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“I’m serious, Vicki Lombardi. I saw the devil.”
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She looked at me, in the eyes. Her hand squeezed my hand (she was on my good side this morning) and began to nod her head. “I bet you really did.”
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“I did.”
I ran out of that place and down toward the river. I knew that delta like the back of my hand, had grown up in an oxbow with that river all around me. I figured I’d lay low for a week and maybe come out a few miles upriver and start over. They knew who killed Brook and they let me go. The White sheriff would spend about ten minutes on the case before he called it a suicide or something then go back to Greenville and have a Coke.
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Before I got too far, I heard Betty calling my name. I shoulda kept running, but I didn’t. I liked Betty, and I needed to be around somebody that liked me right now.
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“They all seen you running to the river. Just circle back in about an hour and come to the house. I’ll be waiting.” I could have kissed her right there. She ain’t never looked so beautiful to me. Her hair, normally pulled back, had come undone and stretched out behind her like a queen. She’d ditched that wet shirt and was just wearing a white t-shirt now, tight against her skin. She was barefoot.
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“Okay, Betty. I’ll see you in an hour.” I did kiss her. Then I ran.
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I got to the edge of the Mississippi and hunkered down in some mess of cattails growing wild there. It was wet and muddy, but I took off my shoes and strung them over my shoulder. I grabbed a cigar from the pocket inside my coat and used a match to spark it up. I figured I had time to finish off this stogie before I headed over to Betty’s house for some relaxing and not relaxing.
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Well, unbeknownst to me, Brook was working with the county sheriff to find some old moonshiners out in the sticks. Sheriff Lloyd would let Brook get away with his shit if Brook would just tell him where the moonshiners were moving to. When word got back to the sheriff, he was mad as a wet hen that somebody killed his snitch. He figured the killer must be a moonshiner and a murderer. I didn’t know it, but I didn’t stand a chance of making it to Betty’s that night.
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I was about half done with that cigar, leaning against a cypress tree, when I first heard them dogs baying. That caught me off guard. I knew Cecil Murphy and Detta James kept a dog or two, but they wouldn’t let them out this late in the summer. Weren’t much to hunt this time of year. It didn’t take me long to figure out they were the sheriff’s dogs and I had best keep running.
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Betty lived north, so I took off south. I wasn’t gonna run right to them. I sloshed through that delta like a man possessed, scared for my life. I kinda wished I had made that deal with the devil, maybe he could grant me some powers to get the hell out of here. But I didn’t. I was just a kid who practiced.
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I saw the lights next, bouncing around the trees and cattails. Then the voices of men, hiding behind the howling of the dogs. I kept running. I’d lost my shoes somewhere, but my guitar was still across my back and I’ll be goddamned if I still wasn’t toting that cigar. I ran closer to the water, hoping it would kill my scent. Truth be told, when they close enough so you can hear them talking, ain’t nothing gonna save you but the Lord. I weren’t friends with the devil, but I weren’t friends with the Lord, either.
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It struck me funny that, throughout most of my life, I’d had it easy. Easy for a Black man in Mississippi in the 30s I mean. I worked the fields a lot. A whole damn lot. I only had four pairs of shoes in my life (and I’d just lost one), I don’t think I ever got new clothes; all I got was my brother Odell’s hand-me-downs. Don’t know if I ever loved a woman. Don’t think I did. But, all things considered, it could have been worse. Yet here I was singing the blues. I often thought maybe I wasn’t meant to sing the blues. Maybe I was meant to farm and raise kids and sit on the front porch until I died. Now, being chased by the law for murder through the Mississippi Delta, I felt like maybe I was a bluesman. I just hoped people saw me that way, as a real bluesman. I wish I coulda helped other people play. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so ornery to Brook. Maybe I shoulda taught some people.
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That’s what I was thinking when the bullet went through my heart. At least they missed my guitar.
Vicki Lombardi’s shift started at 7:00 a.m., but she usually got to the hospital around 6:45 a.m. to get the lay of the land. She was hanging her coat over the back of her chair when she saw a big red D written beside “McEntire, L.” and the time. 6:38. The red D meant deceased. She’d missed him by seven minutes.
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Vicki had started working on the hospice floor of the hospital about seven years ago. It was less hectic and had a peaceful feel to it you couldn’t find as a nurse anywhere else. Most people hated being around death so much, but Vicki didn’t see it that way. She was here to comfort people in their final days. Hours sometimes. It was a highly rewarding job and she was good at it. And the death? It never really bothered her. But this morning, she cried.
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There was something about Leonard “Mate” McEntire. Just something about him. She had asked her dad about him and he had told her that Mate was a great guitar player back in the day. When the guitarist for his band died, they were going to ask Mate to join, but he had dropped out of the scene by then. Damn shame, her dad had said. He was fucking good.
The other nurses on the floor pretended to believe her when Vicki blamed the tears on a head cold. They nodded and smiled when she excused herself to go to the bathroom. They lowered their heads and acted like they didn’t see her duck into Mate’s room. As a general rule, the nurses on the hospice floor didn’t cry when someone died. But they all had. Vicki was allowed her turn.
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She stood near his bed, on his good side, and smiled. She wished she could have known him in another life. He was the kind of guy that would keep you on your toes. Funny, smart, talented. But more than that, he was sharp. She knew when he was on that stage, he was a star. Her dad had said pretty much the same thing. But he quit. She would never really know why. Maybe he should have sat with the devil that day.
A kid sat on an old chair in the backyard of her house. She was trying to play “Gorgeous” by her favorite singer. But it was harder than anything she had ever tried before. She was too slow on a chord change and the tempo just fell apart.
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A shadow fell over her. Someone had walked up from the woods that butted against her backyard. It wasn’t uncommon. People in small-town Mississippi were weird and neighborly that way. Sometimes you just took a shortcut. The kid looked up to see an old man smiling down at her. His torn jeans and dingy t-shirt looked older than dirt, but the guitar he carried was immaculate. It was a Gibson L-1, a fucking classic.
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“It’s that F chord that’s getting ya, kid,” he said in a thick New York accent. “Everybody hates the fucking F chord. I still do. But you can do it. See? Watch this.”