They say revenge is a dish best served cold. I never really got that, but I do know that I never took pain very well at all. My father was a strict churchgoing man. He had no problem with bringing out the strap whenever any of us kids would get out of line. There was always a lecture on how much we had failed him and his god. Then we were walloped, and walloped good. I remember walking away from each of those encounters with his anger and his strap feeling hot, like my skin was burning. It would take me forever to calm down. I think the reason I took to guitar and the blues so eagerly was because it gave me a place to vent. I would slam power chords. I would wrestle notes off the fret board. I would tear through twelve bars. The white-hot heat of my anger fueled my music. Without it, I wonder how much more trouble I might have gotten into. But the pain I felt from Hardy’s beating had no such easy outlet.
I churned for days. While my face healed and the stiffness in my ribs and belly eased off, I felt that huge heat I’d felt as a kid. I was hip to the fact that he was too big and bad and mean for me to ever imagine taking him on physically. Plus there were Vic and Jerry to consider. So I focused my thoughts on how I could hurt him as much as he’d hurt me. I felt a bitter taste in my mouth. I felt tears burning at the back of my eyes, and I walked around my room with my fists clenched so hard my forearms ached.
There didn’t seem to be any answer for my need for revenge. There didn’t seem to be any easy answer for how to get out of his hold either. But I wanted both of those things more than I’d wanted anything. At that point it didn’t matter to me if I lost out on the studio and his big promises of a video and connection to music biz movers and shakers. What mattered was that I got free of him. I was bluesman enough to resent the idea of being any man’s slave. Finding a way out became my prime focus.
It came to me as all the best things do— unexpectedly and without stress. It just sort of fell from the sky like a great song lyric does or a fragment of melody that you hum and know in your gut that it’s awesome and right. When it came to me. I sat up straight in my chair. It was a simple enough idea, but there were a ton of things that could go wrong. Still, it felt good knowing there was a road to take.
“Play both ends against the middle,” I told Ashton.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “What does that mean exactly?”
I smiled. “It’s a player’s trick,” I said.
“Okay. But I still don’t know what it means.”
“It means you put out risk on purpose to get your needs met. Like when you want a certain thing to happen, you play the win side and the lose side together so that they cancel each other out and you get the result you want anyway.”
“So you put your head in the noose and hope no one kicks the chair out from under your feet?”
“Sounds about right.”
“In terms of Hardy, though, what do you mean?”
“I mean I play him for the money, not the horse.”
“Is this some kind of Indian thing, Cree? Because I’m really not following you at all.”
I laughed, and he looked worried. We ordered ourselves another round of coffees, and after they arrived, I leaned close to him and told him the details as they had come to me. It was complicated and took a long time. When I finished, he sat back in his chair and stared out the window. Then he looked at me and nodded. But he looked a hell of a lot more worried.