ON A TRAIN THAT IS PASSING THROUGH
(1955)
The end of the Memphis summer is a pressure cooker.
The lush green of spring has long since faded
Through the sun-bleached ripeness
of the dog days. Hot, dry, long afternoons drag
Toward the slow down of fall
and harvest.
Time starts to lean
Forward toward the countdown
Before school starts again
and the repetition of routine.
There is always
The anticipation of the unexpected
The possibilities of whatever
The new girl at school
Her name was Vera. She had dark red, almost black hair pulled back in a ponytail. She wore horn-rimmed, cat-eyed glasses like the sexy secretaries on pulp detective dime novels’ covers. She wore cashmere sweaters with buttons down the back. That did a lot for her figure, which needed no help. When she strutted down the hall, books clutched to her chest, the waters parted. She had transferred from Kingsbury, a school full of hoodlums and jukebox babies. She rode in a carpool with a friend of mine from homeroom. He stuttered, barely managing an awkward introduction on the school parking lot. She smiled. That Friday night at a school sock hop in the cafeteria, she walked up to me during the last dance. I was standing around, trying to keep my collar up.
“Well,” she said, sarcastically. “Since it looks like you’re not going to ask me to dance, I guess I’ll have to ask you.” She was a great dancer. She told me to call her. We talked on the phone for hours, days, weeks during that school year. Her father, an ex-newspaperman from a small Alabama town, played chromatic harmonica and had the first real record collection I saw. Her mother liked me. We spent hours drinking coffee and smoking Pall Malls in the kitchen.
Vera was soft and feline. She didn’t know anybody at White Station, but had her eye on society, hell-bent on being a sorority girl and moving up the food chain. Even then, I was a little left of center. We dated off and on through high school but she always had her eye on some pre–Ivy League slick with a mama’s-boy haircut and a high-end future. We went to horror movies at the Normal Theatre by the university: Curse of the Cat People, Return of the Wolfman, and best of all, Creature from the Black Lagoon. The white bathing suit scene with the scaly Lizard Man swimming secretly beneath the unaware bathing beauty was an unforgettable vignette in my early pursuit of happiness.
Vera had no use for Elvis. She was a pupil at Jane Bishoff’s dance studio, studying modern dance and jazz dancing. There was no professional dance troupe in Memphis in the 1950s. From time to time, Jane took her most talented dancers to perform at a supper club, Silver Slipper, out on the highway. One night, Vera encountered a young, unknown Elvis. He was clowning backstage, flirting with girls and flashing a shiny, tin badge inside his pink sport coat that read, “Chicken Inspector.” She was unimpressed, to put it mildly. To further her point, Vera played me a 78 record of “Big Mama” Willie Mae Thornton singing the original recording of “Hound Dog.” I made her play it over and over, fascinated by the loose groove and the sarcastic lyrics glossed over in Elvis’s simplified white-boy version.
This was one gem of arcane knowledge I drew from her father’s record collection, which was mostly vintage Dixieland. “Big Mama” Thornton’s “Hound Dog” featured Kansas City Bill and Orchestra, which sounded like no more than a trio. It was the same song Elvis sang, but with more lyrics, more story, and an incredible groove. The drums turned the beat over and over. There were extra beats in the chord progression and irregular word phrasing in the vocal delivery. The band howled and barked like dogs as the song faded out. I loved it, my favorite thing since Will Shade and the Jug Band in Whiskey Chute. I made Vera play the intro on that worn-out 78 over and over, trying to discover this primitive-story-in-song’s secrets: “You told me you was high class / But I could see through that / and Daddy I know you ain’t no real cool cat.”
I think Vera saw where my life was headed before I did. To me, she represented my only chance at a so-called “normal” life, which included graduate school and a day job in a world where I would have been miserable. The more I got into an artistic lifestyle, the further I grew away from her value system and her father’s right-wing politics. The mainstream establishment I had been taught to accept slipped further away. Music opened the door to a life that pulled me into something only my grandmother had seen coming.