SECOND SEMESTER
What the Monkey Saw
(1961)
The release form for an experimental workshop that would earn me an automatic pass in psychology lab mentioned inducing temporary schizophrenia. My hypnotherapist had already diagnosed me a paranoid schizophrenic. What could it hurt? LSD was just letters then. I had no idea.
Behind the post office was a small, cinder block building with a sign on the door: PRIMATE BEHAVIOR STUDY LABORATORY. Two clear plastic tents with a table and chair divided the front room. The next room contained barred animal cages. Student volunteers were tested against chimpanzees. We took standard psychological tests, putting pegs in holes and washers on the pegs, with one hand and then the other. The monkeys cheated, using both hands at once.
What looked like a thermostat hung on the clear plastic wall. From time to time a lab assistant dressed like the Gray Man adjusted the device. He wore a surgical mask, never spoke, and discharged aerosol spray into the air behind my head. Testing started with three males and three female chimps. Two males fought to the death and one female killed herself. I tested with a male, Clayton, who survived as far as I know.
Sharon had difficulty getting to Waco on weekends. She was a scholarship student living in a run-down off-campus rooming house. She didn’t have bus fare and depended on other students for rides. I went by the dorm for clothes, and found a message. She wasn’t coming. I felt tired. I hung around, fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, and woke in my clothes, disappointed Sharon wasn’t coming. I heard the dormitory coming to life and escaped to the Catacombs and our private world. The air was cold and clear. My first cigarette tasted like straw, reminding me of burning leaves at home with Alec and my dog. I took another deep drag, held it, and reached into my pocket for my shades. Shake it off, big boy. You can fight but you can’t win. You’re trapped like a rat. All you can do is play it out.
Back at the apartment, Pat smiled and put in extra water for coffee. She looked good in the morning. She always looked good. She had checked out of the dorm for the weekend. Browning was asleep with the customary look of horror on his face. We sat at the small red kitchen table with our steaming cups.
“Sorry about Sharon,” she said. “There was nothing she could do.”
“I know.”
“She’d be here if she could. She wants to see you.”
I shrugged it off. We heard screaming—“God damn”—from the next room and knew Jimmy was awake. More coffee and new plans.
“Well, just ’cause Bunn’s not here we don’t have to roll over and die,” Browning said. On other road trips we had visited Longhorn Cavern State Park, where we experienced total darkness. We had also visited Possum Kingdom Reservoir and experienced a lot of Oso Negro and Dos Equis Mexican beer. I didn’t know what he had in mind. “Is Wortham, Texas, somewhere around here? Do you know where that is?”
“Of course I know where it is. It’s in Texas,” he huffed. “It’s right down the road. What’s your sudden interest in Wortham? It’s just an old oil boom town that went bust.”
I went to the orange crate that held community records and picked up an album. “Says here Blind Lemon Jefferson is buried in Wortham, Texas. I thought if it was somewhere close we might go see his grave. It’s unmarked.”
“In the first place I’ve never heard of Blind Lemon Jefferson and how are we supposed to find a grave if it’s unmarked?”
“Well,” I told him, suddenly taking interest, “There’s this book I’ve got that describes how to get there with a picture of the graveyard.”
I played the record. Blind Lemon is hard to take, unlike Jimmy Reed or B.B. King. It’s hard counter-rhythm, strummed in an atypical series of patterns that doesn’t resemble standard blues form. He recorded early and stood out from the more gospel-structured Delta style. There’s a melodic counterpoint and ballad-like melody line that remains unique in the blues idiom.
I went back to the dorm and picked up my copy of Sam Charters’s book The Country Blues. I showed Browning pictures of Blind Lemon, deserted downtown Wortham, and the lonesome windswept graveyard with the unmarked sunken space where Lemon and his brother were laid anonymously side by side between his mother’s and sister’s marked tombstones. “This is great. This is great!” Browning exclaimed gleefully. “Old man Baker would love this! Pure D Texas at its obscure best. This is it. We’ll hit the road tomorrow. It’s all set.”
We spent the rest of the evening listening to “Black Snake Moan” and “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean.” Browning had discovered another thing about Texas in which to take pride.
Sunday morning. Old timers could feel a “norther” coming in the water pipes. Campus was deserted. The rooming house on Speight Street was hung over. Pat made coffee. The stereo was turned down low. “Black Snake Moan” crawled in the room. We drank hot coffee and went downstairs to the car. The platinum blonde sat shotgun, silent behind her sunglasses. I shared the back seat with beer and a sack of ice. Jimmy pointed the green Ford sedan south. We crossed the Brazos River with the north wind on our tail and a Lord’s Supper tablecloth commercial on the radio.
The scenery was a blur of rangeland, scrub oaks, and the Big Sky, as the locals liked to call it. Browning was from West Texas. His idea of “just down the road” and mine were different. Dilapidated oil rigs clustered in rusty bunches. Like good Baptists, they were not working on Sunday. Wortham was past the oil fields. We drove until we found an open gas station. The attendant was a kid. Jimmy did the talking. He said we were students from the college, writing a research paper. The kid pointed and mumbled something about “old men.” The old men weren’t hard to find. They sat on a bench around the corner from the Domino Parlor. One stood leaning on a crutch, his right leg cut off at the knee.
Browning asked if they knew anything about Blind Lemon Jefferson.
“Yah sah,” the one-legged man said. I took over, telling him what I had read on the record cover: Lemon was born in Wortham, he had frozen to death on a street corner in 1930, and the record company had sent a man south with his body, but it only got to Dallas.
“No, sah,” the one-legged man shook his head. “It was ’29. I remember ’30 was bad, but I never shall forget ’29. Me and ol’ Pete dug the grave.” He pointed back to the bench. “It was us that buried him. The ground was solid froze. They had to lay out planks to walk on. We built a fire to thaw out the dirt enough to dig. New Year’s Day.” He gave us directions, “Past the ‘white cemetery,’ outside the city limits on the left.”
We parked on the roadside. There was no gate. One strand of barbed wire was strung between the fence posts. A homemade sign twisting in the wind said CLOSE GAP. Blind Lemon’s unmarked grave lay between his mother and her sister. The chain of events that stranded his coffin in Dallas also took the record company money for a headstone. He shared a grave with his brother, who was “Cut up in the sawmill. Buried in pieces in a cardboard box.”
The afternoon sun was warm but a cold wind blew across the badlands. We huddled around the graves. Browning grinned with Texan pride. Pat stood shivering, arms crossed beneath her breasts, wondering what this was all about, what we were doing there. I remember the song Blind Lemon sang into the darkness, “There’s one kind favor I ask of you. Just one kind of favor I ask of you. Only see that my grave is kept clean.”
Back in Waco, at the old house, we drank, talked, and someone brought me the guitar.
Black and alone
Cars going by
Would not stop
Or know
And we killed them
By the hundreds
A night long ago
I sang my song
While the band played loud
And the world stood on its head
You give me someone
Half my size
And I’ll whip
A room full of them
“Watch me
Stick a poker
In your mother.”
Later that night, I took a blanket and retired to the back seat of Browning’s Ford. I slept there breathing puffs of fog, protesting the cold and damp grayness that seeped in through vents and window cracks.