LOST IN THE WOODS
(1962–63)
I fell back into Memphis’s easier rhythms and my old habits. Memphis State was like high school. I had to wiggle—rely on the “kindness of strangers”—to get myself enrolled. Baylor refused to send my transcript, a trick that could end with my ass in Vietnam. Somebody, somewhere in Baylor’s bowels was pissed at little Jimmy. With the help of old theatre friends and Vera’s mother, who was a placement counselor at Memphis State, I registered as a fifth-semester freshman, with no credits except those from summer school. I got the university’s first-ever psychological deferment from ROTC.
I signed up for theatre history and anthropology, and found a place to hang out across the railroad tracks from school, aptly named the Campus Grill. Charlie Freeman was enrolled part-time and at the Campus Grill most afternoons. Bass player Tommy McClure showed up occasionally. Sometimes a whole rhythm section would be there.
I gigged with them a little. Roadhouse gigs on Highway 51 and in Arkansas. But mostly I had started doing folk music gigs. I traded my Rickenbacker solid-body for a Gibson J45 fire-engine-red sunburst, got out my old Jimmy Reed neck rack and harmonica, and fancied myself the poor man’s Ramblin’ Jack. It was easy. No band; no split the cheese. Talk, make sarcastic remarks, and tell lies to the audience. Hell, I was good at that!
I played the Bob Dylan record for everybody, like when I tried to turn my high school friends on to Jimmie Rodgers, the Singing Brakeman, or Blind Lemon Jefferson. Back then, some got it, but not many. They thought I was kidding with Jimmie Rodgers. It was the same deal with Dylan. Most folks didn’t get it—yet.
I buddied up with Bill Newport, a kid I had known at White Station. His mother was my senior English teacher. He was a year behind me, in the same homeroom class with Vera and Steady Eddie. He was a good companion and co-conspirator. His garage-converted-pool-hall became my Room for Baylor Boys, a place of refuge and repose where we spent hours contemplating Eric Dolphy.
Memphis was beautiful that fall. The leaves changed slowly, gold to black gum red. I got a sheepherder’s jacket at the saddle shop where I had seen Elvis cracking bullwhips with Nick Adams back in the fifties. I gave up the Ivy League Bruce Wayne disguise and settled back into jeans, Sears work shirts, and black Wellington lowtop boots.
Jack Kennedy had managed to get elected without my vote. I turned twenty-one later that fall. The year of Camelot. I “became legal,” as we say down south. I could “vote and tote” (apply for a handgun permit), but more importantly, I could buy liquor and drink in a bar legally. I made full use of my new privilege. I drank my lunch at the Campus Grill, and caught a mild buzz before anthropology or philosophy class.
I searched for traces of the musicians in Sam Charters’s book. The beginning of the civil rights movement made old black folks distrust the white boy asking questions even more. My old actor pal, Leon Rossum, found the first solid lead. He was a student at Southwestern, and had a teacher who claimed Gus Cannon was his family’s yardman. They lived on Parkway, which had a tree-lined esplanade that had once bordered the city and now marked the beginning of Midtown. Gus lived on the place. He was tall and thin—old but not yet bent—baldheaded, with a Russian-looking fur hat and gold frame spectacles.
We found him bent over a gas lawn mower in the driveway. Two strange white boys walked out of the afternoon into the world of an old black man from another lifetime. We still didn’t realize what would to happen to us. He led us out of the chilled October air and into his room over the tool shed/garage behind the big house. A gas stove overheated the small room. I noticed strangely painted lead pipes upright in a box in the corner. We sat.
“There was a fella here month or so ago to see me. White fella. You boys from New York?” Gus asked.
Leon shook his head. “Memphis.” I wanted to say, “sir.”
“I came to Mefus when I’ze ’bout yo age,” he said. “Playin’ in a medicine show. Fust seen a fellow blow a jug in Mefus—give me idea for them blowin’ pipes.” He gestured toward the pipes. They were painted multicolored and capped on one end with rubber can stoppers. They had old bottle caps and pieces of colored glass beads stuck to the long sides. “Pipe’s got a mo’ better sound,” he added. “That New York fella had a machine with him and he recorded me. I used to make records ya know for de RCA Victor company. Yas suh. Folks don’t believe me when I say that, but it’s a fact.”
“I believe you,” Leon said reverently. Sitting in the afternoon sunlight, the old man rolled his head.
“You play music, suh?” he asked me. I nodded. “You have the look of a musician. Would you play fo’ ol’ Gus den? I don’t hear near ’nuff music these days.”
The old man reached under his bed and pulled out an ancient cardboard guitar case. He opened it slowly, removed the oldest Gibson guitar I had never seen, and strummed it once with his giant brown thumb. “I gots it tuned like a banjo, the fourth string down. You tune it to suit yourself.”
I ran the string the way it was, making my E chord into a minor. I pulled up the G string to standard (like the Bo Diddley open D tuning, yet another secret code of their magical black music). I ham-fisted slow blues. Gus Cannon, onetime leader of the Jug Stompers, slowly swayed in the dusty light streaks from the setting sun, his eyes almost closed. After a few minutes he asked, “You like that music, white boy?”
I nodded.
“Don’ mess with it if you don’ like it. Dats ol’ music and it sot in its ways.”
It was getting dark. We said our grateful goodbyes, and he told us to come back anytime. He did not play for us that first time, but he would many times in the future. His banjo was in pawn. The man who recorded him sent him a copy of his record and no money. “I’d sho’ like you gentlemens to hear my record, but I ain’t got no playin’ machine.” As we left he asked if we were from the NAACP.
When my family moved from Chicago to Memphis in 1949, we lived outside the city limits, east of town, in Berclair, a little community that consisted of a drug store, a hardware store, a barbershop, and Mr. Baird’s Big Star grocery store. Mr. Baird’s son, George, was my age. George was a chronic epileptic currently under sedation, dulling some of his mental processes. Resulting drug addiction and extremely poor vision added to his handicap. By high school he had fallen several grades behind. He had a reputation for fist fighting, which he did his own way, like everything else. He wrote poetry he recited from memory in an awkward, childlike fashion. Like Alfred Jarry, Rimbaud, and Branwell Bronte, George invented his own infernal world. The walls of his condition locked him inside his own reality. He had a child’s mind, forever a protégé.
He traps, hunts, and fishes.
He has an uncanny ability with animals,
Though he seems oddly cruel at times.
His world is not constant
And yet always the same.
Each moment is the same moment.
Every day begins at the same place.
Each morning though the same
Is always new.
Its God dumb.
To itself and its history.
George and I weren’t friends growing up because I wouldn’t let him trap squirrels in my yard. When our paths crossed ten years later, the first thing he said to me was, “Boy, Jimmy. I remember you. Never would let me trap your squirrels.”
George had done little since high school. He couldn’t drive. Bill Newport and I would take him to the pool hall. One night Jimmy Crosthwait, Newport, and I picked up George. We pulled into his long country driveway. He was in the backyard casting with his fly rod in the dark. I thought he was practicing his aim, casting almost straight up into the yard light.
“What are ya doing, George?”
“Fishing for bats.”
“George,” I said, amazed. “You can’t catch bats like that.” He smiled and held up a Mason fruit jar with six bats in it.
That fall we went on coon hunting safaris with George and his father’s hound dogs, including
Old John
Who was supposed to be
The best hunting dog in Shelby County.
When you heard Old John tree
You’d be sure there was a coon.
Old John could follow a trail too cold for the other dogs.
Old John didn’t hunt with the pack.
That was what first made me wonder about Old John.
He hunted way down in the bottoms
All by himself
And if he heard the other dogs tree something
Sometimes he came
And sometimes he didn’t.
If he did come
He was liable not to stay,
Coon or no.
When George called them in
The other dogs came,
But when Old John heard the horn
He went further and further away.
He’d be way off across the river
And down in the bottoms
When the other dogs came in.
George called and called until
Finally we had to go get him
Put him on a leash and drag him to the car.
But he was still supposed to be
The best coon dog in Shelby County
Because when Old John treed
You knew there was a coon.
Maybe what Old John really liked was those last few minutes when the other dogs have come in, and he has it all to himself. He could hunt in the bottoms, bawl his old bawl that he must have known was worn out, and stay out until George finally got him. Those minutes when everyone else quit it were all his, until the night he never came back.
I was downtown one afternoon, walking by the Peabody Hotel, when somebody shouted, “Hey, Baylor Theatre.” It was the writer from Route 66 whom I had met in Dallas.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Hometown,” I answered. “What are you doing?”
“Shooting an episode. It’s got a tall girl who rides a big motorcycle. I’ll shoot a lot of pieces and put it together back in Hollywood. Don’t suppose you could get me into Graceland?”
“Nobody gets in there,” I told him.
They shot a fight scene at the Penthouse Night Club, a place run by my friend and future manager, Herbie O’Mell. He had the first integrated house band in Memphis, with Charlie Freeman and Duck Dunn playing with Little Willie John. Hot stuff. My future bride was in the show, jumping a horse in the fox hunt scene. We had yet to meet.
I dated around and still corresponded with Vera, now at Emory University, and Barbara Teal in Cincinnati. By Christmas I was pretty horny. On her first night home for the holidays, Vera made it clear she was only interested in being “friends.” Fortunately Barbara came in town to visit her grandmother. We spent a couple of nights on the backseat of my white Chevy wrapped in a big king-sized blanket I borrowed from Harry Bowers, who was amazed by my good luck. Harry was hell with the ladies and still going with Anne Moss. But he could only dream of a woman like the fallen angel Barbara Teal.
After she returned to Cincinnati I felt the hole in my life more than ever. Vera drifted further away. I feared drifting back into the dire female psychodrama. I wrote long letters to Sandra Hudlow, who was matriculating at Baylor Theatre. I had seen her only twice, at Baylor for Nancy Barrett’s farewell party and in Breckenridge at the Belvina Supper Club. Yet I poured out my intimate thoughts to this almost stranger. I neared desperation.
Amphetamines, my newfound study aid, helped boost my grades. I crammed and outlined all night. Newport was in anthropology with me. Our professor was called “Dr. Nash,” even though he wasn’t a Ph.D. He was a radical non-Boasian, which was rare, with a unique take on race and prehistory.
Crosthwait had become an artist. He painted and made sculptures of found object junk. He lived in a shack a local poet, Kenneth Bowdin, owned on the Arkansas side of the river under the old Harahan Bridge. He made his own clothes and grew his hair below his shoulders. We hung out a lot. He played trap drums in the Counts, but seeing no difference between the down beat (1) and the back beat (2 and 4), he was a little abstract for mainstream music. He had worked in the Ozark Mountains for a Buddhist monk, Brother Upaya, who was digging a bomb shelter in preparation for the Apocalypse.
My parents went to Little Rock on weekends to see University of Arkansas football games with old friends. During high school I went with them, but now I had the new house to myself on a semi-regular basis. More poker games with Newport, George, Bowers, and “Drive-In Danny” Graflund, former King of the Toddle House, who was always up for six-packs. In high school, when my band played fraternity parties, Graflund would jump on stage and scream, “Suck fuck!” into the mic. One night he improvised a whole song as the band played “Johnny B Goode,” one of the most creative things I ever witnessed. An ex–football hero and hardcore fraternity boy, Graflund had a creative fire that had yet to surface completely.
One weekend, Bubba Hardy, the toughest man I ever met, ran a poker game in the breakfast room. “Drive-In Danny” Graflund, Bill Newport, and I smoked paregoric-laced Pall Malls in my art room. We broke out the tape recorders. I played acoustic guitar, Newport beat a bass drum boosted from Baylor Theatre, and Graflund made up vulgar song after vulgar song, one of which contained the unbeatable lyric, “Rat shit, cat shit, suck your mama’s tit, cocksucker, motherfucker, eat a bag of shit!”—a poetic verse that has served me well in many a hostile environment. The Paregoric Blues Band tape became legendary. A friend of Graflund’s older brother expressed concern for Danny’s soul and offered to pray with him.
That evening degenerated into a board-breaking competition. Newport used karate moves and laughed at Bubba Hardy, who used brute strength. They were breaking a nail keg. The competition proceeded without incident until George Baird broke a board across the top of his head. Later that night, during the poker game, George got too excited and had a full epileptic seizure, the only time I ever saw Bubba Hardy show fear. Newport bitterly took care of George; he was used to dealing with his friend’s spells.
George’s fit put a lid on the party. Andy Eudaly (“Tom” from The Glass Menagerie in high school) had been on the roof with a date. Andy was a lady’s man. “Dickinson, your life is a circus,” Andy said about the evening’s events. “Let me get you a date with this girl I know. She’s special.”
His words had a familiar ring. My only blind date had been in Waco, helping out a friend with a beautiful girlfriend. He fixed me up with her best friend, a three-hundred-pound Mexican girl with a mustache. Especial! At the time Andy and I spoke, I was doing nothing but walking around all day in my old bathrobe, drinking sherry, reading Brendan Behan, and listening to Sketches of Spain. It wasn’t working, so I told Andy to set me up.
Andy warned me, “This girl has class. Maybe you should dress up.”
I dressed up, sporting a seersucker suit, blue Oxford cloth Gant dress shirt, and my black Wellington boots. I splashed on Royale Lime aftershave and picked up Andy. I followed his directions to my date’s house in the heart of East Memphis, a couple of miles from White Station High School. My mother’s friends lived across the street. I had driven by the house a thousand times. A big mimosa tree dominated the front yard and two Cadillacs were in the driveway.
My date was tall and thin, a mix of Audrey Hepburn and Mary Tyler Moore. She was a little young for me, a senior at Miss Hutchison’s School for Girls. Mary Lindsay Andrews’s eyes flashed with mischief. Not my type. Andy and I followed the two girls past a big white grand piano into a boy’s bedroom with a stereo console in the middle of the floor, an overstuffed chair, a sofa bed, hand-drawn pictures of hot rods on the wall, and a set of Rogers drums in the corner. Mary Lindsay saw me look at the drums.
“Those belong to my brother.”
“Who is your brother?” I asked.
“Al Stamps. He’s my half-brother.”
AL STAMPS!
“Andy says you play drums.” Eyes.
“Yeah, I play a little bit.” I looked at my boots.
“I dare you,” she snickered.
I shook my head. She walked to the drums, sat, and played the drum part to Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say” perfectly. Mary Lindsay was smart. Her conversation included talk of books, movies, and music. Like Al, her mother and half-sister played piano. Mary Lindsay was a jumping horse rider. Ribbons and trophies attested to her ability. She moved with a soft rhythmic grace and confidence that comes with mastery. I started to pay attention. As we talked she came over and sat at my feet. Arpège. Fresh and inviting. It stopped me in my tracks.
It was a school night for Mary Lindsay, so Andy and I made an elaborate exit before it got too late. We came back thirty minutes later, and parked where a mimosa tree blocked view of the car. We snuck up to her window, and popped out the burglar bars. She snuck out, and we talked all night. When I touched her, I felt a charge down to my toes, not a static electric shock, but like grabbing a hot wire and not being able to let go. I didn’t want to let go.
I waited a couple of days to call Mary Lindsay. She was glad I called. We doubled with Harry Bowers to the Sky View Drive-In. I don’t remember the movie. She tasted like peppermint candy. For our third date we went to the Oso coffee house, which Charlie Brown had opened after the Cottage folded. The Oso was smaller, darker, older, and sleazier. Blues legend Furry Lewis was playing. I couldn’t wait. Charlie had found Furry living on Beale Street and working as a street sweeper for the city. Twice a day with a push broom and a garbage can on wheels, Furry Lewis swept Beale Street’s gutters and cracked and crooked sidewalks. Armed with my Webcor tape recorder, I picked up Mary Lindsay and headed for the Oso in North Memphis. She smelled great and looked dangerous.
Furry Lewis, a small black man with white hair and blue eyes, dressed in a dark gray suit and Sunday shoes, limped to the stage on a cork leg, juggling his guitar as if he might drop it. I asked him if I could record his performance. He said, “No suh. I don’t mind.”
He sang everything: old blues, stuff older than blues, minstrel medicine show tunes…. He sang Jimmie Rodgers, “All around the water tank … waiting for a train,” and after an abstract bottleneck solo, he yodeled. He sang church hymns and “St. Louis Blues” with no recognizable Handy lyric. He closed his last (of three!) set with “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” where in the melody both vocal and bottleneck went to a full four-chord change. Each time, Furry held the one and looked at his guitar as if it were missing the chord change all on its own. You couldn’t tell what was in the act. He told stories between songs and recited poems, like George Beard. He opened the second set with
Our father who art in Washington.
Mr. Kennedy be his name.
He taken me of off rat trap tobacco,
Put me back on golden grain.
’Cause the sweetest flower in the world is the lily of the beech,
And the worse whiskey I ever drunk
Right here on Poplar Street.
’Cause the hoppa grass makes the hops.
Honey bee makes the honey.
Good Lord makes all the pretty girls.
Sears and Roebuck makes the money.
“’Scuse me,” Furry snickered.
He was an incredible entertainer. I watched a living montage, sixty years of American subculture I had been separated from by racial lines. Now it was at my fingertips. Mary Lindsay could tell I was an overcharged battery. “That was something special,” she said when we were back in the car. “I feel lucky to have seen that.”
I drove aimlessly, not knowing where to go. I drove down the river. We talked. I told her about seeing the Jug Band when I was a kid. I told her about Gus Cannon. I told her about Butterfly and Dishrag and the “codes.”
“You live an interesting life,” she said. When I kissed her I no longer heard the music in my head.