We stayed in my room a long time that night, spinning records, looking at the covers, and talking. Or I should say that she talked and I listened. I had no clock because I had no reason to be anywhere at any particular hour. I never paid much attention to what time it was. Sometimes I noticed the church bells tolling, but they were more like background music than a reminder telling me I had to do something.
“You’ve got Django’s first album, the one he made before he changed his name? You know about that, right? His first band was called the Soul Strangers. They were his first love when he was just a kid, our age, his first shot at the big time. They played blue slave music stolen from a lost river delta in the New World, like everybody else did in those days, white boys trying to be black men. He called himself ‘The Crawling King Snake’ and ‘The High Priest Gone.’ And he went. He disappeared. That’s how it happened. He vanished, and then he came back as Django Conn, the Late Great Lord of Glister, the new Frankenstein.”
There was a different look on her face when she talked about monster movies. Sadness, but the sadness that some people actually like to feel. Late autumn leaves have that sadness, and so does the look of a room after a great party is over, and some kinds of music too: slow and dreamy and deep as a goldmine.
“Remember? At first there was a rumor he came right out of the movie screen, like he was a special effect blend of Boris Karloff and Elsa Lanchester, Bela Lugosi and Carol Borland. Did you ever see her? She’s great in Mark of the Vampire—cool, creepy, and beautiful. People said that Django was like a creature made up of all those stars. Vampire and mad scientist and werewolf. Witch and warlock, ghost and ghoul. But he’s got something bigger, something ten thousand times more high voltage than horror movie stuff, and that’s the voice, the words, the sound.
“You know, I’m still buzzing from the show. It was just last night, and it feels like it was a year ago, or in another life. I was really gone, really scrambled. I woke up this morning and it was like my whole body was a deck of cards that had been totally shuffled, dealt out, and played in some weird game. And I don’t even know the rules. I was up front by the stacks. You said you saw me, right? I was practically close enough to touch him, and I felt the power surging off the stage, off of Django himself right into the crowd. Into me, myself, and I-don’t-care! Everything was changing. Cells, germ plasm, brain spasm, molecules. I don’t know what to call it, except everything was new and true, through and through, thank you, thank you, Sweet Jesu!”
Sometimes I think she was replaying songs from the deepest places in herself, the words and rhythms so much a part of who she was. And at other times they seemed more like messages.