Ace Atkins - Dark End of the Street

Man, we looked terrible walking into the hotel lobby, some kind of convention just breaking up around the bar. The Peabody was all dark wood and marble, brass rails and oriental carpets. The smell of aged whiskey and the gentle notes of a jazz piano. The kind of place that made you feel you had a couple more zeros in your bank account. The hotel had given lodging to Faulkner and Robert E. Lee, and local legend says the Delta begins right in its lobby and stretches out to Vicksburg. Still, most tourists just remember their mascot ducks that paddle around in the fountain all day before returning to their rooftop roost.

But the ducks were long gone by the time we got back. It was late, approaching midnight, when we tracked mud over those oriental carpets looking for a place to fall asleep. U’s truck would’ve done nicely.

But instead of heading with us to the front desk, U stopped cold and pointed to a couch in the center of the lobby. I could barely make out who was waiting for us. I mean, it was a convention of real jackasses. Laughing at bad jokes. Drinking that free company alcohol. A couple slow dancing without music.

But then she turned around.

Loretta.

Dressed in a floor-length black suede coat, a black turtleneck sweater dress, and tall black boots. She was smoking; Loretta hadn’t smoked for two decades.

Suddenly, I felt like I was about ten and my mother had come down the street to make me come home for dinner. My face and neck heated with embarrassment.

“Said not to tell you,” U said.

“Thanks.”

This was all I needed, Loretta coming up to check on me. She did the same damn thing when the Saints threw me off the team and about everyone I knew had quit me. My girlfriend at the time was sleeping her way through New Orleans social hounds and I had gotten myself into an intimate relationship with bottles of Jack and Beam.

Loretta found me at this biker bar by the Riverbend puking in some bushes. She didn’t say a word but grabbed my ass, stuck me in the back of JoJo’s El Dorado, and drove me back to my warehouse. Never did ask how she knew I was there.

“What, you ain’t happy to see me?” she asked.

“Yes ma’am,” I said. My head beginning to throb. “Where’s JoJo?”

“Lord, look at you. Ulysses, you do this to my boy? I told y’all, you ain’t young men anymore. Fightin’ like kids.”

“I was in an accident.”

She touched my head and then patted my face. “You’ll be fine. And JoJo ain’t here. I took the train myself this afternoon. He had the damned nerve to ask me how he was supposed to eat. I told him to serve himself some of that “jump up” breakfast. He asked what it was and tole him that was the kind where he jump up off his ass to make it.”

U laughed. My head kept throbbing so I didn’t try.

“And who is this?” she asked, looking over at Abby.

I introduced her to Loretta, and for a moment – knowing every one of her facial expressions – she thought I was scamming on one of my students. Abby was in her twenties, but I was well aware she looked about fifteen. She was polite to Loretta, even offered her hand while looking at the ground.

Loretta just reached over and held Abby to her fattened bosom. Loretta always had the ability to find people who were in pain. Sometimes in her show, she’d spot some poor bastard who truly was living the blues and start making him laugh. It was beautiful. It was a gift.

U said, “Good to see you, Loretta. You got him now?”

She smiled and wrapped her other thick arm around my waist.

“Hey, man,” U said. “Come on with me for a second.”

I got untangled from the family hug, Loretta already seated with Abby and plying her with questions, and followed U back out to his Expedition parked in the Peabody’s mammoth parking garage.

“You sleep,” he said. “I’ll watch.”

“Go home. I’m fine.”

“Woman got your gun?”

I nodded.

He laughed again. Maybe even harder than when he found out that I’d driven the Gray Ghost into a hole. He punched a button on his keychain, the truck chirped, and locks clicked in his doors.

“What were you packin’ anyway?”

“Browning nine.”

“What the fuck did you have that for?”

“Worked great for me.”

“How’d you keep that under your coat? I mean, you got to holster the damn thing and you can’t move and anyone with any sense can see it. This ain’t the Wild, Wild West, man. Get in.”

I got in the passenger side. The parking lot bare and quiet.

He opened his glove compartment and pulled out a Glock 9mm. Smaller than the ones I’d seen. Must’ve been a new model.

“Stick this in your coat. Don’t know where you found it. Understand? Has a hell of a history I’m sure. Took it off that peckerwood from the other night.” He widened his eyes. “Holds seventeen motherfuckin’ rounds. Take both clips.”

I did.

“Be careful, brother.”

Loretta had already gotten a suite for us. I always knew Loretta and JoJo made a nice living but they usually lived pretty simply except when Loretta traveled. When we played the Chicago Blues Festival last year she’d rented out a hell of a room at the Palmer House. She said life was too short to stay in those “Holidaze” Inns.

I agreed. It was nice to be in the big sprawling room filled with heavy wood furniture and gilded lamps. Big-ass bathtub where I took a thirty-minute shower cleaning dirt from every inch of my skin. Loretta had ordered me a couple beers and a sandwich from room service.

I thanked her, but the thought of food made me sick as hell.

I exchanged places with Abby and a quick silence fell between me and Loretta. Her face had been in such a tight grin since she’d met Abby that it took it a few seconds to fall. She had her long coat draped over her chair and had propped open a window listening to the sounds of the city where she’d made her name.

“You want to tell me why you’re really here?” I asked.

“You need help.”

“Shit.”

“Watch your language, boy.” Her face didn’t break, just kept on listening to those city sounds like it was music.

“Bluff City was a long, long time ago. All of us in that same neighborhood. Stax. Hi. Called it Soulsville.”

I watched her as I took off my boots. Then I stretched out on a rollaway that had already been laid out, smelling of the bleach in the sheets. I closed my eyes still listening to her stories.

“Why are you here?” I asked in a groggy voice. “I can handle it.”

“You need me, boy. They ain’t talkin’ to you. Are they? Tomorrow we’ll find Clyde. All right? Tomorrow let’s go get my brother.”

MEMPHIS MUSIC IS not dead. Although it’s pretty damned hard to get away from the past. The droves of Elvites to Graceland, the well-known mantra of Sam Phillips’s contributions to rock and roll, and even the B. B. King imitators playing covers in nameless, soulless bars along Beale. But beyond the history, the tributes, and even the fiction, there is a real, breathing music scene at little clubs in Midtown with singer-songwriters who’ve come to the city as if it were Mecca, hoping just to soak up a little bit of what has inspired musicians for generations. Knowing that the name Memphis attached to you somehow makes you more interesting, more soulful, more real.

One of the best places to get immersed in the local scene was down at the Hi-Tone on Poplar. I hadn’t been there since the bar screened a documentary of local bluesman Will Roy Sanders a few years back.

Tonight, men with sideburns and wallet chains prowled the bar, smoking as if the surgeon general had suddenly changed his mind. Women in satiny vintage dresses and funky ‘fifties glasses shaped like cat eyes sat around small tables with mismatched chairs sipping imported beer and listening to the music.