Ace Atkins - Dark End of the Street

“Don’t do that. Somebody’ll think you’re serious.”

“Clyde’s pretty out tha frame. Isn’t he?”

“From what you told me, out the frame, out his mind, out this universe.”

“When they were grabbing him back under the bridge, he told one of the handlers that he rode the candy beams of the galaxy highway. But then again, who hasn’t?”

“Sometimes I forget who I’m talkin’ to, Travers.”

Some orderlies took us outside to the volleyball court where we sat at what looked like an old dinette set surrounded by four mismatched plastic chairs. The ground was bumpy and filled with rocks. Grass grew in yellowed splotchy patterns. U and I didn’t talk, just yawned and shuffled in our seats feeling the calm that filled the vacant space as sunlight started flooding through the chain-link fence. We were outdoors but I felt like we were in a basement or cavern, the bluish-gray sky simply a painted ceiling.

Within a few minutes, they led Clyde – drawn face and shaky-legged – out to the table situated in the ragged void. We were so exposed and in the open, I felt like we were having a tea party on the fifty-yard line. I smiled up at him, but he didn’t seem to notice. Didn’t seem to remember the fight, or the day, or who he was. This was going to be a huge waste of time.

As I watched him slump into his chair and stare into a far corner of the building where he now lived, I tried to focus on who he’d once been. I tried to think about the Apollo, the sessions at Bluff City, and that brilliant sharp voice on Dark End. Those words seeming to come through the wind and my imagination and memories. A phonograph needle catching a man’s soul came to mind.

But all I saw was a withered old man. He was just plain beaten. Any brilliance had been stripped away like water eroding the side of a mountain.

He wore a blue gown under a thick bathrobe and paper shoes. His fine hair seemed like feathers blowing against a rock.

“Clyde?” I asked. Just a knock on the door.

His gaze didn’t leave the vacant corner where he stared. It wasn’t a place you stared. You stared into the sky or a parking lot or at a nice-looking woman. You didn’t stare at beams supporting an ugly building or damned old washing machines collected in rusted heaps nearby.

His eyes didn’t wander.

“I’m a friend of your sister’s,” I said. “Loretta. What happened, Clyde? There were men looking for you. What did you get yourself into?”

I felt like I was talking to a second grader.

I put my hand on his back. I wanted to establish some kind of link, but instead felt foolish and manipulative.

His dry lips parted and he moaned. I think it was a moan. Maybe it was the wind sneaking around the buildings and down into the valley where we sat.

The sound again. His lips shifted against each other and finally some more sounds. With a little more effort, that same staring into the blankness of forever, he spoke: “I went to sleep.”

“What?” I asked and looked over at U. He nodded and gave me another be-cool gesture. We’d been told he’d been put on some medication that would help with the tantrums. The doctors weren’t even sure he’d be able to communicate.

But he did. Sort of.

“After I was born, I went to sleep and woke up other people.”

“What do you mean you woke up other people?”

“Some of them was parading, some of them was performing, some of them was doin’ movies, stuff like that,” he said. “So I woke up with them, and carried on their duty, their performing. For that short period of time, when I was first born.”

“Clyde, listen to me,” I said. “Tell me about the men.”

“They put me to sleep, and I woke up then, woke up in midair, in rain, woke up the rain, the rain was hurting, hurting me, yeah it was hurting me, it was hurting, I could feel it. Snow. Stuff like that… It hurt Mary, too.”

“What happened with Mary? Is that why they’re after you? I want to help. I want to find out who wants to hurt you.”

His eyes suddenly turned to me looking like he wanted to accuse me of coming here and disturbing his delusions. “Hurt?”

“Who?”

“They’re dead.”

“Who?”

“Eddie and them.”

“Mary?”

“She dead.”

“What happened?”

“The car is dark at the bottom of a lake. I see them coming but I can’t move. My feet stuck down deep.”

I folded my hands and covered my mouth and nose. My head pounded from lack of sleep and a bad need for a cup of coffee. I felt blurry.

Then he started. He did it right here. The song. Right in the dead center of a nut-house exercise yard, he started performing. The voice was cracked but clear in its warped, weathered perfection. Almost as if it had been aging for decades for this one moment. The words were sung low and heated and with emotion. But his face was completely impassive. Fucking “Dark End of the Street” in a nut house. The world was upside down and I was excited and nauseated at the same time.

“They’re gonna find us,” he said. “They’re gonna find us, Lord, some day, you and me, at the dark end of the street.”

I waited for him to trail off into that twirling, dripping line of emotion about you and me as if that heartache of not being together in the daylight would last forever. But he didn’t. He left it there like the last words of a funky poem. A question mark. A structure too cool to be messed with.

“What happened?” I asked for the twentieth time. I wanted to take in the whole moment and savor it and write about it and let everyone in the world know that I’d heard Clyde James sing “Dark End” one fall morning in Memphis. But I couldn’t. I had gone too far from caring about moments and music and poetry and finding beauty in a crazy old man clinging to the one song that made him immortal.

I wanted to find out how he got hooked up with the Dixie Mafia. The sky began to turn purple and black and clouds streaked by in loose, torn colors.

“Who killed them, Clyde?”

He looked at me and smiled. A loose, goofy-old-man smile. His hands outstretched like a circus clown apologizing for dropping the oranges he was juggling. “Don’t you see? We all did.”

“Bobby Lee Cook?”

His eyes squinted at me and then stared back into the dark space filled with rusted machines that didn’t work.

“Let’s go,” U said. “That night messed him up something terrible.”

I didn’t move.

“I got a buddy who can get us the case file,” U said. “It’s all we can do.”

I looked at Clyde James as I stood. I cupped my hand around his shoulder, but I didn’t want to build a connection anymore. I think I just wanted to pass on some of Loretta’s love. I patted his back and gave him a smile that only confused him as he continued to hum his song.

Gooseflesh raised on the back of my neck as we walked away. I heard him speaking, not to me, but to the air. To anything that listened.

“All I am is a voice,” he said. “Lost in a dream.”

THE PHRASE PUBLIC RECORD is misleading. Most people think it means they have access to all the governmental information they want, anytime they want it. The truth is that the “all” part of the statement varies from state to state – mainly watered down to “some” – and the “anytime” means when they get around to it. Last year, I was helping a fellow tracker look for a death certificate on legendary bluesman Blind Blake in Atlanta and ran into a mighty long clusterfuck. He had the theory that Blake had died somewhere in south Georgia after being hit by a streetcar in the ‘twenties and that ole Blake’s death would show up somewhere in state records. My written request was never answered. My phone calls were greeted by polite paper sluggers, but no answers were ever given. A trip to Georgia confirmed that no one had even looked for the damned thing.