| Me and Big Joe by Michael Bloomfield --page 7 |
| At the hospital they put some butterfly stitches in my palm and wrapped me up. I left the emergency room and walked across a steaming asphalt parking lot toward the car, and from forty feet away I could smell drunken, sweaty, seventy- year-old blues singer.
I got in and Joe seemed to regain his senses, what ones he had left, anyway. I showed him my bandaged hand and he claimed not to remember a thing. He behaved as though nothing had happened. �Listen, you boys,� he said, �now we goin� to find the best blues singer of them all�the finest I ever knew, yes sir!� He directed George to a place that didn�t even have front steps�they� all just rotted away. We walked around behind the building to try the rear stairs, and in the back yard was a mountainous collection of refuse�every kind of filth imaginable was back there. There were old moldering mattresses, shredded and stained with the springs sticking out, there were pieces of cars that had rusted and reddened from years of exposure, and I don�t think the garbage from the tenants had ever been collected�I believe they�d been throwing it in the yard ever since the apartment was built, and from the looks of the building, that had been a long time ago. We started up the rickety stairs to the second floor. George struggled with Kaercher�s big tape recorder while I lugged Joe�s ancient amplifier, which, judging from its weight, must have been sheathed in lead. I was soaked with sweat, my head was pounding and my cut hand was throbbing, my stomach felt sour and the stench of eons-old garbage tore at my nostrils, and as we approached that second-floor landing I didn�t care. I really did not care at all, just how great a blues singer was up there waiting for us. A middle-aged barefoot brown woman In a loose-fitting housedress let us Into the apartment, which was stifling. We dropped our gear In the kitchen and followed her to the front room, and the first thing I saw in there, seated on a couch, was a twelve or thirteen-year-old girl who weighed at least 400 pounds. She was dressed in flour sacking, and you could tell by the shape of her head and the look on her face that she was an Idiot. I don�t mean a person with no sense 1 mean a complete retardate She was mumbling and drooling, and her face was smeared with grease. On a table in front of her was a plate of rib bones, and beside the plate was a jar of mayonnaise that looked like zinc ointment left too long In the sun. What the girl would do was take a bone and dip it in the mayonnaise, then run it back and forth through a gap In her front teeth to get the meat off. As sick as I felt, and as bad as my hand hurt, this was It. I mean, things had been funky before, but daddy. this was freak city. �Joe,� I said. �Let�s not stay here. I�m not feeling well at all�I think we�d better go� �Shut up!� he yelled. �I don�t want to hear nothin� about it! I�m the talent scout here. I�m the boss, an� you people are workin� for me! Now get in there an� set us up our machine.� --Continued on page 8 |
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