Gutbucket Quest (2 page)

“Wow” Slim said. “You’re a star. I mean—you must be a star.”

Progress shook his head, smiling. “Some folks say so,” he said. “I expect it’s maybe true if I sit down and think on it. But it ain’t what I thinks inside me. I ain’t sayin’ I don’t enjoy it. I do. But here, where I live, I’m just an old man been around a while. Time has a wonderful
way of cutting away the trivial, and you gives a person long enough, they can get to doin’ most anythin’.”

“But you’re great” Slim protested.

“Oh, come on here, son. You ain’t listened to but a couple of songs.”

“No, it’s there. I can hear it, feel it. You’re playing what I’d about give my left nut to be able to play.”

“Come on, now. I bet you could play it without havin’ to give up any body parts.”

“Yeah, sure,” Slim said. “I could play it. I can do okay. Technically I’m okay. But the feeling isn’t there for me, somehow. I’m missing something.”

“Well, son, like I said, you just stay on here with me for a while, I’ll do my level best to teach you what I know, and we’ll see can’t we do somethin’ about whatever it is you think you missed.”

“Really? I gotta tell you, I’m pretty much a total idiot sometimes.”

Progress laughed and clapped Slim on the back. “We all is, son. Every damn one of us is idiots in our own way and time. But you can learn to get beyond it most times. You stay on here. Like you say, you gots no place else to go to, so you just makes yourself at home.”

Then Progress made Slim clean up and rest for a while, because he was dirty and bruised from the lightning strike and his fall. It was clear that the man didn’t think any less of him for it, and indeed, was intrigued by the manner of his arrival here, but knew that Slim needed a bit of time alone, just to get his head halfway together.

And while Slim washed his face and arms, and brushed off his clothing, he thought about what had happened. He realized that he had somehow changed worlds, but had no notion how or why. So he forced himself to focus not on the moment of the strike, but on the hour before, when things had been normal.

2

. . .
I want to suggest that the acceptance of this anguish one finds in the blues, and the expression of it, creates also, however odd this may sound, a kind of joy.

—James Baldwin,
The Uses of the Blues

I
t all began on one of those blistering days when the Texas plains pant like a dying coyote, when the red dust lies heavy and the air seems to scorch the flesh it touches. The white colleechee road lay like a straight wound through the grass and mesquite green on the hillside. Slim Chance walked slowly down the slope to the unfinished adobe house he chose to call home.

Slim was, perhaps, average. Yet, there was a certain distinction about him. He was nearly six feet tall, but chubby, so that in actuality he appeared shorter. His gray-smeared brown hair reached to the middle of his back, matching the swiftly graying beard that hid much of his face. Metal-framed glasses, sad gray eyes and a particular swing or sway to his walk were details that added up, in some definitive way, so that an observer, seeing Slim for the first time, would say, “There’s a child of the sixties. An artist or a musician. Whatever, a misfit.” And the observer would be right. The only detail missing was the thinning
hair, or even the baldness that Slim had escaped, unlike so many of his contemporaries.

It was another day with no mail, no messages, no communication. A very dissatisfying sort of day, so Slim walked and studied the well-known side of the road, hoping for a glance at something new. A snake, a dust-brown tarantula, a bright wildflower, anything out of the ordinary half-mile sights he saw on his daily walk to the mall and back.

He took the walks, though his nature was to drive even the short distance, because he told himself it was good for him. If he could lose weight, he could have a better shot at getting work. No one loved a fat musician. Not out in front, anyway, where Slim wanted to be. He’d been there before, back when. But he’d been young and pretty, back when. Life and time and sadness had served to rob him of the strong, clean lines of face and body he’d once been blessed with. So he walked, waiting for the fat to go away, playing his guitar, planning, working when he could.

But he hadn’t had a gig in more than a month. Even the welcome, if infrequent, royalty checks were getting thin. It just didn’t seem to be the season for the blues. Not for playing them, at least. So he’d spent the empty time studying the wild Texas plains environment, trying to soak it in, make it a part of his playing, as if just by being there he could turn its existence into a sound, a style he was looking for.

He’d come to the plains first in winter, dug in against the chill and the snow and constant brownness. It had been worth the wait and the trouble. Spring hadn’t sprung, it had exploded. It had been as if he’d woken up one morning to a world turned suddenly green. The land had been more alive each day that passed. The mesquite, the salt cedar, the cottonwoods and willows grew from skeletal barrenness to startling verdancy.

Quail hunted small prey in his front yard and the Godawful ugly
crane that lived up the creek flew close to the house. Horned toads scattered from the paths his feet took. Millions of ants built their sand castles in the red dirt, hauling what were, to them, massive pieces of wood and branch to cover and conceal the entrances. The tarantulas were comfy in their holes awaiting unwary beetles whose empty shells were scattered on the excavated dirt like wilted lettuce leaves on a midden.

It wasn’t until later, near summer, that Slim had seen the glittering black tarantula wasps that preyed on the beautiful, dignified spiders. They were flying black widows, parasites, poisonous and evil, in Slim’s eyes. Over the course of the season, he had rescued several paralyzed tarantulas from their hideous fates, from the devouring wasp larvae.

His cat, Minnie, had, in her proper time, climbed up onto his bed at two o’clock in the morning, clambered onto his lap, panting, and presented him with three grandkittens. Then, once the kits were weaned, she had run away. Even the stupid-looking snake he had found and played with had escaped and was living behind the stereo cabinet where it seemed content to stay, maintaining a curious, uneasy truce with the rambunctious kittens.

Slim was most fascinated by the wolf spiders, the friendly, beautiful, fearless wolves that lived in nearly every window, nook and cranny of the house. He loved spiders, always had, but the wolf spiders were almost like a species apart from any others he’d known. They were frighteningly intelligent and, from observation and testing, he knew they had eyes that could see movement, at least up to ten feet away. He’d watched their stillness as they’d watched flies, their slow creeping and stalking, the massive leaps and pounces when moves were finally made on the unknowing flies. And he’d watched them eat, daintily, unselfconsciously, wondering at their sentience. They were the only spiders he’d ever seen that stalked and hunted, and he wondered if that activity was the cause of their obvious intelligence.

Slim had been absurdly excited when, one day, he’d spied a reclusive
newt scurrying across a bare patch of dirt. And he’d been delighted, on his frequent walks down to the creek, to usually find an old box turtle or two to say hello to and pass a little time with. He was thrilled the first time he’d seen a dozen or more Fuller’s hawks on their wild mating flight, and there was a deep contentment in witnessing the high, silent flight of the eagle that lived in the rocky cliff down the creek.

He knew that when outstaters though of Texans, his part of Texas, they thought only of dust and desolation, rednecks and rifles, oil wells and Alamos and flags. He’d been surprised, himself, upon moving there, unprepared for the wild beauty, the hundred-mile horizons. He’d also been unprepared for the savage glory of the Texas lightning storms, the rumbling travel of the thunder.

He’d moved to Texas to play the blues. Not the popular blues; homogenized, synthesized and zombilized. The real, down-home, Gutbucket blues that caught hold of the primal skill and power the blues could hold in the right hands. But, in his ignorance of Texas, he’d ended up in a place so blue it didn’t even have a blues scene, didn’t have any respect for the music or the players.

“Damn” he said out loud, tossing a rock down the road as he turned into the driveway of his house. “I wish I could get inside something for a change. Wish I could find a way just to play the music.”

He truly didn’t think he was asking so much. It had been so easy, back then, in the old days. It had come so fast he hadn’t even had time to realize what was happening. He’d started the band in high school and, after graduation, had quickly gotten recording contracts, money and fame. They’d been San Francisco’s own bad boys, even in the wild days of the sixties. Managed by a Hell’s Angel, they’d been said to have the longest hair, the biggest amps and the baddest attitudes in the business. Named after a kind of LSD, they were the loudest band in history. Their first album had been recorded on a pier, the studio unable to contain the chaos of the blues they’d played. The only band to
have been barred from the Fillmore for excessive volume, people said the music started shaking their guts blocks away from the halls and arenas.

But the money, the fame, the women had twisted his life and he’d left the business to try to be “respectable.” But the women he loved always left him, no matter what he tried or did, and each time his heart broke it let more and more of the hunger escape. The hunger to stand onstage and sway to the music, to climb on the strings and lose himself in the sound and fury. Each crack in his seldom repaired heart let the hunger grow and begin to consume him.

After his last lover had left him—money, as always—he’d started taking side gigs he wouldn’t have considered before, getting money together, planning his move to a Texas that had assumed nearly mythic proportions in his mind. A Texas where he thought he could find his blues, maybe even find himself. Perhaps find a love he could hold on to. But the hunger wasn’t assuaged and the blues weren’t to be found. Slim wanted to feel—well, he didn’t know what he wanted to feel. There was just a brightness and a breathlessness inside him that didn’t belong and often caused him to feel inept and ignorant.

He wanted to do something grand, something huge and heroic, wanted to pour his feelings, his loves and pains, his life, his small victories and little deaths into the thin silver strings of his guitar. He wanted to touch the magic of the blues and he wanted to love someone who would love him back the same.

But something was missing. There was something he didn’t have a handle on. He didn’t know what it was, he only knew it was there.

He was entirely alone, except for his animal friends, and he was dying of it, he felt. Twenty-some miles from town, he’d been unprepared for the isolation, the loneliness, the alienation of living that far up the country. Sometimes he wanted to scream from the hurtful need to touch and hold someone, to make love, to have someone else there;
to, for God’s sake,
talk to somebody.
It was a summer of dreadful speculations, hopes and realizations. It was a summer of painful discontent and restlessness, a summer of hunger, a summer like no other he had lived.

Once inside the house, back in the coolness, Slim wondered what to do with himself. While thinking about it, he fixed a glass of ice water and petted the cats. He could sit down and work. Groups like Cities in Pain, Boots V Jeans and the Oscars were all waiting with what he visualized as signed, sweaty checks for the songs he was supposed to be writing for them. He had a talent for songwriting that at least helped support his life, but the puerile rock-and-roll material the bands wanted didn’t fit the mood he was in. He had, as he often did, the blues.

He loved rock and roll, sort of. But it didn’t have the feeling, the emotional content of the blues. Rock and roll could make you dance, but blues could make you sweat. Rock and roll could talk about the pain and joy of loving, but blues could make you feel it. A good blues player could, with just his fingers and strings, express the sound of falling tears, the ripping of a broken heart, the poverty of being alone. A blues player could create the sound of hot, liquid sex, the swing and sway of a woman’s walk, the curve of a breast, the tickling laughter of a feminine voice. And Slim hoped, someday, to be a good enough player to begin to find the voices he needed and wanted so badly, the voice it felt as if he’d spent most of his sad life searching for.

The sound of far-off thunder caressed the sky and Slim went outside again to look. Clouds were swiftly moving in, but it didn’t look or smell like rain. A dry storm. Good. He went back inside and grabbed the black, maple-necked, Ibanez strat that was his favorite guitar. Then he headed down to the creek.

Slim had a dream. Or a fantasy, perhaps, though it seemed more possible of realization than a fantasy. He wanted to learn to play the
lightning and the thunder, to capture on guitar the flash and crack and heat, the instantaneity of a close lightning strike, the rumbling rolling threat of the thunder as it moved from cloud to cloud.

He’d watched the lightning, loved it, studied it with the dedication of a scientist. He felt he knew things about the lightning that no one else in the world could know. Scientists had said for years that lightning actually started on the ground and flashed up to the sky. Most people didn’t believe it, not really, and scientists, like everyone else, were too afraid of death to stand out in the light to actually study the phenomenon. But Slim had
seen
it, had truly seen it move upward, reaching to the angry clouds, a fern-frond of light and heat and potential destruction. And he knew, because of the massive Texas horizons, that it wasn’t half the time, it really was all the time. Because he knew, he’d seen that lightning started on the ground and arced through the sky to strike downward at the Earth, ten or twenty or thirty miles away.

And he could look up at the giant sky cloaked with black thunderclouds, and he could feel where the next strike would be. It was a kind of magic, he thought. Testing himself, he had once stood within fifteen feet of a massive strikedown. He had felt the unbelievable heat, had been shaken and deafened by the bomb-blast of the sound, had seen, in aftervision, the ball of energy and radiation that had formed for an instant where the lightning had touched and moved through the Earth. It had almost knocked him over, and it had scared the shit out of him.

He could feel the pressure of the clouds above him as he walked down to the creek. Over what he thought were hundreds or thousands of years, the small creek had dug a respectable gully on his side of the bank. It was, in fact, the beginnings of a cliffside. But on the other bank, the land was flat and gently sloping. If one walked a little way down the creek, it took an odd twist and the cliffs grew on the
opposite side, so that if one were to travel the creek from beginning to end, cliff and flatland would alternate sides.

And suddenly it had happened: the lightning strike. It had launched him not into death, not into the next county, but into what seemed to be another aspect of reality. And he still had no idea what to make of it.