Old Blues

I've wracked my brain, but I don't remember exactly when I first heard the blues. High school, Jacksonville, Florida, the early sixties. Somebody had died, a great-grandmother, and there was a wake. We'd driven up from Jax for the service, it must have been my father's side. A small church, Sandy Springs, outside Pocahontas, Tennessee; then the wake, which was a social event of note, and there was an old black guy, sitting on a kitchen chair, out under a sycamore tree, finger-picking a slack guitar and playing the blues. A back-street bar, around that same time, just before the eruption of racial violence, when Miles took me to listen to the music. Decades later, Skip James still sends chills up my spine. When Sam Charters recorded that first Lightning Hopkins record, 1959, the landscape changed, not the least because, like those new caves, everything old seemed incredibly new. Fuck a bunch of shadows. I have to go take a nap. I don't get there because the phone rings. An old friend, or, rather, an old acquaintance, burned out, hard-running poet who lived downstairs in the building where I had an apartment when I was teaching at FSU. I recognized his voice, faintly British, and asked him how he ever tracked me down, got my phone number. Land lines, he said, were easy. Oh. He'd found some of my writing and wanted to talk. His dime, and I'm a good listener. I can roll a cigaret while I'm on the phone; the pause, when you need to lick the paper, can become pregnant. Doesn't have to, but it could. Point is, I wasn't doing anything. His first two marriages had failed. He read me some of his recent work and it was sentimental crap. I realize this is a suicide call, and I don't know what to do. If you're determined to kill yourself, it's pretty easy, stop breathing. I advise him to step back. Circumstances change.