When I Left Home (13 page)

Authors: Buddy Guy

BOOK: When I Left Home

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We figured he was giving us an extra dollar, just to show appreciation, but when we looked at our bills they said “$1,000.” I counted those zeroes at least four times and every time came up with three. A thousand dollars. Never had seen a thousand-dollar bill in my life. It was like seeing a woman with two heads or a cat with two tails. Didn’t know what to make of it. Harold had the same reaction.

Fred smiled. “Ain’t from me. It’s from”—and here I’m gonna make up a name—“Wanda.”

“Who’s Wanda?” I asked. “And why she giving us this money?”

“Wanda’s one of the best workers in Gary,” said Fred. “One of the prettiest. She looking for some guys to take of care of her, and y’all got chosen.”

“I ain’t sure what that means,” I said.

“Me either,” said Harold, who was also not real wise in the ways of street women.

“Means be here tomorrow,” said Fred.

“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” I said. “Indiana’s dry on Sunday.”

“F&J is a private club on Sunday. Invitation only. Y’all are invited.”

Come Sunday Harold and I drove back to Gary. We wearing our $30 suits and curious as all get-out about what’s gonna happen. F&J was locked up, but when we knocked on the door Fred was right there.

“Gents,” he said, “the rest of the committee is here.”

“Committee?” I asked.

“Just come on in and have a seat.”

A big table had been set up in the middle of the club. Eight pimps were sitting there. Their suits had to cost $100. Next to them were twelve or thirteen fine-looking females. Some of them had long legs and skirts hoisted up high. Some of them had big beautiful breasts practically busting through their blouses. Some of them were on the plump side, but pleasingly plump. None of’em was even close to ugly.

Wanda, the prettiest of all them, with jet-black skin and blazing brown eyes, came over to me and Harold. She let us know we were the ones.

The pimps ordered lots of liquor and a ton of food. The whores sent out for a special cake. The check was piling up. I tapped Harold on the shoulder and signaled for him to meet me in the men’s room.

“What the hell’s happening?” I asked. “What we doing here?”

“We eatin’ with a gang of pimps and whores, that’s what we doing. Liquor’s good and so is the food.”

“Who’s paying for all this?” I asked.

“Wouldn’t know.”

“Maybe that’s why Wanda done gave this money. Maybe we supposed to pay.”

“Maybe.”

“You think we should?”

“I ain’t thinking,” said Harold. “I’m just feeling like I died and gone to pussy heaven. You do the thinking.”

“I’m gonna pick up the tab,” I said.

“Good, man. You do that.”

We went back to the table, and when the check came, I saw it was nearly $300. Never saw a check that big before. But I had my thousand-dollar bill. I pulled it out and laid it on the table. Next thing I knew Wanda was slapping me across the face.

“Nigger!” he screamed. “You green as a pool table and twice as square. Daddy never pays for his baby’s meal. Baby takes care of Daddy.”

She stuffed the thousand back in my pocket and brought out her own money. There was no arguing with Wanda.

At the end of the evening she invited me and Harold back to her house. Turned out she had three little kids.

“I know you guys are new at this,” she said, “but that’s why I want you. All the other Big Daddies ’round here be robbing and thieving their women. You two don’t look like no robbers or thieves to me.”

“No, ma’am,” I assured her. “But neither is we good at the kind of work you want. We just musicians.”

“But you know how to protect a woman.”

“Wouldn’t want no one to harm you, that’s true,” I said.

“And you know how to get a woman out of a jail.”

“That just takes money.”

“I got the money,” said Wanda, pointing to her purse.

“Well, then, you don’t need no one to do what you can do yourself.”

“You telling me no?” she asked with a little tear in her voice.

“I’m telling you, Wanda, that you don’t need to waste your money on me and Harold here.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Harold.

“I’m speaking the truth, Wanda,” I said. “We gonna give you back your money because you wasted it with us.”

“Speak for yourself,” Harold repeated.

“Come on, Harold,” I said. “We ain’t gonna take no money that we don’t deserve. You’ll find someone who can do this job. Lots of men know how. We don’t.”

Funny end to this story was a few months later it was the week before Thanksgiving and the F&J was jammed. Between sets, I seen Wanda come in wearing this skin-tight red dress. She was looking fine. Came up to me and said, “Hey, baby, I’m cooking Thanksgiving dinner and wondering if you’d come by.”

Being so far from my Louisiana home, I was much obliged.

“Sure thing,” I said.

Thanksgiving was a lovely day. She cooked a turkey just like her mama from Mississippi had taught her. She made the biscuits from scratch. The greens and sweet potatoes had me thinking of my mama. Her kids were well behaved and sweet as they could be.

After dinner we talked about the kind of life she wanted to have once she put enough money away. She wanted to buy a house back down South. She wanted to make sure her kids graduated high school. She talked to me like I was family. I didn’t make a move on her to have sex. I knew she’d had enough sex from enough men. She didn’t invite me over for sex. She didn’t want sex; she wanted a friend.

Wasn’t that I didn’t want sex. I did. But being careful kept me from chasing anything crazy—or at least that’s what I thought. I’d been living in Chicago many months—maybe even a year—before I got me my first little piece. Happened at the Squeeze, the same club where the man walked in with his wife’s head in a paper bag.

Cute little gal came over to me. I appreciated that because I was no good at making the first move.

“Been watching you for some time,” she said.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“But I’m just wondering one thing. It’s a personal thing. Mind if I ask?”

“Go ahead.”

“I wanna know you if you make love as wild as you play that guitar.”

Naturally, the question excited me. Right then and there my blood started to rise.

“All I can say is that I do my best,” I said.

“Well, my style is wild.”

“I like wild,” I assured her.

“But I also get a little rough beforehand. You know what I mean?”

“Not exactly, but I’m willing to find out.”

“If there’s some fighting first, the fucking gets better.”

No woman had ever come on to me and used the word “fucking” before. The word got me even more excited.

“In the name of love,” I said, “I’ll do a little fighting.”

When we got up to her room, though, turned out she was all talk. She’d been drinking so long that she fell right to sleep. Being a gentleman, I didn’t wanna wake her. Got in bed next to her and fell asleep myself. Was the middle of the night when I felt this
whack!
across my back. Damned if she wasn’t whipping me with my own belt. She hit me so hard my back was bleeding.

“You ready to fight?” she asked, all smiles.

I was hurting, and I wasn’t about to take this shit lying down. I went for her, and she was happy.

“Now,” she said, “you’ll see what real fucking is all about.”

She wasn’t wrong.

Chess Moves

The gunslingers had different styles. Some of the cats—like Magic Sam and Otis Rush—were quick at the draw and didn’t mind showing you how they did it. Like the Mud, they were teachers who felt that the lessons should be passed on. Other cats didn’t look at it that way.

Earl Hooker wasn’t interested in teaching you nothing. He was too busy looking over his shoulder.

When I first got attention on the bandstand, I noticed Earl Hooker listening hard to my licks. Believe me when I tell you I wasn’t playing half of what he could play, but I could see him studying my guitar and amp.

Couple nights later I come to discover my amp is sounding different. I’m also missing my long wire that lets me wander all around when I play. Someone said they saw Earl messing with my equipment during one the breaks. So on a Saturday I decided to go over to where he stayed with his mama and pay the man a visit.

His mother told me, “He’s asleep.”

Well, this was four in the afternoon. Of course musicians tend to work all night and sleep all day, so I understood. His mama went about her business, and I was set to leave when I heard a loud snore coming from the bedroom where the door was ajar. I tiptoed over, stuck my head in, and sure enough, there was my guitar wire and a couple of tubes that I recognized as belonging to my amp.

“Hooker,” I said. “Wake up, man. What you doing with my wire and my tubes?”

He came to life, yawning and rubbing his eyes. “Just borrowing’em, man. That’s all.”

“Don’t you need to ask before you borrow?”

“I was curious to hear that sound you make. Wanted to see if it was the tubes.”

“I want my wire back.”

“Take it.”

“And my tubes.”

“I think they work better in my amp than yours,” said Earl.

“I think they work right well in mine.”

I took my stuff and left.

Even though I was pissed on that particular day, I couldn’t harbor no bad feelings for Earl—he was too great for me to stay mad. Earl was the first one to get the hang of the wah-wah pedal. He was one of the first to use a double-neck guitar. He liked to experiment. He also liked telling stories. A couple of his stories killed me.

One had him and his band traveling way down into the Delta for a gig at a roadhouse. Owner said only way to attract a crowd was to go into the fields and tell the folk picking cotton when and where he’d be playing. Earl and his cats were wearing their old tuxes with the cummerbunds—the only clothes they brought—and they didn’t wanna dirty ’em up.

“If you wanna get paid,” the owner said, “then get out in them fields and advertise your show. Else you’ll be playing to an empty house.”

So Earl and his guys parked alongside a big cotton field where everyone was doing the afternoon picking.

“Playing down the road tonight,” he told all the workers he met. “Gonna be playing the kinda music you like. My songs go good with drinking and dancing. It heats up the ladies real good.”

After a while, here comes a white supervisor on a horse. The man was holding a rifle.

“What are you niggers doing out here in tuxedos?” he asked.

“We musicians,” said Earl.

“Right out here you ain’t. Out here you picking cotton.”

“I don’t think so,” said Earl.

“Well, I do,” said the man with the rifle.

For the next hour Earl Hooker and his band became the best-dressed cotton pickers in Mississippi.

That night at the roadhouse the crowd was small—and so was Earl’s pay. On the ride back to Chicago stomachs were empty and funds were tight. So when the band stopped at a grocery by the side of the road, Earl had a plan: he’d go in and buy some soda pop and crackers. Meanwhile, his piano man, wearing a big overcoat—a mighty strange-looking outfit during the summertime—walked down the aisle where they had the canned meats.

“When the man isn’t looking,” Earl told his piano player, “slip some of that Vienna sausage in the pockets of your coat. Get all you can.”

The plan worked. Earl bought the pop and crackers while his man got a whole mess of canned meats. They went down the road twenty or thirty miles before stopping in a little wooded area. They got out and spread back the grass so they could lay out the food and start to eat. Everyone got a soda pop and a few crackers. When it was time to break out the canned meat, the piano man emptied his pocket.

He had done stolen cans of Alpo dog food.

“What the fuck!” Earl cried. “Can’t you read?”

“You know I can’t,” said the piano man.

“I forgot,” Earl admitted, “but at least you could have picked the food that looked good.”

“I did. Pictures on these cans make the food look real good.” When Earl told me this story I cracked up.

“What’d you do?” I asked him.

“You ever smelt a can of Alpo?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. “I got dogs.”

“Well, that day Alpo didn’t smell so bad. I went behind a tree, spread it over some crackers, and I ate the shit—that’s what I did.”