Underneath the El

According to Billy-Boy Wise, one rule prevailed when driving under the El tracks: Never cross the center line. Stay in your lane no matter what. No matter if the car ahead of you slows while the occupants catcall a fox on the sidewalk. No matter if the driver up there brakes to hail a brother on the street. Car idles while the homeboys conclude some business with their dealer? No matter. Car double-parks while a dude jumps out for a pack of smokes from the corner store? You just sit there chilling out in the traffic, checking out the sights and sounds, the smell of East 63rd Street under the Jackson Park El.

Billy-Boy was good for a lot of advice from the shotgun seat, in spite of himself not even having a driver’s license. In spite of the fact that, like me, he was almost seventeen that spring of ’65. I was usually the one slumped behind the wheel of Dad’s long green Electra 225, fedora pulled low so my lily-white forehead wouldn’t show between the hat brim and my Cool-Ray shades. Keeping one eye on the instrument panel of the Buick, waiting for the red glow of the idiot light when the car overheated. No matter. Just turn up the radio, slip out the Hohner Marching Band harmonica, and wail with the Stones, or Dylan, or the Kinks. And never cross the center line.

 Just then, the Zombies were wrapping up “She’s Not There.” In the back seat, Joey Grano looked miserable. “Shit, Frank, we’re like sitting ducks here.  Pass somebody and let’s get moving.”

“Nah, we’re okay,” I told him with a confidence I didn’t exactly feel, trying not to watch an apparent drug deal go down on the corner.

“Don’t be a pussy,” Billy-Boy cackled. “You can’t ever cross the center line.”

The burgundy Caddy in front of us braked, the driver calling out to a street-corner look-out.

“Jeeze!” Joey leaned forward. “Go around this guy, go around him!”

Billy-Boy flipped back the brim of his own dapper hat and gave him a scandalized look. “You never go around,” he said. “It’s a parade! And we’re in it!” To me he said, “He just doesn’t get it.”

“I get it!” Joey cried. “What don’t I get?”

Billy chuckled, shaking his head. “The whole scene, man. The blues. You don’t get the blues.”

I didn’t know Joey that well. It so happened his sister was one hot tamale, and it was for her sake I suffered little Joey to hang with us. Usually he kept quiet and went along for the ride. “You still crying over your precious Pamela?” I asked. Joey’d just been dumped by his girlfriend of six weeks, and he was acting like somebody stole his bicycle.

 “Lookit that!” Billy-Boy said, nodding toward a hooker in a short tight dress, chatting up some business on the sidewalk. She turned as if she’d heard him and started toward us, but the traffic moved and we rolled forward a couple car lengths out of her territory.

“Oh, man, a fox!” Billy-Boy said, looking back.

“Under the El Tracks!” I sang.

“Oh, yeah,” Billy-Boy joined in, and we finished the last bars of the Sammy Wilson song:

“Won’t you go and tell my baby,

Meet me underneath the El,

The Northwest corner of Woodlawn that

My baby loves so well.”

Billy-Boy closed it out with an echoing phrase on the blues harp, a little sloppy but recognizable. People on the street turned to look, and a guy at a newspaper stand on Champlain gave us a big toothless grin.

“Jesus,” Joey whined, “how much farther?”

“Should be comin’ right up,” I said. Because that’s where we were headed: The Northwest Corner of Woodlawn, underneath the El.

A week earlier we’d been shuffling through dusty 78s at the Blues Record Mart in Bronzeville. Way out of our neighborhood, but worth the trip for genuine bargains. Clarence, the owner, had put the Sammy Wilson tune on his turntable. Billy thought to ask, “What’s on the corner of 63rd and Woodlawn?”          

Clarence, on a stool behind the cash register, hunched his narrow shoulders and gave us a bug-eyed look through a pair of glasses big as woodshop goggles. “That’s the Marb,” he said.

“What’s that?” I asked. “Like a concert hall, like a theater or something?”

He shook his head, “Naw, man, it’s …” he paused for dramatic effect, “it’s the world-famous … Black Marble Lounge.”

I must have looked blank but Billy wouldn’t admit he’d never heard of it. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “The Black Marble!”

Clarence nodded solemnly, and then laughed. “You-all never been there?”

“Well, now, I think, maybe I might have been…” Billy mumbled.

“You full of shit,” Clarence laughed. “Else you’d know… that’s where Sammy Wilson always hung out. Him and Junior Wells, James Cotton. All them old boys. They all of ‘em – an’ the young Bluesmen —Paul Butterfield, Charlie Musselwhite— they all learned harp listening to Little Walter and Sonny-Boy, and jamming at The Marb.”

“So,” I said, “it’s a Chicago blues scene landmark!”

“Home of the Blues!” Billy cried. “Frank wants to learn,” he explained to Clarence, with a condescending pat on my shoulder. “He’s a— a student of the Blues.”

I blushed, but admitted, “Yeah, you could say that.”

“Well, young man,” Clarence said, “if Chicago is the Home of the Blues, then the Black Marble Lounge is the – the – the kitchen!” He showed his big white teeth. “Yessir, the Kitchen of the Blues!”

 “Tremendous!” Billy-Boy howled.

Clarence did a little dance. “Kitchen where it all be cooked up!”

Billy-Boy bent to look me in the face. “Frank,” he breathed. “We gotta go! The northwest corner of 63rd and Woodlawn!”

So here we were, late afternoon the next Saturday, sunshine flashing over our shoulders through the rear window, slices of gold slanting down through the ties of the Jackson Park El in ever-diminishing slivers. Somewhere around Drexel Boulevard the last one flickered and we drove on - start and stop, start and stop - as dusk oozed out of gangways.

We were going to The Black Marble.

At Woodlawn I signaled left and waited for a break in the traffic. “Here it is.” A one-story storefront building stood on the corner, its dark maroon brick streaked with soot to complement the rusty steel of the El columns crowding the sidewalk in front.  I eased the Buick alongside the high curb in the loading zone in front of a weathered side door. A drunk in rumpled clothes hunched on the doorstep, passed out with his head draped over his knees.

Billy-Boy spilled from the car. “Come on, Frank! Jesus, it’s The Black Marble!” He straightened his brim in the reflection from the car’s back window.

“You think they’re going to serve us?” I asked, stepping out to peer up and down the street.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s why we brought our own.” He took a slug from the brown-bagged pint of Southern Comfort we’d been sipping on the way and offered it to me across the front seat. I helped myself to a swallow of the sweet liquor and handed it back. Stuffing the bottle into a pocket of his black trench coat, Billy turned and swaggered up to the front door. He usually had little trouble getting served. For one thing, Billy Wise was big, six foot four, kind of tubby. In spite of his baby face, at first glance in a dark bar he looked like a forty-year old man with a spare tire. No one had to know that his mother dressed him in Ivy League shirts and pleated slacks before sending him off to high school.   He disappeared around the corner.

 I turned to Joey. “You coming?”

“No way,” he said, cowering lower in the back seat.

It was probably for the best. Except for the little bit of fuzz on his upper lip, Joey looked like he was about twelve. His face and arms were a couple shades darker than mine, but still he clearly didn’t belong in this neighborhood. Like me, he wore jeans and a plain white tee-shirt. In the rear-view mirror I regarded my own smooth cheeks and skinny neck. I combed my fingers through greaser-length brown hair and curled my lip into a tough-looking sneer.

“Okay, sit tight and cry about your precious Pamela. We’ll just run in to check the place out. We won’t be long.” 

A train rumbled overhead with sparks like lightning as I approached the front of the place.  The black plate glass window was outlined in gold, and elaborate gilt scrollwork proclaimed: Black Marble Lounge. On the sidewalk at 63rd Street I got double takes from a couple soul brothers, so I briskly pushed through the door and stepped into the cool dark fog inside. 

The bar was almost empty, a couple guys sagging over stools down at the end, leaning on their elbows and staring into glasses of beer. Cigarette smoke hung in a blue cloud just under the low ceiling, all aglow from the neon Hamm’s beer sign. A vague sort of purple from the jukebox pulsed on the walls.  Billy was conspicuous on a stool in the middle. When the burly bartender stepped out of the shadows, Billy nodded to the taps. “Hamm’s,” he said and slapped a five-dollar bill down on the bar.

“Make it two,” I said, hopping up on the stool beside him. I hoped I didn’t look as nervous as I felt.

The barkeep peered at both of us in turn through eyes like slits, hesitated, and decided to pour. I took a gulp of foam and made a big production out of lighting a cigarette.

Holding back the hubbub of 63rd Street, old-timey band music cranked from the jukebox with a horn blowing a soulful riff. An El train passing overhead rattled through the windows and up through the floor.  Our eyes darted everywhere, taking everything in – the neon signs, the well-stocked back bar, dingy walls festooned with posters of blues greats: Muddy Waters, B. B. King, Little Walter. Billy spun around on his stool. “Tremendous!” he tried to whisper, but it came out like the squeal of a six-year old.

An older man in a wrinkled suit sat talking low at a table near the window with a skinny-legged woman in a slinky blue dress. Behind them in the dark corner on a raised platform, a pair of lonesome-looking microphones stood in front of a Fender amp and a basic drum kit. Billy lowered his head and talked out of the side of his mouth. “This is the Black Marble, Frank! James Cotton! Sammy Wilson, for Chrissake! They could be standing right there in that corner!”

Piano music filled the background while Billie Holiday crooned, and a sax moaned into the breaks. “Lady sings the blues, She's got them bad, She feels so sad…”

Lady Day. I shivered, it was so perfect. The old record snapped and popped from the scratchy rough handling of another time and a special place.

Billy-Boy trembled with glee.  “We’re in the home of the blues, Frank,” he said. “The kitchen of the blues.”

The next song broke out with a wha-wha trumpet over honky-tonk piano, before a woman’s voice began the lament, “Love, oh love, oh careless love.”

 “You know who this is?” I asked.

“Love, oh love, oh careless love,” she lamented.

Billy stared. “It’s Bessie Smith!”

“Love, oh love, oh careless love,” she cried. “You see what careless love has done.”

I had a lot to learn, but it was a start, sipping a beer in the Black Marble Lounge.

Billy-Boy called to the bartender, “Any live music today?”

He squinted from his position at the end of the bar. “Yep.”

“What time?”

“Round about nine or so.”

Billy checked his watch. “Shit,” he said. “It’s just past seven.”

“Well, we’re not sitting here for two more hours!” I said.

“No,” he said, pouting over his beer. “This is bullshit.”

The next song on the jukebox was Muddy Waters, doing “Baby Please Don’t Go,” one of my favorites with its jangly guitar. I bobbed my head, swaying as Sammy Wilson’s harmonica echoed Muddy’s lyrics.

Billy slid off his barstool. “I’m going to the shitter,” he said, and stomped toward the rest rooms.

When the tune ended, the couple got up from their table and, leaning together, shuffled out the door.  Perched there by myself, I could feel the bartender’s eyes on me. I slurped my watery beer. It was like the air went out of a balloon. All the magic had wafted away. Without the music, the place wasn’t any different from any local tavern on any corner in any neighborhood in Chicago – the murky atmosphere, the drooping barflies, the pungent stink of ten thousand spilled drinks.

After what seemed like an hour, Billy-Boy burst back into the room. He sidled up to me without sitting down.  “It’s a good shithouse,” he said. “ – Not a great one, but a good shithouse.”

“What’s good about it?”

He shrugged and thought. “Broken mirror. Dim light bulb. Leaky faucet. Stained toilet bowl.” Gulping his beer, he lowered his head and looked at me sideways. “All the graffiti is painted over, though. Couldn’t read it.” He turned his back to the bartender and went on with his voice low. “Clarence says he went in there one time and found Sammy Wilson sloppy drunk and passed out on the can.”

“Oh, that’s great.”

Billy grimaced and nodded. “Clarence just looked at him and said, ‘No good, Sammy, no good.’ He says Wilson doesn’t do anything anymore but drink and hang out.”

“That’s sad, man. He could be making records or going out on tour. I mean, what the hell?”

“Yeah, stinks. It’s like…the shithouse of the Blues.” Billy sighed. “It’s like where the Blues came to die or something.” Abruptly he swigged the last of his drink. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said, slapping the glass down on the bar.

We crowded through the door without a glance back.

I welcomed the blast of fresh air that met us on the street, tinged as it was with the aromas of barbeque ribs, car exhaust, and that burnt-electric ozone from the trains. The night had turned dark, but street lights glared brighter than day under the El tracks. The lines of cars stretched longer than a mardi gras parade, and nobody crossing the center line. Foot traffic had gotten heavier, too, people teeming on the sidewalks and jaywalking around the slowed and idling cars -- and headed right toward us were a pair of Chicago’s finest. Two rotund white cops sashayed over. Billy slipped around the corner as one of them barked, “Hey! You! Come back here!”

The other one, a big guy, loomed over me, sniffing and glancing into the lounge. “What are you doing in there?”

“Nothing. I -- uh just went in to use the washroom.”

The shorter cop, meanwhile, had followed Billy around the corner and came dragging him back by his coat collar. “Hey, now, careful,” Billy said.

“Me, careful?” the cop said. “What the hell are you two doing down here? Do you know the area?”

Billy straightened his coat. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “I know the area like the back of my hand.”

“How’d you get here?” the tall cop asked.

“My car,” I told him, jerking a thumb that way.

Leaning around the corner, they glanced toward the Buick. “That guy with you?”

We were a little surprised to see Joey Grano out pacing the sidewalk. The drunk from the doorstep was now leaning heavily bent over – maybe sleeping – face down on the broad trunk of the Electra 225.

The short cop swept his cap off and wiped his brow in consternation. He looked up and down the street. “Jesus,” he breathed. “You guys are gonna get yourselves killed down here.”

The tall one stepped up and pointed. “Listen, you better get into your vehicle and get the hell outa this neighborhood! This ain’t no place for a couple of white boys!”

“Okay, okay,” I agreed. “We’re going.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Billy-Boy said. “It so happens we’re done with our business here anyways.”

I marched to the rear of the car to check out the napping dude. “Joey, what’s going on here?”

Joey turned at the sound of my voice and whirled over to us. “Frank! What the hell! I been waitin’ for hours!”

“Aah, you’re nuts!” Billy-Boy said. “We just had one beer.”

“I – I was worried about you. I tried to go in the back door here. Then this guy woke up.”

I leaned in close to examine the rank-smelling drunk. His face was brown as shoe leather, with a fringe of gray whiskers. The black nappy curls on his head were threaded with gray and flaked with dry leaves from the sidewalk. He snorted and his eyes popped open. “Let’s go!” he said. “Forty-third Street!”

Billy squealed with joy. The drunk straightened up and struggled for balance, looking from one to the other of us.

“He’s been goin’ on about Forty-third Street!” Joey whined. “I didn’t want to talk to him, but I was afraid to get him mad.”

“That’s right!” the guy shouted. “Forty-third Street! Let’s go!”

“I just want to go home,” Joey was almost crying. “Can’t we go now?”

“You better go home!” the big cop threatened, and his partner thwacked a billy club against his open palm. “Don’t make me call a paddy wagon.”

“Yeah, we’re going!” I said, and slid behind the wheel.  The others scrambled in and the Buick’s heavy doors slammed as I started up the car and turned on the lights. In the rear-view mirror, I could see the two cops watching, hands on their hips. We lurched away from the curb.

“Frank?” Joey whimpered from the back seat.

“Wait a minute!” Billy-Boy yelled.  I hit the brake.

The cops had turned away. I watched them amble out of sight.

“The booze!” Billy yelled. He threw open his door, burst from the car, and scuttled along the curb toward the corner.

Joey leaned forward into my line of sight. “Frank?”

Billy, perplexed, looked back with an exaggerated shrug and backtracked, methodically retracing his way down the gutter.

“Frank!” Joey barked.

“Yeah, yeah, we’ll go in a sec.”

Billy returned to squat at the open door. “When the cop came after me I dropped the bottle in the gutter, right at the curb. And now it’s gone!”

“Well, what do you expect?”

“It was only out of my sight for a minute!”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Billy.”  I imagined a hand reaching out of the storm drain and snatching it up.

“Unbelievable!” Shaking his head, Billy slid back into the shotgun seat.

We rolled forward. “What the hell is that smell?” Glancing over my shoulder I finally saw the drunk sprawled in the back seat.

“Let’s go!” he called out. “Forty-third Street!”

“What the hell?”

Joey slid back into the far corner against the left rear door. “Tried to tell you.”

 “Let’s go!” the drunk said. “Forty-third Street!”

Billy-Boy turned to him. “What’s on Forty-third Street?”

The black man stared at Billy as if just now noticing his big white face. “Well, you know,” he finally mumbled. “We gon’ play, you know…”

Billy busted out with a laugh. “Yeah, you know! Let’s go, Frank! Forty-third Street! Let’s go!”

And so we went.

I steered down Woodlawn, away from the bright lights of 63rd Street, past blocks of crumbling graystones and rambling tenements. We rolled the windows down and Billy blew harp as we sang, “Go and tell my baby…”

And the drunk in the back seat joined in, a sweet low grumbling bass to back Billy-Boy’s excited tenor, “Meet me underneath the El.”

We wailed into the night. Block followed block of streaked limestone town homes with blackened cornices. The broad grassy swales of the Midway were fresh-mown moats around the castle keeps of the U of C.  We rolled by the crenellated towers and holy halls of academia, careening around the broad drive through Washington Park.  

Our passenger slouched comfortably, a vague smile on his glistening face.  Joey squirmed and stared out the window at the graffiti-tagged buildings.

“This is Blackstone Rangers territory,” he said.

“Don’t pretend you can read that shit,” Billy-Boy laughed.

Brick apartment buildings gave way to dilapidated frame two flats, scorched hulks with boarded-up windows, and empty lots like toothless sockets in the face of the city.

Joey leaned over the front seat. “Frank,” he groaned, “I think he pissed himself!” The drunk slumped all the way over behind Joey and wriggled away from the dark stain on the upholstery.

“Oh, Jesus, no!” The smell of urine was unmistakable. “My old man is going to kill me!” I pulled over to the curb on Prairie Avenue.

“Just roll him out of the car right here,” Billy said. “He’ll never even know it.”

Around us spread a wasteland of rubble, here and there a solitary old mansion standing dark against the streetlit sky.  Shadowy figures skulked in the shadows of ruined buildings and a pack of dogs ranged across the flattened remains of a city block.

“Shit,” I said. “We’re almost at 43rd Street. Let’s see what’s there.”

“Let’s go,” the drunk muttered against Joey’s back.

“Forty-third Street!” Billy cackled.

We drove parallel to the elevated embankment. Garishly-lit newsstands and shops clustered around the El underpass on Forty-third, the cheerful glow of a settlement approached from a wilderness savage and dark. The old Forum Theater stood on the corner brilliantly lit, solid as a red brick church and lively as a gospel meeting on Sunday. According to the marquee, some Drifters imitators would be doo-wopping on stage this Saturday night. People milled about, lined the sidewalks and streamed in to the showhouse.

 Across the street a saloon poured music out into the night, and we drove by at a crawl. An Oldsmobile 88 halted abruptly in front of us, forcing me to brake hard for the passengers that scrambled from the back seat. As we idled there, a scrum of unruly drinkers erupted from the bar, shouting and laughing. Fists flew -- a man reeled, landing on his back, and a circle closed around the scuffle. The crowd grew, spilled into the street, and flowed around us. A scowling man cursed and shouted at the Buick. We quickly rolled up the windows.

“Frank!” Joey wailed. “Get outa here!”

“I can’t!” The big Olds 88 in front wasn’t moving. Staggering revelers banged up against our car. Angry faces stared in at us. The Buick rocked and lurched.

“Frank?” Billy-Boy’s voice quavered. “Go around, Frank!”

I spun the wheel and nosed out slowly to pass the other car. I crossed the center line.

Something thumped loudly on the roof. A bottle smashed on the pavement outside my window.

“Hit it, Frank!” Billy-Boy cried.

I stomped the gas pedal. Four-barrel howling, the big 8-cylinder engine launched us roughly down the cobbled street. We raced under the El tracks and out to South Park Boulevard.

 Billy exhaled a nervous laugh. “Hahaha good one Frank, heh -- way to go! The old deuce-and-a-quarter moves out! Man-oh-man-oh-man!”

Merging into the heavier traffic through Bronzeville, we relaxed a little, and soon found ourselves on a well-lit block Billy and I both recognized.

 “Hey, here’s the Mart!” he said. “Looks like it’s open!”

The lights of Clarence’s Blues Record Mart glowed a warm welcome, and an empty parking space awaited right in front. I swooped in with the Buick.

“All right!” Billy yelled, exploding from the car. He scuttled up to shout at the door, “Hey, Clarence!”

Joey popped open the back door and squeezed out past the stirring drunk.

“Help me get him out,” I told him. We each grabbed a handful of the old guy’s threadbare jacket and pulled him out to the curb, lifting him up between us to keep his head from bouncing onto the concrete. With some effort we got him standing on his own feet, tottering between us.

Smiling amiably the drunk fished around in his jacket pockets and whipped out a bottle in a brown paper bag. “Have a drink,” he suggested, uncapped the bottle for himself and drained it.

“Billy-Boy,” I said, “the mystery is solved.”

Billy turned and gaped. “Unbelievable! Is that my Southern Comfort?”

 “What the hell are you-all doin’ out here?” Clarence asked. He stood at the open door glaring and shaking his head. “And what in the hell are you doing with Sammy Wilson?”

Inside the store, perched on his stool like a pigeon on a light pole, Clarence turned the question around on Sammy: “What in the hell you doing, joy riding around with a bunch of white boys?”

The man shrugged sheepishly and mumbled, “I – I’m jest – you know – goin’ around, you know. Forty-third Street, hell, you know…” He seemed precariously balanced on the folding chair where we’d set him before unfolding a few for ourselves and ranging them in a semicircle in front of Clarence at the counter. I sat close, ready to catch him if he wobbled to my side. Billy on his right was quiet, still dealing with the fact that a few minutes earlier he’d been about to kick one of Chicago’s finest blues musicians out onto the pavement.

Joey wandered around the shop, picking up record albums and putting them down, peering out between the posters in the storefront windows, peeking into the back room.

I explained to Clarence how Sammy Wilson had ended up in my car.

He sighed, “It’s a damn shame. A damn shame!”

 “What’s the big deal about Forty-third Street?”

“Sammy used to play the Forum, when he had his own band,” Clarence said. “Muddy Waters got him gigs there from when they was playin’ together. Sometimes now they let him in the side door. He also like to go over at Lucille’s across the street. It’s one of his favorite hang-outs.”

 “So that was Lucille’s,” I said. “It looked like a riot broke out when we rode past.”

“Yeah,” Clarence said. “It’s kind of a rough place.” He squinted at me through his goggles. “You-all stay away from there, you hear?”

I held up my hands and nodded.

“Yeah, yeah,” Billy-Boy said, his swagger returned. “I been in worse joints than that.”

Clarence just laughed, his narrow shoulders jerking like chicken wings.

Sammy smiled Buddha-like contentment and closed his eyes. “Whoa!” he said and opened them wide again.

Clarence watched Joey standing at the office door. Finally he called, “Go ahead and play it if you want. You know you want to.”

Joey glanced over uncertainly. Clarence’s roundhole Martin guitar was propped up in a stand next to his desk.

“Go ahead,” Clarence said again. “You been strokin’ it with your eyeballs, so I guess you can play it.”

Joey’s hangdog expression didn’t change, but he stepped into the room and carefully picked up the guitar. Cradling it in his arms, he brought it over to the radiator in front of the window and sat down. He brushed his fingers across the strings experimentally, and a minor chord spread across the room.

“There you go,” Clarence said.

I looked over at Billy. “I didn’t know he played.”

“Play it!” called Sammy Wilson.

For the first time all night Joey Grano allowed a little twist of a smile. He tentatively thumbed a shuffling boogie-woogie, single string, carrying the bass line through 12 bars before adding chords.

“All right!” Sammy shouted.

“Sounds good,” I said.

Billy-Boy tapped his foot and bobbed his head, and the second time the measures came around, he sang out:

“Oh my baby she done left me,

My mule he up and died.”

And Sammy Wilson and I both joined in for the rest of the verse,

“The dog he et my dinner, and

I got the blues all up inside!”

“Oh, Baby!” we all sang, and Billy-Boy drew out his harp. With great ceremony, he offered it up to Sammy, who took it with a nod and began to blow.

Oh how he wailed! All the blue misery of a wino in the gutter, all the honking blue melancholy of a drunk on a doorstep, blue sorrow of the last sticky swallow of Southern Comfort. Sammy Wilson wailed and blew -- and gagged and retched -- and spewed a half gallon of booze and nastiness all over himself and the linoleum floor. With a groan he tilted off the folding chair and sprawled into the reeking puddle.

Joey muted the guitar strings.

“Shit,” Billy said. His Marine Band harmonica lay glistening in the pool of vomit.

Clarence came around and knelt down as close as he dared, dabbing at Wilson’s face with a tissue. “No good, Sammy, no good.”

I rushed to the bathroom and returned with a fistful of paper towels to spread around on the floor. Clarence struggled to get Sammy upright, while Billy-Boy gawked and blinked. The powerful reek of acid and alcohol stung our eyes and nostrils. Billy backed away and leaned against the counter.

Joey began again, playing softly, his fingers walking the neck from one suffering fret to another.

“Why do you do it, Sammy?” Clarence said. “Why oh why?”

Sammy Wilson’s eyes rolled back in his head and he slumped against Clarence’s knee with a grunt.

For a long time nobody spoke. Then Billy-Boy sighed, imploring with hands outstretched. “This is bullshit,” he finally said.

I nodded. “It’s like the death of the blues.”

Just then did Joey Grano pluck and bend the bluest of blue notes ever, that twanged the misery of a teen-aged heartbreak, that echoed bravado through steaming city streets of anger and desperation in the chill blue light underneath the El.