—So, he said. What do you want to hear?
—I don’t know, I said. I don’t know what I want to hear.
—Firstly, I’m going to fix up. If you faint easily or have a phobia of needles, I’m happy to go down the hall to the bathroom.
I’d never seen anyone use narcotics before, never been around it, but in the moment his reasonable tone carried me. At nineteen, you can be very accepting, if something is presented to you as normal. You don’t know, so you pretend you’re experienced, you play along. He produced a little wooden box, rolled up a sleeve and started to cook a shot of heroin. He had some sort of medical-looking rubber tourniquet, which he tied expertly to his upper arm. Chester Bly’s madness was deep and fast-flowing but he was a very organized man.
I waited for something to happen, something dramatic like in the “mature adults only” pictures at the Rialto, a spasm, a widening of the eyes, but he just stared glassily at the turntable. After a pause that seemed to stretch for hours, he reached into his box and pulled out a record.
Blues ain’t nothing but a doggone dirty feel
Got no money in your pocket to buy yourself a meal
An amazing record I’d never heard before. Though I begged, he wouldn’t tell me what it was. I was to find out that this was a habit of his—to play things but conceal their identity. I was forever squinting sidelong at spinning labels, hoping in vain to read them.
It was an exquisite record, near mint and as clear as if the performer was in the room, a guitar blues with a vocal that occasionally climbed into a tremulous falsetto. It was followed by other exquisite records, record after record to which Bly listened with his hands steepled and a frown of concentration on his face. When each one ended, he whipped round to lift the needle off the platter. It was as if he snapped out of a trance.
I feel that is very good, he would say. Or, that is a recording of exceptional quality. Always with this measured judicious tone. And I would nod. After four hours, I said I needed to go home because I had work the next day. My head was spinning, round and round, seventy-eight revolutions per minute, and I was finding it hard to hold everything in mind, all the things I’d heard, the flow of recondite facts and opinions. He looked at his watch with an air of disappointment, and showed me to the door.
WATCHING CHESTER BLY walk in to work the next morning, his jacket folded over one arm. Watching him in short bursts, as I raced from desk to desk. Chester Bly coming out of the bathroom with two wadded handfuls of wet paper towels. Chester Bly bent over his desk, carefully wiping the surface, the seat of his chair, its back rest, each of the four wooden legs.
I could not stop to wonder. I had people shouting at me. Copy! Copy! I had to run. Later, when I brought something to one of his neighbors, Bly acknowledged me with a barely perceptible nod. That was as much communication as we had for the rest of the week. I wondered if I’d failed in some way, if I’d said something gauche, mixed up Lonnie Johnson with Robert or Tommy or Willie Johnson. Lonnie Johnson was “molasses,” in Chester’s opinion, along with more or less anyone who ever played in a nightclub. Molasses was syrup. It was for the herd. The connoisseur knew the corner was the place for blues. The corner or the porch.
Chester’s silence was frustrating. I was in orbit, running ellipses round his immaculately sanitized desk, aware at every moment of my proximity to—not to Chester Bly himself, but the thing that had hold of him, the obsession. I was like a child edging closer to a waterfall, wanting to feel the force of it, to stand beside the thunder and the spray. At night I would play my music, the few “good” records I had, and I would listen as hard as I could, but they seemed like minor pieces of a much larger puzzle, meaningless segments of blue sky. All I could think of were those boxes under Bly’s bed. Those little spinning labels, the unreadable text, the hands steepled in a posture of prayer.
One day he sent me a letter. Instead of calling me over or stopping me at the watercooler, he chose to write to me at my home address. No preamble, not much you could call personal. Just a couple of lines, an invitation to a listening party, to be held in his room the following Friday.
Five of us were crammed in there. Five collectors, all men. I was the youngest, Tom and Hal perhaps ten years older. The oldest was Mr. Pinkus, who didn’t seem to have a first name and was probably in his sixties. Each one had a specialty, string bands or Scottish reels or Flamenco or Javanese court gamelan, but each also loved the blues. None were naturally social, and Chester made no attempt at hosting, beyond providing the paper cups that we filled and refilled with cheap California jug wine.
I’ve not seen a second copy of this, Chester would say, pulling out yet another incredible record, another forgotten performance by a lost genius.
Laid down last night just trying to take my rest
My mind got to rambling like wild geese in the west
Sometimes, if one of the collectors knew the right question to ask, Chester would reveal the name. But if pushed, he could push back. He had a sharp tongue. He kept us in a state of cowed admiration. Sometimes, one of us would have heard something before, and would signify his claims with an outward display of appreciation, nodding or tapping his knee or gesturing with his pipe.
—What is that, Chester? It’s Mississippi, right? It’s got to be Mississippi.
—Jesus, Tom, if you can’t hear Texas you’ve gone deaf.
—Texas. Right, Texas.
—Yes, Tom, like Chester says. Listen to the guitar figures.
—Pipe down, Pinkus. People are trying to listen.