—Sorry, Chester.
The next week, he invited me again. Some new things had come in the mail, he said. I didn’t need a second invitation. Bly did not shoot heroin in front of his other collector friends, but whenever we listened to music alone, as we began to do at least once or twice a month, he would fix up at the kitchen table, then brood over his record boxes for several minutes, caught in whatever was happening to him, whatever message the drug allowed him to receive. He never offered heroin to me. It was never even a question. The drug ritual was no more than a bodily function, just something he did, and I grew to think of it as a banality. Bly seemed to have no family, no ties to the world. As he freely admitted, all his spare money went on music. He owned little else, and lived in the most frugal manner. His room was always spotless, the kitchen shelf stacked with cans, but outside the hallway smelled of urine and bacon grease and the bathroom on his floor was often swimming in dirty water. He didn’t seem to notice these hardships. It was as if his whole soul was directed towards the carefully wrapped packages that he picked up, sometimes daily, from a box at a post office on the next block. I think this was why he lived in that place, to have the post office close by.
Ten-inch cardboard squares, sandwiched around precious shellac. Brown paper parcels tied up with string. I wondered if Bly had been in prison. How else could he make do with so little of the world? By any standards, I was a serious collector, but he seemed to have nothing else, no need to go to the park or the movies or walk round a museum. He was just a vehicle for his obsession, what the Haitians call a cheval, a mount for the spirits to ride.
I don’t know why I was invited into his solitude. It seemed he wanted to share something of himself. He told me, for example, about his filing system. It was his belief that a man could only properly hold “around four hundred” records in his mind. A collection should be no larger. He had no time for anyone (which was almost everyone, as he well knew) who amassed thousands of records “without regard to quality or importance.” There existed what he called a golden number. About this number he could grow quite mystical, but he would never tell me exactly what it was. He would audition many records, but if he wanted to keep one, another had to go. Each new star had to deserve its place in the constellation. It had to be, in a word he always used with great gravity, “worthwhile.” For me, who found it wrenching to let go of anything, even music I never listened to and didn’t really like, this was impressive. Because of it, Bly was constantly buying and selling records, sometimes stringing together complex deals, acquiring material in which he had no personal interest to use as bargaining chips in some drawn-out game with another collector.
He answered my musical questions, but I knew not to ask too many. It was important to him to keep something in reserve. Some topics he considered public knowledge, part of every collector’s basic education. These things he freely told me: how a record lathe worked, how changing the width of your stylus could draw more music from a worn disc. Others, he offered in the form of clues or hints. He had, he said, once met a man who saw Robert Johnson alive during the war, serving as a cook on board a ship in the Pacific, but he would say no more about the man, or Johnson’s cooking.
There were certain topics he would only allude to, or rather, there was a mood in which he would intimate darkly that there were such topics, “areas of research” he was not prepared to name. There was some music he’d play and put straight back in its sleeve, refusing to name the players, refusing to discuss it at all.
—Now, now.
That’s what he’d say if I was forward enough to ask. Admonishingly, as if I’d brought up something risqué, obscene.
—Why don’t we move on?
ONE AFTERNOON IN THE NEWSROOM, I was taking a break, smoking a cigarette and listening to some sportswriters argue over who was the better pitcher, Lefty Gomez or Whitey Ford, when Bly appeared, looming over me, his eyeshade like a great green beak. There was something violent about his sudden arrival. The sportswriters could feel it; they turned away and continued their conversation elsewhere. Without hello or any other preamble Bly asked if I knew how to drive. I said yes. He said he too knew how to drive but did not care for it. He found driving stressful. It was good that I could drive. I agreed that it was. He looked at his hands for a moment, examining the nails. So did I think I could get hold of a car?
I asked him where he wanted to go.
—Mississippi.