Twenty minutes later, a stewardess had Serge by the arm and escorted him back to his seat over his protests. “I told you, I wasn’t trying to disable the smoke detector. I was
Serge reluctantly sat down. He thought a second. He reached under his seat for his camera.
The businessman was typing on his laptop. He could feel Serge’s eyes drilling into the side of his head.
“Listen…” said Serge.
The man sighed and closed his laptop.
“I’d like to take some more pictures again when we land. Will that be okay? If it isn’t, I’ll understand. Life is so fleeting I want to capture every moment. I’ll just set the motor drive on automatic and let ’er rip.”
The Boeing 737 banked over Long Island for its approach. The landing gear went down. Serge leaned across the man again and pressed his lens to the pressure window. Click, click, click. “I’m getting goose bumps.” Click, click, click. “This is just like that U2 song…. You like U2?… Of course! Everybody does!…
The Boeing taxied up to the terminal. Serge unlatched the overhead bin. “I only take carry-ons. Checking your luggage is playing with fire….” He turned, but the businessman was already halfway up the aisle.
“Hey!” Serge yelled. “We forgot to exchange phone numbers….”
28
New York City. Manhattan. East Side.
Eugene Tibbs was blue. That was his job.
He had always been blue.
He was blue back in his days on the Mississippi Delta, in those cotton fields, and he was blue in Memphis, on Union Avenue, recording for Sam Phillips at Sun Studio. He was blue after selling his soul to the devil late one night at the crossroads. And he was blue because he didn’t sell his soul for talent and fame but for a sandwich. That’s what cheap liquor will do to you. That’s what the blues does to you.
Tibbs sat in the last car of the 4-5-6 subway line as it clattered and sparked under Grand Central Station. Well after midnight, Eugene was alone in the car, reading a paperback by Ralph Krunkleton. He looked out the scratched window at a group of laughing people in the seedy yellow light on the Fifty-first Street platform. They couldn’t fool him. They were blue, too. He could tell. He knew the blues.
Tibbs had just returned from Florida. More like fled. He had been let go from a steady run at Skipper’s Smokehouse, the legendary blues joint on Tampa’s north side. His last night there had started blue enough, but there was trouble waiting down the tracks for Tibbs. He sat in a chair onstage, wearing a neat black tuxedo and cradling his faithful hollow-body Epiphone guitar, Gertrude. That’s when trouble walked in the door.
Eugene performed as Blind Jelly Doughnut, and his sunglasses were so dark he could safely watch a solar eclipse. They made him bump into things, and people thought he really was blind and his music, therefore, the bluest of all. If you were blind and not blue, something was wrong.
But even with the sunglasses, Tibbs recognized the man who came in the club that night. He’d recognize him anywhere, and it might as well have been the devil himself, wanting to talk about that sandwich. Damn the blues.
The man came right down to the stage and took a seat at a cocktail table in the front row. He set his glass of ice water down and pulled out a notepad. It was that damn Atkins fellow from Alabama, the blues historian who’d been stalking him for an interview. The man just wouldn’t take no.
It unsettled Tibbs seeing him sitting there, quietly confident, watching, waiting for a slip — the man could ruin everything. It became a war of nerves. Eugene broke out in a sweat. After the third song, he began to cough. The man in the front row stood and silently offered Tibbs his glass of water.
“Thank you,” said Eugene, taking the glass.
The man jumped back and pointed. “He can see! He can see! I knew it!”
The audience was horrified, houselights came on, a scuffle broke out. Eugene barely escaped, running three blocks and ducking into an adult theater. He peeked out the window at the mob running past the theater with torches and clubs. Don’t mess with the blues.
Tibbs caught the first flight back to New York. He took a bus to the Port Authority Terminal, then tried to use the subway, but he didn’t have the right change. When you’re blue, you never have the right change. That’s the way it works. Rock and roll gets the limos. The blues makes you walk. It was another dozen blocks across the Village back to his loft apartment in SoHo, next to the nineteenth-century carriage house on Crosby Street where Billie Holiday used to live.
