In Search of the Blues: A Journey to the Soul of Black Texas by Bill Minutaglio

Author:Bill Minutaglio [Minutaglio, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780292778566
Google: Dl_FRA5sCXUC
Amazon: 0292722893
Published: 2010-03-01T11:52:07.865000+00:00

FIRE IN THE HOLE BLUES

I liked to take the long way home, sometimes south down Oakland (now Malcolm X) and then a right on Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard, aiming for Oak Cliff, crossing a dank leg of the Trinity River and then cutting back by the Dallas Zoo. One night I stopped on the dark bridge over the river. There was some strange creature at the side of the road. I thought it was a nutria or some biochemical creation from the depths of the polluted water. It was a dog, coated with mange, bleeding from sores. I drove away, cursed, did a U-turn, and picked up the dog. I went to an all-night vet’s office and had the dog more or less revived. It was a little like another random day on MLK when I was driving toward Oakland. Near where Jasper Baccus had once chased me into the street, thinking I was a fraud, an imposter. There was something on fire in the alley. Something back there. I did a U-turn. I stopped and walked with the fearful cottony steps I had taken in Harlem, in a million places, toward the flames. I don’t know whether people scattered, but if some did, it would make perfect sense. I stayed for a while. And then I came back the next day. And I came back every day for about a month, from sunrise until as late as I could stand it.

It was winter, and people were trying to survive by huddling around a fire that they had made in a barrel. There was massive distrust for the first week or so after I arrived. And there was some sort of breakthrough when I pooled money and went to the place on the corner that sold cigarettes and beer. I bought two forty-ounce bottles of malt liquor. Several days of that, and the trust factor went higher. I thought after a while of how easy it would be to become an alcoholic. After a while, I was almost deadened, inured, to the mad spikes. One day some knives were pulled and people squared off, and I didn’t move, didn’t seem particularly alarmed. It was as if it were happening on the outer edges of the frame. I went home very late at night, and my wife said my entire body smelled like smoke. I felt as though I had been inside a house that was burning. As always, I thought a lot about the fact that when our little ensemble splintered for the evening—the Texas writer A. C. Greene wrote me a note saying that he thought my story was like a play—most of the actors walked into the alleys or went to the bus stop, whereas I got in my car and went to a house with a refrigerator that was fairly full.

For an evanescent second, faces in the cars gliding by on the South Dallas boulevard on their way to Fair Park, to the highway, to anywhere else instinctively turn toward … something.

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