The times,
oh they a change. (or at least appear a
then to do so?)
For Memphis,
my Memphis (hopefully the real Memphis?) – what once used to mean
hardship and poverty, confusion or even the old jokes of far eastern Egyptian
Capitals, now seemingly tended, deeply cared for, no longer a step-child of rot or
neglect; my how times have changed indeed.
Maybe it
was always this way, will perhaps be again soon – maybe new city folk will come
in, softer city leaders will put up their own attempt at trials, at time, at a real
investment in time and place and culture and affordable wages and housing; that actual mecca is never the place, or a singular idea – it’s just the
refusal to let the story, the real story, to never die.
A recorded
loop of some other Marc’s song leaks from a speaker poorly disguised as a
lamppost, everyone takes the photo they will assuredly forget to post or retweet (or repost the retweet), and go back to
their own clapboard Holiday Inn; the pavement here is clean enough to eat from, yet no one is
hungry.
Meanwhile across the way, a chain barbecue joint offers “authentic ribs” for more than a day’s wage, the sauce bottled in mid-state New Jersey, an alt-vegan bio-resturaunte beside it.
A cartwheeler meanders by selling kabobs and kimchi, all huskings old poems and gleaming six strings; I stand in the middle of this ‘old’ street and feel absence like a cavity where a tooth once lived, stood mightily, properly well.
Perhaps I
am wiser now. Richer, certainly, not
having to circle round the same ten blocks over and over, like an old rubix cube
or pandora’s box or old wine or grudge to settle. Not breaking irons nor chasing dollars, not
even evading policia at every turn; assuredly sweating less so.
Yes the cops
now help old ladies across the street here, the parking lots have clearly also won.
They stretch in every direction, black oceans under a jaundice moon. A digital
billboard flashes advertisements for a riverboat cruise that leaves from a dock
more than two miles away. The air smells of hot asphalt and funnel cake, time
and forgetfulness. Somewhere a mechanical bull bucks in slow motion for tips. I
search the faces passing by (college girls in cowboy hats, fathers hoisting
toddlers onto their shoulders) and find no recognition of who I or what this
ground once held. They take selfies with a bronze statue of former local, his
trumpet frozen mid-phrase, and move on to the next attraction.
The blues
is a backdrop now, a filter on their cameras.
Yet I
close my eyes, and the street rewinds. It
is now the seventies, and the rot has already set in, but it is a slower rot
then, an unknown, an almost dignified malfeasance as we pretend to ourselves
that time and lies are better now. How are we to know that what we are staring
at is not progress? That the same vultures
erected new nests, that they continue to flap wings and soar overhead. The lots are still new-ish, sure, still proud
enough of their gleaming emptiness and false promise. They shimmer like the
hoods of the Cadillacs parked nose-to-tail atop them. The clubs have begun to
cater to the out-of-towners of course, but the music hasn’t entirely
surrendered. At the Ebony, a trio from Clarksdale still plays for both tips and
pride, their amplifier held together with duct tape and prayer.
The
singer’s voice cracks on the high notes the way a levee cracks before the deluge.
Outside, a
street preacher continues on in a powder-blue suit waves a tambourine and warns
of the wages of sin. He will soon enough
be replaced by ‘fluencers, by other types of shysters we always know well, will
always be here and encourage all. They
hound us, circle us sure, for they are such intimate vultures of our lives; that
to be without the abuser now as then, is to only know and sew abject confusion
(and dream a dream so dearly so, so easily lost or cast away).
Then too
it is suddenly 65’. A great battle has
been won, Tennessee continues to rip and roil of course, and everyone remains…unsure,
certainly, on what to do, but it is a new century, a new war, and the tides now
like then continue to churn. A dice game
flickers in the alley behind the BBQ stand. The air is thick with hickory smoke
and reefer and the sweet rot of bourbon spilled on sawdust. The street is
narrower then, inprobably so, the buildings leaning in like gossipy aunts, but
girding on, every out and down and on.
You can smell
the river even, if you stand in the right doorway, or the wind catches or turns
so.
But the
lots now as then are spreading, each and every shoreside dealer offering ten
percent return guaranteed return (for whom? Nobody cares to bother to ask). Every month another rooming house comes down, another shoeshine
and part of the shoreline vanishes seemingly forever. The city fathers speak of
progress, of urban renewal, of making the city ‘safe’ (if only for convention
dollars). They do not say what they are renewing, or who it was unsafe for. Meanwhile, my own negro boy, how he continues
to glance over his own shoulder, on his very way to school..
I close my
eyes again and the film jumps even further back.
It is
1958, and Beale Street is a Kingdom. The pavement itself seems to breathe, to
exhale out promise and tobacco scent. Mitchell’s Hotel glows like a lantern at
the corner, its sign promising ROOMS BY THE HOUR OR THE…well, something else,
all tempting, calling me, us, we all, so. Inside the Club Paradise, there is a
lady named Miss Ruth is singing about New Troubles coming forth (as if the emerging
burdens were hers alone to carry). Her voice is a low fire, blanking and
flaring, giving us all hope. The band beside her answers her with horns that
sound like they have swallowed the Delta whole. Men in sharkskin suits lean
against the bar, their glistening fedoras tilted like question marks. New women
in satin dresses the color of midnight laugh a bit too loud, their laughter a
kind of defiance.
For the
first time I saw her, it was not yet a street but a river of sound; a black
Nile spilling over its banks and flooding the very night with something older
than the city itself. It was 1958 alright, and I had come down from Harlem on a
Greyhound that smelled of sweat and fried chicken and ultimate tired sadness,
chasing rumors of a music that could make a man forget even his very name.
Memphis back then of course did not disappoint. The city had risen around me
and everybody, like a fever dream as we all gently landed, its warehouses and
cotton lofts glowing with the same imperial confidence that must have animated
Alexandria when the Ptolemies still walked its quays.
Like Rameses
before seeking his 87th bride..
For Beale
itself was the proof: a narrow corridor of brick and neon where the Delta met
the world, where the children of new Pharaohs—dispossessed, re-enslaved,
re-freed—had built something equally mighty of and in their own right.
Meanwhile
outside, the street remains(ed) a carnival of small hustles: a boy selling
newspapers, a policy runner collecting dreams in a cigar box, a soapbox man promising
salvation for only just dollar and delivering it back in tongues. The matchstick
click against the curb, the police coming soon. Someone is always winning,
someone always losing, everyone going their own desperate intricate ways.
The air
then as now is thick with sweat and perfume and the copper tang of blood from a
fight that ended ten minutes ago and will start again at closing time. You can
feel the river two blocks away, the ‘ssippi rolling its ancient tongue against
the low bluffs outside of town, whispering that everything here is both at once
borrowed and everything here is eternal. Just like back home – just like I want
every small child to hear and bear witness to (and see).
It wont
last though, nothing does: the sharks have already sensed and scented blood in
the water.
Yet as I
open my eyes and I am back in the pretend present, standing beneath the
too-bright neon again, the cancer note clutched deep in my hand, some new
senses occur. A new fangled carriage clops past, its driver narrating ancient history
in a voice like melted plastic, a Tesla beside him, idly revving on. The
tourists applaud on cue, continue their merry way along this intellectual
slaughterhouse.
I want to
tell them what they are clapping for, but the words stick in my throat like sharp
gristle. I lower my eyes, and begin to
walk away.
For modern
Beale now is only two blocks long, whereas once it continued all the way down
to Myrtle (and of all charming delight, Manassas). They have attached a big stadium to its
backside, and the architecture students come to take their Argentinian privilege
beside Chinese voices alongside endlessly looping digital shenanigans, and Antarctic
ways. It used to be…different, I think. (I have to believe it is still there, will
most assuredly, certainly come again). I believe it because I, we, everyone all,
must.
Because if
Memphis can forget Beale, then every city that ever birthed a sound worth
hearing can be reduced to a selfie stick and a shining cyanide capsule.
But rivers
don’t work that way. They pile up, or go around, flow, cut through, of course. They eventually carve canyons through
mountains (They carry seeds a thousand miles).
They most
certainly return.
Instead I
walk to the edge of the street where the pavement gives way to one of other
endless seas. The asphalt is warm under my shoes, still holding the day’s heat.
As I pass I think of the old old city of Alexandria; how it eventually sank
beneath the harbor and and into the Mediterranean itself, and was lost for
centuries, its libraries and temples claimed by silt and salt and (eventually)
time. I think hard too of Memphis (the
other Memphis, of course), where beside that other great river still runs
through the city like a vein of liquid memory, passed a necropolis (which like
all necropolis, dry dearly in and with enough time).
For all
rivers are the same. They carry the dead and the living in the same turbulent,
petulant current. They erode stone and build new deltas, carry on; they forget
nothing.
I see now
new kids coming by with newer trumpets locked in hand, phones alight with
algorithms and waking dreams and promises.
They are making their own stories as they bounce and boogy along, humming
music to themselves that is at once both foreign and home and harmony, and new lies
and old promises yet undiscovered, and on that I begin the first quakings of a hint
of a gander of a smile.
For Beale
Street is not dead: it is and always was dreaming.
…and
dreams, like rivers, have a way of always winding onwards. (And in time, eventually finding the sea.)
Beside it
all as I go the ‘ssippi flows ever on, always like me (like all of us, really),
still churning, burning so, as it goes ever outward, onward..
