Last Fair Deal
an excerpt

The white man had just arrived in Memphis, and six days into his stay, news came that the bluesman had died. It seemed strange to Tash that an entire city could be immobilized by grief. Fact was, Tash Delay was on assignment, and now he wanted to know just how he was going to finish his story.
But then again, Tash was always worried about things like that, about stories finding endings and the way cities seemed strange. It wasn’t long before he got cocky about a topic—maybe he’d discovered something that everyone else already knew, like Robert Johnson had long thin fingers—and you would have believed he’d grown up in Greenwood, Mississippi and he probably would have told you he had if you’d asked. Tash was like that.
Tash’s life was built on three indisputable facts: he was white, he was attractive, and great things were expected of him. Tash always told me that I was predisposed to hate him, that it was decided long before either of us had been born that we’d find each other, hate each other, but not be able to walk away. It wasn’t a love thing. It was just a solid piece of information.
But some people ask you to hate them. They practically beg. Tash was a partygoer, the highlight of uptown cocktail parties, the draw of East Village readings, the object of Greenpoint toasts. At times, he was impossible to escape. When his second novel was published, his publisher hired an outside publicity firm that employed guerilla tactics, such as the tattooing of downtown sidewalks with the cover of Tash’s new book and the words: You were never clean. When people encountered Tash, they rarely used the terms “met” or “ran into”; these verbs were too pedestrian. One “experienced” him. Tash complained about it, saying he was hardly able to experience himself because so many other people were in on the game. And that’s why he loved Memphis. No one was in on the game. This was also why he hated Memphis.
The body had been found three hundred miles downriver from the old bridge, in a mudflat near Vidalia. It was snagged on a tree, and people said that the face was gone, that there was nothing where the faced used to be but a gooey stew. Porter had been missing for a month, but everyone knew before Vidalia that he was dead. No one jumps off the old bridge and survives unless they’re dreaming.
The body was sent back to Memphis, where the coroner concluded that Porter Jefferson had died accidentally, probably on a bender, but no one much believed that, especially because the coroner was Dr. James Hooker, Sr., and there was history there. And besides, bluesmen were always ending up dead around here.
But Tash Delay, twenty-eight, of New York City, had no history with Porter Jefferson, except for the space of time it takes to finish two whiskey sours at the Peabody’s Lobby Bar, and it was this and not his literary fame that finally made him interesting in Memphis.
They’d given Tash six thousand dollars to find “The Last Bluesman.” The simplicity of the title, they reasoned, belied the complexity of the claim. It was the type of self-conscious literary weekly that hoped Tash would find The Last Bluesman holed up in a Chicago housing project, wearing a stained undershirt, bloated by whiskey, and using his welfare check envelope as a coaster. Tash could convince the old man to play a set at a small club and he’d be a hit and Blind Pig records would give him a recording contract and the magazine could take credit for finding The Last Bluesman and for forcing every asshole in the country to tip hat to the stunning primitivism lingering still in hidden corners of a clean, plastic country (Tash was a skillful practitioner of the America-as-a-plastic metaphor, and yet, no one was more obviously manufactured than Tash himself, a Frankenstein of once-subversive cultural trends and the trimmings of poverty fronted by those who’ve never bounced a check.) Preferably, the club would be of the under-the-El variety, a Checkerboard Lounge type joint or a Du Drop Lounge sort of place, which was in such a rough neighborhood that if you could find a cabbie to take you there, he’d drive onto the sidewalk, pull under the awning and drop you off two feet from the door.
But Tash felt that the Chicago blues scene had been written about too much; it was tired. And really, that dichotomy between urban blues and country blues was false, he thought, it was an unconscionably simplistic view of intricate actualities. And now that Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf were dead, there was no archetype, only posers and imitators. This Tash believed.
“This blues thing is a kind of Antarctica for me,” Tash told me when I met him at one of Spade Levine’s album launch parties for some old backwoods drunk who still remembered how to play a B5 chord. Tash used Antarctica to describe anything he found interesting and wished to be write about, but which he felt was under-appreciated. The history of the Third Avenue El was Antarctica. Good port was Antarctica. The secret lives of mailmen were, collectively, Antarctica (a version of the continent that won a National Magazine Award two years earlier.)
But all I could think about when Tash said this was the vast whiteness of the continent and the cold that keeps everything frozen under layer after layer after layer of ice, until you get to the water and find there ugly, primordial creatures whose blood runs white. Now American blues was Tash’s great, unexplored Antarctica, even though bunkers with laboratories had already been dug into the ground there, flags had been planted, and entire populations wiped out. Antarctica is nothing if not white and Tash was just a fake.
But like attracts like, so Hook said, and it was Spade Levine about whom Tash was writing (“Ask a white guy to write about blues music and he’ll write about another white guy,” Hook said.) Spade Levine lived twenty miles outside Memphis on the old Little Plantation that had been shuttered for thirty years before his arrival. He had 350 acres, and the renovated main house had been featured in Home Beautiful three years earlier, when Spade had hired a regiment of home decorators and interior designers to turn it into a replica of the Drayton Hall Plantation in Charleston. The house stood isolated on a closely shorn field, with smaller houses closer to the woods. There were cotton fields and gardens, three separate sets of long, corrugated chicken houses near the January First creek that split Spade’s land in half. He rented most of his cropland to local guys, but the fields closest to the main house were his, and he hired Mexican day laborers to take care of the grounds.
Spade had been writing about the area for years from an apartment in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, churning out mysteries for a small New York publishing house. But when his big book hit and the film rights were picked up and he changed agents and publishers, he moved to Memphis because, he sometimes told people, he needed some verisimilitude and a couple extra bedrooms. He was a former NCAA golf champion from Rutgers who had shattered his wrist in a car crash (it was a news item of some controversy at the time, Tash told Sam later, as the rumor that Spade had been receiving a blow job at the time from the young woman he was escorting home from the bar could not be verified.) His first novel was called Biscoe Biscuit, about crime on the steamboat docks in Biscoe, Arkansas. It didn’t matter that the Mississippi didn’t pass through Biscoe in real life; like the Corps of Engineers, Spade carved it a new channel. He decorated his stories with roadhouses and barbeque joints and broke-down blues musicians who used chicken bones as picks, and named his characters Blind Joe Smalls and Chocolate Samson and Miss Beulah. His P.I. was a white guy much like Spade, who’d once been a well-known college athlete before shattering his wrist in a drunk-driving accident. Miramax picked up the film rights and suddenly Spade Levine was a rich man.
Spade had met Tash at the Sewanee Writer’s Conference two years before on a panel called The New Mailers: Nouveau Maleness in Contemporary Writing. Tash told all the women he met at the conference that although he’d been asked to appear on a panel named for Mailer, he was no fan of the guy’s anti-woman politics, that he resisted the designation—and so managed to get laid by no fewer than six MFA-bound poetesses and one twenty-five year old memoirist who was trying to decide whether or not to turn her life story into a novel since she’d been told by several literary agents who’d considered her manuscript that the memoir genre was too “crowded.”
At the end-of-conference cocktail party, Tash and Spade staged a drunken brawl, and everyone left the conference believing Tash DeLay and Spade Levine were born enemies. It had been good for both their careers: independent weeklies in New York and San Francisco latched on to the counterfeit feud and hired Spade to review Tash’s latest work, and Tash to review Spade’s latest book (“His prose is clotted—a collection of debris from various sources, gelatinous, something that must be excised from one’s personal library with expeditious determination,” Tash wrote of Spade’s latest novel before landing the bluesman assignment.) In a kind of side game that no one else could get in on, they trashed each other’s books, by mutual assent, in very public forums to ensure big sales.
After a year in Memphis, Spade discovered that he couldn’t write about what he no longer had to imagine. Seeing the real Delta destroyed his carefully constructed Delta world, and so he ceased writing. There was no one named Chocolate Samson, nobody using a chicken bone pick, and the Mississippi was under the control of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and so Spade became a wine columnist for a gourmet magazine and briefly penned the “Dear Jack” column in a woman’s magazine, providing to countless single Manhattan girls advice from a “unvarnished male perspective” and after some months of this, he started walking the Harahan Bridge.
I met Spade at Swafford’s, where Hooker had taken him after finding him wandering on the bridge with “that look in his eye.” Hooker invited him for a drink. Playing at Swafford’s that night was a guy named Pea Vine Simpson, a retired mechanic from near Greensville, who had a voice like steel wool and a set that went on forever. He wasn’t very good, but no one minded; no one had come there to see him. But he’d charmed the hell out of Spade.
“This is real,” Spade said that night. “This is real.” Hooker laughed at him and bought him more drinks, but as the night wore on, Spade grew more and more fixated on old Pea Vine. “This is real,” he said again and again and again, until it became a chant.
“He sucks, man,” Hooker finally said. “He’s terrible. Spade, none of these old blues guys are good anymore because they’re all drunks and they just don’t care. All the good ones died years ago.”
“No man,” Spade said, “He’s real.” Later, we’d learn how proficient Spade Levine was at making real what wasn’t, but that night, after Pea Vine finished what passed as a set, we watched Spade approach the old lush at the bar.
Several weeks later, Hooker met up with Spade downtown near Hook’s rehearsal space. He was a new man, he told Hooker and Hooker had to admit that his eyes looked like they belonged to a living man again. Spade told Hook that he had started a record label called Bad Situation Records using his latest royalty check as seed money and that he had already signed his first artist: Pea Vine Simpson.
“I’ve done been resurrected,” Spade told Hook.
A year later, Bad Situation Records was making money and raising other dead souls. Among its miracles was the resuscitation of Porter Jefferson.