Alan Govenar (33 page)

Despite Lightnin's urban appearance, he retained a country sense of humor with long, rambling anecdotes, which Phillips found very appealing. Once, Lightnin' took Phillips and his brother Joel to a chapel to view the body of a friend of theirs. “We went inside and two open coffins were on display,” Phillips says. “They walked up to one, peered into it, shook their heads, then went over to the other casket and saw that in it was the man they knew. They stood around it making droll,
sotto voce
comments about the deceased, which I wish I could remember (one had something to do with remarking that their friend appeared considerably whiter in death than he had been when he was alive. Well, yeah, because whitish powder had been applied to his face, and it looked positively ghostly and kind of Kabuki). After awhile, they strolled over to the other coffin and began making more droll comments about the body of the woman who reposed therein. The things they were saying were so hilarious (not cruel or ghoulish, just terribly irreverent), that I had to stumble outside because I was choking with suppressed laughter. After about half an hour, they decided they'd spent enough time paying their respects to the deceased, and we departed.”
²⁵

The first time Phillips met Antoinette was unexpected, but nonetheless unsettling. She tried her best to stay out of Antoinette's way, but inevitably, one day their paths crossed. “I'd been down there awhile and was at Shorty's garage,” Phillips says, “when Lightnin's car pulled up outside and stopped in the street, with the driver's side facing the garage (I'm nearsighted and didn't have my glasses on), I assumed it was Hops (as we often called him). I got up from my chair and walked to the car to say hi, but when I got close to the driver's side, I saw it wasn't Lightnin', it was Antoinette. Oops! I think she was as startled as I was. I backed away into the garage, and I'm sure I must have asked for a stiff shot because that rattled the heck out of me.”
²⁶

That day, Antoinette was driving Lightnin's black and white Dodge on one of her patrols. “Who knows where he was,” Phillips recalled, “but she was checking out all his haunts, and then some…. Her patrols were very funny. Lightnin' trying to sneak around and get away from her was funny. And that didn't mean he was necessarily up to anything nefarious. He could simply have gone fishing or ‘ridin' and lookin” with Joel or Spider or Billy, or he could have been at a card or craps game in another part of town. No matter, Antoinette kept her eagle eye out for him at all times.”
²⁷

After this incident with Lightnin's car, Phillips realized that she needed to make herself more scarce and began visiting Hattie's tailoring shop, a few doors down from Shorty's. “Hattie was probably in her forties, a seamstress, a stone Texas cowgirl who went to rodeos, was crazy about catfish, and said that she had once killed a no-good boyfriend. I got to know the people who dropped by her shop.
²⁸
I didn't see much of Lightnin' during this period, though he occasionally dropped by just to say hi. He and Hattie knew each other through Shorty, but didn't run in the same circles.

“Hattie began calling Lightnin' ‘Turkey Neck' (though never to his face), not so much because of his neck, which was a bit long but not exceedingly so; but because when he wore a certain pair of boots which apparently didn't fit very snugly, he'd be overly careful when he walked. He would tip forward a bit and his head would bob up and down, which reminded Hattie of a barnyard fowl searching for kernels of grain on the ground. Whenever she saw him stepping past her shop going toward Shorty's, she would exclaim ‘Yonder go Turkey Neck, yonder he go!'”
²⁹

After Phillips had been in Houston for a while she “settled into a routine and lost the sense of there being any other life.” But she was running out of money, and while she liked spending time at Hattie's place, she had been exiled from Shorty's garage (because Antoinette had discovered her there), and was isolated from the action. Moreover, she recognized that her presence in Houston was disrupting the lives of the people around her. “I realized that it was a situation realistically impossible to sustain. It wasn't right,” Phillips says, “no matter how much I tried to ignore that fact,” and her “adventure came to a swift end” when she “learned two alarming pieces of news: the first was a warning that I should watch my back because Antoinette was tired of me poaching her man and was going to put some Louisiana hoodoo on me or shoot me, or both; and the second, truly humiliating news was that my parents were apparently planning to come to Houston to bring me home. Whether Antoinette's alleged threat was real or a scare tactic, I'll never know—I didn't wait to find out. But I especially did not want to suffer the ultimate mortification of being ignominiously carted home by my parents, so I went back to L.A.”
³⁰

Phillips moved home, got a job as a fry cook, and began writing
Mojo Hand,
which she finished in 1965. “I told no one that I was writing the book, but after I'd completed the manuscript, I showed it to lay professor Fallon Evans at Immaculate Heart,” Phillips says, “because I hoped he would tell the nuns that I could actually accomplish something even though they'd expelled me from college. That was
all
I wanted. But Fallon, who had published a series of detective novels, sent it to his agent without telling me, and Trident bought the rights almost immediately. However, my editor, Bucklin Moon, insisted that the name Orpheus be taken out of the book because he denied that it had any relevance to the story.”
³¹
Phillips wasn't prepared for the book to be published because she had no intention of becoming a novelist. She had written the book for personal reasons.

Phillips's novel fictionalized her relationship with Lightnin', and when she completed the book she was still very involved with him. Whenever Lightnin' came to California between 1964 and 1966, Phillips tried to meet up with him. “The liaison continued for a number of years after I left Houston—when he would come to town,” Phillips says, “either to L.A. or San Francisco. Not always, but frequently, I would stay with him.” On these occasions, Phillips was able to spend concentrated periods of time with him. “We'd get up together. You know, he always had a nip in the morning. And then he would have eggs and grits.” During the day, they'd drive around, do errands, and Phillips would usually go to his gigs at night.

Phillips had hoped that Lightnin' would teach her to play guitar, but he was fairly protective of his musicianship and guitar picking moves. “He did not go off somewhere to rehearse, nor did he rehearse his repertoire at all
per se,
but he was extremely open in allowing me simply to be present during his private music-making times. When he had some song, or verse, or guitar riff that he wanted to develop and fix in his mind and fingers, he would pick up his guitar and work on it completely unselfconsciously, while I would kick back and listen. Sometimes he would sing a line or verse directly to me as an ironic way of commenting on my mood or actions, or to express affection. Sometimes I had my guitar and we'd play a game with a succession of increasingly intricate riffs, and even though he would frequently show me his fingering, I was invariably left in the dust … and he was genuinely tickled when I studied his picking and fingering, and tried to copy his licks, though I was by no means a quick study.”
³²

Once in Los Angeles, Phillips says, “Lightnin' and I were in Schwab's drugstore on Sunset Boulevard. He was searching the shelves for a laxative; the food wasn't agreeing with him because he wasn't in Texas or the black part of L.A. and who should we look up and see but John Lee Hooker—looking for a laxative too. They both said, ‘Oh, the food here, man.' They started groaning and commiserating about their indisposition.”
³³

Sometimes when Lightnin' came to L.A. to play at the Ash Grove, he'd stay with two sisters, Jimmie and Tee, who “lived way down in south L.A. They had a soul food cafe downtown, ‘Jimmie and Tee's' near Seventh and Grand across the street from J. W. Robinson's, and their clientele consisted of white professionals who worked downtown, as well as blacks. They were superb cooks from Mississippi. I don't know when he met them, perhaps during his first trip to L.A. back in 1946, but they were old friends, and I'm sure that's all they were. Jimmie and Tee were very conservative women, modest, soft-spoken, all about cooking, a bit plump and plain in dress, they wore white uniforms when they cooked and served in their restaurant. They were very traditional in a Southern sense; I liked them a lot.”
³⁴

When Lightnin' was in town, Phillips would go over to Jimmie and Tee's house to see him. “We'd sit around watching TV and eating food they brought home from the restaurant, or they'd cook just for us.” Surprisingly, “Lightnin's favorite TV fare seemed to be old Amos and Andy shows, old B-grade westerns with Stepin Fetchit, and other stereotypical black sidekicks hamming it up to the hilt, and Charlie Chan movies. This, of course,” Phillips says, “will be extremely controversial to many, but I spent many a night, into the wee hours of the morning, sitting in their living room watching the worst old film and TV
dreck
imaginable (which I adore), including these racist films, and I'd be rolling on the floor at Lightnin's comments. Jimmie and Tee didn't like him to watch the films, but soon they'd be weeping with laughter, as well. I wish I could recall some of the cracks he made. I think that he had a keen sense of stereotype and the way in which it was deployed by African American actors in many but not all of these films as a transgressive weapon. And I appreciated that.”
³⁵

From the first week of April to the third week of October 1966, Lightnin' played more than a dozen dates in California, dividing his time between the Matrix, the Fillmore, the Cabale, the Berkeley Folk Festival in the Bay Area, and the Ash Grove in Los Angeles. The crowds at the Ash Grove were diverse and sometimes included celebrities, some of whom would stop backstage to meet Lightnin', but he wasn't necessarily welcoming. “Once when I was with Lightnin' in the dressing room at the Ash Grove,” Phillips says, “Bobby Darin knocked on the door and asked to come in; he wanted to tell Lightnin' how much he admired his music. I'm not sure that Lightnin' really knew who Darin was as a pop icon, though he certainly knew his name. My jaw dropped when Darin came in, but I tried to play it cool. Here was one of my teen heart-throbs … come to pay his respects to a man
he
considered a master of music.”
³⁶

Phillips loved spending time with Lightnin', but after Antoinette found out about their trysts, she did her best to stop them. Antoinette began to travel with Lightnin' to California, but instead of attacking Phillips, she tried to befriend her. Antoinette realized that if she got to know Phillips, she could keep better track of Lightnin', so when she saw Phillips she approached her and they began to talk. When Phillips eventually returned to Houston in late 1966, Antoinette even asked her to go on a road trip with her to Opelousas, Louisiana. “She invited me to hear her cousins Clifton and Cleveland Chenier,” Phillips says. “We drove there and she took me to her family home, a fairly large, well-maintained farm just outside Opelousas…. People in the Third Ward made a point of telling me that she was educated and had gone to Catholic school.”
³⁷

When the two women were together, they didn't talk about Lightnin'. Antoinette focused on explaining aspects of Creole culture to Phillips, which, Phillips says, “was wonderful. She would tell me about the food, the language, peculiar habits of place. We didn't talk about personal matters. Half the time she was translating from Creole for me.” And when they got to the club where Clifton and Cleveland were performing, Phillips was surprised by how old fashioned everything was. “A man came over and wanted to know where my father was so that he could ask permission to dance with me. ‘Whoa!' I couldn't believe it. They were dancing the two-step. It wasn't at all like Texas [where they'd just say], ‘Hey baby, come on over here and shake your booty.'”
³⁸

After traveling with Antoinette to Louisiana, Phillips says they “became wary friends,” and her relationship with Lightnin' underwent a shift. While Phillips was primed to dislike Antoinette, she did eventually gain respect for her. She understood that Lightnin' loved Antoinette, and that Antoinette, in turn, cared for him in complex ways. But as Phillips pointed out, “Antoinette was cuckolding her husband … and part of my thing was: ‘Lady, don't get all uptight about me; I wasn't going to run off with him, and it wouldn't happen if I tried because he was tied to
you.'
I was obsessed with Lightnin' and had come to Houston specifically to follow my obsession, to embody my personal Orphic fantasy, and to gather material to write the book, but
l'amour fou
does not make for enduring love, and I knew that, so, it was a strange kind of thing.”
³⁹

Most of what Phillips knew about Lightnin's relationship with Antoinette, she learned from other people, “both down there and also from blues aficionados elsewhere. Many people told me that she saved him from probably dying an untimely death.”
⁴⁰

As Phillips and Antoinette got to know each other, they started spending more time together when Lightnin' was in town. “Antoinette was reserved and demure,” Phillips recalled, “but she definitely had a presence. At the Ash Grove, sometimes Antoinette and I would be in the dressing room when Lightnin' was on stage, she'd giggle and say ‘Let's have a little juggalo', then she and I would conspiratorially pour drinks from his stash.
Juggalo
was her name for a drink. She never drank much, and always maintained her composure. When she began traveling with him, my romantic involvement with Lightnin' had essentially ended. I'd drive to the Ash Grove, spend the evening, and go home. I'd drive them to and from the airport, and just be a running buddy.”
⁴¹