Chicago by Brian Doyle Read Free Book Online Page A

from my brown study, with another expedition to the South Side, this time to a tiny subterranean blues club named for its proprietress, a large calm woman named Theresa, who seemed to know Edward, and waved us into the murk without charge. It was more of a basement than a club, it seemed to me, but Edward led me to a corner where a young piano player was just finishing a meditative blues with a lovely trickling solo that had the patrons staring at him in amazement. “That was Otis Spann, you know,” said the pianist quietly into his microphone. “He died eight years ago not far from here and he buried under old oak trees not far from here and we going to play Otis all night long like praying. Otis was the best of us all. He a wonder of a man. God gave that man a heart unlike any heart ever was. He was a beautiful man. He died so very young. He only forty when he died. Anybody ever to hear Otis play, you different ever after. A piano player to hear Otis for the first time, that was the end of the piano player you used to be and the beginning of your new one. This happened to me. So tonight we going to play Otis as long as Theresa let us stay here. We maybe play ’til morning if she let us. We going to pray on the piano. We begin with ‘Someday’ played slow and low so you feel the blues at the bottom of your bones,” and he closed his eyes and began to play again, and the music was so lean and sobbing and sweet and sad, so slow and haunted and resigned, with a hint of thorny endlessly patient weary bemused endurance in it, that I did feel it in the bottom of my bones; and I had the odd feeling that I had always known this music somehow without ever actually hearing it before, that it had been waiting patiently for me, so to speak, and now we were friends, and would always be so; we understood each other somehow, we thought and dreamed in the same language, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with skin color or gender or occupation or avocation, or any of the other things by which we define and categorize and wall ourselves off from other people. This music was bone music, music that you either felt very deeply, inarticulately deeply, or you did not. I had the sense that you could enjoy it on the surface, with its propulsive rhythm and repetitive pulse, its predilection to chant and litany and tides of chorus, without loving it, in the way that you could enjoy pop and folk and ethnic music here and there, usually married to an occasion or event; but even before the young piano player finished the song I was utterly and completely and forever absorbed by the blues, and have remained so ever since.
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    Actually meeting Miss Elminides finally had piqued my curiosity about her, and between Edward and Mr Pawlowsky I learned a great deal. Edward was of the firm opinion that she had taken up residence ten years ago, not six, and even at that time she was in the habit of riding the bus, destination unknown, although Edward believed she was a teacher, from various mannerisms and accoutrements and habits, and even the way she carried herself. She had a firm but gentle mien, always willing to listen but brisk and impatient with her time being wasted; she had a preternatural sense of people lingering or waiting in the hall, about to knock on her door; she was apparently erudite in geography, topography, cartography, history, navigation, and music, if the maps and instruments we had seen on her wall were any indication; she took the bus south and west every morning, and returned to her bay apartment late every afternoon; she had the eerie teacherly ability to quell young Azad’s exuberance with a look or a quiet word or even a slight decisive gesture of her hand; and occasionally, at the times that you would think matched the intense periods of a school calendar, she would lock herself in her room for days on end with large stacks of papers and folders, and subsist, apparently, on