Dark End of the Street - v4 Read Online Free PDF

Makin’ Love.” The singer was about as large as my dance partner, in a tailored pin-striped suit and Jheri Curl hair, preachin’ the gospel of Memphis soul. Driving drum beat, that spooky ‘sixties organ, almost country and western guitar, and a small horn section punctuating every emotion. The singer stopped in the middle of the song, drum and guitar carrying on the rhythm, bragging to a woman in a plastic snakeskin coat, “Ain’t nothin’ short on me but my mustache.”
    Wild Bill’s was a straight shot of a bar with long tables where everyone smashed together commune-style, a place where three dollars and fifty cents would get you a forty ounce and a clean glass. The room was narrow, painted orange, and decorated with Christmas lights, Polaroids of drunken patrons, and posters of black women in bikinis.
    A juke house usually meant an old clapboard shack or storefront in some tired Mississippi town. But Wild Bill’s lived in a strip mall occupied by a dry cleaner, a deli, and three beauty shops. One offered no-lye relaxers and body weaves.
    I seriously didn’t come to party or dance or act like a complete fool. Actually, I had just been sipping on the last of my forty and working on a plate of spicy chicken wings when she’d pulled me out onto the floor. Soon I was bumping, shaking, and strutting at her side. Didn’t want to offend anyone.
    I even tried to move with her, but she kept on bumping me with her butt and about knocking me out on the street. So I planted my boots hard to the floor and tried to hold my ground, even smiling a bit when the band finished out the tune.
    Felt like Travolta when he stayed on the bull in Urban Cowboy.
    But as I began to walk away to my beer and wings, the band took it down a notch with a slow ballad. The woman grabbed my hands, locked them around her waist, and took me for a slow ride around the small dance floor.
    She twirled me all around — my boots barely skimming the floor — and I felt like something stuffed with sawdust that you’d win at a county fair. I finally returned to my seat, chewed the remainder of meat off the last wing, and drank in the whole scene.
    She watched me from the other side of the room and sent me another beer. I nodded at her, careful not to get too close. She looked like she wanted to keep me as a pet.
    All around me, people were passing about bottles of Canadian whiskey, screw-topped bottles of champagne, and more quarts of beer. They sweated into plastic hotel ice buckets, hooted with laughter, and unwound from the hard week.
    Besides the rhythm guitar player, I was the only white boy in the house.
    I took a sip of warm beer and watched the man work his guitar. He was skinny and kept the kind of beard you’d expect to find on a character from the New Testament. Wore a T-shirt advertising Atlanta blues mecca Blind Willie’s, Wranglers faded almost white, and Birkenstocks.
    Man’s name was Cleve Mack and thirty years ago he’d created the nerve center for some of the greatest soul music ever recorded. Always worked that way. Didn’t matter if it was Stax, Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, or Bluff City. The greatest soul music was a blend of white and black artists, a pure Memphis melting pot of country, gospel, and blues.
    I pushed away the skeletal remains of the wings and the last of the amber beer in my glass. My thin notebook was in my back pocket and I was ready to get some leads. That big woman had worn my ass out. No more hip shakin’ tonight.
    I found Cleve out back behind the strip mall smoking a joint beside a rusting Dumpster that smelled of sulfur and shit. His face wrinkled like old parchment around his blue eyes. His body so thin, he looked as if he were sick or on a hunger strike.
    I walked over, introduced myself, and told him about Loretta and her desire to find her brother. Cleve sucked on the joint and kicked at a paper basket of wings. He toed at it for a few moments but wouldn’t knock the messy bones on the