(Photo credit: Scott Ferris)

Rolling into Houston at the end of the afternoon, a sticky four hours from Dallas on I-45, south all the way, we pulled up outside Fitzgerald’s, an aging building dating from 1918 and originally a home for Polish music. G.B.Fitzgerald took the place over in 1977, and by the time we played there that September, the joint was being run by his daughter Sara.

Playing those Texas dance-halls and clubs on a Sunday night had a little something that didn’t usually happen on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Those nights were usually working nights for local musicians, but Sunday was often a night off, and Roomful being a musician’s band usually drew some very cool cats. The very sharply dressed and very silver-haired Freddie Cisneros with his beautiful wife Mary Jane might show, maybe Pete Mayes, immaculate in a white suit and big hollow body guitar, possibly Johnny Copeland, perhaps the T-Birds, Lou Ann Barton or Stevie Ray Vaughan. One night, a year or two later at Fitzgerald’s rival club Rockefeller’s, we had Eddie ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson, Koko Taylor and Albert Collins all up on stage at the same time, shaking the joint with Koko’’s Wang Dang Doodle’. I remember Albert looking me in the eye at the end of that night, saying, ‘Man, if I had this band, I’d be a millionaire’ … 

This particular evening Freddie came down with some of the guys from his band, The Cold Cuts, and Freddie sat in, playing Ray Sharpe’s ‘Linda Lu’ for all he was worth, short intensive flurries of notes from his guitar, and then into the call and response “ Oh Yeah, My Baby’s Gone’, another Ray Sharpe tune that Freddie had just recorded for Hammond Scott’s cool new Black Top label, under the name of Little Junior One Hand And His Magic Guitar with The Cold Cuts, an appellation that just has to be one of the best stage names ever.

Cool cool Freddie, he sure did swing.

He and Mary Jane invited some of us back to their place after the show, where we were wined and dined, plates of tacos and beans and rice, cervezas and endless music talk, records pulled from shelves and spun on the big hifi to appreciative shouts of approval, commentary on the players, a mad jabbering festival of food, booze and music and passionate talk, nodding heads, waving arms, tall tales, cries of disbelief, guffaws and groans, and then another disc, another round of crazed talk, more beer, and then finally, a four am series of goodbyes, and a bleary-eyed ride back to the hotel, the Allen Park Inn, sitting beside the Allen Parkway, that winding old road shooting west from downtown, that runs alongside the equally winding Buffalo Bayou, grab a few hours of oblivion prior to a late Monday afternoon check out, and an eight hundred mile drive to Atlanta, Georgia, back once more to that town that had so changed my life a scant eighteen months before.

So out along the bayou, onto the highway, headed for Highlands, Hankamer, and Beaumont, and then as Jimmy Rodgers would have said, ‘Goodbye Texas, and hello Louisiana’, as we bid Orange farewell and rolled east, that long old Interstate 10 just lying out there in front of us for hours, past Lake Charles, Lafayette, the south with its swamps and bayous, little towns and huge petro-industrial installations, gas flares and lights flickering in the humid night, billboards flashing by, garish sentinels of the highway, and on and on to Baton Rouge, over the brown and muddy Mississippi River, forever following its relentless southward destiny, bringing tidings from the northern reaches of this strange and mis-begotten nation, ah Baton Rouge, that Red Stick town with restaurants advertising crawfish Hunan style, blinking neons for Dixie Beer, and billboards for Jimmy Lee Swaggart’s TV shows, beaming the word of God into homes with his messages of faith, flag and family values accompanied by his rolling piano stylings, which if you didn’t know, you’d swear it was some cat like Jerry Lee Lewis running the keyboard, which would not have been a bad guess, because old Jerry Lee was in fact Swaggart’s cousin and they’d grown up together, learning piano together, fishing in the bayous together and learning how to sin together. ‘Course, Jerry pretty much embraced that life, that sinful life, and Jimmy went on to preach against it, tho as we were to find out later in the decade, that devilish holy roller Jimmy really dug it, though his tortured soul could never admit it. Except when he got caught with his pants down, which kind of changed things. 

Baton Rouge is where 10 veers off to shake hands with New Orleans, and we rolled through the last of Louisiana on 12, past Hammond, past Ponchatoula, north of Lake Ponchartrain and then hitting 10 again a few miles west of the next stateline, and the Suburban crossed the Pearl River Nature Preserve, the swamps dark and eerie, stretches of water gleaming and flashing silver under the southern moon, and then over the river itself, and it’s ‘Goodbye Louisiana, and hello Mississippi’, Gulfport, Biloxi and then it’s Alabama, poor beat poverty gripped Alabama with the crummiest roads, miles and miles of uneven concrete highway, ba-dump, ba-dump, ba-dump for hundreds of miles, which for those sitting next to the windows means an end to leaning a head against the window trying to sleep, too much ba-dump, ba-dump, ba-dump makes your head spin, your neck ache and your mind despair - oh, Alabama, state of disrepair, your state bird may be the Yellowhammer, but your roads just hammer and yammer, yammer and hammer. 

At Mobile we hit 65, northeast to Montgomery, and then on towards the Georgia line, big bugs squishing on the windshield, and past Montgomery the first faint streaks of dawn beginning to dance on the horizon, and another day breaks, the piney woods emerging from the gloom, dark green and impenetrable, kudzu and Spanish Moss softening outlines, little farms with dungareed farmers calling the cows for morning milking, dusty pickups on service roads and side trails, off to make the day’s wages, another sweat-soaked day ahead, toiling on the land, tractors in the far distance hauling long trailers, strange mechanical animals with long plumes of dust for tails, and then over a hill and they are gone, gone forever, visions seen, visions lost, and the Suburban groans onward, the U-haul trailer obediently and blindly following, fortunately having no choice in the matter, even as its tires become more cupped with each inexorable mile.

Oh America, when will your roads ever come to an end, when will your cars finally run out of gas, oh America, when will this urge to see beyond the next horizon ever abate, when will the thrum and drone of rolling rubber ever cease, oh America, when will your mighty engines be quiet, the crankshafts stop spinning, the transmissions finish their whining, the pistons quit rising, the tappets end their tapping, the exhausts stop spewing their poisons, and the differentials come to a slow and joyously agreeable stop? 

When? Well, not for a while … still some miles to go, and we gotta gas up, stretch our legs, grab some morning coffee, and clean all these dead bugs from the windshield, and wow, what shit have we hit during the night? Yellow and red splodges of bug bodies, liquified at impact,  and then air-dried at seventy mph, stretching from one side of the glass to the other, a montage of death, road accidents that never make the pages of any newspaper, an unrecorded, unheralded and ignored slaughter, and what remained of their remains washed down the drains of an unnamed truck stop just outside of LaGrange, mass funerals that were unacknowledged by the handful of overweight truckers in polyester coveralls in the adjacent rows of pumps, engaged in hosing down their cabs, chewing tobacco, one hand holding the hose, the other trying to drink coffee from a polystyrene cup all the while listening to the crackle of a CB, the multi-tasking of the American trucking industry, a crazed collage of coffee, diesel, radio talk and dead bugs.

The Georgia sun was rising as we pulled back onto the highway, Al driving, Porky and Pic in the front seat, me, John and Jimmy in the next, and then Big Guy, Doug and Rich in the next, with Ronnie back in the hamster cage, the circus was back on the road, and closing in on Atlanta, and the promise of bed, the dream of lying at full length, a soft mattress, the ability to roll over, to the left or to the right, didn’t really matter which way, it was just the freedom to be able to do it, oh, such a luxury, such a delight, such a pleasure, and if you wanted to take a pee, why, just throw the covers back and walk to the bathroom, no having to ask the driver to pull over, and have everyone on your seat get up and out of the truck just so you could make it to the side of the road and get some relief, oh man, the sweetness of a bed and a room, clean sheets, and a pillow. A pillow, dammit, a pillow. These were the dreams of those of us in the Suburban, but the dream was forbidden for the driver. He had to gaze at the road, the immediate future, the many tons of potential death flying by him at horrendous speeds, those fleeting rushing chunks of stylized steel to be avoided at all costs, the most important cost being the complete and utter avoidance of thinking about sleep, no matter how tired he was, how his reddened eyes burned and instead concentrating upon the absolute necessity of keeping those peepers peeled and open, watching, calculating, estimating, keeping that dusty old Suburban on the straight and narrow, eyeing the gauges, watching the signs, checking the rear view mirrors, the side mirrors, the far distance ahead to check of potential problems half a mile down the road, homing in on impending on ramps with possible dangers of cars or trucks piloted by absent minded or just simply crazy fools suddenly entering the highway, be prepared for the sudden whoosh of a passing eighteen wheeler, its forty foot trailer pushing wind, flashing his lights to signal to the trucker that it was now safe for him to pull into our lane ahead of us, and him blinking his rear lights in thanks and acknowledgment, the little courtesies of life lived at sixty miles per hour, and the traffic thickens, rush hour is on and as we get close to Atlanta the pace quickens, all the commuters in their cars, the four wheelers as the truckers call them, hurrying to make their gigs, speeding, zipping in and out of the traffic, as if they have some kind of magic ‘keep me safe oh lord’ halo around their cars, turning them into kinds of psychic dodgems, which will actually work and really keep them safe, which of course they won’t, as sadly evidenced by the mangled wreckage we’d see from time to time, flashing blue and red lights, screaming sirens, and ambulances with back doors open wide, and kids sitting at the side of the road crying, damn halos didn’t work then, no sirree, but there were no accidents that morning, so I guess, for a short while at least, the halos were working, and then we were there.

Parked, motor off, stumbled out of the truck, clothes bags and instruments in hand.

The hotel. Beds, sheets, pillows, and bathrooms.