A Bluesman Explains

     That summer I'd been hired as a temporary replacement drummer for the Jailhouse Lemon Lee Band on a tour through the southwest. In the small hours on the road from somewhere to someplace, I asked Lee, then in his late 70s and blind since birth, how he managed to hold his own in the endless nickel and dime Five Card Stud games that we played to kill the road hours. I suspected that as the New Guy that I was being set up as a mark in a long con that might not even involve poker.  I'd played in dozens of poker games with Lee and his crew and while Lee didn't consistently win, he rarely lost big. I couldn't figure out how he did it.

     From behind his aviator sunglasses Lee told me he used mirrors.

     Then he laughed quietly and made himself comfortable.  I thought he'd drifted off but what I thought was him mumbling in his sleep were actually lyrics to songs yet unwritten, his rich baritone barely above a whisper, the melody more felt than heard.  The man was a wellspring of stories.  It wasn't for my benefit and I doubt he was aware of my presence, this is what came as naturally to him as breathing itself.

     I heard the 16 bar poetry of midnight trains and blue tick hound dogs, of prison time, times good and times hard, the love women who dun him wrong and the good hearted women who got away.  A Fourth of July in Kansas, a played out steamer on the Mississippi, life on the road from somewhere to someplace else.  A tapestry of the man's life, through which ran, mostly unseen but always there, the thread of The Woman, never named, always present.  

     And then he was finished and folded his hands behind his head, leaned against a canvas sea bag  in the seat next to his, with his sly smile and aviator wraparounds. I should have let the lingering magic, I didn't.

     "But how do you see things? How do you know those playing cards? How can you even describe a color like -- like, say, pink?

     Spell broken, we were back on the rattling tour bus with diesel fumes and near-sprung shocks, stale beer, snoring, road thrum. The eastern sky hinted pale blue. He sighed, like a man explaining a simple concept to a child: pink was meeting the girl next door for the first time, your first kiss, how she looked on her wedding day, your first child, and how you remember her the last time you were with her, when friends and family quietly stepped out of the room to give you some last time alone.

     He was a widower pushing three decades by that time. He never spilled about the playing cards. But that's how he explained the color pink.