Back to Wando Passo, David Payne [little red riding hood ebook .TXT] 📗

Marcel smiled. “Thanks, Ran. I appreciate you saying that.”

“So, can I ask you something? I’m dying to know what you think of RAM’s song.”

“‘Talking’? I like it.”

“It’s better, isn’t it?”

“Than ours?”

Ran’s expression hardened involuntarily.

“You know how you feel at the multiplex?” Cell said, moving on. “At the end of some romantic comedy—some pretty good romantic comedy—when the couple finally gets together, and the sound track swells, and you get that little lump in your throat?”

“Yeah?”

“That’s how RAM’s version makes me feel, Ran. I liked it a lot the first four times. Maybe five? Now it feels pretty much like wallpaper. Yours…”

“Ours…”

“Whatever…”

“I guess we never got that straight.”

“I guess we never did. RHB’s, to me, has some of what you feel when you go outside in the bright sun and have to face your life without the swelling strings to buoy you along. That’s why it’s as fresh today as it was then.”

“So you don’t think the cream always rises?”

Marcel laughed. “Hell, no. Who told you that one?”

“Ponzi Gruber, among others.”

Marcel shrugged. “Sure, Ran, the cream rises. Once in a hundred or a hundred thousand times it does. What comes up mostly, though, is whey and skim and one-percent. That’s what I think. But, hey, I’m probably prejudiced.”

“Hey, you probably are. I won’t hold it against you, though.”

“Good one,” Cell said, smiling back and conceding five when Ran held out his hand.

“But this is getting kind of touchy-feely, isn’t it?”

“A bit,” said Cell.

“So, trunk gates…,” Ransom said. “How the heck do trunk gates get from here to Madagascar?”

“They came the other way,” said Marcel, laughing. “Not from Madagascar, but West Africa.”

“You’re kidding? That’s not true, is it?”

“Sure, it is. You think Claire’s people brought rice cultivation out of Sussex? County Cork? No, Ran, the Yoruba and Ewe, the Bantu-speaking people from the Congo River delta—they’d been growing rice for hundreds of years. They brought this whole business with them out of Africa—not just the labor, but the know-how, too.”

Ran considered. “Damn, so the white man stole that, too?”

Marcel’s expression turned wary.

“I swear to God, we’re a predatory lot, aren’t we?” Ran said. “Somebody should have exterminated the whole lot of us like Norway rats before we spread.”

“I’m not trying to piss you off, Ransom. I’m just telling you a simple fact. I’m sorry if it doesn’t fit in with your views on white supremacy.”

“White supremacy?” He laughed. “It’s just like our old dispute over rock ’n’ roll, isn’t it, Marcel?”

“Let’s don’t go there, Ransom.”

“Okay, let’s don’t.”

“Nobody knows better than you that rock came out of the blues.”

Ran laughed happily.

“I remember you sitting there hour after hour, driving everybody crazy with that old piece-of-shit MCI reel-to-reel, playing phrases over and over, back and forth—Leadbelly, Johnson, Son House—breaking them down into fundamental particles, till you could play them lick for lick, even the mistakes. You were like some sort of junior Alan Lomax. Why are we having this conversation?”

“Everything you say is right, Cell. Rock came out of the blues. The blues came out of Africa. African roots, African rhythms, all filtered down through slavery. The blues are black, one hundred percent. One hundred and ten. But rock and blues are not the same. Rock was a response to blues, and it was preponderantly, overwhelmingly a white response, and rock ’n’ roll is preponderantly, overwhelmingly a white creation.”

Cell sighed heavily.

“To me, the blues is like moonshine, Cell. When you gotta have it, nothing else will do. There’s some great moonshine and some legendary shiners, but in the end you can’t compare it to a great French wine. The Beatles and the Stones, Dylan, Led Zeppelin—maybe the Who? And Hendrix—I’ll give you Hendrix, even if they said he wrote white-boy rock until he died…. You can argue over who should make the cut, add or subtract a couple from the list. But, give or take, those are the great rock ’n’ roll chateaux, and all of them but maybe one are white. Which is not to disrespect black music or the blues, but just to say that whites added something to it, some crucial ingredient. That ingredient allowed rock to set the world on fire, which the blues never did and never will.”

“And maybe it’s like Mitch Pike’s easy-listening version versus RHB’s,” Cell said. “Just because rock reached a wider audience doesn’t make it better, Ran. If you ask me, it’s very goddamn likely people will still be listening to Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters when the Beatles and the Stones are dust.”

“You really think so?”

“Yeah, I really do.”

“Then you concede my point that rock is overwhelmingly, preponderantly white?”

“I don’t concede it. I’m not conceding shit. And here’s another thought: what say we just agree to disagree and leave it go.”

“But why?” Ran said, his face intense now, and sincere. “I’m not trying to piss you off either, Cell. You gave me your facts about rice cultivation. I’m giving you mine about rock and roll. Why is this incendiary?”

“You know exactly why.”

“Well, I know it’s one of two reasons: either it’s incendiary because it’s incorrect and racist, or it’s incendiary because it’s true and doesn’t fit with your notions of white inferiority.”

“I think you know which way I lean.”

“So you think I’m a racist, too?”

“I’m not sure you want to know what I think in that regard.”

“Who knows, Marcel, the truth may set me free….”

“All right,” Jones said. “All right. You want it?”

“Give me your best shot.”

“I think you were a poor kid from that town up there….”

“Killdeer,” Ransom said.

“Killdeer. I think your dad abused you. I think you grew up telling nigger jokes and despising black folks because they were the only people on a lower social rung. I think you pulled yourself out of there on talent and sheer desperation, which is something you deserve some credit for. I think you went to New York and had some great early success. You impressed Christgau and Lester Bangs, you bought a Comme des Garçons suit and went to Le Bernardin because you