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worse. Sometimes a lot worse. And 'cause we're black, we play the biggest shitholes this side of the Mississippi. We play the chitlin' circuit. We
know
the blues, ya see."
    "Let her sing," Tony said simply, with authority. Something about Tony made people take him seriously. Then he leaned over to me. "Just sing a few lines of 'At Last.' Go on, gorgeous."
    So it wasn't an audition. Not really. Just the three of us in a club still smelling of lingering smoke as the bartenders and barbacks were breaking the place down for the night, glasses clinking, the place sort of echoing now that nearly everyone had left. Half the house-lights were up, the floors were sticky with spilled alcohol. I sang the first verse of the Etta James's classic, my voice echoing. I had nothing to lose. Red had been telling me for months I was too much of a kid to sing the blues. I wasn't hardened by the road. I had no right to sing the blues. Not like the first ladies of the blues who all did time in jail, or got hooked on heroin, or went through five and six marriages, unable to find lasting love.
    I sang the lines, thankful I'd had four black Russians to give me some extra nerve. And when I was done, Red leaned back in his chair, mouth open. Tony looked smug and bemused. Red didn't say anything for a good minute. Finally, eyes twinkling, he leaned forward and said, "Now, child, how come you never told me you could sing the blues before?"
     
    I knocked on the door of apartment 1A, the ground floor of an old Southern courtyard home. Red rents it for a song, literally, from an eccentric dot-com millionaire (there are still a few of them left) who trades cheaper rent for weekly piano lessons—even though the guy's still struggling with "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star."
    "Is that my girlfriend?" Red smiled and opened the door, enveloping me in a hug and pulling me inside.
    His apartment is nirvana to me. Original posters of Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Sidney Bechet, Billie Holliday, Mildred Bailey and Duke Ellington hang in frames covering every square inch of wail. It's a shrine to ail things blues and jazz. Each week I walk in and knock on the framed Mildred Bailey picture for luck. Though I don't know how much luck poor Mildred had. She had an unbelievable voice, a way of singing that made you feel it deep down. But she was sort of homely and overweight, consequently overshadowed by the blues singers who would be packaged and powdered like sex.
    "Drink, sugar?" Red winked at me and pulled out a bottle of Chivas. It's our Sunday ritual. We each have half a glass—all his doctors will allow him each day now—and toast to life, the blues, sometimes even to death. Whenever a blues or jazz legend dies, we observe a moment of silence. On those days, we cheat and have a full glass.
    He poured me a scotch, which I drink out of deference to him, but which feels like hot fire sliding down my throat. It used to make me want to retch. I don't know if it's an acquired taste or what, but now I don't cringe when I drink it. Because I am always striving for a more raw blues voice, I pray before each glass that it's doing the trick.
    "To Ma Rainey and Mildred, and all the jazz and blues goddesses, including this one right here in my livin' room, Lord." He poked a bony finger gently into the hollow between my collarbones. We clinked and swallowed.
    "Mighty fine." He smiled.
    I blinked away the tears hard liquor always brings to my eyes. "Yeah, Red. This stuff is gonna kill me."
    "Ain't killed
me
yet, and I'll be eighty my next birthday."
    "I thought you were going to be seventy-nine."
    "Truth is, I got no idea." He shrugged his shoulders, staring into his now-empty glass. I waited patiently to see if he might say more. He was often closemouthed about all he had seen and done, even about what his given name was, certainly not Red. But sometimes, a fragment of memory, maybe even a single chord on the piano, a song, a note… would carry him away to another time, playing