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recognized Will, who shook his hand and shouted a greeting above the din.
    Inside, the establishment seemed to be on fire. From what I could see through the thick smoke, the bar was lined with black men in hats who looked us over skeptically. Two couples danced to the music from the jukebox; after three months as Will’s roommate, I recognized the voice of Jackie Wilson.
    I’d never seen the inside of a bar before; if I’d been suddenly, inexplicably transported to the Elks Lodge in Des Moines, Iowa, I would have felt a frisson of exotic danger. But this was like standing on the thundering lip of Victoria Falls, teetering above the steamy abyss. The walls were covered in red shag carpet, and the patrons were dressed with a meticulous flamboyance that made me feel distinctly underdressed. Will had disappeared. I tried to find a posture that would seem natural and fixed my attention on a tiny stage where three musicians were setting up their equipment. Painted on the bass drum was the legend LESTER HOLMES & THE SOULFULS . When Will finally returned, he was holding two beers and a ratty cigarette. He handed me one of the beers and lit the cigarette as a fourth man with tight glistening curls and a sequined jacket hopped up on the stage to scattered applause.
    Will handed me the cigarette. When I reminded him I didn’t smoke he shouted, “It’s grass.” Had I been anywhere else I would have declined, or argued, but instead I inhaled the weedy smoke, perhaps sensing that it might make me feel less out of place, eager for any ritual that would ease my profound discomfort.
    “Lester’s going to be as big as James Brown if I have anything to say about it,” Will shouted. I nodded vigorously as if this were my firm conviction, too, and took another drag; minutes passed, it seemed, before I suddenly examined the statement and found it improbable. Then in another moment it seemed the most reasonable assertion in the world, and when Lester began to play I decided he was indeed the greatestsinger and guitar player I’d ever heard. The music entered my body and took over my heartbeat and respiration. I felt as if I were somehow participating in its creation, sensed that every brain stem in the room was synchronized to this powerful rhythm, all of us part of a single nervous system. Lester and the band were the nucleus, and we were all orbiting electrons.
    “Lester’s drawing blood from that guitar,” Will said, accenting the first syllable in the Deep South manner. The audience talked back, exhorting him to
Say it
and
Sing it.
I found it hard to take my eyes off him, his sinuous moves inducing a kind of hypnotic rapture. A woman bobbing in front of the stage kept calling out, “Ride my alley, Lester.”
    Between songs, another fan called out, “You fast, Lester.”
    “Lightning would be faster,” he growled into the mike, “ ’cept it zags.”
    I’ve always been a highly self-conscious person, but that night was one of the few times in my life I experienced a warm dissolution into a pool of collective consciousness; it provided me with a sympathetic point of reference for the strange fervor that’s driven Will for thirty years, and has enabled me to see the continuity in his quest from juke joints to private-jet debauches, from shooting galleries to Zen monasteries. Briefly, I think, I got it. Somehow connected to everything, I felt liberated from the narrow box of my own small existence. And if the exhilaration of that moment faded with the night, I can recall the force of it still. It was like the rocket transport of sex, like emerging from Plato’s cave into the brilliant sunlight of life itself.
    Suddenly we were helping the band load equipment into an ancient pickup truck. Then quite naturally we found ourselves in the front room of a small frame house. Just like that. I thought this a wonderful way to move around the planet, eliding and deleting the boring intervals of transport, zapping from one high point to