Crossroads of Idol Dreams

London, late November 1968. Hurtwood Edge, Surrey.

The house is wrapped in the kind of English rain that never quite commits to falling; it merely hangs in the air like a bad memory. Inside the kitchen the Aga ticks like an old heart that has forgotten the rhythm of joy. The air carries yesterday's curry, cold tea, and the faint, shameful ghost of smack cooked too often on the same bent spoon.

At 6:10 a.m. the stairs creak once, softly. Half awake Alice Ormsby-Gore drifts down barefoot, silk kimono slipping off one shoulder, hair still tangled from a restless sleep. She expects the usual tableau: Eric passed out on the sofa, some obscure 78 blues record spinning in silence, with the needle pestering the label. Instead she finds him upright at the pine table, dressed in the same crushed-velvet trousers and yesterday's white shirt, now ash with sleeplessness. His elbows are planted wide, head cradled in trembling hands. A cup of tea has gone cold enough to form skin. He is staring straight through the tabletop into a void of confusion.

"Eric?" He jumps as though the word were a gunshot. His eyes are red-rimmed, pupils blown wide, the blue almost swallowed by black.

"Alice," he whispers, and the name cracks in the middle. "I've gone clean out my mind."

She kneels, gathers his cold fingers into hers. They feel like something rescued from a river.

"Tell me slow," she says.

He tries for a laugh; it comes out wet. "I dreamed I was Robert Johnson . Except it wasn't no dream, Alice. I opened me eyes an' the light was wrong (thick, yellow, merciless). Mississippi sun burning the back of my neck. My mouth tasted of red dust and last night's whiskey. My legs were shorter, my feet blistered inside shoes held together by hope and wire. I had an old Stella across my knee, and I watched and listened as my fingers were played by someone else.

"I sat on a county store porch, screen door banging behind me like a loose tooth. Field hands tossed pennies and nickels that rang like small bells of pity. When I struck the first chord of 'Terraplane Blues' the guitar took over; my hands moved like they belonged to somebody else—I just felt it, but cound't control it. I could feel every callus Robert earned and never bragged about. The sweat running down my spine was his sweat. The cracked voice that rose up was his voice (thin, haunted, older than its years).

"Night dropped sudden, the way it does down there. One minute sky, next minute gone. Juke joint out in the country, coal-oil lamps swinging, air so thick with bodies and corn liquor you could chew it. Women danced close enough that I smelled talcum powder and terror in the same breath. I played 'Me and the Devil Blues' and every note felt like signing a contract in blood I hadn't yet spilled. An' right then, Alice, right in the middle of that stinkin' juke, I paniced—would I share his fate, full an' proper?. That still turns me inside out. Thought maybe this was it, maybe I was stuck there to share his fate. I can't explain it, but knowin' this, strange as it sounds, only made his music sharper, sweeter, necessary, like the last breath a drownin' man takes before he goes under for good.

"Then the room tilted, lanterns smeared sideways, an' I slammed back here at this table...

He looks at her then, tears cutting clean lines his cheeks.

"I lived a day inside his skin, Alice. And I wonder, somewhere in the Delta, did he wake up inside my life, hearing ten thousand strangers scream my name while I stood onstage too wrecked to feel anything at all. What if he felt this emptiness I carry around like loose change? What if he understood, finally, that fame is just a longer, slower way to die?"

His shoulders begin to shake. She pulls him close, feels the damp of his shirt and the frantic rabbit-beat of his heart. Outside, the rain keeps its patient counsel against the windows.

Helena, Arkansas, early June 1938

Front porch of a shotgun house on York Street. Late afternoon, heat still rising off the planks. Robert Johnson sits on the top step, hat pushed back, staring at the Stella in his lap like it might bite him. His shirt is open, sweat cutting little rivers through the dust on his chest.

David "Honeyboy" Edwards is leaning in the doorway, rolling a cigarette, watching his traveling partner act stranger than usual. Robert's voice comes out low, cracked, almost talking to the guitar instead of Honeyboy.

"Lawd help me, Honey... ain't no man on this earth gonna b'lieve what I jus' come through."

Honeyboy licks the paper, strikes a match on the doorframe.

"What you talkin' 'bout, Robert? B'lieve what?"

Robert looks up slow, eyes wide and shiny like he's still seeing something far away.

"I was gone all night, Honey. Gone clean outta my own self. Woke up inside a white boy. England somewheres. At first some big fine house (cold, quiet, full o' things you ain't never seen: lights that come on by theyself, no fire, no oil; big picture boxes flickerin' with movin' people inside 'em; record players tall as a man, spinnin' my voice back at me like ghosts in a box; magic ever'where, electric magic hummin' in the walls; an' outside, automobiles runnin' down the road fast as lightnin' an' quiet as a whisper). Then... then a stage big as a cotton field under a roof. Lights bright as the judgment throne. Thousands an' thousands o' white folks (more'n I ever seen in one place) hollerin' an' carryin' on like church caught fire."

He stops, swallows hard.

"An' this white boy (tall, hair long like a gal, dressed like a jester) he be playin' my song. My 'Cross Road Blues.' Lawd, so loud yo' insides felt it, guitar loud enough to wake the dead. Sound comin' through big boxes like God hisself talkin' through a thunderstorm. An' every soul in that place bobbin' dey heads. Honey, a whole ocean o' white folks listenin' to dat boy play my music, an' crazy as he looked, dat boy was tearin' it up."

Honeyboy chuckles, thinking it's a joke.

"You been drinkin' that canned heat again, man?"

Robert shakes his head fierce.

"I felt it in his fingers, Honeyboy. Felt what it like to be loved for somethin' I done made (loved so hard it hurt). Felt money in pockets deep enough to drown in, an' poison in the blood no money can buy off. That boy rich, sick, famous, an' still lonesome as me. Maybe mo,' he know da blues."

He strums once (a thick, distorted chord that don't belong on an acoustic Stella, gone almost before it sounds).

"They call him Clapton. Eric Clapton . That the name I carried in his head."

Honeyboy sits down on the step now, cigarette forgotten.

"You tellin' me you lived a day in the future, inside some white boy playin' yo' tune?"

Robert nods slow, eyes fixed on the setting sun like it might take him back.

"Whole day. From when he woke up shaky in that big house till the last note o' 'Crossroads' died in that big hall. Then the blues pulled me home like a fish on a line. Woke up right here on this porch with the taste o' his whiskey still in my mouth. Smooth. Too smooth."

He looks at Honeyboy, almost pleading.

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