Chapter 31 - Meeting Chuck Berry

(Chapter 31 of a book length piece on Chuck Berry.)

And then, somehow, I find myself being led by Jimmy Marsala into a room with lemon yellow walls and a cream colored couch or love seat. If I’m not mistaken, an open guitar case is near the wall to my right. But I might be mistaken, because my attention—by which I mean my faltering brain stem and sputtering central nervous system—is focused on that couch, where I see, so real, my “imaginary” friend and lifelong hero, my surrogate dad, the father of rock and roll and of us all. He appears lost in some happy thought, exhausted but smiling, leaning back, one arm on the back of the couch, the other at his side. Marsala tells him “Chuck, this fellow wants to give you something!” and suddenly 84 year old Chuck Berry is bounding out of his comfortable chair. “I’ve got to shake his hand!” he says. I would be terrified, but I’m functioning at a level too primitive for fear. “That was a great show. You were spectacular,” I tell him, as he grabs my hand and pulls me close.

We are standing at a proximity that would normally make me uncomfortable. This is not the giant of my imagination. He is about my height, but much thinner—the former heavyweight, though still tough, has become a feather in his old age. His nose has done what elderly noses do. His face and chin and waist line are remarkably thin. His eyes sparkle. As we talk I am mesmerized by curly white hairs poking from behind the admiral’s cap. I remember when he was much younger than I am, and his hair was slick and dark.

He is wearing his glittery red shirt and frayed black trousers. I get the feeling someone has altered them for a thinning frame. He smiles and keeps my hand for a time while I utter inanities. I have practiced them. They are things I need to say, however silly. I speak on autopilot, using brain stem. I hope that some of what comes out of my mouth makes sense, but I’m not sure it matters. I am the millionth fan who has spoken this way, and he has heard it all before.

I tell him, stupidly, that I last shook his hand at age 15. I tell him that I first saw him when I was 14, and that (I am at times a man of understatement) “It changed my life.”

“I’ve been coming back to see you ever since.”

That’s when he tells me something. He is listening. For just a moment we have an actual conversation! He tells me that when he was 14, he’d done some sort of work directly beneath the spot where we were standing. I remember him saying “When I was fourteen…” and I remember him finishing by pointing at our feet. “Below this very spot where we are standing!” he says, with satisfaction. And I know we talk about what it was that he did— it is some childhood job. But his words have been excised by my adrenaline. I have no memory of what he said that he did. In fact, the memory is gone by the time I leave the room.

This, for me, is a tragedy that mars an otherwise remarkable evening. It is proof that my cognitive faculties were reduced to something like the awareness of a dying turtle. Because even ten minutes later when I try to recount it to Paul and Liz, I don’t—can’t— remember what he said.

By the time I meet him I have spent more than a year and half painstakingly resurrecting and reassembling lost memories. Those memories were stored carelessly by a child, tossed here and there the way I now handle keys, tax records, checkbooks, mobile phones and credit cards. (As a youth I only had keys and memories to lose.) The memories I retain survived out of sheer cussedness, the way that rugged little firs survive stark conditions at the timber line. They survived despite repeated rinsings of red wine, despite the course of years, despite work, and stress, and change, and millions of newer, sometimes more profound memories: the births of my children, the death of my mother, Stevo’s and daddy’s funerals. I took those small, tough fragments and nurtured them. I rebuilt my past. It took work and time.

And yet here I am with my hero, who is spoon-feeding me a moment that should be mine forever, and ten minutes later it is gone.

The memories I kept of that room and that conversation are not fuzzy. They are crystal clear, but shot with holes, like a brick of Swiss cheese. Most of what is lost doesn’t matter. It’s me, jabbering. I know what I said. What I want back is him, speaking, telling me something that mattered to him, and therefore matters to me, that as a child he had done some menial but memorable task below the very spot we were standing. It is his own rugged little fir on the mountain, something that I imagine he had been pondering, through that wistful smile, when I entered the room, thinking, perhaps, how far he had travelled to get back to that same spot, an old man, a legend, who had once again managed to ignite fire in the hearts of 2000 strangers. For just that one, brief moment, my imaginary friend was telling me something real, about the boy with the telescope; about the boy standing, head bent, in the darkroom below that blurred picture of Lincoln; the boy I had drawn so painstakingly in pencil when I was 17; the boy who, absent reality, might have been my real boyhood friend. The man who had spoken to me before only in dreams spoke to me in real life, sharing one precious memory (and to a nostalgic man few things are more precious). But as soon as he said it, as soon as I heard it, it was gone, evaporated like the words and visions of a dream when we are woken against our desire.

I carry on, more or less on auto-pilot. I tell him that he played brilliantly. I try to joke about him seeming much younger than 84: “Are you turning forty-four on Monday?” It doesn’t work. I swear he says something like “Oh yes, I’ll be seventy-seven!” but that is probably hallucination on my part. Anyway, I’m not sure he can hear everything I am saying. After an hour in front of the Dual Showman, his ears are probably ringing like Johnny’s guitar.

I tell him that I have something for him.

“I drew this when I was 17,” I tell him. It’s my pencil sketch of him as a child—a little Chuck Berry, in a dark suit, his lips twisted a bit. The face reminds me of my friend Dando, a boy in West Africa who’d been like a little brother to me. It is a good drawing, a surprise to me even now, a little wider than his actual face, but I’d gotten the expression, the quick wit, the wisdom of a boy who was going to be somebody (a bit like a middle-aged baby Jesus in a renaissance painting.) My mom saved it in a rusty metal box along with artwork from kindergarten and other childhood artifacts. It is so old that the golden brown residue of the Scotch tape I had used to fasten it to my wall bleeds through the thin, lined paper making an amber mustache.

He takes it in his hands and examines it. “You drew this?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m not an artist, and don’t often draw, but I drew this when I was a kid because you were so important to me. It’s so old that you can see where the scotch tape is coming through the paper.”

I assumed at the time he recognized the picture. I had copied a photograph on the cover of his 1973 album, “Bio.” He’s 13 or 14, so the picture I copied was probably taken close to the time that he did whatever job he told me about.

But who knows if he recognized it? Days later, after a second birthday show at Blueberry Hill, I presented him another copy, this time asking him to autograph it for me. He looked, and smiled, and signed. His son Charles was standing behind him. Charles must have recognized the drawing from his father’s Facebook page, where I posted it briefly next to the original photograph, or from my blog, where I wrote about it. “Hey, Peter” he said, “It’s your picture!”

As I walked away I heard Chuck say “It looks like me!”

Charles laughed. “It is you, dad!”

But I’m still backstage in the yellow room. “I have a website about you,” I tell him. “A lot your friends have written about you there. They say some wonderful things about you because they love you so much, and I wanted you to have a chance to read what they have said.” I give him the interviews topped by pictures of his friends Judy and Karen, and musicians Bob Lohr, Bob Baldori, and Daryl Davis.

Again, I can’t tell if he cares or can even hear my mumblings, but he nods solemnly and studies each document, giving me the time he must know that I need. I don’t see it, but a line is forming across the room.

I pull out a photograph that Doug took. It’s a great one, Chuck singing, arms spread wide. This is a year and a half before Doug and I will stand backstage with Chuck Berry. I’ve never met him, but we know each other anyway.

“This was taken by a guy in Iowa. He comes to see you often. I think it’s a great picture. He sent it to me, and I thought you should have it.” Again, he pays close attention and makes appropriate noises. At some point his wife comes in and sits down quietly behind me. When I finish he turns and leans down, and gives everything to her. She studies it with some interest.

“Take all of this to the house,” he says gently.

Before I leave I tell him something like:

“I want to thank you for all that you’ve done for me and for all of us. I really think you are one of the great Americans.” It must be longer than this, because twice my voice gets wavy with emotion— but not too much.

I know that at some point I reach out and touch his shoulder, and before I leave he shakes my hand again and bumps my forearm with his. He is incredibly warm, alive, gracious, and attentive.

And although my memory of that moment is damaged, that is what I will always remember—the generosity of an icon, an historic figure, one of the great artists of our time or any time; a man who told Tchaikovsky the news at his third or fourth recording session and lived up to the boast; who invented rock and roll as we know it; who taught the Beatles and the Stones and Dylan; who wrote the poetry of “Bye Bye Johnny,” “Nadine,” and “Memphis;” a man who is probably the most influential musician America ever produced, and one of its most influential guitarists; a man who toured the country, heating his own food to avoid the back door of a restaurant, and who helped break down Jim Crow by feeding his family and playing music to kids; a man old enough to be this old man’s father, who’d just played an exhausting knockout show: that man stood and greeted the latest in a long line of perfect strangers, and listened as if he mattered.

That’s what I remember, and that’s what I’ll never forget.

(This is Chapter 31 of a book length piece on how Chuck Berry changed my life and our culture.  The prologue and Chapter 1 are right HERE.  The next chapter is right below.)

11-12-12 10:58 148/175