Goodtime Charlie’s Got The Blues

Charlie was on stage singing some blues. It wouldn’t matter if he had been singing Dixie. The club was empty of customers. It was going on two am. Charlie thought he should call it a night. The owner told him he was being paid to do four sets If he didn’t, the owner didn’t think he’d pay Charlie for the night. Charlie needed the money to keep from sleeping in an alley. Sometimes he had to do that anyway. It depended on how tanked he was. In some of the places he played, he’d get drunk and arrested. He’d get a warm bed and a hot, if horrible, breakfast. The only things Charley liked were music and booze. He played the one and the other played him That’s why he played small piano bars. These weren’t tux and gown places. They were joints. Charlie liked them because they would let him drink while he played. They also were the only ones who’d give him a gig.

Sometimes he’d wake up not knowing where he was. Charlie slept in the basement with the rats. They never bothered him as far as he knew. The strange marks on his body were probably from the floor, or so he thought. The nicer owners would give him a blanket. The others would let him sleep in their alleys. They all would let him wash up in the restroom. They had to allow him to be a little clean. The clientele wasn't great but they had working noses.

Sometimes of the police officers would see him and thought it too cold for Charlie to sleep outside. They’d arrest Charlie, giving him a warm place to sleep and a rotten if healthy, breakfast. The Chief frowned on that. That is if it happened too often. He made the arresting officer clean up the vomit, clean the shit and the piss. There weren’t a lot of officers willing to arrest Charlie.

“Charlie. I’m arresting you for public intoxication,” one of them would tell him

“Nah, it ain’t that cold tonight. Don’t want to wear out my welcome. Thanks anyway."

Charlie started out as a pretty good blues singer. He was clean and sober. He was married. One night he came home to a note from his wife telling him she’d had decided to move along and he wasn’t moving along with her. That threw Charlie for a loop for a while. He got over her quickly so it wasn’t that big a loss.

Charlie started out the way all Blues singers did. He played at rat holes and dives. He was paid very little. He barely made enough to keep fed and have some kind of room to sleep in. As time went on and he matured with the Blues, he’d got better paying gigs. He was very good in those days. He knew he had it made in the shade. He got a lot of applause and cheers. He had a manager and that was a mistake. Having a manager was necessary but not the one he picked. All the money the manager said he was investing was true. He was investing in his own account.

Still, Charlie was very good. He had a sad voice that was perfect for singing the Blues. Guitar and vocals are the instruments most frequently heard in blues music and Charlie was a great guitarist. The drinking lessened his quality. He knew it but lacked the common sense to see it what the drinking was doing to him and his music. Charlie played Mississippi-Deep South Blues in its truest form. He wasn’t B.B. King but he was still good. He loved the Blues music for expressing a range of emotions, including sadness, melancholy, and other gloomy emotions. Charlie loved singing difficult realities of life, such as love and loss, oppression, hard times, poverty, and social inequality. Charlie was at home with all of that. That was what drew him to the Blues in the first place. It’s sort of a cat playing with a mouse.

Charlie began letting himself go to pieces. He didn’t realize it until he found his clubs and the whole night life going away. Most of the time his manager couldn’t be found for weeks. Charlie's money was lower than it should be. His manager had told him he was investing for Charlie for when he couldn’t play anymore. Charlie didn’t get that. Why would he stop playing?”

Charlie finally figured it out. He didn’t quit drinking but knew why his music was drifting off. He had to stop it or at least drink less. As time wore on, Charlie started to feel better. He looked in the mirror and saw a clean shaven man. He was looking like he was playing at a nice night club. He also knew he might be dreaming. The best he could hope for was to be able to have a room instead of an alley. It wouldn’t be much of a room and he sometimes had to share the bathroom with several men and hope for the best.

He decided to give the fans a nice show. He was amazed at how well he sounded. He was more amazed at their booing him. Maybe he was dreaming. If he couldn’t suit a crowd of men and women in some stage of alcohol overload, who was going to hire him while they were sober?

Charlie couldn’t find a decent club who would hire him. Even the rat-holes he had played wouldn’t give him a gig. They said they had found younger blues singers for a lot less money. “At a lot less talent too, Charlie would tell them.”

The usual response was,“Hell, most of my crowds wouldn’t know the Blues from monks in a talent show. Of course, you can’t do that. You really love the Blues. You have to play it straight.”

A couple of them offered to hire him to wash dishes. Well, he wasn’t going back to the homeless folks living in a cardboard box. The men were thieves and 20/20 drinkers. They’d all be untrustworthy and you had to take all your stuff with you or you wouldn’t have any stuff when you got back, and the women smelled from a good distance. They’d tried to be prostitutes but that wasn’t going to fly. Anyone stupid enough to past the smell had to worry about every STD known to man and maybe some that hadn’t discovered yet. It was a bitch when it rained. They’d have to under a bridge and be targeted by gangs. He didn’t have a clue about that one. There wasn’t two dollars in the bunch.

Yea, Good-time Charlie had the Blues.