Little Enis Pursues His Muse

Lawyer: Yer Honor, my client Joe Hogbristle wants to change his name.

Judge: Well, I can certainly understand that! What does he want to change it to?

Lawyer: He wants to change it to Fred Hogbristle. Says he's tired of people saying, "Hello, Joe, whaddya know?"

--1001 Jokes for All Occasions

The main problem I expect to encounter in describing the adventures of me and ole Carlos Toadvine, aka Little Enis (here, incidentally, is how that happened, straight from the source's mouth: "Well, it was a Eye-talian name, to start with. Todavinney, they called it, and they used to speak that Spanish all the time. But I got the name of Little Enis at the Zebra Bar, back in '55. Because the name of Carlos Toadvine was too big, and too long of a name to put on the marquee. And I was imitatin' Elvis Presley quite a bit in those times, I was younger, and thinner, and so I just said, Well, he is quite famous, I'll just foller along and do like he does, just like ever other musician in the country, I sang his songs, y' know. So they was this joke goin' around, I expect you all've heard it, about Elvis the Pelvis? And his little brother Enis? The Penis? So they just looked at me--I was short, and all--and they said, 'Enis ...' "), the main problem is that the saga has about 17 beginnings, scarcely any proper middle to speak of and no denouement anywhere in sight. Not exactly a yarn, you see, so much as it's (continued on page 126)Little Enis Pursues His Muse(continued from page 117) a kind of snarl or tangle of loose ends. But then what isn't?

In a way, I suppose, it all began that night in the fall of 1956 in Lexington, Kentucky, when I walked into the Zebra Bar--a musty, gritty coalhole of a place across Short Street from the Drake Hotel (If you duck the drake your a goose! read the peeling roadside billboard out on the edge of town)--walked in under a marquee that did, indeed, declare the presence within of one "Little Enis," and came upon this amazing little stud stomping around atop the bar flailing away at one of those enormous old electric guitars that looked like an Oldsmobile in drag--left-handed! He's playing it left-handed! And upside down besides!--this pugnacious-looking little banty rooster of a guy with a skintight gold-sateen cowboy shirt and an underslung lower jaw and a great sleek black patent-leather Elvis Presley pompadour and long Elvis Presley sideburns and a genuine Elvis Presley duck's ass ("You know, people sometimes asks me what I think of these people like you, that have got the long hair and all. And I just say, Well, they've got their thing to do. Because actually, see, I've had long hair my ownself since I was fifteen years old. I mean I was the first one that created long sideburns in Lexington! I had'em down to here!"), this 5'4" watch-fob knickknack of an Elvis up there just aflailin' and astompin', laying down a rendition of Blue Suede Shoes that would have done the master proud; in fact, he was even (oh blasphemy!) better than Elvis, his guitar playing distinctly saltier, his inflections ("You c'n do ennythang that y' wanna do, but onh-onh honey, lay offa my shoes") just a shade flatter, twangier, down-homier, his bump 'n' grind at least as lewd and spirited as anything the Big E himself had thrown at us on Ed Sullivan a few Sundays back. We all flashed to him instantly, and we hastened to settle our sodden selves into a booth so that my roommate, Willie Gordon Ryan, the evening's patron live one, could spring us to the first round.

We. That included, let's see, Ryan, who was in college at last after a four-year hitch in the Air Force (as a matter of fact, that's what we were celebrating that night; it was what Ryan called The Day the Eagle Shits, the day his monthly GI Bill check came in), and several booze buddies of ours, Tommy Cook and I.J. Wagner and Bill Whealdon and Buster Kline and....

And me, which is the beginning to a whole nother loose end, the loosest end of all, some might say. Because although it's true I was then a grad student in what I regarded, at the time, as the premium lunch-meat state university in all of academe, I had also just spent a year damn near flunking out of grad school at Stanford University, I'd read Henry Miller and smoked a genuine reefer and been to see the beatniks in North Beach even before Life magazine got there, friends, and I intended to show these rustics what it was all about, by God!

Which perhaps explains why, barely a year after I'd gone off to California as the blandest perambulatory tapioca pudding ever poured into a pair of cordovan shoes and a charcoal-gray single-breasted suit and a pink oxford-cloth button-down, I was now schlepping around Lexington in cycle boots and Levis and a Levi jacket and 24-hour-a-day shades and a cowboy belt with a picture of Evelyn West and Her $50,000 Treasure Chest on the buckle and an armpit of a goatee and a haircut that would have made the scroungiest pachuco in L.A. look like Cary Grant, not so much a duck's ass as it was, say, a sort of cocker spaniel's ass. I mean I wasn't just fiddlefucking around, folks, I was out to turn some heads! And it was working, too: Already, after only a few months, I ranked right up there with Adolph Rupp's new basketball coliseum and the Agricultural Experiment Station among the sights one mustn't miss on the UK campus; on football weekends, whole carloads of old grads had been seen to screech to a halt in heavy traffic to stare and point, fraternity men's upper lips automatically curled into sneers the instant I came into view, sorority housemothers hastened to gather their maidenly charges behind their skirts at the very mention of my name.

But now about this Toadvine: Well, in some remarkable, not altogether describable sense, he saved my graduate career, such as it was. Because up until the moment I walked into the Zebra Bar that night, I'd been persuaded that there was no way in the world I could survive Lexington long enough to get my M.A. and, as the saying went, make like a sewer and get the shit out of there. But suddenly there he was, Little Enis, all the evidence I could ask for that even out here in the darkest heart of the provinces, careful inspection was liable to turn up some cultural phenomenon worthy of an enlightened man's condescension.

And condescend I did, to my heart's content. For Enis, it soon developed, took to flattery like a duck to water, poor innocent; so all I had to do was buy him a 75-cent Zebra Zombie at his first drink break between sets and advise him that, as a noted folklorist from the university (where, in fact, I was currently pulling a low C in the one-and-only folklore course I ever enrolled in), I was satisfied that he and his understudy Elvis constituted the single most cosmic event in the history of American ethnosecular music (a genre which, incidentally, I invented on the spot), and that was it, I had him, my very own flesh-and-blood Artifact to patronize!

Yea, verily, and patronize I did, too: For the next two or three weeks, I patronized the Zebra as often as I could get together enough of my father's money to finance a field trip down to Short Street (it generally required only a couple of bucks, because it turned out there was a Zebra regular of questionable motives--actually, he was a short, slight florist with a beret and a black pencil-line mustache, but who's ever going to believe that?--who seemed to have a certain affection for my rough exterior and kept me well supplied with beer whenever I came in); and when Enis left the Zebra and moved to a terrifyingly low-rent country-and-western tavern called Martin's, over on the north side of town, I patronized that (at peril to my life, I might add; the clientele at Martin's didn't really take to me at all, for some reason); and when he moved on to The Palms, a plywood-and-glass-brick moderne cocktail lounge between a drive-in theater and a pigburger stand out on the Northern Beltline, I patronized that, too.

Now, The Palms had lately fallen into the hands of one Linville Puckett, who until that very autumn had been a hotshot guard on the UK basketball team, but who had come to a parting of the ways with Baron Rupp (some small dispute over training rules, as I recall) and had hung up his jock forever to move around to the business side of the bar and become a night-life impresario. So he took over this sleazy roadhouse, complete with the pair of dusty plastic potted palm trees that flanked the ladies' room door, and immediately renamed it Linville Puckett's Palms and installed the slickest dance floor in town and the liveliest jukebox in town and the hottest attraction in town, which is to say Little Enis and his new combo, the Fabulous Tabletoppers. ("Yeah, they was quite a few stars out there at that time. I was about the biggest thing in Lexington, so they would all say I was a big star, and Linville, he was a basketball star. So that was quite a good drawin' card, Linville Puckett the all-America basketball player, and Little Enis the all-America left-handed upside-down guitar player.") Within a week The Palms was jumping every night, Puckett's most avid admirers showing up right after work when he was usually tending bar, early enough to drink their suppers, blue-collar sports fans and UK fratties drunkenly maneuvering for choice bar stools all through vespers, in hopes they could overhear the fallen hero tell how he'd told ole Rupp to go piss up a rope or some such, and by around eight o'clock Enis would generally have joined them at the bar, knocking back a few whiskey and Cokes or a couple (continued on page 142)Little Enis Pursues His Muse(continued from page 126) of cool ones to clear his head before the first set. ("When I was drinkin', I'd live each day from day to day, that's how I lived during my drinkin' years. And when I'd go to sleep I wouldn't even think about gettin' up. And then the next day I'd get up and party again. I even went out here to Eastern State Hospital to get me some he'p. That shrinker said to me, 'Are you a alcoholic?' And I said, 'Well, if you call drinkin' a quart of whiskey before you can read the Sunday paper a alcoholic, then I reckon I must be one.'") Along about 8:30 the guys with dates would be falling by, here a Deke out aslumming with his Tri Delt, there a TV repairman hustling the wife of a client who worked the night shift at the Dixie Cup factory, and by a little after nine maybe a few unattached girls would have turned up, telephone operators and typists from the IBM typing pool and students from the Fugazzi Business College and the Vine Street Academy of Beauty, gathering themselves in jittery little coveys here and there at the tables closest to the dance floor, where the light was better, and they'd sit there glaring at those oblivious jerks crowded around the bar until finally one of the girls, say an aspiring beautician working on her Ph.D. in beehives at the Academy, would get so p.o.'d she'd pick up her tom collins and sashay over to the jukebox and plug it with her own quarter, punching out maybe Fever and part one of Raunchy and Paralyze, Elvis' latest, and when Little Willie John suddenly whumped out those first few heavy bass notes and growled "Never know how mu-uch I need you" the guys at the bar would look up, startled, to discover that they weren't alone after all, and almost instantly begin to undergo the metamorphosis from sports fans to just plain sports, their eyeballs ticking off their calculations like the UK coliseum's flashy electronic scoreboards as they checked out the action in the other room--"the hides," they call them in Lexington, "multitides" when they come in bunches. By the time Raunchy was half over there'd be four or five newly acquainted couples on the dance floor, raunching away, doing a sort of postjitterbug, pretwist bop, just standing there at arm's length, grimacing and hunching their pelvises at each other in a kind of dirty-boogie face-off ("I jus' cain't stand that awful ole niggery dancin' they do out there!" a UK sorority girl once wailed to I. J. Wagner), and while Elvis was groaning his way through Paralyze, Enis and his boys would mount the little bandstand beside the jukebox and start tuning up (I seem to recall a bass and drums and an electric organ in the group, and a guy who doubled on sax and trumpet). As Elvis wrapped it up and Enis, cradling his guitar in that weird way of his and grinning an utterly wicked, lickerish little grin, obviously just spoiling for the chance to render Elvis' own songs back to back with their creator, stepped forward into The Palms' feeble greenish-yellow spotlight, his pompadour glinting like obsidian, his tidy little torso all ashimmer in that same gold-sateen cowboy shirt, his small white hands poised like a striking sparrow's talons above the first fleet notes of All Shook Up ("Well, my daddy was a farmer in Hogue Holler, over here by Danville, and I swear he couldn't play the ready-o without gettin' static. But my mother, she sung in church, and I'd of walked a country mile to hear her sing a song, she had the most beautiful voice you ever heard. And her people, they was entertainers, years ago they was with Red Foley at Renfro Valley. My uncle, he was state fiddlin' champion on the old breakdown fiddle at the state fair. So they would all get together of a Sunday afternoon, and everbody'd bring their music instruments, and I was just a little thing, you know, but I'd santer around th'oo that crowd and directly I'd pick up somebody's guitar, and the first thing you know I'd be abangin' on it."), stepped forward into The Palm's blare and reek, and with the spotlight glaring in his eyes, the only thing he could make out would be....

Me again. The old loose end again, the noted folklorist again, drunk again. Sitting there right under Enis' nose at the table nearest the bandstand, wearing those ridiculous shades and that ridiculous Levi suit and that ridiculous haircut, drunk as a lord since three o'clock in the afternoon, when I had inconspicuously departed from my romantic-poetry seminar at the tea-and-cookies break, and had fled to the wretched pigsty of an apartment I shared with Willie Gordon Ryan upstairs over the Southern Girl Beauty Salon, and had found Ryan there busily cutting freshman English (which he was flunking anyhow), and had straightway sallied forth with Ryan at my side, as faithful a Sancho Panza as ere a Quixote could've asked for (it being the day my check came in, bearing my father's customary reluctant-looking signature), to an establishment called the Paddock Club, where we drank Oertels '92 beer straight through till 7:30 (not counting one time out for a fried-baloney sandwich), and where I once again made a jackass of myself by informing some indignanat coed that the doodles in the back of her family-and-marriage notebook demonstrated "a distinctly Freudian penis-envy character." And also where I. J. Wagner and Tommy Cook, on their way home to study for a dairy-and-animal-husbandry exam after a two-hour supper of beer and pickled eggs and pinball at the Scott Hotel Bar, dropped by for a spot of Oertels '92, just to clear their palates, and from which the three of us (Sancho Ryan having already committed his iron to other fires that night) repaired forthwith to The Palms, I. J. and Cookie to juice some more and dance them niggery dances and hustle the ladies a bit. I to do my noted folklorist act for the third time that week. And to juice some more.

Thus had I arrived at my present sorry state, drumming my thumbs against the tabletop with drunken, arhythmical abandon while on the bandstand just above me Little Enis, his feet planted wide in that classic Presley straddle, his groin thrusting like the machine-tooled private parts of the Great Fucking Wheel, his left leg jiggling spasmodically inside his pants as if he really was a-eetchin' lak a bug on a fuzzy tree, tore like a man possessed into Elvis' repertoire, segueing out of All Shook Up straight into Hound Dog, then laying back ever so slightly with Teddy Bear (the somewhat shopworn ladies of The Palms squealed like bobby-soxers over that one--because, as I overheard one of them sigh when Enis purled "Run yo' fangers th'oo mah hair an' cuddle up real tight" and hove a lusty dry hump in her direction, "I could cuddle that sweet thing to death!"), then revving it up again with Blue Suede Shoes and (for variety) Little Richard's Long Tall Sally and Fats Domino's Kansas City, then tying off the set with a That's When Your Heartaches Begin so mellow and lachrymose that Colonel Parker himself would have shed a tear in his Hadacol if he'd heard it.

And through it all there sat The Palms' own noted folklorist and resident greaser, thumping away at my tabletop like a tone-deaf Sal Mineo auditioning for The Gene Krupa Story, applauding furiously for every number, calling out requests at the top of my voice between songs ("Hey, Enis, do Rip It Up! Do Jailhouse Rock! Do Hound Dog again!"), generally pulling out all the stops in my effort to demonstrate that I was, indeed, a true aficionado, so that he would come and sit at my table during the breaks, and let me buy him an Oertels '92 and patronize him some.

Which, often as not, he'd do. Oh, there were plenty of times when a tableful of admiring hides would snag him first ("That little son of a buck will get laid where most men couldn't get a drink of water," a Palms bartender confided to me one night. "I heard a couple of these old girls say he's awful heavy hung. They was talking about somebody named Old Blue, and it turned out they was referring to Enis' pecker!"), but for all their charms, they were wanting in that sophisticated appreciation of his art that he could always depend on finding at my (continued on page 187)Little Enis Pursues His Muse(continued from page 142) table. So at least once or twice an evening he'd join me (and, if the pickings on the dance floor were running slim, I. J. and Cookie) for a fast drink, and I'd tell him how he was the biggest thing in troubadouring since Alan A-Dale, and he'd tell me about all the offers he was getting from Dot Records, and all the albums they were begging him to cut, and all the road tours he was going on ... and one night when my panegyrics had left him in a particularly expansive mood, he even told me that he was temporarily working days as a "maintenance engineer," shoveling coal into the LaFa-yette Hotel's furnace, and that his real name was Carlos Toadvine. He never did quite get my name, incidentally; the closest he ever came to it was the time he introduced me to a barmaid as "Ted Flannigan, he's gettin' his doctor degree at the colletch."

And so it went. Throughout that fall and early winter I was liable to fall by The Palms as often as two or three nights a week to pay my respects to Enis; it got so the waitreses would deliver an Oertels '92 to my ringside table as soon as I walked in the door. Then in January I finally met a Lexington girl who, although her tastes in music were a good deal tonier than mine (the first Present I ever gave her was a 45 of Chuck Berry's Roll Over Beethoven), was content to sit there while I rattled our beer glasses with my tattooing thumbs (the first present she ever gave me was a set of bongos) and told her about the paper I planned to write for my American folklore class, entitled "The Influence of the Elizabethan Bardic Tradition upon the Works of Carlos Toadvine."

Fortunately for belles-lettres, I never got around to writing it; because in the spring of '57 there occurred the two most cataclysmically significant events of my life up to that time: I got married and I flunked my master's oral. Flunked it cold: I hadn't been in that room with those three professors more than 15 minutes before my California cool had turned into an iceberg on my tongue. As Ryan might have put it, I couldn't have said shit if I'd had a mouthful. Get a grip on yourself, McClanahan, the trio of professors chorused sternly, shaking their hoary heads in unison; quit hanging around bars pretending to be some kind of Beatster or whatever they call it, and start applying yourself to the study of the history of English literature, and come back next year and try again.

Shaken to my very cycle boots, I did as I was told: I spent a whole year dutifully sitting in on sophomore literature surveys, memorizing names and dates and titles and the rhyme schemes of the sonnet. True, I didn't altogether abandon my old identity: every now and then I'd don my greaser guiese (except for the goatee, which had gone down the drain of the Southern Girl Beauty Salon apartment's bathroom sink on the morning of my wedding day) and drop by The Palms and pick up on a couple of sets and trade a little bullshit with old Enis. But it wasn't the same, somehow; my head had got so full of names and dates, and Enis' head so full of fans and plans, that we never seemed able to focus the the way we used to on the only thing there really was between us in those days, that awkward little dance our two egos always did whenever they encountered each other.

For the most part, though, I stayed close to home that year, the way an earnest newlywed grad student is supposed to, and attended to heart and hearth and desk. So that when spring rolled round again, and those ogres on my orals committee summoned me once more into their lair, I was all primed and cocked for the occasion ("Now, Mr. McClanahan, perhaps you could name three, ah, female Victorian novelists for us?" "Yes, certainly, lessee now, there was ... were... um, Charlotte Brontë, and that other one, Emily, I believe it was ... were ... and, lessee ... Jane Eyre?"), and, sweating like a piglet on a spit, I acquitted myself with a performance that the chairman of the committee allowed they might consider passable if I'd clear out of the state by sundown and swear never to tell a living sold where I'd got my sheepskin. In June, when I struck out for Oregon to seek my fortune in the writing-and-teaching game, I was sped on my way by the stiff westward wind that the UK English department's collective sigh of relief had given rise to.

But don't suppose even for a moment that just because I went off agamboling through the groves of academe, I forgot all about my favorite ethnic artifact, no, indeedy. As a matter of fact, Enis was ever with me, like a treasured charm on a watch fob, and I was forever trotting him out for the amusement of my tittering colleagues at faculty cocktail parties (cocklety factail parties, I used to call them in my cups), describing him, imitating him, striking that spraddle-legged stance and prognathousizing my jaw and strumming left-handed on my imaginary upside-down guitar and singing a few bars of Hound Dog in my toneless, tuneless voice, aping him, rendering him, using He had become as much a part of my repertoire, my act, as Elvis had been of his; I'd made a Character of him, an exotic, and in the process, without ever really meaning to at all, I'd also made a joke of him. "Ah, how quaint!" my fellow pedagogs would chirp. "How rustic, how veddy recherche!"

Once, after I'd moved on from Oregon to California. I was back in Lexington for a visit when I noticed an ad in the paper announcing that a place out on the Richmond Road--I don't recall the name, but it advertised itself as (continued on page 190)Little Enis Pursues His Muse(continued from page 187) "Lexington's Smartest Niteklub"--was featuring Little Enis and His Fabulous Tabletoppers, "famous recording stars, just back from a successful engagement in Las Vegas." Filled with wonder--had he really made it, then? Had all those airy dreams of his come true, even as I, from my lofty vantage point in California, had been airily making light of them?--I hastened out the Richmond Road that very evening to check out this remarkable new development for myself, this Enis risen like the phoenix from the ashes of his own great expectations.

Alas, it was not to be. For Lexington's Smartest Niteklub turned out to be a drafty, sour-smelling old barn of a road-house with a dollar-a-head cover charge, a lot of whitewashed latticework entwined with crepe-paper roses behind the bandstand, and a clientele consisting entirely of me and four overdressed, glum-looking middle-aged couples scattered hither and yon at widely separated tables around a vast, empty wasteland of a dance floor, their faces luminously impalpable in the eerie, livid pallor of the neon lights, staring baleful as ghosts out of the darkness. (""Yeah, when I got to drinkin', we lost a whole lot of fans. The young people. See, we was playin' sock hops and so on and so forth for the kids, and when they seen I was gettin' intoxicated, why, sooner or later their family, their mothers and daddies'd say, 'We just as soon you'd not go out there to that sock hop. Little Enis is playin' it, and he's drunk!'") And Enis, former 120 pounds of dynamite (with, according to that bartender at The Palms, a nine-inch fuse), had put on maybe 40 or 50 pounds, and he was wearing a suit--a brown suit--and he wasn't playing the guitar, he was conducting! ("I had got to where I'd gained a right smart of weight, too, and then it wadn't long till I got to where I'd mumble my words and couldn't play my guitar real good, I'd make a million mistakes!") Standing up there like Tex Beneke lethargically waving his empty hands (well, one of them was empty, anyhow; the other held a sloshing glassful of a poisonous-looking mixture that had to be whiskey and Coke) at a clutch of seven or eight uninspired gents in mismatched sports coats hacking and puffing away on various equally mismatched instruments, their playing so fathomlessly muddy and murky it was next to impossible to tell one song from another. The only one I was able to remember very clearly afterward was Love Letters in the Sand, because on that one Enis finally put down his drink and got out his guitar and did the vocal; but it still came out sounding as though they were writing the love letters in about three feet of muck at the bottom of the Slough of Despond.

I asked the waitress--a matronly lady wearing a white uniform and white shoes and a starched white-cotton tiara, who stood above me like a nurse preparing to take my temperature with a swizzle stick--anyhow, I asked her what she knew about that hype in the newspaper ad, and she told me that Enis and the original Tabletoppers had, indeed, cut a couple of records down in Nashville back in the latter Fifties, and also that in the wake of that triumph he really had gone on the road for a while with a couple of Real Big Stars, Jerry Lee Lewis, she thought, and maybe Fats Domino besides. ("I started in the music bidness when I was ten years old, workin' in the tobacker patch in the daytime and playin' on the ready-o station in Danville of a night. And then in the late Forties I played square dances and all up in Broadhead, Kentucky, with Esco Hankins and The Tennesseeans. I went on with the Grand Ole Opry along about Fifty-one, Fifty-two, and after that I stayed around Nashville for some while and played with a fella by the name of Ferlin Huskey. Then I come back up to Lexington with a Grand Ole Opry show, which on that show besides me was Hank Snow and Martha Carson and Ferlin Huskey and Sonny James. So then I stayed, up here after that, playin' the clubs and the bars.") But, Florence Nightingale reminded me, lowering her voice so that her boss (who sat idly picking his nose over the cover-charge cashbox at a table near the door) wouldn't overhear her disloyalty, all that was several years ago, and Enis does have quite a problem these days with his, you know, with his bottle. ("Well, just begin' in the clubs day in and day out, and people was just constantly saying', 'Enis, have a drank with me, buddy!' and all, and I got to where I just constantly had a drink in my hand, funnelin' it down. An arn man couldn't of stood up under what I was adrinkin'. I would, uh, consume at least two quarts of whiskey. A day. Not countin' beer. And they was several times when I caught myself gettin', you know, fairly drunk.") I considered asking the waitress if perchance she was acquainted with Enis' faithful side-kick Old Blue, but she didn't exactly look like old Blue's type, somehow, so I let it go.

By the time the band slogged out of Love Letters in the Sand and into My Blue Heaven, I was slogging out the door. Back in California, I appended that evening as a melancholy little epilog to the Enis story, and assumed I'd ne'er see Enis more, except perhaps on some far distant shore of Rockabilly Heaven.

• • •

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, as they say. Get this, for instance: In the summer of 1971, when I hadn't written a printable word in months and months, when my career at Stanford (where I had been teaching since 1963) had only lately perished of an anemic bibliography, and when, for all manner of other, even more compelling reasons there's no need (thank goodness) to go into here, my life seemed to be ticking away inside my breast like a time bomb planted there by some insidious cosmic assassin, at midnight on the very eve of yet another trip to Lexington, intending merely to take a teensy little taste to help me through the packing, I accidentally dosed myself with about 2000 micrograms of what is said to be the most stupefyingly powerful acid ever criculated around San Francisco, and spent the next 12 hours clinging like a shipwrecked sailor to the sides of my king-size water bed, awash in my own terror, drowning all night long in the fathomless deeps of the certainty that I was going mad. dying, dead.

And for God's sake, don't ask what any of that has to do with Carlos Toadvine; nothing at all, probably. But I do know this much: An experience such as that will bring a man to give some serious thought to the matter of his own mortality. And by the most curious kind of coincidence, mortality was also very much on Enis' mind just then. For not many days before the morning that I, a survivor after all, came to among the flotsam and jetsam on that westernmost beachead of my sanity, Enis had awakened in a Lexington hospital bed after a week in an alcoholic coma to the news that his liver was now approximately the size and texture of a well-done White Castle dime burger and that his next few drinks would surely be his last.

I didn't know that then, of course; in fact, I'd been in Lexington almost a month before the night Enis and I crossed paths again, the night when, in a fit of nameless angst, I did up an enormous stogie of Kentucky bluegrass and stoned my poor self to a fare-thee-well and went out driving aimlessly about town, in the vain hope that the flickering pyrotechnics in my head would shed some new light on how I might go about piecing together the myriad fragments of my life and mind. And I suppose it must have been an hour or so after I'd set out that I found myself idling my motor at the Southern Railroad crossing out on South Broadway--a workingman's neighborhood of tobacco warehouses and whiskey-by-the-drink bars and fleabag hotels and used-clothing stores--while an endless freight train oozed along before me; and after I'd sat there for several minutes my ill-used consciousness reluctantly informed me--for even a busted clock has to tell the right time twice a day--that I was right then situated directly across the street from the Scott Hotel.

Now the Scott Hotel is a great ugly old four-story pile of gray-green brick with a lot of quasi-Victorian afterthoughts--turrets and gables and oriels and cupolas--haphazardly affixed to its upper reaches and a neon Rooms by day or week sign in the lobby window and, around the corner, a scummy old spittoon of a tavern where, back in the days of my callow youth. I used to go sometimes to drink beer and rub shoulders with the hoi polloi, the way any would-Beat worthy of his whiskers was supposed to do. The tavern, though, had evidently acquired both a new name--Boots' Bar, according to the lighted sign at the corner of the building--and a whole new entertainment policy, something rather livelier than the six-flipper pinball machine that used to be its main attraction: for emblazoned on the wall facing the street, in awkwardly painted letters two feet tall, were the words GO-GO Girls!

For the merest fraction of a moment, thinking perhaps to make some sense of the future by contemplating the ruins of my history. I considered going in for a shot or two of 40-proof Old Blast from the Past; then, just as quickly, I thought better of it. Because Lexington's notion of Southern hospitality didn't necessarily extend to loopy-looking long-hairs in bell-bottom britches, and in 1971 there were still bars in that very neighborhood where, if Prince Valiant himself had walked in and ordered a beer, it wouldn't have been two seconds before some good ole boy would have taken the prince's Singing Sword and stuffed it up its master's ass and made it whistle Dixie.

The train's caboose was in my headlights, and 1 had already slipped the car into gear when I glanced back and noticed that, in three-inch letters above the Go-Go Girls!, with clumsy little musical notes leaping off the words like fleas leaving a sinking dog, and the letter P scrawled in by some wag with a can of black spray paint, the sign said:

The Man with a Golden Voice Little Penis!

And the next thing I knew I was hooking a hard left into the Scott's parking lot. ... And the next after that I was standing beside a blaring jukebox at the rear of a large, dark, low-ceilinged room with so much smoke in the atmosphere that I could almost feel the droplets of nicotine condensing on my eyeballs, and dead ahead of me at the far end of the room was a flimsy little stage, and on the stage, bathed in pellucid greenish light, stood a lady about 156 years old, wearing green Day-Glo pasties and black bikini panties and white Easter parade spike-heeled pumps, her bosoms adangle on her rib cage like two Bull Durham sacks half filled with buckshot, her stomach as scarred and dimpled as an old golf ball, her meager legs sheathed in torn nets of varicose veins, her sequin-spangled crotch thrusting fitfully to some obscure beat that she alone seemed able to discern in the strident rhythms of Resurrection Shuffle, which is what the jukebox happened, appropriately enough, to be playing at the moment.

"Pour it on, Lucille!" someone hollered from somewhere out there in the murk, and someone else hollered, "Let's see them titties fly!" And I saw that there were maybe 25 or 30 customers in the place, nearly all of them men, sitting in clutches of twos and threes at the tables closest to the stage, and half a dozen nigh-unto-bare-ass-nekkid ladies plying the sea of smoke with trays of drinks. I spotted an empty table over near the wall and made for it.

I needn't have worried about my hair. For I'd no sooner sat down than there emerged out of the gloom a tray-bearing maiden--I swear she didn't look a day over 14--habited in tasseled pasties and a sort of sequined diaper, with breasts scarcely bigger than a pair of green persimmons and a face as amiably homely as a beagle pup's, and she walked straight up to me and put out her hand to stroke my hair and said, loudly but to no one in particular, in a voice so nasal it twanged like a broken guitar string, "Shit fahr, 1 wisht you'd look at the heada hair on hee-yim!" Then, holding my locks back with her hand, she leaned over and planted a kiss as wet as a raw oyster smack in my left ear.

"Whatcha havin', California?" she inquired, rising. Suddenly I felt like Randolph Scott, when he strides into the Barbary Coast saloon with the dust of the trail still on his boots, and the dance-hall queen sidles up to him and murmurs, appreciatively, "Sa-a-a-ay! Whatcha havin', Tex?"

"Well." I said, "I guess I'll have another one of those, to start with." 1 got a wit on me like a rapier, when I'm ripped.

"Aw, naw," she said, grinning. "One to a customer, now."

I told her I'd settle for an Oertels '92, then, if she had one. On the stage the venerable Lucille, unresurrected but still gamely shuffling, creaked her way through the last few bars of her number, and a man's voice, hoarse with phlegm and static, issued from a hidden two-bit loudspeaker, wheedling, "Awright, fellas, don't set on yer hands, these girls'll work hard for you if you let 'em hear it." The disembodied voice paused to make room for a listless spatter of applause--along with two or three halfhearted catcalls--then droned on. "That was the lovely Lucille, with skin all o-ver her bod-eh! The title of that little number was called It Won't Get Well if You Picket; it's one of them good ole union songs."

"Who's that talking?" 1 asked the girl when she came back with my beer.

"Oh, him," she said sourly, gesturing vaguely toward the back of the room, where I noticed for the first time a morose-looking middle-aged gent sitting at a table by the jukebox with a glass of beer, three empty bottles and a microphone before him. "That's Billy Bob Todd. He's supposed to be some kinda comedian."

"Well, chacun à son goût," I said, handing her a dollar. "What about Little Enis, though? Is he going to ...?"

"Goo?" the girl said. "Which goo?"

But Billy Bob Todd was already answering my question for me. "And now," he was saying, "here he is, the Man with a Golden Voice, and a Million Friends, Little Penis! ... uh, Little Enis!"

"Thank you, Billy Bird Tur ... uh, Billy Bob Todd," said a familiar voice over the same loud-speaker, and I looked back to the stage and, sure enough, there he was, perched up there atop a tall stool with an upside-down 12-string acoustic guitar in his arms, old Enis himself in the very considerable flesh, a rotund little bodhisattva in a polo shirt and sporty white wing-tip oxfords and slacks so snugly cut you could plainly see the outline of Old Blue within them, dressing left, Enis and Blue, that immortal pair, indivisible as Damon and Pythias, Abbott and Costello, Ferrante and Teicher, together still through thin and thick, a synergy if ever there was one, Enis grinning impishly above his guitar to acknowledge the laugh he's won at the expense of Billy Birdturd, Enis' tiny right hand already fingering the frets, over the top of the guitar's neck after his own heretical fashion, Enis' left hand rising involuntarily to smooth back that black-enamel hair, Enis smiling as he checks himself out in the full-length mirror mounted on the wall stage right and finds himself good, the best of all possible Enises, Enis bending now to his mike to say, "Welcome to Boots' supper club, here in the beautiful Hotel Scott Hilton, overlookin' the Southern Railroad tracks.... Now, here's a song I used to play when I was a boy down in Hogue Holler."

Out there in the raucous darkness I sat poised on the edge of my seat, waiting for the first notes of Blue Suede Shoes or Rip It Up or Shake, Rattle and Roll--or even Love Letters in the Sand--to send me off atripping down memory lane, thinking, Heh-heh, that Enis is a card, why, Enis playing Rip It Up in Hogue Holler would be like Wanda Landowska playing Melancholy Baby at a Bach recital.

Right; no doubt about it. But chances are they do play Wildwood Flower in Hogue Holler, and that's what Enis was playing now, flat-picking like a fool, little clusters of notes as sweet and delicate as periwinkles spilling from that scratchy old loud-speaker above my head.

"How about it, California? You gonna pay me for that beer or not?"

"Oh, sorry," I said, abashed, "but I never heard Enis play bluegrass before. He used to play just rock 'n' roll, mostly." Uh-huh, I reminded myself as I fished a dollar from my pocket, that's what had set my mind adrift, all right. Bluegrass.

"Well," she said, "far as I'm concerned, I've done heard enough of that old hillbilly shit down home in Crab Orchard to do me for a lifetime. But Enis's been real sick, in the hospital, you know, he can't jump around the way he used to. Hey, I bet they don't play that old hillbilly shit out there in California, do they? Shit fahr, I wisht I was in California and Crab Orchard, Kentucky, had a feather up its ass. Then me and it'd both be tickled."

"You'd be better off to stay where you are," I assured her. "Everybody in California talks about comin' to Kentucky, these days."

"Well," she said gloomily, "I shore do hope some of 'em comes to Crab Orchard, then."

She started to move on to the next table, but--especially since she was escaping with my change still on her tray--I figured I was entitled to another question. "Hey, Crab Orchard," I called after her, "how's Old Blue? He hasn't been sick, too, has he?"

"Blue?" she said, already moving off again. "I don't know nobody by that name."

Uh-oh, I thought, this may be more serious than I'd supposed. (How was it that old folk song went, the one about the hound dog? "When Old Blue died, he died so hard/He shook the ground in my back yard"?) But Enis sure didn't look like a sick man, up there blithely plucking those bouquets of wildflowers off the face of his guitar like Mary, Mary, quite contrary; in fact, he looked perfectly fine, fat and sassy and full of vinegar, his hair still black and sleek, his close-set eyes still aglint with that old devilment, his jaw still jutting with that old bulldog audacity, all in all the spittin' image of J. Edgar Hoover's renegade kid brother, you know, the wild one that ran away to join a rock-'n'-roll band 20 years ago and never has been heard from since.

And when he polished off Wildwood Flower and eased on into Loose Talk, and began to sing ("When I go out walkin'/There's lots of loose talkin'"), his voice seemed to me clearer and stronger and surer than ever; in the refrain ("We may have to leave here/To find peace of mind, dear"), it fairly rang with the doleful, plangent tones of that chronic melancholia that, in country music, almost inevitably afflicts backstairs lovers, like a kind of psychic venereal disease.

But it was a tough house--mostly, they were there to see them titties fly--and such applause as Loose Talk pulled down was decidedly light and sparse. Next Enis took on Six Days on the Road, Dave Dudley's truck-driver classic, but that failed him, too; this time I clapped for him almost alone, and the forlorn sound of my applause disappeared with scarcely a trace into the general hubbub of social intercourse within the ranks of the audience.

"Awright now," Enis said dispiritedly, "I'm gonna play somethin' real soft this time, so I can hear you all talk."

He did an I Kept the Wine and Threw Away the Rose that could only have been sung by a man who'd lived it--but the trouble was that half the audience had lived it, too, and evidently they weren't quite drunk enough just yet to want to be reminded of it, so in the main they ignored it completely. Enis filled out the set with Buck Owens' Sam's Place and Hank Williams' Lovesick Blues and Your Cheatin' Heart, and then, looking really dejected, he mumbled something about taking a break and switched off his mike.

"Thank you, Little Enis!" cried Billy Bob Todd. "Give him a nice hand, fellas! Enis was brought to you by the makers of Black Draught. He'll be back in a little bit, brought to you by the makers of Blue Ointment! But now...."

At Billy Bob's urging, they finally rewarded Enis with a nice respectable little hand, and he smiled and waved and bobbed his head in the approved how-sweet-it-is fashion, like a diminutive Jackie Gleason. But when he eased himself off his stool, a sudden pain somewhere in his vitals pinched off the smile into a fleeting grimace, and I knew then that Crab Orchard's diagnosis was essentially right on the money: Little Enis, the original Glutton for Punishment, was definitely not a well man.

"But now, fellas," Billy Bob went on as Enis stashed his guitar and stool in the wings, "we got a very beautiful girl for you; this girl comes from a very large family--one mother and 12 fathers--here she is, the Queen of the Jungle, the lovely Edna!"

Little Richard struck up Bony Maronie on the jukebox and the lovely Edna, a portly, double-chinned dumpling in a foot-tall blonde bouffant wig and tasseled pasties and fake-leopardskin bikini bottoms, waddled onstage and began sort of marching in place to the music, phlegmatically hunching her suety loins every fifth or sixth beat but mainly just picking up first one foot and then the other, as if she needed to go to the bathroom and had found the door locked.

"Sooo-oo-oo-ooeeeey!" Billy Bob hollered. Edna, sullen beneath her wig, flipped him the finger and trudged on.

The next time Crab Orchard steamed past with her tray I flagged her down and ordered another beer. When she brought it I asked her what it had been that had put Enis in the hospital. "I thank it was his liver," she told me, almost gaily. "They say the whiskey's just about eat it right out of him." But she said if I wanted to talk to him during his break, I'd find him sitting in the little room beyond the bar (I looked where she was pointing in time to see Enis, his rotund silhouette ballooning up from those pegged pants cuffs, trundle through the doorway like a toy top wobbling on its spindle), and--same old Enis--there wasn't nothing in this world, she said, that he liked better than for somebody to go back there and fuss over him a little.

All right, I thought when she was gone, suppose I do go back and talk to him; what then? It's sure to be another downer, I figured. First there'd be the awkward inevitabilities--"Uh, Mr., uh, Enis, you probably don't remember me, but I used to..."--and then we'd settle down to a long, carefully considered discussion of... what? The Influence of the Elizabethan Bardic Tradition upon the Works of Toadvine? The fact that I'd been Doing him ("Do Enis, Ed! Do Enis!") at cocktail parties for nearly 15 years now? The fact that the world was going to hell in a handbasket, and the both of us were going with it? No way.

"Looka there, fellas!" Billy Bob whooped. "Ain't that the loveliest sight you ever seen?" He was directing the beam from an oversized flashlight through the smoky darkness at the lovely Edna, Queen of the Jungle, who now stood with her back to the audience; as the beam of light settled on her already almost naked backside, she reached behind her and hooked her thumbs in the waistband of her leopardskin panties and lowered them to the tops of her thighs, the better that we might behold her loveliness in all its cloven, dimpled splendor. "Edna, honey," Billy Bob implored, "show these boys how you can make that right one wink at 'em, now! Watch that right-hand one, boys!" Edna obligingly bunched and twitched the muscles in her right buttock, and set it to jiggling like a dish of vanilla pudding. "Look at that, fellas! I tell you, boys, a man could write a book about a thing like that!"

Well, by God, Billy Bob, a man could, at that, couldn't he? Not a book, of course, and not about Edna's ass, of course; but if a man was half a writer he could situate old Enis in this place, this Boots' Bar where human frailty seems endlessly on parade, and do an interview or something that might--if a man was half a writer--reveal a hell of a lot about fame's dereliction and fate's treachery, about... mortality.

Sure, why not? I could go back into the past and fulfill that ancient promise, it would be a sort of second chance to set at least that one small alcove of my untidy history in order; and maybe I'd even learn something in the process, maybe he'd tell me what it was like to really go down for the third time and then come to and find oneself still struggling against the tide of circumstance. And right outside in my car, buried beneath the debris of my travels, didn't I just happen to have my trusty little portable tape recorder? And also outside in the car, was there not a roach the size of an El Producto? The times, they are awastin'!

In a trice I was in the front seat of the car, rooting through the ashtray after my roach, and in twice that trice I'd found it and fired it up and was in the back seat rooting through moldy sleeping bags after my tape recorder, and in thrice that trice I was standing over Enis' table in the back room of Boots' Bar (where Enis sat, alone and glumly pensive, over a cup of poisonous-looking coffee), holding out the tape recorder so he couldn't miss it and saying, "Uh, Mr., uh, Enis, you probably don't remember me, but, uh," and Enis, instantly perking up and eying the tape recorder as thirstily as he might a fifth of J. T. S. Brown, was saying, "An innerview, huh? You know, when I was with Jerry Lee Lewis, we was innerviewed just about ever day, by ever ready-o station between here to Australia. Yeah, that guy over there was real comical, the way they talk and everthang."

And suddenly the Ed 'n' Enis Show was on the air again, me and Enis caught in our own intimate time warp, me telling Enis how the article I intended to write about him was bound to make him even richer and more famous than the one I'd almost written 15 years ago for my American-folklore class would surely have rendered him, Enis telling me how he'd once been all set to get rich and famous on his own, how he'd gone on the road with Jerry Lee Lewis and played Lost Vegas with Fats Domino, how he was doing all right for himself until he came back to Lexington and the bottle brought him down ("When I was out here to the nuthouse, tryin' to get myself straightened out, they put me in this occupational therapy, you know? To occupy your mind? So they give me this big wad of clay, and says, 'Now, you make whatever's on your mind, Enis.' So I made me a little canoe, see, and a little Indian alayin' in it. Not doin' nothin', just alayin' there! And painted it blue! The whole thing, boat and Indian and all! And that shrinker says, 'Now, Enis, what do you reckon that stands for?' And I says, 'Why, it tooks to me like that's just what was occupyin' my mind! Nothin'! Not one thing! I reckon I'm just like that old Indian!'"), and how...

(Along about here on the tape is where the lovely Edna, carrying an empty tray in one hand and cupping the right side of her jaw in the other, comes slouching in and sinks into a chair and moans, "Aaaaah, shit, I can't wait no more goddamn tables, I got a goddamn abscess tooth! Plus it's my goddamn period. Lemme hide out back here with you all for a minute."

(Out front somebody is indifferently plucking at a guitar. I tilt my chair back to where I can look through the door into the other room and see that Billy Bob Todd has mounted the stage and is sitting on Enis' stool, with Enis' guitar across his lap. He is getting about as much music from it as Enis would from flat-picking a barbed-wire fence.

("That son of a bitch Billy Bob is gonna get my guitar outta tune again," Enis says grumpily. "He thinks he's a picker. Sheeit. He couldn't pick his mother out of a nigger parade."

(Edna, gingerly probing along her gum line with a grubby forefinger, notices the tape-recorder mike at her elbow. "What're you all doin'?" she snickers around her finger. "Broadcastin' to outer space?"

(Well, hidy out there in the void, friends and neighbors, this here's your Ed 'n' Enis Show, where all the action's at; we got it all right here, we got crude dudes and lewd nudes, we got Ed and Enis and Edna's Ass, we got Old Blue and Billy Birdturd, we got Twenty Girls Twenty, we got----

("This boy here," Enis is telling Edna, setting her straight, "this boy here is Ned McManahan, he's a p'fessor at a colletch. He's fixin' to write a book on my life story.")

(We got, like I said, the same old Enis. But Edna coolly appraises me, and is plainly not impressed. "The nerve is dying," she declares as her finger disappears into her mouth again. "The gobgamn nerve is dying.")

And how, Enis went on, this last time the high life had almost laid him low for keeps ("Well, we was playin' out here to Comer's Bar, and I just keeled over right there on the stage, and never woke up till eight days later. And when I come out of my coma that doctor told me if I was to start drinkin' again I wouldn't live a good two weeks. See, they had went up in me with a tube and tuck a picture of my liver, and it wadn't no bigger around than that! And just afloatin' in there! So what I mean, I just don't hardly have no liver left for me to consume any amount of alcoholic beverages whatsoever. 'Cause you just as well start talkin' to the Good Man Upstairs, when your liver goes out on you.").

I heard the click inside the tape recorder that told me we were out of tape, which was just as well, because a moment later Crab Orchard came in to remind Enis that it was almost midnight, time for his last set.

"Hey, Enis," I said, on sudden inspiration, "Miss Crab Orchard here says she's never been introduced to Old Blue! How'd you ever let that happen?"

Despite the miseries in her tooth, the lovely Edna managed a knowing smile at the mention of Old Blue's honored name. But Enis, to my surprise, took my question at face value and answered it accordingly.

"Well," he began gravely, "your liver, see, controls all the har-mone cells in your body. And after I come out of that hospital, I reckon I just didn't have no har-mones left, hardly. But they been givin' me these shots, and it won't be no time now before----" Noticing Crab Orchard standing over him looking characteristically perplexed, he broke off and, grinning suddenly, reached out and patted her naked haunch. "Aww, yeah, Crab Apple, honey," he said, "you'd like Old Blue, if you just knowed him. He's got a head like a house cat and ribs like a hungry hound."

This time Crab Orchard got it. She giggled and slapped lightly at Enis' hand and went through the standard Oh-Enis-you-awful-thang-you routine, but it was obvious she didn't really mean it. She even blushed a little, as if something within her recognized that his very lubricity bespoke a crazy kind of boyish innocence, that after his own fashion he was being a perfect gentleman, he was being courtly; Old Blue was his Excalibur, and Enis had presented him to her even as the gallants of King Arthur's court must have offered up their swords in service to their ladies.

"Listen here, you dirty man," Crab Orchard said, still smiling, "if you're so hot to trot, whyn't you go out there and play me some rock 'n' roll? I'm tard of that old country shit."

"Hey, yeah!" I put in. "Do some Jerry Lee Lewis songs! Do Elvis!"

"Oh, Lordy," Enis said, wincing as he struggled to his feet, "I don't know. I got awful bad water on the knee tonight, I don't know if I can...."

He'd do it, though, I realized as I watched him go gamely limping off after Crab Orchard; he'd do it because there was a show happening in his head, too, a one-man spectacular starring Carlos Toadvine as the Incomparable Enis, and that show must go on, water on the knee or no. He'd do it because he was a trouper, a real little trouper. And besides, if Carlos Toadvine missed a performance, who else could play the part?

"Sounds like Old Blue's been under the weather, too," I said to Edna as I gathered up my gear to move into the other room.

Edna favored me with yet another smile, a wistful one this time. "Aww, that Enis," she mused fondly, a faraway look in her eye. "He sure used to be somethin', he sure did." I started to ask her if she'd care to make a statement to that effect for publication, but just then a sudden twinge in her tooth brought that wet slug of a finger back into her mouth, so I reconsidered and went on out.

By the time I'd picked up a beer at the bar and found myself a table, Enis was onstage, perched on his stool retuning his guitar after Billy Bob's irreverent trifling. His melancholia had evidently passed; he was grinning, and that roguish gleam was in his eye again, that incorrigible vintage-Enis cheekiness that, inscribed upon this roly-poly latter-day Enis' chubby little features, put me in mind of a concupiscent choirboy, a randy cherub. Right then it wouldn't have surprised me in the least if Old Blue himself had come dancing out on Enis' knee, spiffy as Mr. Peanut, with a little top hat and a monocle and maybe a little white wing-tip collar and a walking stick, Old Stage Door Johnny Blue doing a sprightly buck and wing to the tune of Fit as a Fiddle. Somehow I was already beginning to suspect that this set just might turn out to be an altogether different story from the last one.

"The girls'll be back in a minute, fellas," Billy Bob advised us. "They're shaving right now. But here's the man you've all been waitin' for, the Man with a Golden Voice, the one and only, the fabulous Little Enis!"

A small pitapat of applause greeted the announcement, but the audience was still decidedly restive, still a good deal more taken up with its own concerns--ordering another round of beer, going out to take a leak, grab-assing the waitresses--than it was with whatever Enis had to offer. This time, though, Enis was up to the challenge; he was eying his indifferent audience as cockily as the lecherous pissant in that old joke, the one who crawls up an elephant's ass with rape on his mind.

But the first order of business was to get the elephant's attention. "Now, here's a nice little song," Enis said, "if you like nasty dirty old songs." He picked off a tantalizingly swift run of warm-up notes, then added, "But this song ain't really dirty. It's just all dependin' where your mind is at.

"Any ice today, ladies?Any ice today, ladies?How about a little piece today?"

That did it; as the song went on ("There's a lady lives on Ninth Street/Her name is Missuz Brown/She takes ice most ev'ry day/Got the biggest box in town"), it got ranker ("There's a lady lives on Tenth Street/Her name is Missuz Green/She don't get no ice today/'Cause her damned old box ain't clean") and ranker ("I'm a vurry nice iceman/I won't cheat you, of course/But if you want a bigger piece/I'll have to get my horse"), and the ranker the song became the more clamorously the crowd acclaimed it; it woke them up and broke them up, jacked them up and cracked them up, they cheered and clapped and stomped and whistled so lustily that by the end of the last verse ("I'm a vurry nice iceman/That's vurry plain to see/But hurry up and put it in/It's drippin'... on... m' knee"), the din of their enthusiasm nearly drowned out the final chorus.

"Aw, yeah," Enis said as soon as they'd settled back a bit, "I'm a go-getter. My wife works and I go get'er!" With that he launched into a Salty Dog as spiritedly priapic as a sailor home on shore leave; and in the little theater inside my head Old Blue danced onstage again, an amorous old salt in Navy bell-bottoms and a tiny white swabbie cap cocked low and rakish on his beetled brow, like Gene Kelly in Anchors Aweigh. As Blue took his bow and cakewalked off into the wings, Enis stopped a go-go lady who was just then passing before the stage--a hefty, hulking, heavy-breasted, witless-looking girl in a wig like a double-dip cone of Dairy Whip--and said, "Hey, Big Un, honey, would you brang me a CoCola? Maybe I can drownd this goddamn liver." While she slouched off to fetch it he killed time with a few more bars of Salty Dog, just idling his motor, letting us know he wasn't finished with us yet, not by a long shot. When the Big Un came back with his little glass of Coke he tossed the whole thing off in one long swallow and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Now, then, sweetheart," he said, pointing the bottom of the glass at her incandescent orange Day-Glo-tasseled dugs as he handed it back to her, "let's me and you show these boys how you can start them things by hand on a cold mornin'." The Big Un, recognizing her cue, nodded happily and set down her tray and turned to face the audience, and Enis said, "Now, here's a little number I learnt from Jerry Lee Lewis," and laced into Great Balls of Fire, and the Big Un, bouncing in double time on her toes, grabbed herself a handful of her left breast and gave it a vicious counterclockwise flip and set its tassel to spinning, slowly and erratically at first, like the prop on Jimmy Stewart's plane in one of those old You-can't-send-the-kid-up-in-a-crate-like-that movies, then faster and faster as she warmed up, as Enis warmed up--"Hook it, Enis!" somebody hollered. "Hook it, son!"--and then she laid hold of her right breast and cranked it up and flung it the way she had the other one, only clockwise this time, she was a twin-prop DC-3 revving up on the runway, her prop wash swirled the smoke that hung before her, and now Enis was really digging in, really getting after it--"Y' shake m' nerves and y' rattle m' brain/Too much luhhhv/Drives a man insane"--the all-America left-handed upside-down guitar player had his chops back, for now, at least; that big 12-string rang out as though Jerry Lee Lewis himself had taken up residence inside it, Jerry Lee and a concert grand piano and the entire New York Philharmonic Orchestra--"Y' broke m' will/But what a threee-ill"--the Enis Hour was on the air, brought to you in living Eniscolor through the miracle of Enisvision, featuring the interpretive dance stylings of the Lovely Big Un and the noted impressionist Old Blue (there he is now, that little dude in the double-breasted serge waiting in the wings, all set to step forward into the living rooms of America and hunch his shoulders up inside his coat and pop his knuckles and say, "Reeely big shew, reeely big-big shew!"), and starring the Enis the World Awaited, the Man with a Golden Voice, and a Million Friends, the Man with...

"Good-nis gray-shus, gret balls o' fieyer!"

But how about that curious-looking long-haired party out there in the audience, the one in the California getup, the one with his 40th birthday hard upon him and his mind blown as full of holes as Enis' liver, the one who's leaping half out of his chair, hollering, "Do Elvis, Enis! Do All Shook Up! Do Hound Dog! Do Lawdy Miss Clawdy! Do..."? Could that be...?

Uh-huh; me again. The Old Loose End again, the Famous Arthur again, stoned again. The more things change, the more they stay the same, and here comes another one, just like the other one. Because in a flash it was 1957, and Enis was down off that stool and on his feet, and his left knee--water and all--was pumping inside his pants as though he wore a jackhammer for a peg leg with a hot-water bottle for a kneepad, and he was kind of seesawing his guitar back and forth across the swell of his belly and cranking away at the face of it like a demented organ-grinder, singing, "Well, bless-a mah soul, whuzz-a wrong wi' me?/Ah'm a-eetchin' lak a bug on a fuzzeh tree," and the Big Un was about to take off into the wild blue yonder (over yonder, meanwhile, the Wild Blue his ownself, decked out now in a polo shirt and pegged slacks and white wing tips just like Enis', danced a frolicsome dirty boogie with his shadow in the farthermost corner of the stage), verily it was 1957, and Eisenhower was in the White House and I was in my prime and Enis was in the chips and Old Blue was in the pink, and we were all in The Palms (not Eisenhower, of course, just Enis and Blue and me), and all around us folks was dancin' them niggery dances, and I was belaboring my tabletop with all my old abandon--like Enis, at least for now I had my chops back--everything had slipped back into synch, I could recognize myself again, I mean I'd know that guy anywhere, no matter what disguise he wore, that's just old Fred Callahan from out at the colletch, he's your basic all-time Little Enis freak, he's been trying to find his way back to this moment for nearly 15 years and now at last he's here, he and Enis and Old Blue, too, they're a little the worse for the wear, but they've all made it this far more or less intact, Old Blue can still rise to the occasion when he's had his booster shots, and The Enis That Shook the World can shake it still, and their accompanist Jed McHanaclan, the old California mutant, is still the premiere tabletop percussionist in all of Rockabillydom, just listen at 'em wail, just listen at that Lawdy Miss Clawdy, that Hi-Yo Silver, that Hound Dog, that Kansas City, that Blue Suede Shoes, why, these boys coulda been stars if they'd just kept that act together, Enis would be on the cover of Rolling Stone and Playboy would run a full-color spread of Lucille and Crab Orchard and Edna and the Big Un and all the Enisettes and The New Yorker would commission John Updike to do a four-part profile of Old Blue, Psychology Today would editorialize on the phenomenon of Enis envy in American culture and TedNedFredJed would deliver a brilliant lecture entitled "The Influence of the Elizabethan Bardic Tradition upon the Works of Toadvine" at the Juilliard Colletch of Musical Knowletch, they coulda made it big, they coulda played Carnegie Hall, they coulda been by-God immortal!

Ah, but what voice is this I hear, croaking down at me across the years from the pedagogical summit I so long ago aspired to? "Now, then, Mr. McClanahan, in his Ode on Intimations of Immortality, Wordsworth asks himself the rhetorical question 'Whither is fled the visionary gleam?/Where is it now, the glory and the dream?' Perhaps you could tell us--pull yourself together, man!--how the poet, in his maturity, consoles himself in the poem's closing quatrain for the loss of that youthful vision of immortality?"

Why, certainly, Dr. Earwigg (I might've answered if I hadn't skipped out on all those seminars), I do believe the lines in question are, if memory serves, the following:

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

• • •

Coda:

Enis has been drinking again.

Time warped on, you see, and suddenly it's 1973 somehow and, thanks to a miraculous intervention with the iron logic of history by some old friends of mine in academe, I have ended up back in Lexington as this year's Visiting Eminence on the staff of the very English department with which I so ignominiously parted company all those years ago. I finally began writing about Enis when I arrived here last fall, and in these last few months my head--that dilapidated old ruin I once called Home--has become the repository of the world's most definitive collection of Enisana, its rickety shelves filled to overflowing with a wild profusion of Enisdotes and Enisisms, Enisography and Enisology and Enisthetics. I have even seen a photograph of Old Blue; the faded-rose tint of the color Polaroid snapshot rendered him a wee bit wan and peaked, but even in repose his dimensions were truly awesome. "Now, this here," Enis said as he handed me the photo, "this here is good art." There, now: Enisthetics. What'd I tell you?

Enis, meanwhile, has moved on--and up--from Boots' Bar to a plastic-posh supper club called the Embers Inn, where he makes pretty good money providing diversion during the cocktail hour for a crowd of local used-car dealers and horseplayers wetting their whistles after a hard day's toil in their respective callings. And Enis has lately taken to marinating his own poor desiccated liver in a daily quart or two or three of Mateus wine. ("Aw, yeah," he says, "I like to have me a little sip of ro-zay ever now and then.") He has gained another 30 or 40 pounds, and some days there's a jaundiced cast to his eye. Seeing him, I am reminded that a linguist friend of mine once suggested that "Toda-vinney" probably used to mean "all the wine."

Notice, though, that I said Enis has been drinking, not Enis is drinking; Enis is drinking was last week. This week Enis has quit drinking; he has also bought himself a maroon 1968 Cadillac convertible and a poodle with painted toenails. And the more things stay the same, the more they change.

His friends worry about his health, but their concern doesn't cut much ice with Enis. "Shoot, you can't teach me nothin'," he was telling some of us last week out at the Embers. "I got all five volumes of The Book of Knowletch. Cost me three hunnerd dollars."

With that he hooked back the second brimful glass of Mateus I'd seen him down during that particular 15-minute break (this was last week, right?) and hauled himself to his feet. "Now, Ned," he said, turning to me, "if you'll get out your pencil and paper, I'll sing you a song that tells a whole lot on my life story. You might could use some of the words to it for an endin' on your book, maybe." And a minute later he was up there caressing his guitar as gently as a lover, keening, in a voice that could crack the hardest heart that ever beat,

"Oh, I'm walkin' on the sidewalks of Chicago,

If I buy the bread I can't afford the wine.

Yes I'm walkin' on the sidewalks of Chicago,

Wishin' I had lived some other time...."