Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [106]
Just as they were leaving, Blank noticed that Lightnin’ was dealing cards and gambling, and for lack of anything else to say, Blank asked him what game he was playing. “Lightnin’ said, ‘It’s called Pitty Pat … You want to learn how to play it?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ Anything to stay around there. I learned the rules…. It’s like playing Go Fish, trying to figure out what’s in the other person’s hand. You need to fill a pair. It’s called Pitty Pat or Pitty Pair. It’s a pity if you don’t have a pair. So I had like forty dollars in my wallet and he won all forty of my dollars and I got upset. I was losing all the money we had tied up in the film, and my whole future was down the drain. I didn’t have money to buy breakfast in the morning. And he found it amusing. He chuckled and said, ‘If you can find some more money and come back tomorrow and I’ll play you some more.’ So I borrowed some money and came back the next day, and he played me again, and this time I was sober and looking very carefully to see how he could be cheating me…. I checked the cards to see if they were marked. But he knew what I had and took all my money. This time I got really upset and he got really delighted. And said, ‘Well, maybe you guys aren’t so bad after all.’ But he was sober by now, too, and more rested, and said, ‘You can get your camera out now if you want.’ So we did some shooting and this time we were very careful about pushing him. If we saw him getting tired or irritated, just the slightest sign of this, we’d excuse ourselves and disappear for a day or two, and then drop by, and see how he was feeling, and if he was in a good mood, we’d get the camera out and shoot. If he was in a bad mood, we just keep on going.”9
Blank and Gerson spent six weeks shooting the documentary during the spring of 1967. He lived on the floor of a hippie crash pad in Houston, but the filming proceeded very slowly. The shooting ratio was six or eight to one, and it just took a long time to get the footage they needed. During the making of the film, Blank says he “was amazed by Lightnin’. He had kind of an otherworldly quality about him. He was a shaman of some sort. He could know what people were thinking. He could read into the way people walked, or just their body language. He could talk on about this person or that person and make up stories about their lives.”10
Blank recalls how Lightnin’ told so many stories during the filming that not all of them could be recorded. For example, when Lightnin’ showed his ankle scars and talked about the chain gang, he or “someone close to him” explained that he had been put in jail because “he had an affair with a white woman,” but there are no other interviews that confirm this as ever actually having occurred. In another story he told Blank, he said that he had once been a “cop,” as evidenced by the long aerial in the back of his car that was pulled over and tied down from the front. “It’s a long aerial,” Blank remembers Lightnin’ telling him, “that the cops used to use in the days of radio communication. You had to have a tall aerial like that to receive such a signal. He had such a radio and he liked to keep the antenna on his car to remind people and him that he used to be a cop.”11
Whether or not all of Lightnin’s stories were true was in a sense irrelevant, Blank says. “He had a take on life and things that was always enchanting, the way he saw the world. Like a pure poet, he was constantly being fed sensations and stimulations from the world around him that he poured