Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [130]
When he wasn’t cruising the neighborhoods or shooting dice, Lightnin’ hung out in front of Johnny Lee’s, a Chinese grocery in the Third Ward. “He sat in his car at his corner,” Benson says, “and he would make loans to people in the community, and he would sit there with a couple of pistols in the car and a half pint of Canadian Club. So whenever I wanted to find him, I’d get in my pick-up truck and I would cruise and usually catch up with him there…. And I would go sit in the car with him and we’d sit and drink Canadian Club until both of us would get drunker than shit and then he would say, ‘Let’s go get something to eat.’ Well, I had a key to the apartment and Miss Nette would always keep the refrigerator full of food she’d cooked for us. So we’d go home and we’d warm up something from Miss Nette, or if she was there, she would fix something for us, and we’d eat and sit around and play guitars.”52
One time Benson drove up to Johnny Lee’s grocery store and was shocked to see that Lightnin’ “had a gun to a guy’s head … and he had a Pearl beer in his other hand. And he walked over to my truck, still pointing the gun at the guy, handed me the beer through my truck window, and said, ‘Hold this beer for me, baby, while I kill this motherfucka.’ And I’m looking at the windshield at him, and he’s arguing with the guy. ‘Who told you to drink my liquor?’ and the guy says, ‘Lee,’ a cousin of Lightnin’s, who lived out in Sunnyside. ‘Well, who told you to drink out of the bottle? Why couldn’t you drink out of the cap? You’re supposed to drink out of the cap so they can tell that you’re not greedy…. You can’t turn the bottle up.’ See the guy had taken a drink from the bottle, and Lightnin’ was going to kill him. Lee was so drunk; he was wallowing all over this hood of his car. He couldn’t even stand up. And Lightnin’ said, ‘Who told you to drink out of the bottle?’ And the guy said, ‘My mama.’ And Lightnin’ said, ‘You’re right, because if you had said my mama, you’d be dead right now.’ And Lightnin’ started pistol whipping Lee and then he come back to me and said, ‘C’mon, baby let’s go.’ And he got in his car and I followed him around to his apartment.”53
Benson believed that Lightnin’ wasn’t “as hard as he put on to be. But Lightnin’ would kill you. He was from that generation that would kill somebody, but when you did anger him, he was dangerous. But he was a very sweet man. He could be very tender.”54 Michael Point, a white hippie writer and blues fan, who sometimes served as Lightnin’s driver in the 1970s, recalled that often times when he arrived early to pick up Lightnin’ for a gig, “He’d be out on the porch with all these neighborhood kids around him, and he’d be playing a kids’ concert for them, all cheerful and positive—Sesame Street versions of his songs. It’s the last thing he’d want anyone to know.”55
When Lightnin’ was in the white world, he was often more withdrawn; he didn’t say much, but he was nonetheless self-assured and confident in his own ability to do whatever he pleased on stage. On April 10, 1979, Lightnin’ appeared in his fourth and final program at Carnegie Hall in a show called Blues ‘n’ Boogie that was organized by Christophe De Menil and her production company in New York. Anton J. Mikofsky, a blues fan and photographer, was hired to write the program notes and worked as a kind of consultant for De Menil. “She had a definite idea of who she wanted to book,” Mikofsky says, “but was open to suggestions. Her vision was that the superstar would be Clifton Chenier, the great zydeco accordion player from Louisiana. He hadn’t been in New York City since maybe the 1950s, when, I think, he played the Apollo, so this would be a comeback for him. And she arranged for Big Mama Thornton to be a special surprise guest with Clifton Chenier. And the second billing would either be John Lee Hooker or Lightnin’ Hopkins. As