Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [99]
Phillips and Bizor became friends. “He protected me and helped me navigate the terrain; and when I was really strung out from the situation—love as disease—I would lose my appetite and was prostrate half the time, and Billy would make sure I ate. He would take me places and talk to me about Lightnin’…. He liked Lightnin’ in his way as much as I did. Both men and women were drawn to Lightnin’ in powerful ways.”21
For Phillips, Lightnin’ was “a wonderful person to be around, a lot of fun to hang with, and do things with…. He loved to ‘ride and look,’ as he called it. He’d drive his own car, or have someone, such as Billy, drive him around. He could drink a little bit and relax. And there were always his cronies to do things for him.”22
As much as Lightnin’ liked cruising around Houston, he was always on guard. Phillips remembered riding with Lightnin’ in his Dodge when, she says, “he showed me a large pearl-handled revolver, which I’m certain was loaded.” But Phillips saw it as “a continuation of the Texas country/cowboy culture—white as well as black, and a phenomenon that extends across class as well—a culture which had fused the ethos of the Wild West with that of the old South into that brash, inimitable Texas ‘thang,’ which encompasses just about every aspect of one’s behavior…. Lightnin’ and his friends even used the word desperado, which they pronounced ‘desperator,’ when they referred to those who used or threatened violence in the commission of their crimes.”23
Lightnin’, however, rarely dressed in Western styled clothes, though he did wear a straw cowboy hat in hot weather: “He usually wore lightly starched short-sleeved sport shirts—sometimes unbuttoned so that his undershirt was visible, though I remember him always wearing pleated slacks, never jeans or work pants … he wore a pair of cut-off pants underneath—he was so thin, that gave him some bulk.”24
Despite Lightnin’s urban appearance, he retained a country sense of humor with long, rambling anecdotes, which Phillips found very appealing. Once, Lightnin’ took Phillips and his brother Joel to a chapel to view the body of a friend of theirs. “We went inside and two open coffins were on display,” Phillips says. “They walked up to one, peered into it, shook their heads, then went over to the other casket and saw that in it was the man they knew. They stood around it making droll, sotto voce comments about the deceased, which I wish I could remember (one had something to do with remarking that their friend appeared considerably whiter in death than he had been when he was alive. Well, yeah, because whitish powder had been applied to his face, and it looked positively ghostly and kind of Kabuki). After awhile, they strolled over to the other coffin and began making more droll comments about the body of the woman who reposed therein. The things they were saying were so hilarious (not cruel or ghoulish, just terribly irreverent), that I had to stumble outside because I was choking with suppressed laughter. After about half an hour, they decided they’d spent enough time paying their respects to the deceased, and we departed.”25
The first time Phillips met Antoinette was unexpected, but nonetheless unsettling. She tried her best to stay out of Antoinette’s way, but inevitably, one day their paths crossed. “I’d been down there awhile and was at Shorty’s garage,” Phillips says, “when Lightnin’s car pulled up outside and stopped in the street, with the driver’s side facing the garage (I’m nearsighted and didn’t have my glasses on), I assumed it was Hops (as we often called him). I got up from my chair and walked to the car to say hi, but when I got close to the driver’s side, I saw it wasn’t Lightnin’, it was Antoinette. Oops! I think she was as startled as I was. I backed away into the garage, and I’m sure I must have asked for a stiff shot because that rattled the heck out of me.”26
That day, Antoinette was driving Lightnin’s black and white Dodge on one of her patrols. “Who knows where he was,” Phillips recalled, “but she was checking out