“I’m not going out, Sam.”
Parker stared blankly at him, then grinned sickly.
“Aw c’mon, Willie! Don’t joke with me. Like I told you, I’m too old for this stuff.”
Willie looked half dead and dead serious.
“I mean it, Sam. I’m not going to play.”
Parker stepped away, somehow managed to keep the agonizingly painful smile on his face. It was as real as margarine, but he kept his voice under control.
“All right, Willie. Why don’t you want to go out there?”
“Because of this.” He fumbled with his shirt, tossed a crumpled ball of paper onto a chair. Sam looked over at it, then back to the singer.
“It’s a letter from my grandfather,” Willie explained. “He’ll never win the Nobel Prize, my grandfather, but he’s a great man. You see, he saw the story about the Seattle concert, too. Told me my kind of singing isn’t
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meant for a big group of people. Said that I was embarrassing my ancestors.”
Sam tried to understand this, but he couldn’t. There was no reference point for him in this cultural desert, and he admitted it.
“I don’t follow you, Willie. I’d like to, but I don’t. How the hell can playing music disgrace your ancestors?”
Willie stared at him with eyes of limpid oil. “Sam, where do you think my songs come from?”
“I thought you made ’em up, Willie.”
The singer shook his head.
“No, Sam. Only the words. Most of the music is based on chants. Old medicine chants, Sam. Passed down in my family for hundreds of years. It’s all the inheritance I got. Grandfather thinks I’m misusing them. I don’t know that I go along with him—I don’t feel so good—but I respect him. So I’m not going to play, dammit! Can’t you just believe that and leave me alone?” He stumbled, looked around wildly. “I need a drink.”