He sat on a mattress on the floor of his unfurnished, single room apartment. Before him were two slips of paper.

One was a bill from Memphis Light Gas and Water letting him know how delinquent he was with his payments, and notifying him that his service was going to be terminated the following Monday.

On Tuesday it was supposed to drop below freezing.

The other piece of paper was a shopping list. Food, toilet paper, a new toothbrush to replace the one that had lost nearly all of its bristles.

He didn’t have enough money to pay for the things on both slips of paper.

Inside his head, this felt like some kind of sick joke. Like a question from one of his philosophy finals come to life, where he had to defend his choice with the writings a dead French guy.

If things had gone according to plan, if that job he was planning on had come through, or if his old one had held on a bit longer, he would’ve been out of debt by 2021. Instead, he lost his house in 2010.

To be cold or to be hungry. Those were his choices.

Cold or hungry.

Memphis Note
Memphis is one of the poorest cities in the nation, with more than a quarter of the population saying they’ve had to choose between utility bills and buying food. And sadly, there’s not some silver lining to this cloud, things are stagnant and it is up to us to make a difference in our city.

When the lieutenant stepped out of the car, the soles of his shoes sizzled against the black top. It’d been over a hundred for two weeks now. The city couldn’t take much more of this heat.

The first officer on the scene was a young patrolman, he sat on a concrete planter in front of the modest shotgun house, holding a handkerchief against his mouth, vomit splattered at his feet and over his shoes.

“Another one?” Asked the lieutenant.

“Yes, sir. Elderly lady. Neighbors called in about the smell. She’s – it’s bad in there, I wouldn’t go in, wait on the morgue boys.”

“Might be a bit of a wait.” Sighed the lieutenant, he hadn’t gotten much sleep since the bodies started piling up. “They’re pullin’ some triangulation crap, saying the need the city council to authorize the overtime or they can’t keep workin’ these hours.”

“How many does this make?”

“Somewhere north of seventy, I imagine. If it keeps up at this rate, we’ll be lucky if it stops before it breaks a hundred.”

“What the hell are we supposed to do, sir? Can’t arrest the weather.”

“Do like they did in the old days, son. Pray for rain.”

Memphis Note
During the summer of 1980, a killer stalked the streets of Memphis, taking 83 lives in less than three weeks. It was a heat wave that locked the city and most of the Midwest in hundred-plus degree temperatures. All of the victims were elderly citizens, and nearly all of those were poor minorities. While the cost in human life was staggering, it helped teach the city how to prepare and manage extreme heat, keeping future death tolls to a minimum.

“So, all I gotta do is make my mark on that dotted line, and you’re tellin’ me that you’ll take me all over the world, playin’ the blues for everybody?”

I dabbed the sweat from my head with my pocket square and nodded. It was a sweltering day already, and being in tight corners with this man, a massive woman he called his Mama (though I had my doubts), her wood burning stove, and a pot of boiling meat was more than I thought I could bear.

“Thing I don’t understand is I got all the food I can eat, all the drink I can swallow, an’ all the tail I can stand right now. Why would I want more?”

I began to formulate a response, hoping to play on his desire for immortality, when the large woman thrust a plate of boiled hog innards down in front of me.

“Ya see, me swallowin’ that deal’s about as likely as you swallowin’ a single bite of Mama Ray’s fine chitterlings.”

To drive his point home, he forked a piece of intestine, pulled it off the tines with his teeth, and began to chew, open-mouthed.

“Eat up, son, eat up.”

Memphis Note
Following the success of W.C. Handy, and before the dark days of the Great Depression, Memphis was a hub from which recording studios would send out A&R men looking for the best of the Mississippi Delta Blues. I can only imagine that those A&R men would sometime find artists that were less than eager to sign with the pampered Yankee record label reps.