Spell on You
by Brian HaycockScreamin' Jay Hawkins passed on five years ago this month. He died in Paris at age seventy of complications from surgery. I saw the obituary in the local paper, read the story in Rolling Stone. There was a recent picture in the Stone and he looked good for seventy. Too good. He looked more like a fit fifty-year-old. I've been watching the internet since then and there haven't been any reports of sightings, no accounts of unknown R&B performers channeling the Screamin' Jay experience. Maybe this time he's really dead.
I met Screamin' Jay - sort of - in 1977. I was working nights at Rattlesnake Rob's, a beer joint on the state highway outside of Houston. It was just a big tin-roofed shed, built as a warehouse for a farm equipment franchise and then converted into a roadhouse when the dealership went under. I was nineteen at the time - underage for work involving alcohol - but this was Texas, and at the time no one cared about that. The owner was a man named Robert Hielbrunn, a middle aged ex-trucker whose only qualifications for owning a bar were that he drank most of the time and wasn't well-suited to anything else. He liked to be called Rattlesnake, or at least Rattler, but most people just wound up calling him Rat, which he hated.
"Don't call me Rat," he'd snarl at a customer. "The name's Rattlesnake."
"Sure thing, Rat. Pour me up another pitcher of Lone Star."
The place was never a big moneymaker. Rat would have a band most nights, just working guys playing bad cowboy music to make a little tip money, have a little fun. People would come by after work, have a few beers, maybe go out in the parking lot and fight for a while, then come back in and have a few more. That didn't bring in enough money to make expenses, so a couple times a month Rat would line up a touring act, someone who could draw a small crowd, and he'd collect a cover charge, sell a little more beer than usual. He booked odd acts, mostly past-their-prime rockers: the Guess Who, Gary U.S. Bonds, the Belmonts without Dion, anyone he thought could get people to make the drive out from Houston to pay a ten-buck cover and drink two-dollar beers. And one time he booked Screamin' Jay Hawkins.
Screamin' Jay had had one hit, "I Put a Spell on You," in 1956, and he'd been riding it ever since. The music was basic Louisiana rhythm and blues, but Jay had his own unique vocal style and delivery. His idea of singing was to shout, growl, grunt and wail through a song, hitting a few of the notes, doing some of the lyrics, and murdering the rest. He earned his nickname every time he picked up a microphone. I'm pretty sure Rat had no idea who Screamin' Jay was when he booked him, or he might have thought twice about it. I would have.
Along with his bizarre musical style, Screamin' Jay had a reputation for strange onstage behavior. There were stories about him performing in drag, ripping off his clothes mid-song, performing voodoo rituals on stage. The man was an urban legend all by himself. By the time enough people had told Rat that his headliner might be a full-fledged maniac the contracts were signed and people were calling, asking about tickets.
"You could still cancel," I told Rat a couple nights before the show. "Just get some other bar to take over the contract. There are plenty of bars around that'd take the show."
"Screw that. I need the money. We make it through one night with this nutjob and I'm in business for another month. And you still have a job. As long as he stays on the stage and doesn't get any blood on the customers we'll be all right."
"What if he shows up in drag?"
Rat stared at me, baffled. "What's that mean? Drag?"
"It means he'd be wearing women's clothes."
"Hell, boy. He does that I'll shoot him myself. We don't put up with that stuff around here."
As it turned out, Screamin' Jay never wore women's clothes on stage or anywhere else. That was just a story that had been passed around. There were a lot of stories about Screamin' Jay, and not all of them were true. On the other hand, the way it turned out, women's clothes wouldn't have been so bad.
That Saturday night I was working the bar with Jimmy Burgess, a trucker friend of Rat's who'd managed to lose his license for drunk driving, which in Texas at that time was hard to do. He was working for Rat until the suspension was up and he could get his rig back. Norma and Jeannette were covering the door and waitressing that night. Norma was Rat's girlfriend, which would have been a real surprise for his wife if she'd ever found out. I didn't know where he'd found Jeannette, but she looked about a hard forty, with a cigarette voice and enough makup to paint a garage. She kept coming on to me, asking me if I had any girlfriends and did I want to go back to the storeroom with her, kill some time before the show. I did not want to kill any time with Jeanette. I was nineteen and I was up for pretty much anything, but I wasn't up for that.
Jimmy and I had put in a couple hours cleaning the place up and setting out the tables and chairs, and we had it looking pretty sharp for a beer joint. We were spreading a little sawdust on the dance floor when Rat came up to us and said, "The band's out back. They say you'll have to haul the equipment in for them. I guess that's in the contract. I didn't really read it that closely."
Jimmy made a face. "What, they can't carry in a few speakers?"
"Just do it, okay? It's no big deal. Uh, and they said you'd have to bring Screamin' Jay Hawkins in, too. I don't know what they meant by that, but just take care of it, okay?"
We went out the back way and found a '59 Cadillac hearse parked by the back door with a little U-Haul trailer hooked on the back. There was a group of black men standing around off to the side, five of them, smoking cigarettes and passing around a silver flask. I nodded to them and opened the back of the trailer. We stacked the amps and the instrument cases on a beer dolly and had the equipment piled on the stage in two trips. We didn't try to hook it up.
People were already starting to file in, taking up the front tables, picking up glasses of beer at the bar. It was an odd mixture of blacks from Houston, hip-looking white kids out to see an old-time rock and roller, and the usual rednecks who hung out at the Rattlesnake most nights. Rat shot us a look from the bar that said, "Get moving."
We went back out to the lot and I walked up to where the band was standing around. They were dressed completely in black, and with the sun gone down they looked like ghosts out there in the darkness. Jimmy hung back. He wasn't comfortable around the people he still called Negroes, and they didn't usually take to him, either.
"Which one of you's Screamin' Jay?" I asked. "We're supposed to see he gets inside."
The one closest to me showed a grille of white and gold teeth. "He's in there," he said, nodding toward the hearse.
It was getting dark and I couldn't see anyone in the hearse. I thought he was kidding around, and I could feel myself getting a little mad about it, but I forced a smile and said, "In there? In the hearse?"
He grinned even wider, said, "That's right. Go ahead. You'll see." The others were chuckling to themselves, like some joke was being played. On me, I knew.
I heard a low growl behind me. Jimmy. I had a bad feeling about the way things were going. He had a temper that got him in more trouble than his drinking. There was a story that he'd once attacked the cab of a broken down eighteen-wheeler with a tire iron and tow chains and fought it to a draw. I smiled back and thanked the man, acting polite, not really feeling it. I turned toward the hearse, nodded at Jimmy, trying to keep things moving.
There was no one sitting in the hearse. There was only a coffin laid out in the back. When we cracked the rear door dim lights came on in the hearse and we could see the coffin up close. It was polished mahogany with brass fittings and leather-lined handles on the sides.
I could hear the band laughing quietly. I looked over at them, asked, "You mean to say he's in the box?" They laughed harder. We didn't.
"That's right. What you want to do is carry that in, set it up on stage, just leave it like that. We'll take it from there. Don't worry, it'll be one hell of a show." They all laughed harder.
I could tell Jimmy was steaming. There was this growl coming out of his throat and he looked like he was seriously thinking about going over to the band and just letting loose for a while, seeing how things came out. He'd done things like that before. "Let's just do this," I said to him. "No problem."
"Sure, kid," he said. "No problem. I just want to get through this show and get me a shot at that Jeannette. You ask me, she's lookin' pretty good tonight."
"Yeah, that's good. Good for you." I tried not to sound too relieved.
We unhooked the trailer and pulled it a few feet away from the hearse, then got the rear door full open and started dragging the coffin out. It was a lot heavier than I thought it would be, but then I'd assumed it was empty, that the whole thing was just a joke. It wasn't empty. When we slid it clear of the back of the hearse and lifted it by the side handles we staggered a little, then got it under control and moved toward the back door. We got it inside and set it down, went looking for something to set it on, but it wouldn't fit on a beer dolly and nothing else would work. We had to carry it. We wrestled it halfway down the hallway to the bar before we had to set it down on some wooden crates for a break.
"Damn, that sucker's heavy," Jimmy said, sucking air and shaking his hands to get the circulation in his fingers going again. He'd sweated through his flannel shirt.
"I wonder what they put in there to make it so heavy." I was thinking there was more equipment in it. Either that or they had the coffin loaded up with rocks, just to watch us struggle with it. I didn't like it, but being a nineteen year old working at a beer joint I was used to being on the wrong end of a joke now and then.
"Take a look."
"I don't know. We're just supposed to get it set up, get back to work. We really ought to be working the bar by now. Rat's not gonna like working it by himself while we're back here messing around."
"Screw him. It'll just take a minute. Go ahead, kid, open it up. I need more time to get the feeling back in my fingers anyway."
I worked the latch that held the lid tight and got my fingers under the fixtures along the lid. I lifted and felt the lid raise slightly. The whole thing was heavier than it looked. I bent my knees and put my back into it, felt the lid move up and back, exposing the inside of the coffin.
There was a dead man inside.
He was lying there, wrapped in a black satin cape, with a long white scarf and black shoes shined like mirrors. His hands were folded on his chest holding a string of bright stone beads and some kind of porcelain doll. He looked very peaceful, almost as if he could just be asleep. But you could tell by the waxy skin and the absolute stillness of the body that he wasn't sleeping. He was stone dead.
Jimmy came around the coffin and stood next to me. "Damn," he said. "That son of a bitch is dead."
"He can't be dead. It's got to be some kind of a trick."
"That's no trick. You can tell. Touch him, you'll see."
"I don't want to touch him." The last thing I wanted to do was touch him, but I knew I'd have to. Jimmy wasn't going to leave me alone until I did.
"Go ahead. Being dead ain't something you can catch." I noticed Jimmy wasn't reaching out to touch him.
I reached down and put my first two fingers against his cheek, expecting him to wake up when I touched him, to jump up and ask me what the hell I was doing.
He didn't wake up.
His cheek was cold and dead. It didn't just feel cold to the touch, it felt so limp and lifeless it was hard to believe it had ever been alive. It seemed to suck the heat from my fingertips. I felt my hand start to shake and I pulled it away.
"Yeah," I said. "He's dead all right. No question about it."
"Damn. I wouldn't know Screamin' Jay Hawkins from a fencepost, but I'm guessing that's him in there."
"Yeah, that's him." I'd seen a few pictures. We just stood there for a long minute, staring at the body, thinking about it.
"Man, ain't that a kicker? There goes the big show. Man, what the hell are we going to tell Rat?"
I thought about it. We probably weren't supposed to have opened the coffin to begin with, so I figured we wouldn't tell Rat, or anyone else, anything at all. At nineteen I was already starting to appreciate the importance of playing dumb. I reached up and pulled the coffin lid back down, fixed the catch.
"We're not going to tell Rat anything."
"Just wait for him to find out?"
"Sure. Why not? What we'll do is put the coffin on the stage like they told us, then we'll go work the bar. Anyone asks, we'll just say we carried it in, set it up. We didn't open it. We don't know from nothing about what happened."
"Sure, that'll work." He nodded. "What do you think happened to him? You think maybe he suffocated in there? Maybe it was the band killed him and stuffed him in there. You think?"
"Could be. You saw how they acted, like it was a big joke. 'Hell of a show' that one guy said. Yeah, they could be in it somehow. Although now they'll be unemployed."
"Not our problem, though."
"Right. We just get him up on the stage and get back to work. We sell as much beer as we can before this all goes bad, maybe we'll still have jobs next week." I wiped at the latch with a bar rag, ran it down the length of the lid, getting rid of any fingerprints I might have left there. I didn't think they could lift a print from the cheek of a corpse. I hoped not. I wasn't going to open it back up and wipe off his cheek with a bar rag. "Come on, let's get this done."
We lifted the coffin and wrestled it into the hall and up on the stage. We set it on some wood crates and went over to the bar, where Rat was pouring beers out of the kegs as fast as he could manage. He was so busy he didn't even bitch at us for taking so long out back. It was the biggest crowd I'd ever seen at the Rattlesnake, and people were still coming in. The crowd at the bar was three deep, all of them holding money, waving it in the air. We got to work and spent the next forty-five minutes slinging beers and tossing bills into the cigar boxes under the bar. It was so busy I nearly forgot about the dead body of Screamin' Jay Hawkins in the coffin up on stage.
The band came out at nine o'clock and started milling about on stage, setting up some props, getting the sound system set up the way they liked it. I glanced that way when I could, wanting to see what was going on, but I was too busy pouring beers to watch them work. I didn't want to seem too interested. For a sound check one of them went to the back of the hall and the others played a few notes. That was it. They were ready.
With the show getting started the orders changed to pitchers as the crowd stocked up for the show. Then, suddenly, there was no one left at the bar. On the stage there were votive candles, a couple of torches in glass chimneys, a skull lit from the inside sitting on a bar stool. Amps, monitors, mike stands. And the coffin. It was just sitting there, center stage, with the crowd looking up at it, wondering what it was doing there.
The band started up. They had guitar, organ, tenor sax, bass, drums, and they got going on a tight rhythm and blues number, taking it easy, warming up. They eased into "Mustang Sally," with the sax taking the vocal part, the drummer snapping the cymbals. They looked like they were having fun.
Jimmy elbowed me and said, "You know, this could really put the old Rattler on the map. You know, like wherever it was Hank died." Jimmy was a big Hank Williams fan.
"Didn't Hank die in a gas station?"
"Man, I forget where. Wherever it is, I'll bet it's famous."
"That'll be great. The club that killed Screamin' Jay. They'll be lining up to get in here."
"Better'n nothing. Place like this, you take what you can get."
Finally the band broke into "I Put a Spell on You." They started out playing the familiar chords in the lower registers, the organ and sax making spooky "Twilight Zone" sounds above the mix. Someone turned the house lights way down, leaving the stage lit by the candles and torches, maybe a couple of red spots. Plus the electric beer signs on the walls. It managed to look creepy and cheesy at the same time, but I wasn't worried about the stage design. I was worried about what would happen when they opened the coffin and found the body of Screamin' Jay Hawkins.
The lid of the coffin started to rise.
I thought I was imagining it at first. It moved so slowly it seemed like a hallucination, or a stage illusion caused by the flickering of the candles. But it kept opening, inch by inch. There was the sound of squeaking hinges, maybe from the organ, maybe a sound effect they'd set up. I caught myself standing on my toes, trying to see inside the coffin. The lid kept rising, an inch at a time, and the band started playing louder, building toward a crescendo. The crowd was leaning forward in their seats, caught up in it. Then the lid was fully open, exposing the darkness within.
Here it comes, I thought.
There was a face inside the coffin, rising as slowly as the lid had risen. There were gasps from the crowd as it came into the light, a long, flat face, a hatchet mask of death. It rose until the torso was sitting straight up, rigid.
The eyes snapped open. They were black stones set in enormous circles of white. They stared blindly into the clouds of cigarette smoke that hung above the crowd.
The band reached a frenzy, slamming out those staccato beats, holding nothing back now. Someone howled from the back of the hall. Someone else screamed.
And then Screamin' Jay threw his head back and started to laugh. It was a laugh from deep inside his chest, a laugh filled with madness that echoed in the air. It was the sound of a cold wind blowing through an asylum, rattling the windowframes.
A small voice inside me kept saying, "But he's dead." Reminding me. I'd seen him. I'd touched him. Iíd felt the chill.
There was a small explosion on the stage. Lights flashed and billows of white smoke rose from the floor and hid the band. Then Screamin' Jay stepped out from the smoke, tossed his cape aside, and started singing. Or something like singing. Wailing. Grunting. Screaming. He was standing at the microphone, howling out the lyrics to his one hit. He was full of menace, singing "You better stop the things that you do," and "You better watch out," like he was bent on coming back from the grave to get even. With all of us. Every few bars he'd go back to laughing that maniacal laugh, then screaming uncontrollably.
The crowd ate it up. Most of the crowd, anyway. I saw a couple of the redneck regulars get up and leave before that first song was half over, and it didn't take long for the rest to follow. It wasn't their thing. But the others, the ones who had come for the show, they were on their feet at the end of "Spell on You," shouting and howling like maniacs on Mad Dog. And they stayed that way until the end of the show.
I didn't like it. In fact, I hated it. Mostly, I was spooked from my brush with Screamin' Jay's corpse, still wondering just what was going on. Plus I was a little wired from serving all those beers before the show. So I really wasn't in the mood. And it just wasn't my kind of music. I liked rhythm and blues, but not like that. Screamin' Jay did every song the same way; whooping and hollering, grunting and groaning, trying to outdo himself on every line. He had some songs that would have been disgusting if they'd been understandable. Thankfully, they mostly weren't. Others he was just butchering for the hell of it. At one point he'd gone a couple of minutes into a song before I recognized it as the Beatles' hit, "Eleanor Rigby."
Around that time I heard Jimmy say to Rat, "Man, I told you book Delbert McClinton."
Rat just grunted. He didn't seem to care. Every time I looked at him he seemed to be counting the house. Smiling while he did it.
It seemed to last forever, but finally the band shifted back into "Spell on You," there was another explosion, more smoke, and when it cleared the coffin lid was closing slowly on the body of Screamin' Jay Hawkins. From inside there came one more long, evil laugh, and then the lid closed for good.
The crowd went wild. They were all standing, jumping up and down, yelling for more. But the show was over. The dead don't do encores.
After the crowd was gone I saw Jimmy walk up to the bass player, who was pulling the plugs on the amplifiers. "We'll haul the equipment, the sound system, all that," he said. "Like it says in the contract. Just box it up and we'll get it." He nodded toward the coffin. "But you guys can take that thing out of here. I'm saying, we ain't touching that thing. Leave him here, we'll bury him out back." The man just grinned back, nodded.
The last I saw of Screamin' Jay Hawkins, four of the band members were carrying the coffin out the back way while the other held the door. When Jimmy and I hauled the sound system out and loaded it back into the trailer I managed not to glance at the tinted rear windows of the hearse.
A few years later I bought a couple of Screamin' Jay's records, read some magazine articles. When he died I did some research on the internet. Just out of curiosity. He had a remarkable life. As a baby, he was given up for adoption and raised by the Blackfeet Indians. He was a middleweight Golden Gloves champion. He fought in Korea and served time in prison. He was an alcoholic and a drug addict. He fathered fifty-seven children. He opened for the Rolling Stones and hung around with Keith Richards. He appeared in movies, including the cult classic, Mystery Train. There were stories that he'd traded his soul to the devil for his one hit record. He was fascinated with snakes and kept hundreds of them in his home. Some claimed he was dangerously psychotic, others that he was just a shrewd promoter making the most of what he had. He was a legend, a mystery, a myth in his own lifetime.
When he died he was cremated and his ashes were scattered over the Atlantic Ocean. That's what it said in all the papers. That's the official story. I don't believe it. Not the part about the ashes.
When I think of Screamin' Jay Hawkins, I can't imagine him dying of a simple hemorrhage, a sad and ordinary death. I can't see him ending as a rain of ashes falling on the ocean, sinking into the darkness. When I think of Screamin' Jay I see him down on the bayou, buried in a shallow grave with a crude wooden marker, candles lighting the scene. Or stretched out on a marble slab in a crypt somewhere south of New Orleans, with pennies on his eyelids, dead flowers all around. I see him as I saw him backstage at the Rattlesnake, wrapped in a black satin cape, his skin waxy and cold, his hands folded across his chest, holding those beads and that porcelain doll.
Waiting for the music.
©Brian Haycock
Brian Haycock lives on the wrong side of the tracks in Austin, Texas, where he has worked mainly for nonprofit organizations. He enjoys running (especially in the summer heat), hiking and reading stories of all kinds. His stories have appeared on the e-zines Thuglit, Nefarious, Crime and Suspense, Yellow Mama and Grim Graffiti. He tries to keep his distance from the undead.