How This Works

Stu tends to like things out of order. In this case, the story begins at the bottom. If you've never been here before, scroll down and read up. Unless as a child you enjoyed walking backwards. Can you remember? If so then read down.

Sammy's Stash (part 1)

So Sammy bends down and retrieves her backpack, which I of course observe with interest. She places it on the bar and begins bringing items out, one at a time, gently, reverently. But it's Mickey who does the talking. Mickey, as it turns out, is a genuine fountainhead of information. If you can ask the right question. And only if. At present however he needed not a prod.

"Family bible?", queries he.
Turns out the record begins with the publishing date, 1750, and culminates with our own Sammy. She opens, I look. Samantha Higgins born 1855 to Mary Patricia and Seth Robert Higgins. I noted she was the fifth of five children, and the last entry in the book.

"Why nothing after you Sam? What happened?".

I could see the question hurt, so now I'm wondering exactly how thin is this ice onto which I have just so glibly trodden. But before she could get back from the place she had just gone in her head, Mickey picked up the ball. "Influenza. Local epidemic. Took the whole lot of em."
"Jesus, Sam, they all died but you?"
Says she to me, softly, "Yeah, and that's the point, isn't it?

There followed, in no particular order, things like a record from an orphanage in up state New York. A photograph of Sam holding a French newspaper with the year, 1888 visible in the headline. "That's the Champ-de-Mars in the background." says Mick, butchering the pronunciation. "She's standing where the Eiffel Tower wasn't built yet. Plane, train, steamship and coach tickets spanning twelve decades. A 1912 New York state chauffeur's license. "That's a good one" chimes Chewy, "first drivers license issued in this country". Military records. Sam was a nurse, twice. World wars one and two. Drove ambulances. A newspaper article from 1920 describing the fearless efforts of one Nurse Higgins during the flu epidemic. People forget, the flu, the fucking flu, killed twenty million people world wide. Deeds. Sam owns property in fourteen states, some of it purchased before they were states. Diplomas. Sammy has degrees in geology, physics, computer sciences, music and fine art. Oh yeah, she's an MD and one hell of a machinist?
And then there were the personal things.
Vials. Fabrics. Dried flowers. Poems. An Ipod.

Sammy's Stash (part2)

The proof was overwhelming. A century and a half of documentation. Which begged a few questions. Ok. A lot of questions. But as I was still young and she seemed to have plenty of time, I took it slow.
"Sam, you carry this stuff with you all the time?"
"Yeah."
"Why?"
"So I won't forget."
"Forget what?"
"Who I am, of course, or who I was. I realized somewhere around a hundred, that memories start to become kind of tricky. Hard to manage."
"How so?"
"Well, the very act of remembering consumes time in the present. What did you have for lunch yesterday?"
"Huh?", I rejoined, ever so clever.
"Recall what you had for lunch, but in detail." She touched my hand and I saw it. Light shimmering off a pool and beneath the shimmer, yesterdays lunch. But I mean, everything, including what the guy next to me had, sounds, smells, random thoughts had while chewing. Then she removed her had and I was back in present with Sam asking "Mickey, how long?" He's looking at a pocket watch, which he has to put himself in a hammerlock to do and says, "Three minutes, twenty-three seconds."
"See? It took three minutes.....","And twenty-three seconds" Mickey corrects...."Thanks, Mickey, but try to stay on point. It took three minutes to revisit a lunch that took about thirty to live. And that was flash memory. Reflective memory? Very time intensive."

"Now, the older you are the smaller the present is compared to the past. I'm a hundred and fifty. One minute of present consciousness is approximately one point two six eight times ten to the minus eighth of a percent of my life span, not correcting for prenatal memories, leap years and seconds added to compensate for the slow change in the earth's orbit. So it's not that you can't remember. It's that you don't have time. You need to keep triggers, strategically chosen triggers."
"So what's in the vials?"
"Smells. Nothin brings it back like scent. Olfactory imprint is the deepest."
"So you just haul these things out and show em to anybody?"
"First of all, you're not just anybody and second, the answer is, yes."
"Doesn't that freak you out a little? Don't you worry how people might react to a potential immortal?"
"Nah, they never believe it. They can't. It makes them too aware of their own mortality. You'll go home tonight, think it over and find a way to reject it too. If I let you."

Now that actually sounded pretty promising to me. I considered not asking her anything else, but two questions were just killing me so I rolled the dice.
"Sam, um, why is yours the last name in the bible? Why didn't you have kids?
She looked at me with a wistful smile and I knew she had forgiven me for asking even as I did so. I think I fell in love right there.
"I can't" says she simply. "Seems every form of refuge has its price."
We let a moment pass on that one.
Then I ventured, "Who's Stu to you? How long have you known him?"
Though not the last, this was certainly the first time I saw Sam look genuinely troubled.
"I don't know", she said, "I can't remember."

Sammy and Stu

Sam the psychichick was, as it turned out, amazingly consistent... at least physically. This I learned from Stu who had joined us after his set. At first he just drank a beer, which wasn't so easy as he kept thumbing himself in the eye, while Sam and I chatted. She had arranged herself so that the tips of her fingers could brush my hand. Aside from the goose bumps, I had the definite awareness that when she touched my hand she was inside my head. I knew she knew the lines along which I was thinking so I didn't resist, and she didn't blush. While disscussing aloud whether or not true originality is even possible in a genre as fundamentaly defined as the blues (academic bullshit yes, but what the hell, look at who I get to bullshit with), I did manage to wonder what the psychic bit was like for her. Linear stream of consciousness, like spoken text?, imagery like a movie?, total submersion like falling into a pool of consciousness?

"More like the reflection off the surface of the pool", says she suddenly, "glittering and dancing, with a whole private world just visible beneath". Sam does that a lot. She'll be talking normally and then out of the blue drop a direct and usually quite poetic reference to your inner thoughts. As I was not yet accustomed to her so doing this comment dumbstruck me, or is that struck me dumb? In the silence Stu yanked his thumb out of the mug handle, pointed it at Sam and said to me, "Ain't she a beaut? She still looks exactly like she did when she was twenty. Yep, she hasn't changed a wink in hundred and thirty years."

Ok. He who was just struck dumb is now also dumbfounded. "Sam is a hundred and fifty years old?" (Some of us are reading from the bottom up remember.) "Stu", chides she,"don't you think it's a bit soon in the relationship for that kind information?" Fingers touch, she looks at me smiling and says, "No, it wouldn't be anything like doing it with your great-great-grandmother. Trust me." Stu has already turned to the guy next to him, a really big biker type, and was challenging him to a thumb wrestling contest. Clearly he had dropped that little bit of mental ordinance with a purpose. So now I'm asking myself just what is the story between Stu and Sam and what the hell do you mean she's been around for a century and-a-half? when a voice says, "She can prove it buddy. Show him Sam."

Said voice belongs to Mickey. Mickey is the bartender at You Bet Your Life.
Mickey moves like a cat. You know, quiet, smooth, first thing you know you don't know how long he's been sitting in your lap. Or in this case, standing there listening to you. And listen he does. In fact he can move his ears like a cat. You can actually watch him cock one ear toward one conversation and the other toward some other sound. Auditory multitasker. Consequently Mickey knows everything that goes on. Like he's got eyes in the back of his head. Which he does. Literally. That's where his eyes are, in the back of his head. This necessitates a rather odd comb over that brings his hair down to his nostrils. Actaully a good thing when he's facing you, you don't have to be distracted by the blanks spots under his eyebrows. It's like talking to the shaggy dog. When he's looking at you it's more like talking to a Wookey. So at the moment, Chewbacka is looking at us while he mixes a drink behind his back, which makes it right in front of us and repeats in a voice going the other way, "Go on Sammy, show him the documents."

Something About Stu

The next time I saw Stu was in a little bar called You Bet Your Life. The place is a story in itself, which we'll get around to eventually. For now the need to know is that they run an open mic there. I go to listen because you just never know what you're gonna hear. Sometimes the sublime. Sometimes the ridiculous. The You Bet ain't no upscale venue. It's more a case of, what happens when you sell booz cheap and leave the front door unlocked.
Anyway, I walk in to see Stu standing at the mic playing. Aside from the instrumental cover of Brickhouse medleyed with Long Train Runnin (who'd a thunck?), the first thing I notice about Stu is that he's standing there as flat footed as a retired bartender. Back on his heels. This gives me a pleasant sense of cognitive dissonance which I ingest along with a pint of porter. Stu segues into his next number with a monologue about the oceans of Europa compared to the methane lakes of Titan. I don't know if the lady sitting next to me was psychic or if I just looked confused, but she leans into me and says (in a voice that delivers some sweet little shivers), "Moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Google it when you get home". Right away I am thinking helplessly, I'd like to google you when I get home, but manage to keep my response to,"Geez thanks". She smiles and says, "That's quite possible".
Before I can think myself into an embarrassment, Stu starts playing.
He's pretty much tearing it up when I see some new weirdness. This time it's his thumb. His thumb is huge. Not grotesquely so, mind you, but definitely beyond normal. He's barring chords over the top of the neck, all Richie Havens, and he's getting all twelve strings with just the middle bone of his thumb, wrapping the end of his thumb around the back of the neck. (Did I mention he was playing a twelve string? That's right, he open tuned a twelve by ear while rapping about interplanetary oceanography and got it dead on. That's when it hit me.
Stu is physically inconsistent. I mean, he keeps changing. One time he's like all ripped and diesel and the next time he looks like something out of a Giacometti exhibit. Last I saw him he was bouncing around like a freakin fawn and now he's got busted arches and a digit on steroids. Not to mention perfect pitch. I start thinking, maybe it?s not so much Who is Stu as What is Stu? My mind is furiously attempting to connect the dots when psychic chick leans in again, (closer this time, shivers and quivers) and says, "Stu's a hoot, isn't he?" She slides her hand onto mine and continues, "My name is Samantha, but I think you're going to call me Sammy." The dots go poof. In the background behind her I vaguely perceive Stu looking right at us, grinning.

Stalking Stu

After a couple of months of milk and cookies, I needed to know where Stu went. It obviously wouldn't be possible to do on the sly, so I waited on the stoop and the first thing I said when he showed up was, "Stu, I?m gonna follow you." He sits down next to me and says, "Well really you should follow you heart but, OK." And he takes off his shoes. Now Stu has some big feet, like 13's or 14's and he always wears these light Chinese slipper jons, no socks. I watch as he rolls them up and sticks 'em in a cargo pocket. Then I follow his gaze down to his feet which he was stretching and things got, well, really weird, I mean, his feet were just wrong....
His toes took up basically half the length of his foot. All the same size and really strong looking, with highly defined joints. The ball joints were all the same size too. The arch was short and thick and the heel was small and sharp. He's grinning as I'm staring and he spreads his toes, but you know, like you and I spread our fingers, and oh hell yes they were webbed. Except, web implies delicate membrane and there was nothing delicate about Stu's feet. It was more like hide or maybe Hyde. So I start to articulate, "Uhh, Stu?...." but he's up pocketing the cookies and says, "Let's go."
Now I don?t know how old Stu is but he's clearly playing the back nine, all grey and gnarly, you know what I mean? So I had figured it'd be easy to keep up. But here he is standing on those toes like he's floating, like that's how he's supposed to stand, on his toes....(note to self, does this guy ever actually put his heels on the ground?)....and now he's a couple of inches taller than me....and I figure I am in the embrace of a miscalculation....I'm not even gonna call what he did running. I was running. He was, umm, loping. Sort of springing from one set of toes to the other. Our stride ratio must have been about 5 to 3. Half an hour or so of this, totally winded, I see the front stoop again in the distance. Stu had led me in a circle....
We stop and Stu ducks behind some bushes. He reemerges with a bicycle and asks me do I realize how many bicycles are abandoned on college campuses every Spring? His question is no more surreal than his feet so I am sanguine with it. Thousands he says, auctioned off cheap or given away by campus security. "I've been stashing them for years. From the east coast to the west, I'm never more than a short lope from a set of wheels." He throws a leg over and I see that there are no peddles, just spindles. He wraps his toes around one and hands me a disc. Then he says, "Dude, the chocolate chips are awesome, but do you think you could do peanut butter once in a while?" Then he pops a wheely, does a Bruce Willis (low key yippee ki yo mutherfucker) and is gone in the dark....the title on the disc is glowing softly....New Shoe Blues....

Sighting Stu

The first time I saw Stu he was playing on the street at lunch time in the financial district of a major west coast city. He had picked a nicely reverberant brick alcove. Well staged. When we got there he was blowing through this oddly upbeat version of Just Like a Woman. He had attracted a small group consisting mainly of the suits and service types that populate a financial district at lunch. Or as Stu later described them, aliens and illegal aliens. Of course, people came and went but a half dozen or so stayed for the set. By the end, which was a twist on Minnie the Moocher, he probably had, in addition to hid own seed money, seventy or eighty bucks in his guitar case, some of it mine.
I asked him why didn't he play down on the wharf with the hordes of tourists spending crazy. He said pretty much anybody can hang next to the breakdancers and mimes and score some change, but if you can come down here and get people who have neither the time nor the intention to stop and listen and drop a little cash, then you've sold some music. Disinterested, preoccupied strangers are the second hardest audience to play.....
Of course I asked.....but he didn't answer.....

WHO IS STU?

I don't know, actually. I leave milk and cookies on the front stoop and he leaves recordings. I have no actual photographs, no artifacts, public records or information of any kind. In the few conversations I managed to have (you've pretty much got to sit out on the stoop all night just to get his attention) he claims to have "self erased". Says he "don't want no numbers". No social security, no drivers license, no bank account, no insurance, no dental records, no birthday, no cell phone. Just like that. Then he drinks the milk and puts the cookies in his pocket. Says they're for somebody else.....