“No. Go ahead and bogart it, my friend.”

He laughed. “I’ll bet the first time you heard that song, it was in Easy Rider. Am I right? Tell me I’m right.”

“You’re right.”

“Thought so.” He took a couple of more hits, then licked his fingers and doused the business end. “No need to use it all at once.”

The smoke lingered. A lot.

No, wait—lingered isn’t quite the right word. What this smoke did was remain. It didn’t drift off, didn’t start to break apart and dissipate, it just hung in the air, a semi-solid cloud that didn’t appear to be in a hurry to go anywhere.

“That must be some strong stuff,” I said.

“It does the trick, if used in combination with the right ingredients.”

“Like brandy and pain pills?”

“Give that man a cigar.”

“Can I get you anything else?”

He pointed to something beside the door. “You can bring me my ax, if you don’t mind.”

Turning, I saw the beat-up guitar case leaning against the wall. I picked up the case, noted that the handle was about to come off (the duct tape used to re-attach was just about shot), and carried it over to Knight. He opened the case and removed the guitar, a gorgeous, new-looking Takamine 12-string with a dreadnought-sized cutaway white-bound body, solid spruce top and rosewood back and sides, a mahogany neck with white-bound rosewood fretboard, a rosewood bridge, and a black pick-guard.

It was one of the most beautiful instruments I’d ever seen.

“Yeah,” said Knight, seeing the expression on my face, “she’s a beauty. I’ve had this baby for most of my life. Half the time—shit, most of the time—I took better care of her than I did of myself.” He gave it a light strum, and the room filled with that rich, clear sound that only a perfectly tuned guitar can produce.

“So, Sam…any requests?”

“You should play what you want.”

“Hmm.” He began playing a series of warm-up riffs, nothing spectacular, then slowly eased into a standard blues riff, then the same with variations, something he described as the Blues Minor Pentatonic Scale, consisting of the root, the minor third, the fourth, the fifth and the minor seventh.

“Something to hear, if you know how to listen,” he said. “You know, it never occurred to me before how frighteningly easy it is to re-shape a single note or scale into its own ghost. For example, E-major, C, G, to D will all fit in one scale—the Aeolian minor, or natural minor of a G-major scale. Now, if you add an A-major chord, all you have to do is change the C natural of your scale to a C-sharp for the time you're on the A-major. Music is phrases and feeling, so learning the scales doesn't get you ‘Limehouse Blues’ any more than buying tubes of oil paints gets you a ‘Starry Night,’ but you have to respect the craft enough to realize, no matter how good you are, you’ll never master it. Music will always have the final word.”