Benny Jay: Mississippi

For the last few months, Milo’s been telling me about a friend of his — a fellow we’ll called Teddy.

Teddy’s forty-something or so. Friendly, courteous. Great storyteller.

Here’s the thing – he did twenty-some years on a Mississippi work farm.

Milo caught me off guard when he told me that. I don’t usually come across people who did hard time in Mississippi.

You’d figure a guy like that must be mean and ornery.

But Milo says Teddy’s a really great guy. He calls him – and I quote – “the sweetest guy in the world.”

Teddy went in for robbing banks.  He got away with three robberies and got nailed on the fourth. His method was fairly straightforward: He walked into a bank with a pistol and walked out with the money. One haul brought him thirty grand.

He had a partner in his crimes. Milo doesn’t know his name. Says Teddy never told him. For all I know, the partner’s Milo – the man does have a shady past. For what it’s worth, Milo swears he never spent a day in Mississippi.

When Milo first told me Teddy’s tale, I thought – damn, I could do a lot with thirty thousand dollars. Of course, it doesn’t go as far when you have to split it with someone else.

They also convicted Teddy on kidnapping charges. Apparently, he and his associate took someone — a bank employee or customer, I can’t recall — into the parking lot with them on that last robbery.

In Teddy’s mind, it’s a bogus kidnapping charge cause they weren’t kidnapping the guy so much as temporarily holding him hostage until the got away. They never intended to harm anyone and no one was harmed. You might say, he did the robbery but he didn’t do the kidnapping.

Reminds me of that line by Bob Marley: “I shot the sheriff but I did not kill the deputy.”

Actually, there’s another line that’s even more appropriate to Teddy’s fate:  “Only thing I did wrong, stayed in Mississippi a day too long.”

That’s from the song Mississippi by Bob Dylan. I can’t get enough of Mississippi. It’s on the Love and Theft CD. I listen to it all the time, especially when I go on long drives.

Thanks to Milo, I think of Teddy every time I hear the song. I’m not sure Teddy’s knows the song. But I’ll bet he’d appreciate it more than most. If he’d only got out of Mississippi one day sooner….

I can’t tell you exactly what Mississippi’s all about. (Here’s the link – figure it out for yourself.) It’s like a lot of Dylan’s songs — just when I think I know where he’s going, along comes a baffling verse that loses me.

I’ve concluded that Dylan fills a lot of his songs with gibberish. He’s either messing with our minds – cause he knows we waste far too much time poring over every word he writes — or he’s got one really great line that needs a bunch of not-so-great lines to set it up.

If so, I understand. As Milo likes to say: A good line is a terrible thing to waste. If you have to string together a bunch of gibberish just to get to one good line — well, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. As John Wayne used to say.

But back to Teddy….

Milo called the other day with a bombshell: Teddy’s back in jail. Something to do with a woman. I’m not really sure. It’s all very complicated, as these things tend to be.

It’s hard to believe a sweet guy like Teddy can get in so much trouble. Just doesn’t make any sense. It’s like he can’t get out of Mississippi no matter what.