The Blues & Billie Armstrong 19
THAT EXQUISITE ACHE
Previously in The Blues & Billie Armstrong…
The hatbox, these new letters, this true motherlode of secrets, somehow made the first envelope more real, the pink lipstick brighter, the scratch-scratch louder.
Entering my bedroom, I heard the creak and scrape of wood as Billie lifted the bottom pane of the window and slid it upward.
She stooped to poke her head into my room and smiled her big, relentless you-know-you-like-me smile, seemingly oblivious to my inner turmoil. “So, this one letter talks about some old records he gave your mom but there aren’t any records in the hatbox and I looked all through the hi-fi cabinet. Do you know what he’s talking about?”
“No,” I lied on reflex.
“Do you think we should look through those other boxes in the closet?”
“I think you should stay out of my mother’s things.”
She held up one of the letters. “Don’t you want to know what all this means?”
“What do you care? You didn’t even know her.”
“Well, Alice told me some people say it was suicide, and that’s something I kind of understand because—”
“Who the hell do you think you are?” I went to the window to look her in the face.
Billie dropped her eyes, and for a second I wanted the words back. “I know, I know, I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s none of my business and maybe I should’ve kept my big mouth shut but look, man…” She stood and held a hand out toward the bed and the scattered contents of the hatbox like they were gameshow prizes. She looked around the room as if searching for better words, more words.
“Archer, everyone’s always telling us what to do, you know? How to talk, how to think, what to wear, who to like. Parents, teachers, grandmothers, cops, whatever.” She paced the corded rug, her hands tumbling through the air as the words leapt out of her mouth. “It’s like you’re in a movie—they hand you a script and a costume and you’re supposed to just shut up and play the part. And no one even cares who you really are, man.”
She circled the room, brushing a hand across the furnishings—the vanity, the sewing machine, the typewriter on the yardsale desk. “And I think your mom wanted more than that, right? I mean, maybe this sounds stupid to you, but when the whole world wants you to pretend to be someone you’re not, sometimes you just want to hide… or run away…like… forever.”
She was near tears, and even I could tell she was talking about herself as much as my mother. I was surprised by this new side of Billie Armstrong—one without the hand-on-hip certainty I was already getting used to. Another page turned.
And I did know a little about being pushed this way and that by teachers and preachers and fathers and friends, and especially grandmothers. And it was true there were questions on my heart that could never be answered without an honest examination, at least an acknowledgment, of the letters, the records, the envelope and everything else.
Sometimes you want the truth to go away and leave you alone, but sometimes the pain of not knowing can only be relieved by the pain of knowing.
“It’s not stupid,” I said, as I passed the stack of records over the window sill.
“Whoa, where did you get these?” she said. “You lied, didn’t you? You little asshole!” But she was laughing, and just that quickly the shadow of weary frustration vanished from her face. She moved away from the window and didn’t see me pull the shoebox from under my bed and slip the pink lipstick envelope into the pocket of my red flannel robe. I wasn’t sure yet if I could trust her with the whole story.
By the time I tramped back through the kitchen and the living room and got to the doorway of the dayroom, Billie was already standing over by the hi-fi, shuffling through the records.
“Man, we gotta hear this stuff, I mean just listen to these titles: Moanin’ at Midnight, Wang Dang Doodle, what the heck is a wang dang doodle! And this one, I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man, oh I think I know what that’s about!” She winked and made dramatic faces and paraded around the room, acting out the labels as she read—widening her eyes in mock fear, dancing and pumping her hands in celebration, swinging her hips like a harlot. Then she stuck out her lower lip in a pouty frown. “Sad Hours by—”
“That one goes last,” I said.
She didn’t ask why, but she stacked the records on the turntable with Sad Hours on top. I reached over and turned the on switch. My mother must have turned the same switch that rainy day, poured a drink as the music started, sat down at the vanity and swallowed the red pills and the white pills and maybe freshened her lipstick. I sat on the little stool myself, looking in the big round mirror, wondering how much more I was ready to know.
The needle dropped on the record with a staticky pop. The sound of a ghost moaning in the dark slithered out of the Grundig cabinet, then a guitar broke in with a gritty twang, keeping ragged time with the drummer’s steady working beat. A harmonica bawled like a determined, hungry baby, and the ghostly moans became the bellowing and rasping voice of a wounded man staggering home from a crossroads bar, bent over, gut-shot. It was the man called Howlin’ Wolf.
Billie said, “What is this?”
“I think it’s the blues,” I said. “I mean like, the real blues.”
“Yeah… real,” she said.
It was so real and raw it made Cream, Led Zeppelin and that whole psychedelic blues crowd seem refined and overwrought. And forget about the Archies or the Monkees and even the early Beatles—they were all fizzy orange soda pop, and this was cold black coffee at the bottom of a chipped cup. The sound of dead-end alleys, broken bottles and dented trash cans, the smell of fresh puke and reefer.
The words didn’t quite make sense as a story—somebody’s knocking on the door, somebody’s calling on the phone, and the Wolf is afraid to answer but they won’t go away. It’s never clear who it is—perhaps a jealous husband, a scorned lover, a bill collector. Perhaps death itself, the ultimate repo man. Tell em I’m not at home, the Wolf says in a rattled, desperate plea.
I loved it instantly, though not in a conscious analytical way. Rather, it seemed to release something pressurized inside me—a valve was opened and some of my awkward young angst and stifled grief hissed into the air and was dissipated like a secret gratefully told. There was something in this music that said you are not alone, your pain is real, your suffering true, and you are right that platitudes and scripted ceremony aren’t an honest answer. I suddenly wanted to hear every record and every song at once, ravenous for the rush of discovery, this revelation of my mother, a spectral visitation in black vinyl and rumbling bass.
Billie felt the power too. I watched her in the Woodstock nightshirt and her bare rosy legs, standing near the hi-fi cabinet swaying and rocking to a sad ballad with her eyes closed, then reading to herself from the letters of J.R. Cole while her shoulders danced a two-step to a quick shuffle, and even breaking into a shake and shimmy to some boogie-woogie piano.
She tried to lure me to read the letters. “Oh man, you gotta see this one. This is where it all began,” she said and tried to press one into my hand. I refused. I was overwhelmed by the music alone—a whirling vortex of teleportation and missed opportunity. I pressed my eyes shut and pictured myself coming home from school to find my mother singing along to Big Mama Thornton’s growling version of Hound Dog (which made the Elvis version sound like a childish novelty record).
I projected imaginary home movies of my mother and myself dancing around to the raucous and defiant Messin’ With The Kid by Junior Wells. I imagined trying to explain that exquisite ache I heard from Little Walter’s harmonica—and having her nod in understanding.
I blurted out loud, “You know, when someone dies you can lose things you never even had.”
I didn’t even open my eyes to check, but I knew Billie had heard me because she turned up the music until I felt the bass notes rise up from the floor and shiver in my chest.
The Blues & Billie Armstrong is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this book are either the product of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance of the fictional characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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