The Blues & Billie Armstrong 2
UNEASY LISTENING
Previously in The Blues & Billie Armstrong…
You see my face through the window, the whirling lights bouncing off the glass, my mouth in a holler. My voice now distant and faint and the tone shifted to righteous self recrimination. You only hear snatches of my lament—some garbled nonsense about “the persistence of truth.” Meanwhile, Howlin’ Wolf is still moaning the blues in my Cadillac.
The first time I heard the blues was a gray rainy Wednesday in September of 1969.
I was sitting with my mother in our house on Fourth Street. I was twelve years old, almost thirteen; she was thirty-two and quite dead.
This was up in Lupoyoma City, a small-minded town next to a big muddy lake in the hills of Northern California. Earlier that day I’d walked out the front door under a clear sky. I was halfway across the lawn when my mother hollered, “Your lunch!” I ran back and she handed me the brown paper bag, the top folded over twice with a sharp straight crease and my name printed neatly with black felt pen on both sides. She wore a sundress with blue flowers on a white background, and I didn’t think to tell her how pretty she looked.
That afternoon the sky crowded up with gray-bellied clouds and it began to rain. At school we were kept inside watching a movie about Dr. Leakey digging skeletons out of the ground in Africa. After the final bell I took the bus to Fourth and Main and ran the last block home through the downpour. I stopped on the covered porch and wiped my sneakers on the welcome mat so I wouldn’t get yelled at for leaving wet footprints on the floor.
Inside, the house was full of the empty hush that brings background noises into the foreground—a loud tick of the second hand on the grandfather clock, the refrigerator hum leaking in from the kitchen, the rain stammering against the roof. And something unfamiliar, a rhythmic scratching I couldn’t identify but followed back toward my mother’s room—not the room where my parents slept, but the one she called the “dayroom,” where she kept the art deco vanity with the big round mirror, the typewriter on the yardsale desk, the Singer sewing machine, and the twin rollaway bed where she suffered through her migraines.
The door was open.
The scratching sound came from the Grundig Majestic hi-fi, which I’d almost forgotten was in there. As far as I knew it hadn’t been used in a couple years, since the day I helped my father move it out of the living room to make way for his brand new Magnavox Astro-Sonic Stereo Console, which he enjoyed showing off to guests, always finding an opening for the same hokey line—that he was serving “Sinatra and Seagram’s.”
The old Grundig’s auto-changer didn’t always work properly, and now the phonograph needle was stuck in that blank moat at the end of a record, scratching back and forth.
My mother lay on the rollaway bed, on her back in the sundress, on top of a pale green chenille bedspread. I thought she’d fallen asleep listening to the hi-fi, but on the nightstand the lamp was left on and a half-gone fifth of vodka stood uncapped in a small circle of dusty light next to an empty highball glass and a huddle of drugstore pill bottles.
My mother had a warm brown complexion that showed her Mexican-Irish blood, but now her face was drained and bluish gray. Mascara ran in rivery stains down her cheeks. There was no sound of her breath. Her chest and stomach did not rise and fall. Her head drooped to one side and a trail of vomit ran from the corner of her mouth onto her neck, the smell of it tainting the air.
I didn’t want to scream or cry. I wanted to show grace under pressure, courage under fire. I tried to think of a movie, a book or a TV show with a reassuring synopsis—faint-hearted kid finds dead mother’s body, reacts with perfect composure, proves manhood.
I found my way to the kitchen, thinking I should call someone. The year before, my mother had redecorated. She’d painted the walls sunflower yellow, ordered a new fridge and range in harvest gold, and new vinyl flooring in a striking orange-yellow-brown pattern. I remember how proud she was when the project was finished, and how my father mocked her by wearing sunglasses to the dinner table.
A yellow plastic phone was mounted on the yellow painted wall. I stood with the receiver held away from my ear, the dial tone buzzing, and I considered the handwritten list of phone numbers tacked to the wall: the local newspaper where both my father and grandmother worked, my aunt’s beauty parlor, our family doctor’s office, the police and fire departments. I tried to rehearse what I would say, but I couldn’t arrange a clear sentence in my mind. I couldn’t imagine the words “my mother is dead” staggering out of my mouth.
The square, electric Timex on the wall above the table said 4:15. Phone call or not, my father would probably be home within an hour, bustling through the door ready for a stiff drink and Walter Cronkite. Did I even want to be here then? I felt oddly embarrassed—ashamed even—to be the one who found her like this, to be in the position of informing adults of something so completely out of a child’s domain. I didn’t want to be the bearer of this news, but I also didn’t want to be the boy who couldn’t bear it.
I hung up the phone without dialing and drifted back to the dayroom like a sleepwalker. I slumped onto the low stool at the art deco vanity and listened to the scratching and crackling still coming from the hi-fi, and in the big round mirror I saw my boyish face alongside the reflection of my mother on the bed. We were near lookalikes. She was five feet tall, I was an inch shorter. Both slender and tanned, with brown hair so dark it looked black in low light. She styled her hair like Jackie Kennedy (not Jackie Onassis), with a curved swoop of bangs above one eye; my father sent me to the Main Street Barbershop for a “regular boy’s haircut” which always left me with a similar swoop.
I wasn’t sure what it meant that I hadn’t noticed all this before—not only the ways we looked alike, but any hint of this end. I was so clearly her son, but did I even know her? What twelve-year-old boy truly knows his mother—her dreams, her regrets, her pride and shame?
The blue-flowered sundress had two pockets thigh-high on its front. Still gazing at the vanity mirror, I caught the white flash of something peeking out the top of one pocket. Turning around for a direct view, it looked like the corner of a folded piece of paper.
I couldn’t remember the last time I had willingly touched my mother. She had touched me—pushed the hair out of my eyes, turned my collar down, tried to hug or kiss me—but your average American boy knows when it’s time to start keeping motherly love at a distance, especially in public.
Touching my mother’s body at that moment might drive me screaming out of the room, out of the house and into the Lupoyoma streets, but I wanted to retrieve that piece of paper. I had the shy, needy hope that it might hold a clue that would help me understand. I walked around to the other side of the room, put one knee up on the bed and leaned over precariously. I grasped the corner of the paper with fingertips and carefully slid it out of the pocket without touching anything else.
It was a letter envelope, sealed and stamped and addressed in my mother’s handwriting to someone I didn’t know, a PFC J.R. Cole. The name meant nothing to me, but the envelope suggested she was planning to go out that day—to mail the letter if nothing else. There was no mail delivery within the city limits of Lupoyoma; she would have to go to the post office or the nearest public mailbox to send a letter. Then I turned the envelope over and saw the pink imprint of a lipstick kiss.
It didn’t make sense. She knew I would be the first one home. I’d seen her purse and car keys waiting on the yardsale desk. Now I’d found outgoing mail in her pocket. She was clearly planning to go out. Maybe the rainclouds changed her mind. Or a headache came on and she laid down for a nap. But the vodka, the pills and the kiss on the envelope spun my thoughts off in other directions where I didn’t dare follow.
The scratch-scratch from the hi-fi now seemed amplified to oppressive intensity as if someone had cranked the volume knob. I couldn’t think straight. I crossed the room and lifted the needle off the record. The scratching stopped, but the silence was unnerving.
On the turntable a short stack of 45s had been set up and played one after the other. I held the turntable arm suspended in the air and read the label on the top record. “Sad Hours,” it said, in silver-gray type on a red spinning background, and I wondered if she’d known this would be the last song she ever heard, if she’d planned it that way and set up the whole stack like some grim Top 10 countdown. I watched my hand drop the needle at the beginning of the track, and I sat down on the bed next to my mother, envelope still in hand.
What came out of the speakers was not my father’s Sinatra, nor one of my mother’s favorites like Trini Lopez or Peter, Paul and Mary. It wasn’t folk or rock-n-roll or jazz or swing or country and western. And it definitely wasn’t easy listening. It was like meeting someone who speaks English but with a seductive accent you’ve never heard before.
The bass line ambled into the room and paced the floor in a circular path with sadsack persistence. An electric guitar chimed in with jangly complaints of its own. Brushes gossiped to a snare drum and the chick-chick of the hi-hat punctuated the beat. An instrument I couldn’t name took the lead—a horn of some kind that announced itself with a long, distant moan, then whined and wailed and honked bitterly. It shook its head in regret and wagged a finger in warning. There were no words, yet the unidentified horn spoke of dark days and busted hearts, of sorrow and resignation. It seemed to accuse, confess, beg forgiveness and promise a fight all at once.
Jerky film clips of shuffled memory flickered across my inner sight—the lilt of my mother’s inflections as she read me to sleep when I was little, red pedalpushers and white sunglasses in the Little League bleachers, a swipe of kitchen yellow on her forehead, the scent of Aquanet hairspray hovering by the vanity in this very room.
When the song was over I wiped my eyes with a shirt sleeve and got up and turned off the hi-fi. The Grundig Majestic was a mid-fifties model in a honey-colored wood cabinet with double sliding doors that covered all the knobs and buttons when closed. The turntable was further hidden in its own drawer that had to be pulled open for access. I closed up the whole thing with the 45s still stacked on the turntable. I grabbed the Vodka bottle off the nightstand and swigged a mouthful that burned like cold gasoline, set the bottle back in its place beside the empty glass and the pills.
I took the pink lipstick envelope to my room and hid it under the bed in the Keds shoebox with my baseball cards.
I pulled on a jacket and my Giants cap and slipped out the back door into the whispering rain.
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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Oh, Roy! So brilliant. Archer breaks my heart. Can’t wait for the next chapter.