Previously in The Blues & Billie Armstrong…
It was Sunday, May 10, and in the appropriate calendar square, Darlene’s twice-underlined handwriting said “Santa Rosa!” And the tiny capital letters printed in the corner said: “MOTHER’S DAY.” All day long, no one had mentioned it.
On Monday I swung by the Weeping Willow on the Sting-Ray after baseball practice, but I’d forgotten it was Billie’s day off.
I checked at the library, but Alice said she'd been by and left and I might find her at The Music Box. According to Alice, Billie and Nate Henderson had recently met and “I guess they hit it off, which doesn’t make sense because Nate is a pimply nerd and, well, Billie is Billie.”
To me it did kinda make sense, because they were two brainy, creative types who danced to their own odd rhythms and were near social outcasts in Lupoyoma. Plus, I remembered what Alice had said about Nate being that particular kind of “cool.”
I was anxious to tell Billie all about my ride to The Bus Stop, my talk with Frankie, the Big Mama record, and the hole cut out of the newspaper, but when I walked into the store Billie and Nate were each leaning on the counter, Nate on the merchant side, Billie on the customer side, both of them singing along loudly to some folky rock song—something about bringing keys to Los Angeles—and when the chorus came around they sang even louder than the stereo system.
I soon learned the keys in question were actually smuggled kilos of marijuana. The performer was a young man named Arlo, son of the famous folksinger Woody Guthrie, and the record was side one of the triple-album Woodstock soundtrack, just released days before. Nate had borrowed his mother’s station wagon and driven two hours through the mountains to buy a copy in Santa Rosa, because The Music Box’s order was late (as usual), and he could not stand to wait any longer.
“This is too important,” he said, holding up the album cover. He pushed the slash of hair that cut across his face to the side so both eyes were visible, and he adopted a fussy-professor voice. “One day it will be preserved in the Smithsonian as an artifact of the cultural revolution.”
“History, man.” Billie said, and that started the two of them on a giggle fit.
“What’s so damn funny?” I said.
Billie grabbed a handful of my shirt and led me behind the counter, then through a tiny storeroom-slash-office, and out the back door of the shop into the alley. From the pocket of her denim workshirt she produced a book of matches and something even I could identify as a half-smoked marijuana cigarette. She held the joint with one hand, and with the other hand she did that trick where you bend a match over the striker and light it with your thumb like snapping your fingers. Once the rolling paper caught fire, she stoked the cherry to a glowing red with a series of little sucks, then held it out to me with that trouble-loving gleam in her green eyes. The next thing I knew I was coughing out my first hit of weed while Billie pointed and laughed and mocked my struggle to breathe.
She was dressed like a railyard hobo that day, with her too-big workshirt only half tucked into her torn and faded and patched-up jeans, but there was something beautiful in the playful tilt of her head and the bounce of her red waves of hair, the way she swayed her hips to the music and rolled a shoulder forward as she started to speak, or flung her head back when she laughed. Maybe it was because we were all high, but maybe not. Maybe it was just peak Billie Armstrong, so alive and so certain of herself and the spark of the moment. Nate could hardly look away from her and hung on every word of her monologues, which were more expansive than ever. Like me—like Alice and Laurette and even Hank—Nate wanted to turn those pages. Maybe that was part of what others feared—not just what she said, but the fact that some of us were listening so closely.
Billie responded like a performer energized by the adoration of her audience. She told hitchhiking stories, hands tumbling in the air, she zigged and zagged from one amazing tale to the next. How she’d been teargassed in the streets of Chicago and locked up in a paddy wagon. How she’d slipped backstage at Woodstock and shared a joint with one of the drummers from the Grateful Dead. How she’d picketed the Miss America pageant, yanked her bra out the sleeve of her shirt like magic and added it to a bonfire.
She rifled off quotes from Janis Joplin and Bertrand Russell and speechified on the wisdom of John Lennon and Betty Friedan, the courage of Martin Luther King, and the evil stupidity of Phyllis Schlafly.
She jumped excitedly to her new job at the Weeping Willow, how it was typical capitalist sexist exploitation but culturally fascinating because Molly was Irish and Pop was Mexican and Sonny was a totally righteous dude who had been part of the occupation of Alcatraz. The son of a Black man and a Yaqui Indian woman, a Vietnam vet with a leg full of shrapnel, a Purple Heart and a blue metalflake Harley, chopped and raked. She gushed on about digging the whole scene and said I absolutely must come that Saturday night to see Nate’s band play on the Weeping Willow patio.
“It’s gonna be outtasight,” Nate said.
And Billie said, “History, man.” Which started another laughing fit.
I forgot all about the news I had come to share. Getting high for the first time left me quiet and hyper-attentive to physical sensation. The air seemed thick and charged, like a hot afternoon humming with insects. My feet didn’t quite reach the floor. I floated across the room to some record bins and flipped through the albums, trying to look discerning and unflustered.
Over by the counter the music and talk roared on in bursts of commiseration and exultation. Music, politics, books, news—I wasn’t always sure of the categories. Vaguely familiar names and phrases flicked by.… Blonde on Blonde… Soul on Ice… Oswald and Ruby… My Lai and Manson… Gloria Steinem… Tom Wolfe… James Earl Ray… Instant Karma… Cesar Chavez… four dead girls in a Birmingham church. Billie and Nate swooned in tandem as if their absolute agreement on each topic was a secret treasure they’d just discovered.
In the clearance bin I found a record I wanted—B.B. King, Live at The Regal. I floated over and set the album down on the counter next to the display of kazoos. Nate picked it up and looked it over quizzically.
“Archer’s like, totally obsessed with old blues music, man,” Billie explained.
“Oh yeah,” Nate said. “Little Walter, right?”
I nodded, impressed that he remembered, but also happy to respond without having to actually move my mouth in a purposeful way.
“What about this?” He pointed to the record player. “Hendrix, Airplane, Santana? Heavy stuff, right?”
“Heavy,” I said, and I felt heavier just saying the word. I was unusually conscious of the elasticity of my face as it formed sounds. “Not real blues, though,” I managed to say.
“Ah, a purist!” Nate said, and I kind of liked the sound of that. I imagined a Boy Scout patch that said Blues Purist.
Billie said, “Put on side two again, Nate. I want him to hear The Fish Cheer.”
In a careful, deliberate, even reverent manner, Nate removed the record from the turntable and returned it to its proper sleeve, then slid another one out, deftly twirled it to the flipside and placed it on the turntable. “Dig this,” he said as he dropped the needle.
It was the infamous performance of Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag by Country Joe McDonald, the one that eventually got the Woodstock album banned by concerned parents (or as Billie would say, “uptight hypocrites”) in respectable homes all over the country. The man had three hundred thousand kids shouting the word fuck over and over at the full capacity of their lungs, then he delivered the most perfect laughing-to-keep-from-crying song ever sung against the Vietnam War.
Nate turned it up loud and Billie moved behind the counter and they sang along face to face. A swelling energy—a sense of inevitable change—reverberated in the recording and in the room. It was gloriously and shockingly defiant, which cranked up my stoned paranoia. I kept listening for the little bell on the front door, certain the music could be heard out on the sidewalk, and some tubby, red-faced man with a bad combover and a sweat-drenched suit would soon enter pointing and screaming, “I know your parents!” And, in Lupoyoma, such testimony by itself could be enough to condemn each of us to our own home version of Hell on Earth.
But Billie and Nate kept on, undaunted, joyously shouting the words all the way through to the end of the song. And when the song was over, Nate kissed her. Right in front of me, not five feet away. Not a friendly peck on the cheek, but not a sloppy backseat makeout kiss either. Rather, a sudden, impulsive, sensuous kiss that looked like a question and an invitation.
Billie didn’t look that surprised. Or interested. She just lightly pushed him away and laughed if off.
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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