Previously in The Blues & Billie Armstrong…
“This motherfucking war,” I said to Cronkite, and I turned off the television and ate my unevenly cooked Swanson’s Fried Chicken Dinner in the darkening silence.
Saturday I planned to check the morgue for the July 18, 1969 issue of the Call & Record, hoping to find out what my mother had cut out of page 8.
It probably meant nothing, especially now, after my visit with Frankie Watkins, but at least I’d know.
Sticking to my usual routine, I spent the first part of the day gathering the used type metal from the Linotype machine and the composing table, dragging the full hellbox to the pig room and melting all the metal down in the big iron cauldron. I skimmed the dross, poured the new pigs and left them to cool and harden.
This was the part that I loved, the sweaty ink-stained hundred-and-fuck part where I was a printer’s devil, not just a janitor. On these mornings, alone in the back shop, in charge of something skilled and challenging and even dangerous, I was a workingman. In the afternoons a peon, a drudge, the cleanup boy.
The Giants were visiting the Dodgers that afternoon, and I’d brought my own transistor radio so I could carry it room to room and listen to the game. The Dodgers went ahead three to one in the first inning, and it stayed that way while I swept the concrete floor of the back shop, wiped down the restroom, scoured the toilet and emptied wastebaskets. Moving up front, I dusted desks, wiped down phones, mopped the linoleum and emptied more wastebaskets, the sandy baritone of broadcaster Lon Simmons following me through the dour, shadowy offices.
Games against the rival Dodgers always came with heightened intensity, even in mid-May, but this one felt bigger than usual. The Giants had lost the first two of a four-game series in L.A., dropping into fifth place in the division, three games behind the Dodgers and eight behind the first place Cincinnati Reds. This was a team stacked with legends like Mays, Marichal and McCovey, so the record didn’t at all reflect their potential. Or most fans’ expectations. My father had already written them off. “Stick a fork in em, they’re done,” he’d said.
But to me they were heroes. And you don’t give up on your heroes. They just needed something to turn it around, and a couple wins against the Dodgers could be the spark that got them going.
When the front office cleanup was done, I scrubbed my hands with hot water and Lava soap and made sure they were totally dry. I remembered all those months ago, during my training, Hank joshing me about Grandma Junia’s exacting standards and matching serrated tongue (as if I wasn’t already well acquainted). She always handpicked five pristine copies to be filed in the morgue, and she didn’t want them smudged by the likes of me. I grabbed the five papers she’d left at the end of the long front counter, and I went to the locked door at the end of the hallway, key in hand.
On the radio, it was the sixth inning, and the Giants had just tied it up on a home run by the big first baseman Willie “Stretch” McCovey. In the seventh, they pulled ahead four to three somehow, but I was busy combing the shelves, looking for the July 18, 1969 issue.
I carefully flipped through the entire 1969 section. There should’ve been at least three or four copies still on file, but I didn’t find a single one. It was weird, but I figured Hank probably misfiled them in the wrong year, or had forgotten to file them at all, or maybe the press broke down and for once Vic couldn’t “jimmyrig the thingamajig and limpdick the bastard home.”
Maybe next Saturday I would set aside time to look further, although maybe it was pointless all along. For all I knew, my mother had carefully scissored out a recipe for potato salad or a coupon for five percent off at Sprouse-Rietz, then simply used the pages to protect the stuff in the hatbox in her normal tidy, organized way. Still, I wanted an answer.
But on that day I didn’t have time. Baseball practice that afternoon, then off to the Weeping Willow to see Nate’s band and hang out with Billie. I still hadn’t had a chance to tell her about my visit with Frankie, much less the missing paper, but I was hoping there’d be an opportunity that night.
In the top of the eighth inning, as I was washing up, the Giants added another run on a second blast by McCovey, and as I headed out the back shop door, they held on to win the game five to four. Maybe they weren’t done yet.
Nate Henderson was the bass player and the leader of the band.
He’d given the band its name, Mellow Day. He’d handpicked the players, led the practice sessions in his parents’ garage and handled all the bookings, and when he’d gone away to Santa Rosa Junior College, the other members had failed to find a new bass player, or a new practice space, or any paying gigs.
Everyone knew Nate never wanted to study business in the first place and only enrolled to avoid the draft. At the time, local draft boards had godlike power. In Lupoyoma, that meant any healthy eighteen-year-old male was guaranteed to be drafted unless he was a registered college student or his family happened to have a close friend—perhaps a business associate—on the draft board.
The saying was, if you have the dough, you don’t have to go.
Nate didn’t have the dough, so off to college he went. But in late 1969 the government held the first draft lottery, and Nate’s birthdate came up number 328 out of 366. For the foreseeable future, there was no real chance he’d be drafted, college or not. He dropped out of JC, moved back to town, got the guys back together, and Mellow Day quickly reclaimed its status as a popular working band.
They played poolside birthday parties for the cheerleader daughters of Lupoyoma councilmen, and spiked-punch dances for the local chapter of Rainbow Girls, and the low-budget weddings of recent high school sweethearts expecting to be parents in nine months or less.
And that Saturday night they were booked to play at the Weeping Willow Resort & Trailer Court. The way I heard it, this was something of an experiment. Sonny the new cook had suggested to Molly that live music might bring in some extra business, and Billie the new waitress had supported the idea quite enthusiastically, arms waving about and such. Molly had fretted about the cost but agreed to try it once and even to consider making it a regular thing for the summer months—if all went well that night.
No one knew ahead of time that it would turn out to be a historic performance. (Well, maybe Nate and Billie knew.)
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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